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…not actually a full-on review post, I just couldn’t think of a pithier title, when the actual subject is:

The weird experience of reading/watching two different things right in a row that both went “btw, Hell is official canon here, people are actively being tortured, ok moving on, none of our heroes are gonna have any concern about that ever again.”

One was the recent movie Genie, where, yeah, it was a throwaway gag. And the movie overall was one of those “MC gets infinite wishes, never even thinks to drop by the nearest hospital and start wishing cures on people” stories. So you can’t expect much.

(MC does wish for his greedy boss’s fortune to be donated to a housing nonprofit! I was delighted when that came up! Then…he time-travels and retcons it, and never re-wishes it. Whyyy.)

But still! This happens:

Careless statement of “I wish you would go to hell”
(This part is fine, it’s a genie story, gotta get in a valuable lesson about being careful what you wish for)
Hasty “I wish he would come back from hell!”
Victim reappears, sooty and singed, understandably ticked off
So now we know some form of eternal flaming torment is real, AND there’s no foolproof filter on who goes there, AND your genie pal has the power to free people from it
None of this is ever mentioned or thought about again ever!

Nobody involved in making this movie ever second-guessed that…?

—

Anyway, the other incident is Camp Damascus, the “what if Chuck Tingle decided to write serious horror” novel. (For a YA level of “serious horror.” Which is about the level I like to deal with, so that worked for me.)

Real mixed feelings about this book. It has good points, it has bad points. Not mad that I spent my time reading it, but it did kinda feel like the first draft of a better book.

But, uh. It sure is A Choice to write a novel about the literalized horrors of religious abuse and anti-gay conversion therapy, and have part of the worldbuilding be “some form of Hell is real! Demons are real! They really do put people through agonizing horror-movie torture scenarios! Just not to gay people.”

The MC spends most of the book afraid of these demons doing horrible brutal murderous things to her, and/or the people she loves.

Then in the climactic showdown, demons do even more horrible brutal things to a bunch of camp counselors, and she’s just…unmoved.

Because, hey, the demons were only threatening gay people because of the church’s control. And now they’re free! So now their standards for “whose limbs do we get to rip off” are…uh, MC explicitly doesn’t know what their standards are…but she doesn’t spend any time stressing over whether the new victims deserve it any more than the old ones did.

To be clear! This is not part of a reveal that the counselors were one-dimensional evil!

The MC is friends with a former counselor. Who’s also gay, and has also been living with the threat of demon-torture. They’ve had heartfelt conversations about how, yes, he did bad things at the camp, but he can’t be too hard on himself, he was being manipulated by a cult, and he can make up for it now that he’s free.

How many of the present-day counselors are in the same situation? Who knows! And nobody left in the book has any interest in finding out.

Someone could write a dissertation about which “assumptions baked into this kind of Christian worldview” Camp Damascus takes the time to unpack, compared to which ones it just…doesn’t question or second-guess at all.

I won’t — I’m not nearly invested enough to do the rereading it would take to get all the details right — just saying that in general, wow, there is A Lot here, if anyone was interested.

—

Gonna wrap this up with a Hazbin Hotel reference.

Obviously it’s not the first story to do “okay, some form of Hell is canon real, now let’s actually stop and dig into the implications.” But it’s almost certainly the first one to drop the banger line “if Hell is forever, then Heaven must be a lie” in the middle of a song, and I think that’s beautiful.

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In that last post about pruning my tag-wrangling assignments, I mentioned the “got 1 fic, the fandom tag got canonized, then nobody ever used it again” fandoms.

Then it occurred to me that there’s an even smaller type: the “nobody used it again, and the original author deleted, so the fandom tag is still around but has 0 works” fandoms.

If there’s an automatic way to find how many of these you wrangle, I don’t know what it is. So I just did a pass through my fandoms with 0 unfilterable/unwrangleable tags attached, and double-checked the work counts.

You know how AO3 will give you a “Retry later” error if you try to load too many pages in a row? Yeah, it made me take at least four breaks while I was going through this process.

The payoff is, now I’m down to 1338 fandoms. Knocked a full 62 empty tags off the list.

(Their tags are still canonical, but they won’t show up on the Unassigned Fandoms list, until/unless some user posts another fanwork that makes them 1-use again.)

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About a month ago, TW chairs announced a new limit: each wrangler should have a maximum of 450 assigned fandoms. Of the 400+ wranglers in the committee, only 3 actually had more than 450 fandoms, so for most people this was going to make no difference in their lives at all.

So, hey, I’m one of the 3! Figured I’d write about it.

To be clear, the limit is for admin reasons. There hasn’t been any allegation of “you’re falling behind in wrangling because you have too many fandoms to keep up with.” Not to me, and I have no reason to believe it’s happened to either of the others, either.

The thing is, my habit for a while now has been “check the Unassigned Fandoms list for webcomic fandoms with less than 5 works, pick them up, tidy up whatever tags they have, and then just…keep them.”

