flak rss
Until now, this blog was being dynamically generated by a software tool called flak . You can follow this link to find the flak source code . I made some customizations. For instance, I replaced the input parser with a parser for the djot markup language . I made a few additional changes, but they’re probably too minor to note. You can find the code for my customized flak at this link . But…
I’ll start at the end, because that’s the most important part. Later this month, I’m obtaining medical aid in dying AKA death with dignity. Barring unforeseen circumstances or unexpected changes, my last day on earth will be June 13th, 2025. Realize that I’m just over 46 years old. So how the hell did we get here? I’ve written part of the story in dribs and drabs over…
If you provided infinitely many monkeys with paint and canvas, they would eventually produce paintings that rivaled and even surpassed anything created by the most well-respected of human artists. If one or more of those infinite monkeys make a pixel perfect duplicate of Van Gogh’s Starry Night or whatever, does it imply that monkeys can produce art? I don’t think it does, and…
Last night, I was telling some friends about Peter Thiel and one of his intellectual gurus, Curtis Yarvin. I ended up pointing them at a great piece published in The Baffler in 2014: Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream of a Silicon Reich . Then, out of curiosity, I went looking on the Internet to see if anyone had made any commentary on that piece. What I found was plenty of unabashed nerd-bashing.…
A friend of mine visited recently, and he was showing us Musk’s Grok on his phone. Yes, eww yuck, I detest Eugenics Boy, government wrecker, swasticar salesman, and public Nazi saluter Elon Musk, so I’d never use this thing, let alone pay for it. For that matter, I won’t use or pay for Chat GPT, Claud, or any of the rest, because I think this shit’s stupid, just more…
Over the last ten weeks or so, the US has turned into an absolute horror show. Let’s list a few of the horrors, shall we? Mass deportations, revocation of legal status, “accidental” deportation of people who are in the US legally, and international students being “disappeared” for exercising their freedom of speech or who knows what, really. That was such a long…
The future was stolen from us, and it started during the dot-com boom back in the late 90s. What happened? There was wide-spread manic investment in computer technology and computer networks. This was low-hanging fruit for the holders of capital. What did we get? Shitty websites. A surveillance panopticon powered by the locked-down and cloud-dependent computing devices in our pockets which we…
Remember a few months ago when a 7.6 magnitude earthquake struck in the waters near northern California? This was in mid-late December, I think. For a brief time, no more than thirty minutes to an hour, there was a tsunami warning for the area. Care to guess what was going through my head? “Please, please, please let it take out Silicon Valley.” To my mind, Silicon Valley is basically…
The title is a quote from the prematurely-canceled TV series Firefly. I’ll admit, I’ve never seen the series. It’s not available with audio descriptions anywhere, so perhaps I never will. But the quote is a banger, and it is all too appropriate for our current sociopolitical situation. We, meaning lefty or anti-Trump types, need to adopt it as our slogan, our raison d’etre,…
Some of us meet “that one person”, and we spend the rest of our lives madly and passionately wanting them. For me her name was Niyati. We met when we were in the eighth grade. I was 13. She was very tall, with long dark hair, a small frame, and a voice that made my heart tremble every time I heard it. I concluded that she was totally out of my league, so I never gave her any indication…
My body continues to weaken, and I have every reason to believe that my best and happiest days are behind me. I’m so young. I hate it.
Yes, fuck cynicism[1]. With a rusty spike bearing Clostridium tetani, smothered in toxic waste and radioactive compounds. This might be my last blog post ever. I feel like I don't have long left on Earth. And if I had one message I'd want to leave to the world, it would be this one. Cynicism about the future is part of why the world is in the shape it is in today. Cynicism is what leads people to…
I’ve appreciated this poem by Rumi (A.K.A. Rumi Jalal ad'Din) since the first time I read it, at least 10 or 20 years ago. I Died as a Mineral (Translated by A.J. Arberry) I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was Man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die as Man, to soar With angels blest; but even…
For the people out there who don’t have a funny bone, this is satire. But I’d argue that satire is at its most ekscellent when it is grounded in some truth. The truth is that English orthography is an absolute disaster and Elon Musk is an objectively terrible person. With Elon Musk making the Nazi salute to Trump and Trump’s crowd, I think it’s a mighty fine time to improve…
Remember how I told you about Brain Tumor Boy in my article about medical testing? Reason 666 Why US Health Care Is So Fucked: The Testing Obsession! , if you need a refresher. Why I find that whole thing as funny as I do is that I suspect that if you look at my chart and a Physician’s Desk Reference, you can easily conclude why my blood pressure is abnormally low. Premises I have heart…
2024 was a Landslide…for "Did Not Vote" | Environmental Voter Project Quoting from the linked site: Using data from the University of Florida Election Lab, a new analysis by the Environmental Voter Project shows that 85.9 million eligible voters skipped the 2024 general election, far surpassing the 76.8 million ballots cast for Donald Trump or the 74.3 million for Kamala Harris. If "Did Not…
Almost fifteen years ago now, I read a post-apocalyptic novel The Postman by David Brin. It was about post-collapse society in the US, after a string of events took out the US around the turn of the millennium. What struck me as odd and implausible at the time was the way in which the collapse occurred, but given what I know now, this book sounds eerily prescient. The collapse started with nuclear…
There were a few episodes of the original Star Trek where the Enterprise would find some planet full of village idiots worshiping an artificial intelligence as God. The ones that come to mind are: Episode: The Return of the Archons (Landru) Episode: The Apple (Vaal) Episode: For The World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky (the Fabrini Oracle) I always found the first two of them kind of…
