This episode of Rev Left Radio sums up most of my views around the recent election pretty well: on Corbyn, the media, Brexit, limits of our electoral system, where to focus for these next five years.
Author: Neil Mather
Really true – it’s important not to become closed off. There is a wealth of ideas and values to be gathered from around the world, and that’s the beauty of the Internet, allowing us to connect to those. The mix is important. Politically speaking at present in the UK, with a national government that doesn’t represent me at all, taking us out of a federation of countries that I love, the local feels like the most hopeful site of action for now – but local actions infused with ideas from around the world.
Freeman’s Wood in Lancaster, painted over a ‘Private Keep Out’ sign.
They hang the man +
Flog the woman
That steals the goose
From off the common
But let the greater
Villain loose that steals
The common from the goose
I’ve been off social media for a few weeks. I don’t think I really missed it; I don’t think it missed me that much, either. Logging back in to the Fediverse, everything seems much as it was.
I think I’d like to read one of those popsci histories in 20 years from now, of what happened with social software. Like I used to read about the early days of the Internet. Heck, this time I might even know some of the people in the book.
So December was busy. I moved properly into Lancaster. I moved out of London in September and was staying with family for a few months nearby. I am really liking being in Lancaster so far. I am renting a small terraced house for a fraction of the price of a cupboard in London. I feel solvent again. I can see the Lake District from the park. I work from home.
There’s a real alternative culture here in Lancaster I’m finding. I’m joining the makerspace around the corner from me, and I went to an electronic music open mic night that was absolutely banging. There’s like 3 vegan/vegetarian cafes.
There’s a workers co-op in town selling all the hippie produce I tend to buy. There’s a music co-op. There’s an eco co-housing place not too far away. The next town along is Preston, with all its Preston Model shenanigans going on.
The North-West is a wild place if you’re interested in the history of labour and capitalism. And now it’s a bit of a lightning rod of fucked-up late-stage class politics. At least Lancaster is one brick that has stayed red as the Red Wall is falling down.
I feel back to my roots, but I am far from being a Workington Man. Let’s see how things transpire. I want to be close to my family for a while. And while I’m here, let’s make the most of it. To paraphrase the saw – if you can’t change your town, then change your town.
With the monumental fuckup of the recent election, I feel like a local, community focus is the best place to focus and make a difference for the short-term.
In at the deep end! Reading your posts has made me realise (remember?) how poor the emacs onboarding experience is. I wish I’d blogged about it when I started up with it again – I can’t remember what I thought about it at the time. The terminology certainly doesn’t help – a lot of it comes from before other terminology became common (copy/paste, window/tab, etc), and there seems to be some resistance to change emacs to match.
I think one very helpful thing to do would be to display the GUI menu – if you press SPC T m (space then T then m) it will toggle the menu bar on and off. That is a fault of Spacemacs – they disable it by default as they say they are keyboard-focused. (I don’t know if spacemacs is the best beginning experience, I just went with it for the vim bindings!). But with the menu bar you should be able to find easily many of the things you want to do, along with their keybindings for future reference.
The main config file is the .spacemacs hidden file in your home directory. You can get to quickly from within Spacemacs by pressing SPC f e d. If you set the value of dotspacemacs-startup-banner to nil, it will hide the big logo on the splash screen. (You can press SPC f e R to reload it without restarting Spacemacs). Also if you just click on [Release Notes] it will hide that. There’s a list of Recent files and Projects below those two things.
The config file is written in Emacs Lisp. I found this pretty confusing for a while! But now, I also like that too, and am teaching myself Lisp. Perhaps I have brainwashed myself 😀
It’s good to read your posts about your experience, Frank. There’s no denying it, Emacs is not easy to start with, and it is good to document why. For me it has been worth persevering. But I haven’t used Sublime Text, VSCode, Atom for any long period of time, however, so I can’t compare and contrast.
I think I would like some kind of virtual experience where I have my own Memory Palace, the method of loci, the visual virtual space in your head where you walk through as you recall things. But not just for recall, for construction too. I would invite other people in and they help me build it and I help on theirs too, we build them together.
Some kind of mashup at the intersection of hypermedia systems like HyperCard, MOOs like LambdaMOO, commonplace books, blogs, microblogs, personal wikis.
I wonder if this is some terrain where Spritely is going? That would be rad.
HyperCard was inspired by an acid trip.
I think this stage of development should be factored in to the SDLC.
(h/t to Panda for telling me about HyperCard)
I saw David Thomas Broughton play in Lancaster tonight, supported by Bell Lungs. They were both great.
It was the 15 year anniversary of Broughton’s album The Complete Guide to Insufficiency. I saw him play 15 years ago in Leeds when I was at university.
I wondered where those 15 years had gone.
Anyway, it was a good show.