Dei Layborer https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/ Wed, 08 Apr 2026 15:08:31 +0000 https://i.snap.as/0GOZIIwS.png Dei Layborer https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/ Presenting History https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/presenting-history?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[As an aspiring(?) translator, historical sources are often a prime source for texts that both warrant translation and are free from intellectual property issues. But they also bring their own difficulties, even beyond the differences in language that can arise over long periods of time.!--more-- Every year, much of the U.S. celebrates Columbus Day, in honor of Christopher Columbus. While I at least (vaguely) know the history behind the holiday, it’s nonetheless beyond my understanding why it’s still A Thing. This sort of vague incomprehension is my usual reaction to this country’s hypocrisy. Anyway, my supplemental response to all this is usually to think about how more people/ need to read Bartolomé de las Casas (or Casaus, as he reminds us). From there it’s a short journey to reminding myself that I’ve thought about translating his most famous work for years. Wording One of the stumbling stones unique to this project is how. Not in the broader sense, but more specifically what approach I want to take. I’ve been stymied in the past by a feeling that I would need to be very aggressive in my translation, by which I mean changing more than I typically like to. This is because, to a modern reader, de las Casas’ prose sucks. Okay, this is of course disingenuous. It’s not that he was actually a bad writer, it’s just that Spanish prose from the mid-17th century is very different from Spanish writing of the 20th or 21st century, much less present-day English. But that means having to change a lot more than I’ve wanted to in order to make my translation readable. And readability matters, especially when my whole purpose for translating this is to try to have de las Casas’ arguments (and descriptions) be compelling to a modern audience. Translation is, in my view, all in the name: it is a bringing over of something. This is where our word “translate” comes from: Latin trānslātus, a participle of trānsferre (“to bear/carry across”). The equivalent word in Spanish, traducir, comes from a similar but not identical root: Latin traducĕre (“to make something pass from one place to another”). As another aside, Russian’s word переводить is a compound of the prefix п(е)ре-, which means “over, across, afresh” and the verb водить, meaning “to lead, to drive” (used when traveling by any vehicle, for example). Russian verbs of motion are wild, but that’s for another day. This “bringing over” always requires adjustment, some changes. It’s why you can’t just go one word at a time, but goes even beyond that. You have to be conscious of the context, the tone, and what the author is really trying to get at. And you have to do all this while, in one of my rules for myself, producing something that cannot be identified as a translation based on the resulting text alone. Tone seems to be a particular pitfall when going from a Romance language to English. Because of History, English often has two versions of a given word: one Germanic, one Romance (Latinate). The latter are often words that end in -tion, for example. Also because of that history, the Latinate form tends to be more formal, to say nothing of sometimes taking on some additional nuance or connotation. For example, we have Germanic “job” or “calling” vs. Romance “vocation” or “profession.” Wikipedia conveniently has a list. But Spanish doesn’t generally have this. The vast majority of Spanish’s vocabulary comes directly from Latin, and so you’ll see instances of -tion words (-ción in Spanish) far more frequently. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the prose is formal; it’s simply what the author has to work with. When I’ve looked through English translations of Spanish works that I know, however, the English often comes across as a great deal more formal than I believe the original Spanish to be. This problem is compounded when dealing with something older. We often forget that, say, the King James Bible was not archaic to the people writing it. In translating the New Testament, I believe it’s entirely appropriate to have Jesus use contractions when speaking. Much of the Greek text of the New Testament is straightforward, even plain (especially Mark, which sounds almost child-like sometimes). So for text like de las Casas’, because his Spanish prose is archaic, there’ll always be a temptation when translating it to make the English text similarly old-fashioned. But this ignores the context in which it was written, as it would not have come across as old or archaic to someone reading it at the time it was put to paper. There’s another potential pitfall when going from Spanish to English, namely cognates. Many of those -tion/-ción words I mentioned mean very similar things, but they may not always be used the same way. Take this example from a modern Spanish text I’m also working on translating (more on that another day). The verb originar (to originate) is used to refer to something creating tensions between two political factions. I could render this as “originating” those tensions, but that’s not a common usage of the word, even in an academic setting, so I’m probably better off going with something else. — — — Returning to my qualms about changing too much, I’ve simply decided I need to get over it. My rendition will thus be freer than it might’ve been several years ago, while still being true to the underlying content. In many cases this may simply mean leaving out one of multiple times he repeats the same phrase (with at most a small variation), because that is something that present-day English-speaking readers find repetitive rather than augmentative. For an example of what I mean, de las Casas loves duplication. When he wants to emphasize something, he’ll frequently use two synonymous adjectives (or adverbs or verbs) for this purpose. For example, at the start of his narrative of the original discovery of the “Indies” (mainly Hispaniola and the surrounding islands), he talks about “the great [or large] and infinite islands nearby [to Hispaniola].” I think most English-speaking editors would see this as unnecessarily repetitive or duplicative (see?), even if the words he uses do have slightly different shades of meaning. This last point means it’s that much harder to know when exactly a description is superfluous. Returning to my example of cognates, he also uses the word “depopulate” a lot, which at least to me sounds kinda funny. It’s clear what it means, but it’s basically never used in English writing to my experience (even in history or academia), meaning I have to find various ways to say the same thing. It’s easy to get stuck not wanting to translate one word into more than one, but that’s of course impossible, and would lead to a lousy translation. A related difficulty is where sentence (and even paragraph) breaks should happen. You’ve probably read something in English from the 19th or early 20th centuries, and noticed that their sentences tended to be considerably longer than how we write now. This is something I’m guilty of in my own English-language writing. Well, 16th-century Spanish goes even further. For example, here’s the final sentence of the “argument” from the Brief Account: Él lo hizo, y viendo algunos años después muchos insensibles hombres (que la codicia y ambición ha hecho degenerar del ser hombres, y sus facinorosas obras traído en reprobado sentido) que, no contentos con las traiciones y maldades que han cometido, despoblando con exquisitas especies de crueldad aquel orbe, importunaban al Rey por licencia y autoridad para tornarlas a cometer, y otras peores (si peores pudiesen ser), acordó presentar esta suma de lo que cerca desto escribió al Príncipe nuestro señor, para que Su Alteza fuese en que se les denegase, y parecióle cosa conveniente ponella en molde por que Su Alteza la leyese con más facilidad. Again, this is one sentence. And to be clear, it does flow as one, even if it requires a little more working memory usage on the part of the reader. If I were to leave it as one sentence in my translation, however, it would be something like this: [de las Casas] did so, and seeing that some years later many thoughtless men (whom greed and ambition had made degenerate from their humanity, and their criminal acts bringing them to evil) were, not content with the betrayals and evils they have committed, depopulating that sphere with singular types of cruelty, were asking the King for license and authority to return to committing these and other worse acts (if worse could exist), agreed to present this summary of what regarding all this he wrote to the Prince our Lord, so that His Highness [the King] influenced him to deny it, and it seemed helpful to put it in a form such that His Highness could read it more easily. That is a lot of predicates. To be clear, Spanish prose has more rules dealing with pronouns, so the its and thises which I’ve rendered literally are much less ambiguous in the original. But even were I to correct for those, it’s still a bit of a mess. So my first pass at cleaning things up would be: [de las Casas] did so, and saw that many years later, many thoughtless men (whom greed and ambition had made degenerate from their humanity, and whose criminal acts brought them to evil) were not content with the betrayals and evils they had already committed, committing singular types of cruelty. So much so that they were asking the King for license to return to them and other worse acts (if such were possible). De las Casas therefore agreed to present this summary of what he had written to the Prince our Lord, so that His Highness [the King] would influence the Prince to deny this evil request. To this end, it seemed beneficial to arrange it in such a way that His Highness could read it more easily. Again, this is a first draft and still needs some cleanup. But I hope it’s easier and clearer, and also that it demonstrates just how much needs to change to get there. This passage went from one sentence to four, which also requires occasionally adding or altering transitions between phrases so that things flow in a way that makes sense. — — — The ultimate question, as with any art, comes down to successfulness (or a lack thereof). How successful will I be in bringing de las Casas’ words across both a linguistic divide and a temporal one? How successful will those words be in moving the reader? On some level I’m doubtless asking myself will it matter? There’s really no way to answer any of these. Just as with drawing, it’s possible to get too close to your work, with the result of either seeing too many of its flaws or too few. It’ll be quite awhile before this project is finished, assuming I actually do finish it. I bounce between things a great deal, and this particular translation is slow going even compared to others. It’s easy to get intimidated on many fronts, both questioning my abilities and whether there’s any point in doing this at all. I’ve had at least some success on my more contemporary translation, and I’m hoping this will, well, translate to A Brief History. And truth be told, you never know what will happen. I have three translations from English to Spanish that have been officially published. The first was two of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories, the second (or third) is The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. In both cases, I’d posted what amounts to drafts of the translations online, and the publishers reached out to me. Someone I work with recently had a novel published the same way; he’d been releasing chapters for free as he wrote them, and a publisher came along who wanted to sell them. And if nothing else, keeping up my abilities with another language is never wasted time, especially one like Spanish that I find myself using regularly in day-to-day life. Of course, other effects could be forthcoming that I never know about. This is where I’ve been struggling of late: this sort of faith that I am causing something positive that I’ll never know about. It’s sort of like the author who’s never appreciated until long after they’re gone. How much solace could they get from this hope or even belief that one day, thousands of people will read what they wrote and be moved by it? It’s certainly a pretty empty meal for me. There are, I’m sure, better ways of looking at things I work on and all that, but it’s not just a dial in my brain I can turn. I remember hearing or reading once recently that the journey of (religious) faith included a period of all but losing it, so maybe that’s just where I am in this particular flavor of belief or hope or whatever you want to call it. Until next time, Internet.]]> As an aspiring(?) translator, historical sources are often a prime source for texts that both warrant translation and are free from intellectual property issues. But they also bring their own difficulties, even beyond the differences in language that can arise over long periods of time.

Every year, much of the U.S. celebrates Columbus Day, in honor of Christopher Columbus. While I at least (vaguely) know the history behind the holiday, it’s nonetheless beyond my understanding why it’s still A Thing. This sort of vague incomprehension is my usual reaction to this country’s hypocrisy.

Anyway, my supplemental response to all this is usually to think about how more people/ need to read Bartolomé de las Casas (or Casaus, as he reminds us). From there it’s a short journey to reminding myself that I’ve thought about translating his most famous work for years.

Wording

One of the stumbling stones unique to this project is how. Not in the broader sense, but more specifically what approach I want to take. I’ve been stymied in the past by a feeling that I would need to be very aggressive in my translation, by which I mean changing more than I typically like to. This is because, to a modern reader, de las Casas’ prose sucks.

Okay, this is of course disingenuous. It’s not that he was actually a bad writer, it’s just that Spanish prose from the mid-17th century is very different from Spanish writing of the 20th or 21st century, much less present-day English. But that means having to change a lot more than I’ve wanted to in order to make my translation readable. And readability matters, especially when my whole purpose for translating this is to try to have de las Casas’ arguments (and descriptions) be compelling to a modern audience.

Translation is, in my view, all in the name: it is a bringing over of something. This is where our word “translate” comes from: Latin trānslātus, a participle of trānsferre (“to bear/carry across”). The equivalent word in Spanish, traducir, comes from a similar but not identical root: Latin traducĕre (“to make something pass from one place to another”). As another aside, Russian’s word переводить is a compound of the prefix п(е)ре-, which means “over, across, afresh” and the verb водить, meaning “to lead, to drive” (used when traveling by any vehicle, for example). Russian verbs of motion are wild, but that’s for another day.

