Archive for January, 2017
We’re off to Conflikt, a filk (geek folk/fan music) convention in the Seattle area. Last year I was Toastmuppet, this year, I’m just one of the crowd. See you there, I hope!
If not, or even if so, this works way better than it has any right to, but it is a bit slow at the start. Give it time.
I warned you there would be a lot of these now.
The Trump immigration/wall order is out, and includes action against sanctuary cities/counties/states, and by that, they mean they get to define ‘sanctuary’, at their sole discretion, and cut all Federal grants on that basis.
The plan, as I see it, is to really fuck the west coast. I believe that the Secretary’s ‘sanctuary’ label – which echoes Federal use of ‘terrorism sponsor’ label – is intended to be used politically. This is entirely a tax looting operation. Historically, Oregon and Washington have received about 80% of tax dollars back in Federal spending; that’s what I mean when I say we are very large tax exporters. The goal here is to reduce that to zero, so it can all be spent on Trump supporter states. Authoritarians always loot: this is a looting operation.
It’s also meant to destabilise our economy. It will affect everything – transit, infrastructure, health, education, you name it. The goal is to drive us immediately into budget crisis, which they will then blame on us in their propaganda. And let’s not lie: they will succeed in causing a crisis, barring immediate (and successful) legal actions and injunctions. We have to be ready to deal with that. It will not be easy.
It is absolutely a declaration of economic war against us. Treat it as such.
(Also, I don’t think the first “or” in “or which has in effect a statute, policy, or practice that prevents or hinders the enforcement of Federal law” (section 9(a)) is in the slightest bit unintentional. I think they’re coming after things like legalised pot as well. If you have friends who don’t care about the primary issues, hit them on that, maybe that will stick.)
Here’s the relevant section:
Sec. 9. Sanctuary Jurisdictions. It is the policy of the executive branch to ensure, to the fullest extent of the law, that a State, or a political subdivision of a State, shall comply with 8 U.S.C. 1373.
(a) In furtherance of this policy, the Attorney General and the Secretary, in their discretion and to the extent consistent with law, shall ensure that jurisdictions that willfully refuse to comply with 8 U.S.C. 1373 (sanctuary jurisdictions) are not eligible to receive Federal grants, except as deemed necessary for law enforcement purposes by the Attorney General or the Secretary. The Secretary has the authority to designate, in his discretion and to the extent consistent with law, a jurisdiction as a sanctuary jurisdiction. The Attorney General shall take appropriate enforcement action against any entity that violates 8 U.S.C. 1373, or which has in effect a statute, policy, or practice that prevents or hinders the enforcement of Federal law.
(b) To better inform the public regarding the public safety threats associated with sanctuary jurisdictions, the Secretary shall utilize the Declined Detainer Outcome Report or its equivalent and, on a weekly basis, make public a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens and any jurisdiction that ignored or otherwise failed to honor any detainers with respect to such aliens.
(c) The Director of the Office of Management and Budget is directed to obtain and provide relevant and responsive information on all Federal grant money that currently is received by any sanctuary jurisdiction.
(Source for text: http://www.12news.com/news/politics/national-politics/full-text-read-trumps-presidential-executive-orders-regarding-the-border-wall-and-immigration/392606198 )
Several months ago, Klopfenpop loaned me a teenage engineering CA-16 pocket operator, a.k.a. the “factory” model, a synth-sequencer-noisemaker in pocket-calculator form. And then Anna bought me one a few weeks ago! Which was amazing.
I’m still pretty confused by it (I’ve never used a sequencer for anything except drums which is somehow totally different even though it’s not) and I am trying to get my head around the actual feature set. I’m not traditionally good at interfaces that require you to just kind of remember what’s stored where? So I’m going to have to learn to use this thing by actually reading the instructions, which is totally unlike how I have learned every other instrument ever, which has always been “fuck with it until neat sounds come out.”
Like, right now I’m kind of confused about the factory patterns vs. patterns you store yourself and I’m not sure if the ones you store yourself overwrite factory patterns or not. I’d think they must but the instructions are not specific and being a “Never Erase what you Can’t Replace” person I’m hesitant just to, you know, try it. Because DATA.
(yes, this is goofy. but still true.)
But I certainly like making it make really annoying noises so I guess really it’s all okay. 😀
Well, it’s zero day, a.k.a. go time. What do we do?
Shore up some bulwarks, is what.
First: get your local governments into non-cooperation mode with the new administration’s overtly racist, misogynist, and fascist agenda. Yes, fascist. Maybe not Mr. Trump; he’s just an egomaniacal authoritarian, but people like Steve Bannon? Absolutely.
