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---
layout: post
title: Real Life in Star Trek, Where Silence Has Lease
date: 2022-12-01 17:18:03-0500
categories:
tags: [scifi, startrek, closereading]
summary: <i class="far fa-hand-spock"></i> The outside world in Star Trek
thumbnail: /blog/assets/31209212418_910d33ddf8_o.png
proofed: true
---
![An artist's rendition of colliding black holes](/blog/assets/31209212418_910d33ddf8_o.png "No less empty than their special effects, right...?")
## Disclaimer
In these posts, we discuss a non-"Free as in Freedom" popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names are trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and everything here relies on sitting squarely within the bounds of [Fair Use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use), as criticism that uses tiny parts of each show to extrapolate the world that the characters live in.
## Previously...
I initially outlined the project [in this post]({% post_url 2020-01-02-trek-00 %}), for those falling into this from somewhere else. In short, we attempt to use the details presented in *Star Trek* to assemble a view of what life looks like in the Federation. This "phase" of the project changes from previous posts, however. **The Next Generation** takes place long after the original series, so we shouldn't expect similar politics and socialization. Maybe more importantly, I enjoy the series less.
Put simply, you shouldn't read this expecting a recap or review of an episode. Many people have done both to death over nearly sixty years. You *will* find a catalog of information that we learn from each episode, though, so expect everything to be a potential "spoiler," if you happen to have that [irrational fear](https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2011/aug/17/spoilers-enhance-enjoyment-psychologists).
Rather than list every post in the series here, you can quickly find them all on [the *startrek* tag page](/blog/tag/startrek/).
## Where Silence Has Lease
The title for the episode comes from Robert William Service's [*The Spell of the Yukon*](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Spell_of_the_Yukon_and_Other_Verses/The_Spell_of_the_Yukon), in its last stanza, though I don't see any connection to the episode's plot. Quite the contrary, in fact.
If you enjoy this sort of thing, I encourage you to compare this story to [*Encounter at Farpoint*]({% post_url 2022-05-19-farpoint1 %}) and [*Where No One Has Gone Before*]({% post_url 2022-06-23-gone %}). The former introduces an all-powerful entity looking to trap and test the crew. The latter sends the ship to a novel space, where illusions endanger them.
> **PICARD**: Both. I think it is perhaps best to be ignorant of certain elements of Klingon psyche.
Just in case you thought that recent changes meant that Picard would stop spouting racist nonsense, this episode has you covered.
> **RIKER**: At ease, Lieutenant!
Apparently, the writers don't think much better of Klingons, treating Worf like an animal.
Also, what happened to the safety precautions they made such a big deal about in [*The Big Goodbye*]({% post_url 2022-08-04-big-goodbye %})? Can the holodeck fake its way through space and solidity, but not keep participants from injuring each other?
> Captain's log, Stardate 42193.6. We are on a long reach toward the Morgana Quadrant, a section of the galaxy which has yet to be visited by a manned Federation vessel. We are using the time to further detail the charts of this region.
You might remember the "Morgana Quadrant" from the end of [*The Child*]({% post_url 2022-11-24-child %}).
Also, I won't make anything of it unless we see it happen consistently, since I still fall into the same linguistic trap after putting in effort to correct myself, but note Picard using the word "manned" to refer to the ship, rather than a gender-neutral and species-neutral word. The original series tried---unsuccessfully, sometimes---to use the probably more appropriate word "crewed."
> **DATA**: Captain, the most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is I do not know. I do not know what that is, sir.
What a jackass. It only becomes science or wisdom if you use your ignorance as an impetus to learn. Claiming ignorance and dismissing other people's questions looks more like low-end religion.
> **DATA**: Accessing. Negative, sir. There is no record of any Federation vessel encountering anything remotely like this.
For the record, Data can mentally scan all the ship's records, but he still asks his colleagues to define rudimentary vocabulary words for him, like a child.
> **WORF**: My thoughts were of an old Klingon legend of a gigantic black space creature which was said to devour entire vessels.
Weird that nobody thought to put that in the ship's database, given all the other random legends they've discussed. Does nobody in the Federation study Klingon legends? Have the Klingons isolated their society to such a degree that outsiders can't learn anything about folklore?
