2026 w46 bright eyes

Aaron Swartz should have been forty.

The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz : Brian Knappenberger : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

The Internet's Own Boy depicts the life of American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. It features interviews…

Internet Archive

somehow, by proximity with the display names, even the 'real' names on https://www.eff.org/about/staff look ever so badass & heroic. i mean, yeah, all names are made up, all words are made up. what's that heritage listpost 'things they believe about names'? close: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names.

wins and best bits

• study: uploaded a document containing probably two thirds of the assignment. it was upload day & I was absolutely sick of the sight of the graphs. onwards.
• the cold snap hit without any wind or rain. we haven't had a dry cold in this house before and it's so much nicer! to realise it's frozen when you open the curtains and not when you swing your legs out of bed.
• repotting the conservatory plants for winter. the peppers are still bearing somehow but the tomatoes are over. and the strawberry plants need to recover from waterlogging before i do the winter prune and wrap.
• 'phone off Friday night' continues, & this week it was unusually hard because just as I'd turned it off & put it in the cutlery drawer the news came through on his feeds about the aeroplane grounding notice. so i had a physical urge to grab my phone & read about how distant strangers had fucked up this time.
  • but i traced that feeling back & identified that what I actually wanted to read was that I had successfully noticed the beginning of the end times & that we were in the End Of The World Montage & I had been allotted points for being Aware. It's truly feeble how often what I actually want is to award myself a star sticker for Awareness & Witnessing.
  • i note that 'phone off Friday' does not mean offline. it just means i have to go and sit at the internet. :)
• learning the trick of using a small piece of paper to cover the foreheads of actresses on the internet so that they look like living women having a nice time, instead of hostage situations.

pissy about

• that family can't actually have gone away and left the outdoor cat, can they? that's not something people really do.
• electricity prices, again. & of course there are oil spills from the struck boats, & from boat collisions because they're all spoofing their location so as not to be killed. & nobody except hollow-eyed strident sub-millennials will even consider just stopping. there's like five of us truly accepting 'line go down'.
• the water meter with the physical turning dial has been replaced with a water meter with a radio link & an LCD screen. 'because these are only rated for ten years,' said the perfectly pleasant visiting engineer, whose fault it wasn't. & I can't just stand there in the street & tell a man that I am certain his employer would do a fraud to the meter the second they find out how. not wi'out my tinfoil hat.

what's not done and why

• i really do want to get the old shed down before year end. I can't work out how to break it down into tasks. there's got to be some intermediate stage between 'safely disassembled & ready to rebuild' & 'hey, I could tie rope round one upright & start hauling'.
• study: i did not give of my best in that assignment. I get irritable about the 'reflect on how this has made you fitter happier more productive' questions, & when I'm irritable i become over-aware of my other pet peeve, which is the hair-twirling Malibu Stacy 'you don't need to understand the underlying causes at this stage, just remember it's clockwise!' shittery. i need to learn to see those moments as 'here is where you open another tab and search' rather than 'here is where the salaried educators are actively withholding education from you'. they aren't going to get better. I am only responsible for myself.

what's new and does it matter

• large institutions finding out why you don't push the updates like that. planes & emails this time. no, each individual event doesn't matter to me but as these events come closer and closer together we approach a critical fuckup density from within which no competence can escape.
• the garden water dishes froze. even if i don't have a morning routine about any other thing, i need to start a pattern of going out and breaking the ice or replacing the water for the little critters.
• we have birds living in our roof. or, the birds have apes and dogs living in their floor. it doesn't require action, only observation.
• the dog food subscription sent this month's delivery in plain silver bags with stickers on, instead of the full-printed bags they usually use. supply chain stuff, the food itself is the same as always. they were transparent about it. But the interim packs don't have a reseal at the top, so I was fretting about needing to save it in a clicky tub when it's open, until i realised I will of course just tip it into the previous empty bag. I would have realised it immediately if I'd been actually faced with the problem, instead of pre-worrying.
• do not extrapolate that realisation to any other thing.

elsewhere as always: storygraph & tumblr. sit up properly, see you next week.