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It's safe to say that The Wheel of Time TV series, streaming on Amazon Prime, has divided fans of the source material, namely Robert Jordan's enormous, sprawling, epic book series of the same name, spanning 14 door-stopping volumes published over a period of 24 years (1989-2013).

I would not call myself a great connoisseur of fantasy, but I do know something about these particular books, having been introduced to them as a teenager by a high school friend in the early nineties. I have warm memories of the series, and less warm memories of the tense, multi-year waits in between installments.

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In general, I take a dim view of graffiti. This, however, makes me smile.

Buildings like this fascinate me for reasons I can't fully articulate. I guess, to my eyes, it just feels like it has a story to tell, like a grizzled chess player in the park.

To some extent, the contrast between the IndieWeb and standard social networks mirrors the contrast between Linux and, say, Windows or MacOS. People keep asking when the former will become mainstream and it's kind of the wrong question to ask, because going mainstream was never the goal. The masses were never the target audience.

I'm kind of impressed with Github Actions. Easy to use, very composable.

So, I've ditched Netlify, opting instead for a raw nginx on a relatively modest VPS. I had heard some horror stories of people being charged thousands of dollars over a denial of service attack.

So far so good. I no longer have to worry about running out of build minutes either.

This is really cool! I will put in a shameless plug for my own :-)

https://desmondrivet.com/2019/12/08/intro-to-indie-web

I recently finished watching Bodies on Netflix and the concept of free will comes up a fair bit given that the show involves a predestination paradox. One of the characters voices the opinion that "free will is an illusion" (his words) because human choices are ultimately the result of physics and biology. Human choices, in other words, are predetermined, and that means that free will doesn't exist.

The character in question is acting as a mouthpiece for the notion of incompatibilism, the idea that free will and determinism are mutually exclusive concepts. It's the most common way that the free will debate is framed. If you accept the idea of incompatibilism, then you can either believe in determinism (usually considered the rational choice) or you can believe in free will (usually considered the irrational or emotional choice). But you can't believe in both. The character, being a scientist, believes in determinism, hence his assertion that free will is an illusion.

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7 photos

I stumbled on a vaguely ghetto-like enclave in Saint-Henri, Montreal.

Annual Christmas tree snap

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with productivity systems. I usually don't bother with them but on those infrequent occasions when my life gets a bit hectic, I will sometimes make use of one. When that happens I always fall back to David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD). I read his book a long time ago and, at the time, found myself impressed.

The fundamental feature of the system is that it downplays the classic, detailed, prioritized to-do list in favour of the so-called next action list. When considering a particular goal, instead of allowing yourself to become overwhelmed with all the myriad things you know you need to do in service of that goal, you instead focus only on the very next thing you can do to move closer to your goal. The end result is an unsorted list of things you can do "in the moment", across all the various goals in your life at the moment.

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TIL that the maxim "My country, right or wrong" has a second part: "If right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right"

Beautiful day. Beautiful flower.

Yeah I may have judged too quickly with regard to Obsidian. Do you use or recommend it?

My blog is 16 years old. I've rotated through several blogging engines in that time (Bloxsom, YAWT 1.0/2.0, Pelican and finally Eleventy) but they all have one thing in common: they all process blog entries stored as plain text files.

The fact that all my blog entries are stored as plain text files on my computer is, I believe, one of the main reasons my blog has lasted this long. Text files are trivial to back up. Text files don't really crash and rarely get corrupted. Text files are readable and writable on any computer manufactured since the 1980's - hell, the 1960's if I let punch cards into this conversation. When you contrast this simple durability with, for example, a MySQL data store (used by several blogging engines, including one of the most popular ones, WordPress), with all of its attendant version compatibility and data corruption issues, the superiority of plain text becomes undeniable if you're trying to write something that lasts.

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Photo enlarged to show texture