Read this – the Gospel of the Public Library from Sightless Scribbles.
Nothing I love more than the public supporting public libraries. Sightless Scribbles gets it!
Author: Lord Bob
Accessibility
I’ve run this blog through a number of accessibility checkers and it fails miserably.
I’ve done a few things to make it more accessible for people with vision issues. Simple things. Making sure links are underlined and are a different color. I’ve been using HTML headings properly, putting alt text in, etc. But it fails really badly for anything that would help a non-sighted person.
Gonna look into this. I need to do more reading and research about this. The WordPress them I use is really old, and I find that most WordPress themes both confusing, horrible looking, and probably not accessible.
Some Reading
A few days back I wrote this post about our trip to the bookstore, during which I bought three books.
Yesterday (Sunday) I had fished the novel I’d been reading (The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues). I’ve been reading so much space opera the last few years. I love it, but I’ve been feeling like reading some other sorts of science fiction, so I grabbed the copy of Annihilation that I bought and started reading.
So, a few things…
- After all these years of reading on a Kindle I was actually nervous about reading a physical book. That seems weird to me as I write this, but it’s true. The Kindle is so easy to read on that it feels like cheating. I was concerned that even with reading glasses my eyes would get tired, that I’d constantly lose my place on the page, that I’d miss being able to read with the lights dim.
- Most oldschool space opera is pretty simple. The plots are simple. The prose is fairly simple. Frankly you don’t have to concentrate on them as hard as you might for something like Neuromancer, which is just more stylized, noir-style prose, that requires you to really appreciate the language and descriptions in a more intentional, patient, and thoughtful way.
- I love space opera. I can pick up nearly any space opera novel written in the 1960s – 1980s and go to my happy place. Something like Annihilation – well – it isn’t space opera. It reminds more so far of Lovecraftian cosmic horror. So when you pick up a book that really kind of defies categories you don’t know if you’ll like it, and for me it feels like I might be wasting my time. I think that’s why series are so popular. Read the first book. If you like it, the next 3 or 4 books (or 50) will probably also be enjoyable. That’s why I love Star Wars novels. They drop you into a universe you are already familiar with, and have characters you already know.
- I knew a little about Annihilation before I bought it. I’d seen some videos on Quinn’s Ideas about the Southern Reach series. I didn’t remember any details at all. The one thing that stuck with me from the videos was the notion of cosmic horror, but not “fun” cosmic horror like Lovecraft, but modern, disturbing, get-inside-your-head and make you feel the oppressive atmosphere cosmic horror. I’ll be honest. I feel like we have enough horror in our lives already. I don’t really want to dwell on it when I’m trying to relax with a book. And yet I did purchase this book. Maybe something “out there” was compelling me to buy it. I’m babbling. OK – simply put – I wasn’t really sure I’d enjoy reading something that isn’t a little uplifting.
Most of these concerns turned out to be unfounded. I had not trouble with my eyes, reading, or immersing myself in the story. I’m halfway through the novel at this point. It’s well-written. I did not find myself disoriented because I didn’t “know the universe” already. While it is not a happy book, and it is certainly has that Lovecraftian feel in the exploration of a super weird space and all the anxiety the comes with that, it lacks that particular quality that makes something “so dreadful it makes you sick and oppressed-feeling but you can’t put it down.”
Looking forward to continuing reading Annihilation this week.
Going Forward
Going forward I’m not going to comment on other people’s blogs if I think they somehow don’t meet my “standards” (whatever that means). I think all the bloggers I follow are of good intentions. Sometimes execution of an idea does not go the we you might want it to go. People are imperfect. I know this firsthand. I’ve seen good people in the web get absolutely harassed because they didn’t articulate something to someone else’s liking.
Deletion
I rarely delete a post, but a recent one — I just deleted it. Nothing horrible. I just felt after some conversation and consideration one of the links was not true to what it said it was. Basically, talking about punk rock and then selling punk rock tshirts = a serious contradiction of the message. It becomes content marketing at that point, which is not blogging. It’s just shit.
See, I can admit when I’m wrong!
The State of My Skating
This afternoon I was walking out to my car and as usual I spent a couple of minutes fiddling with the various skateboards hanging on the wall out there. It’s just too hot to skate here in Texas right now, so the poor boards hang there forlorn, their special purpose not being enacted. This saddens me greatly.
One of the boards is my freestyle board.
