Wanderlust Will Carry Us On

I remember the first time I left New England.

A perfect storm of bullshit circumstances culminated in me, just barely two weeks off from turning eighteen—not even a month since graduating high school, stepping off a plane at Boston Logan that had taken off from Athens a few hours previously. Tired and a little bit delirious, I spent the night at the airport Hilton waiting for my internal clock to catch up on timezones and dreading the next day’s flight. Southwest Airlines to the innermost circle of hell, and in the first week of July: Orlando International Airport. I was off to college in a couple of months, a minuscule liberal arts school in Ohio, but until then my permanent address had moved with my parents. So keen were they to retire to Florida that the last week after graduating before the Big Move was spent in a two-bedroom hotel suite. I was heartbroken. Utterly devastated. To the teenaged version of myself, it felt like the end of the world.¹

One night spent sobbing in an airport hotel sounds melodramatic at best, but if there was one thing I knew for sure in my confused teenage heart, it was this: I’d sworn an oath to myself that I would make it back. For a couple of years, it was one of the few things that kept me going. I try to remember that because, as goals go or for reasons to stay alive, I could’ve done a lot worse. It ended up taking eight years to get back to New England, the only place I’d ever thought of as home, but in 2019 I finally made it.

Shortly after I made it back, everything went completely sideways.

With hindsight’s perfect clarity, I can look back and say that if I’d let myself enjoy New Jersey, I could have called it home—and actually meant it. You see, I spent all those years wandering² maintaining that home meant one very specific thing: Rhode Island or eastern Massachusetts. Nothing else would do. I enjoyed my time in Jersey, I met some lovely people, and if I’d let myself settle down properly there (or even if I’d bothered finding a nicer apartment), maybe none of this would’ve happened the way it did. Maybe it would’ve happened in a worse way, who knows. There are a million decisions that I could’ve made differently. Here, on this timeline, in this branch of the decision tree, I chose to move back to New England. I found a decent apartment in suburban Boston, started a new job, and thought that I’d settle down here and start the rest of my life.

What happened?

1. Six months after I moved, while I was still very much in the process of settling in and re-acquainting myself with the area, the coronavirus pandemic came to America.
2. My gender identity crisis, which had already reached a boiling point before moving in terms of whether or not I was actually going to let myself come out, became an all-consuming maelstrom that drowned out everything else in my brain.
3. As if that particular identity crisis wasn’t enough, I started having some inescapable doubts about whether or not I was actually happy to be home.

For a while, I blamed that last one on the pandemic. After all, it had started out with me cancelling flights down to catch some spring training games. Travel is in my blood, as much as it can be–neither side of my family tree has ever been particularly content to stay in one place for too long. Rationalising it away as some garden-variety wanderlust was easy. Once the vaccines hit, during that glorious summer of 2021 before we knew this pandemic was going to stretch on for years to come, it stopped being so easy. Here was everything I’d been missing: my friends, the restaurants, all the tangible reasons I’d moved back. I had even started hormones by then, and on weekends I usually had a mediocre wig clipped to my slowly-regrowing hair. Things were looking up.

Everything, that is, except the nagging feeling that I’d made a terrible mistake. For every good memory I could revisit, and for every familiar curve in a road, there was something else haunting me. I kept gaining more and more distance from the person I used to be–a sad and directionless boy struggling with an identity crisis that wouldn’t even be his last–and I kept finding more and more reminders of that person.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on the human condition, what it means to be alive, to have a soul, to exist in any meaningful sense. Even after years of therapy, I can’t even pretend to be an expert on what’s going on with my own subconscious. She remains as much a mystery to me as the inner machinations of the universe. There is one thing I know with absolute confidence, as surely as that sad boy knew back in 2011 that he’d make it back to New England: I’m not him anymore. The only thing we share is a paper trail. His motivations are not mine. His goals are not mine. At this point, they’re completely foreign to me! The thing that I expected the least about my transition has been the clarity of thought and sense of self that I’ve developed now that I have a different set of hormones pumping through my system. Once the initial brain fog lifted, I could feel the importance of those old goals fading. What replaced it? That’s the hard part.

