clarity flowers @clarity@xoxo.zone

I've been using my personal wiki for a full season now. It's amazing how easily it fit into and transformed the way I spend my time. Looking forward to watching this thing grow all tangled and strange in the coming years.
https://clarity.flowers/changelog.html

Sat outside trying to memorize all the different birdsongs in my neighborhood, and to tell where each bird likes to hang out. After a while of it, it started to fatigue and overwhelm me as what was before a noisy texture of sounds became a collection of acts of communication.

There's a few little brown birds, each with their own songs, that seem to each have their own spots. There's also a flock of tiny ones with a high-pitched twitter, and a few others with a simple one-note tweet.

a story about my day

Trying to decide whether I want to have nice kerning, or to embrace the simplicity and slight awkwardness of the 8-pixel grid. I'll probably stick with the latter for now.

"The very same political discourse that had once excluded homosexuals from American society by appealing to the interests of a silent majority is now used by homosexuals to keep members of its community in check."

And that's the book. Looking at what's transpired in the 6 years since the author's death in the context of what I've read leaves me some tangible hope and a lot of concern.

Learned about rsync the other day as a faster alternative to scp... one of these days I need to just go through and read every single entry in section one of my computer's man pages, there are so many useful things.

In a society where health is oriented around whether or not you can work we will "live the decay of our organs and bodies far more explicitly, painfully, and overwhelmingly than ever before." And this can't be ground for political struggle when we're enclosed in a moralistic view of health as an individualized choice.

"As state violence receded, markets stepped in to meet and shape a consumer profile of gay identity."

Chitty's argument as I understand it is that anti-assimilationism gains its teeth when you understand it as a material and class-driven struggle over relation between sexuality and public space, and here seems to be saying that the gay bars of the 70s and 80s were the first step of enclosing gays into private space.

Tinkering with making a tiny tilde server for my friends. I set up my shell to tell me a random fact (via wikipedia) every time I log in

Starting to build the language for entering notes. You enter notes using the first letter of solfege, and it'll pick the note closest to the previous one. You can move the cursor up or down to make bigger leaps with '+' or '-'. This is "notate 'drmfs-s+rtd'

"It is fascinating the degree to which intellectuals are willing to attribute such sweeping transformative ideological powers to television shows."

playing with sizing. this is the narrowest possible staff height (a charmingly awkward 9 pixels)

Generation of palette-based PNGs. I wanted to write this entirely by hand, but it turns out that the PNG compression algorithm is more complicated than I want to deal with right now (I might end up switching to GIF later as that algo is simpler). So, I pulled in zlib and banged my head against it until it worked. Having test data from http://www.schaik.com/pngsuite/pngsuite_bas_png.html to do byte-by-byte comparisons via xxd helped a lot

"In short, human sexuality is not only malleable and historical; indeed, at certain points in history, such transformations of human nature were central to the forces of production and to certain objectives of statecraft."

Thinking about building a command line tool to create pngs of music notation so I can write about music theory on my wiki. Playing with @neauoire's nasu as a way to generate the sprites I'll be using.

I've been reading Sexual Hegemony by Christopher Chitty, and it's some of the most amazing theory I've ever read. It's been consistently blowing my mind and causing me to rethink how I think about queer history and sexuality in general.

Snippets from my reading notes (https://clarity.flowers/wiki/sexual_hegemony.html), but quotes can't really do this book justice. I'm going to try to synthesize my favorite parts of this book into my own words once I finish it.

My site generator now has a simple templating tool because I finally found myself in the position where i was considering needing more than one template.

It's so satisfying to feel comfortable writing parsers and formatters like this, it's like a whole world has opened up to me now that I can write little DSLs in an evening.