serakit

Me over on schneefink's journal last week: "I wonder what the End is like in a world where people can't die..."
The show, this week: "Let's go visit the End!"

Apparently it's listening to me.

( Rest of Post Cut for Spoilers )

This command line book keeps stopping to make commentary on how WONDERFUL Linux is in comparison to Windows-- the latest being that Windows is like a Game Boy where you can only do what the game cartridges say and eventually get bored, while Linux is like an erector set because you have COMPLETE CONTROL.

Quite aside from some fundamental skepticism of that entire metaphor, this is an instructional book on Linux command line. If I am reading it I am probably committed to using Linux. There is no need to get all dramatic propaganda.

Apparently MA has joined the 21st century and is allowing online ballot petitions. They're petitioning to get ranked choice voting onto the ballot as a ballot question.

This ballot question sadly doesn't implement it for presidential elections, but using it *anywhere* and proving that it works is a first step, and Maine's already got it running. (We led the nation in gay marriage; let's lead the nation in this too!) If you're an MA voter, you can sign it here:

https://sign.voterchoice2020.org/

I've been learning command line, and also rereading fanfic.

One fic I've been reading features this quotation from Socrates: "You are providing for your disciples a show of wisdom without the reality. For, acquiring by your means much information unaided by instruction, they will appear to possess much knowledge, while, in fact, they will, for the most part, know nothing at all; and, moreover, be disagreeable people to deal with, as having become wise in their own conceit, instead of truly wise."

He's talking about reading in general, which I can't agree with in full-- I do think having access to information is important, however easy it is to misinterpret when you're teaching yourself. But I've been very focused on building my computer skills for about four days now, and I've been finding an interesting set of applications applied to that, because I started out with a big book on systems administration. I also have several people in my life who code for a living. I'm not even an entire chapter into the systems administration book and I've already had several things happen to me because of talking about what I'm doing with various other people who are willing to provide insight about it:

A long discussion about open-source ideology, sexism, racism, and classism, and the history of these things in the computing community
The man command exists
You'll probably wind up Googling everything anyway because the man command isn't informative
Bash is both a shell and shell scripts and you should know which one you're trying to learn (the first one is what you start with)
Some amount of "this is what a shell is"
A book on Linux command line that's explicitly a teaching book rather than a reference book
Scala is amazing and you should consider learning it / Scala is a niche language only occupied by very specific people so don't bother with it and definitely don't do it *first*
Rust is the first language to permit truly good code / Rust isn't quite that amazing but plays nicely with Scala / Rust is lower-level than Scala and so closer to system administration but still not quite "a thing you're likely to be using"
The entire structure of the internet prohibits genuinely good security practices
Python is an up-and-coming language; Ruby is on its way out
Lots of the recommended additional reading in the sysadmin book was written by people with Opinions and you should consider the authors before deciding to read them or take them seriously
Some history of GNU versus Linux
Linux distributions fall into broad categories of Debian, Redhat, and Other
Open-source has weird purity culture attached to it
As a result of the weird purity culture, some people don't like that Redhat makes money
A website with some silly zines and printable posters with Linux commands
Being able to speak both programmer and librarian is actually a valuable skill in some segments of the programming world
Vim is a hobby that happens to edit text, and text editors in general have a *really weird* Culture around them

All in the last FOUR DAYS, and I'm not even spending my entire day on it; I'm still spending a lot of time working at my currently-still-extant day job, reading, starting to look at apartment listings, and panicking. (And when I can pull it off, some writing fiction, as I am theoretically still doing that.)

And none of that would have happened if I were only working from the book I originally took out of the library! I'm not sure I would have necessarily come to a lot of this at *all* if I were *only* working from books, and certainly it would have taken longer. I'm sure my views of a lot of it will change and reform as I gain more depth of knowledge (right now I have cd, ls, file, and less, in command line, and 33 chapters to go in the command line book), but having other people of more experience around to discuss with is definitely valuable in helping form that depth of knowledge.

Book: "Now before we begin, you'll need to know vim, bash, Ruby or Python, and expect, so if you don't know those go learn them before we continue!"
Me: "...so all the reviews claiming this was a book for beginners *lied* to me."