He left me a lot of bullshit to clean up. I’m hardly in good physical health, the apartment has been a disaster basically since I moved in, but that all pales in comparison to this: there was no plan for what to do after getting back to New England. There were barely plans at all, actually–he was somewhat surprised to still be here for every passing birthday, and wasn’t entirely sure if he’d be here for the next one. I still don’t have much of a plan, honestly, but I know that I want to stick around for it. It’s a new feeling. I’m not used to it yet.

My justifications for having picked Seattle are somewhat flimsy: I know a few people there, people I care about deeply; and it’s somewhere I haven’t lived before. When I started considering what to do if I didn’t want to stay in Boston, it occurred to me that I’ve already lived anywhere that I’d want to live on the Eastern Seaboard. I also know, from experience, that I don’t thrive if I’m too far from an ocean. So, as much as I love Minneapolis, or for appealing as Chicago truly is, they were never truly on the list.

I have to live somewhere, though. I looked at the West Coast, and thought about the time I’ve spent there—brief, comparatively, but all good times. There’s a reason my last name is what it is, and it’s very much tied to an experience I had in southern California. Around the same time as I’d decided that I’d ruled out most of the East, friends I know and love–the sort of people I’d list as emergency contacts–had started making their way to Seattle. It seemed to be a critical mass. Besides, sweater weather lasts longer in the PNW.

So, I’m about to set out on the longest drive I’ll have ever taken. Fortunately, I have friends to visit along the way. As I write this, I should very much be packing my belongings into boxes. The moving container shows up this weekend, and my lease is up in a week. There’s plenty that I’ll miss, and it’s been hard these past few days not to dwell on it. Truth be told, I’m too sentimental to truly be “over” anywhere I’ve lived—even the places that objectively sucked. Like lovers I’ll never see again, I have such specific memories of them all: the way the air smells, random waypoints that tell me I’m on the right road (or at least, not on the wrong one), every good bar I drank in more than thrice. I can even remember cities I’ve never lived in like that, somehow. There are corners of Santa Monica that make that list of well-loved details, and I only spent two weeks there.

That’s why I wonder if it’s a curse. It’s entirely possible that I spent so long ignoring where I was in favour of a nebulous dream that died as soon as I worked out who I actually was that I’ll end up wandering forever, never accumulating more than can fit in a small box van, constantly in search of something I’ll never find. After all, I still don’t know whether Seattle will be home or not. At the very least, if it’s a city I can stay in for more than half a decade, maybe that’s enough.

Come back in ten years and ask me where I’m living. If it’s still on Puget Sound, maybe I found it.

We Got You: Thirty Hours on America's Finest Railroad

America’s trains suck. Nobody’s going to contest that–when it comes to passengers, we’re pretty shit at moving them around. (Still pretty damn good at freight, though, despite the freight roads’ best efforts to sabotage themselves.) Despite this, every year, just enough people buy Amtrak tickets to justify its continued existence. Every year, just enough Congressional funding gets snatched away from the military-industrial complex while it isn’t looking to cover the funding gaps and keep the lights on. Hell, if Amtrak proposes discontinuing certain stops, legislators will lobby to ensure that a dismal, 3 train per week service keeps stopping in their district (even if they don’t want to fund it!). Like the rest of this country’s transportation infrastructure, it’s all falling apart at the seams, and a perfect storm of capitalist interests and archaic regulations stand in the way of the kind of change urbanists and rail enthusiasts dream of. Decades of under-investment in favour of private automobiles and freight trucks have left a once-great network a shadow of its former self. Given all of this, given a passenger train’s inability to arrive on time, even given how expensive a ticket can be if you want a sleeper car, why do we keep riding the rails?

