roseinshadows - Tumblr blog

[roseinshadows]

Weird dream

Weird dream last night:

I was reading 1980s issues of MikroBitti, A Finnish computer magazine.

These 1980s issues had type-in programs for various 8-bit computers of the era.

So this particular issue had a mortgage/loan calculation software code listing. I remember looking at the listing and it had real financial terms in it that I had never understood so I knew it was legit.

Now, the weird thing was, the description text stated this was specifically a loan calculator app specifically for the needs of gay households.

It even had a 1970s style whimsical, tasteful illustration of gay dude couples doing random householdy things together.

(So how much of this dream is based on reality? I have been reading MikroBitti archives for nostalgia - they're available on web for subscribers - and they did have some listings back in the day for financial stuff (or maybe some game related to finances or something). And publishing this kind of program could have made sense, because no one had spreadsheet software in the era. ...just can't imagine what kind of features they might have had specifically for gay couples, but hey, I'm no finance person, don't ask me!)

[roseinshadows]

From Radio is my Bomb, a very awesome historical document on radical self-publishing.

[roseinshadows]

Ohhhh...?

I mean tacking a random online service on another online service didn't work out? WELL COLOUR ME SURPRISED.

[roseinshadows]

Weird dream:

Last night had some weird dream about a space western guy on a space western desert planet.

His little daughter had a 16 KB 8-bit computer. He had problems resetting it, which was a huge problem, because the space outlaws on that planet had hidden some information on the computer, and they were all in danger because of that.

He had tried typing SYS 64738 but after talking to the local tech nerd, they figured out he needed to type SYS 16738 instead because it was a 16 KB computer and not a 64 KB computer.

[Probably some early-autumn-flu-induced dream somehow inspired by Starfield (Sam&Cora Coe) and random Commodore 64 stuff.]

[roseinshadows]

I'm extremely high on caffeine so I decided to write a blogpost. (Probably the worst idea ever.)

Anyway. Language. Once again, upon visiting YouTube, I heard from various sources that somewhere, somehow, the right-wing people are screaming about Pronouns again. ...yadda yadda, if they knew Adverbs were a thing, their minds would blow, old joke, old joke. ...Joking aside, I' m quite worried that after this particular attack on Pronouns fails once again, they'll launch and all-out attack on Numerals eventually. They are anti-science, after all.

But I digress. This got me thinking of politically correct language in general. The right-wing folks keep saying that all this pronoun stuff and other PC language leads to weakening of expression.

Allow me to offer one counter-example.

Now, in Finnish language, we don't actually have gendered pronouns. There's no grammatical gender as such. Any notion gender exists only in purely descriptive nouns and adjectives.

One thing the people striving for politically correct language are trying to fix are gendered job titles. Which actually hasn't really been a huge problem in ages; even if there are job titles that end in -mies 'man' such as puhemies 'speaker of the Parliament' or postimies 'mailman' or lakimies 'lawyer', that's understood to be gender-neutral and nobody wants to bring back postinainen. It'd just make everyday life more complicated, no?

But the job titles are being phased out and there are plenty of good alternatives for them. Postimies already sounds mildly old-fashioned, too, as the term postinjakaja 'mail deliverer' became commonplace.

In fact, this dang soy-drinkin' commie PC term is actually a good example of flexibility of Finnish language. Ok, so posti doesn't change, but jakaja is an interesting word - derived from jakaa 'to split, share, deal, distribute', with the -ja suffix turning that into a description of a person. So jakaja is '(generally) delivery person, (in card games) dealer'.

See? This is a rich form of expression, contrary to the claims.

It can even be made epic. As said, lakimies (lit. "law-man") is still in use, but there are better words, like asianajaja 'advocate'. This can be broken down to asia 'matter, cause, case' and ajaja 'driver, handler' - which is derived from ajaa 'to drive, to steer'. I picked 'advocate' as the translation earlier because it's closest to The One Who Speaks For Your Case.

See, even boring everyday terms can have really complicated shit behind them. And I'm not even a pro linguist, they'll probably babble more about this shit.

Holy shit I wish I could afford something else to drink than instant coffee because this shit is making me trip balls creatively speaking aaaaaaaargh

[roseinshadows]

The Long Shadow of Adobe

Posting some photos to the blur-from-the-north queue again. Decided to peek into the image metadata before I wipe it for publication. (I don't know if Tumblr does it automatically.)

Ah, we live in a civilized age. The metadata doesn't loudly say that the photo was made with Affinity Photo. There's a relatively inconspicuous entry in XMP metadata that says the file was produced by AP2. It's all very elegant.

ACDSee doesn't even bother to announce its presence. It's an asset manager, you see. Asset managers need to mess with the metadata frequently. If it announced every single modification to the metadata, that would render the whole history feature useless. (It only bothers to announce its presence when I use the image editing features.)

What does the legacy EXIF metadata say?

"THIS FILE WAS SOFTWARED BY ELEMENTS ORGANIZER 14.0. VERILY, CREATOR-TOOLED BY ELEMENTS ORGANIZER 14.0. THAT WAS WHAT DID IT. THAT WAS WHAT DOES IT FOREVER NOW."

...You may move away from Adobe software, but the tools cast a long shadow over you.

As you might have guessed, I haven't used Adobe Photoshop Elements Organizer for… a while now.

For film/positive scans, it'd be appropriate if the app that produced it would generate XMP history entries. Weirdly enough, Epson Scan doesn't add its name to metadata. SilverFast only uses legacy EXIF tags, which is weird.

[roseinshadows]

Thank you to everyone who got me to 100 likes!

