simpler times

one last effort i've tackled is moving the functionality of less frequently invoked instructions into the runtime, and reducing the cost of invoking said runtime functions all the while.

this has been quite successful. the final effort will be some semblance of a birch object format suitable for loading on microcontrollers or other MMUless environments

when i omit the instructions which assume the existence of a heap allocator and the affordances one permits, the birch instruction set is down to 40. i'm purposefully avoiding looking at Uxn too closely apart from superficial matters because i really do want birch to be its own thing, but, that's just 8 more than Uxn, with some support for quickly addressing stack locals across frames and other things that truly make sense to consolidate into discrete instructions.

i'm fairly happy with this.

They tire me. Good on them.

haha! I've been coming to work riddled with every type of flu and covid known to man all along just to prove AI can solve all infectious diseases! I'm actually playing 11D chess [chugging a vial with a skull and cross bone that says "bubonic dogshit" on the label]

During the Greater Depression, so many people starved that the State brought in mobile crematoria. When the community destroyed those machines, it was one of the first great actions that eventually led to the independent organization of this city. The people who burned the machines and chased off the cops then went block by block (it's not like anyone had any work) to administer the last rites to the dead, each according to their custom.

Today, young people go through the great fields of the Cemetery, where countless, countless sooty stones mark graves among the tall grass. Some visit in winter or early spring, after the fall burning but before the grasses grow too tall, and there are very few paths. Some visit in late spring or summer, when prairie flowers nine feet tall flourish among the stones.

At the center of the Cemetery there is a small building, with big windows in plain white concrete walls. The young people who visit, having walked among the graves, go inside.

Sometimes they will already know a name going in; sometimes they'll talk to one of the archivists, and get a name from them.

It might be the name of a distant relative, or the name of an ancestor's neighbor. Or it might just be a name they found by chance wandering among the graves, that spoke to them somehow. Either way, having received their name and a personal access key, they will go down into the archive's underground vault. They will find a workstation and search for the person who died. They will collect, clean up, and annotate the enormous troves of data that data brokers collected on them before the Depression, read their posts, emails, and docs. Sometimes, when the archive possesses physical copies, they will go into the Stacks and find them, scan and digitize them.

Eventually, after several years (they still have their work and regular studies, so only very few do this for more than a few hours a week), they will write the story of this person. They will have learned who they had been, whom they had loved, who had loved them. They will learn just how their society betrayed and discarded them, and they will bring them back, in a little way. And someday, no-one will have been forgotten.

#microfiction #solarpunk

last night as a means of coping with life, after having had someone else's cats live in my basement (I treat them as my own now) I have decided to replace the Power Mac G4 Cube I removed from service (on account of the capacitive touch power button they would frequently fuck with) with a Power Mac G4 Quicksilver. Damn thing still works great after all these years! It will be in use for many more years to come.

scare your kids this halloween by telling them stories about "the fetterman"

it is late 80s. you are using leaded gasoline to cook crystal meth indoors, as per the current trend. your boss demands you name a technology or be instantly fired and then executed

“plug n play”

your boss is humiliated. you are allowed to golf

Ode to Taco Bell, by Éros Brousson:

“For years I thought that Taco Bell was a fictional restaurant in video game like GTA, a place that only existed between a strip club, a gun store, and a man in a Hawaiian shirt committing a felony.

“Then I landed in Miami and there it was: between a strip club, a gun store, and a man in a Hawaiian shirt committing a felony. The purple bell glowing in the dark like a church for people whose evening has gone horribly wrong”

(1/?)

like you go on there and within 15 mins you can go to someone else's place and pet their cat

they should make a grindr for cats

#neurodivergent #neurodivergence #NeurodivergentLife

In the meantime, please enjoy these cursed pictures of my Mk7.5 Golf R with MkV R32 wheels and my MkV R32 with Mk7.5 Golf R wheels (I had to swap 'em because I picked up a sidewall bulge on one of the Mk7.5 wheels and needed something reliable to go camping for a week)

Getting all the hydraulic lines secured to the pump was a bitch and a half. I had slightly bent one hydraulic line in the process of this repair, so the flare nut would keep cross-threading. After a few hours of trial and error and being splayed on my belly over the engine, I got the line bent back into the correct shape and that last flare nut went on smoothly.

All that's left to do is get the splash guard back in place, do a bleed procedure, and pray.

It takes a lot of fucking effort and finesse to work around the hydraulic lines in an engine bay mostly taken up by a VR6 engine. But, I was able to get everything situated in its rightful place, with some trial and error; it had been weeks since I had last been in the engine bay so I had to pull the pump off the firewall mount to have room to marry it to the control module.

Today was an excellent day for me to perform actions. So, first thing first was to separate the control module from the pump module from my eBay acquisition.

while i'm at it it is worth pointing out saying "Chozo statue", if you were to translate literally back to Japanese, would be like saying "bird people statue statue"; "chozō" is basically a portmanteau of "chōjin no zō" which means "bird people statue", referring to what in English is referred to as...a Chozo statue

language is fun

#metroid

calling it Chozodia is like colonisers from Earth naming their settlement Humanville

#metroid