Long time no see. I've been lurking for some time, but I just haven't wanted to post much in a while. I think I may have been baited to come out by goobster's dope Dingwall and Strandberg.

Various new stuff going on. I got a new job that I'm excited about, and will be moving to Glendale in a couple weeks. Didn't really expect to be living/working deeper in LA, but there's not much demand for a chemist/mass spectrometrist in the inland empire.

I think it's actually been pretty eventful since I last checked in? I got married (COVID elopement, more or less. The actual reception is this year). We nearly pulled the trigger on a house (good thing we didn't actually). I've been recording more and more music, and making a lot of progress in mixing and stuff. Got a Moog.

Overall things have been pretty good actually, but things really need a shakeup, so I'm very excited to be moving to a new place with ample windows and natural light as a stark contrast to the dungeon we've been in for several years now.

It is a pubski of meager means, but we make do with what we have. This is where the real party is. We have pruno and badges.

I made a glitch art thing. I think it will be the new album cover, which I intend to wrap up very soon now.

So the album releases on Friday, but it's on Bandcamp already

https://elkbird.bandcamp.com/album/nature-expansion-pack

Go ahead and take a download code for it!

I'm engaged! We've only been together 10 years, so it's not like that much has changed, but still!

I put up some new music.

Also, apparently the town cops are extra shit. I nearly drove through this on my way back from work.

Merry Christmas hubski!

Don't mind me, I'm just hanging up decor.

The past week has been pretty harrowing. Work was miserable, then I got fired. Now I’m actually feeling pretty good, oddly enough.

I think I’ve never really had a big failure in my life before. Facing this one has been—dare I say, transformative? The reasons for my removal are fair. They really are. I could also list external forces that lead me to this failure—and those would also be fair—but I don’t want to make excuses or tell myself I am not accountable. Me from a year ago, hell even a month ago would be mortified to face that truth.

Coming up to this point was among the most stressful periods in my life. Now that it’s come and passed, I’m really ok with it. I’m not going to flounder in sorrow or beat myself up more than I already have. I’m really just interested in learning from my mistakes and moving forward. I’m way more forward thinking, positive and happy than I ought to have the right to be right now. I’m also cool with that.

I’ve also let work-life balance slip away from me big time. I was absolutely crumbling under the stress there. More than I realized. That’s also something that’s been following me around in life and work for a while now. I’ve been excessively negative for ages.

I’ve been trying to understand why it’s so hard for me to avoid burnout. My conclusion for now echos kleinbl00‘s sentiments in this post. I try too hard to find fulfillment in my work even though I know it’s not what’s really important to me. Then I get too invested, burnt out and miserable.

Right now I’m fine though. I fell like things have suddenly clicked. Like I’ve hit the bottom of the U-curve and it’s all up from here. And there’s so much to do in day-to-day life, holy crap. I mean, it’s only been a couple days, but little chores, self improvement, social time, projects... I make lists of things to to and can barely cover them. All these things that were getting neglected when I spent 60 hours at work a well plus another 10 sitting in LA traffic. I’ve been a busy body and there’s still so much to do.

So yeah, I guess that’s where I’ve been at. Growing.

You can’t prove it. This is a perfect pubski. I won’t tell you anything.

I forgot today was a pubski day.

I discovered piskel and have been making some rain-inspired gifs.

I've also been making a bunch of rain sounds on my TX81z. I've been in a rain mood recently.

All I know is that you're not close to a straight, full house, or anything good. Not even a pair. I would probably fold.

I'll drink some of the bourbon I brought home from KY.

Music

I commissioned a pixel artist to do some art for my music project and I got this cool scene out of it:

I also won an auction on a cheap and cheesy Yamaha PC-100 which should be arriving in the near future.

Other stuff

I put up an easel in my living room and I've been idly painting watercolors. It's fun, and maybe I'll eventually have some decent paintings to show for it.

Hubski is quieter and more thoughtful. It's not as fast-paced and populated as a lot of other social media, but it lends itself towards better in-depth conversation.

It also lets me recognize the various users as individuals, not faceless usernames. This almost never happens for me with other social media.