Work on that now. Don’t just try to get them to oppose it until it starts happening for real – because if he keeps his campaign promises, it is going to happen – but to get them to refuse to cooperate from day one. Particularly with the mass deportation plans and Muslim registry plans, as a start.
Whereever you are, you need to establish: we don’t do this. Our governments don’t do this. We Don’t Do This Here, full stop.
We’re talking local governments because those are the ones you can actually reach. If you write to your city council, odds are real good you’ll get a response. Same with county, most of the time, and generally, state representatives. Occasionally you’ll maybe even get something from the governor.
So you need to phone or write:
With messages hitting these points:
I think the phrase “refuse to cooperate” is critical, because it means “even once it starts, don’t give in, don’t stop fighting.”
Once you’ve done it, try to get other people to do it too. We need a meme of non-cooperation; we need to normalise non-cooperation, and states matter. Counties matter. Cities matter. The Feds get a lot less done if they have no local help.
Talk it up. Tell other people. Make it happen.
Second: don’t let other people normalise any of this. Not media, not anybody. One explicit goal of the white supremacist and misogynist ~~alt-right~~ shitheel pack is to make their racism and overt hatred of women socially acceptable, to move the Overton window even further over into douchebag territory. Deny it.
Last night gaming, I ran into some guy who started gleefully chanting racist slogans and n****r n****r n****r into Overwatch team chat. For fun. That can’t stand, so I hit my mike and said, “Fuck you, I don’t play with racist motherfuckers. I’m out” and dropped on them mid game. Even if he didn’t individually care, even if nobody else dropped after I did, everybody got a tiny demonstration: this will cost you something, even if the momentary cost is trivial.
Do not game with fascists, do not work with fascists, do not cooperate with fascists, do not negotiate with fascists. Do not hand fascists a platform.
Why? Because their agenda is intrinsically uncivil – as all eliminationist agendae are – and therefore, they do not get civility. They have abandoned any legitimate claim to it. The only claim being made is to raw power, and that’s the only thing they care about – or that matters. They don’t get a debate, they get a – metaphorical – boot to the head.
So never let any of that shit just go by. Resistance has to be personal. Fascism, misogyny, racism – it has to have a daily cost. In social life, in standing, in money, in whatever way it can be had. When all that matters is power, when all that counts is what you can get away with, then all that works in response… is taking that power away. Yeah, it might be socially uncomfortable at times, but deal with it – because if they have their way, they’ll make millions of peoples lives a whole hell of a lot worse than “socially uncomfortable.”
So get out there, and give ’em hell. Everywhere you can, be it small change, be it big money, be it grit in the gears, be it sand in the eyes, scale doesn’t matter when it’s coming in from every front.
Every chance you get: make ’em pay.
All those posts I made about data cleanup and old hard drive data recovery got someone I know from my old SF club interested in his old Amiga hard drives, which he sent me, and which I imaged for him, and did as much file recovery as I could.
One of them was just fine – complete image, files pulled off separately as well, life is good. The other…
This is what’s actually in the disk’s partition table.
And for those who have no idea what that means: disks can be divided up into smaller disks, more or less. There are reasons to do this, mostly on servers, mostly not workstations, but whatever. These are called partitions.
This particular drive is cut up into six, count ’em, six partitions, sort of, except that two are completely broken and one is made up of parts that are also at the same time parts of two other partitions, and just kind of… overlayed atop each other.
Spoiler: this don’t work.
It’s like if you got to chapter two of a book, and midway through, chapter three appeared, overprinted and interleaved with the second half of chapter two. And after chapter two ended, chapter four picked up, printed underneath the rest of chapter three, making chapter four unreadable. But you can still make out chapter three if you squint.
There is no partition utility in the world which would let you do this.
The amazing thing is that I managed to recover the contents of both “TWork” partitions, which is a lot like getting chapters two and three from my analogy back and sorted out separately and readable. Couldn’t do anything for chapter four, though. And chapter six… I don’t know what happened there. It’s some kind of goddamn chainsaw murder scene with horror movie implications.
Sadly, both of these drives did the all-too-common very-old-drives-out-of-storage thing, where I managed to image them and pull contents, but after one last heat up/cool down, they just said “aaaaand we’re done here” ’cause that seems to be that. They’ll work long enough to come online, but the Viking won’t even stay up long enough to format it, and the Quantum ST will format, but will only let you write between 10 and 60 megs before taking itself offline and hiding from the controller until you reboot the machine. So no eBay listings for these.
Still, I’m happy. I made enough auctioning off all this old stuff to buy another microphone kit and I am closing in on another toy. Expect more DIY studio gear posts! It’ll be fun. 😀
Met a few friends of Leannan Sidhe’s, from Shoreline – other musicians with their own band(s) – this weekend, dropping by a joint recording session for a big school project. (They’re all in SCC’s audio engineering and music programme.)