Ok, I have had some really strange dreams. I’ll tell you about two that I’ve had recently. The second one was this very afternoon. Braille Textbooks I’ve always had these really oddball dreams about school or being back in school. In yesterday’s edition, it was the very first of the school year, so I was receiving and unboxing my braille textbooks. I was eight years old or…
There’s speculation that Musk and Putin have some dirt on Trump. Especially Musk. So I was thinking about it this morning, and I came up with the most fabulous seed (pardon the pun) for a novel. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump have this daddy and little girl kink going. Donny even insists that Daddy Vladdy call him Ivanka. Of course, Trump is stupid enough to do some of this in Twitter DMs.…
Article from Wikipedia about the Infamous “Clear Channel memorandum”. This was sent to Clear Channel stations shortly after the September 11 attacks, and it suggested songs that were not appropriate to play on the air. Read through the whole list. It’s funny as fuck, and terribly sad at the same time. Two of the most inspiring songs of all time, Imagine by John Lennon and Get Together…
Day after Christmas, known as Boxing Day to folks in the British Commonwealth, I called my cardiologist’s office to report some issues I’d had during the previous week. After riding a stationary bike for 20-30 minutes last Saturday the 21st, I started feeling like I was going to have a heart attack. That I am perpetually fatigued. Simple things like doing the dishes, cooking, and carrying in a…
One skill I’ve developed over the years is slacker food prep. Because who wants to spend a lot of time in the kitchen, am I right? Sometimes you can get something really filling and flavorful with minimal prep time and few ingredients. It’s an added bonus when those ingredients are cheap. Recently, I discovered the life-changing magic of textured vegetable protein A.K.A. TVP.…
I thoroughly expect this post to get many people’s knickers in a twist. You know what? I don’t care. I may or may not have too many years to live. Do you think I am afraid of being cancelled? I’ve been an outsider all my life. I’ve been in emergency rooms with people telling me that I nearly died. That’s, like, the ultimate cancellation right there. Grim Reaper may…
I’m going to put on my prophet’s hat for a moment. I think that if everything does not fall apart before 2028, we will have elections. But I also think there’s a pretty good chance that things will fall apart. That cold civil war we’ve been fighting since April 14 of 1865 might very well turn hot before 2028. I’ve been reading Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor. Essentially this is a…
I posted this to the Fediverse way back in late 2023. It was almost lost, because I switched Fediverse accounts. But thanks to the life-changing magic of archived PostgreSQL dumps, I found it. I’m putting it here for the sake of permanence. I was capturing traffic being sent to my Raspberry Pi today, attempting to debug a SIP problem. And I noticed a really weird packet from someone’s Google…
I worked for Google in 2012 and 2013. I’ve never really written about my experience there and why I left. But I was inspired to do so by a conversation several days ago. The summary is that I could not, as a self-respecting Socialist, work for a place where the difference between haves and have-nots was so obvious. It’s worth telling the backstory. The other day, I stumbled into a…
This is from the spring of 2022, posted elsewhere and reposted here. Last night, we went out for a meal to celebrate my girlfriend’s upcoming anniversary with her other partner. They wanted sushi, so we went to a local sushi place that had an all you can eat deal. They ordered the all-you-can-eat sushi, while I had vegetable tempura. Each of them ended up getting one more plate of food than…
On the 7th of August, I had an appointment with one of my cardiologists. She told me that they wanted to do another procedure on me: a second cardiac ablation. This isn’t a cure. It’s a band-aid that can calm the ventricular tachycardia (VT), but they can’t make it go away permanently because of the extensive scarring of my heart. I asked her if she could estimate my life…
This was originally written shortly after the events in question, in July of 2023. It was theraputic to write, and it will be theraputic to publish. Be warned, there is some very raw anger here. The post scriptum is a followup written in August 2024. I took 10 5 mg oxycodone tablets Saturday in a botched attempt to end my own life. It was an act of pure, unadulterated rage. The logic, if it can be…
Nota beni: I am totally blind and have congestive heart failure with regular episodes of ventricular tachycardia. Keep all of that in mind as you read this. Back in June of 2018, I bought a Motorola G6, an Android phone, through Amazon. Yeah they’re a terrible company, but that’s a topic for another rant. We didn’t do our research. This device was sold as a “Prime…
I wasn't a participant in any of this history: just a teenager who read a lot and paid attention to what was happening at the time. I'm also oversimplifying, and I'm probably telling a lot of people things they already know or even things they know better than I do. Today, when you say the phrase "electronic mail", there's a nearly 100% probability that you are actually talking about Internet…
After my HTMX post the other day, a friend was asking me about my technical choices. “Why do you use HTMX?” “Why do you use that Lua Scheme hybrid, when you could just use Lua?” (The second question was of course referring to Fennel). When it comes to open-source or personal use code, the most correct answer is always: because I wanna . Do your thing. You really don’t have…
HTMX is pretty awesome. We have a few Bluetooth LE sensors in various rooms of our apartment to keep track of temperature and humidity. They are sampled periodically, with readings written to an sqlite database. Up until now, I’ve just been showing the current data with a little command-line script. But tonight I wrote this stupid little CGI script in Fennel that displays a table of house data and…
Installed flak on blog.the-brannons.com, and it appears to be working nicely.