vdso
I've been messing around with nix because I like the idea of having declarative and reproducible dev environments. Running ldd on a simple app in a nix shell listed the following dynamic links:
[nix-shell:~]$ ldd $(which bash)
linux-vdso.so.1 (0x00007ffc4809e000)
libreadline.so.8 => /nix/store/xxcf5gwyn5pldv4b4wa2jw6vqg7v55y6-readline-8.2p10/lib/libreadline.so.8 (0x00007f6255a37000)
libhistory.so.8 => /nix/store/xxcf5gwyn5pldv4b4wa2jw6vqg7v55y6-readline-8.2p10/lib/libhistory.so.8 (0x00007f6255a29000)
libncursesw.so.6 => /nix/store/z7nr6aqlzv51pk5ar8bgzg2alfqvi8fd-ncurses-6.4.20221231/lib/libncursesw.so.6 (0x00007f62559b3000)
libdl.so.2 => /nix/store/3dyw8dzj9ab4m8hv5dpyx7zii8d0w6fi-glibc-2.39-52/lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00007f62559ae000)
libc.so.6 => /nix/store/3dyw8dzj9ab4m8hv5dpyx7zii8d0w6fi-glibc-2.39-52/lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007f62557b7000)
/nix/store/3dyw8dzj9ab4m8hv5dpyx7zii8d0w6fi-glibc-2.39-52/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /nix/store/3dyw8dzj9ab4m8hv5dpyx7zii8d0w6fi-glibc-2.39-52/lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f6255a93000)
These mostly refer to nix store objects, but I was curious about:
linux-vdso.so
vdso is a method the kernel uses to speed up system calls from user space by linking a library of system calls into every user space app, but I didn't know this.
To investigate this unknown library I typed 'linux-vdso.so' into my browser forgetting my tridactyl plugin treats any search string that sounds like a URL into a destination address and my browser took me here:
I'm not sure why someone thought this was necessary, but I like it.
m's kitchen
I wanted to find some new sourdough recipes, both to wake up my starter and to use some of the ingredients crowding my freezer and cupboards. Specifically I wanted to use the old can of pumpkin puree we bought last November, the frozen blueberries Suzanne gave us when she left for Sweden, and the overpriced little bin of candied ginger I bought in duress which is now in the way of everything else (including the big bag of candied ginger I found later for a much more reasonable price at gross out)
After going through a bunch of shitty SEO recipe sites, I found a few of interest and I somehow stumbled on a youtube channel which sent me down a rabbit hole.
Let me introduce you to M's kitchen. featuring a collection of savory and sweet bread recipes.
These videos have a kind of Japanese craftsman vibe to them. There's a word in Japanese, shokunin that describes the kind of careful striving towards perfection. I've featured these sorts of videos on my webpage before, highlighting the ritualistic Japanese process of making charcoal, paper, chalk, ink pens, and pottery. I went through my feed to link to these videos here but discovered they had all been taken down, consumed in the internet dumpster fire.
I don't know much about the person behind M's kitchen. All the videos are marked as 3 years old. She has an instagram link in the description, but I can't view any facebook owned links, so I don't know if it's active.
She makes each of her breads by hand with a standard method. The melon bread is folded in a particular way and the top is scored with six lines just like you'd see in a shop. The ham and cheese rolls are rolled, folded, cut, and inverted in a way which suggests that she learned it working at a bakery.
The videos don't have a soundtrack and aren't condensed in a way that hides the effort required. You never see her face, only her plump hands, the hands of a baker that loves baked goods. I can recommend these videos if you're looking at excuses to try some baking.
I made a note of the URL so I could return to it later and when it came time to bake I decided to load up the channel on my phone. A search for "m's kitchen" returned this a different Japanese baker - with recipes that seemed OK but weren't as good as the channel I was looking for. If you look at those links, the only difference is the tag: 'mskitchen9332' vs 'mskitchen4740'.
Curious, I did a youtube search for "m's kitchen" and quickly backed away because the internet is a dumpster fire and youtube in particular, is a horror show. But after deciding to do a write-up, I went back and picked through all the ads, shorts, and suggestions to join the Nazi party to investigate all the "m's kitchen" channels.
- This m's kitchen channel covers Indian food. It looks good, it's just not what I'm looking for.
