r.stricklin

Today I:

reported to my cell provider as junk an unsolicited text message from my cell provider about a branded credit card offer.

BECOME UNGOVERNABLE

I walk the thinnest line

Has yours got the 800bpi option?

oof. better you than me.

Don’t let anyone who takes LinkedIn seriously be involved. If it’s not an overt farce I don’t want to know any more.

El DeBarge? Now it’s just taking the mickey.

First day of school and the iPod has just Foreignered me. It could just as well be 1987, except I’m not waiting for the school bus in the dark and rain.

season 22, coming in the air tonight

At some point I entered the phase of my life where there's still food I don't care for but avoiding it or picking it out seems like a bigger waste of life than just eating it and not enjoying it. Like baby corn, or celery, or mayonnaise, or brazil nuts.

Squash, though... squash can **** right off.

or for that matter how many conversations I've had about `cat|grep|awk` being a wasteful and utterly unnecessary use of fork()

hell yeah bruh

but let me tell you how many times I've had shell scripts rewritten by coworkers to use `|cut` five times in a row because they couldn't wrap their brains around the way it already did the exact same thing using IFS and `set --`.

Brian Kernighan, in 1976.

I would just like to mention that this equally well describes many of my senior level co-workers, today, in 2025. Most of them are decent people who are fine co-workers. But their apparent and continuing lack of curiosity around fundamentals beggars belief.

"Far too many programmers are red pencillers. Some are literal red pencillers who do things by hand that should be done by machine. Others are figurative red pencillers whose use of the machine is so clumsy and awkward that it might as well be manual."

“Ed sighs. Dog sighs are some form of distilled truth. What does he know? What do dogs know? Ed sighs like he knows the truth about me and he loves me anyway.” —Charles Yu, “How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe”

to ignore the future, to see everything as present. I’ve been a bad pilot, a bad passenger, a bad employee. A bad son.

It is hated by purists and engineers, equally. It’s bad for aesthetics, bad for design, bad for fuel efficiency. It’s bad for the machine. To run in P-I is to burn needless fuel in order to avoid straightforward travel. It’s what allows me to live achronologically, to suppress memory,

“But I abused it. It’s not supposed to be used as the primary driver of chronogrammatical transport. It isn’t designed for that kind of use: the Present-Indefinite isn’t even a real gear. It’s like cruise-control. It’s a gadget, a gimmick, a temporary crutch, a holding place.

present, hovering, floating, used to be you could avoid ever pinning yourself down to any particular moment, could go through life never actually being where you are. Or I suppose, more accurately, being when you are. That’s what P-I allows, a convenience mode.

“The truth is, I broke the Tense Operator by living in between tenses. I broke it through my cheating, wishy-washy way of moving through time. It used to be that you could cheat the machine by leaving it between gears, living in a kind of half-assed way, present and at the same time not quite

I enjoyed the blankness that comes during marathons, and the intensity of focus that comes during slalom/freestyle.

I thought very hard about a lot of things that could happen, which I wanted no part of.

And then I went home.

I never wore them again. They're still in the closet.

10 minutes later, as I stood immobile at the top of a short flight of stairs, I had a very long moment of soul searching. I realized this is not something you can "try." You either do it, and whatever happens, happens, or you stay the fuck home.

I skated a lot in my 30s. At one point I thought I'd try aggressive inline, grinding rails and whatnot. Needs totally different skates. Bought a pair. Immediately discovered they are atrocious for doing any kind of normal skating in.

yes, well done Half Price Books. very droll.

one of those temperaments is wrapped up in managing such a project, and is pretty much required once more than one or two people get involved

You’re far from alone. It’s a natural progression from the mature realization that most of us don’t have all the temperaments necessary to realize a sufficiently ambitious project.

pretty much, only it’s my front door and about thirty spots on the front porch between there and the driveway.

...aaaand welcome to the twice annual Spiders Going Full J.P. Morgan event with webs stretched clear across the front entrance multiple times a day. gack. ick.

The other day I lost a favorite classic mechanical pencil to my 25 year old backpack finally starting to shred at the seams. The prospect of having to replace it adds to overall sense of bummed-out. Today the pencil turned up in the trunk of the car. Microscopic elation is still elation.