This “bringing over” always requires adjustment, some changes. It’s why you can’t just go one word at a time, but goes even beyond that. You have to be conscious of the context, the tone, and what the author is really trying to get at. And you have to do all this while, in one of my rules for myself, producing something that cannot be identified as a translation based on the resulting text alone.

Tone seems to be a particular pitfall when going from a Romance language to English. Because of History, English often has two versions of a given word: one Germanic, one Romance (Latinate). The latter are often words that end in -tion, for example. Also because of that history, the Latinate form tends to be more formal, to say nothing of sometimes taking on some additional nuance or connotation. For example, we have Germanic “job” or “calling” vs. Romance “vocation” or “profession.” Wikipedia conveniently has a list.

But Spanish doesn’t generally have this. The vast majority of Spanish’s vocabulary comes directly from Latin, and so you’ll see instances of -tion words (-ción in Spanish) far more frequently. Nonetheless, this does not mean that the prose is formal; it’s simply what the author has to work with. When I’ve looked through English translations of Spanish works that I know, however, the English often comes across as a great deal more formal than I believe the original Spanish to be.

This problem is compounded when dealing with something older. We often forget that, say, the King James Bible was not archaic to the people writing it. In translating the New Testament, I believe it’s entirely appropriate to have Jesus use contractions when speaking. Much of the Greek text of the New Testament is straightforward, even plain (especially Mark, which sounds almost child-like sometimes). So for text like de las Casas’, because his Spanish prose is archaic, there’ll always be a temptation when translating it to make the English text similarly old-fashioned. But this ignores the context in which it was written, as it would not have come across as old or archaic to someone reading it at the time it was put to paper.

There’s another potential pitfall when going from Spanish to English, namely cognates. Many of those -tion/-ción words I mentioned mean very similar things, but they may not always be used the same way. Take this example from a modern Spanish text I’m also working on translating (more on that another day). The verb originar (to originate) is used to refer to something creating tensions between two political factions. I could render this as “originating” those tensions, but that’s not a common usage of the word, even in an academic setting, so I’m probably better off going with something else.

— — —

Returning to my qualms about changing too much, I’ve simply decided I need to get over it. My rendition will thus be freer than it might’ve been several years ago, while still being true to the underlying content. In many cases this may simply mean leaving out one of multiple times he repeats the same phrase (with at most a small variation), because that is something that present-day English-speaking readers find repetitive rather than augmentative.

For an example of what I mean, de las Casas loves duplication. When he wants to emphasize something, he’ll frequently use two synonymous adjectives (or adverbs or verbs) for this purpose. For example, at the start of his narrative of the original discovery of the “Indies” (mainly Hispaniola and the surrounding islands), he talks about “the great [or large] and infinite islands nearby [to Hispaniola].” I think most English-speaking editors would see this as unnecessarily repetitive or duplicative (see?), even if the words he uses do have slightly different shades of meaning. This last point means it’s that much harder to know when exactly a description is superfluous.

Returning to my example of cognates, he also uses the word “depopulate” a lot, which at least to me sounds kinda funny. It’s clear what it means, but it’s basically never used in English writing to my experience (even in history or academia), meaning I have to find various ways to say the same thing. It’s easy to get stuck not wanting to translate one word into more than one, but that’s of course impossible, and would lead to a lousy translation.

A related difficulty is where sentence (and even paragraph) breaks should happen. You’ve probably read something in English from the 19th or early 20th centuries, and noticed that their sentences tended to be considerably longer than how we write now. This is something I’m guilty of in my own English-language writing. Well, 16th-century Spanish goes even further. For example, here’s the final sentence of the “argument” from the Brief Account:

Él lo hizo, y viendo algunos años después muchos insensibles hombres (que la codicia y ambición ha hecho degenerar del ser hombres, y sus facinorosas obras traído en reprobado sentido) que, no contentos con las traiciones y maldades que han cometido, despoblando con exquisitas especies de crueldad aquel orbe, importunaban al Rey por licencia y autoridad para tornarlas a cometer, y otras peores (si peores pudiesen ser), acordó presentar esta suma de lo que cerca desto escribió al Príncipe nuestro señor, para que Su Alteza fuese en que se les denegase, y parecióle cosa conveniente ponella en molde por que Su Alteza la leyese con más facilidad.

Again, this is one sentence. And to be clear, it does flow as one, even if it requires a little more working memory usage on the part of the reader. If I were to leave it as one sentence in my translation, however, it would be something like this:

[de las Casas] did so, and seeing that some years later many thoughtless men (whom greed and ambition had made degenerate from their humanity, and their criminal acts bringing them to evil) were, not content with the betrayals and evils they have committed, depopulating that sphere with singular types of cruelty, were asking the King for license and authority to return to committing these and other worse acts (if worse could exist), agreed to present this summary of what regarding all this he wrote to the Prince our Lord, so that His Highness [the King] influenced him to deny it, and it seemed helpful to put it in a form such that His Highness could read it more easily.

That is a lot of predicates. To be clear, Spanish prose has more rules dealing with pronouns, so the its and thises which I’ve rendered literally are much less ambiguous in the original. But even were I to correct for those, it’s still a bit of a mess. So my first pass at cleaning things up would be:

[de las Casas] did so, and saw that many years later, many thoughtless men (whom greed and ambition had made degenerate from their humanity, and whose criminal acts brought them to evil) were not content with the betrayals and evils they had already committed, committing singular types of cruelty. So much so that they were asking the King for license to return to them and other worse acts (if such were possible). De las Casas therefore agreed to present this summary of what he had written to the Prince our Lord, so that His Highness [the King] would influence the Prince to deny this evil request. To this end, it seemed beneficial to arrange it in such a way that His Highness could read it more easily.

Again, this is a first draft and still needs some cleanup. But I hope it’s easier and clearer, and also that it demonstrates just how much needs to change to get there. This passage went from one sentence to four, which also requires occasionally adding or altering transitions between phrases so that things flow in a way that makes sense.

— — —

The ultimate question, as with any art, comes down to successfulness (or a lack thereof). How successful will I be in bringing de las Casas’ words across both a linguistic divide and a temporal one? How successful will those words be in moving the reader? On some level I’m doubtless asking myself will it matter? There’s really no way to answer any of these. Just as with drawing, it’s possible to get too close to your work, with the result of either seeing too many of its flaws or too few.

It’ll be quite awhile before this project is finished, assuming I actually do finish it. I bounce between things a great deal, and this particular translation is slow going even compared to others. It’s easy to get intimidated on many fronts, both questioning my abilities and whether there’s any point in doing this at all. I’ve had at least some success on my more contemporary translation, and I’m hoping this will, well, translate to A Brief History.

And truth be told, you never know what will happen. I have three translations from English to Spanish that have been officially published. The first was two of H. P. Lovecraft’s short stories, the second (or third) is The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. In both cases, I’d posted what amounts to drafts of the translations online, and the publishers reached out to me. Someone I work with recently had a novel published the same way; he’d been releasing chapters for free as he wrote them, and a publisher came along who wanted to sell them. And if nothing else, keeping up my abilities with another language is never wasted time, especially one like Spanish that I find myself using regularly in day-to-day life.

Of course, other effects could be forthcoming that I never know about. This is where I’ve been struggling of late: this sort of faith that I am causing something positive that I’ll never know about. It’s sort of like the author who’s never appreciated until long after they’re gone. How much solace could they get from this hope or even belief that one day, thousands of people will read what they wrote and be moved by it?

It’s certainly a pretty empty meal for me. There are, I’m sure, better ways of looking at things I work on and all that, but it’s not just a dial in my brain I can turn. I remember hearing or reading once recently that the journey of (religious) faith included a period of all but losing it, so maybe that’s just where I am in this particular flavor of belief or hope or whatever you want to call it.

Until next time, Internet.

]]> https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/presenting-history Sun, 11 Feb 2024 20:58:36 +0000 Leaning Into the Void https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/leaning-into-the-void?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[My previous post ended up being disproportionately about the media I’m consuming, strangely enough. While that’s not typically what I like writing about, it’s still on my mind for different reasons.!--more-- A slow night, albeit unplanned as such. It was supposed to be an evening for Ving Tsun training, but the overcast sky meant that my eyes had other ideas. For whatever reason, I’m quite sensitive to certain types of gray or dim days, such that they wear my eyes out no matter what I’m doing. The result of this is nausea and dizziness, meaning I unfortunately was not in any condition to train. Having a good amount of ambient light in the room I’m in can help, but there’s something about the quality that needs to be just so rather than it solely being about quantity. After a couple hours’ listening to a podcast with my eyes closed, I’m at least at a point where dark-mode windows are tolerable. Returning to the thing about the media I’m consuming, I was thinking today about why I’ve been drawn to what I have been, lately. I finished Annihiliation and am well into its sequel, Authority, which centers on the Southern Reach organization itself. If you’re not familiar with the trilogy, it deals with this strange area (dubbed “Area X”) that appears on the southern coast of the U.S. and attempts to explore or just generally understand it. I’ve also begun Un verdor terrible (A Terrible Verdure, released in English as When We Cease to Understand the World) by Benjamín Labatut. I learned of the book thanks to an episode of the TrashFuture podcast on it, although I haven’t listened to the episode since I haven’t finished the book. At least so far, it’s an exploration of the contradictions inherent in the stories of the scientists behind some of recent history’s biggest discoveries. For example, it tells the story of Fritz Haber, a German chemist who helped develop Germany’s chemical weapons program during World War I, who invented a pesticide called Zyklon (which would go on to be used to murder some of his own family during the Holocaust), but who also developed a process for extracting nitrogen from the air to be used in fertilizer, which was so effective that some estimates put 50% of the world’s food supply at his feet. Even though I haven’t been back to The Three Body Problem, it does still fit in with these others. After all, it’s named for an unsolved problem in physics, namely how to model a system of three objects that have their own gravitational fields. These books all touch, in their ways, on something beyond just an unsolved problem: instead looking at the limits of human understanding. What happens when we hit that wall in one way or another? This question is so attractive to me, ironically, because I think on some level I’m hoping to gain some deeper understanding from it. I love few things more than having my mind totally blown, to have some new mental avenue be opened. It’s something that is increasingly difficult to find in my own day-to-day life; I’ve mentioned in the past that during a free-association exercise a couple years ago, I saw myself in this huge idyllic field, and hated it. Maybe it’s as simple as wanting to be reassured that there really is more out there than what I can see out my window. I think too I want to be reminded that there are people thinking past what passes for epistemology in the broader culture. Science (or at least popular science) and politics (or, here too, its broadest incarnations) have become our new god. As Labatut said in a recent (Spanish-language) interview: “For better or worse, today science is the form in which human beings interact with mystery.” Nonetheless, he also touches on where science and more transcendental things or practices do overlap. These scientists, he says, “[a]re possessed by doubt, they suffer their desire to know like those who suffer from love, and many times they lose their souls as a result, or burn themselves, or condemn themselves, or are condemned as a result of what they brought into the world.” God knows I can relate. For me, my “desire to know” is usually less focused, which is itself something I wish I could change sometimes. If I had to specify what desire to know tortures me, it’s the desire to know what questions to ask.]]> My previous post ended up being disproportionately about the media I’m consuming, strangely enough. While that’s not typically what I like writing about, it’s still on my mind for different reasons.