> **RIKER**: Incredible. It's like looking into infinity, sir. Remember the course in ancient history at Starfleet Academy? About the time men still believed the Earth was flat?
>
> **PICARD**: And that the sun revolved around it.
>
> **RIKER**: And that if a ship sailed too far out into the ocean, it would fall off the edge of the world?
Sigh...
No historical culture has seriously imagined the Earth as flat. Primarily, most people don't give the planet they live on much thought, with flat discs serving either as a metaphor for something or a lack of information far enough out where curvature would make a difference. And at least as far back as the Ancient Greeks, and we have multiple ways to measure the curvature available to even the lowest budgets.
Rather, American writers such as [Washington Irving](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Irving) *needed* people to have historically believed in a flat Earth, in order to build [Christopher Columbus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus) up as a culture hero for the United States. European countries had claimed as national heroes the other major explorers who had some association with the North American continent, and American writers didn't want to "share." Since nobody claimed Columbus---probably because he got lost, never admitted that he didn't reach India, committed ethnic cleansing regimes so horrifying that they imprisoned him, and so forth---he became the hero of choice, essentially the "kid picked last" for teams in the gym class of national myth-building.
Because Columbus has nothing to recommend him, in his personality or career, these American writers fabricated the idea of a widespread belief in a Flat Earth for him to oppose.
Decades prior to the setting, but two years into the production of the episode, Sybok makes a similar comment in [**The Final Frontier**]({% post_url 2022-04-14-tff %}). And I go through all this detail to make an important point: For at least a century, Federation educational institutions have perpetuated the myth of a belief in a flat Earth, seemingly---since Sybok name-checks him---to preserve the unearned reputation of Columbus.
> **PULASKI**: Isn't this impossible, sir? I'm not a Bridge officer, but. Increase by one thousand, Mister Data. By ten thousand. It does know how to do these things, doesn't it?
>
> **PICARD**: Commander Data knows precisely what he is doing.
>
> **PULASKI**: Forgive me, Mister Data. I'm not accustomed to working with non-living devices that. Forgive me again. Your service record says that you are alive. I must accept that.
However, she *will* make it absolutely clear in every scene that she finds the existence of synthetic peers offensive.
I should mention that, when watching, I overlooked the bit coming in a few seconds, where Picard shuts Data down from discussing something that *could* actually have some relevance. That makes me wonder whether Pulaski exists to express such blatantly racist ideas that we stop noticing the other characters treating Data like a tool.
> **RIKER**: Aye, sir. Wesley, reverse our direction, set a course for the Cornelian star system. Impulse power.
No such star exists, as you might have already guessed. Instead, the writers---what passes for writers, I mean, since the writers strike probably continues in the outside world---have tried to show off their fancy educations. [Cornelian dilemma](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelian_dilemma) describes dramatic situations where a character must make a choice where all options will cause some significant harm.
Unlike *The Spell of the Yukon*, I assume that we can all see how the dilemma applies to an episode where Picard makes the choice to kill the entire crew to spite an alien who wants to perform sadistic experiments on them...
> **RIKER**: Shields up. Go to Red Alert!
They detect a ship and need help, so obviously they need to jump directly to threatening violence.
Mind you, the "Romulan" happens to attack, so they do make the right choice for the plot, but that still undermines any chance they had of getting this right.
> **RIKER**: It's a Federation ship. NCC one-three-zero-five-dash-E. It's the *Yamato*, our sister ship.
The name Yamato shows up across Japanese culture in a way that I don't believe happens anywhere else, referring to places, families, ethnicities, philosophies, eras, art, and more, probably most prominently the family name of the [Imperial House of Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_House_of_Japan). In modern science fiction, though, the name usually most directly pays tribute to 1974's [**Space Battleship Yamato**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Battleship_Yamato) anime series and its sequels and adaptations.
That especially seems likely, here, because "sister ships" generally have some commonality to their names, and you won't find many commonalities between *Enterprise* and *Yamato* that don't involve 1974 animation featuring them...
> **TROI**: I'm not certain of that now, Captain. I do sense something unusual.
