Around the end of December, I started noticing issues with the server that this blog runs on. I quickly realized that the hard drive was failing, and although I tried to swiftly preserve the data, I was unsuccessful at backing the blog’s content up.
The most recent backup I had was from March 15, 2020. 😬 Back up your stuff, y’all!
Luckily, I’ve been able to manually copy much, though not all, of the old content from the snapshots saved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which is just an absolute saving grace. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be attempting to recreate these posts. I expect things will be a little broken for a while as I try to put things back together.
In the longer term, I’ve realized that it might be time to close down this WordPress blog and switch to a different kind of online presence—perhaps one that’s not burdened by over a decade of backlog, or by a stack of technologies like PHP and MySQL that I barely understand. I’m strongly considering switching to a static site made using Hugo, which would reduce the technical complexity significantly while also allowing me to craft a more bespoke site, one that feels more personal. In the process, I’ll probably remove a good chunk of my blog posts so that only the content I deem relevant and meaningful remains.
But seriously, back up your stuff!
Credits
Bandage emoji in header image is from Twemoji (CC BY 4.0).
It was probably a decade ago that I discovered the piecepack. Invented by James Kyle in 2001, the piecepack is a public-domain game system, a standard set of components designed to be combined and used in an infinite array of potential games, much like a standard deck of cards. It’s not a game itself, the same way that a deck of cards isn’t a game. It’s just a set of pieces—you supply the rules for the games you want to play.
The much-anticipated cyberpunk video game Cyberpunk 2077 was released this week, and as a result, the Net has been abuzz about my favorite genre. I certainly haven’t played the game–not my jam–but I have a different kind of cyberpunk game to rave about.
Sit down, console jockey, and let me tell you about my favorite card game ever: Netrunner.
These last few weeks, I’ve been learning how to use Blender–free, open-source 3D modeling software–with the help of Andrew Price’s incredibly helpful series of tutorial videos. This was my final image from the first run through the tutorial.
Learning Blender seemed like a fun endeavor for the tail end of 2020, especially since I’ve sorta neglected my artistic skills for a while. Plus, it would be really cool if I got good enough at modeling and scene design that I could create new artwork for Project NISEI!
My next challenge is taking what I learned here and modeling a pint of beer. I’ll share it when I get it figured out!
It’s high school, and I believe copyright is ridiculous.
My dad has introduced me to Project Gutenberg, an ever-growing library of books in the public domain, and I am spellbound. Contained within its creaky website are thousands of books that are owned by nobody. Or maybe everybody. After all, I could download one and do whatever I wanted with it. I could republish The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, only with the protagonist’s name changed to something patently absurd like “Benedict Cumberbatch”, and I would be utterly free of consequences, because I own those stories now as much as anyone else. They are free to be remixed, reworked. They belong to none of us, and all of us.
Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios has this great new video about the right’s fixation on cuckoldry and what “cuck” as an insult means, through the lens of their fixation upon polyamory. In it is also a deeply relatable segment about how being a polyamorous man often gives lots of opportunity to “win” by toxic masculinity’s standards… but that’s not something he (or I) are really interested in.
I can’t do it justice; it’s just real good. Here, watch:
Heads up: Y’all, this ain’t professional mental health advice, it’s about my personal observations and what’s worked for me. I’m not your therapist1and if I am, then hi, let’s chat about this in session. If you want professional help tailored to your own situation, it’s best to get yourself a counselor!
In a session this week, I came up with the analogy of the “Shame-Regret Vinaigrette.”
Shame and regret are two pretty miserable emotions. They tend to travel together, especially among people who are not used to making mistakes (hi) or feeling bad at things (also hi). Preeminent-researcher-on-shame and omnipresent-self-help-darling Brené Brown2Maybe it’s just the circles I run in, but I feel like I’m always half a sentence away from someone excitedly bringing up Brené Brown. Is this a counselor thing? A Millennial thing? Is this bisexual culture? has described shame as being the feeling that we are “flawed and therefore unworthy of love“. It’s not a helpful feeling, it’s just kicking ourselves when we’re already down.
