Author: jzb

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Pictures of Cats playlist

Jonathan Coulton is probably best known for his Thing a Week albums and songs like “Tom Cruise Crazy,” “First of May,” and “Skullcrusher Mountain.” All of those are fantastic, of course, but my all-time-favorite song by Coulton is from his Solid State album, “Pictures of Cats.” (Not a shock, I realize.)

Sir Wobbles, an orange cat, loafed on a black and white blanket.
Sir Wobbles invites you to enjoy “Pictures of Cats.”

It’s about something all-too-often relevant, but especially so last week: the need to seek out something soothing when the world is overtaken by bad news.

All at once, it fills up my feed
More bad news that I didn’t need
I can’t stop reading, but I wish that I didn’t know

Still too soon; there’s not much to say
They don’t know, but talk anyway
All of the pieces and none of the places they go

So I am looking at pictures of cats
I am looking at pictures of cats

As I said, especially relevant last week. If you’re reading this months or years from now, you might have trouble placing the bad news from last week from the bad news that’s happening all the time. It doesn’t matter, really.

The other thing that helps me, aside from looking at (or posting) pictures of cats, is to make playlists. So I’ve been working on a Pictures of Cats playlist; it’s incomplete, and I’m still tinkering with the track order. Currently features Coulton, Aimee Mann, The Staves, Tracy Chapman, Eliza Rickman, Gil Scott-Heron, Beth Orton, Johnny Cash, R.E.M., Leonard Cohen, Gurf Morlix, Gillian Welch, The Jayhawks, Jukebox the Ghost, and Mavis Staples.

It’s on YouTube Music because it’s the least-bad option for hosting such a thing, at least that I know of, that most people will be able to use. I sure miss sharing such things on cassette… Anyway, check it out, and make suggestions if you are so inclined.

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Goodbye Malcolm

A picture of a black lab, 14 years old, bathed in sunlight.
Two black labs facing the camera. Hanna and Malcolm
Malcolm and Hanna

Two dogs came into my life when I met my wife in 2016, Hanna and Malcolm.  Both black labs, half-siblings, born in 2010 about six months apart with Hanna being the older sibling. They were purebred dogs that were judged not quite show worthy and Meg adopted them in 2011, first Malcolm and then Hanna.

I met them not long after meeting Meg, and got to know them well as Meg and I were dating.  Malcolm and Hanna helped raise more than 30 foster kittens and got along famously with the cats in Meg’s household. Continue reading “Goodbye Malcolm”

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Splitting sites

Today, I surgically removed zonker.net from WordPress.com and co-hosting with Dissocated Press to have a cleaner split between personal and “professional” topics.  The next step will be figuring out what blogging software I want to use for Dissociated Press for the next 20 years or so and start self-hosting it again as well.

I don’t do a lot of blogging on Dissociated Press these days, since I spend most of my time writing about open source for LWN.net, but I’ve never been 100% comfortable mingling personal topics with posts meant for a much wider audience. Not that Dissociated Press gets millions of page views, but…

Anyway, I hope to pick up the pace of blogging here about random things that don’t fit for LWN.net and are too long or less ephemeral than what I put up on Mastodon.

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Switched to ClassicPress

Have updated the site to ClassicPress using the migration plugin. As far as I can tell, no problems. Please leave a comment if something is terribly broken. Or even a little bit broken.

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“Now and Then,” the last (?) Beatles single drops

AI-generated image of an illustration of a mixtape type thing. It looks like an unholy combination of a mixtape and boombox.

I’ve been a Beatles fan since I was 7, nearly 50 years now. There’s only two Beatles songs I that I actively don’t like* and then the rest of the catalog I love.

Sometimes it takes me a few listens to get into a song, even some of my favorite artists. I love Aimee Mann, but I had to come back to The Forgotten Arm for a few extra listens before it really grabbed me. It’s never been that way with The Beatles. Maybe because I got into them so young, but they’ve always just felt like home.

When they released “Free As A Bird,” and “Real Love” in the 90s, they instantly grabbed me and felt like Beatles songs. I had a frisson of joy the first time I heard them, the same tingles I got the first time I heard “Help!” when I was 7 and was an instant fan.

“Now and Then” … didn’t do that. I was open and hoping, but to my aging ears it just doesn’t sound like The Beatles.

But I’m glad they tried. I’m not cynical about it. Better, IMO, that they tried and if it does give other fans the same joy as other Beatles songs then that’s awesome.

* (“Revolution 9” which IMO doesn’t even count as a song, and “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)” because it’s just so low-effort and dumb.)

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Today’s Read: Exit, Voice, Loyalty, Neglect

Caught this on HN. “Exit, Voice, Loyalty, Neglect: Why People Leave, Stay, or Try to Burn It All Down,” by Brett & Kate McKay.

The exit, voice, loyalty, neglect (EVLN) framework will help you understand why people stay in or leave a relationship (including friendships), why people stay in or leave a job, why people stay in or leave a church, and many more of life’s interpersonal and institutional dynamics. 

Definitely worth a read. I don’t agree with everything here but I think it’s a great starter point for discussions.

My observation is that people often use their voice when they are invested and want a situation to work. You’ve worked at Acme Corp for seven years, most of the time it’s been good. You like your job and co-workers, but growth and management changes have taken a toll. So you start speaking up trying to make things better. That is loyalty. Loyalty isn’t passive acceptance or blind hope that things will get better if someone else makes changes.

What this calls “loyalty” I’d call apathy, inertia, or lack of agency. “Things were good once, they will be again, so I can just wait it out.”

And neglect isn’t the same thing as “burn it down,” IME. I’ve seen both. Maybe it needs a section on sabotage…

Prolly going to write something longer on this for Dissociated Press when I have the time. A bit backlogged there.