For those not in-the-know, a freestyle board is a skateboard that is a bit smaller than a typical board, and it is designed for very technical flatground tricks. They tend to be significantly narrower. A standard board these days range from 8″ wide to about 9″. That’s typical. A freestyle board is about 7.3″ to 7.5″ wide. There are a few slightly wider, but you get the picture. The narrowness facilitates doing tricks in which the board flips, like kickflips. The relative shortness facilitates a number of other very technical tricks, but it all really boils down to smaller is easier to manipulate.
For most of my skateboarding life I have been known as “the freestyle guy.” Freestyle is a very small niche within skateboarding. In my early days in skateboarding, the late 1970s, good skateboarders were expected to be good all-around. That meant they could do freestyle, skate bowls, do slalom, etc. So that’s what I did. I became pretty good at freestyle because finding a flat parking lot in which to practice was a lot easier than finding a bowl. I could practice freestyle every day. Back then there was no such discipline as “street skating.” There was only skateboarding.
I had the good luck of living in a neighborhood with alleys running behind our houses. Most of the driveways were sloped up. So we could skate the alleys as if they were snake runs or ditches. I became good at skating large flat banks because of this. In fact, while people still seem to thing of me as a freestyler, banks and ditches are my preferred terrain, and really always have been, but I do love skating flat ground and doing tricks.
When the Covid pandemic hit in 2020 I was forced to stop my regular heavy freestyle practice sessions. For the previous 6 years I’d been practicing a lot and going to contests in Germany when I could. It was a lot of fun, and those trips are some of my best memories of my life in skateboarding. But with the pandemic in full swing and simultaneously a wife battling breast cancer (and thus immunocompromised) I simply couldn’t afford the risk of breaking my ankle or whatever and ending up in an emergency room full of Covid patients.
So, I stopped flipping the board. I totally stopped. No kickflips. No rail flips. No 360 shove-its. Not caspers.
Instead, I began thinking much more about the simplest elements in skateboarding. Simple but not necessarily easy. Flowing. Turning. Different kinds of kickturns and pivots. Spins. Wheelies. Footwork. Creatively linking those elements into smooth flowing carving turns. Sliding into different positions.
This has become my preferred way of skating now. On flat or on banks. I have no interest in flipping the board or getting airborne in any way. Zero. Zilch.
Today when I was looking at my freestyle board I realized the depth of this change in my preferences. I’ve known for a long time that I’m having more fun with my current way of skating and didn’t have much desire to go back to my old ways, but today I realized very abruptly that I have NO desire to go back. And that feels – not weird at all.
One might think “Bob’s getting older and his afraid or weak, or afraid AND weak.” Not true. Today I spent 4 hours at a very strenuous aikido seminar. At 62 I have excellent agility. I can move with grace. I can do huge breakfalls without injury. If I wanted to do kickflips and whatnot I could.
I just don’t want to. At all. If I never did another “technical” freestyle trick again I wouldn’t miss it at all. I just don’t enjoy doing them anymore.
Here’s something I filmed last year. I’m riding a fairly big board. It is representative of the kind of thing I enjoy doing now. Rolling, flowing, spinning, turning. On flat or on banks. There are endless combinations of the basic elements of skateboarding. Putting them together in sequences with flow in and out is a challenge. It feels good. That’s the thing. This kind of thing is connected to the Earth. It’s about movement, not board manipulation. This is what I like now.
The Way I Want To
This post will be kind of a rambling stream of consciousness thing…beware…
I’ve been having some interesting conversations with my niece this week. We’ve been talking about the notion of “self”, Zen, masculinity/femininity and the continuum of such ideas, and how to live one’s life. Yes, it is nice to have a niece like this, with whom you can solve the riddles of human existence.
This morning, for some reason, I was thinking of my parent’s old friends Dalton and Elsie, from Monroe, Louisiana. They were good friend when we lived there, though that wasn’t a long time. We moved to Texas when I was 5. But for many years we would visit them when we went over there. They has 3 or 4 daughters, the youngest was my age. A good family. Good people. Anyway, I did a quick search and found that Dalton and Elsie are both dead. Not a surprise. They were old. Dalton lived to be 94.
I suppose I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality the last few weeks. Don’t worry – nothing profound coming up. It all seems like yesterday and a million years ago. Looking up our old friends reinforced that feeling. When I think about all this it’s impossible not to reflect on my own life and how I’ve lived it. I’ve had a great career as a public librarian. I love it. I believe in it. I believe in public service and intellectual freedom. I’ve helped promote and continue those ideals. Furthermore, I think a proper life on Earth centers around lifting others up. Cooperation over competition. Kindness and generosity. I think anyone who thinks otherwise should be taken out and maimed (kidding…kind of).
