Funky Little Dæmons

The Travel Post

2023-12-31T22:39:47Z

I still haven't left California or been on a plane in almost 4 years. So much for Jet Set Emma.

January
- Santa Cruz, work off-site
May
- Fresno, rocket launch with Tripoli Central California (TCC)
October
- Helm, camping at the TCC launch
- Randsburg, camping at the Hot Nozzle Society launch at Friends of Amateur Rocketry

The car camping is new for me. But camping in a farm field in the Central Valley left me with bug bites. I'll have to do something to keep the bugs at bay there. Camping in the desert was great.

cynthia1960 and I are still planning to go to Scotland for Worldcon. Hopefully they are still not as bad as the rest of fucking TERF Island when we go.

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More on the mess we're in.

2023-11-27T06:26:48Z

Emily Gorcenski has a longish essay up on the eschatological character of today's fads in "AI". It's worth your attention.

"By the 1990s, artificial intelligence research had failed to meet any of its stated goals, but this lack of success did not impede the field from reifying Christian dominionism and reshaping themselves in the messianic tradition."

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It's Genocide, Not Queer Liberation

2023-11-17T23:26:12Z

Israel needs to keep my name out of their colonizer mouths. I do not consent to murder and genocide in the name of queer people.

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To Hell with these ghouls.

2023-11-07T21:26:02Z

Amichai Eliyahu, one of the Zionist ghouls in charge of the genocide of Palestine just called for using nuclear weapons. You all need to stop making apologies for Israel.

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Free Palestine

2023-11-06T23:29:41Z

I have to realize that there's no point at which some people will finally recognize that Israel is a settler colonialist state engaged in a war of genocide and ethnic cleansing, so I'm cleansing my timelines of those people. I hope they will at some point get a clue, but not holding out hope.

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emceeaich @ 2023-09-13T00:05:00

2023-09-13T07:06:27Z

I continue to be amazed by people thinking a Black web engineer in Florida and a ~~SF writer from Thailand~~ (edit: I have more info now and misunderstood the situation) are a bigger threat than white supremacists, but here we are.

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Some notes on fedi drama

2023-09-06T18:54:41Z

There's been a bit of noise in my part fedi/mastodon lately.

A person, self-identified as trans, arrives on a fedi instance and writes a lot of knowledgeable, lengthy threads on the long crisis of capitalism.

In one of thier posts they use a term to describe capital, that at least one mod on the instance they are on flags as "this could be read as an antisemitic slur, would you please edit that?"

The person refuses to edit it, they are ejected from the server.

That was two weeks ago.

This person no longer talks about capital and how to fight back.

Instead it's been two weeks of "fedi mods are mean girls."

It's annoying.

At the same time, I'm pretty happy on fedi.

I have the fascist instances blocked, and I have good systems for keeping it that way.

I'm going to mute said person, for a week (you can mute people besides blocking them or their instance) in hopes they get the "mean girls" rant out of their system and get back to talking liberation.

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Kanzaki Neko Hitomi: 2004 - 2023

2023-07-26T01:03:53Z

She was with me nearly a third of my life. cynthia1960 named her for the protagonist of one of the anime we were watching we we became a couple. For close to twenty years she would jump into bed after me and settle on top of or next to me, and I'd wake up with her.

I had to let her go today.

It fucking hurts.

Farewell my void empress and rest easy.

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This week

2022-03-02T22:15:36Z

My employer getting bought by a video game platform company and the web browser I used to work on becoming a Disney Princess was not on my bingo card.

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Rot in hell, Lowtax.

2021-11-20T23:53:51Z

The WisCon troll of 2008 hurt a lot of people I love and care about, and Something Awful amplified the harm they did.

Something Awful centered the privilege of (primarily young) white men and treated it as inviolate.

Good riddance, and put Lowtax on the same row of penis flatteners as Hayek and Lee Atwater.

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Flying on the farm

2021-10-22T03:12:56Z

I got to fly rockets last weekend.

Tripoli Central California has a three-day launch at an industrial farm a half-hour west of Fresno. Tripoli, and the National Association of Rocketry are organizations (I'm a member of both) that oversee launches of high power model rockets (H, I, J, K, M, N, O, and so on.)

