Time to Orbit: Unknown

Time to Orbit: Unknown is a novel by Derin Edala. It's the length of maybe 5 standard novels, but available to read in its entirety online here (some typos). This is a work in the specific genre "hypergraphic authors for voracious readers", subgenre "scifi themes". I only recommend it if you are in the target audience "voracious readers", in which case I strongly recommend it.

The story opens on an interstellar colony ship, with one passenger unexpectedly awakened from transport hibernation. This is a great setup from a novel standpoint, as the first-person narrator has no idea what is going on and provides a great introduction to the world for the readers. The fact that he has to figure out what's broken on the spaceship, from first principles, since he is not an astronaut, adds to this framing device convenience. It also makes the mystery delicious: we are discovering things at the same time as the narrator. A mystery! In space!

The author is excellent at their craft. I don't know how else to express it. This story starts as a space-scifi-mystery and every once in awhile, it completely shifts genre. (Spoilers: logistics challenge! science puzzle! rogue AI! social conflict leadership struggle! murder mystery! international interplanetary geopolitical conflict! sociology study of voluntary colonization! philosophical exploration of individuality!) Every time the genre shifted, I was absolutely convinced it was a good idea and the author brought me along. At some point I realized the game was "genre shift in an apparently-endless story" and I loved that, too.

Last week the author published the end --- chapter 183! --- of the story. It didn't end in a way I find satisfying, and it seemed a bit rushed, but honestly I don't know that any end to the infinitely-extensible-feeling beginning of the story would ever feel satisfactory.

Recommended if you have interest in a long reading project that is a bit silly and a bit tense and 100% scifi in the post-publishers-encouraging-doorstop-series era.

This post's theme word is ontic (adj), "having or relating to a real existence." Certain genre staples of science fiction are purely joyful, not ontic.

What is the longest amount of time you have gone without using the internet?

 I take attendance by having the students answer a question. (Previously 2017, 2019.)

What is the longest amount of time you have gone without using the internet?

Answers varied:

• not long
• 10 minutes
• few hours (x2)
• 12 hours
• 1 day
• 2 days (x3)
• 3 days
• 5 days
• days
• 1 week (x5)
• a week in nature
• 2 weeks
• month
• 9 months
• 6 years
• no clue
• my childhood
• first couple years of my life
• first 2 years of my life
• first 5 years of my life
• first 7 years of my life

This post's theme word is testudinal (adj), "slow; old." Reminiscing about years of school pre-internet makes one feel testudinal and ornery.

Spring 2021 quotes

 I forgot to write attributions so here are some more-scrambled-than-usual quotes:

"Thank you! You've been sucked into the trap alongside me."
"I like being sucked into the trap."

"Are you going to issue some futures on that party?"

"There's two people in the house, so 'who ate it?' has an air of mystery."

"... the robot spy in your house who you just yell at."

D: "Nine times out of ten, if I have banged my head against it, it turns out the reverse triangle inequality does it."

Z: "That's a good question and I should have asked it, but I was a little flustered."
K: "The title of your memoir!"

D: "Um... this is when I need to have two copies of this book open, to flip back and forth."

"All curly-haired girls have an opinion of which founding father their ponytail looks like."

Z: "I like the policy of 'visitors should be neither seen nor heard.'"

S: "I think these [meetings] will be better in person."
J: "They can't be worse!"

Z: "X and I get into arguments about how to pronounce things. I'm like, I don't know if this is because you are 4 or because I came from a weird place."

G: "Why is that cat looking at the thermostat?"
Z: "I have no idea."

"pull request: check yourself before you wreck yourself, [username1]"

D: "Which is why, when your dog asks you a question, you say, 'That will be answered in the next paper.'"

L: ""My toenails are sore from being inside my socks yesterday."

K: "I'm five minutes into butts."

I: "At some point you can drive this probability high enough that your computer will spontaneously *crumble* with higher probability [than that this will fail]."

D: "I have to say that, until this morning, I was convinced that the three musketeers were mice."

Q: "The kid's clearly a knucklehead."

O: "If I need to, I can buy another computer, which will increase the number of computers in this house by... 1%?"

Z: "Python is the language that has unlimited late days."