I know that I keep bringing this up, but I really wish I knew what purpose Starfleet believes that Troi serves on the bridge. With the way that she has acted dismissively towards her heritage in [*Encounter at Farpoint*]({% post_url 2022-05-26-farpoint2 %}) and [*Haven*]({% post_url 2022-07-28-haven %}), and she always tries to fudge her way through these conversations, so we can assume that she hasn't trained to use her empathic ability in non-superficial ways, she makes a lousy therapist when she tries to provide advice, and nobody seems to respect therapy. Yet, she gets more lines in episodes than a lot of characters who we might think should have more to say.
> **NAGILUM**: Nagilum.
You might have an inclination to connect "Nagilum" with Nāgīlā/נָגִילָה---as in [*Hāvā Nāgīlā*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hava_Nagila) or *Let Us Rejoice*---but even though they didn't get him, they allegedly wrote this part for [Richard Mulligan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Mulligan), and named the alien by...pronouncing "Mulligan" backwards.
> **PICARD**: It is the way in which we propagate our species.
>
> **NAGILUM**: Please, demonstrate how this is accomplished.
>
> **PULASKI**: Not likely.
Notice that, once again, an outsider mentions sex, and they become prudes. I don't mean that she should have prepared to demonstrate, or anything like that, but especially as a doctor, she should surely have the confidence to talk through the process and maybe provide illustrations to the curious.
> **NAGILUM**: To understand death, I must amass information on every aspect of it. Every kind of dying. The experiments shouldn't take more than a third of your crew, maybe half.
>
> Captain's log, Stardate 42194.7. It is obvious that whatever we have met sees no value in our kind of life form. How do we fight something that both is and is not there?
Compare this conflict with [*Lonely Among Us*]({% post_url 2022-06-30-lonely %}), where Picard claims that the *Enterprise* prioritizes acquiring knowledge above everything else. I laughed at that idea, precisely because he should agree with Nagilum, if he actually believed that.
In fact, you'll notice that they then debate whether they can afford to lose half the crew to experimentation.
> **PICARD**: Destroy the Enterprise.
>
> **PULASKI**: Isn't that a little like curing the disease by killing the patient?
I hate to agree with Pulaski on anything, but she *does* have this one right...
That said, notice how well this fits with Picard's usual stance when dealing with powerful aliens. He needs to assert his authority, to prove his power, no matter the costs.
> **PICARD**: Come.
Picard has Erik Satie's [*Gymnopodie I*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnop%C3%A9dies) playing, part of a series of three piano compositions often cited as a precursor to what we now call [ambient music](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambient_music).
> **PICARD**: Oh, is that all? Well, Data, you're asking probably the most difficult of all questions. Some see it as a changing into an indestructible form, forever unchanging. They believe that the purpose of the entire universe is to then maintain that form in an Earth-like garden which will give delight and pleasure through all eternity. On the other hand, there are those who hold to the idea of our blinking into nothingness, with all our experiences, hopes and dreams merely a delusion.
The Federation still looks at death as an unresolvable mystery, despite---much like I pointed out with *The Child* and birth---having telepathic populations and at least one high-level official who spent a few months dead, before coming back in [**The Search for Spock**]({% post_url 2022-03-31-tsfs %}). I mean, in that kind of universe, it feels like scientists shouldn't have too much trouble studying death.
> **RIKER**: Yes! Absolutely! I do indeed concur wholeheartedly!
First, for all the less-than-complimentary things that we can say about this episode, let's take a moment to appreciate the series making one of its occasional jokes that actually lands.
That out of the way, it didn't occur to me when they gave the destruct order, but they seem to have dropped the security with their awful passwords.
> **PICARD**: I'm not interested.
Right? Why would a Starfleet captain ever have any interest in self-reflection and analysis... 🙄
## Conclusions
This episode tells us that at least some people listen to classical ambient music, Starfleet engineers apparently style themselves as 1970s animation fans, and so forth.
### The Bad
This episode sometimes seems like a showcase for racist sentiment, starting out showing worries about learning too much about Klingons and spending more time abusing and demeaning artificial beings. They also continue to deal with the introduction of novel aliens with threats of violence, and Picard continues to bristle at non-humans having control over his life, this time trying to claw back some small degree of control by threatening the lives of the entire crew, and acts dismissive towards the possibility that a non-human would have worthwhile insight into his personality.
