current debian no longer writes to syslog 😦
if you look in /var/log, someone left a README file.
the README says "you are looking for logs? but you cannot find them?" and continues in broken english, smugly telling you that systemd has made logs obsolete, and you should use "journal cattle" to ask politely for your own logs.
[did you just tell me to fuck off, jim?]
if you run journal cattle, it shows a page of syslog from april. if you hit G to go to the end, it hangs forever.
[slow clap]