( I’ll take tiny fandoms in other areas of personal interest, too... )

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I mentioned earlier that having only partially done the Orion questionnaire, I was somehow now destined to keep coming back to write in my journal even after NaBloPoMo was over, like the blogging analogue of the siren’s call of the Trevi Fountain.¹

I find myself with a quiet moment here today and only multitasking less than a dozen other things, so why not move it along a little further as well?

If you could make pancakes with anyone living or dead, who would it be?
I’m going to make the assumption that the question is asking about someone I can’t readily do this with today if I wish, so the easy answers of making and sharing breakfast with my spouse and children which would always be my first and everyday desire, or even my own parents, should be stated but for our purposes here set aside for the sake of the deeper “what if…” implied here. I think my grandfather would be my choice. As a young boy I spent many hours with him, learning a lot about his technical expertise and generally looking up to him and spending time with him. It would be nice as an adult to be able to have pancakes (or whatever) with him and be able to share our perspectives now about life and everything looking back on our experiences after all this time.
What are some of your favorite words?
你們 (nǐmen—in Chinese they have a plural form of “you,” distinct from the singular— nǐ 你—which is brilliant to make it clear whether you mean “you” as the one person you’re addressing, or the group of people you’re with; there’s yet another form of “you” when addressing a large audience as well), scrumptious, kerfuffle, ephemeral, gazebo, skullduggery, quux, firebottle, frobnitz.
Who are some of your heroes, heroines, real or fictional?
The previous question revealed one of mine already. My father has always been another of my real-life heroes especially as I was growing up when it seemed to me there was nothing he couldn’t do. Even as I got old enough to realize he was a regular mortal, I started to appreciate the choices he had to make and how he sacrificed to support his family, always putting others first with patience and compassion that was a role model to me to try to aspire to be like.
What is something new you’ve done recently?
Maybe not extremely recently but I’ve been expanding my range a bit on the microcontrollers I’ve been playing with in recent years. Back in the early 2000s I was exclusively using PIC chips but now it’s all Arduinos and Raspberry Pis these days. And I’ve been dabbling a little more in trying to appreciate Anime a bit more.
What’s the wildest thing you’ve experienced or witnessed in nature?
Earthquakes, monsoon season, and a really good tropical thunderstorm with lightning bolts striking way too close for comfort certainly remind one to respect Mother Nature and realize how small we humans are when out in the elements by ourselves.
It’s late afternoon on a summer Saturday, you’re sitting with your feet in a cool creek and someone hands you the perfect beverage. What is it?
Right now, it would typically be a Diet Coke, I’m embarrassed to admit, but I need to cut down on that, so let’s say a lemonade.

I hate giving interviews.
—Bobby Deol

__________
¹Which I have, actually, tossed a lira coin into a few years ago but that return trip remains on my “to do” list.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: Once in Royal David's City—church soloist

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Continued liveblog as I read Seven Seas’ new print edition of PSOH, and make sporadic comparisons to the original Tokyopop translation.

Chapters 1-3 were covered here. You can pick up the books with my affiliate links here. The rest of this post is the notes I microblogged in a Mastodon thread and a Bluesky thread.

( Dreizehn and Dragon and Dice, oh my... )

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Just got the first two volumes of Seven Seas’ new PSOH Collector’s Edition. (Here’s my list of the series on bookshop.org, for anyone who wants to buy them in a way that gives a kickback to (a) local bookstores, (b) me, and (c) not Amazon.)

I already had the whole series in the original Tokyopop edition, but wow, the print quality on this new release is such an upgrade. The lineart, the toning, it has so many fine details and subtle gradations that didn’t get to shine nearly this much in the first version.

It’s also a brand-new translation of the text. I’m resisting the urge to do a whole line-by-line comparison — I want to just read and enjoy the stories, without looking back-and-forth between two books on every single page — but I keep getting curious and spot-checking individual lines/panels…

Guess I’m liveblogging this now, huh.

(Thread on Mastodon, duplicate thread on Bluesky, I made those by copying this post as I wrote it, bit-by-bit.)

( Dream and Despair and Daughter, under the cut )

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THE world of computing has no shortage of tribal factions, some of them more fanatical than others. Emacs vs vi, Windows vs Linux, which programming language is the One and Only to rule them all, the list of things we will pile up hills of old CDROMs and unread manuals to then die on are endless.

Some people are content to leave these choices to more pragmatic matters of selecting the right tool for the job at hand, and quietly allowing others to do the same.¹ Others, of course, see their choice of language (*cough*)Rust(*cough*) as superior to all others and are baffled why anyone still bothers using any other language. There are many technical reasons why that is absurd regardless of how amazing that language’s strengths are, of course, but that attitude is kind of interesting psychologically. Why are humans driven to be so territorial about things like this?