- This m's kitchen channel has 10 videos of Japanese recipes with a cutesy xylophone heavy soundtrack (a big red flag).
- This m's kitchen channel has 5 videos of greasy American food with cutesy soundtracks
- Each video in this m's kitchen channel shows dozens of household and kitchen gadgets, unboxing, and food(?). It uses cutesy soundtracks. I think I'm either too old or not enough of a capitalist to understand the appeal.
- This m's kitchen channel has short Japanese recipes interspersed with political council meetings(?). The recipes are aggressively short and feature cutsey soundtracks.
All the channels with soundtracks are bad. It's almost as if these people know their content is otherwise too weak to invoke the appropriate emotional response. I have similarly strong opinions about the way reality television is edited.
I don't know what the phrase "m's kitchen" means to an Asian person. A search for "m's kitchen" on duck duck go brought up several local Chinese restaurants. When I searched for "m's kitchen Tokyo" it brought up several facebook links I was unable to follow.
On a whim I did a search for "n's kitchen" and it brought up a bunch of Thai food with some Japanese and Chinese recipe channels.
"o's kitchen" brings up African and American food channels.
"p's kitchen" was inconclusive, but I was growing tired.
By the time I reached "q's kitchen" I was too irritated by youtube's SEO bullshit to continue.
So in conclusion:
- Never browse youtube. It is a mostly horrible cesspool.
- Never put anything of value on youtube. Copyright no longer serves to motivate people to produce things - only for rentseekers to steal from the public domain.
- Videos with background music are almost certainly awful
- Videos titled "X's kitchen" where X is a letter of the western alphabet are racially segregated(?)
- Shokunin is delightful to watch.
Here's what I made:
The Butter Incident
I suspect everyone has an Apollo 13 moment where a serious problem arises requiring ingenuity, courage, and a cool demeanor, but not everyone is able to rise to the challenge. I faced my own personal apollo 13 with bravery, and dare I say heroism?
The Incident
My mom had a surgery, so I drove out to the valley to visit for a few days. In early September California was experiencing a heat wave, so I spent most of my time indoors baking bread. I'd already baked two loaves of banana bread with raspberry and almonds and a much less sweet, sourdough loaf with cranberries, the rest of the raspberries, and almond-chocolate toffee. On the morning of the incident I started two more batches of sourdough; a plain white loaf for sandwiches, and a double batch of sourdough english muffins.
By 7pm it looked like the english muffin mix was ready to be cooked, and I decided I had enough time to finish them before bed. To minimize the time I spent waiting for the muffins to cook, I loaded my mom's giant industrial gas stove with all three of her cast iron skillets, turned on the fume hood, and lit the burners.
The final step of preparing english muffins is to fry them in a skillet with butter like a pancake. In the interest of speed, instead of cutting a slice of butter into the pan I just picked up the lump and rubbed it into the hot pan.
Cooking commenced and english muffins were lining up on the cooling rack beside the stove. I went to butter the furthest skillet and the lump of butter, about half the size of my fist, squirted from between my fingers, bounced off the back of the oven, and fell into the inexplicably wide gap between the oven and the back wall.
Perhaps my reaction to this calamity wasn't as cool as Jack Swigert's on Apollo 13 when he reported the explosion that blew a hole in the side of their ship with:
"Houston we have a problem."
My reaction was a deep, mournful,
"OH NOOOOOO!"
Shamara came in to see what was wrong and left cackling.
The Problem
The butter was nearly as wide as the gap through which it fell. It was in the corner beneath a mounting plate for the electrical supply, and behind the rear foot plate, which made it inaccessible from beneath and nearly inaccessible from above.
The oven was hot, I'd been baking and nearly all the burners were burning under hot iron skillets.
The oven was too heavy to shift. My mom said it took two men to line it up and slide it into position. I just needed to shift it a few inches to get my arm back there, but even that was impossible.
Just like the apollo engineers I had to find a creative solution.
"Does mom have a trash grabber?!"
Shamara left while I hurried to finish the rest of the muffins and reappeared with a grabber. It was too short to reach the floor behind the oven and the grabby end was too wide to fit between the cabinet and the electrical socket plate.
"Where are your yardsticks?!"
I'd hoped to push the butter into a more advantageous position or reach it from beneath the oven, but this only revealed the existence of the invisible plate covering the rear foot and illustrated how the lump of butter was too large to slide underneath.