Q: "I meant to put myself on mute but I turned off my video because I have no idea how Zoom works anymore."

Y: "I'm [X]'s niece, we won't get into how."

C: "Scraping the hair off your face every day is messing with nature."

Z: "Geocaching --- that's where you bury a server in your backyard."

I: "Beautiful. I did a probability."

J: "Hey, let's completely change everything at once and then try to cope with the ensuing disaster."

G: "Friends and the internet are about the same level of uselessness." 

Z: "Students will misunderstand, no matter what we do."

L: "That was Dad! I never used the word 'dynamite'. I prefer 'plastique'."

M: "You know these kids with college educations --- they can read!"

I: "Alright, what else is new, besides bad weather and rain and your illegal activities?"

K: "How about malaria?"
L: "Malaria is just... very inconvenient."

Z: "I think the idea of food and drink is insane."

Q: "They join the major late and are like, 'I picked up CS35 on the street.'"

I: "This hypercube is reaching the limits of my artistic sophistication."

Z: "Your department seems comparatively... cohesive. You all agree on stuff..."

I: "Knock yourself out on Complexity Zoo. But don't do it for the next half hour, we're in class."

This post's theme word is autokinesy (n), "self-propelled or self-directed motion or energy." The instinct to write down out-of-context quotes for my later self is a bit of psychic autokinesy; it goes back in my notes for more than twenty years.

End-of-year cleaning: podcast subscriptions

It's the end of the calendar year so I'm upping my recurring donations to charities and artists. And suddenly... my hard drive is full? This seems ridiculous because I haven't done anything data-intensive in months.

A short investigation later...

A truly incredible 119G of memory stores unlistened-to podcasts. In a year of actively subscribing and donating to things, this 2020 garbage fire of using my attention and privilege to do better, it is time to unsubscribe from some stuff.

Podcasts from which I'm unsubscribing, sometimes hundreds of episodes behind:

• David Tennant Does a Podcast With...
  David Tennant interviews various guests and makes them say like two sentences and an anecdote for every separate fact he extracted from a whirlwind tour of their Wikipedia/IMDB page. This just never held my attention enough for me to listen to the episodes.
• Dissect
  This is a really fantastic music analysis podcast but it requires a lot of attention and the host's voice and production values just didn't ever push it to the top of my queue, so it has languished for several years. Alas, pruned! I'm still subscribed to three other music analysis podcasts so if some truly incredible song comes along I will hear about it, even in my digital monkish seclusion.
• Jordan, Jesse, GO!
  The original podcast. An extremely good way to feel not-lonely and not-isolated when in grad school abroad, but in the years since it has not held my attention. At one point the hosts themselves called out that they are a stereotype of "two white guys discussing their childhood video games with no particular agenda" and over time I've developed more varied and diverse podcast interests. (Sometimes their guests promoted the guests' podcasts, which I subscribed to and found more interesting.) And I guess I no longer feel America-sick, since I live back here now.
• Social Distance
  The pandemical podcast from The Atlantic. In March was comforting to have a daily podcast of people also worrying and sharing information, then they exhausted the low-hanging fruit of topics and became less interesting and less relevant, then I had enough mental space to do my own research and reading and I haven't listened in several months. (I still read some related columns but they are much faster to get through than the podcast.)
• This American Life
  I found other things more interesting and haven't listened --- there are more than 8G of these episodes alone. I have since heard some spot-on parodies of the tone and style that were so perfect that subsequent listening to the actual show is dimmed in comparison.

Several others are on my watchlist --- doing inventory reminded me of my interest in the podcasts, but I hadn't listened in a long time. If I don't listen to them by the end of December, I'm also going to unsubscribe and delete all those files.

This is what happens when I've already KonMari-ed my excess clothes, books, furniture, childhood memorabilia, shoes, electronics and cables, and piles of miscellaneous cruft. My documents are in organized folders, my photos are sorted, my finances are in order. If I were any more responsible it would ooze out my pores and be even more repellent than my already-achieved levels of disgusting competence. \end{humblebrag}

This post's theme word is autotelic (adj), "having purpose, motivation, or meaning of itself; not driven by external factors." Autotelic cleaning and organizing gets its own chapter in my autobiography, but blogging just gets an incomplete sentence fragment footnote... if I get around to it.