Regret (alongside its cousin guilt), however, is adaptive. Regret is action-oriented. It highlights a decision we made that we would now do differently, and in doing so, it helps us understand our values. For a long time, I was horribly ashamed of who I was in high school–I looked back on those years with deep revulsion and a belief that I deserved to be rejected and scorned for it. Over time, however, that has shifted to regret over how I acted. It’s still not a comfortable feeling, but thinking that way allows me to see what matters to me today and identify the ways I’ve grown and am continuing to grow.
It’s helpful, therefore, to be able to separate shame from regret.
But therein lies the rub3“Therein lies the vinaigrette” was voted too convoluted a pun and the writer has been chastised for his hubris.. The more shame and regret are agitated, the more they emulsify and intermingle, and the harder it is to pull them apart. It used to be that when I thought about my high school years, I got hit with a horrible pang of shame, and I would immediately react. Mentally, I shoved that thought as far away as possible. Sometimes, the discomfort would seep into my muscles, and I’d try to shake the thought out of my head–literally, I’d shake my head like I was clearing a bad dream. My mouth would make weird “gack ack ack” noises.
And that would seem to work… for a moment. So long as I didn’t look at the thought again, I could avoid that shame. But the next time I was reminded of it, bam!, there it was again. Ugh! Gross! Push it away further!
This year, as I’ve done more mindfulness meditation, I’ve become familiar with how engaging with a thought–whether to dwell on it or to counter it–keeps that thought alive. Even when I was trying to push my shame-filled thoughts away, I was still engaging with them, still treating them like Important Business. Whether I dwelt on them or ran from them, I was still reacting to them, and in doing so, I was shaking up the Shame-Regret Vinaigrette.
If you want to get to the helpful, productive regret, then, one way to do it is to disengage. I began mindfully observing my thoughts and feelings, but resisting the urge to run with them. I noticed what my shame felt like, but tried to “ride the wave” of discomfort instead of seeking an immediate solution. As I did, it was like I stopped agitating the jar. Shame and regret started separating. I could see the difference between “I’m a horrible person for how I acted,” and “Today, I absolutely would not act the way I did in high school.”
One of those was helpful, so I began focusing on that and letting go of the rest.
The Shame-Regret Vinaigrette, therefore, is ultimately about acknowledging your feelings without engaging with them. It’s about giving yourself space to observe without agitating the jar… and letting the unhelpful stuff naturally filter out.
“…okay, but why would you want to let the oil filter out of a vinaigrette?”
The baking summer heat is relenting just a little today. I slept in, and once I was up, hopped on my bike for a casual ride around Salem. The sunshine, the breeze on my arms and face, the feeling of my legs pumping beneath me–it was a welcome reminder that I’m alive.
When I got home, I sat down at my kitchen table, took a few deep breaths… and did my first focused tarot reading, using the “Keep Calm (While Gravely Fucking Concerned)” spread by Evvie Marin of Interrobang Tarot.
This is probably where people who’ve known me a long time just did a spit take. Sorry about your monitors, y’all.
See, in high school and college, I latched onto my identity as an atheist and skeptic. I roundly rejected anything with even a whiff of the mystical, esoteric, or religious, including, as you’d expect, tarot. My dad–a man with whom I ungraciously associated all manner of nonscientific, woo-y philosophy–occasionally would consult the I Ching, and it lodged irritation in my mind like a raspberry seed between my teeth. Why do you need such mystical bullshit?, I wondered. Your sticks aren’t going to tell you the future!
As the heat of that identity has smoldered down into gently glowing coals, however, I’ve come to develop a more integrative appreciation of the “mystical”, in a way that younger Spencer would have found incomprehensible. As it turns out, I can draw tarot cards and reflect upon them without ever believing they’re endowed with any form of supernatural power. They’re symbols, nothing more and nothing less; distributed by chance, sparking the meaning-making part of my brain. Brains are very good at making meaning, and sometimes a little bit of novel stimulus goes a long way.
