I hobbled together a news aggregator, aeolus. evolution has been productive enough for email and calendars, but the RSS configuration and interface was holding me back. I wanted something online so I can scroll on the go, and after surveying what's on the shelf it turned out to be dangerously easy to roll my own crawler.

The heart of the thing really, simply syndicates a list of feeds, generating Hugo-compatible input to render a combined view. I'd prefer Nikola, but there's already a Hugo theme based on a Wordpress theme that apparently looks familiar because of its popularity amongst digital newspapers. Plus the meta taxonomy has been productive! The bulk of the bespoke logic I've had to implement so far is date sanitization and glue.

Broader access to the news came as The White House launched its own news-skinned blog this week. I can find candlestick doodles of the S&P's psychotic episodes in any report of the world, but I can't readily see budget allocations by agency. The Executive could center a crystal ball that reveals the overall health of all its departments. Instead we got an Oops, All Opinion rag.

Having my own opinion page front and center was fun for a minute, but the constant sound of my own voice had an averaging effect, a piece of quartz resonating into a steady state. Was my frequency set at the factory or could my buzzing of the bells and whistles of the anxiety machine contour new forms from the static? I installed a puzzle collection on my phone a year or two ago to pass time while waiting for food. Then I have the TV, radio, and Internet all shout at me while I eat the food.

The electric chatter is a soothing break from humans weighing my soul. I'm not proving my humanity to a robot designed to be bigoted to other robots, I'm killing time by burning calories looking at traffic lights and bicycles. Who's got the mop to soak up the collective excess wrung out of our scrolling? Beyond the veneer of "bot detection" I've wondered if I could CashApp my daily tithing to Amazon and enjoy the privileged freedom of "Known Good". An indulgent life on Olympus! This side of the line is the human side, however, so I couldn't pay even if I could.

This island is big and small. My resolution to a dual existence as writer and publisher was to aim the shrink ray at the mirror and have aeolus breeze by my blog simultaneous to the streams he slurps. I currently categorize my posts under Social, which also aggregates Slashdot and the Y Combinator front page. There's a vanity in shortcutting to the front of that line rather than submitting my posts and hoping to see them again, but as long as I'm doing more than the Literal President I can live with a little pride.

I also spun up cstate and monitorbot on ionos1 and ionos2, who are hosting all of this, then configured the crawler to scrape the status pages. For now each node monitors the other plus the abstract "yieldsfalsehood.com".

As for life, Dany is scheduled for surgery next week. I found a lump that the vet recommended for removal and biopsy so that's the plan. Aria and Renzi are staying with us this week keeping Dany and Teemo company while I write and garden. I found a peach growing on the tree, a sweet treat for generations that follow.

The generations that preceded have been their noisy selves, notably Nietzche's decaying brain insisting on its own rationality and begging anybody in earshot to linger with it a little longer. The American solution to the problems causing and arising from Pope v. Anti-Pope was to aim the shrink ray at religion and let anybody be A Pope. The proportionate position was profitable, but Fred's untreated infection and a wave of mermaids followed War across the World. Twice! The US was recovering from a lobotomy, dismemberment, and replantation, a weakened state greeting the bug's arrival. Now we're back to Kings and Popes and King-Pope camaraderie.

Internet atheists ran west to hallucinate in the desert with Descendents of Reagan Dads Doing it Differently and distill fascism out of half baked communism. The retreat from Christianity left an historical blindspot that opened space for a return of the dark age Christianity that the retreating were retreating from. Not that I'm promoting a holding onto Christianity, either. The flight of the mermaid is a fundamental force in the universe lifting us to these heights from where we were before the bang. Damn it, I did Nietzche again!

Koch contrived his postulates in 1884 while Zarathustra was in delivery down the road. The contrarians claimed they like coughing, actually, and a wave of pro-infection programming propagated forward. Now the brain damaged Secretary of Health and Human Services leads the charge against germ theory.

The young Catholic bleeding heart is contoured and cut by Northeast comfort until some holier than thou slice sloughs off to hallucinate with Those Who Know Everything About Everything in one of the many forests we used to have to cushion the exploratory before this latest wave of explorers burns down the woods where they were found burying their soiled sheets alongside Orion's ironic lack of self awareness.

The journey could be our Great American Buddha, but a friendly disposition towards disease combined with proud distrust, blind arrogance, and judgmental embarrassment drives a hard line between consecutive generations. A real challenge in "overcoming" for frothy philosophers wielding words like "will to power" would be talking like a human. Maybe even with their parents!

I'll see mine soon. I'm taking my dad to a baseball game.

Hello! Spring's here. There's mud everywhere, with more rain on the way.

The dogs are doing well. My own workflow fell to the wayside, but I've been breathing new life into the site. Or adding new complicated barriers to maintenance, whichever comes first.

The landing page for this domain is now its own static site generated by ovid alongside the web server configuration needed to serve it.

The deployment strategy for the blog changed as well. This page is now packaged in an ext2fs image and served over HTTP with pyext2fs. I also packaged up the documentation for various projects to be served in the same way, and hobbled together enough lua, jinja, and yaml to publish them all uniformly.

For the sake of the exercise I publish the images themselves, e.g. fhs-3.0.ext2fs. I then layer qemu-nbd on top to supply a block layer to pyext2fs, which is proxied behind nginx before finally reaching Internet. I think this might be Just Life in microkernel land, but I've been a sheltered monolith. Linux seems to have gotten me far, but all I know is namespace and kvm.

