Month: July 2022

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I Could Live There

I love the ultra modern of today's architecture, but there's also a special place in my heart for deco and deco-adjacent work from the 30s.

[source]

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This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things

Prompted by a comment left by Frank on my last post…

"I make light because I am thoroughly depressed, angry, exhausted, burned out, and numbed by the entire lot of white/christian/conservative/republican/authoritarian/ nazi/hating/lying/cheating/insane/backwards/unreasonable/fucking assholes. And they are not just in this country…it's a world phenomenon."

I quipped back, "And this is why we can't have nice things ANYWHERE."

And probably, I began to think, why we haven't had definitive proof of being visited by extraterrestrials.

I'm sure this has already been posited by minds far greater than mine as an explanation to The Fermi Paradox, but what if all species reach a certain point of development—on the verge of extra-solar space exploration—and poof! they blow themselves up over petty squabbles, god-myths, racial bias, and whatever else they might cause them to separate into an us-versus-them mentality like Man has suffered during most of his existence on this planet. As much as I'd like to think otherwise, maybe one of the hallmarks—nay requisites—of "intelligence" is aggression and competitiveness. I mean it took something to get to the top of the food chain, and having bigger brains certainly contributed to that.

Maybe we haven't been visited—or, considering the vast distances, even heard from anyone else out there yet—is because intelligence never really makes it. Perhaps the galaxy is littered with the corpses of great civilizations that never broke out of their planetary shells, instead turning inward and destroying themselves only to rise and fall again indefinitely. Though not yet widely accepted yet in academic circles, there is certainly mounting evidence that just such a thing has happened on this planet; our current worldwide civilization was not the first—and will not be the last to inhabit this blue marble.

Or as Battlestar Galactica famously proclaimed , "All this has happened before and will happen again."

Of course the other possibility for not having been contacted is that if you are an incredibly advanced, galactic civilization that has mastered most if not all of the laws nature and can manipulate them at will, would you want to make contact with a bunch of continually warring, willfully ignorant apes on a small rock in the backwaters of the Milky Way?

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Testing Ventura

Being the inveterate geek that I am, and attempting to find whatever joy I can in this pre-apocalyptic hellscape wherever I can, whenever a new Mac O/S comes on the scene I immediately jump on the public beta test bandwagon as soon as they're available and give them a spin.

I'm an Apple fan, but not an Apple fanboy (there is a difference), so there's no way I'm paying $99 a year (or whatever the going rate is these days) to be a part of the developer community just to get these releases the moment they become available. I'm satisfied to wait a few days (or in the case of the initial releases) a couple weeks to grab them as a public beta tester.

Several years ago I had a pretty bad experience with one of the betas—admittedly ignoring everyone's advice to not use them as your daily driver—that for a while soured me to the whole experience, but since then I've gotten smarter about trying them out, loading them on external drives so as to leave my main drive untouched.

Tiring of that approach, this year I decided to go a different route. One of the reasons I went with a 1 terabyte drive on my current Mac is so that I can partition part of it off and load the betas on that and have all the speed and accessibility that scenario affords while keeping my main drive fully sequestered.

All that being said, for the couple weeks I've played with Beta 1 and now Beta 2, and in my estimation, they're actually almost ready for prime time—at least for everything I use my Mac for. What's prevented me from throwing caution to the wind and loading the O/S as my daily driver is that there are still glitches—the most notable not being able to unlock the Mac with my watch and Messages not syncing between devices—that prevent me from doing something so foolish. And then there's the fact that some of the much-touted new features (like being able to use your iPhone as your webcam) simply refuse to work for me. In fact, I finally gave up trying to get these things to work and deleted the Ventura partition altogether, returning to using Monterey full time.  Unlike my wild and crazy youth, I now prefer reliability over new and shiny. At least most of the time.

UPDATE 10pm: After watching a few more YouTube videos today and realizing all the things I'd missed in Ventura, I decided to give the new O/S one more spin. So this afternoon I created a new Ventura partition, re-enrolled my Mac in the beta program, and went about installing it again. It was only when the install completed and the machine rebooted that I realized that I had screwed up…big time. I had done this at work and had been distracted when I started the install and I never actually specified the Ventura partition, so—you guessed it—I installed it over my existing Monterey installation.

I didn't panic; I had a full Carbon Copy backup from 12 a.m. this morning, so I knew I could always wipe the drive, reinstall Monterey and then restore all my shit from the backup.

But I'm actually not in any great hurry to do that. All the little glitches I just got finished complaining about in the paragraph above had disappeared, and as of this writing, everything is working normally.

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At least Rachel earns her paycheck, you pathetic CUNT.