It might be a healthy dose of romanticism. Railroads built huge swaths of this country, after all. It might be that, even when it sucks, it sucks far more comfortably and more humanely than air travel does. My train was 7 hours late, but almost nobody was complaining. I started writing this post on the Coast Starlight itself, somewhere in the middle of southern Oregon, and it started out as something more like a straight travelogue. It quickly turned into some ramblings on what I consider far more interesting questions: why do people take Amtrak, and what kind of people are you going to find on a long-distance train? End to end, the Coast Starlight takes 35 hours on the timetable, under perfect conditions. A direct flight, Seattle to Los Angeles, takes three hours runway to runway. Even if you factor in the TSA’s nonsense and how long it takes to get out of LAX, a 737 wins every time.

Up to this point, I’ve spent most of my life on the Eastern Seaboard, riding the supposed shining star of our passenger rail network, a crown jewel of speed and congestion. The Northeast Corridor: four hundred and fifty-seven miles of commuter trains navigating the remnants of fallen corporate empires. Our fastest and most technologically advanced trains, reduced to shuffling along between double-deckers and diesels owned by cash-strapped, fiercely independent original colonies, each of them oblivious to the interconnected nature of even the uncrewed flag stops and glorified suburban bus shelters that lie mere steps clear of stainless steel giants and thousands of watts of power – this is the America I know best. A metropolitan axis that desperately clings to exceptionality, even if it means self-asphyxiation.

I won’t lie, it freaks me out how big the non-Eastern states are. Weekends of driving half the length of Ohio convinced me that it needs to be two states. A mad dash up the 5, from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley in a rented luxury sedan, did more to convince me of Calexit’s merits than any disinformation scheme ever could: this is a state that feels like an entire country. And yet, I’m moving west. My new home state is approximately the size of all the New England states combined. What better way to properly acclimate myself to the scale of the West Coast than with a perennially under-funded railroad? Two hundred dollars, and I had a business class ticket from Seattle to Oakland on the Coast Starlight. (I briefly considered a sleeper car, but that would have cost 4 figures. If I was doing the full length of the route and had someone with me, maybe.)

My train left Seattle right on time, but I had woken up that morning in my friend’s apartment with a voicemail from Amtrak’s guest services: my train would have “no food service available”. That sounded pretty dire, even for the mere 24 hours timetabled to Oakland. I didn’t know if that meant the snack bar would be closed, or what–there were no details available. I was able to make some last-minute preparations to survive the trip: King Street Station is a quick five-minute walk from a Japanese grocery store. Armed with a dangerously cute insulated bag¹ filled with snacks and refreshments, I stepped onto the platform and hoped for the best. When it comes to travel, my philosophy is to not make too many plans, but to have some frameworks in my back pocket in case things go wrong. It’s served me well thus far, but it feels a little bit like cheating when there’s a place that sells spam musubi and delicious prepared meals that close to the station. (This falls well short of the truly bizarre preparations² an Insider writer recently took for a trip on the very same route. I remain confused about the mindset required to do almost no research in advance but decide that a gallon of water is required.)

It turns out that “no food service” meant that the refrigeration was borked in the cafe, located on the first level of the observation car: no way to keep the infamous Amtrak cheeseburger or personal pizzas frozen. Ice for drinks was served out of a cooler shoved behind the counter, the one working refrigeration unit was devoted (correctly so) to wine and beer. At this point, I must introduce my favourite person on the entire federal payroll, a woman who I would lay my life down for: Angelica, the cafe car attendant. Unlike conductors and engineers, who have strict time limits on work hours for safety reasons³, lounge/cafe car attendants and sleeping car attendants work the train from one terminus to the other. On long trains like this, they do get meal breaks and a chance to sleep overnight, but they don’t get exchanged on and off the train like other crew does. Angelica’s announcements on the PA were a genuine highlight of the trip. Her opening spiel regarding the food situation (including a plaintive request for patience and care in “the world’s smallest shop”) ended with a promise that fresh food would be loaded on the train for us in Portland (and further points south) and these words: “Welcome aboard the Coast Starlight. We got you.”

Angelica, Our Lady of the Cafe Car, I hope every good thing that you deserve comes to you.