I decided to book a hotel for the night and drive a rental down from Oakland on Friday. I had lots of Marriott points to use.

Apple Maps took me to the wrong site when I plugged in their Lat/Long, but it was near dark because of heavy traffic heading out to I5, so I drove the rest of the way into Fresno and my hotel, ordered food, and went to bed to get an early start.

Marriott upgraded me to a huge room, which, if I had any last minute work to do, would had been nice. Instead I read Harrow the Ninth in bed. I also found Tripoli's map to the site and made sure it was loaded on the phone.

Saturday morning I stopped at Dutch Bros for a large Americano and drove out to the site.

The flight line was already a couple of football fields long with everyone who had decided to camp overnight. So I got set up.

I flew Super Bonbon first, with a video camera attached, on a sparky motor. Sparky motors have metal shavings and produce a steampunk-y trail of smoke and sparks. They are fun to watch.

There's no sound, and the motor eject delay could had been a couple of seconds longer, but it was a great flight. The rocket descended on a pilot drogue to 600 before an electronic altimeter attached to the main 36" chute released.

I did not enable the recording altimeter, so I have to estimate the altitude.

I watched other launches for awhile and prepped California Stars for flight. This is a scratch built rocket. Unfortunately, its first flight was a failure. Long rockets with small fins are tricky, and even though my simulations of the rocket said it would fly stable, it got up a hundred feet, flopped around, and fell to the ground, damaging the airframe.

It's a shame because cynthia1960 had guest list passes to see Wilco play on Monday night.

I wasn't going to end the day on a failure. So I flew Big Ida. It's built from an Estes Super Big Bertha kit. I flew it on the same motor I flew California Stars on, an F20W. It flew perfectly. But I left my phone at the car, so I didn't get the flight on camera.

Ida was Cyn's first ancestor born in Oakland, hence the name.

I had another I motor and decided to fly Super Bonbon again, without the camera. It was getting late in the afternoon, the wind was picking up, so I aimed the rocket off-vertical and into the wind so it wouldn't travel as far.

It still drifted a couple thousand feet from the pad, and I was hunting for it on the ground at dusk. But I found it!

So that's three successful flights.

Tripoli, and the local NAR section LUNAR will have launches in November and December, so I'll head out to those. I've got more rocket projects underway, and will build a new version of California Stars.

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QotD: Meeting at someone's level when that level is the Ninth Circle of Hell

2021-10-19T18:06:07Z

"Manchin understands his stock portfolio, & I can't meet him where he is, because I don't have a canoe to row to his yacht." -- Damien P. Williams

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QotD: Neo-liberal Savior Syndrome

2021-10-15T17:18:21Z

"There are many ways to help fix a state. And running for governor is not even in the top 10." -- Lyz Lenz

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emceeaich @ 2021-09-03T18:04:00

2021-09-04T01:07:51Z

I had decided, after starting my transition, that Christianity is redeemable.

The past 18 months has demonstrated that Christianity is not redeemable, but in fact is a cult centered on death and genocide and I can no longer recommend its practice.

To paraphrase Camus, if there is a god, we are obligated to kill them.

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QotD

2021-08-31T04:13:48Z

"How the fuck can there be anti vaccine "witches?" If you disagree with binding an invisible malignant entity into a single drop of potion that seals a subject's blood against the full force of that very same entity's curse then you are not and can never be a witch you're just a karen who buys rocks" -- source

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"Sixty-nine Dollar Dick Rocket" is the name of my Van Halen cover band.

2021-08-26T23:43:32Z

I'm tempted to buy a couple of these and sneak them into the stock on display at Good Vibes on San Pablo.

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QotD: To live outside the law you must write your own garbage collector routine

2021-08-17T18:25:08Z

" A systems programmer will know what to do when society breaks down, because the systems programmer already lives in a world without law." -- James Mickens

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OoCQotD

2021-08-13T17:21:48Z

"[B]ut we were constantly seeing Michael Stipe around town and had to pretend everything was normal.”

Context is losing its religion with Driver Eight.

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OoCQotD

2021-07-31T20:38:54Z

"i don't know how to build a rocket engine, let me make it harder"

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emceeaich @ 2021-07-14T16:24:00

2021-07-14T23:26:50Z

To paraphrase Mel Brooks, tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when a fascist explodes in a fountain of their own shit.