A slow night, albeit unplanned as such. It was supposed to be an evening for Ving Tsun training, but the overcast sky meant that my eyes had other ideas. For whatever reason, I’m quite sensitive to certain types of gray or dim days, such that they wear my eyes out no matter what I’m doing. The result of this is nausea and dizziness, meaning I unfortunately was not in any condition to train. Having a good amount of ambient light in the room I’m in can help, but there’s something about the quality that needs to be just so rather than it solely being about quantity. After a couple hours’ listening to a podcast with my eyes closed, I’m at least at a point where dark-mode windows are tolerable.

Returning to the thing about the media I’m consuming, I was thinking today about why I’ve been drawn to what I have been, lately. I finished Annihiliation and am well into its sequel, Authority, which centers on the Southern Reach organization itself. If you’re not familiar with the trilogy, it deals with this strange area (dubbed “Area X”) that appears on the southern coast of the U.S. and attempts to explore or just generally understand it.

I’ve also begun Un verdor terrible (A Terrible Verdure, released in English as When We Cease to Understand the World) by Benjamín Labatut. I learned of the book thanks to an episode of the TrashFuture podcast on it, although I haven’t listened to the episode since I haven’t finished the book. At least so far, it’s an exploration of the contradictions inherent in the stories of the scientists behind some of recent history’s biggest discoveries. For example, it tells the story of Fritz Haber, a German chemist who helped develop Germany’s chemical weapons program during World War I, who invented a pesticide called Zyklon (which would go on to be used to murder some of his own family during the Holocaust), but who also developed a process for extracting nitrogen from the air to be used in fertilizer, which was so effective that some estimates put 50% of the world’s food supply at his feet.

Even though I haven’t been back to The Three Body Problem, it does still fit in with these others. After all, it’s named for an unsolved problem in physics, namely how to model a system of three objects that have their own gravitational fields.

These books all touch, in their ways, on something beyond just an unsolved problem: instead looking at the limits of human understanding. What happens when we hit that wall in one way or another?

This question is so attractive to me, ironically, because I think on some level I’m hoping to gain some deeper understanding from it. I love few things more than having my mind totally blown, to have some new mental avenue be opened. It’s something that is increasingly difficult to find in my own day-to-day life; I’ve mentioned in the past that during a free-association exercise a couple years ago, I saw myself in this huge idyllic field, and hated it. Maybe it’s as simple as wanting to be reassured that there really is more out there than what I can see out my window.

I think too I want to be reminded that there are people thinking past what passes for epistemology in the broader culture. Science (or at least popular science) and politics (or, here too, its broadest incarnations) have become our new god. As Labatut said in a recent (Spanish-language) interview: “For better or worse, today science is the form in which human beings interact with mystery.”

Nonetheless, he also touches on where science and more transcendental things or practices do overlap. These scientists, he says, “[a]re possessed by doubt, they suffer their desire to know like those who suffer from love, and many times they lose their souls as a result, or burn themselves, or condemn themselves, or are condemned as a result of what they brought into the world.”

God knows I can relate. For me, my “desire to know” is usually less focused, which is itself something I wish I could change sometimes. If I had to specify what desire to know tortures me, it’s the desire to know what questions to ask.

]]> https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/leaning-into-the-void Thu, 01 Feb 2024 03:08:42 +0000 23 and Me https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/23-and-me?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[I suppose it’s inevitable that my mind would be focused on “looking back” as the year comes to a close, although this would be equally inevitable simply because it’s been so long since I’ve written here.!--more-- I’m not really sure where my penchant/passion for writing has gone, but it has unquestionably faded. It just isn’t a draw like it used to be, while I remain stuck trying to find something to occupy myself day-to-day. Speaking of which, I’ve taken some time off work for the holidays, so at least there has been plenty of time for following my whims. So far, it’s mostly been: Putting entirely too much time into Factorio with the help of my brother. Creating a Typst package for formatting polytonic Greek text via transliteration from Latin characters (GitHub). Basic functionality is there, although I’d like to perhaps handle numbers as well. Working on a plugin for Obsidian that will allow for uploading a page from it directly to write.as via the latter’s API. A CSS/JS library for changing a web page’s appearance based on weather conditions. There’s a basic skeleton there, but the main thing is figuring out how much I want to build in versus have the user do. In other words, do I include “default” styles for it being sunny vs. raining vs. whatever, or do I just create CSS classes and let the user handle everything else? If nothing else, I’ll likely want to come up with some styles for my own use. Chipping away at my translation of Bartolomé de las Casas’ A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, about which I hope to write more later. On the “hope to do or at least work on” list: Finish wiring some LEDs into a Lego house Work on the design/CSS for some poor sod’s web project (the descriptor is a reflection on my lack of progress, not theirs, so I should probably prioritize this) Work through more of a Go tutorial on creating web apps Restart and set up a VPS that I had pre-pandemic. The main things I hope to get working for now are instances of RocketChat and BookStack for personal/family use. A discord compatriot who knows more than me has graciously offered to help. Actually finish this playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3. I’d been stuck on a fight in Act III that I finally beat last night, so I’m hopefully back to making progress. Once I do that, I’m either restarting with a new/different character or maybe actually possibly beating Cyberpunk 2077. As an aside, BG3 is unquestionably my game of the year, and is easily the best CRPG I’ve ever played. Other, more remote things to look at: Digging out the newest laptop that we no longer use and getting Haiku up and running on it, followed by looking for potential development projects Some graphic design work for my side job teaching kung fu Preparing materials for a legal education lecture I’ll be doing on my day job’s area (Social Security disability) The idea of having all this stuff to do, and maybe actually making progress, is encouraging. But that may well be the caffeine and lisdexamfetamine talking; they make me much more optimistic in general. This is an arc I’m still trying to figure out. It’s one thing to be able to focus better, and maybe some sense of feeling hyped or whatever, but the positive emotional effects go a lot further than I’d expected. If you’ve ever had a pleasant caffeine buzz, it’s like that but more so. The post-holiday crash was a bit rough this year, mostly feeling aimless when not under the influence of the aforementioned stimulants. I’m not sure whether it’s actually improving or if feeling better is the result of the aforementioned stimulants. Times when I’m not under their effects can still be rough, as it’s often very difficult for me to find the right amount of mental stimulation: enough to keep me from totally going out of my mind with boredom, but not so much that my brain can’t rest if it needs it. Speaking of being under the influence, I’ve noticed over the last couple months that alcohol has lost all of its perceived effects. I’m still assuming that my tolerance hasn’t change for the purposes of e.g. driving, but the last few times I’ve consumed any, regardless of amount, I haven’t had any sense of buzz or anything like that. Instead, if I have more than a couple drinks within a relatively short period (i.e. enough that I would’ve gotten buzzed before), I feel nothing followed by feeling sleepy an hour or so later. It’s very weird, and I’m not sure what could be causing it. I definitely gained an undesired amount of weight when COVID lockdown started, but this effect (or lack of effect) is more recent than that. It seems to correlate more with my starting a couple vitamin supplements (vitamin D and methylfolate), but I can’t be sure, and I’ve certainly never heard of either of those causing this kind of effect. It’s not a huge deal, even if the occasional buzz was really fun; I’m just puzzled more than anything. — — — This whole year has been a bit anticlimactic. To be fair, major (i.e. beyond just my own ambit) events these days tend to be negative more often than not, so maybe I should be careful what I wish for. It’s easy to drive myself crazy trying to figure out some proper “last” event, whether that be a last blog post of the year (which this may not even be!), how I spend New Year’s Eve, all the rest. Instead, I’m trying to remind myself that we can’t really choose how these milestones happen, and even when we can, they don’t have some magical, outsized effect on what comes next. Instead, it’s a case of trying to make each day a little better. This desire for progress is its own trap, at least for me. I really don’t know what to do with myself when I feel like I’m treading water, and those periods have always been deeply distressing and uncomfortable. I’m trying not to see myself as being in such a period right now, difficult though this may be. I think a lot of it is brought on by an overall lack of feedback: I’m coasting, to an extent…but more than that, I just don’t really have a sense of things. It’s a relativity thing: I don’t have any other reference frames in view, so I can’t get a sense of movement one way or the other. The result is feeling like I’m just keeping pace, which is better than moving backwards, but still unsatisfying. — — — To finish (and embrace a significant shift in tone), a few more media-related recommendations: Annihilation by Jeff van der Meer. I’m about two-thirds of the way through it, and am really enjoying it. The movie, which I liked (and which is what prompted me to start reading the book) is very different. The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. My understanding is that the author has said some shitty things, but I don’t know enough about this to say anything more. The book itself is interesting, but I’m also finding it bogging down in the middle, which is where I am right now. Del tiempo y sus demonios (On Time and Its Demons) by Diego Armando Arciniegas Malagón. I try to have at least one Spanish-language book going at all times to keep up with my Spanish, and this is the one right now. I’m not very far into it, but what I’ve read so far has been excellent. The author has got an incredible command of language, and is able to switch voices fluidly without disorienting the reader. As far as I can tell there hasn’t been an English translation, unfortunately. But if your Spanish is up for it, it definitely seems like it’ll be worth your time. (That it currently has a 4.58 on GoodReads should also say something.) Games-wise, beyond the two I’ve mentioned already (Factorio and BG3), I’ve also been enjoying Super Mario Wonder, ‌(the) Gnorp Apologue, Space Haven, and perennial favorite Transport Fever 2. On those occasions I’m feeling a tad more social, Ready or Not and Starship Troopers: Extermination are both great fun with others. I often struggle staying engaged with TV shows or even movies, so not a whole lot here. I’ve been slowly making my way through Pluto on Netflix, which I’m definitely enjoying, even if I worry that the ultimate payoff won’t hold up (to be clear, this is just a vague sense rather than the result of anything specific). Rick and Morty has held up well overall, and I’m one episode from finishing the most recent season. Have a pleasant New Year’s, Internet. ]]> I suppose it’s inevitable that my mind would be focused on “looking back” as the year comes to a close, although this would be equally inevitable simply because it’s been so long since I’ve written here.

I’m not really sure where my penchant/passion for writing has gone, but it has unquestionably faded. It just isn’t a draw like it used to be, while I remain stuck trying to find something to occupy myself day-to-day. Speaking of which, I’ve taken some time off work for the holidays, so at least there has been plenty of time for following my whims. So far, it’s mostly been:

  • Putting entirely too much time into Factorio with the help of my brother.
  • Creating a Typst package for formatting polytonic Greek text via transliteration from Latin characters (GitHub). Basic functionality is there, although I’d like to perhaps handle numbers as well.
  • Working on a plugin for Obsidian that will allow for uploading a page from it directly to write.as via the latter’s API.
  • A CSS/JS library for changing a web page’s appearance based on weather conditions. There’s a basic skeleton there, but the main thing is figuring out how much I want to build in versus have the user do. In other words, do I include “default” styles for it being sunny vs. raining vs. whatever, or do I just create CSS classes and let the user handle everything else? If nothing else, I’ll likely want to come up with some styles for my own use.
  • Chipping away at my translation of Bartolomé de las Casas’ A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, about which I hope to write more later.