Since we had plenty of non-perishable snacks, hot coffee, tiny bottles of booze, and cans of Coke; and I had my insulated shiba bag; the lack of refrigeration wasn’t what turned this journey into a supposedly fun thing that I’ll absolutely do again.⁴ That didn’t happen until Portland: a Union Pacific freight train suffered an “upright derailment” that still managed to foul the points required to route trains out of Union Station. Stopped for approximately at two hours in Vancouver (WA), apparently the decision was made to drive the promised food up from Portland instead of waiting to see how long it would take for a route south to become clear. What did they bring us? Popeyes fried chicken. Big catering bags full of three-piece tender meals, with mashed potatoes, a couple packets of dipping sauces, and a biscuit. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a better biscuit in my life than the one handed to me in the observation car and enjoyed once we’d gotten back underway to Portland. This was around when I started thinking a little bit more anthropologically. Before the two-hour delay, I’d been sitting in the observation car: a punk who’d gotten on in Seattle with an acoustic guitar was taking requests and entertaining some booths. Unlike my previous long-distance Amtrak trips, there was no immediate pattern to the passengers: families with kids, some retirement-age couples, people of all ages. Pollsters should set up shop in the snack bar, honestly–they’d get a more representative sample than they do now with “people who answer phone calls from unknown numbers in the middle of the day” for the pressing questions of the times.

In Vancouver, most of us got off the train to get some fresh air, stretch their legs, and use a less cramped restroom. This is one of the more basic things that appeal to people about trains, I think: although a Superliner coach is extremely roomy and gives you plenty of opportunity to move around as compared to any jet, regular stops for fresh air are baked into the schedules. If you happen to subscribe to one of humanity’s most popular vices, what this really means is that smoke breaks are baked into the schedules: Amtrak is the last great refuge of the American smoker. My previous long-distance trips have been on the Auto Train⁵, which only featured one air break/crew change (overnight in Florence, South Carolina). For the smoker, these fresh air stops are a godsend, and many an ashtray was filled while we were stopped.

Of course, if this was an airport gate with an indefinitely-delayed flight, a queue would have instantly formed at the service counter, a thousand angry phone calls would bloom, and nobody would be happy. This? Even later on, when things got even worse, I only heard one or two people complaining. That’s all. If nothing else, it’s proof that if you give coach class enough legroom, they’ll be happier about whatever ordeals they face. I spent some time on the platform chatting with a couple from Seattle–in retrospect, this is one of the things that struck me. I am not normally one for small talk, in general I avoid conversations with people I don’t know under any circumstances, and yet I found myself chatting with people in the observation car or during fresh air stops. Whatever it is about rail travel (and I’ll tell you now, I don’t come to any satisfying conclusions as to why it has this affect on people), it affects even the most jaded of us.

Enjoying the least homophobic national-chain fried chicken in the country from the comfort of my train seat would have been enough to keep me happy. Once we got to Portland and received a new train crew, we had plenty of time to kill: to avoid the derailed freight train, a Union Pacific conductor would join us for a detour around the city on a freight line until the train rejoined its usual route south to California. Until that conductor showed up, we had an extra hour or so to stretch our legs. For me, this meant meandering around Portland Union Station: a beautifully-preserved structure from 1896 built by the Northern Pacific Railway, with plenty of late-1940s interior details and some gorgeous neon signs. Again and still, very few complaints to be had from any of my fellow travellers, nor from the many who joined the train in Portland.

Aside from the obvious suspects (railfans and smokers), I was still trying to understand what motivates someone to choose Amtrak over a car or a plane. Between a car and a train, it makes a lot of sense: driving sucks, and if you’re on a vacation in a city you’ve got to work out where to stash the car all day. I could have rented a car: depending on the route I could have spent around 12 hours on the 5 or around 14 hours on US-97⁶–both just a little too long to comfortably drive in one day. Often overlooked is the fact that cars and their drivers need to stop every so often–if the satnav says 12 hours, that’s probably 14 hours total on the road. Once you break it up into a two-day trip, the train’s back in competition (assuming you care about yourself and don’t want to do a single-entry endurance race involving one or more hapless friends/co-drivers). Unless your car is German or Swedish, the seats probably aren’t as comfy as Amtrak’s anyway.