(In entirely unrelated news, guess what I'm now learning!)

You know that thing where you have two essays tumbling simultaneously through your brain all tangled up and then you try to write both of them at once and discover that neither of them can possibly live up to what's tumbling around in your brain?

Yeah, that's what I'm experiencing right now. So you get this essay now, another one later, and neither of them are going to adequately express everything I'm thinking, which I suppose is the eternal curse of the writer. (I *love* that line from "The Hours" where Richard comments on how everything was so much less than he wanted it to be even as he's winning the most prestigious poetry award out there.)

In this particular instance, siderea crossed over into my subject area with this post, and now I am having Thoughts.

Once upon a time, in the days of yore, most schools had at least one school librarian. I don't think school librarians have ever been funded *well*, but there used to be more of them, and they used to be recognized as professionals with a complementary but not identical skillset. For that matter, they are a complementary but not identical skillset to the public children's librarian; I had some of the same classes as people doing that but a lot more freedom in my schedule. We have, as school libraries have been cut, been taking on a lot *more* of those functions than we're actually meant to or suited for (libraries: the catch-all social service, and that is another essay entirely)-- in an ideal world, if the teacher says "here is a list of people you can do your biography report on", they've consulted with the school librarian first and made sure grade-appropriate biographies of all of those people actually exist in the school library, and because serving the curriculum is part of the function of the school library, if they say "I want to have a biography report and need you to have grade-appropriate biographies on a bunch of these people," the school librarian will *do that* insofar as her budget allows. The teacher does not need to go try to hunt down age-appropriate biographies; the librarian will do that-- or will come back and say "there are no age-appropriate biographies on this person; here are some other Local Personalities you can use to try to get that same local flavor, or you can drop the requirement that they must use print books and they can use these online sources."

(The school librarian will also explain to you why, in this age of graphic novels winning the Caldecott and picture books winning the Newbery, declaring you are going to read the year's winner with your class before you've seen what won is a bad idea. Yes, a school librarian did in fact write in to School Library Journal asking how to explain this to a teacher for whom it was apparently *not* self-evident that a book obviously out of the age group of her classroom shouldn't be used with her classroom.)

Curation is a subtly different skill from teaching. My experience is that a lot of teachers are aware that we're more trained for it than they are or aren't great at it don't have time to do it themselves, although there's unquestionably a lot of sample bias there-- I don't encounter the ones who aren't asking me to please find them twenty books on sunflowers that are appropriate for second-graders.

When I look at what siderea suggests schools should be doing for the pandemic, I see things that the school librarian should be helping with: finding existing educational online resources that are at least somewhat captivating, helping the teachers incorporate those things into the curriculum, and helping the teachers interface with the unfamiliar technology they're now using. (No, not all librarians are great with tech, but we have fewer excuses for it-- informational technology is within our remit, as is, within reason, being able to figure out things we don't know how to use.)

Many of the public libraries have in fact done the thing siderea is describing! But we're necessarily communicating to a wider audience. Children's departments have babies up through teenagers to cater to, and the way we conceive of "developmentally appropriate" is not always the same way the school system conceives of it. It's the same reason public libraries don't respond to every collection development request they get from teachers, even though they are getting more and more of them as the school libraries get cut. Our primary function isn't supporting the schools; it's supporting the community, which includes the schools (*all* of the schools, which can sometimes mean five or six elementary schools alone in a suburban city that's large enough for multiple schools but not multiple libraries) but also includes homeschoolers and children too young to go to school and teens who've dropped out-- and *doesn't* have a primary mission of curriculum support but instead one of community support. The school library has a much narrower focus.

(Incidentally, we're also a lot more conscious of the childcare role the schools play, because we are explicitly *not* playing a childcare role, but one of the reasons we're closed right now is that when the schools are closed people congregate at the library, including randomly leaving their children there whether said children are old enough to be left there or not.)