Meanwhile, Data thoroughly misrepresents the scientific method, to the apparent approval of his peers. Interestingly, he also confirms that he has no actual need to ask his colleagues mundane questions, since he either can access the databases remotely or has memorized it all. And yet, we also find out that Federation databases don't include Klingon legends.
The Federation also perpetuates the myth that ancient people had a strong belief in a flat Earth, apparently to polish the reputation of a horrible person.
We also continue to see prudishness about sex.
### The Weird
Despite the presence of telepaths and people who can return to life after death, the Federation doesn't appear to have studied death to any significant extent.
## Next
In one week, the crew gets tired of star-trekking, discovers that their computers have far more impressive capabilities than they could have imagined, and immediately ignores the ramifications of that new information, in *Elementary, Dear Data*.
#### <i class="far fa-hand-spock"></i>
* * *
**Credits**: The header image is [New Simulation Sheds Light on Spiraling Supermassive Black Holes](https://www.flickr.com/photos/24662369@N07/31209212418) by [NASA Goddard Space Flight Center](https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/), made available under the terms of the [Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) license.

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---
layout: post
title: 🔭 Looking Back on 2022
date: 2021-12-25 08:05:15-0500
categories:
tags: [retrospective, newyear]
summary: Interesting discoveries from 2022
thumbnail: /blog/assets/P20210331AS-1892-51131137370.png
offset: -30%
---
![Joe Biden Pitching "Build Back Better"](/blog/assets/P20210331AS-1892-51131137370.png "Regardless of whether it goes forward, I'd argue that Build Back Better has been the defining story of the United States in 2021...")
As I've tried to do on the last Sunday of every year that I've run **Entropy Arbitrage**, I wanted to take at least *one* post to look back on what 2022 looked like from my weird space, and maybe pat myself on the back over projects that I managed to pull together and release since the beginning of the year. I mostly base the format on the [previous end-of-year posts](/blog/tag/newyear), though it does change every year.
For those of you who read the [**Entropy Arbitrage** newsletter](https://buymeacoffee/jcolag), the format should look similar, with thoughts that don't feel sufficiently fleshed out to warrant their own post, but too complex or wordy to be a social media post.
## Culture
This year, I noticed a few interesting things about how people consume and process politics and popular culture.
### Stand Your Ground...When It Benefits Me
I've written a bit, here and there, about the [recent Twitter takeover]({% post_url 2022-05-01-twitter %}). I've talked about the [elephant in the room of alternatives]({% post_url 2022-11-20-mastodon %}), and satirically questioned whether [Twitter's implosion joins a larger trend]({% post_url 2022-11-13-social %}). In a few cases, I've posted links to stories pointing to a broader agenda to destroy spaces where people freely criticize billionaires, or as a way to disrupt activism in general by sowing distrust.
However, I haven't talked about the reaction, which both amuses and worries me.
I mean, specifically, that we can see a contingent of Twitter "power-users" out there, insisting that we should refuse to cede this privately owned space to the right-wing people who...own it. Please, they beg, do not abandon Twitter, because if you do, the bad guys will surely win.
Especially when these users have podcasts, though, I can't help but feel an irony that they loudly abandoned Spotify as a distribution platform for buying exclusive rights to a popular (though boring and right-wing) podcast, because they didn't want to associate with and support that business model. However, they consider it a moral imperative to stay on Twitter.
It sounds odd, until they talk about why they know that many people have already ditched Twitter: They see their follower counts dropping. In other words, they consider Twitter more important than Spotify, because they don't know how to rebuild their audience on another platform, whereas they can ask listeners to change podcast providers.
And I don't mean to thoroughly demean this. I realize that, when your income relies primarily on viral tweets bringing listeners and readers to your work, you probably don't appreciate the idea of platforms that don't prioritize and encourage virality. I also realize that the majority of people leaving now mostly identify as white, and so just now feel the abuse that others have endured on Twitter since it launched. But still, I wish that they'd honestly say that they worry about their metrics...
## A Virus in the Writers Room?
## Technology
Most of my day, of course, is involved with some aspect of a computer.
