I'm banned from Facebook again. So, the new outlets for my thoughts are Twitter, this blog, and the Port Townsend Leader opinion pages (if they ever actually print any of my submissions).

I was banned from Facebook for having a "fake name". Does Nikolas Abzdefghijklmnop sound fake to you? Maybe that's not my given last name, but it's actually a completely intentional last name, and a critique on names and individualist identity in general. It's not fake at all.

"Abzdefghijklmnop" is something I made up when Facebook asked me for my last name, and Abcdefghijklmnop didn't pass through their automated fake name filters. I've also just come to like my new chosen last name, and now I identify with it. But that's not even important — the reason I chose this last name is because there's too much emphasis on names, and identity in general, in North American society.

Naming people and ideas leads to a sort of profane worship of those people. For example, I love Nick Drake — and there are all sorts of theories about how and why he died. From my perspective, his death was a result of his mental instability, which stemmed from his inability to meet expectations he had for himself, and others around him had, (like his producer calling him a "genius"). It seems like a lack of validation from others, an alienation from the world, really got to him.

It's unfortunate that many people who make music or art, they want to make things that's popular, genre-appropriate, technically sound, that have some appeal to the people around them. Is that what art is about? Sure, that's one purpose. But my favorite purpose of art is when it's about expressing yourself... whether or not others want to hear or see, or even understand that expression!

When I hear a song, I don't just hear whoever happens to be singing, or whoever wrote or performed the song, who put everything together. Once you get through however many people were involved, I also hear everything surrounding the making of the music, the setting, the cultural norms, and the time and place. Music is a product of its environment, so if a person can be a genius, so can an era!

I don't believe in that sort of human individuality, or genius, and I see humanity as more of a collection of life that we're all a part of. So why would my last name — whether it's real or fake, really matter to anyone? I mean, at some point in history my last name was made up or chosen by someone else anyways.

Would Facebook have banned Malcolm X for not using the last name that happens to be associated with his birth certificate? And what happens if you don't have a birth certificate or government ID?

Whatever, it's more fun to write on here than Facebook anyways. I don't have to feel like I'm intruding on everyone's meme-sharing activities, and the words aren't all truncated to a single paragraph, to discourage real conversation that has any sort of depth.

	      11:19 < Samu> https://imgur.com/GSr0gNx last 10 years
		11:19 < Samu> recessions help my ai
            

this is really how you play. im still stuck in the playing manually, clicking around the screen mindset. i need to automate this.

I'm a Dillo user. My browser supports tabs.

Balseros es un documental ambicioso e impresionante. Sigue las vidas de algunas personas en Cuba después el colapso de la Unión Soviética desde 1994. En este año, Cuba dejó de recibir el apoyo de la Unión Soviética, que resultó en el deseo y la habilidad para mucha gente de emigrar de Cuba. El documental no responde mis preguntas sobre exactamente por qué tantos Cubanos querían salir del país.

Me parece increíble que las personas - adultas - arriesguen sus vidas en una balsa, saliendo de su hogar, dejando atrás sus amigos y su país, para empezar de nuevo en los Estados Unidos. De hecho, Oscar dijo que cuando construyeron una embarcación, no le importó nada - si llegaban o si morían también. Y él tiene una esposa y una hija. Aquí vemos cuan importante es para Oscar llegar a los Estados Unidos.

La pobreza en el caribe es extrema. Me recuerda a una canción jamaicana, "Reparation" por Vybz Kartel y Gaza Slim, que habla de los estafadores en Jamaica que toman dinero de los turistas. Su argumento es que los estafadores no hacen algo tan malo. Sino, son partes vitales de la economía jamaicana, y el hambre es un crimen más cruel que las estafas y el robo. Hay un toque de marxismo en esta lógica: "De cada cual según sus capacidades, a cada cual según sus necesidades".

La relación entre los Estados Unidos y los países caribeños es interesante, porque hay tantos inmigrantes caribeños en los Estados Unidos por culpa de la economía. En muchos casos, es más fácil ganarse la vida en los Estados Unidos y posiblemente enviar una parte de su salario de vuelta a los parientes.

Al mismo tiempo, hay estadounidenses que eligen retirarse o simplemente vivir en las islas porque el costo de la vida es más bajo. Claro, es más complicado que eso, pero el dinero y la economía sin duda es el tema general de Balseros.

In Unix, there's a write command that lets you send messages to other users logged in to the system. In Debian, a version of this command is included in the bsdmainutils package. I'm lucky enough to know people that like to communicate with me this way.

It's a known bug that write only supports the basic characters that are part of ascii. So you can't use all the characters of different languages like Danish or Spanish.

The write utility does not recognize multibyte characters.

—from write's man page

You can fix this by changing the character buffer to use a multi-byte type instead of the old-school 8-bit char. Details are here.

There are still some improvements that I need to make with this patch. wchar_t isn't ideal for UTF-8 data, though it works. Apparently it's better (i.e. possibly more portable in the long run) to use char16_t or char32_t, including uchar.h instead of wchar.h. https://stackoverflow.com/a/527307/173630 Also, I need to investigate some interactions between this patch and how it's displayed over ssh when you're connecting through Mac OS X.