Everyone struggles to figure out who they are and what they should be doing. We all come to different conclusions. I think it’s critical that we all be free to be who we really are and to explore and figure that out. The roadmaps to happiness we are given by society are not for everyone.
Which all why, a few years ago, after I accidentally recorded this beautiful skateboarding clip I used it to make this very short video and used “If 6 was 9” by Jimi Hendrix.
Because when I was 11 years old I became a skateboarder and beneath all the layers I am happy to be a dirty old skateboarder.
I’m the one that’s gonna have to die
When it’s time for me to die
So, let me live my life the way I want to
Tension
Just sitting here at my desk at work, with nothing going wrong (besides the entire country), I took a few seconds to breath and get centered, and suddenly realized how much tension I am carrying just sitting here. I’m thinking as hard as i can about — well – everything. No wonder I’m exhausted all the time.
Keyboards can be cool
Most consumerist delight. Cool blue keyboard.
What’re we gonna do now?!
Private Hudson guards my new science fiction shelf. The Ultimate Badass. Fuck’n’ A man…
Subculture_Postpunk is
Sunday nights at 8pm Central we almost always stream Subculture_Postpunk on Twitch. The guy plays records. You just see his two turntables and maybe an album cover and the growing playlist, and it is just so good. Like tonight, listening to this music, here in our little house, with my wife who loves it all as much as I do, with our little sheltie sitting with her and on the other side our cat, I just want to weep with happiness. The music makes me feel so good. It helps drive away the impending sense of doom that the approach of another work week always brings (I’m exaggerating, but really, I hate when my weekend is over).
The Honor of Teaching Older Students
For the last 4 months I have been the co-lead instructor of our aikido dojo, and the dojo-cho (person who runs the dojo).
The pandemic was rough on us. We lost most of our students during the months we couldn’t practice. People understandably moved on to other things. No regrets at all for shutting down during the worst of those pandemic months. We probably saved some people from being hospitalized.
So now we practice at a local recreation center, and we are an official class offered by that rec center, for about $60 a month. Being in a rec center attracts a different kind of student. We get a lot of people who just want to see what it’s all about. They stick around for a month and we never see them again. That’s fine. We get fewer people who are martial arts fanatics, which is really good. We don’t need people who jump from art to art to art. Honestly, I’d prefer we just have normal, average people who want to study aikido. That’s it. We’re not training people for the Octagon.
We have two students who are up there in age. One is 68, the other I think 73. They have been practicing with us a year now.
As I personally approach retirement in just a few months, and as I also enter the last “chapter” of my life, I’ve become very guarded about how I spend my time. I put a lot of thought into what I’m doing. Those remaining hours of relatively healthy life are valuable, because at almost 62 right now, even if I lived to be 80 and I was healthy for most of it, I know it will feel like the time just flew by.
Now, I have to admit that I have felt some frustration with our new students. The two older guys are good guys. One of them is learning. The other, well, I feel like he might have had a stroke at some point because I can’t tell that he is learning anything. And we almost always have a teen boy in class who is just has no relationship with his own body. Very hard to teach. It stretches my patience as an instructor, but I understand that is part of it. I believe that aikido is for everyone, and now is the time to prove it.
What I have come to realize this week is this: Those older guys — they are choosing to spend the valuable and precious remaining time in their life practicing with us, and being taught by us.
When I think of it in those terms, which I did for the first time yesterday, it is a bit overwhelming. They are HONORING us with their time. They are honoring me by being my students. That time they are using – it is beyond precious. Like all our time on earth, it is really the most valuable thing we have, and we can’t save it, stop it, or get any replays.
So I feel re-energized, and I will do the best I can to teach them well.
New Books and More Overthinking
The last few years I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction. Actually, that’s all I’ve been reading. It’s a long story, but boils down to “I like science fiction.”
I’ve done most of this reading on my Kindle. The Kindle has made it very easy to find a lot of hard-to-find old SF paperbacks. When I say easy, I mean you see it and click, and BOOM it is on the Kindle. I also like reading on the Kindle. It’s a very nice reading experience. Being able to control the font size not only makes it easier on my eyes, but I feel that I read more efficiently on the Kindle, as I don’t lose my place on the page so much.
In short – I like the Kindle. Yes, Amazon is a big evil company. Also yes, they made it a lot easier to live during the pandemic. Also yes, you gotta pick your battles in this life. For me that means I’m going to buy books on my Kindle, even though I “don’t really own them” because the reading experience is – just – superior for me.