[roseinshadows]

Weird dreams

From a few days ago:

Saw a TV broadcast about a man and a woman who had been released from prison after 20 years. I realised they still had the key to my front door, and when I saw them boasting in TV I knew they were going to come to my place. (I don't know what their actual deal was and what they wanted with me specifically, they didn't strike me as criminals.)

When I realised they had come to my door and were trying to open it, I just opened the door, and they were flabbergasted and trying to hide the fact that they were trying to come in.

I grabbed the key from the woman's hand, slammed the door shut and held it closed with my weight. I swallowed the key for good measure. I then tried to keep the door shut and I called the police.

Soon I heard from the police radio that they weren't coming after all, because they had more important things to attend to. Apparently I didn't make the thing sound urgent enough.

Then the TV reporters showed up to talk to the man and woman again. They realised that they were trying to break in and called the police too. It was very awkward for the police.

Another dream from last night:

I dug out my old Nikon D3200 and were taking photos of roses in a vase. However, they were older flowers, so I decided to go to a flower shop by bus and bought three new roses. (I know where the flower shop is, but I've never actually visited it.)

Back home, I had problems arranging the flowers in a nice manner because the new flowers kept slipping in the vase and going deep under water.

Eventually I did succeed getting them arranged properly and did get some good photos, I guess. I kept thinking that I need more flowers in my home.

[roseinshadows]

A random attempt at art, I guess?

Basically, long time ago, I had this hazy dream about a weird cult that believed that it was the destiny of humankind to dive into Sagittarius A*.

I filed that in the "cool sci-fi ideas" folder. Didn't actually use that in worldbuilding/writing, but I sorta kinda roleplayed as a member of the cult in Elite Dangerous.

Lately I managed to claw my way back to the creative projects (the reason why I've been in such a massive slump is a tale for another time) but I decided to basically do this to get my feet wet with Affinity Designer. Tried to post this elsewhere on the net but it got removed by mods. Social media was a mistake, blogs ftw.

[roseinshadows]

Copy paste of basically the emoji I'm feeling right now, even though my hardware doesn't show this thing up right now.

Why doesn't #Samsung still do this damn thing. I switched to #Nokia for god's sake, just because of the fact they had the stock turtle emoji And they had a Finnish team, so, eh.

[roseinshadows]

My first ever attempt at using ChatGPT to solve a programming problem

A wise… random person… on the side of the Internet once told me: “Don’t be afraid of ChatGPT. It’s just a spicy autocomplete.”

Now, I’m a Ruby person. Ruby usually Just Works.™ However, Python is, like, it usually works. But sometimes. Sometimes. NO. It just tells you to go deal wif’ it. Fuck.

“Hey, can you parse a "YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS” timestamp, please?“ "FUCK YOU.” “ChatGPT, can you help?” “Well, the date stamp should be in the ‘YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS’ format, maybe.” “…it IS, but thanks anyway.”

SIDE NOTE: exiv2 is just a fucking epitome of “Python library sitting atop of C++ library, dammit”. Oh, you’re looking for the Python documentation? Just look at the C++ docs, dammit, you’re a programmer, I’m sure you can wade through the docs! And enjoy str(image.data[“whatever”].getValue()).prettyPlease(). I HOPE that if I check out the exiv2 Ruby Gem, it at least has the courtesy of returning DateTime objects when the underlying data has date and time shit and doesn't require things to be parsed separately.

Or will they???

Oh shit. Well.

[roseinshadows]

A completely non-profit performance of Rush E, by Sheet Music Boss, performed somewhat muddily by Pripyat Pianos. I subdivided the MIDI as far as I could. I could not subdivide it far enough. Sorry. Obviously, the piano is on fire.

[roseinshadows]

Crucial Finnish survival information

Teräsbetoni [correct spelling] = Reinforced concrete.

Teräspetoni = My steel beast.

KNOW THE DIFFERENCE.

IT COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE.

[roseinshadows]

Weird retro telecommunication things

People over in France apparently tend to have pretty fond memories of Minitel service. This was a network that offered a whole lot of public electronic services - way before the Internet and WWW hit homes. This was an incredibly popular service, because the national telecom offered free terminals for the users.

In Finland, we had a similar service called TeleSampo and Infotel. I think TeleSampo was ran by Tele (national company) and I think Infotel was ran by regional telecoms, but I'm not sure.

Anyway, it was nowhere near as popular as the French service because, of course, you needed a computer and modem to use it. However, I remember my father use it for online banking and I personally used it to access Freenet, which was a way for school kids to access the Internet.

Well. Today I learned that there, in fact, were dedicated TeleSampo terminals! Which you could get with the low, low price of 1500 FIM (€250, unadjusted for inflation). The pic above was spotted in an ad in MikroBitti 10/1990.

Edit: Ooh, the thing in the ad seems to be very similar to Alcatel's Minitel terminals that are pictured in Wikipedia. Fascinating.

[roseinshadows]

OK, so there's this theory that the world is held on its place by a giant stack of turtles. Turtles all the way down.

By laws of probability, about half of the turtles are female. They might have eggs. Half of the turtles in the eggs might be female. And so on.

Logical conclusion:

It's not just turtles all the way down.

It's also turtles ALL THE WAY IN.

🤯

[roseinshadows]

Finnish national football team should adopt these as baseline ⚽🇫🇮

i dont like most engl fan chants but these two are hilarious

[roseinshadows]

NaNoWriMo progress, 2022

Long ago, I posted about my NaNoWriMo successes.

Here are the graphs updated for 2022:

The "word count" graph was getting completely useless several years ago, so I came up with a bunch of other visualisations - and it seems that NaNoWriMo even decided to add a graph similar to the "distance from par" to the site nowadays.

Tools used: Jupyter Lab, R, and the R library ggplot2 for plots.