Quote board, fall 2020

Inexplicably, people keep talking around me and my brain keeps latching on to the strange ways they arrange words and ideas.

K: "96% of your quarantine room capacity is available."
Z: "Book now and save!"

(assorted chorus of voices): "Did you get the spoiler for the back to cut down on air resistance? can it pop wheelies? how much does that keyboard bench?"

K: "You're getting feature requests from a feral cat?"
Z: "Yeah."

Z: "But your parents aren't there, right? As far as raucous house parties go, feeding your dog bacon to get her to like you is, like... fine."

Z: "Our hot take is that you need to just lubricate the freshmen so they have snail trails and can't actually get close to each other, they just slide off... we want to make McGill Walk into a slip'n'slide."

K: "I'm not a colonizer."
F: "It's widely regarded as a mistake."

R: "I once realized I was a WASP and was shocked."

F: "When Lenin was young and the revolution was strong, THAT would be the way to take power."

Q: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

F: "Sometimes it's a conjunctive AND and sometimes it's a disjunctive AND."

F: "It's the prosperity gospel of tenure lines."

D: "Tiny houses intended for birds: very cute. It is a truth universally acknowledged."

K: "Have you tuned the wheelbarrow?"
L: "I've been trying to hit it with a hammer. I'll post it on YouTube."

F: "I've been appreciative from the beginning. And I'm waiting to receive one more... make it blue to match my eyes."

? (from a 66-person video call): "That is a way not to have a coup: you think you're on private chat but you broadcast to the entire school."

? (on 142-person call): "I look forward to meeting some of you in person one day."

L: "I don't exactly understand the science of Wifi --- I know it's little elves that fly through the air and whisper the voices of other people..."
K,M, and O (simultaneously): "You basically got it."

R: "Static! I only hear it when you're talking."
Z: "That's just my midwestern accent."

L: "In the sewing room --- well, in the third sewing room, ..."

S: "If you don't like my build infrastructure, we can talk about that offline." FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT

Z: "[Q] has been on sabbatical for the past 10 years, so..."
Q: "from future import *"

N: "I have to say, for me, experiencing it on film was sufficient."
Z: "You don't feel the call to the southern pole?"

D: "Some would argue that this 'premium content' is not, in fact, content. But I would argue that it takes time to watch and is unedited."

D (in response to me): "Lila, did you lose your Zoom premium? I'm getting ads." (I did a funny bit!)

Z: "Extend the cat a line of credit. [beat] Step 3, profit."

R: "Stepford wives, if the Stepford wives were democrats."

I: "Is that your foot in front of you?"
N: "That's his face."

C: "Can the system keep the chipmunks out?"
D: "Are the chipmunks committing identity fraud using your credit card?"

N: "I succumbed to the lure of firecrackers in my youth, so I remember the attraction."

F: "I found a way around it."
N: "He naturalized the bayonet."

R: "Plus their proprietary blend of whatever they think almonds taste like."

C (distantly, off-camera): "Ooooh! Ow ow ow!"
N (distantly, off-camera): "I gave birth to three children, it hurt more than this."

F: "That was when the sun didn't rise. That day."

K: "I have a +1 resistance to emotional damage."
F: "I need to activate that."

D: "Our first thought was to go to Denver. But it's far away and on fire."

Z: "I lightly overshopped because I was excited about the squash."

M: "What is the saying?"
A: "More money, more problems."
M: "Oh. My first thought was, more children, more problems."

D: "Here's my backend. Please engineer it to something useful. I wrote... no test cases."

D (on Zoom): "I'm streaming this on Instagram Live right now."

L: "If I misunderstand something, you can be almost sure I didn't misunderstand it."

N: "Congratulations on assembling those Ikea shelves."
Z: "It is what I was raised to do."

U: "I don't know how much we can train people to be nice."

F: "You've solved the dilemma! I'm going to die in a warehouse fire."

K: "If you lose by 5 pants I will be very interested to see how that plays out."

D: "You definitely shouldn't buy a vintage electric blanket."

K: "I like to turn the cereal box off and on again."
L: "On the cereal box, they hide the controls."