Jets fly the same route in two hours. I could’ve had an entire day in either my origin or my destination, and so could have everyone else on the train. Maybe it’s a luxury after all–Amtrak long-distance routes are sometimes described as a “land cruise”, a description that I tend to dislike. Free time, however, is the greatest luxury of all. Americans have fewer vacation days available to them, on average, than almost all other countries on Earth. In fact, most countries have a minimum number of paid vacation days that all workers are entitled to! With this in mind, it’s not hard to understand why vacationers may favour air travel. Why waste time in transit when you could use that time wedging as many activities as possible into your meagre few days off work?

It’s not difficult to see how the cruise ship comparison gets drawn, but I genuinely think more people are using Amtrak as a utilitarian form of transport than they are a luxury experience in and of itself. Travel of any sort can be an experience, and I don’t even think I’d describe a sleeper car as being especially luxurious in comparison to even the most budget of cruise ships. A Motel 6 seems to have a nicer bed, for example.⁷ The answer might be boring. It might just be that it’s the least bad way to travel the country. Air travel is tedious, and driving the highways sucks. I say this as a car enthusiast, someone who enjoys driving: the sort of person who likes Amtrak is probably the same sort of person who avoids interstate highways. They’re too full of trucks, and traffic–when they’re not busy destroying communities in inner cities, the ribbons of asphalt are busy avoiding nearly anything of interest.

The Coast Starlight gave me plenty of time to contemplate all of this when our Portland crew timed out somewhere in the middle of southern Oregon. We were quite a few miles short of our scheduled crew swap and fresh air stop at Klamath Falls, and by the time they were driven up to the train, we were about 7 hours late. This persisted all the way through to Oakland, although we at least had plenty of the sub sandwiches (roast beef, vegetable, or turkey) that had been delivered to the train in Eugene.

There’s a screenshot on my phone of the Amtrak app, showing me that my train was approximately 6.5 hours late into Oakland. I felt great, though. Aside from a desperate need for a nice shower, a state I find myself in after using any form of transport, I didn’t feel fatigued, annoyed, disgruntled, or indeed any negative emotion at all. Most trips in a pressurised tube dehydrate me and are liable to leave me with, bare minimum, a cough.⁸ Driving for more than two or three hours–even in my beloved Golf, with the most ergonomically correct seats you can get in a car that costs less than $30k, guarantees that my knees and ankles will be miserable at the end of the day. This alone is reason enough to take the train.

I keep coming back to romanticism, though. I can’t think of any word better, and I think it describes the relationship that those of us who love trains have with Amtrak. It’s not like an unhealthy relationship–we’re fully aware of what it could be, and as such we are intimately aware of its shortcomings. If you’re even remotely pressed for time, Amtrak probably isn’t your first choice. If you do have the time, and especially if you’ve never done it: take the train sometime, for it’s the most perfect distillation of this country there is. Even if it all goes wrong, they’ll do their best to get you there. There are beautiful landscapes (punctuated by what’s left of America’s industry) passing by the train’s windows every mile. You’ll very likely be subjected to the side effects of our worst priorities as a society, but you’ll also experience more of what makes this country beautiful and good in one day than most people do in a month of suburbia. It’s broken, it’s beautiful, and it’s doing its best. Bare minimum, you’ll get a damn good story out of it.

Waiting On the Lightning

Alright, well, that little experiment didn’t survive its first encounter with the enemy.¹ I haven’t totally abandoned the whole playlist-post thing, but I don’t think it’s going to be a regular weekly feature. In fact, I don’t anything’s going to be a regular weekly feature anymore. There isn’t much point in beating myself up over failing to meet a self-imposed deadline about a fucking hobby.

It’s been the customary six-ish months since the last post around here. I’ve got some ideas to use this thing more often – maybe now that I’m out of the winter doldrums, they might even come to fruition. Or, this is just another lightning-quick flash in the pan that I’ve been waiting for, not realising that it would disappear as quickly as it comes.