I honestly don't think it's to Hubski's benefit if we scalp a bunch of users that are in the midst of a hissyfit because they can't look at r/fatpeoplehate anymore. Hubski aims to be more cerebral, relaxed, community and discussion-oriented than what reddit has been since, well, ever probably. The frothing tactless immaturity that's swimming around reddit right now should stay there.

What has two thumbs and a postdoc position? This guy.

Guess who got the Voynich Manuscript for Christmas?

Well, the version you can buy on Amazon at least.

I'm yet again burnt-out on science. Every time I think it's really a product of the current environment that bogs me down, but this time the pattern is starting to look apparent. I don't have the patience and fortitude to stick it out in academia, and even if I could compete there I don't think I'd want that life. I already know a QC-ish job would have me miserably bored. There's only so many careers that have a clear path from my terminal degree and I'm staring to rule them out one-by-one. I need to start looking at unconventional career paths. It I have no clue what to do.

I've had a great weekend. The lady and I have been meaning to camp or vacation for months now but we never make the time (she works night shifts, every other weekend) so mid week I just said fuck it, let's just go to the desert this weekend and try to catch the end of the superbloom.

Anza Borrego park. We got a nice primitive camping site in the mountains at the edge of the desert and it was gorgeous. The superbloom was eh. I guess it's pretty flowery? Anyways I also got a grill for the first time so that we could have a fire at the camp. Now we also have a grill at the house and I made some excellent spare ribs with it.

Leaving, we also passed by the Salton Sea, and holy crap, the road between the park and there is something like in Mad Max.

Can I make a card of my comment in that same comment to create an infinite fractal of cards? I'm gonna try.

HOLY SHIT

The thing about Hubski that seems to trip up most new users is that it's path is different than a lot of comparable sites. Hubski's goal isn't to "get big" or grow it's userbase to super big proportions. Hubski's goal is rather to maintain it's community and quality of content, so things move slower here.

A lot of people come here looking for a replacement for sites like Reddit, but you shouldn't think of it like that. Hubski will give you your fix of things that Reddit can't offer, but it doesn't do all the things other site will--and shouldn't.

7. I rather like that there aren't thumbnails on Hubski and I hope it stays that way. Hubski has a clean, zen look to it as is. The other issue is that all posts are on comparatively equal footing on your feed without thumbnails. Thumbnails become attention-baiting little bastards. Browsing Hubski takes some human amounts of patience, and that's in line with what the site wants to offer.

9. Everyone seems to always fret about power abuse when coming from Reddit. The admin/moderator dynamic that there is on Reddit does not exist on Hubski. All content is really just user-moderated on a per-person basis. I don't know how such controversies could even arise on Hubski.

I can definitely understand the point about users looking like just a line of data, especially for newcomers. On reddit if someone says "oh, I've seen this guy posting here before", I think: how do you even notice them as an individual? I think most of the time I don't even look at usernames on reddit.

Here, I could see the same thing happening. I've been on the site long enough that the veil of impersonality for all the frequent users has melted away and I can actually pin an individual with opinions, thoughts, and feelings on their pen name. If I were new I would have no way to do that.

I know some subreddits utilize a line of flair (which may be entirely customizable) which I think helps a lot to put a person to the name. Another idea to throw in the pot.

I think the key to new identifiers is that they should be tasteful and have some form of uniformity within the site's aesthetic, lest we look like a geocities page. So if we use avatars, it should be something within certain confines (like the little circle G+ uses, eg.).

Does anyone actually look at hubski and think it looks like a reddit clone at first glance?

So regarding my recording hangup I posted about before; inspiration has struck and I've committed to making a mini concept album about the russian sex lizard satellite.

Two tracks are well underway and I have many ideas/clips floating around for the other stuff. It's gonna be a mix of guitar/bass and synths. I need to get some beats together though: sequencing percussion is new territory for me.

I don't know if there's gonna be any lyrics, and I'm pretty sure I won't be doing any signing, but I'm still brainstorming ideas for it:

* formation of an orbital lizard communist micro-utopia

* 1m5f lizzard love hexagon side story

* Stalin reference

* something about fruitflies

So lyrics are coming along pretty solid I guess. At the very least I think I want some Russian radio chatter. I already have a Russian countdown to blastoff, but I couldn't find any stock narration about lizards in space in Russian.