### Developing Software
I started using [Rust](https://www.rust-lang.org/) more, this year, which has been satisfying. The "borrowing" memory-management system isn't always intuitive, but the compiler errors provide a consistently good guide to making the code work, in that respect. I don't recall if I've ever mentioned it on the blog, but Rust is right on the tipping point where it might be the first language that I reach for---rather than C, which I used consistently for the first decade of my career, so I work with it easily despite disliking it---when throwing together utility programs.
Less satisfying has been watching [Proton Native](https://github.com/kusti8/proton-native) turn into [Valence Native](https://github.com/valence-native/valence-native), and apparently just wither away, considering that nobody has touched the code since creating the fork. It's a shame, because I *really* liked the idea of a React-like layout/component system for native desktop applications. It's fine to use web rendering engines as application frameworks to get more people developing software, but they're too bulky to be viable solutions except in the snotty "everybody should just buy better hardware" sense.
I also came to the conclusion that [Haskell](https://www.haskell.org/) is a nice idea for a language, but not likely ready for routine work. As I mentioned in [the relevant developer diary]({% post_url 2021-11-22-manastir %}), documentation is often incomplete and condescending, as if the community doesn't want the language used for serious work.
However, another bright spot in the year was using [Gitpod](https://gitpod.io/). The idea of turning Visual Studio Code into a website *sounds* terrible, but it's snappy enough and reliable enough that I plan to install an instance on an in-house server and stop keeping clones of repositories on my laptop unless it's something *running* on the laptop, such as **INTERN**.
## Hardware
Another laptop's power connector has died---there must be a better way to manufacture those, or maybe shift to wireless charging---so, I've been working from a "spare" that I picked up around the time that I got the main computer, while I get the new system running. It's under-powered in most respects, with a small screen and odd keyboard. There's less space on the hard drive. And I'm constantly realizing that there are more files that I need from the old laptop. It's a weird experience, honestly, the first time in my career where a computer has just been too slow for me to reasonably use.
This system's power switch *also* has problems---probably why it was so cheap when I bought it---so if I overload the system, rebooting is an ordeal that I'm never convinced will complete. If it does and the blog doesn't update for a few days, that'll be because the thing finally stopped turning on, and I'm scrambling to find a new PC while shopping on something even *further* below standard.
Anyway, it's a shame that the idea of a [terminal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_terminal) never evolved into mobile computing. The ideal situation would be a decent desktop/server computer with a laptop that can mostly only remote into a desktop or cloud system, the terminal either rugged enough to last indefinitely or cheap enough to be effectively disposable.
Maybe I'm looking for a tablet, even though that sounds terrible, and the prices don't yet scale. But who knows? I mean, I also don't know why there are no longer refurbished laptops cheap enough to keep handy...
## Releases
I mess around with a lot of projects, but rarely bother to look back on what I've accomplished. So, with the new year ahead, it's time for me to do that...even though I'm disappointed that my "big" semi-secret project *still* isn't finished.
### Daily Nonogram
In February, I [released code to generate nonogram puzzles](https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2021/02/21/nonogram.html), and began publishing a [Daily Nonogram](https://john.colagioia.net/nono/) to my personal website. The original version, using images from [PxHere](https://pxhere.com/), was a more pleasant experience than using images from [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page), but the former made their "Random" page more difficult to scrape at some point.
### INTERN
While I haven't designed it to be useful to anybody but myself, I decided that I needed a search engine for my notes and writing. The result---usable, but still in progress as I find other potential uses---is the [**INTERN**](https://github.com/jcolag/intern) and the [**Ask INTERN**](https://github.com/jcolag/ask-intern) command-line client. The server maintains an index of many of my note files, and responds to searches for root words, prioritized by the similarity of the search string to the found text.
Configuration for both programs happens once, in the local system's configuration directory, regardless of the current platform.
I admittedly don't need such a thing on a regular basis. However, I do use it a few times per week, and it's *far* more useful than jumping from folder to folder executing local searches, since `grep` isn't exactly tuned for multi-word searches. In addition, the existence of the index allows for additional features in the future, such as analyzing my writing for words that I might overuse.
And then there are the business-related projects, as I get [Colagioia Industries](https://colagioia.com) back up and running.