Z: "Do I not know my own course number?"

F: "It's not screwed over in the sense that... I could have played better. But I didn't."

L: "Rampantly floating with pubic hairs."

J: "Bread is the bread of life."

D (faintly, with astonishment): "Oh, Mom, you added me to your friends."

D: "It's your turn. Disappointingly, I am prepared to talk you through beating me."

J: "It's about the journey. The slow, inexorable journey."

K: "I can't believe we're moving past 'arbitorium'!"
L: "Arbitrarium!"
M: "Arboretum?"
N: "I got it, clearly: Lab of Ornithology." (<-- this was, unbelievably, correct!)

Z: "I just think --- and I hear myself saying this as it comes out --- when people ask questions they don't think about what they don't know."

K: "How'd you get out of the pentagram?"
F: "It's a demon-backed demon trust."

Z: "It's hard to both get off at the same time. It's also hard to both go down at the same time." (IIRC this was about internet service uptime but WOW)

F: "A mountain of lawyers, in a giant mech suit, as another lawyer. With missiles."

Z: "We're just multiplying matrices by vectors in my course, man, I'm not touching that third rail."

Z: "The other thing --- there are lots of problems bathroom-related --- living with my sister..."

Z: "They came up with 2 major options to save money. One was to demolish the building."

R: "If you decapitate someone, it's rated R."

This post's theme word is heterophemy (n), "the use of a word different from the one intended." It's easy to get on the quote board by accidental heterophemy in earshot of me.

Live theatre, sort of

WHEREAS the ongoing pandemic and various other elements of environmental, social, political, economic, and biological disaster loom large, and

WHEREAS the rational fairly strict self-quarantine (of those who are able) has, since March, severely limited occasions to socialize and gather in groups for the purposes of mutually enjoying culture and company, it is

HEREBY ACKNOWLEDGED that having so many performers shift to an online method for displaying their art to a geographically disparate crowd has, in fact, WIDENED this reader's ability to financially support the artists she loves while appreciating their performances in real-time.

Everything's on a screen, and frankly having to see my family only in delineated, buffered, pixelated windows feels much more limiting than having to see live performers in windows. Realistically these performers would have been mostly inaccessible because they were not touring my locality; so I find a tiny sliver of redemption for 2020 in the broader access to live art. The rest of 2020 should consider itself still on blast for its shortcomings.

This post's theme word is rort (n), "a wild party." I have tickets to watch shows three nights this week, from the comfortable pajama-clad rort of my own sofa!

Mosquito resolution

 After many months of living at the end of a narrow internet pipe, my bits finally stopped flowing (the pipe was blocked? ok, metaphor) and I caved and signed up for fiber. Now I have a much bigger pipe! Bits are freely flowing as never before!

Importantly, I am now viewable as many pixels, often even in motion, for my many, many, video calls. My life (and many others) now consists mostly of taking video calls in different parts of my dwelling, and my interlocutors can now see me in smooth motion and continuous audio! What luxury and decadence, etc.

The pixels are in fact so delicate and rich that yesterday during lunch on my porch, my interlocutor was able to see the mosquito that I chased in and out of the frame, as it hovered around me and tormented me with the threat of stealing my blood. This was nice, because I got reassurances that I wasn't completely insane (another person validated the visible insect!) and that I didn't look completely insane (chasing an invisible phantom).

Today I received a belated housewarming gift: a giant citronella candle. Emphasis on the houseWARMing, and also on the acknowledged battle that owning a house is: battle against my house being washed away, battle against incursions of snow and mice, and the personal battle to keep all of my blood --- which, I want to emphasize, I am currently using to support vital life operations --- inside my body. I don't plan to burn it indoors, but hopefully this will resolve my outdoor mosquito deliciousness problem.

This post's theme word is henotheism (n), "belief in or worship of one god without denying the possibility of others." Welcome to my henotheistic house; over there is the citronella shrine.

Happy birthday, Turing!

Today is the 106th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing. (Of course, at birth he was probably very bad at abstract reasoning and proofs, like most babies, but he overcame these difficulties and grew up to be truly excellent at math.)