On the “hope to do or at least work on” list:

  • Finish wiring some LEDs into a Lego house
  • Work on the design/CSS for some poor sod’s web project (the descriptor is a reflection on my lack of progress, not theirs, so I should probably prioritize this)
  • Work through more of a Go tutorial on creating web apps
  • Restart and set up a VPS that I had pre-pandemic. The main things I hope to get working for now are instances of RocketChat and BookStack for personal/family use. A discord compatriot who knows more than me has graciously offered to help.
  • Actually finish this playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3. I’d been stuck on a fight in Act III that I finally beat last night, so I’m hopefully back to making progress. Once I do that, I’m either restarting with a new/different character or maybe actually possibly beating Cyberpunk 2077. As an aside, BG3 is unquestionably my game of the year, and is easily the best CRPG I’ve ever played.

Other, more remote things to look at:

  • Digging out the newest laptop that we no longer use and getting Haiku up and running on it, followed by looking for potential development projects
  • Some graphic design work for my side job teaching kung fu
  • Preparing materials for a legal education lecture I’ll be doing on my day job’s area (Social Security disability)

The idea of having all this stuff to do, and maybe actually making progress, is encouraging. But that may well be the caffeine and lisdexamfetamine talking; they make me much more optimistic in general. This is an arc I’m still trying to figure out. It’s one thing to be able to focus better, and maybe some sense of feeling hyped or whatever, but the positive emotional effects go a lot further than I’d expected. If you’ve ever had a pleasant caffeine buzz, it’s like that but more so.

The post-holiday crash was a bit rough this year, mostly feeling aimless when not under the influence of the aforementioned stimulants. I’m not sure whether it’s actually improving or if feeling better is the result of the aforementioned stimulants. Times when I’m not under their effects can still be rough, as it’s often very difficult for me to find the right amount of mental stimulation: enough to keep me from totally going out of my mind with boredom, but not so much that my brain can’t rest if it needs it.

Speaking of being under the influence, I’ve noticed over the last couple months that alcohol has lost all of its perceived effects. I’m still assuming that my tolerance hasn’t change for the purposes of e.g. driving, but the last few times I’ve consumed any, regardless of amount, I haven’t had any sense of buzz or anything like that. Instead, if I have more than a couple drinks within a relatively short period (i.e. enough that I would’ve gotten buzzed before), I feel nothing followed by feeling sleepy an hour or so later. It’s very weird, and I’m not sure what could be causing it. I definitely gained an undesired amount of weight when COVID lockdown started, but this effect (or lack of effect) is more recent than that. It seems to correlate more with my starting a couple vitamin supplements (vitamin D and methylfolate), but I can’t be sure, and I’ve certainly never heard of either of those causing this kind of effect. It’s not a huge deal, even if the occasional buzz was really fun; I’m just puzzled more than anything.

— — —

This whole year has been a bit anticlimactic. To be fair, major (i.e. beyond just my own ambit) events these days tend to be negative more often than not, so maybe I should be careful what I wish for. It’s easy to drive myself crazy trying to figure out some proper “last” event, whether that be a last blog post of the year (which this may not even be!), how I spend New Year’s Eve, all the rest. Instead, I’m trying to remind myself that we can’t really choose how these milestones happen, and even when we can, they don’t have some magical, outsized effect on what comes next. Instead, it’s a case of trying to make each day a little better.

This desire for progress is its own trap, at least for me. I really don’t know what to do with myself when I feel like I’m treading water, and those periods have always been deeply distressing and uncomfortable. I’m trying not to see myself as being in such a period right now, difficult though this may be. I think a lot of it is brought on by an overall lack of feedback: I’m coasting, to an extent…but more than that, I just don’t really have a sense of things. It’s a relativity thing: I don’t have any other reference frames in view, so I can’t get a sense of movement one way or the other. The result is feeling like I’m just keeping pace, which is better than moving backwards, but still unsatisfying.

— — —

To finish (and embrace a significant shift in tone), a few more media-related recommendations:

  • Annihilation by Jeff van der Meer. I’m about two-thirds of the way through it, and am really enjoying it. The movie, which I liked (and which is what prompted me to start reading the book) is very different.
  • The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. My understanding is that the author has said some shitty things, but I don’t know enough about this to say anything more. The book itself is interesting, but I’m also finding it bogging down in the middle, which is where I am right now.
  • Del tiempo y sus demonios (On Time and Its Demons) by Diego Armando Arciniegas Malagón. I try to have at least one Spanish-language book going at all times to keep up with my Spanish, and this is the one right now. I’m not very far into it, but what I’ve read so far has been excellent. The author has got an incredible command of language, and is able to switch voices fluidly without disorienting the reader. As far as I can tell there hasn’t been an English translation, unfortunately. But if your Spanish is up for it, it definitely seems like it’ll be worth your time. (That it currently has a 4.58 on GoodReads should also say something.)
  • Games-wise, beyond the two I’ve mentioned already (Factorio and BG3), I’ve also been enjoying Super Mario Wonder, ‌(the) Gnorp Apologue, Space Haven, and perennial favorite Transport Fever 2. On those occasions I’m feeling a tad more social, Ready or Not and Starship Troopers: Extermination are both great fun with others.
  • I often struggle staying engaged with TV shows or even movies, so not a whole lot here. I’ve been slowly making my way through Pluto on Netflix, which I’m definitely enjoying, even if I worry that the ultimate payoff won’t hold up (to be clear, this is just a vague sense rather than the result of anything specific). Rick and Morty has held up well overall, and I’m one episode from finishing the most recent season.

Have a pleasant New Year’s, Internet.

]]> https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/23-and-me Sat, 30 Dec 2023 19:26:32 +0000 Strategic Withdrawal https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/strategic-withdrawal?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[A new week, a new whatever. Thankfully there was far less in terms of emotional crash yesterday, which is hopeful. I also allowed myself to do a lot less over the weekend, which may have helped.!--more-- A couple more things have crossed my path, both of which seem like the next step in not fighting my own nature. The first is a book, El túnel by Ernesto Sábato. It is, at least on its face, the memoir of a murder, but the part that strikes me is the narrator’s rejection of many “normal” aspects of the nitty-gritty of socializing, being a social being, etc. The other is a blog post by Gwern Branwen, who is into a lot of things I find rather unhelpful (rationalism) or actively negative (effective altruism, crypto), but whose website I find ridiculously well-designed. I first came upon his site at some point due to a long post (all of his posts are long) on rubrication, which I enjoyed. I came back to the blog recently after something from there was posted on Hacker News, and I was intrigued by the title of the post I linked above. Most of the actually-good bits I found in the Gwern post are from other people. But the long and short of it is questioning whether we should really be trying to push people out of subcultures and into the “main” one. A lot of it is about social status and the size of groups we compare ourselves to, which isn’t particularly helpful in my case (at least not now). After all, this question requires there to be something you seek to be proud of, and I have not remotely found such a thing in my own life. But the more significant question for me is simply whether a greater degree of “opting out” (in the post’s words) is something I should really consider embracing. Or, better said, something I should stop fighting. The book’s ultimate purpose (and how the protagonist’s words should be interpreted) remains to be seen, as I haven’t finished it yet. But it’s pretty short, so I’m hoping that won’t take long. What has grabbed me so far, at least, is the way the narrator simply decides he’s not going to do things a certain way. Sometimes it’s a case of recognizing that he’s terrible at the “normal” way of doing something (e.g. talking to an unknown woman), others it’s just a (simple?) decision not to do it that way. These are typically left unexplained. I think as always it’s a question of balance. On the one hand, I can certainly envy the people who have that one thing that they seek to perfect to the best of their abilities. But, as the blog post points out, we tend not to ask what that kind of life leaves out, what the cost of that pursuit of perfection actually is. At the same time, I do think there’s such a thing as over-extending oneself, and that’s definitely where I am: trying to straddle too many different groups/areas/foci/whatever. This same thought applies equally to the idea of “opting out,” of course. Entirely isolating myself is not really any better than over-extending. Unfortunately, I haven’t the first idea how to work towards being part of a group, which is something that we tend to forget is a thing. This 2003 essay (quoted by the Gwern post) describes it as follows: Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school… …Nerds don’t realize this. They don’t realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don’t realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who “can draw” like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that’s why they’re good at it. Likewise, popular isn’t just something you are or you aren’t, but something you make yourself. This is (at least out of context) more than a little reductive, and overstates just how much control one has over the result. But I do think it’s accurate to say that being popular isn’t entirely something that just happens. Even if you can’t always make it happen by choice, you can absolutely take deliberate steps to make sure it doesn’t happen. At the same time, I’ve been told for much of my life that you shouldn’t go looking for people, you should go looking for stuff that you like, and then find people that like that too. Unfortunately, I haven’t the foggiest how to do that given how quickly my interests change. I’ll be curious to see if this settles down any, but it’s far too soon to know. Related to this, I don’t have a good sense of what I want to devote more (read: sufficient) time to in order to have it go anywhere, since I still lack a good sense of why I do much of anything…at least beyond “it seemed cool at the time.” This focus on socialization vs. withdraw is, in a way, at the core of what I’ve been trying to sort out for the last few years. My instinct is to be 99.9% reclusive, but I often worry about whether that’s too self-indulgent, and wish that I could be clearer about what I’m doing outside of my internal ambit. Too often, I think, we conflate knowledge of a thing with power over the thing (cf. that fantasy trope of being able to control someone/something if you know its “true” name). Mass media/communications wildly skew this, as we can know a little about a lot and can find out plenty more. But knowing about the shady things one’s government is getting up to doesn’t equate to much in the way of influence over the problem. (An interesting side-note from the Gwern piece is the suggestion that nationalism/national identity breaks down as people retreat into subcultures. He seems to suggest a negative here, but I would say good riddance.) Growing up as I did, straddling the Internet Age (I was online in some sense as a kid, but these were the days of dial-up and BBSes), I think some or even many of us got the idea that all this new access to knowledge and overall interconnectedness would mean a lot more than it actually does. It’s also far easier to indulge in the human tendency to see single people as the driving force behind something, which is almost never actually the case. We can find a lot more people to compare ourselves against, and it’s much harder to keep that kind of thing in perspective. Our culture also tells us to ignore all the ways that successful people lucked into their success, leaving us to wonder why we “couldn’t” make it. The more important side-effect, though, is the fact that once we come to that realization, few of us have an idea where to go next. We’re told we too can be the next [great person], so we internalize that, and then are deeply damaged whenever we come to understand that this is just wrong. I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know one thing it’s not: you can’t just forcibly shrink your horizons. Just deciding that you’re not going to care about things that used to matter, or that you’re not going to be as curious about the world are recipes for frustration at best. There’s a more pernicious angle as well: trying to force ourselves to look more closely around us (especially in terms of the people in our lives) without a true refocusing just makes the people and things we care about look small. This metaphor of refocusing (rather than trying to completely change how we think) seems like the best way, even if I haven’t a clue how to actually do that yet.]]> A new week, a new whatever. Thankfully there was far less in terms of emotional crash yesterday, which is hopeful. I also allowed myself to do a lot less over the weekend, which may have helped.

A couple more things have crossed my path, both of which seem like the next step in not fighting my own nature. The first is a book, El túnel by Ernesto Sábato. It is, at least on its face, the memoir of a murder, but the part that strikes me is the narrator’s rejection of many “normal” aspects of the nitty-gritty of socializing, being a social being, etc. The other is a blog post by Gwern Branwen, who is into a lot of things I find rather unhelpful (rationalism) or actively negative (effective altruism, crypto), but whose website I find ridiculously well-designed. I first came upon his site at some point due to a long post (all of his posts are long) on rubrication, which I enjoyed. I came back to the blog recently after something from there was posted on Hacker News, and I was intrigued by the title of the post I linked above.