### All Around the News
I launched [All Around the News]({% post_url 2021-04-25-aatn %}) in April, in hopes of testing the economics of modern journalism. While the plan has been side-tracked---more on that, later---the site has released thousands of articles and gets a steady stream of traffic from around the world.
When I return to it, the [Intravert ad spot](https://intravert.co/book/9fe4cdbeb1/295/) will probably go away for the duration, in favor of a more traditional approach, plus clearly labeled native advertising. I'll also need to push to increase the traffic to more people per day than articles posted...
### Sunday Rants
This year, I've written about a nice range of topics.
* Self-improvement, such as [sleeping]({% post_url 2021-01-10-sleep %}), [opting out of public records searches]({% post_url 2021-08-01-records %}), and [learning stenography]({% post_url 2021-11-28-steno %}),
* Social justice, including [race and reparations]({% post_url 2021-02-14-reparations %}), [gender]({% post_url 2021-02-28-genders %}), the [primary social movements driving society]({% post_url 2021-05-30-winning %}), [being an ally]({% post_url 2021-06-06-do-work %}), [Juneteenth]({% post_url 2021-06-20-juneteenth %}), [content advisories]({% post_url 2021-07-04-advisory %}), counter-productive nature of [generational theory]({% post_url 2021-08-15-generations %}), and [abortion]({% post_url 2021-09-05-roe %}),
* Media criticism, such as [racial dynamics in superhero fiction]({% post_url 2021-03-07-super %}), representation of [Asian women in fiction]({% post_url 2021-03-21-asian %}), the [lack of media websites that care]({% post_url 2021-05-02-wanted %}), the [Free Software Foundation's ethical mess]({% post_url 2021-05-09-fsf %}), [how media deals with moral issues]({% post_url 2021-07-11-mmedia %}), and the [comprehensive misunderstanding about how superheroes should work]({% post_url 2021-11-21-super %}),
* Technical and career topics, such as [estimating schedules]({% post_url 2021-01-27-estimate %}), [CSS dark modes]({% post_url 2021-03-24-darkmode %}), [cryptocurrency]({% post_url 2021-05-16-crypto %}), [prioritization and scheduling]({% post_url 2021-06-13-priorities %}), [maybe-useful approaches to hiring]({% post_url 2021-06-27-hiring %}), the [use of a Stack Overflow account in education]({% post_url 2021-07-25-stack %}), the [value of GitHub Copilot]({% post_url 2021-07-18-copilot %}), and the [stagnation in web frameworks]({% post_url 2021-08-08-framework %}).
I also launched the irregular [Let's Fix...](/blog/tag/lets-fix) series of posts, though there's only one post, so far.
The posts aren't all as polished as I wish they were---several of them were intended to be published later but moved up the schedule due to align more sensibly with then-current events---but I think that I'll be able to continue standing behind what I wrote in them, and I can always go back for another round of editing.
### Fiction
While I wasn't able to pull a second novel together before the end of the year---it has been sitting mostly abandoned for at least six months, in fact---I did release an attempt at a [Halloween horror story]({% post_url 2021-10-31-gevkahahal %}), a science-fantasy take on [the War on Christmas]({% post_url 2021-12-05-war %}), and a transcription of [*Calafia, Queen of California*]({% post_url 2021-03-28-calafia %}), itself an adaptation of a medieval Spanish story.
### Entropy Arbitrage
I made significant---though mostly invisible---changes to the blog, over the course of the year, from adding plugins to make the source code more sensible, to investigating different emoji fonts, to identifying posts that have changed and how much they've changed.
That's in addition to concluding the blog's second year, with the five hundredth post published.
I have also kept up [the mailing list](https://entropy-arbitrage.mailchimpsites.com/), with updates on a couple of the posts mentioned above, in addition to improving that code. Maybe the biggest initiative was finally getting the blog sign-up (to the right of the page, if you're reading this on the blog) to work regardless of ad-blockers.
## Personal
Finally, I've learned a thing or two about myself, I think.