So where am I going with this? Again, not anywhere specific; I'm mostly just pointing out that school librarians exist for a reason and that we'd probably be doing at least somewhat better at the distance-learning aspect of the pandemic if schools had librarians-- and that the school librarian actually is a much more professional role than most people admit to. But I'm also pointing out that "Can't they do more curation" is actually a fundamentally different skillset with a completely different career path attached to it. I've used very little of the half an education degree I got before deciding it wasn't for me in my career as a librarian, even during those periods of time when I've been fortunate enough to actually be working in the children's that I've trained for. (How do you get half an education degree, you ask? My college had a program where you could do a combined BA/MAT in five years. I wanted to do this until I'd done two years of it and then I really, *really* didn't, but by then I'd taken many of the required classes.)

The most recent episode I have listened to at the time of posting this is "The Sick Village". (Which is to say, I'm caught up.) My prediction for the ending, based on the information we acquired in this newest episode: the "somewhere else" to send the powers is going to turn out to be inside either Jon or Martin, or require the death of either Jon or Martin, and require the other one to be the one who pulls the trigger on it. I'm guessing Martin for death and then Jon suddenly not being Archivist anymore with the banishment of the powers and having to learn to live like a human again while grieving for Martin and having no way to put any of what he's done for the last few years on his resume. Martin is more in touch with his emotions and we've already established that he's connected enough to the Panopticon to be inside it; Jon grieving him is much more pathos-y than the other way around.

(I really want to know what it is Elias is *getting* out of any of this, though.)

I saw someone recently put up a Twitter poll that read "Who do you think should be president?" Options listed for answers were Biden, Trump, and "Someone better who will never get elected." They then used the fact that that third one was well in the lead to be all "See? We shouldn't vote for Biden and the national committees control who gets elected."

There are a couple of problems with this. One is that your Twitter followers are *not* a random sample. If you're the kind of person who's posting that, the kind of people who follow you are people who are likely to agree with it, because you're probably posting leftist politics normally. Everyone you know agreeing with you, or large swathes of Twitter agreeing with you, is not the same as most people in America agreeing with you.

Another problem is that you didn't specify the "someone better". If your someone better is Sanders, a bunch of people are thinking of Inslee, then a bunch more are thinking "Gary Johnson" or "Bill Weld", and yet more people are thinking "Down with the presidency; anarchist collectives all the way!", you're going to have some problems right there with that vote getting split-- maybe to the point where Biden's got a plurality of people who actually do *want* him to be president, even if he doesn't get a majority. Large numbers of people not being happy with the current presidential candidates are not the same thing as those large numbers of people agreeing on who should replace them.

Y'all lose a lot of the moral high ground when you complain about push polls and media propaganda and then go resort to the same tactics yourselves.

Apparently at least some industrialized governments have now moved from theoretical eugenics to actual eugenics, as an official government entity in the UK instructed the NHS to consider autism and learning disabilities as high for "frailty" when it comes to determining who gets a ventilator.  And then was threatened with being sued by disability rights groups and backed off this, but there have also been reports of doctors in the UK declaring that people in group home settings should all unilaterally have DNR orders issued regardless of their actual medical history.

Magic: The Gathering has a new card in the upcoming set called "Spacegodzilla, Death Corona".

This was, of course, printed months ago before any of this happened and one of the things they've been doing since they realized the scope of coronavirus is frantically making sure it's removed from any reprintings and making sure it's reprogrammed on the digital versions of Magic. Unfortunately, the first printing was printed ages ago and they can't get rid of it. Several people online have been observing that this means the Spacegodzilla card is immediately going to become a very rare, very expensive collector's item, which is probably true.

Despite the serious subject matter I am amused by the presence of an article on Wizards of the Coast's official Magic website with a headline "Statement on Spacegodzilla."

I am annoyed about entire Godzilla crossover series for reasons having nothing to do with the coronavirus; the whole concept of this sort of crossover feels much more silver border and should never have appeared in black border.

(This has not been a good year for Wizards of the Coast's decision tree; they're really proving they don't care at *all* what the community thinks as long as they can get people to spend more in the short term. Which is detrimental to the long-term; I was very invested and I'm getting progressively less so as I get more tired and more certain each new announcement is going to involve yet another terrible decision-- after Judge Academy, Chandra, Secret Lairs, and now the existence of the Godzilla series, I'm just... not especially excited about Ikoria, or what comes next.)