Most of the actually-good bits I found in the Gwern post are from other people. But the long and short of it is questioning whether we should really be trying to push people out of subcultures and into the “main” one. A lot of it is about social status and the size of groups we compare ourselves to, which isn’t particularly helpful in my case (at least not now). After all, this question requires there to be something you seek to be proud of, and I have not remotely found such a thing in my own life. But the more significant question for me is simply whether a greater degree of “opting out” (in the post’s words) is something I should really consider embracing. Or, better said, something I should stop fighting.

The book’s ultimate purpose (and how the protagonist’s words should be interpreted) remains to be seen, as I haven’t finished it yet. But it’s pretty short, so I’m hoping that won’t take long. What has grabbed me so far, at least, is the way the narrator simply decides he’s not going to do things a certain way. Sometimes it’s a case of recognizing that he’s terrible at the “normal” way of doing something (e.g. talking to an unknown woman), others it’s just a (simple?) decision not to do it that way. These are typically left unexplained.

I think as always it’s a question of balance. On the one hand, I can certainly envy the people who have that one thing that they seek to perfect to the best of their abilities. But, as the blog post points out, we tend not to ask what that kind of life leaves out, what the cost of that pursuit of perfection actually is. At the same time, I do think there’s such a thing as over-extending oneself, and that’s definitely where I am: trying to straddle too many different groups/areas/foci/whatever.

This same thought applies equally to the idea of “opting out,” of course. Entirely isolating myself is not really any better than over-extending. Unfortunately, I haven’t the first idea how to work towards being part of a group, which is something that we tend to forget is a thing. This 2003 essay (quoted by the Gwern post) describes it as follows:

Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school…

…Nerds don’t realize this. They don’t realize that it takes work to be popular. In general, people outside some very demanding field don’t realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who “can draw” like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that’s why they’re good at it. Likewise, popular isn’t just something you are or you aren’t, but something you make yourself.

This is (at least out of context) more than a little reductive, and overstates just how much control one has over the result. But I do think it’s accurate to say that being popular isn’t entirely something that just happens. Even if you can’t always make it happen by choice, you can absolutely take deliberate steps to make sure it doesn’t happen.

At the same time, I’ve been told for much of my life that you shouldn’t go looking for people, you should go looking for stuff that you like, and then find people that like that too. Unfortunately, I haven’t the foggiest how to do that given how quickly my interests change. I’ll be curious to see if this settles down any, but it’s far too soon to know. Related to this, I don’t have a good sense of what I want to devote more (read: sufficient) time to in order to have it go anywhere, since I still lack a good sense of why I do much of anything…at least beyond “it seemed cool at the time.”

This focus on socialization vs. withdraw is, in a way, at the core of what I’ve been trying to sort out for the last few years. My instinct is to be 99.9% reclusive, but I often worry about whether that’s too self-indulgent, and wish that I could be clearer about what I’m doing outside of my internal ambit.

Too often, I think, we conflate knowledge of a thing with power over the thing (cf. that fantasy trope of being able to control someone/something if you know its “true” name). Mass media/communications wildly skew this, as we can know a little about a lot and can find out plenty more. But knowing about the shady things one’s government is getting up to doesn’t equate to much in the way of influence over the problem. (An interesting side-note from the Gwern piece is the suggestion that nationalism/national identity breaks down as people retreat into subcultures. He seems to suggest a negative here, but I would say good riddance.) Growing up as I did, straddling the Internet Age (I was online in some sense as a kid, but these were the days of dial-up and BBSes), I think some or even many of us got the idea that all this new access to knowledge and overall interconnectedness would mean a lot more than it actually does.

It’s also far easier to indulge in the human tendency to see single people as the driving force behind something, which is almost never actually the case. We can find a lot more people to compare ourselves against, and it’s much harder to keep that kind of thing in perspective. Our culture also tells us to ignore all the ways that successful people lucked into their success, leaving us to wonder why we “couldn’t” make it. The more important side-effect, though, is the fact that once we come to that realization, few of us have an idea where to go next. We’re told we too can be the next [great person], so we internalize that, and then are deeply damaged whenever we come to understand that this is just wrong.

I don’t know what the answer is. But I do know one thing it’s not: you can’t just forcibly shrink your horizons. Just deciding that you’re not going to care about things that used to matter, or that you’re not going to be as curious about the world are recipes for frustration at best. There’s a more pernicious angle as well: trying to force ourselves to look more closely around us (especially in terms of the people in our lives) without a true refocusing just makes the people and things we care about look small. This metaphor of refocusing (rather than trying to completely change how we think) seems like the best way, even if I haven’t a clue how to actually do that yet.

]]> https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/strategic-withdrawal Tue, 25 Jul 2023 19:04:02 +0000 Back to My Laybors https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/back-to-my-laybors?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[Brand new look. Same great taste.!--more-- After a sabbatical of sorts, I’m making my way into writing more regularly again. So far I’ve done a reasonably good job of not beating myself up for the gap, which is good since it’s not like that was going to make it less likely or shorten it once it arrived. The theme of this year has turned out to be acceptance. My focus (thanks in no small part to my therapist) has been shifting steadily to simply figuring out how to find an equilibrium with how I am rather than changing what that means. So far it’s been difficult, but in a way that makes me think I’m on the right path. My forays into coding are still a regular thing, and I’m currently working on a front-end design for a web app someone’s doing. Specifics on here will remain scarce until I know how the other person feels about that, or if nothing else until it’s actually released. I’m getting a better handle on how my creative process works, at least, and it’s been fun to work in a style that I don’t typically use for my own stuff. I’m going with a western fantasy motif, but trying to keep it more subtle than that usually suggests. Bells and whistles can be fun in the abstract, but more often than not get in the way of usability. All that animation is fun the first couple times, but starts to get old real fast. The theological front has been relatively unchanged since I last posted. I haven’t had any major revelations on that front, whether in terms of the imagery I discussed last time or more generally. My experience with doctrine and my own personal thoughts and feelings is that they tend to be much more outward-focused, and seem to be more concerned with one’s relationship to the world (and beyond it). Figuring yourself out, meanwhile, is less emphasized, at least in, for example, Scripture. Having to bail out of the seminary classes I was taking and really struggling to get into another ancient language have not helped, but for the time being I’m taking it on faith that I need to be headed elsewhere. I’ve decided I’m going to try joining a new tilde. I was involved with a member site for awhile a few years ago, but felt increasingly alienated so kinda dropped out of it. I’ve found another one, this one in Spanish, and I’m hoping that it’s a better fit. It’ll also give me more regular practice with my Spanish, which I could always use. I’m just hoping that I don’t end up pulled in too many directions, which is another reason I’m giving myself permission to be less consistent on any one thing than I have been before. I’m still reading regularly, and have come across some really good stories elsewhere (such as in games), and I hope to talk more about those things as I go. I haven’t given up the idea of writing fiction of some description either, even if that remains much more theoretical for the time being. For now, which can mean anything from “today” or “this week” or “until the Vyvanse wears off,” I’m doing alright. Moods have been all over the place, though, but hopefully that’ll get better as I progress in some inner reorganization. Time will tell.]]> Brand new look. Same great taste.

After a sabbatical of sorts, I’m making my way into writing more regularly again. So far I’ve done a reasonably good job of not beating myself up for the gap, which is good since it’s not like that was going to make it less likely or shorten it once it arrived.

The theme of this year has turned out to be acceptance. My focus (thanks in no small part to my therapist) has been shifting steadily to simply figuring out how to find an equilibrium with how I am rather than changing what that means. So far it’s been difficult, but in a way that makes me think I’m on the right path.

My forays into coding are still a regular thing, and I’m currently working on a front-end design for a web app someone’s doing. Specifics on here will remain scarce until I know how the other person feels about that, or if nothing else until it’s actually released. I’m getting a better handle on how my creative process works, at least, and it’s been fun to work in a style that I don’t typically use for my own stuff. I’m going with a western fantasy motif, but trying to keep it more subtle than that usually suggests. Bells and whistles can be fun in the abstract, but more often than not get in the way of usability. All that animation is fun the first couple times, but starts to get old real fast.

The theological front has been relatively unchanged since I last posted. I haven’t had any major revelations on that front, whether in terms of the imagery I discussed last time or more generally. My experience with doctrine and my own personal thoughts and feelings is that they tend to be much more outward-focused, and seem to be more concerned with one’s relationship to the world (and beyond it). Figuring yourself out, meanwhile, is less emphasized, at least in, for example, Scripture. Having to bail out of the seminary classes I was taking and really struggling to get into another ancient language have not helped, but for the time being I’m taking it on faith that I need to be headed elsewhere.

I’ve decided I’m going to try joining a new tilde. I was involved with a member site for awhile a few years ago, but felt increasingly alienated so kinda dropped out of it. I’ve found another one, this one in Spanish, and I’m hoping that it’s a better fit. It’ll also give me more regular practice with my Spanish, which I could always use. I’m just hoping that I don’t end up pulled in too many directions, which is another reason I’m giving myself permission to be less consistent on any one thing than I have been before.

I’m still reading regularly, and have come across some really good stories elsewhere (such as in games), and I hope to talk more about those things as I go. I haven’t given up the idea of writing fiction of some description either, even if that remains much more theoretical for the time being.

For now, which can mean anything from “today” or “this week” or “until the Vyvanse wears off,” I’m doing alright. Moods have been all over the place, though, but hopefully that’ll get better as I progress in some inner reorganization. Time will tell.

]]> https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/back-to-my-laybors Tue, 11 Jul 2023 21:10:48 +0000 Runnin’ Up That Hill https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/runnin-up-that-hill?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[I spent some time at ⸺ Hill a couple days ago. It was intended as getting some spiritual reorientation, and ultimately that’s what I got, albeit not in the way that I expected. I’ve been given a lot to think about, but not in the sense of analysis, more just sitting with some things and seeing what happens. !--more-- Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. — Inferno by Dante Alighieri (tr. Robert and Jean Hollander), Canto I, 1-3. I was thinking about the opening events today, especially the part a little bit later where Dante comes across a hill in the wood. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve actually sat down and read the Inferno, and that first verse hits very different. I was in high school when I last read it thoroughly, but I certainly couldn’t appreciate the “midway in the journey” part then the way I can now. At 39, I’m actually four years older than Dante was when the story takes place. (The scholarly consensus, to my understanding, is that the beginning takes place in 1300, while Dante began writing the Comedy in 1308 when he was around 43.) One thing that came up during my couple-hour retreat the other day was that one of the big questions I’ve been asking lately—so what?—is on time given the stage of my life that I’m in. I’ve done the things that you’re supposed to do, established an “adult” life, and now I’m left wondering in many ways what it was all for. A lot of self-reflection and self-analysis is going on, and I find much that is disappointing. This isn’t really about feeling unhappy with myself or that I’m a failure in some way. Instead, it’s feeling like my priorities and the way I’m wired is just fundamentally incompatible with societal expectations, or at least what is valued. It’s all well and good to be interested in the things that I am (which can best be described as “everything, for a little bit”). But in what way has this aspect of myself made my life in any way better? Society seems to value having a niche a lot more, given the steady march towards hives. I’ve seen the odd think piece in praise of the generalist, and that’s all well and good, but doesn’t really seem to be the reality. No one’s hiring synthesists these days. This line of thought doesn’t really go anywhere productive. I’m having a hard time valuing much that I do beyond some variation of it was fun at the time, which doesn’t ultimately count for much. But at the same time, it feels weird and almost mercenary to put too much stock in, say, my relationships with my family. I don’t try to be a good father because of what I get out of it, and it feels wrong to try to think in such transactional terms. At the same time, I don’t like avoiding questions just because they’re unpleasant. It’s one thing to acknowledge something as unknowable, but even that feels pretty dissatisfying in this instance: some vague hand-waiving towards “hoping for the best” isn’t really enough. On the one hand I can’t pretend otherwise, but on the other, keeping myself in this (strange?) loop of reminding myself that I’m unhappy with x, y, and z isn’t any better. All I can do for now is hope that the next hill I come to is one that makes sense.]]> I spent some time at ⸺ Hill a couple days ago. It was intended as getting some spiritual reorientation, and ultimately that’s what I got, albeit not in the way that I expected. I’ve been given a lot to think about, but not in the sense of analysis, more just sitting with some things and seeing what happens.