My mom came in and saw all the equipment on the counter.
"Just leave it and try to get it in the morning."
I couldn't. For all I knew it would be a puddle in the morning or too soft to grip.
The Solution
"Where's your masking tape?!"
My mom was already going to bed. I was working with a deadline.
"It's in the pantry near the sewing stuff."
I took that and the two longest dowels from her closet. My first thought was to tape a fork with some bent tines to her yardstick, but I remembered my mom has some weirdly specific utensils for picking up barbecue meat. They probably have a name among barbecue aficionados, but I don't know what it is or why my mom owns them.
Update: I looked it up, they're called 'meat hooks'.
The handle on the meat hook was thick, so I had to tape them to a narrow dowel to ensure I could rotate it in the tight space. I used a lot of tape because I didn't want to lose something else in that gap.
Then, leaning over the hot oven wearing a headlamp, with my face pressed against the back wall, I lowered the dowel contraption and carefully spun the skewer until it pierced the butter. Thankfully the core of the lump of butter was still cool enough to retain some integrity, and I was able to lift it out of the narrow space.
My mom came in and laughed when she saw me holding the makeshift spear with a cube of dusty butter on the end.
"Just throw it away and go to bed.
"No! I need to document this!"
Now this account has been published I expect movie executives to start lining up for the opportunity to make my heroic adventure into a feature film, possibly with Keanu Reeves or Dwayne the Rock Johnson as me, Dame Judy Dench as my mom, Danny Devito as the lump of butter, and Steve Buscemi in drag as my sister.
Na consumes media
I don't like the idea of defining myself by the products I consume, but I want to share stuff that bring me joy, so here you go; stuff I've been reading and watching which has left a mark.
Hound 2024
I didn't expect much from the comic book publisher Mad Cave, but this story caught me by surprise. Written by Sam Freeman and Sam Romesburg and illustrated by Rodrigo Vázquez, Hound is a war story set during WWI exploring the ways war makes beasts of men. The plot is unexpected, and the rough artwork grew on me after a while (kind of like Moore's From Hell). I generally dislike war comics - this was an exception.
Delicious in Dungeon
This is an anime made by Studio Trigger based on the popular manga by Ryoko Kui. It concerns a group of D&D adventurers delving into a magical dungeon to rescue their friend. To move quickly they decide not to bring any food and to cook and eat the monsters they kill along the way.
This is a good story with humor and nice art, but it could have been shorter. The plot reaches a natural conclusion and then kind of drifts for a while until Ryoko contrives to keep it going. It's entertaining, I just think it would have been better if they resolved one plot line and continued with a sequel. A lot of manga series do this when they start to get popular. It's a curse of the genre.
Mickey and Donald Mickey's Craziest Adventures 2024
This is a Fantagraphics publication! Written by Lewis Trondheim and illustrated by Nicolas Keramidas, it's just a collection of one-page Mickey Mouse comics. I generally dislike saccharin Disney comics, but this collection was entertaining. Mainly I'm impressed that Fantagraphics would publish a Disney cartoon. Who approached who? How did they work out the licensing?
After looking into it, I discovered there are a bunch of Disney comics published by Fantagraphics. Apparently they started reprinting famous artists in 2011. This particular comic is contemporary, so I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe Disney doesn't realize they own Marvel?
Twin Peaks season 3
We decided to re-watch Twin Peaks. This is my second viewing and I like it better and better. Knowing how the third season ends makes it easier to stomach the meandering path Lynch takes to get there. The humor is surprising. I laugh at this series more than most comedies.
Twin Peaks isn't niche, but there are people who haven't seen it. I couldn't ask someone to spend fifty hours watching a television series, but if you're curious, I think it's worth it. My only reservation is with the latter half of season 2 where Lynch stops directing, and the people brought in to replace him don't understand his humor.
Also, I should mention, though it's not strictly necessary to watch all the episodes before season 3, it's recommended. Part of the enjoyment is watching the characters and actors mature and develop.
Here's an example; Bobby, the high-school prick from the first season is now a sheriff in Twin Peaks. Seeing his bafflement at the insanity and idiocy around him is hilarious.
Batman the Animated Series
The 1992 series by Bruce Timm and Paul Dini is considered a classic, but I avoided it for a long time because there was just too much. This was a mistake, it's great. The quality has declined from the first few episodes, and it's getting campy, but it's still great.
