The thing that was on my mind as this was going on:
"I need to not kill this man."
I saw how he stood. I understood his stance. If he had grabbed me, he'd be on the ground. If he'd thrown a punch, I would have steered him into an asphalt faceplant. The parking lot had cameras, the cops would have called it evolution in action.
But I, personally, needed to not kill the man.
What good is twenty-four years of martial arts practice if it teaches you to really need to NOT kill someone?
20 years ago, sure. Nowadays? Oh god fuck no, you’ll spend all day every day dealing with attacks and security issues.
People who don’t know better will be in a world of pain they cannot imagine and anyone who does know better and still subscribes to this technolibertarian bullshit deserves all the pain they get.
Unless you absolutely have to, (and if you even ask if you need to, the answer is, again, FUCK NO), do. not. run. your. own. email. server.
The git zine might have set a record for number of beta readers who helped out with it: we had 66 amazing people read drafts of the zine, ask questions, tell me what’s confusing, and what they learned!
The beta reader process helps us SO much to keep the things that are working and fix the parts that aren’t.
Not just for technical things either! For years, a note on my wall said "Do not write so you can be understood; write so you cannot be misunderstood." Early readers illuminate how many ways I fail... which yeah, kind of sucks, but it's so much better to find those things BEFORE publishing!
When I left Twitter, I worried that it would impact my ability to make a living.
That worry was unfounded.
Would I be doing better if I was still on Twitter? Perhaps. But looking at my #ryoms visitors on Kickstarter, it's clear that the fedi is a more than adequate replacement.
My GPG key expired at 10:10 UTC today, 12 hours after finding out @mwl had all remaining copies of his PGP & GPG book destroyed. If there is a god of encryption, I invoked and angered it yesterday.
TFW your spouse's iMac has 20Mb(!) free out of 2Tb because they tried to use Adobe Cloud for something and now all attempts to reboot keep hanging (filesystem is okay, though) so the next step is to try for Target Disk mode and a cable to a laptop in order to delete cached junk and logfiles until it will boot enough for them to clean up properly …
UNIXen have never been great about coping with full disks/SSDs, but this is a new nadir, and fuck you very much, Adobe Creative Suite.
I think an author pic of this machine, surrounded by my books, with the machine empty and me leaning against the glass in a gelato coma, surrounded by empty cartons, would be perfectly on brand.