### Cord-Cutting After-Effects
In April, I [dropped cable service]({% post_url 2021-04-04-cord-cut %}), and I have consistently felt great about that decision. There's more money in my budget, with less money going into the pockets of monopolies, and I'm not maintaining a service that I don't really use. Locast has unfortunately fallen apart, depriving me of some of my favorite casual viewing, but I have found enough substitutions that it doesn't *really* matter. Oh, and speaking of cord-cutting activities, I have come to the conclusion that BillFixers can't be trusted to perform more than the most straightforward tasks---and maybe even to just act professionally---so I can no longer recommend using them. I added an update explaining in the cord-cutting post, last week, so I won't waste time on it here.
Likewise, canceling Netflix---until this month, actually, to catch up on shows, before canceling again---has brought me nothing but joy, as they send the most *inept* customer retention e-mails that I have ever seen. Now that I'm back, I'm reminded of one huge reason why I dropped Netflix: They don't support their own shows, expecting people to discover (for example) **On My Block**, rather than pushing it into recommendations or advertising it outside the service; I was responsible for learning that it exists, though they'll constantly recommend shows that I've *already* watched.
Amazon Prime is now in my sights, too, as we approach the end of my annual subscription; I'll probably come back for a month if the second season of **Undone** ever shows up. As an aside, I should probably mention that I *originally* signed up for Amazon Prime (with a decent discount) specifically to watch their original shows---it may have been a promotion for **Transparent**---with the delivery just a minor convenience. Then, they got me hooked on the delivery for a couple of years, which definitely isn't healthy. Even that convenience is now mostly useless, though, as I've found better sources to order various goods. So, if I'm watching less Prime Video, it makes no sense to keep paying Amazon, since there isn't much evidence that the company is going to spend it on improving the world in any way. More likely, they use it to research better ways to [trap employees in the paths of tornadoes](https://www.voanews.com/a/dozens-killed-in-unseasonal-us-tornadoes-with-a-long-path-of-destruction/6351046.html) with [no protection](https://otherwords.org/tornadoes-can-kill-so-can-amazons-business-model/).
By contrast, my [Emby](https://emby.media/) server---which I still often consider replacing with [Jellyfin](https://jellyfin.org/) to reduce my dependence on proprietary code---has remained a joy. One local computer hosts a streaming service that includes my CD collection, my DVD collection, legal downloads from various independent sources, some recordings from a primitive, improvised DVR that I rigged up many years ago (a show that I've wanted to rewatch, never got a home video release, and isn't streaming anywhere, no less), and so forth. If it had a book reader instead of just a link to download books to a browser, it'd be close to ideal.
Quick aside: Actually ideal would probably include an online *comic* reader that can pan and zoom from panel to panel, like most of the corporate comic readers have. But that's obviously difficult *and* requires metadata on each comic page to explain where the panels are and what order to show them. There are desktop reader applications that try to do that if the metadata exists, but I'd bet that none have been implemented for Roku, and the metadata is as rare as it is tedious to enter.
### New Skills
As I wrote about last month, I decided to [finally learn stenography]({% post_url 2021-11-28-steno %}), which seems like it'll be fast enough for me to use it routinely soon.
And while it's not a particularly "new" skill for me, I have also spent more time sewing than I have in a long time---using patterns from [Free Sewing](https://freesewing.org/)---to reduce my reliance on supply chains. I'm not good at it, yet, not even as good as I was as a teenager taking a junior high school home economics class, but I'm definitely improving.
Depending on how things go, I may expand this in the new year. As mentioned [a couple of weeks ago]({% post_url 2021-12-17-week %}), for example, I might try to pick up a new language.
### Social Media Changes
While I still support the ecosystems, of course, I've become functionally inactive on the [Free Software social networking platforms](/blog/tag/socialshowdown). I check in on Scuttlebutt almost daily, but have only sent out a couple of posts since last winter; actually, that's a lie, because the "spare laptop" that I've been using has such a tiny hard drive that I haven't been able to *run* Scuttlebutt code without filling up the disk. I log into Diaspora to manually post blog updates, since I haven't successfully automated that. And I automatically post to Mastodon, and manually log in every couple of weeks when I realize that I shouldn't abandon my account to a bot. My twtxt feed is almost entirely bot activity, and I barely check in there.
Even The Practical Dev---not covered as part of the "Showdown," but the underlying software Forem is open source and has features that try to build a community---has mostly collapsed into that special kind of clickbait that perpetuates dumb arguments about whose system is "better." Spoiler alert: Their "evidence" for something being better is invariably that they're accustomed to it, because it's similar to what they were taught in school. Some things never change, I guess...