Midway in the journey of our life I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost.

— Inferno by Dante Alighieri (tr. Robert and Jean Hollander), Canto I, 1-3.

I was thinking about the opening events today, especially the part a little bit later where Dante comes across a hill in the wood. It’s been quite a long time since I’ve actually sat down and read the Inferno, and that first verse hits very different. I was in high school when I last read it thoroughly, but I certainly couldn’t appreciate the “midway in the journey” part then the way I can now. At 39, I’m actually four years older than Dante was when the story takes place. (The scholarly consensus, to my understanding, is that the beginning takes place in 1300, while Dante began writing the Comedy in 1308 when he was around 43.)

One thing that came up during my couple-hour retreat the other day was that one of the big questions I’ve been asking lately—so what?—is on time given the stage of my life that I’m in. I’ve done the things that you’re supposed to do, established an “adult” life, and now I’m left wondering in many ways what it was all for. A lot of self-reflection and self-analysis is going on, and I find much that is disappointing.

This isn’t really about feeling unhappy with myself or that I’m a failure in some way. Instead, it’s feeling like my priorities and the way I’m wired is just fundamentally incompatible with societal expectations, or at least what is valued. It’s all well and good to be interested in the things that I am (which can best be described as “everything, for a little bit”). But in what way has this aspect of myself made my life in any way better? Society seems to value having a niche a lot more, given the steady march towards hives.

I’ve seen the odd think piece in praise of the generalist, and that’s all well and good, but doesn’t really seem to be the reality. No one’s hiring synthesists these days.

This line of thought doesn’t really go anywhere productive. I’m having a hard time valuing much that I do beyond some variation of it was fun at the time, which doesn’t ultimately count for much. But at the same time, it feels weird and almost mercenary to put too much stock in, say, my relationships with my family. I don’t try to be a good father because of what I get out of it, and it feels wrong to try to think in such transactional terms.

At the same time, I don’t like avoiding questions just because they’re unpleasant. It’s one thing to acknowledge something as unknowable, but even that feels pretty dissatisfying in this instance: some vague hand-waiving towards “hoping for the best” isn’t really enough. On the one hand I can’t pretend otherwise, but on the other, keeping myself in this (strange?) loop of reminding myself that I’m unhappy with x, y, and z isn’t any better.

All I can do for now is hope that the next hill I come to is one that makes sense.

]]> https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/runnin-up-that-hill Sat, 05 Nov 2022 03:29:44 +0000 Station to Station https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/station-to-station?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[This ended up being a more sedate weekend than expected, although I can’t say I’m unhappy about this. Admittedly, I would’ve liked to have been feeling more adventurous, but even fighting against my innate inertia is something I have less and less stomach for. !--more-- One thing we did end up doing was having an impromptu David Eggers double feature: The VVitch last night and The Northman today. I’ve been wanting to see both for quite some time (the former since it came out), and The Lighthouse was one of my favorite movies to come out in the last few years. Neither was what I expected: The VVitch was even less of a standard “horror” movie than I’d been lead to believe, and The Northman was unfortunately advertised as a more traditional action movie than it was in either case. An inciting surprise was that my wife was willing to watch both of them with me, since us deciding to be lazy in the same room is one of the rare times these days I have the patience to actually watch a movie, even a good one. My feeling is that all three of Eggers’ movies so far are folktales. There’s no conceit about “this is someone [in universe] telling a story,” it’s told the way someone actually tells a story. They’re grounded with a layer of the fantastical mixed in, and it’s up to the audience to decide where that line is. I don’t get the feeling that he’s specifically trying to tell morality stories, even if one can glean a lesson from them. The common thread, if there is one, is that evil is very good at finding us where we’re weakest. Our impromptu movie and YouTube marathon was initially brought about by my wanting to clean up my office in preparation for painting. Having company definitely helps, and my wife’s a much better practical problem solver than I am (I have a hard time staying grounded in the immediate question). As I was cleaning/organizing, I came across a diary I’d brought back from my dad’s house sometime in the last year. The first entry was from the summer of 1991, when I was nine, and I seem to have written once or twice per year for the next few years, and then a one-off entry in the early aughts when I was in college. Something I wrote nearly every time is that I wanted to write more often, but clearly that didn’t happen. It did get me thinking a bit about why that kind of consistency is so hard for me. I’ve thought often about trying my hand at writing-writing, most likely fiction, and even made a few abortive attempts over the last few years. The frustration is typically that I have some idea or concept, but don’t really know how to take it anywhere. Some of it is not having the patience to do the slow character/world building pieces (i.e. showing not telling), and I also don’t really think I understand people well enough to be that good at characterization. Beyond that, though, is something arguably more fundamental. The things I think about writing about are usually questions that I have. The problem is that if I knew how to answer them, I wouldn’t need to write about them. Once an idea is brought to its completion, I’m ready to move on to the next thing. Sitting down and doing a whole story about something I already know or already think sounds unimaginably tedious. At the same time, I’m not sure a running puzzle-solving process that may or may not go anywhere would be a worthwhile read. Then again, there is this blog, so… ]]> This ended up being a more sedate weekend than expected, although I can’t say I’m unhappy about this. Admittedly, I would’ve liked to have been feeling more adventurous, but even fighting against my innate inertia is something I have less and less stomach for.

One thing we did end up doing was having an impromptu David Eggers double feature: The VVitch last night and The Northman today. I’ve been wanting to see both for quite some time (the former since it came out), and The Lighthouse was one of my favorite movies to come out in the last few years. Neither was what I expected: The VVitch was even less of a standard “horror” movie than I’d been lead to believe, and The Northman was unfortunately advertised as a more traditional action movie than it was in either case. An inciting surprise was that my wife was willing to watch both of them with me, since us deciding to be lazy in the same room is one of the rare times these days I have the patience to actually watch a movie, even a good one.

My feeling is that all three of Eggers’ movies so far are folktales. There’s no conceit about “this is someone [in universe] telling a story,” it’s told the way someone actually tells a story. They’re grounded with a layer of the fantastical mixed in, and it’s up to the audience to decide where that line is. I don’t get the feeling that he’s specifically trying to tell morality stories, even if one can glean a lesson from them. The common thread, if there is one, is that evil is very good at finding us where we’re weakest.

Our impromptu movie and YouTube marathon was initially brought about by my wanting to clean up my office in preparation for painting. Having company definitely helps, and my wife’s a much better practical problem solver than I am (I have a hard time staying grounded in the immediate question). As I was cleaning/organizing, I came across a diary I’d brought back from my dad’s house sometime in the last year. The first entry was from the summer of 1991, when I was nine, and I seem to have written once or twice per year for the next few years, and then a one-off entry in the early aughts when I was in college. Something I wrote nearly every time is that I wanted to write more often, but clearly that didn’t happen.

It did get me thinking a bit about why that kind of consistency is so hard for me. I’ve thought often about trying my hand at writing-writing, most likely fiction, and even made a few abortive attempts over the last few years. The frustration is typically that I have some idea or concept, but don’t really know how to take it anywhere. Some of it is not having the patience to do the slow character/world building pieces (i.e. showing not telling), and I also don’t really think I understand people well enough to be that good at characterization. Beyond that, though, is something arguably more fundamental. The things I think about writing about are usually questions that I have. The problem is that if I knew how to answer them, I wouldn’t need to write about them. Once an idea is brought to its completion, I’m ready to move on to the next thing. Sitting down and doing a whole story about something I already know or already think sounds unimaginably tedious. At the same time, I’m not sure a running puzzle-solving process that may or may not go anywhere would be a worthwhile read.