Just in case you haven't seen this yet (HT: I saw this on Twitter several times, then on slatestarcodex), it is amusing and recursive and cultural and involves computers:

Humans often post on the website reddit, which hosts many, many different message boards and oodles of subcultures and conversations on specific topics. Each specific message board is called a subreddit and has its own adherents, community standards, topic(s) of conversation, style, level of activity, etc.

There is a subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where the posts claim to be written by humans, but are written in all-caps and a style suggesting that they are actually written by robots. Redditors writing these posts are humans, so these are humans writing as if they are robots who are unconvincingly trying to pass as human.

There is a recent and extremely impressive system called GPT-2 which unsupervised-ly learns English and performs some really impressive computational linguistic feats, including writing mediocre high-school-style essays and writing very interesting and totally feasible poetry.

There is a subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2 which trains GPT-2 on subreddits and automatically writes "coherent and realistic simulated content" for each subreddit. Of course, this subreddit is just going through other subreddits, training GPT-2, and writing new (automated, simulated) posts for that subreddit.

Now the subreddit-simulating robot has trained on r/totallynotrobots, which means that there are posts on the internet which are written by a robot imitating a human writing in a style pretending to be a robot who is unconvincingly trying to pass as a human. (Or, as slatestarcodex put it, "a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human.") You can see those posts here.

It's turtles all the way down, and every. single. turtle. is a Turing machine!


This post's theme word is anastrophe, "the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses." Silly grammar mistakes and anastrophe are used to denote unfamiliarity with human language.

What is the longest amount of time you have gone without using the internet?

I take attendance by having the students answer a question.

What is the longest amount of time you have gone without using the internet?

Heuristic answers:

• during class (sometimes 😉)
• a little while
• not long

Time to first computer usage from birth:

• ~4 years before first using a computer
• probably the first 6-7 years of my life
• 9 years (the first 9 years of my life)
• 14 years before I got my first phone
• 30 years (<-- 30="" a="" aged="" could="" editor="" have="" how="" i="" idea="" li="" no="" note:="" person="" reply="" s="" this="">

Time of longest non-internet "break" since first computer usage:

• one hour
• a day
• 21 hours, cross-continent flight
• 2 days
• maybe like 48 hours?
• 4 days
• a week
• two weeks
• 2 weeks (summer camp in a mountain)
• A couple weeks? But I'd love to try going w/o it for a longer time.
• 3 months

One student wrote "∞". I have corresponded with this student by email; I wonder if, on their end, they had the messages transcribed and then read aloud to them by a personal, permanent "internet secretary"? Actually, I'm pretty sure I have watched this student load a webpage during class in a computer lab, so maybe this is just reporting error...

Winning comedic/situationally-funny response: "The times that eduroam is out..."

I previously asked this question in 2017.


This post's theme word is floccipend (v tr), "to regard as worthless." They floccipend internet downtimes.

How to announce sweeping policy changes

Firstly, have you considered not making sweeping policy changes?

While I am sure that you think you have considered every aspect of the change, you probably haven't, and may quickly regret and rescind your announcement when your user base is outraged. (I'm looking at you, Patreon, and thanking you for responding to my strident and vitriolic feedback by apologizing and not making the change.)

Secondly, have you considered making your policy change trivial, but having the announcement denigrate your user base?

I don't advise this, either, okcupid. Boo.

Thirdly, you had better grandfather in all your previous users under their former conditions, or I will quit.

I really will.

It's easy.

And then I will take my attention, and my patronage, and my money, and my life, and spend it somewhere else.

To celebrate the end of this offensive, horrible calendar year, during which I nevertheless achieved some life milestones, I am now reviewing my yearly donations and subscriptions, increasing my donations, and mostly cancelling subscriptions --- and adding that money to the donations pile. So my sweeping policy change is that I am donating more money than before, supporting charities and libraries and artists.

Look at me, supporting capitalism by laboring so that I can give my money away!

(A. pointed out that I behave not in my own best interests, economically, but in a socially-justified way. I am duly smug.)


This post's theme word is mammothrept (n), "a spoilt child; a person of immature judgment." Your sweeping policy change satisfies your mammothrept investors and causes a massive exodus of your site's users!