Turns out they know SJ and Betsy and Alec and all of that crowd, which was great, and we shared stories and jammed a little, which went well. I didn’t stick around too long, for supervillain reasons (and also, they had a lot of tracking to do in their studio session and a limited number of hours in which to do it), but it was fun.
Annnnnd maybe, with a bit of luck, something might come of it this summer. Maybe. Y’never know.
The most amazing thing about 2016-2017 is that I managed to write, record, and release as a single an actual song about Republican politics and pee obsessions…
…and it’s not about this.
They managed to come up with a completely different pee obsession scandal.
Wow.
Looks like “You’re not comin’ for us / we’re comin’ for you” isn’t just a slogan, it has a riff.
Lots of atonal power chords, go fig.
No idea if it’s a whole song yet, but here’s hoping.
“Gosh, Solarbird, what kind of articles did you publish in your old print comics fanzine?” “Oh, articles on religious theory that required half a page of small-print footnotes, exo-music-theory articles that came with a flexidisc, the usual fannish fluff.”
Extreme Geekiness Closeup:
This post inspired by getting a few of my old digital ducks in a row, courtesy the Big Clean I talked about earlier. I guess my new year’s confession is that the reason I love crazy, crazy fanac is because I’ve done so very much of it.
(If I’d been really properly serious about all this, those would’ve been correctly labelled as endnotes, not footnotes. XD )
Anybody got a turntable?
The new year is here, which means it’s time for the annual BIG CLEAN! But – living in earthquake territory and surrounded by active volcanoes – it’s also about emergency prep! Because it’s wise to have right the hell now, one-day, and two-or-three days plans for getting out.
(Some people also talk about having a month’s notice plan? But really, that’s a move, and I think it’s silly to think of that as ’emergency.’ Even one week isn’t a whole lot worse, even if you have a lot of junk – most of what people own that takes more than a week to sort out doesn’t really need to be sorted out.)
So! Let’s say you have one day, or worse, Mt. Rainier has just gone up and the Cascadia fault just tripped and everything is completely pear-shaped but a rescue boat is outside. For someone like me, who creates a lot of content, the key to getting out quickly without massive losses is already be ready.
What’s that mean? Well, you hear a lot about the three-day bag, of course. (At least, you do in Cascadia. It’s not really adequate, you should be prepared for at least a week, but three days is a start. Is this just us?) The three-day bag is one you can grab and take out the door as the building is falling down around you.
You should have data in that too. At very least, a recent backup of key data. For example: we back up our servers to USB flash drives. This sounds hilarious but it’s actually pretty good, because it means we can swap the flash drives monthly, and have a completely offline set of backups as well. And the monthly swap means they never have data-loss issues related to being unpowered for months.
Where do those offline backup flash drives live? The three-day pack.
If you have your creative works scattered across a bunch of formats – by which I mean other-than-digital formats – scan your stuff. And have your digital work collected – at least in backup form – in one place, and let that live in the three-day bag too. (But don’t use flash drives for this, they drop storage over time if left unpowered. They aren’t a good archive format.)
Alternatively, back your data up somewhere off-site. But that’s not always the best idea, for a lot of reasons – bandwidth being one of many, but there are many. If you can do it, great.
So as part of this year’s Big Clean, I’ve been getting my data situation together. I’ve made an image of my recording archives, and I’ve ripped all those old Commodore and Amiga floppies, and right now, and I’m scanning those old fanzines I put out back in the 90s, because why not? All that old stuff’s so small it can live in backed-up archive directories on my laptop, and the laptop is effectively part of the three-day kit anyway.
This is me, following my own advice, and being generally ready, like y’should. I was hoping to be done with all of this by the end of the 2nd, New Year’s Day Observed Bank Holiday Whatever, but I’m not quite done. But I’m close.
Anyway, here’s my RIGHT THE HELL NOW list:
That gets me almost all of my creative output, food, meds, srs bsns ID, and so on. If you don’t have a passport – or passport card – you should have one if you can afford it. It’s better ID than a driver’s license or ID card, and doesn’t get questioned.
My ONE DAY’S NOTICE list – basically like going on tour with less gear but more paperwork. All of the above plus:
Anything more starts getting into “well, now, it’s just a move,” but with 2-3 days, I’d start with more general lab and studio gear, and favourite books and art.
For an emergency, doesn’t that sound luxurious? I’d have that luxury – all that time – because my Right the Hell Now and One Day plans are together. If you live anywhere that can get Abruptly Dangerous? Yours should be too.
THE NEW SINGLE
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