Then again, there is this blog, so…

]]> https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/station-to-station Mon, 31 Oct 2022 03:26:02 +0000 Not Enough Beeps https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/not-enough-beeps?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[I had some down time in Sweet Transit so here we are. It’s been a very low-energy week, which I mostly attribute to getting a long-overdue COVID booster earlier this week. It’s actually been really nice overall—the feeling isn’t fatigue or anything like that, mainly just feeling really relaxed and mellow. “Mellow” being an unusual thing for me.!--more-- It’s surprisingly easy to fall back into old habits of giving a shit about whatever the online drama du jour happens to be. I’m thankfully less engaged than I used to be, but it hasn’t been wholly inescapable. For example, I got in an argument with someone yesterday on Discord regarding the Bayonetta 3 thing. The specifics of the controversy don’t matter; it was, in my opinion, a case of the other person conflating two separate issues. After things ended, I found myself frustrated that truthfulness wasn’t valued more, even when it conflicts with some other value. Ultimately I was left feeling alienated. There’s definitely a tendency among leftists to be as dogmatic as anyone else, and in particular to engage in some of the same types of poor argumentation that we see elsewhere. (This isn’t to equate the two main political axes in the slightest.) I don’t like the speed-to-judgment, and the tendency towards ad hominem before all else. I understand the argument (at least that I’ve heard), namely that there’s much to be gained by attaching a strong social stigma to being a certain way, e.g. racist or sexist. There’s some truth to this, but it also represents giving up on anyone who’s wrong, which is not something I’m on board with. You have to approach people where they’re at, and you won’t make someone less racist by calling them a racist asshole (most of the time, at least). It’s related to why “my body, my choice” is a bad argument (even if it’s true): if someone genuinely believes that abortion is murder, saying “whether I commit murder is my choice, not society’s” is not particularly compelling. But we’re apparently having more fun talking past each other. Even before Twitter, there was a self-imposed word limit on political arguments. I have a sense of the kinds of social situation I’m looking for, but not really how to find it. It’s not about finding people that agree with me about everything; instead, I’d just like to have a sense that I’m heard and that I’m valued. For all the difficulties I had in high school, I do remember an openness among my social circle and a willingness to talk about more than just what we were playing that day that I sorely miss. At least part of this is my own “cultural” differences. For one, I’ve always hated the American tendency to talk around what we actually mean, and so much is left unsaid or distorted under the guise of “politeness.” But how do we trust what someone says if they’re only ever to tell us positive things? We tend to keep ourselves so closed off from one another, even in ostensibly friendly circumstances—that “oversharing” is even a thing says a lot. Something this broad, i.e. “find a social niche,” is easily overwhelming. How does this even start? The answer I’m usually given is to seek out people with similar interests, but even this isn’t actually that clear in practice. Most if not all my interests are things one does in isolation (drawing, coding, reading, etc.), and I haven’t really figured out a way to turn these into social things. Meanwhile, I don’t have a good sense of when someone’s thinking/believing something means I need to walk away from the relationship or not. It’s a combination of moral scale (i.e. whether x is worse than y or some specific threshold), what I’m comfortable being associated with, the extent to which I believe in whether the person can change, and whether I’m willing to wait. It’s easy enough to see the problem, but I rapidly fall apart when it comes to answering these questions. I’ve noticed more and more that I take a very systematic approach to things. I’d describe this mostly as rules-based, but also that these rules need to come from somewhere. Just deciding “this is my cutoff” without connecting that to something else feels arbitrary and thus meaningless. Granted there’s always going to be a point after which you cannot answer “why”, and I don’t always have a problem with that. Because it’s so difficult for me to have a single thought in isolation (they always bring their friends), Sometimes I think my next tattoo should be a donkey. — A more prosaic decision is also on the horizon, namely what (if anything) to do this weekend. We have a couple things coming up over where my parents live (about an hour from here). I never want to leave the house when faced with the choice, but that doesn’t seem to correlate with whether I enjoy myself once I do. At the same time, it’s rare that I end up regretting the decision either way, so I can’t really use that as a criterion, either. Coding continues apace. I’ve chipped away at the project I’m over-coding for my day job (I decided to do a terminal, text-based interface in a web browser), as well as the memorization/concentration thing. For the latter, I’ve basically figured out the page layout so that it scales/rearranges itself well. I haven’t tested it a ton, but (1) this is mostly for me, so whatever, and (2) I don’t know how I could realistically check all the possible permutations of screen resolution, browser window size, and number of cards. I also had to sort out my initial dataset (the alphabet for Biblical Hebrew), which was more complicated than I expected. It turns out that the vowel markers (those “dots” above and below the actual letters) have not been consistent over the centuries, so I had to sort out what I would need to know to read the Old Testament versus, say, what’s used in Modern Hebrew. There was also an added rub in that my textbook doesn’t use the same transliteration scheme for their names as elsewhere. It also forced me to figure out how to do combining characters, which thankfully didn’t prove to be too difficult. Next on the to-do list is to do a modal for picking between data sets. I’d eventually like to allow it to load data from a file too, but don’t want to have to load a file every time I use it. The longer term approach will probably be to have a sub-directory on my site that contains them all, and then just hope I can get a directory listing (or hard code the file names). Whether I go beyond that (allowing the loading of an arbitrary file) remains to be seen. There are also a couple household tasks that I need to finally get done, namely finishing painting a wall in my home office and putting up a motion light on the outside of the house. This does kinda suggest staying home this weekend (or at least minimizing what we do); there’s one thing each on Saturday and Sunday, and they both would eat up a solid half of the day. Given that I have to catch my brain when it feels like doing something to get anything done, having somewhere to be can really screw that up (doubly so where, as here, it’s later in the day rather than first-thing).]]> I had some down time in Sweet Transit so here we are. It’s been a very low-energy week, which I mostly attribute to getting a long-overdue COVID booster earlier this week. It’s actually been really nice overall—the feeling isn’t fatigue or anything like that, mainly just feeling really relaxed and mellow. “Mellow” being an unusual thing for me.

It’s surprisingly easy to fall back into old habits of giving a shit about whatever the online drama du jour happens to be. I’m thankfully less engaged than I used to be, but it hasn’t been wholly inescapable. For example, I got in an argument with someone yesterday on Discord regarding the Bayonetta 3 thing. The specifics of the controversy don’t matter; it was, in my opinion, a case of the other person conflating two separate issues. After things ended, I found myself frustrated that truthfulness wasn’t valued more, even when it conflicts with some other value.

Ultimately I was left feeling alienated. There’s definitely a tendency among leftists to be as dogmatic as anyone else, and in particular to engage in some of the same types of poor argumentation that we see elsewhere. (This isn’t to equate the two main political axes in the slightest.) I don’t like the speed-to-judgment, and the tendency towards ad hominem before all else. I understand the argument (at least that I’ve heard), namely that there’s much to be gained by attaching a strong social stigma to being a certain way, e.g. racist or sexist. There’s some truth to this, but it also represents giving up on anyone who’s wrong, which is not something I’m on board with. You have to approach people where they’re at, and you won’t make someone less racist by calling them a racist asshole (most of the time, at least). It’s related to why “my body, my choice” is a bad argument (even if it’s true): if someone genuinely believes that abortion is murder, saying “whether I commit murder is my choice, not society’s” is not particularly compelling. But we’re apparently having more fun talking past each other. Even before Twitter, there was a self-imposed word limit on political arguments.

I have a sense of the kinds of social situation I’m looking for, but not really how to find it. It’s not about finding people that agree with me about everything; instead, I’d just like to have a sense that I’m heard and that I’m valued. For all the difficulties I had in high school, I do remember an openness among my social circle and a willingness to talk about more than just what we were playing that day that I sorely miss.

At least part of this is my own “cultural” differences. For one, I’ve always hated the American tendency to talk around what we actually mean, and so much is left unsaid or distorted under the guise of “politeness.” But how do we trust what someone says if they’re only ever to tell us positive things? We tend to keep ourselves so closed off from one another, even in ostensibly friendly circumstances—that “oversharing” is even a thing says a lot.

Something this broad, i.e. “find a social niche,” is easily overwhelming. How does this even start? The answer I’m usually given is to seek out people with similar interests, but even this isn’t actually that clear in practice. Most if not all my interests are things one does in isolation (drawing, coding, reading, etc.), and I haven’t really figured out a way to turn these into social things. Meanwhile, I don’t have a good sense of when someone’s thinking/believing something means I need to walk away from the relationship or not. It’s a combination of moral scale (i.e. whether x is worse than y or some specific threshold), what I’m comfortable being associated with, the extent to which I believe in whether the person can change, and whether I’m willing to wait.

It’s easy enough to see the problem, but I rapidly fall apart when it comes to answering these questions. I’ve noticed more and more that I take a very systematic approach to things. I’d describe this mostly as rules-based, but also that these rules need to come from somewhere. Just deciding “this is my cutoff” without connecting that to something else feels arbitrary and thus meaningless. Granted there’s always going to be a point after which you cannot answer “why”, and I don’t always have a problem with that. Because it’s so difficult for me to have a single thought in isolation (they always bring their friends),

Sometimes I think my next tattoo should be a donkey.

—

A more prosaic decision is also on the horizon, namely what (if anything) to do this weekend. We have a couple things coming up over where my parents live (about an hour from here). I never want to leave the house when faced with the choice, but that doesn’t seem to correlate with whether I enjoy myself once I do. At the same time, it’s rare that I end up regretting the decision either way, so I can’t really use that as a criterion, either.

Coding continues apace. I’ve chipped away at the project I’m over-coding for my day job (I decided to do a terminal, text-based interface in a web browser), as well as the memorization/concentration thing. For the latter, I’ve basically figured out the page layout so that it scales/rearranges itself well. I haven’t tested it a ton, but (1) this is mostly for me, so whatever, and (2) I don’t know how I could realistically check all the possible permutations of screen resolution, browser window size, and number of cards.

I also had to sort out my initial dataset (the alphabet for Biblical Hebrew), which was more complicated than I expected. It turns out that the vowel markers (those “dots” above and below the actual letters) have not been consistent over the centuries, so I had to sort out what I would need to know to read the Old Testament versus, say, what’s used in Modern Hebrew. There was also an added rub in that my textbook doesn’t use the same transliteration scheme for their names as elsewhere. It also forced me to figure out how to do combining characters, which thankfully didn’t prove to be too difficult.

Next on the to-do list is to do a modal for picking between data sets. I’d eventually like to allow it to load data from a file too, but don’t want to have to load a file every time I use it. The longer term approach will probably be to have a sub-directory on my site that contains them all, and then just hope I can get a directory listing (or hard code the file names). Whether I go beyond that (allowing the loading of an arbitrary file) remains to be seen.

There are also a couple household tasks that I need to finally get done, namely finishing painting a wall in my home office and putting up a motion light on the outside of the house. This does kinda suggest staying home this weekend (or at least minimizing what we do); there’s one thing each on Saturday and Sunday, and they both would eat up a solid half of the day. Given that I have to catch my brain when it feels like doing something to get anything done, having somewhere to be can really screw that up (doubly so where, as here, it’s later in the day rather than first-thing).