"C" is for creepy Cortana

Cortana is the Microsoft version of Alexa, who is the Amazon version of Siri, who is Apple's version of an embryonic Skynet, as fantasized by data-driven marketers who prefer all subservient voices to be feminized. She's just as creepy, intrusive, and frightening as the others. I can't figure out how to turn her off. After disabling her once, I am now on a screen, quoth:

Hey, look, it's the "me"part of set-up! Can I have permission to use the info I need to do my best work? 

To let Cortana provide personalized experiences and relevant suggestions including when your device is locked, Microsoft collects and uses information including your location and location history, contacts, voice input, speech patterns, searching history, relationships, calendar details, email, content and communication history from text messages, instant messages and apps, and other information on your device. In Microsoft Edge, Cortana uses your browsing history.

FUCK NO. This paragraph makes my skin crawl; it makes me want to incite a lawsuit; it could be the summary voice-over for the beginning of a movie about stalkers and abusive relationships.

Later, in a more detailed explanation, they say,

When your location is used by a location-aware app or service, your location information and recent location history is stored on your device and sent to Microsoft in a de-identified format to improve location services.

The red flag here is de-identified, which basically means "schoolchildren in 2025 will be able to link this data to your name and fingerprints as part of routine homework assignments." De-identified means "your privacy is not really protected against anyone clever, or educated, or with enough data" --- and that almost certainly includes the reams of data that are being collected by this very procedure. In fact, a little later in the same document,

As you use Windows, we collect diagnostics data... This data is transmitted to Microsoft and stored with one or more unique identifiers that can help us recognize an individual user on an individual device...

This documentation also says that some of the data collected may "unintentionally include"... as if anything about this human-authored operating system were unintentional.

The entire new-Windows-device setup --- with the four separate times I have now disabled my own device from eavesdropping and blurting out perky spoken questions --- was very slimy. It feels like a modern update of Clippy, that universally-reviled and -mocked piece of computing history. Basically, it has convinced me that I definitely do not own my device, the data on it, or any analytics about how it is used. (There is no way to turn off automatic updates, either.) So I'll only be using it for the one program I want, instead of as a multipurpose computing device.


This post's theme word is deterge, "to wash, wipe, or cleanse." I require a psychic emollient to deterge the scummy Big Brother sense of using a Windows device.

We're done, Verizon. [mic drop]

... and I'm out (previously: In which I am about to cancel my Verizon home DSL and Verizon update). The service continued to be terrible, intermittent with bad. Both options were disagreeable to me, as a customer, but the variability was even more frustrating. Could they not simply deliver a consistently bad service?

I priced it out, measured my usage and the bandwidth available, and I'll get more consistent, sufficient service by doing almost anything else. My personal favorite is to inscribe individual packets by hand on nuts, and pass these off to squirrels and birds, who by means of their own mysterious communication networks, eventually pass me back the data I requested. (Current bug: this arrives in the timing and placement of bird poops on my car windshield, which I must decode by hand. Don't worry, I'm writing a script to do it automatically.)

In a practice which apparently recurs annually, I add to my list of "forsworn companies" every August. This time it's Verizon: never again, Verizon. You have forced me to listen to at least 10 cumulative hours of your "on hold" music. Never again.

This post's theme word is inveigle (v. tr.), "to get something or to persuade someone to do something by deception or flattery." They could no longer inveigle me into subscribing to the service.

Verizon update

An update: the squeaky wheel does, indeed, get the grease.

After being maximally noisy in a public forum (Twitter) and expressing, at length and in excruciating detail, my dissatisfaction to a customer service agent, Verizon did actually restore my service yesterday evening.

When I say "restore", I mean "restore" --- for example, this morning when I awoke, my modem required a reboot before I was connected to the internet again. (This is pretty standard for my experience of Verizon's home DSL; it often stops working when left unattended, and requires a reboot to connect to the network properly again.)

My subscription-abandonment is forestalled, but that sword of Damocles continues to dangle...

This post's theme word is fulminate, "to explode or cause to explode" or "to issue denunciations." My fulminating rage is tamped down, temporarily.