Anyone speak Russian?

So my band is playing at this show:

Pretty big deal for us. Opening for three well-known bands (one of the later time slots, not a shitty 11 am one) and we'll be playing for the biggest crowd we've ever had. We're also scrambling to put together merch and such things so that we can come out ahead on costs.

I know some of you suckers are in SoCal. If you have a marginal interest in any of these bands come check it out. If you get tickets contact me, I can hook it up.

If there's one thing you can rely on from Gawker, it's that they'll be shitty.

Probably the most concerning attitude around the snafu was this:

“In 2013, all you need [is] a connection to the Boston police scanner and a Twitter feed to know what’s up. We don’t even need TV anymore,” shifted the now-fervid speculation to established fact

Which became rampant during Reddit's sleuthing. People didn't have the sense to know what they were doing and caused a huge mess.

The pervasive egoism on Reddit is pretty detrimental. There's this sense that they can do anything better than the media or that the real truth can surface there when it can't anywhere else. But when it comes to something that matters, they don't know their limits.

Reddit isn't a source of news. It's an aggregator. Yet it's become popular opinion that Reddit should be about original content and breaking news; that it should be the source.

You think crowd-sourcing is good for news and investigation? Well it's no doubt even better at hive-minding, sensationalism and snowballing. These were issues everyone was well aware were problematic with Reddit before it was thrust-forth as an investigative platform. Why in the hell would people expect this combination to end well? A person is smart; people are dumb. It's an excellent system to promote the worst aspects of people.

So whether Reddit's naming suspects in the marathon bombing or spreading questionable theories about the Dorner case, be a smart person and be skeptical.

It's good that you're picking up the book club torch. The scifi club rolled on its own momentum and once that ran out so did the club.

I can add a few pointers from things I learned while doing it, since it was initially just an experiment to see if I could make a club more efficient and raise participation. It was spawned by some comment I made ages ago and can't find anymore--to make a club based on short, online/free material, scifi just cuz that was what appealed to me--and people noted interest so it actually happened.

So my lesson boils down to this:

There is one thing and only one thing that will determine the longevity of your club, and that's accessibility of the material. Accessibility has two main parts to it: how physically accessible the material is (do I order it on Amazon or can I just click a link?) and length of the work. Roadside Picnic is accessible. Moby Dick not so much.

So you should note right there that was what killed #scificlub. You might like to think it was people's reaction to the material but the plain fact was that the club's health went from fine to shit as soon as we hit something as long as Blindsight. There was even substantial interest early-on to read Blindsight, but I didn't want to hit it too early because I knew it could be the breaking point if there would be one, so I steered the club towards works that wouldn't demand more than an hour or two of your time.

Beyond that, there are other finer points that I knew would determine actual participation in the club:

1. Having a selection of materials that were relevant to your interests. "Sci fi" may be open-ended but compared to "books" or "non-fiction/fiction" it's surgically categorical. How can I expect that the next choice in a club will interest me if it could be anything from Twilight to Darwin's The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs? I knew I couldn't with existing club, so I made the offshoot themed. The theme also helped justify its existence.

2. Prompting actual discussion. A thread labelled "discussion" didn't really compel me to write anything, especially if I had no strong thoughts on the material. The prompts I wrote were intended to make people at least say something that could potentially spur further discussion. I tried to keep them argumentative without sounding like an English course essay prompt. I think people became too focused on answering the prompts though; they were really just placeholders.

So that's what I found to be important for the club. Pacing may have also been important: keeping threads not so far apart so that you wouldn't completely forget about it. That probably hurt Blindisght as well, but for the first 7 chapters I'd say the club was as good as you could expect.

You're simply not going to get a small group of internet-bound strangers to commit to hours of reading for a book club, so keep it brief. Only the most devout would stick around for a club like that. Material selection can make a difference--I think we saw that with Watchmen--but the central rule still applies. Even Watchmen couldn't garner impressive follow-through, although it was better than most. Participation was mixed throughout the 7 short works we covered. If people can't commit to that then novels are an all-out bust.

When you look at healthcare in other countries it's absolutely insane how bad the system is in the US. The current reform might not fix it, but at least now my girlfriend can't be denied healthcare upfront for pre-existing conditions.