calcactus

i don't have the brainwidth to do a long review, but james baldwin's 'no name in the street' was. gripping.

it was my first introduction to his work, and it won't be the last.

what grabbed me first: the deep and quiet alienation. i described to the doujin group that he feels like a self-aware/self described quote unquote traitor to so many groups (not out of a lack of a moral compass, just by how the chips fell with being thrust in the spotlight by fate, and by holding onto his sincerity at the cost of being quietly left out on the shore by various tribes.)  i ... don't ever think i've seen a writer accurately capture how that feels before him.

what grabbed me second: i don't ever think i've seen a writer hold such (tight! well defended!) intellectual cynicism and yet a genuine dignity for all life in the same hand as dexterously as he does. he has earned grievances to be sure. but too many intellectual-heavy authors i get a sour note of contempt at some form of otherness-in-their-mind whether it be queers, children, or the disabled or what have you.

not from him.

anyway if you were a fan of malcom x (the autobiography) and its prose/history mix, even more of a reason to read it. for such a heavy read on the civil rights era the prose itself made you want to tear through it to hear more of what he had to say.

“Love him,’ said Jacques, with vehemence, ‘love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters? And how long, at the best, can it last, since you are both men and still have everywhere to go? Only five minutes, I assure you, only five minutes, and most of that, helas! in the dark. And if you think of them as dirty, then they will be dirty— they will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his. But you can make your time together anything but dirty, you can give each other something which will make both of you better—forever—if you will not be ashamed, if you will only not play it safe.’ He paused, watching me, and then looked down to his cognac. ‘You play it safe long enough,’ he said, in a different tone, ‘and you’ll end up trapped in your own dirty body, forever and forever and forever—like me.”

― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

God, grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change
the courage to change the things I can
and the wisdom to know the difference.

- (part of the) Serenity Prayer

—Reinhold Niebuhr, 1892-1971

something really funny about corporate design & approval chains is a 'i don't like iiiiiiiiiit / non answer' comment to a presented design could mean a lot of different things.

mostly not actually about the design itself.

a) sometimes the exec doesn't actually have a problem with the design (when you grill them on the details), they're just butt-hurt they weren't involved in the decision making process. (usually this answer comes from people very insecure about their position & know they're redundant and not mission critical). sometimes it's useful intentionally leaving in one mistake for them to hone in and pick on and be satisfied that They Had A Hand In The Shiny Thing. :p

b) sometimes the exec doesn't like you, period, even if the design is perfect, and that's their ass pull of an answer when they can't find specific things to critique. (mfw when a sales SVP was aggressively butthurt at me for ages about a previous vendor's poor installation quality even when we had already reassured him we had swapped over to a new and trusted vendor lul).

c) sometimes your better design does not fit Their Grand Vision and you have to wait until Their Vision crashes and burns into a fireball before politely presenting them with your option (again).

d) sometimes your better design got sniped by a contractor/consultant who's buddy-buddy with whoever funding the project. (currently emotionally handholding an in-house AD annoyed at this and (c). it sucks to experience. but it happens.)

e) complete radio silence can sometimes mean the exec is straight up too busy to answer / give the level of feedback quality that they want, which some designers interpret as a negative when it's actually not.

there's at least five other possibilities not about the design but it's really funny having all of these happen to me to the point when it's very obvious which one is happening.

it's a job i love but you really really do have to take your ego/"vision"" entirely out of it; the way i see it, any project involving money - i'm paid to be their pixel-pusher/very occasional consultant; the actual imaginative work happens off the clock.

my (gallery) site had been acting kinda sluggish for the last ~6 months and long story short i knew it was due to me getting close to what tegalog can realistically store image wise.

i wasn't worried because there's a limited amount of artwork i want visible online, realistically. it was time to purge. but i also found i forgor to compress some really big comic pages and wow it's amazing how much of a difference that makes when you self host versus rely on social media lol.

anyway spent a third of today deleting / compressing / reuploading some of the big offenders, and deleting some old art that i feel like doesn't reflect me & where i want to go (it'll always be in the zip folders for the curiosity/data hoarders tho).

my proudest compressing was from a 3.2MB file to 32KB. :D 
didn't even loose much quality imo.

(don't need advice, just amused.)

 “loving off-script, hot-blooded and mammalian, bodied, muscular, with your ribs aching. The kind of love that makes you offer your heart up— plump and flushed. Love that asks to eat you whole.”

Joy Sullivan, from Instructions for Traveling West: Poems; “Horse Girl”

it's a little funny but most of my cursory financial knowledge comes from two sources:

a) a group of 80-90 year old grandmas who were the most ruthless day-traders i still have ever known and made a Buttload of money being one of the last real generations where you could manually do that. (from them, learned what a P/E ratio is, how to read yahoo finance, etc).

b) Poasting on hacker news up to 2022 (knowing what ZIRP funds are, Series A/B funding, etc)

ngl? the grandmas were way more financially literate. XD also made the best cookies to snack on.

man i loved talking with them. they brought me in as a speaker one time to talk about cybersecurity 101 when i was a teen.