In which I am about to cancel my Verizon home DSL

I have not had home internet service since July 18th. My provider is Verizon DSL. At this point I have called, emailed, tweeted, and interacted with their phone/troubleshooting menu so many times that I am bored and incredibly frustrated with the system. I might just cancel --- which would be functionally indistinguishable from my current situation of no internet connection, with the exception that I'd know I could stop trying to get them to fix it, and also stop anticipating that they'll send me a bill for this non-service.

Are you a Verizon agent, customer service representative, or technician? Let me answer your questions.

• The DSL light on my modem is blinking red.
• Yes, it continues blinking red even if I reboot the modem. Go ahead and "run diagnostics" from your end.
• The modem is plugged directly into the phone jack, with no splitter.
• This situation persists even if I use a different phone cable to plug the modem into the jack.
• I do not use my home phone service and don't have a corded telephone, so I can't tell you if the phone is working.

Previously (see my outage from July 4 -- July 7, for which you have a ticket in your system), you sent a technician (the helpful Joe!) to my home. He confirmed that the problem was in your wiring infrastructure that delivers the signal to my home, and not inside my home itself. 

"There is a ticket for the Central Office." since July 19th... but no progress. 

• I called on July 19 --- I was told that someone would come to my home July 20, and I needed to be at home from 8am to noon.
• I called July 20, at noon, when no one had come --- I was told that no one was coming, after all, because the problem was in the infrastructure of Verizon's wired network, but it would be repaired by 4pm today.
• I called July 21, in the evening, when I still had no service --- was told that they're working on it, it will be fixed in 24-48 hours, and to stop calling. Verizon would certainly call me with any updates.

There have been no updates.

• I tweeted @verizon today --- got three different replies, asking questions answered by the bulleted information points above, then got sent to a Verizon chat window.
• In chat, was told that "there is a ticket for the Central Office", which will take 24-48 hours to reply via email, at which point I'll get an update from "Verizon Social Media Team" on Twitter.

I'm not optimistic about actually receiving any promised update. (I'm going to wait until the end of the day today, though, before cancelling --- on the off chance that they do actually manage to make progress and get back to me.)

Alternatives? Verizon FIOS (recommended by my neighbors on NextDoor) is not available at my address, so my only alternative internet provider is Comcast. By consensus on NextDoor, Comcast service is terrible and customer service is worse. At this point, tethering my computer to my cell phone looks like the cheapest and most effective way to get home internet service. 

This post's theme word is pernancy (n), "a taking or receiving of rent, profit, etc." Charging for a nonexistent service is atrocious pernancy.

17776

17776 ("What football will look like in the future") is a piece of fiction by Jon Bois, published on the sports website SB nation. Its exact categorization is evasive: experimental fiction? multimedia experience?

It's very cool, in any case, and the entire project is now published. No uncomfortable waiting now, just a lot of scrolling and loading. (And warning: it doesn't seem to work entirely on mobile.) It posits a future, many thousands of years from now, and what game(s) football may have gradually shifted into... and so much more. Purpose, humanity, climate change, the Fermi paradox... it's all there.

This was very engaging, even if I am left with a lingering worry that I'm not getting it. Certainly there were some references I missed, but there were sentient satellites watching a thousand-year-long game of hide-and-seek.


This post's theme word is gesamtkunstwerk (n), "a work of art that makes use of many different art forms." The internet facilitates a vast new landscape of gesamtkunstwerks!

Living life publicly

From Gaby Dunn's podcast, "Bad With Money", episode "Get Rich or Die Vlogging" @ 19 minutes:

Youtubers are allowed to have struggled --- in the past tense --- because overcoming makes us brave and relatable. But we can't be struggling now, because then we're labeled whiners.

This observation resonates strongly on any number of dimensions. The incredible skewed, biased versions of ourselves we're encouraged --- by explicit and implicit social pressures --- to present on social media. The way that public behavior is policed and monitored, especially in any minority group (bonus points for each category you don't fit: white, male, cisgendered, straight, wealthy, speaking unaccented English, able-bodied, no mental health issues, ...).

The idea of having to maintain a sort of "purity" of one's personal brand is insane.

