Joel @cincodenada@cybre.space

Thanks to the infinite (read: virtually nonexistent) wisdom of my household organizational strategy, my bag of leftover bits and bobs from my computer case - which I did locate in only the second place I looked for it - somehow has exactly one (1) hard drive mounting rail in it.

Unfortunately, I need to hold *both* sides of this hard drive in the mounting cage, so I've ordered some replacements off eBay to ensure that I will find the other one laying around the house while I'm waiting for them to show up.

It's always good to read the acknowledgements, because sometimes you find out that three books you read in rapid succession all had the same agent 😄

Tonight I finished A Memory Called Empire, just after reading Upright Women Wanted and shortly after finally getting around to This Is How You Lose the Time War. All of them thanked DongWon Song for being their agent - I noticed the second and smiled, and them laughed out loud when I finished the third.

Props to them as an agent though, I quite enjoyed them all!

#books #reading #scifi #acknowledgements

Just realized I typo'd diagnosis...past Joel, you had two words you really needed to spell right in this post and you botched one of 'em

Okay, inspired by some surprisingly strong opinions at work: how do you feel about the word "diagnoses" as the plural of "diangnosis"?

Also in case it wasn't clear enough, this is not to say anything about how anyone should or should not respond to bigotry, this is just observing my experience as someone who is still relatively new to being visibly queer.

That said, this also echoes a time years ago when I was holding hands with a guy I was dating and got heckled about Adam and Steve (get new material y'all!) and it also had a similar effect in affirming my bi-ness.

So today I went to my favorite coffee stand, in a pretty masc (for me) presentation - I was wearing dusty-plum jeans and a forest-green hoodie with the hood up, long hair down to mid-chest poking out on either side of my face, week-old ratty painted nails, blue men's Vans, large-checkered socks.

On the way back I made glancing eye contact with someone in the passenger seat of a truck before I crossed in front of it, who then after evaluating me briefly shouted out the window something along the lines of "you're a dude! that's a dude!!"

The main effect of which was me thinking "Damn, this person feels the need to aggressively police my gender when I'm at basically my minimum level of genderfuckery? I must be doing something right!"

Like, it's shitty and I'm sure it gets old fast, but also I've historically passed as cishet and don't get that much flak first-hand, so bigotry has so far mostly served to chip away at my queer impostor syndrome 😅

Wow, I'm finally reaching the point in being into vinyl where I'm putting my collection in Discogs, and for all the limited runs I'm looking at, about _half_ of the copies are listed in someone's Discogs library.

I'm sure this isn't the first time someone has made this observation, but dang, that's impressive market share! And like, deservedly I think, they are laser-focused on their target market and do a damn good job of it.

So my best attempt at describing how they're in different contexts:

P!nk opens with the C as the sixth ("submediant", says DDG) over an E flat major in second inversion, and alternates with a B flat over the same chord, then repeats that melody over a B flat major in root position (with some other stuff). Vocals start with B flat at then fall into a C-B♭ cadence mirroring the opening notes (they say EVery THING is = B♭ B♭ C B♭ C B♭)

In Radiohead it's the opening to a descending 4th C4-G3-A3-C4 melody, with the C as the dominant (fifth) of the first-inversion F chord above it, and then the third ("mediant" but does anyone really call it that?) of a root-position A minor above, and then it gets all fun and dissonant.

Music is wild! So many combinations of sounds, so many ways for notes to relate to other notes. I know enough jargon to describe things, but have very foggy ideas of the theory around how to use those relationships.

Random discovery from attempting to find songs from game OSTs for my alarm, which resulted in searching my music library for anything with "ost" anywhere in the track info:

P!nk's "But We Lost It" and Radiohead's "At My Most Beautiful" are piano-heavy songs that open with a prominent middle C.

They're in very different contexts (my best attempt at theory follows), and go in very directions, but they start with the C and go from there. Which I guess you would expect 1/12 of songs to do, but I bet there's some bias.

I wonder what the distribution of opening notes is? Does it change if isolated to songs that are piano-forward?

My working theory on the "not-really-bug" here is that the "Maximum age of chats to sync in days" setting in mautrix-imessage, at least with the Android wrapper actually turns on some sort of "thread last-modified" date rather than last message sent.

I imagine those are usually the same, but if you got a new phone last week and just imported all your text messages, then _all_ your text messages are counted as a week old, and badda bing badda boom, off you go 🔥

Adventures in unifying all my messaging streams with #Matrix bridges: due to a not-really-bug in the SMS bridge, I managed to import 13000 text messages into my Matrix instance yesterday leading to 2k+ unread threads. I did want to get more of an archive in there, but due to an actual bug, the messages are in the right order but every single one of my replies is marked as being sent today.

Time for some bughunting and issue filing...

Picked up an old collection of famous classical pieces at a music store on a trip to the coast this weekend without actually checking when it was published. Flipped through it today to try a few pieces and did a double-take when it referred to Rachmaninoff as "one of the greatest living pianists and composers" (I was pretty sure he was long dead, and indeed he died in 1943). Flipped to the front of the book and it was published in 1936!

I'm not totally sure if that's also the printing date, but regardless it's clearly pretty old and in dang good shape. I found it on the Internet Archive, in case you want to check it out yourself: https://archive.org/details/robbinsmammothco00frey

That said, these kinds of things are helpful for imposter syndrome things because they remind me that oh yeah, you have learned a thing or two in the last decade of building things, hurrah!

And also yes, everyone needs to learn sometime, but if you're actively recommending sanitization to someone who is asking about escaping, you are making the web a less secure place, please read up and stop doing that. It's not a failure to not know, the internet is terrible and complicated, but if you're a web person please do take the opportunity to learn and grow!

Here are a couple good posts that cover things pretty well:
https://benhoyt.com/writings/dont-sanitize-do-escape/
https://blog.presidentbeef.com/blog/2020/01/14/injection-prevention-sanitizing-vs-escaping/

I am currently asking questions on Github about HTML escaping in Javascript (in the context of a specific framework), which is apparently a mistake because I've had multiple people tell me "oh just use dompurify" and NO

I specifically said escaping!! I know about sanitization, I use it when I need to, but here I do not need to render HTML at all, stop recommending an inherently less safe option to people who just want to not render any HTML!

(I'm not particularly looking for recommendations here, `stringify-entities` and `html-escaper` both seem perfectly fine for my uses, but I guess if you have a different favorite knock yourself out)