And, at the same time, there’s something beyond the strictly empirical explanation. Again, not anything supernatural, but something emotional. Something felt, not thought. After all, even with my meager coding knowledge, I could probably rig up a JavaScript program that randomly produces the names of any number of tarot cards. Click a button, get cards. Done. But that’s not the point, is it? Part of the point is to slow down, to handle a beautiful artifact, to tickle the senses, to enrich one’s life for a moment. I picked this deck of cards, the Prisma Visions deck by James R. Eads, for my first tarot deck because the artwork just draws me in. The cards are sturdy and a delight to hold. The edges are gilded with silver foil, so the deck shimmers and shines from every angle.
Or take crystals. They’re minerals. They’re formed by fully comprehensible physical processes. There’s nothing supernatural about a chunk of quartz… but there can be something special about it. After all, we don’t encounter crystals on the regular. They have qualities we don’t tend to experience–translucence, vivid colors, geometric shapes. If humans were cave-dwelling sentient gemstones, if in place of trees, we had crystal spires, then maybe crystals would be mundane. But we aren’t, and they aren’t, so they feel different.
These things don’t have to be supernatural to be magical.
And all of that magic comes from us. A deck of cards is magical in part because the human brain is hilariously bad at comprehending statistics and probability. Tarot is magical because of our ability to reflect and make meaning. A crystal is magical because it’s so unlike the things we encounter regularly. The sparks of “magic” that I see are, ultimately, reflections of our human existence.
Well, that seems apt. Photo by Snapwire on Pexels.com
Earlier this year, I joined a group dedicated to reviving the Humanist Year project, a resource I discovered right when I was starting grad school. The idea of A Humanist Year, like Sunday Assembly, and like this “secular humanist magic”, is that, in contrast to what I thought in high school and college, there can be a place for these “mystical” values and practices in a secular humanist life. Ritual, for instance, can be used to help us mark chapters of our lives. Gathering together can help us process human existence and build a sense of community. Magic can help us find meaning, beauty, or unexpected joy. These have traditionally been the domain of religion and the supernatural, but they need not be.
Besides, meaning, community, flexibility and groundedness–all of those seem like important values for the moment we live in.
I’m so happy to be able to explore and engage with this in a way that doesn’t require me to compromise what I believe about the universe, but instead sits comfortably alongside the rest of my worldview. That’s pretty damn cool. Magical, even.
As for the reading? Well, in a nutshell, it prompted me to reflect that:
The world is changing and there’s no going back. The only way out is through.
To stay cool and collected, I can lean into my loving heart. Now is the time for me to love stronger and strengthen my ties with others.
How to pass the time? Focus on the mundane parts of everyday life. I can keep the house in order. It’s not sexy, but it’s good discipline.
We are at a tipping point between future outcomes. The forces of fascism and hegemony hold a lot of power and are attempting to bend truth to their ends. I need to trust my gut; I know this is wrong, but they will continue to try to convince us otherwise.
Fighting back for me right now looks like putting more resources into things like my little homegrown social network–building community and branching off in ways that serve me and my people more. It’s work, but it will be worth it.
Finally, I can channel my fear into being a safe haven and a rock, taking advantage of my fortunate position. I can shelter others so they can recover and grow. How lucky I am that even my day job allows me to do this.
That’s pretty cool. And now that I’ve written all this, it’s time to do some housework. The cards told me to. 😜
My focus has been all over the place lately. A couple weeks ago, I got back into Minecraft. I’ve played since its very first release, when I was in college, and since then, my interest in it has been tidal, waxing and waning but never fully disappearing. It really is quite a good game–there are so many satisfying behavioral “loops” that bring me back.
