It’s a little disappointing that tech journalism just started referring to Facebook as Meta which is something they didn’t do when Google reorganized under a holding company. Facebook is still in the midst of a PR crisis and journalists are content to help them rehabilitate.

These are the books from the past year that I both read and enjoyed enough that I would encourage someone to get their hands on a copy. In my personal, arbitrary rating system, these were the books that I gave a 5/5 to. A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers This was the first book I read after completing my master’s degree, and its dedication appropriately reads, “For anyone who could use a break.…

Finished reading: A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, 1) by Becky Chambers 📚

I started reading this the day after I finished my master’s thesis. It is appropriately dedicated to “anyone who needs a break.” Each page is filled with something beautiful, revelatory, or comforting. This might be my favorite piece of fiction I’ve read in 2021.

Xiaowei Wang. Blockchain Chicken Farm And Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside. FSG Originals x Logic. 2020. Introduction Jack Halberstam, metronormativity: portmanteua of metropolitan and normative (4). “To question metronormativity demands a vision of living that serves life itself, and not just life in cities.” (5) Ghosts in the Machine Summary Through exploring the countryside with her Great-Uncle and recalling moments of growing up with her grandparents that lived through the Cultural Revolution Wag examines…

I didn’t end up finishing the October blogging challenge. Life got busy and though a few posts were my phone’s camera, I intended to use my X100F the entire time. I ended up stalling out around the twentieth day. I still wanted to at least record some thoughts on the process. The return to the process of composing images was the highlight of my participation. It’s not something I’ve done with any sort of consistency in the past seven years.…

Adobe Digital Editions makes for a rough e-reading experience.

Finished reading: How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow 📚

Notes

Summary How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism is a book length response to Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism: The fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Doctorow agrees that we face difficult challenges regarding technology and capitalism, but fears her diagnosis of the problem will lead us down an incorrect path. Zuboff notes that everything that Big Tech says about itself is probably a lie, but Doctorow points out that she makes one exception: the stated efficacy of Big Tech products.…

DAY 22: Two years largely indoors and constantly engaged in screens has my eyes in regular need of some forced rest.

www.currentaffairs.org/2021/10/o…

Nathan was kind enough to cite me after sending over some of my early grad school work.

Day 21: This painting from a friend above my work shelf often reminds me of space.

Why Would I Want an Append Only Ledger? Author’s Note: The point of this post is to highlight the actual use cases for an append-only ledger and how these ledgers, especially blockchain, are not useful in most cases. I’m collecting my thoughts here in a longer form so that I can later distill them into something much shorter. I wanted to do this through exploring the actual use cases instead of focusing on the rampant scams.…

Day 20 when there is only one sport

Day 19: Some favorite and oft cited books on a mirror

“Heavy is the head that wears the crown” is one of my favorite expressions and I wish I remembered where I first encountered it.

I finally figured out why I was struggling to get objects in slightly different planes to be in focus. The aperture was too wide. Shaking off years of rust still but I’m happy micro blog convinced me to pull out the camera again.

Day 18: I said I’d be finished hanging flyers when I ran out of tape. Flyer created by: twitter.com/banditell…

Day 17: Compass. I like how the author deals with navigating the stars in this book and the dynamics it added to the story.

Rotation Day 16 > I’ve got a feeling the weather is changing
> And my luck is in

/ @challenges

Not sure what it is but the X100F feels noisier than other cameras I’ve had in low light. Don’t have the time or energy to do a test, but it feels true after the past 15 days of using it for the photo challenge.

With both stage and photography lighting, I have always trended towards the setting where it is dimmer than I think most people want. I’m trying to calibrate up so it’s a touch brighter, but I can’t seem to nail it.

DAY 15: An ethereal moment in gaming history

Day 14: wheels up

Day 13: love running into alley animals.

Doing some freelance work for a previous job. Let’s see if the most recent version of this dependency maintained compatability with the project that hasn’t been touched since I left.