Because batman operates at night, the series was painted (and often airbrushed) on black cells which hurts my brain when I think about how the artists animated illuminated geometry. I captured a few frames from the video to illustrate the artwork, and I'm surprised and impressed by how clean the lines are.
Her Forbidden Knight 1998
This is a novel by Rex Stout of Nero Wolfe fame. I found it at the local library, read a few pages standing in the aisle, and then took it home. The origins of this book are mysterious. The copyright is 1998 but if you look into his bibliography it was his first published novel, serialized in 1913. Apparently this is the first time it's been pulled together into a book.
I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. Even for his first novel, Stout has a strangely cozy writing style and puts together a reasonable plot. It's about a group of friends who hang out in a New York hotel lobby playing pool. Mistakenly dubbed the 'erring knights', they adopt the roles of Arthurian legend. The story revolves around their efforts to win the affection of the fair maiden working at the teletype booth. A product of 1913, there is some crazy slang and outdated modes of thought, but to Stout's credit, they are barely problematic.
This book is so old it's out of copyright and you can read it online, though I'd still suggest starting with the Nero Wolfe stories (The League of Frightened Men is a good starting point.). Incidentally, I did an image search to find the cover of the book I had. The image I found has the same white semi-circular mark in the upper left hand corner of the cover which tells me it's not a printing error as I assumed. I don't know what it is.
Earthborne Rangers
Earthborne Rangers is a cooperative card-based board game. You can see an enthusiastic review here.
Joe, our board gaming friend has been teasing us with this for a while. I think he delayed introducing the game because he wanted to buy more expansions, but he made a tactical mistake when he brought it over to show off. I convinced him to start the campaign.
I've only played three sessions so can't recommend it unconditionally except to say that we played and enjoyed two campaigns of the Arkham Horror card game. So far I'm enjoying it so much if Joe was unavailable I'd get my own copy and play it solo.
In Earthborne Rangers you play as a group of wandering rangers solving problems and helping people within a large open world map. The game is card based; you put cards down for the location, the terrain, the weather, and various obstacles like overgrown thickets or forest predators, and play cards to overcome these obstacles, either through force or understanding.
The cards are classified by a system of traits. A prowling Wolhund is a Being/Predator/Mammal and a Sitka Buck is a Being/Prey/Mammal. In this image you can see how the cards interact during play. If the wolhund is triggered it might draw in more predators or bite you if you're tired. When the Sitka Buck is triggered, they might be attacked by a predator, butt head with another Buck or attack you if there's a doe. The cards in your hand hook into these traits and the game unfolds as you interact with these puzzles and a story emerges from the interaction of these simple rules.
Stardeus
Stardeus is a worker management simulator ala Dwarf Fortress set in space. You start the game as a super intelligent computer in charge of a spacecraft that has just exploded. Using your robots and the people inadvertently woken from hypersleep, you rebuild the ship, research a large tech tree, and continue your mission to find a habitable planet to colonize.
The game is still in early access and there aren't many unique events, but the framework is solid, and I hope he continues to expand it.
Music
I usually collect music for a few months and then listen through them all at once, filtering out the uninteresting songs and adding the good ones to my collection. I'm currently in-between music batches, so I don't have much to share.
Taxi
Taxi (2015) is a weird pseudo-documentary where the director Jafar Panahi, after having been banned from making traditional movies by the Iranian government, poses as a taxi driver and records a film using dash cams about social challenges in Iran. It's interesting to get a driving tour of an alien country and Jafar has enough directing chops to keep things moving along and interesting.
Helix
I now use this text editor so much I have difficulty interacting with vim. Helix is fast, featureful, and a joy to use. I'll be happy when it gets a few more integrated tools, but don't let this deter you.
This image is what came up when I searched for 'helix editor'
Tam o'Shanter
Just go read this poem here.
Rust
Though this post has been about reading, gaming, and watching video, most of my time is being spent reading and writing rust. I've been rewriting my various home projects in the new language, using the opportunity to clarify functionality and fix bugs. The result have been surprisingly fast and easy to maintain.
The language is deep and somehow seems more transparent than other languages I've used. I'm still trying to default to approaching problems with types and traits. At the moment I'm overwhelmed with examples. I wish someone would pay me to work with this language. I despair of going back to c when I find a new job.
The infrequently updated blog.