]]> https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/not-enough-beeps Fri, 28 Oct 2022 19:48:22 +0000 A Day https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/a-day?pk_campaign=rss-feed <![CDATA[Starting something anew, it’s easy to get entirely too concerned with making the “first” instance somehow special. This often means that I don’t actually start, since I keep waiting for a sufficiently special [thing] to serve as my first [thing]. So it is with rebooting this blog: I’ve been putting it off for awhile via this specific process.!--more-- Of course, valuing a first is just as arbitrary as valuing a second, third, or three hundred and fifty-ninth. This is especially true when my whole goal with restarting this blog is to make things more casual, and to put less pressure on myself in terms of demanding some level of Big Thoughts. I also tend to over-compartmentalize in terms of online content; I have multiple blogs under this write.as account, created with the idea of talking about one thing in one, another thing in another, etc. This ended up not working very well, unsurprisingly, as I wasted a significant amount of time trying to figure out which blog/identity a given idea fit with rather than just writing the thing. There is also the anonymity question. When I first encountered blogging a little more than 20 years ago, I was young enough (17-18) that the idea of sharing anything and everything didn’t really concern me. After all, anyone who would read my blog and connect it to me was someone I’d be telling this stuff to anyway. (I was fortunate to have a very emotionally open friends circle back then.) As I’ve gotten older this has become somewhat less of the case, although it’s less about me and more about not wanting to share other people’s lives. Meanwhile, getting married and starting a family has, of course, meant that others’ lives are much more deeply intertwined with my own. However, I think most of my hesitation actually comes from the permanence of my decision: once a username is no longer anonymous, there’s no way to change that. I can always disclose my real identity later, but can’t undisclose it once it’s done. At the same time, there’s something to be said for the balance between quasi-anonymity and no anonymity. Still, I basically have to assume that anyone who knows me in real life can/will find this username eventually. Hell, that may not be a bad thing ultimately, and I think putting myself out there a little more will be good for me. My art teacher has encouraged me to start posting to DeviantArt, and while I have an account (same name as this one, and I’ll eventually have a “links” page pinned), I haven’t really felt up to posting anything yet. There’s some self-consciousness, sure, but I’m finding it’s more not wanting to “let go” of anything I’ve drawn so far, since once it’s out there, it’s out there, and no longer fully yours. In his forward to Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes talks about his title character as a child of [his] mind, and I think there’s a similar anxiety in terms of the vulnerability one feels on behalf of an artistic creation compared to one’s actual child(ren). Going forward, I am going to try not to categorize this blog in general. In other words, it’s not a devlog, it’s not a discussion of my drawing progression, it’s not a theology blog. Instead, it’ll be all of those things at various times, plus plenty of other stuff that happens to come into my head. I’m going to shoot for regularity over having some specific focus or even having some super well-developed post. When I first started this blog, my plan was to read through the New Testament and talk about it. I haven’t abandoned this idea, but did go off on another path, as I so often do. The extent to which I stick with any one thing being what it is (or isn’t), trying to narrow my focus leads, as we’ve seen, to less productivity rather than more. I have a few projects going on right now that I may talk about from time to time. Some will be finished, some won’t, and doubtless more will be added. But every once in awhile, a “status update” will be nice, even if it’s just as a reminder for myself. Actively Working On A way to simulate a book (visually) in a web-based context. I’m going to first try to avoid having to do it all via canvas, but that may not be feasible. Still, I like finding new things that can be pulled off via pure CSS. Some kind of chemistry…thing. My original plan was to have a way to show chemical reactions, but even then I’m not sure if it’s going to be purely a simulator of sorts or if I’m going to try to game-ify it or what. So far, I have the ability to add atoms to a blank page and drag them around. I need to do some bug fixing on that, as there’s a stacking problem if two atoms end up in exactly the same place, and I’m occasionally getting some weird collision detection issues. A “concentration” game (in a browser). Rote memorization is really difficult for me, which makes some of my long-term goals (especially in language learning) a problem. Someone on Discord suggested that concentration rather than just going through flashcards is a good method for those of us with ADHD. For reference, concentration (and it may have other names) is a memory game where you have an arrangement of cards face down in front of you. You flip over one card and try to find its match. If you don’t, you flip over both cards (face down) and keep going. The idea is that by having to remember the placement of a card too, this can “trick” your brain into remembering the information on the card. Drawing. I have two things I want to work on, one a digital painting for my daughter and the other what I hope to be a Christmas present for my mom done in some combination of graphite and charcoal (and/or colored pencil). Despite my love of technology, I’m definitely finding that I get better results with traditional media. Work toolkit. My day job involves a fair amount of boilerplate writing (with some variations from one situation to the next), and I’m trying to find ways to automate those. I have a lot of small but not trivial tasks that are ripe for this kind of thing, but I have a hard time sticking with one visual language. I’m not the biggest fan of the flat, modern look that’s so in vogue among web designers these days, but it’s so omnipresent that it’s hard to escape while still making something easily usable. I’m also limited by the fact that I can’t use anything (whether IDE or programming language) that isn’t already built into Windows. So I’m basically stuck with vanilla web tech and/or PowerShell. I’m going to check some tutorials on the latter to see if it may actually be better for my purposes. To Start Eventually Language learning. I don’t know if I want to do another ancient one or something spoken, and even within those categories I have more than a few that I’d like to pursue. In addition to wanting to get the concentration game working, I also need to actually decide which one to do. They all have reasons of one sort or another, as well as varying levels of usefulness and potential for practice (i.e. knowing people who speak them/use them). Right now my top contenders (in no particular order) are: Ancient: Coptic, Biblical Hebrew, or Classical Chinese Spoken/Modern: Russian (had some in college), Mandarin (ditto), KiSwahili, Arabic, French, Esperanto (refresh) An idle game. I’ve wanted to create a game of some kind for awhile, and I think some twist on an idle game is a good place to start. I’d like to do something more story-oriented rather than purely idle. Spaceplan is a good idea of the balance I have in mind, if not the tone or setting. More drawing. There’s no substitute for practice. Streamline a legal document process. I’ve been working with a local legal aid organization on some simple cases, one of which would lend itself very well to automation (it involves lots of just filling stuff out and making sure you send the correct paperwork to the correct person). I’m just waiting to hear back from my contact More translating. I really enjoy translation, and would like to find something else to work on here. I have a copy of a big work on the effects of modern agricultural methods throughout Latin America, which I found really interesting, so that may be a good candidate. I need to track down a couple smaller translations that I’ve done in the past and make sure they’re up on my site. I’m sure I’ll come up with plenty of other things too, which will end up in varying stages of “done” over time. One thing I haven’t mentioned is theology/religion. This is still something that’s important to me and is a big part of my approach to life just in general. But I’m also trying not to think of it as simply one discrete “piece” of my life, rather as something that infuses and underlies my life as a whole. As Khalil Gibran put it in The Prophet: Is not religion all deeds and all reflection, And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom? Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations? Who can spread his hours before him, saving, “This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?” ------- P.S. If you’ve read this far, thank you! Please drop me a line if you should feel so inclined. I also welcome feedback on my blog design, as it’s a new template that hasn’t been thoroughly tested yet.]]> Starting something anew, it’s easy to get entirely too concerned with making the “first” instance somehow special. This often means that I don’t actually start, since I keep waiting for a sufficiently special [thing] to serve as my first [thing]. So it is with rebooting this blog: I’ve been putting it off for awhile via this specific process.

Of course, valuing a first is just as arbitrary as valuing a second, third, or three hundred and fifty-ninth. This is especially true when my whole goal with restarting this blog is to make things more casual, and to put less pressure on myself in terms of demanding some level of Big Thoughts. I also tend to over-compartmentalize in terms of online content; I have multiple blogs under this write.as account, created with the idea of talking about one thing in one, another thing in another, etc. This ended up not working very well, unsurprisingly, as I wasted a significant amount of time trying to figure out which blog/identity a given idea fit with rather than just writing the thing.

There is also the anonymity question. When I first encountered blogging a little more than 20 years ago, I was young enough (17-18) that the idea of sharing anything and everything didn’t really concern me. After all, anyone who would read my blog and connect it to me was someone I’d be telling this stuff to anyway. (I was fortunate to have a very emotionally open friends circle back then.) As I’ve gotten older this has become somewhat less of the case, although it’s less about me and more about not wanting to share other people’s lives. Meanwhile, getting married and starting a family has, of course, meant that others’ lives are much more deeply intertwined with my own.

However, I think most of my hesitation actually comes from the permanence of my decision: once a username is no longer anonymous, there’s no way to change that. I can always disclose my real identity later, but can’t undisclose it once it’s done. At the same time, there’s something to be said for the balance between quasi-anonymity and no anonymity. Still, I basically have to assume that anyone who knows me in real life can/will find this username eventually. Hell, that may not be a bad thing ultimately, and I think putting myself out there a little more will be good for me. My art teacher has encouraged me to start posting to DeviantArt, and while I have an account (same name as this one, and I’ll eventually have a “links” page pinned), I haven’t really felt up to posting anything yet. There’s some self-consciousness, sure, but I’m finding it’s more not wanting to “let go” of anything I’ve drawn so far, since once it’s out there, it’s out there, and no longer fully yours. In his forward to Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes talks about his title character as a child of [his] mind, and I think there’s a similar anxiety in terms of the vulnerability one feels on behalf of an artistic creation compared to one’s actual child(ren).

Going forward, I am going to try not to categorize this blog in general. In other words, it’s not a devlog, it’s not a discussion of my drawing progression, it’s not a theology blog. Instead, it’ll be all of those things at various times, plus plenty of other stuff that happens to come into my head. I’m going to shoot for regularity over having some specific focus or even having some super well-developed post. When I first started this blog, my plan was to read through the New Testament and talk about it. I haven’t abandoned this idea, but did go off on another path, as I so often do. The extent to which I stick with any one thing being what it is (or isn’t), trying to narrow my focus leads, as we’ve seen, to less productivity rather than more.

I have a few projects going on right now that I may talk about from time to time. Some will be finished, some won’t, and doubtless more will be added. But every once in awhile, a “status update” will be nice, even if it’s just as a reminder for myself.

Actively Working On

  • A way to simulate a book (visually) in a web-based context. I’m going to first try to avoid having to do it all via , but that may not be feasible. Still, I like finding new things that can be pulled off via pure CSS.

  • Some kind of chemistry…thing. My original plan was to have a way to show chemical reactions, but even then I’m not sure if it’s going to be purely a simulator of sorts or if I’m going to try to game-ify it or what. So far, I have the ability to add atoms to a blank page and drag them around. I need to do some bug fixing on that, as there’s a stacking problem if two atoms end up in exactly the same place, and I’m occasionally getting some weird collision detection issues.

  • A “concentration” game (in a browser). Rote memorization is really difficult for me, which makes some of my long-term goals (especially in language learning) a problem. Someone on Discord suggested that concentration rather than just going through flashcards is a good method for those of us with ADHD. For reference, concentration (and it may have other names) is a memory game where you have an arrangement of cards face down in front of you. You flip over one card and try to find its match. If you don’t, you flip over both cards (face down) and keep going. The idea is that by having to remember the placement of a card too, this can “trick” your brain into remembering the information on the card.

  • Drawing. I have two things I want to work on, one a digital painting for my daughter and the other what I hope to be a Christmas present for my mom done in some combination of graphite and charcoal (and/or colored pencil). Despite my love of technology, I’m definitely finding that I get better results with traditional media.

  • Work toolkit. My day job involves a fair amount of boilerplate writing (with some variations from one situation to the next), and I’m trying to find ways to automate those. I have a lot of small but not trivial tasks that are ripe for this kind of thing, but I have a hard time sticking with one visual language. I’m not the biggest fan of the flat, modern look that’s so in vogue among web designers these days, but it’s so omnipresent that it’s hard to escape while still making something easily usable. I’m also limited by the fact that I can’t use anything (whether IDE or programming language) that isn’t already built into Windows. So I’m basically stuck with vanilla web tech and/or PowerShell. I’m going to check some tutorials on the latter to see if it may actually be better for my purposes.

To Start Eventually

  • Language learning. I don’t know if I want to do another ancient one or something spoken, and even within those categories I have more than a few that I’d like to pursue. In addition to wanting to get the concentration game working, I also need to actually decide which one to do. They all have reasons of one sort or another, as well as varying levels of usefulness and potential for practice (i.e. knowing people who speak them/use them). Right now my top contenders (in no particular order) are:

    • Ancient: Coptic, Biblical Hebrew, or Classical Chinese

    • Spoken/Modern: Russian (had some in college), Mandarin (ditto), KiSwahili, Arabic, French, Esperanto (refresh)

  • An idle game. I’ve wanted to create a game of some kind for awhile, and I think some twist on an idle game is a good place to start. I’d like to do something more story-oriented rather than purely idle. Spaceplan is a good idea of the balance I have in mind, if not the tone or setting.

  • More drawing. There’s no substitute for practice.

  • Streamline a legal document process. I’ve been working with a local legal aid organization on some simple cases, one of which would lend itself very well to automation (it involves lots of just filling stuff out and making sure you send the correct paperwork to the correct person). I’m just waiting to hear back from my contact

  • More translating. I really enjoy translation, and would like to find something else to work on here. I have a copy of a big work on the effects of modern agricultural methods throughout Latin America, which I found really interesting, so that may be a good candidate. I need to track down a couple smaller translations that I’ve done in the past and make sure they’re up on my site.

I’m sure I’ll come up with plenty of other things too, which will end up in varying stages of “done” over time.

One thing I haven’t mentioned is theology/religion. This is still something that’s important to me and is a big part of my approach to life just in general. But I’m also trying not to think of it as simply one discrete “piece” of my life, rather as something that infuses and underlies my life as a whole. As Khalil Gibran put it in The Prophet:

Is not religion all deeds and all reflection,

And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?

Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations?

Who can spread his hours before him, saving, “This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?”

P.S. If you’ve read this far, thank you! Please drop me a line if you should feel so inclined. I also welcome feedback on my blog design, as it’s a new template that hasn’t been thoroughly tested yet.

]]> https://dei-layborer.writeas.com/a-day Tue, 18 Oct 2022 15:26:34 +0000