And we, of course, see this with Linux distributions² as well. Sometimes I’m amazed Linux got as popular as it has with all the in-fighting between the distro camps (or, perhaps, it owes some of that to the competition created there).

But in terms of smugness, it’s hard to beat the legendary Arch Linux tribe and their viral tagline, often injected unnecessarily into conversations, “I use Arch, BTW.”

And I get the appeal of Arch, personally, if not the attitude. I like working closer to the bare metal of the computer, given my history of starting there and working upward to higher-level languages and operating systems as I learned. I like administrating systems and have even written a device driver or two of my own. I’m not afraid of getting my hands dirty and don’t need a computing “appliance” or someone else to keep it working for me.

On the other hand, I don’t have the spare time at the moment to have to do that all the time. I’d prefer it to be a hobby, not a daily necessity.

But nonetheless, I took the plunge a couple of years ago to “use Arch BTW.”

Purists may object, saying that I didn’t truly use Arch. I did, briefly, and it was fine, but eventually settled on an Arch derivative called Garuda Linux as my daily driver on my desktop system (while my laptop stayed with Pop_OS! that came factory-installed on it).³

It was fine, I liked the fact that the package manager was called pacman, so creativity points to them for that. Generally, it was Linux, and it worked, and I was happy with it. I could bend it to my will more or less as I needed to.

However, over time, the cracks started to show in ways that got too much in the way for me to want to use it every day.

Arch is a “bleeding-edge” kind of system where people tend to always keep the system patched to the latest versions of every package and every system update. But unfortunately that’s not just a tendency, that’s essentially a requirement. If you go too long without updating, things get unhappy.

And unlike other distros, you can’t easily do selective updates or backrev individual packages and apps. You must upgrade everything on the system every time, always, and often. Which means, quite frequently I’d find that someone had made a change somewhere that I had to accept and now my system was broken until someone fixed it.

And that’s really ok if you’re running a Linux system because you like experimenting with computers and aren’t relying on it to be stable to get real work accomplished. But I was. I had personal stuff to do, and research experiments to run and couldn’t afford random downtime arriving like lightning strikes out of the blue.

So a couple of months ago I decided I just had enough and wiped the whole system to go back to my actual favorite operating system, that has always been my favorite since I discovered it as a teenager (i.e., when dinosaurs still roamed the Earth).

Unix.

Specifically, BSD. Specifically specifically, FreeBSD.

Yeah, there’s a bit of a snarkiness there too, but usually it’s a lot more low-key because it’s a smaller, and I think friendlier, community. The only memorable tag-line I remember being viral over time was an old USENET signature line that went something like, “Linux is for people who hate Windows. BSD is for people who love Unix.” (Again, I have more to say about what it is compared to Linux that’s long enough for its own post but for now it’s not Linux but is similar in that it’s also—like Linux—an open-source operating system based on the older Unix operating system but legally and technically a separate codebase and distinct from it.)

After getting it all set up and having moved my data back on to the system, getting reacquainted with ZFS, and settling in, I’ve been pretty happy with it. “They” say BSD isn’t a great choice for a desktop and is best suited as a server OS. That’s not entirely wrong (and to be fair, the same is said of Linux, but a lot more has been invested in getting Linux working better in that space), but it seems to be good enough for me to meet my needs. And it’s better than I recall it being last time I used it.

Rock-solid and stable, too, which is what I need, while also being an OS that’s not remotely interested in holding my hand with administrating a Unix-like system, which I also like.

And having got that all working with version 14.3 of the system, I see that they just released 15.0. So maybe after Christmas I’ll upgrade it. Maybe. I am in the middle of a metric ton of work on my research so maybe it’ll be Christmas, 2026.

There are two major products that came out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don’t believe this to be a coincidence.
—Jeremy S. Anderson
UNIX systems administrator

__________
¹Even if—for whatever reason—they insist on running Windows.*
²If you’re not familiar what a Linux “distribution” is, or why it matters here, I think I have another entry in mind that explains that a little more but for now just consider that Linux, as a computer operating system, is packaged up in a wide variety of different “flavors” from different vendors to distribute to you, each with a little different look, feel, collection of apps pre-installed, etc.
³Mostly because that (Ubuntu-derived) distro is made by the hardware manufacturer, with their hardware in mind, which, for laptops, saves a fair number of headaches.

__________
*Although TempleOS remains one of life's unsolved mysteries, I admit.

Current Mood: productive

Tags:

computers,
geekery

Red Dwarf

Erin Watches/Reads: Genie (2023), Camp Damascus

Fandom-dropping update: A secret fourth strategy

Tag wrangling diaries: This fandom-dropping process

Orion II

Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition, post 2 (volume 1, chapters 4-6)

Erin Reads: Pet Shop of Horrors, Collector’s Edition, post 1 (volume 1, chapters 1-3)

BSD BTW

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