By contrast, I've been semi-active on Twitter, odd as it feels. I've stopped replying to horrible politicians, though, since "engagement" just gives them a higher profile with the algorithm. Best to just report them for encouraging self-harm, when they complain about vaccines or whatever. Though it's extremely unfortunate, since I didn't make those comments just for the catharsis. I make them partly because a reader less invested in their rhetoric either way might benefit from a contrary view grounded in fact, and partly because every post needling them diffuses the targets that they can aim at.
I'm still not on social media more than half an hour per day, though, and I still recommend keeping similar limits for all social networks. The easiest way to prevent what's now called "doom-scrolling" is to not be in a position where it's an option...
The central problem seems to be one of the things that I mentioned in that social networking showdown: Not even the people who claim to support Free Software spend much actual time on these networks, so what space isn't empty is instead filled by bots copying posts over from proprietary networks. And that sense of the community or *lack* of a community is infectious: If the only people on a network are the people talking about the network or are just blindly reposting from elsewhere, why bother? There's a small exception with Scuttlebutt: I like many of the people there, but the overwhelming majority of the actual conversations---ignoring the people using the network as a diary---are about the Scuttlebutt protocol itself and decentralized software in general.
Of course, there's a solution to all of this: Get more people off the corporate-owned networks and into these communities...who I actually want to interact with. So, I'm always prepared to return to those networks, should a bunch of readers start showing up there, for example. There just needs to be something to talk about. Of course, I also haven't abandoned them, so much as look at them less.
### Pacing Myself
Over the course of the year, I had plans to bring the [*Real Life in Star Trek*](/blog/tag/startrek) series to (nearly) a close, finish a novel, release at least one non-fiction book, launch three web services taking the business side seriously, learn animation, and get back into sewing, in addition to dealing my usual day-to-day life. As you can probably guess from the earlier discussion, most of that didn't happen. I overloaded myself, and accomplished less than if I had put off lower-priority projects until next year.
That is---and I'm being specific, here, because I want to illustrate the load problem on the chance it helps someone else catch an issue for themselves, not to dwell on failures---I never got around to building an audience for **All Around the News**, pushing to sell advertising, or adding native advertising features to the article list. Instead of building it into a self-sustaining business, I created a "good enough" toy and moved onto the next project. The novel fell apart, because the idea changed from a simple story with a central metaphor to a model for a season of television with heavy allegorical elements, and the setting didn't have the resilience to support the latter. I have a few unfinished garments cut and half-sewn. I added extra work to the *Star Trek* posts---**The Animated Series** novels, to be specific---and eventually realized that I just wasn't able to keep up.
That's just a sample, which doesn't even get to the projects that haven't seriously looked at. For example, I briefly considered creating my own streaming service with cheap and free content, which didn't get past a note about the fact that I could probably do it. My point is that I need to keep better watch over what I commit myself to doing, even just to myself. I also may need to create regular blocks of time to handle certain kinds of projects, so that I can ensure seeing some steady progress. My current "try to get something in before seven in the morning, and then see where the day takes me" approach is clearly not sufficient.
In fact, one of the reasons that I've been looking at the aforementioned new skills is to slow myself down a bit. That is, if I'm at my sewing machine, I can't stare at a screen.
## Conclusions
In last year's end-of-year post, I said the following.
> Growth takes affirmative effort and isn't something that just happens, whereas it's surprisingly easy to neglect yourself into bad habits.
That still applies, today. I often laugh/complain that technology companies will constantly and rightly tell you that "you can't improve what you don't measure," but then turn around to refuse to measure anything of importance, because they "already know" how to improve. It's not a lesson that we should take for our private lives. Do the hard work. It's worth the trouble.
Enough about me, though...well, at least until tomorrow's [developer journal](/blog/tag/devjournal) post and next Sunday's look ahead at 2022. How was *your* 2021?
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**Credits**: The header image is [President Joe Biden delivers remarks on his economic vision](https://www.flickr.com/photos/whitehouse/51131137370/) by Adam Schultz, in the public domain as a work of the United States government.