I also installed Minetest, because hey, I like the idea of supporting open-culture projects. Buuuuut, I’ve been having so much fun with the richness and depth of Minecraft’s existing content that I’m concerned Minetest will just feel like an off-brand knockoff. I should give it a fair shake, and maybe I will at some point… but right now, when I want to play a voxel-based survival/building game, I can either play the very familiar Minecraft, or I can fire up the novel Minetest and try to learn the new (and less polished) ins-and-outs of that game. One option sounds like work when I want to be playing.
And that kinda speaks to where my mind is at right now. I had a big surge of task-focused energy a couple weeks ago, when I built my garden beds and did a bunch of interior household tasks. Now, I find myself retreating a lot more. I spent the last weekend playing Minecraft and Kingdom of Loathing and sitting on the couch with Rachel, watching several episodes of Mindhunter in a row. There’s nothing wrong with this, of course, but it’s not quite where I want to be. It felt good to make progress on things that mattered to me.
If I think about it, I’ve found myself in the same place with a lot of my projects right now. I’ve burned through a lot of the easy stuff: replacing cabinet hardware, upgrading my computer, buying an inkjet printer, building garden beds, purchasing the hardware for my Friendica instance. And with the easy stuff out of the way, I’m now facing the actual work–a lot of which I feel unequipped to handle and which I feel less capable of steering away from failure. So I’m facing a mountain of perceived snags, like:
Can I transplant my plant starts without killing them? How do I transplant my plant starts?
How are we going to organize our third garden bed, especially since bed #2’s carefully plotted layout got disrupted?
Have I failed at starting seeds because all my starts are leggy instead of stout?
What is causing my computer to run out of memory every day or two?
How do I get my damn printers to work with my computer?
How do I set up a shared music server for my wife and myself that minimizes data duplication while maximizing accessibility?
Will we ever be able to afford all the electrical work in this house that I want done? Is that prudent?
Is it responsible to have several computers running in this house if the outlets are ungrounded (and I therefore can’t use surge protectors)?
I should really start backing up my data–but what should I back up? How? Where? And how do I do that with multiple computers?
Did I properly duplicate data from my laptop when I moved to my desktop last year? Is it all moved?
Relatedly, do I have unnecessarily duplicated data? What is safe to delete?
How can I make all emoji appear in color on my desktop instead of some being in color and others rendered in black and white?
What can I remove from my old laptop to make it faster?
How can I write this blog post about the value of “magic” and ritual in a way I’m proud of?
What roles do Scuttlebutt, my Friendica server, and my blog play in my online presence? How do I want to use them?
Why the heck is my blog stripping the authorization headers and preventing me from using the IndieAuth plugin?
How do I decouple my WordPress installation from the LDAP plugin it uses so that I don’t get login errors every time I update the package?
How can I make (or commission) a little 3D-printable case for the Iron Clays poker chips I have sitting on my desk?
I could go on… but I recognize this is interesting to nobody but me. 😜 As I see it, though, the common thread is that all of these next steps require work. They require me to research and make decisions and try things. There’s not an easy answer, just hard work.
And hard work is harder when it feels like it’s all on my shoulders. Rachel doesn’t understand my server projects or my computer issues–this is not a slight, it’s just not where her interests or knowledge lie. The vast majority of this feels like solitary work, at least right now, and that just makes it ten times harder. I wish I could invite people to my house to look over my shoulder and guide me, or even just to sit in solidarity with me.
Because work that’s shared always feels easier. I grew up with a large extended family, and several times a year, we’d converge on my grandparents’ house for work parties. We’d spend all day trimming branches and hauling debris and planting gardens. It was work, yes, but it was social, too. It was shared.
Maybe I need to find some creative ways to make my tasks a bit more social–even if I’m still the only one doing the work. I’ve reflected before that the work of building a stronger, compassionate, anti-fascist world feels impossibly daunting (and anxiety-provoking) when I see it as a task I have to figure out on my own, but like Good (and Achievable) Work when I see it as a project to be distributed and shared. Perhaps that thinking extends beyond political work.
And maybe, when I don’t see these tasks as burdens I have to bear on my own, I won’t feel the need to escape to digital voxel worlds.