Either way, I’ve been up to a couple of things. For one thing, I started a new job! It’s technically an old job. You probably don’t care about that, and I don’t blame you. There are far more interesting things to talk about.

podcast

After years of certain people (you know who you are) shouting at me that I need a podcast, I’ve finally gone and done it. My friend Noëlle re-launched er podcast, Idle Curiosities, and I’m the new co-host. Every week, we talk about things from our internet search history and what we learned as a result. I’ve been on four episodes so far, if you’re a completionist, but it’s not the sort of show that you need to listen to the entire backlog in order to know what’s going on.

I’ll probably post about new episodes every week here, under the appearances tag. Here’s the first 4 that I haven’t posted yet, for your listening enjoyment:

• 046 - you’re gonna have three vessels
• 047 - cornbread is resillient
• 048 - curveball energy
• 049 - #lizwasright

Being on this show is fun as all hell – even if nobody listened, talking to one of my closest friends every week and discovering what we’ve been searching for is really satisfying. I do hope you give it a listen.

flickr

In February, I went out to Reno for a week and discovered, once again, that I enjoy photography. There’s a cycle I find myself in, and perhaps you’re familiar with it too, where one sinks to such a level of long-term depression and malaise that they forget about hobbies that they enjoy. As far as I can tell, I haven’t picked my digital camera up since 2019, but it turns out that it’s a joy to use, I’m half-decent at it, and I had a lot of fun using it again. Maybe I’ll keep up with it this time around. In the meantime, I’m reëmbracing the halcyon days of early Web 2.0² and have started a new Flickr account to post them on. Twitter’s image compression sucks, Instagram is a dumpster fire, and as far as I’m aware there really isn’t anywhere great to post photography anyway.

a stupid idea i will almost certainly regret

While writing this post, I discovered that my Ruby install broke itself. Again. I’m thinking about moving to a different static site generator. It’ll probably require some massaging to make work, and I’m not looking forward to it, but I think it’s time to stop trying to keep this weird Jekyll setup on life support.

How I Take Notes (2021 Edition)

For reasons I don’t fully understand, I’ve been obsessed with keeping notes to myself in plain text files. A long time ago, this is the sort of thing I used Evernote for – until they drastically changed their pricing and plan options, anyway. Making me pay more money to use a service across multiple devices is a sure-fire way to encourage the construction of a janky half-baked self-hosted replacement.¹ This mindset has put me at the intersection of a few rocks and hard places:

• I stopped using Dropbox for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that I already pay Microsoft for Office 365. Most importantly for this case, that means that they give me a terabyte of free storage in OneDrive.
• My favourite text/markdown editor on iOS, 1Writer, only supports Dropbox, WebDAV, or iCloud Files/Files.app locations reliably.
• OneDrive doesn’t work great on Files.app in iOS. At all.

On the desktop side of things, this has been a solved problem for a while. A friend of mine told me about nb, which has been working great for me as an automatic system for managing and syncing plain text or Markdown-formatted notes. Every time I open and edit a note, it commits the edit to a Git repository. When you open a note on another computer, it runs git pull first to make sure it has the latest copy. It solved almost all of my problems… except for those pesky little things called smartphones. Up until now, I had an extremely precarious system involving a WebDAV directory that was also configured as the storage directory for nb on my primary computer. This made a lot of assumptions about the availabiltiy of a WebDAV resource being shared out of my home, as well as introducing frequent merge conflicts when I’d also updated a note from another computer. Inspiration struck on how to fix this while I was setting up org-mode for myself, though.²

The new workflow works perfectly, and it looks like this:

1. I open 1Writer on my phone, and a Shortcuts automation fires that tells Working Copy to pull my nb-notes repository every time I open that app.
2. After I close 1Writer, another Shortcuts automation fires off telling Working Copy to commit any changes in the iCloud Drive folder that both apps save files to, then to push that commit.
3. Gitea runs a post-push webhook that connects to a machine that’s always online in my network and has nb installed. This machine runs a webhook receiver, and it scans the Gitea payload from each POST request for a commit author that matches the one I use on my phone. When it sees one, it runs nb index reconcile to scan any files that weren’t modified by nb itself.

