Notices by Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social)

I've been reading this 180 year old serial fiction piece called Mysteries of London, and it commits a writing sin that I thought was a product of television.

Chapter 2 consists of a huge amount of narrative exposition being dropped as dialogue between two characters who have absolutely no reason to be telling people these things that they already know.

I thought this was a television contrivance, to get around the fact that there was not a narrator.

No! This piece that has a narrator is doing the same thing. Why?

We're getting ready to kick off a Saturday concert series at the book store.

I want to do a TV ad for the series.

I think that means I need to stage a fake concert with a fake audience.

But it might be easier to just stage a real concert with a fake audience.

I bought a DVD drive from the local big box store.

I have a portable Blu-ray drive at home, but it gets used so it tends to stay in one place.

I wanted something to throw in my bag, and they had a portable DVD drive for around $18.

I thought this was a good deal.

@marcoandrei I was a wordpress dev for a decade. 🥰

I appreciate the offer, but I've got it under control.

I don't mean this in a fashy "return" kind of way.

I'm not here to say that modernity is itself a problem.

But I was raised by people who might as well have fallen out of the proverbial coconut tree. I was raised in a world in which we pretended that the world started in the 1970s, and everything before that was Ancient and Unimportant.

But this modern era is an anomaly. A temporary and unsustainable contrivance. A blip.

What will matter in 100 years?

It feels good to connect what you're doing with a tradition that stretches back decades or centuries.

(It also feels good to do something that feels wholly new and unique, as if no one has ever done it before, but usually this is less about actually doing something new than it is about changing the context in which a thing is done.)

I'm reading "mysteries of london."

It's a penny dreadful published weekly starting 1844. It was probably the most widely read piece of literature of the first half of the 1800s.

It was essentially the must see primetime TV show of its day.

(The act of telling a story was not new. The printing press, and the boom in literacy rates among the working class allowed telling stories to reach a new context.

When serial television came around, it was just a further evolution of that context.)

Whe the current phase of growth, the dying breaths of the industrial revolution, finally subside...

What will be left?

I'm thinking about people, and how people are always people.

People's wants and needs and motivations haven't changed a whole ton in centuries.

Their contexts have changed, sometimes in small ways and sometimes dramatically.

Reminding myself of the ways people are still people is a useful way to determine if what I want to do has any hope of success.

I've spent most of my life doing things that are New. I've tried to live on the cutting edge, I've tried to embrace the future.

Now, I find myself looking to the past more and more.

What good is a computer?

You ever sleep so hard that waking up is agony?

I have slept. Oh god.

I have often worried that my work would leave me penniless and forgotten, but rarely have I worried it would leave me imprisoned.

These days, I worry it will leave me imprisoned.

From a technical perspective, we move to encrypted overlays and sneakernets.

And we eschew anything that looks too much like a distributed immutable ledger. Mutability is fine. If you want to trust the message, get the message signed.

This is not an attempt at fear mongering or catastrophizing.

The internet as a platform looks more precarious by the day. It has since the Obama administration, frankly.

We're going to see a contraction of digital rights eventually, and it's likely to come from this administration, and we need to have already worked the kinks out of the replacement tooling (or be ready to go without.)

If there are people you care about, get their email addresses, get their matrix handles or their signal numbers. Have more than one way to reach them, in the event that the way you reach them right now becomes illegal.

If the FCC essentially destroys the American internet (as seems likely to happen under this administration)... what's the plan?

I suppose Veilid or Tor might enter (back) in to things? But, at this point, I personally have no faith in Tor and I don't know enough about Veilid.

Things like Mastodon get way harder to operate if you suddenly find yourself liable for anything anyone you federated with posts.

And "freedom of speech" has been essentiall illusory for a while, but we have every reason to believe it's about to become more so. How long before saying "fuck the police" or "free Palestine" is grounds for imprisonment rather than just a severe beating by the armed militia masquerading as law and order in this country?

What happens then?

Alright. Trying Laka as a front end for the video game consoles for the kids.

For now, I'm going to make it the responsibility of The Children to keep track of which flash drive they have connected and to keep there menus clean.

I'm *positive* that this will result in chaos.

Lakka looks like it'll do all but one of the things I want.

I can't figure out how to make it automatically scan the attached USB drive on boot (and as a byproduct it appears to be showing ROMs that no longer exist after that drive is removed, I think)

Any tips?

... I found a horrible way to do what I want. (live USB cartridges)