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emceeaich @ 2021-07-11T10:58:00

2021-07-11T18:18:02Z

I'm deeply annoyed when I read grown men write things like, "Sir Richard Branson is the first person to build and fly his own rocket plane to the edge of space." What is it with conflating having obscene wealth with having done the hard work of building a spacecraft?

Yesterday was a milestone, we had guests in the house.

We played a fun co-op game, Ravine, where you band together to survive on a deserted island until rescue, and Caracassonne.

I'm waiting on the custom decals to arrive so I can finish Super Bonbon, the rocket I'm flying in the desert in a couple of weekends to get my 1st level high power rocketry certificate. Super Bonbon is a LOC IV with a highly gay paint job. I'll post pictures of the finished rocket soon, but here's the decal.

Today, Lydia Bennett Tribble is at the vet for teeth cleaning and I feel so bad for putting her in her carrier after morning snuggles.

This week we go carless. The lease is at an end and I'll turn the Bolt over to the Chevy dealer in Fremont. I'm renting a camper van for the trip to the desert.

Last week was people, people, people. Cyn and I went to wildiris' birthday gathering in a park in Berkeley, our niblings' band's show in the outer Sunset, and a bunch of us met in the office on Tuesday (the first time I've seen my workers IRL since I started this job.)

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A long weekend

2021-06-03T05:02:32Z

I was needing a break from work, and even without a WisCon to travel to, I decided to take a couple of days of vacation around Memorial Day. Everyone at my company gets a pool of a month of PTO days to use.

I needed new prescription lenses so Friday I took BART into the City to go to Jin's with my Kaiser script. I found two sets of frames I liked for my distance lenses and they cut the lenses to fit in-house and I had my new glasses in a half hour. My computer lenses are getting the blue light filter coating so they'll ship to me when they are ready.

Then we went to the Apple Store at Union Square and Cyn got a new iPad. The staff aren't in a rush, which is nice, so Cyn got to try a lot of choices and got something she liked. She was also able to trade up her old phone.

Saturday I picked up brats from Taylor's Sausage for the Memorial Day cookout. We're vaxxed, and friends are too, so we'd decided to cook out in our side yard.

I got to see a bunch of my old Linden Lab friends Saturday afternoon outside at a bar in Fruitvale. It was so good to hang out in person and hug!

Sunday, Cyn and I got haircuts and did more shopping for the cookout. OMG, there was a person in line ahead of us at the Smart and Final complaining "why won't the homeless go work at Amazon."

Monday was the cookout, friends and neighbors dropped by, and we realized our building was majority queer!

The brats were great, the beers that the friendly owner of the Good Hop on Telegraph suggested were tasty, and Cynthia's mac and cheese was a crowd pleaser.

I got to meet someone I've been following on Twitter awhile who is a cool programmer and style maven. I introduced her to Hitomi and Json. They gave her lots of love (she can't have a cat at her place in the City.)

It was decided to have a Pride Brunch later this month.

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Disabled for Accessiblity in Space

2021-05-28T08:26:12Z

There's an organization for disabled people working in space science, astronomy, planetary science and related fields: Disabled for Accessibility in Space.

"This is a place to be ourselves, trade advice, talk about life with a disability, offer and ask for support, share successes in our careers and lives, and meet others in the community. Our goal for this organization is to be a platform that can lift up disabled voices by first supporting each other and building on that to advocate for better accessibility throughout our respective fields. Our membership is made up of researchers, educators, engineers, and science communicators working in astronomy, planetary science, geology, and related fields. Members from all career stages are welcome, from those who are interested in entering a space field, to early career, to retired or no longer working."

Please share with your networks.

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QotD

2021-05-17T07:11:42Z

"Since the Mars trilogy, I’ve been describing history as a struggle between science and capitalism." -- Kim Stanley Robinson in Crooked Timber symposium on his novel Ministry for the Future

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QotD

2021-05-14T17:29:05Z

"I met a woman from Illinois who said her grandson thinks the vaccine will chip him. But she said, “Chet, life isn’t that interesting.” And it sounds like he’ll get chipped in two weeks. Good luck, Chet." -- Lyz Lenz

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