Here are the nuts and bolts.

Webhook Receiver

webhook is an ambiguously named program that serves webhook endpoints and fires off commands when they’re accessed. After installing it, I defined a hook.

/homes/selectric/bin/hooks.json:

[
  {
    "id": "nb-sync",
    "execute-command": "/homes/selectric/bin/nb-git-hook.sh",
    "response-message": "Reconciling changes with nb...",
    "trigger-rule":
    {
      "and":
      [
        {
          "match":
          {
            "type": "value",
            "value": "SECRET SECRET I'VE GOT A SECRET",
            "parameter":
            {
              "source": "url",
              "name": "token"
            }
          }
        },
        {
          "match":
          {
            "type": "value",
            "value": "Liz Slade (roxbury)",
            "parameter":
            {
              "source": "payload",
              "name": "commits.0.author.name"
            }
          }
        }
      ]
    }
  }
]

Gitea, like other Git servers, returns a lot of useful information in its payload – in this case, I’ve told webhook to only trigger on commits from the specific author name that Working Copy’s identity is set to on my phone.³

The script nb-git-hook.sh, in the same directory, is dead simple:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/local/bin/nb index reconcile

This command tells nb to scan its storage directory for any files that it wasn’t aware of – if it finds any, it assigns them an ID number and creates a new Git commit so that it can keep track of them in the future.

iOS Shortcut Setup

While I was writing this, I discovered that Shortcuts.app on iOS doesn’t have a great way of sharing automations. If you set up a shortcut, that at least generates an iCloud share link – for reproducibility’s sake, I’ve converted the automations to simply call a shortcut instead of having individually-defined actions.

Here are the shortcuts for pulling updates from the nb-notes repository and committing/pushing updates. Set up an automation that runs those shortucts when you open or close your favourite iOS text editor, respectively, and it should work (assuming that you have Working Copy properly configured).

For the curious, I’m using a very similar Shortcuts+Working Copy setup with beorg to use my org-mode files on my phone as well. Setting that up is what led me to working out how to make this work with my notetaking system, in fact.

⮕ Link: selectric401: the redbubble store

The Internet has evolved to the point where anybody can get anything printed on a t-shirt or a sticker, and I’ve decided to make that everybody else’s problem.

I sell bad jokes in physical format on Redbubble. Instead of actually putting some example images in here properly, I’m embedding a tweet:

alright, new pinned post time -- i have a redbubble shop, you can buy my shitposts in physical form on it. now featuring a bumper sticker from a radio station that doesn't have bumper stickers! https://t.co/QEquiQpo3i pic.twitter.com/YhqJZRK32Q

— Liz (@selectric401) March 30, 2021

I’d appreciate you checking it out if you’re into this sort of thing – any money I make off of selling this is channeled directly into purchasing the substances¹ that inspire these bad ideas.

⮕ Link: Tracking Airplanes with a Raspberry Pi On The Cheap

A previous iteration of this blog featured a post about setting up an ADS-B reciever to track airplanes within radio distance. I’ve relocated that post to live as its own article instead of being a blog post, since it’s more of a permanent document.

Here's To The Fourth Time!

Yeah, I’m doing it again.

By my count¹, this is indeed the 4th time I’ve completely reworked my blog and started over. Last year, I tried writing about baseball. The year before that, I don’t think I actually wrote anything. Who can tell anymore? To be perfectly frank, I don’t expect the readers² to expect much from me, and they’re correct in doing so. Part of me hopes that this time I’ll be be able to use this blog occasionally without feeling bad about how I never do. I’m also hoping that I’ll actually have things to write about: the long-abandoned projects I’ve been neglecting for years.

That’s probably all gross and unearned optimism, though.

Either way, I’m declaring a new start. Again. The thing they don’t tell you about those is that you can start over as many times as you need to.