Speaking of, I spun up a new vm this week and deployed all this before switching over the DNS yesterday. Just in time for the weekend!

Fred left the Army to spend so many words on letters to the editor proclaiming the wonders of his wisdom that he was left with few to write for his readers. Energized by Wagner's death, a creative spark shocked his diseased brain and he farted Zarathustra onto the page while Pinnochio sprang to life in the delivery room next door and Joyce across the hall.

Lafcadio meanwhile had already been pulled out of Greece and pushed out of Dublin, delivered to America to blossom in the benthos of the last stop for pilgrims. Ten years later he found a way to migrate again. He managed to pull Japan close but died 15 years before Goddard devised a method of reaching even more extreme altitudes.

One tried sunlight for nationalism, one tried hitting, one tried high art, and Prometheus invented the house fire. Wagner taught retreat into mythology behind a pompous veil that shrouds the disconnect from reality. Henry Watkin and Paul Leon drew the artist closer to the subject. Ariel drew a line and chased the tale, a dialectic of material mermaids!

Carlos left the Army to punish the Christianity into Pinnochio the year Benny was born. He left the Army to wrap his strings around the Mediterranean and when the Duce turned 21 he went out drinking with Disney, who woke up pregnant with the story as war overtook the world. Again! Not long after peace returned some five years later Donald The Dingus demanded an encore for his birthday then left his brother for realty, reality, and Rosie.

The Duck meanwhile had enlisted in the Navy and raised three nephews, who one night found a flute that they used to lure the woodworkers to the Magical Lathe in a cabin in the woods. To their surprise a bucket of glue poured down on each as they entered, and all of them pulled in by the spinning were squished up so close together that they hardened into the Giant Gepeto!

When he was all done curing, the trio took turns turning through the night. By morning the statue had been reduced to a pile of shavings and a figure small enough to fit under the Cloning Beam, which the nephews used to make this doll I bought you for Christmas.

I made one more trip to New York before Aunt Jin died, certain I'd see her soon down the Potomac. I first met her on the Gulf of Mexico, a long line cast to lure me to the Hudson. We spent the day talking with her caretakers, the neighbors, and the new parents moving in.

She sent me home with a table that I refinished waiting for the wake. Gravitational collapse calling the exploratory back to the island. Star. Starlight.

After the funeral I queued up "New Orleans Funeral Jazz", which is a thing you can do on a whim these days, and schooled up to race the body to the grave. We gathered inside a stone pavilion lined with the seals of the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, and Navy, two versions for them. A friend from Lake Winnipesaukee said a prayer and we left roses for the dead as we departed.

The gas light flipped on outside of Calverton and I thought about swimming to New Jersey or backfloating back to Sebastian Beach. Some foreward thinking spirit saw fit to build a gas station, and another to pack a snack for the drive, stockpiled for the mail carriers in the summer drought, and the ghosts of the past scared away the island fever long enough to drift to Jericho for nostalgia and salmon.

The sails were tattered by then, half my legs replaced with pegs, all my eyes patched, and my connection to the Internet severed, the dregs of bandwidth drained by "Party Hits" on the way from the cemetery. I managed to follow the signs to Queens after lunch but the Belt Parkway Portal appeared mysteriously near the airport to drop me in the Caribbean, a confluence of strange seas. I anchored on a small island I recognized from a story I once heard in West Philly and followed sunrise and sunset north to Wissahickon.

I found the dogs waiting for a walk, an opportunity to catch up with the squirrels on the last two weeks of life, and the next two minutes, generations, autumns. We landed somewhere in the present, fixed to Jeopardy. Terrible Terry, a skunk's critique of the air freshener in the outhouse behind the landfill. Brent's bonus 100k on Wheel. Giants and Steelers tied 9-9 at the half.

Bo and Willie visited for a sleepover after Labor Day. They came back again the next weekend while I made a trip to grandma's. I saw a sign for Shakespeare in Manhattan so I made a little detour on the way home. I thought I knew where I was going, but Jackie Robinson chewed me up and spit me out somewhere in Brooklyn.

I found a navigator in a bar full of monsters and soon enough we found ourselves underground negotiating with Cerberus. The dogs smelled one of their own inside so they offered what tricks they had to get by. They found him lying on the riverside and called out to the ferryman to broker a deal with him too, three bones for another day in the sun. Content with the terms the wolves howled for the good boy, who flew off with his treat.

We sailed on to heckle the bard, who guided us to a sphinx whose riddle I couldn't solve. Nearly mad with hunger the navigator sniffed us out a slice of pizza. As I finished my last bite, I saw in the grease on the paper plate the way home. I made it back just in time for Teemo's ninth birthday! He got cake and I got a tattoo. The seasons are changing and I needed a change of scenery. So I painted the site. And I built a hallway to hang some pictures.

We made a visit to Peace Valley today. I found another guy with two dogs and we scuttled around the shore with them for a bit pinching at the metaphor. They sailed off and we sailed on, stopping for a snooze in the shade before setting course.

A bluejay in the backyard reminded me I forgot something so we were back on the water soon as we made it home, back to the Aisle of Grocery. The dogs watched the boat while I went ashore hunting and foraging for sunflower seeds and a can of wet food.

I finally made a fire and ate then did some work on the site, which helped inspire this little write up!

Mainly I added a new landing page. This space has been blog-forward from the start, now feels time to aim the shrink ray at the ChangeLog and set it beside Thing Being Changed on the same island. The posts kept the same URLs but their index is now here. The archive and rss links are also still the same but I removed them from the main navigation.