There are arenas of life, even outside the weird social-media William-Gibson-esque semidystopian future which we all inhabit, where this bizarre packaging and marketing of oneself is promoted, standard, ideal. I am thinking particularly of applying for jobs,  where there is enormous pressure to present oneself in an idealized version, having overcome struggles but not now being engaged in any particular struggle.


I'm so glad I am employed. The amount of psychological pressure this lifted is still astonishing.


This post's theme word is pungle (verb tr.), "to make a payment; to shell out." If you want my labor, you'd better pungle and pungle hard. I know my worth.

Online dating, frankly

Online dating seems to encourage a kind of window-shopping, where the process is glorified without any acknowledgement or progress towards its ultimate goal. And let's not forget the commodification --- most dating websites are incentivized to keep you on the site, searching and dating, instead of getting you out into the world to meet people and spend time with them. Because then you spend less time looking at their ads!

If you think too hard about this, you will realize that your main function on this planet is to look at, and occasionally click on, advertisements. This is depressing and beside the point, today, so let's set it off to the side -- maybe a few meters beside this point --- and try not to catch it in our peripheral (mental) vision.[1]

I confess that I am a woman on an online dating website. Wait, wait, don't message me yet! Actually, by reading up to the third paragraph, you are already ahead of 90% of all people I interact with online. Congrats! To boost yourself to the top of the heap, it is necessary to have that certain je ne sais quoi. Except that of course I do know what it is. Recently I received some stellar introductory verbal salvos, outstanding for quality.

Example the first opened with a long, mathematically sound musing on the relationship of correlation and causation, as well as a testable hypothesis about correlation causing causation. The message included the sentence: "And thus, we enter the realm of the mad gods." No reference was made to my physical appearance. (The closest they got was a game-theoretical analysis, with the interjection "your behaviour actually reinforces the statistical correlation.") Stellar. A+. Five stars, would message again. (I replied.)

Epistolary author the second began with a lengthy and verbose and self-aware description of how the resplendent majesty of my profile knocked them breathless and wordless. They went on to make several "deep cuts" references and demonstrate intellect and reflective thought capabilities. Again, no reference was made to my appearance, or nationality [2], or sexual appetite. (I mention these things as they are the most frequent topics of very, very bad messages.) Nice! Funny, erudite, and well-executed.

The third victim exposed here to infamy opened their profile with, "The problem with Internet dating's frictionless market is..." Who wouldn't fall for that? --- I ask in all nerdiness.

What have we learned? I appreciate fluency in English and good writing skills. I anti-appreciate references to my physical appearance. Bonus points are earned for sustaining message quality over a nontrivial duration.

I'm sharing to amuse you, the internet, and because these messages were such high-quality that I feel greedy keeping them to myself. May you all have as promising and engaging correspondents in the new year!


This post's theme word is duopsony, "a market condition in which there are only two buyers, thus exerting great influence on price." The speed-dating night flopped because of uneven gender balance and resultant duopsony.


[1] My thoughts have footnotes and asides and alternate phrasings branching out of them, a possible symptom of too much David Foster Wallace and Tristram Shandy.

[2] I here confess that the post title is a badly-conceived pun on dating in Paris. No apologies, but we shall discuss this no further.

Tracking

I am as much a datavore as the next internet-inhabiting member of my socio-economic-educational cohort. Right now, with a few clicks, I can bring up a history of my workouts, personal mass, and grams of macronutrients eaten, going back months or years (depending on the quality of data desired), as well as how long I've worn each pair of contacts I've ever used, and the length of every menstrual cycle. No, this data is neither open nor freely available (at least until I get a good publication out of it).

I have thought about getting a fitbit, but it seems extraneous. At my current level, increasing my steps per day is a tiny factor of my overall activity. Plus I'm not crazy about uploading my data to some company's website, automatically. I want to control the data I generate, and I think this is reasonable.

But this article makes me want to run from the fitbit, for many steps. In fact, I think that I could probably be discouraged from most of my present activities by an article describing them in this light: as an obsessive, addictive, cult-ish fad, in which basic humanity (competition, socializing, merely walking) is suborned in order to commodify community and "brand engagement."

Eugh.


This post's theme word is thrasonical, "bragging or boastful." Linked fitbit accounts are thrasonical interpersonal spam of an unpleasant sort.