HOWEVER. A Barnes & Noble bookstore opened in our neighborhood a couple of years ago, in what has been a semi-down-and-out shopping center. Seeing that space filled with a nice bookstore fills me with such hope for the future. A book store! Not a fucking vape shop or other dirtbaggery. BOOKS.
So as you might be able to tell, I support this. Would I love to have some cool independent book store in that space? Yes. Would Like a bookstore that is more likely to survive than an Indy. Also yes. Would you like me to stop doing this “also yes” thing? Probably Yes. I’ll stop.
This afternoon my wife and I went over to that store and I picked up three books. Actual physical books. It has been a while since I bought a new book. I’ve ordered some used paperbacks from Amazon. Stuff not available as eBooks. I also picked up about 10 very hard to find SF paperbacks at North Texas RPG Con at the start of June. But I feel compelled to support this neighborhood book store. Not Barnes & Noble (though I have nothing against them) but THIS book store. I want it to thrive and help impart some literacy to our neighborhood. Our public library is nearby. That is also great, and I of course love the library, being a librarian myself. But the bookstore can certainly be part of the literacy ecosystem of our area. The Infrastructure of Intelligence.
I have to admit I am conflicted about the physical books. For one thing, I have sold back a hell of a lot of books to Half Price Books over the years. I did that after years of carrying boxes of books around with us every time we moved. Now, however, we have been in our house for almost 20 years. I don’t want the house to just be full of books again, but there are worse things to fill your house with.
I have, for a long time now, thought it was kinda dumb to keep big collections of stuff around the house. Collections can get out of hand. Also, when you die, the truth is no one wants all your shit. I didn’t want all the stuff in my parents house. At the library we get massive numbers of book donations every week, and I’d say 50% are from the collections of recently deceased people. My shit will be no different. Hell, we don’t even have kids. So maybe someone will want our very nice stereo, and maybe our music, but books? No. No one will want a mountain of science fiction novels. They just won’t.
But – I don’t care.
Because now I understand that people have always loved “artifacts” (as my wife, the historian, says). When you walk into our house and see our stereo, our music collection, and the music posters on the walls, they know a lot about who we are. And when we are in our house, that environment reminds us who we are. It makes us feel good. It is a physical manifestation of the joy we feel when we listen to our music.
When I walk into the little bedroom that is my computer room/gaming room/podcasting studio, you see science fiction posters on the wall. Actually, YOU probably don’t see them, because pretty much I am the only person other than my wife who goes in there. When I am in there, it makes me feel good. Our physical environments are important.
So if I want to have a bunch of books in there then goddammit I’m going to have books. Yes, when I’ve had a bunch of books in the past it gave me a little self-satisfaction to see all those books I’d read lined up neatly on the shelves. I’ve decided that’s fine too. I’m not going to win an award by not having things in my house that make me happy to look at. I don’t want the room to become a rats nest full of junk either, but a bookshelf or two full of books isn’t going to get me featured on a reality show about hoarding.
I’m even thinking about buying nice copies of my favorite books that I’ve read on my Kindle to have on the shelf. That might be 30 or 40 favorite books. Some non-SF ones too… On the Road. Zeitoun. William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy. Signs Preceding the End of the World. Frankenstein. In Cold Blood. Invisible Man. The list goes on.
I’m not saying I’m abandoning the Kindle, but having the actual book has come to have value for me again.
Geddy and Alex
This interview has nearly brought me to tears. These two men – their friendship. The work. The art. The kindness.
Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson Go Deep on Rush’s Return | Rolling Stone Canada
Linux Is Here
My friend David converted an old PC that could not run the current or even the not-current version of Windows into a computer that is running the current version of Fedora Linux like a champ!
Here we see the Intergalactic Headquarters of ConcreteLunch Projects.
This is not a state of the art computer. This is 10-year old tech.
- 4x Intel Xeon CPU
- 16 Gigs RAM
- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 video card
- Fedora Linux 44
- KDE Plasma Desktop Edition
It runs Firefox really well, and handles 3 monitors of the following resolutions: 2k, 1080 HD, and 1600×900.
I’m not using this machine for video editing. Not even really for watching videos. It is really for writing and playing online tabletop RPGs using a Virtual Tabletop System (Roll20.net). It is snappy as hell for these uses.
I did get a wider desk to accommodate the three monitors. Still getting the layout dialed-in. I think this really demonstrates that for most uses older tech is still fine.
Non-federated social media will never be used on this computer.
