It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

19: Ficcer

On the obverse of the coin that is my essayist self, professional or otherwise, there's the part of me that also enjoys writing fic. The story of the first fics that I remember writing has been told before, in a notebook, with one-page adventures in a spiral-bound notebook that once was threatened with exposure by a sibling if I didn't stop behaving like a younger sibling about things. At least, that's what I remember the threat as. It's the sort of thing that a young child produces, with all of the mixing, mashing, and generally lack of care for things like continuity, acting in character, or good names for the principal actors in the story. It is, therefore, perfect and perfectly fine for a child of the age that produced it.

There is at least one original works-type story from my near-teenage years, or just falling into my teenage years, that I remember basing upon the private-eye narrative style in the Tracer Bullet noir-type stories that Bill Watterson would come back to as a frequent way of showing where Calvin's imagination was at the time. I doubt it even read like a dime-store novel, but the people who were part of the writing workshop seemed pleased with it as a creation of a child of that age, and there were definitely laughs when I read the short story aloud, which was what was intended, since Tracer Bullet is much more a noir pastiche and parody than something that was intended to be taken seriously as a noir work. And I like playing with language when I write. There are phrases that I slip into stories that are allusions and references to other things, whether other stories I've written, or other properties, characters, or artifacts, or just other things in the universe that the fic is stationed in. Nathalie Heartless is a perfect name for a villain of some scope in a Kingdom Hearts/Miraculous Ladybug crossover. Halloween on Centauri Prime where there is the sound of a distant HONK when there are revelers come to do a little mischief on the Imperial Palace (with the Emperor's permission, of course.) The idea that the girl and her fox in Epistory might have been only one of many who came through, including things like a boy and a tiger, or an old man and two birds. That a child of Calvin's might want to change their name into a symbol, like some other famous person who did that. That Lilo watched a movie about whales and a guy who gets into a whale tank to talk to them. Those kinds of things. Little winks and nods that don't detract from the story, but do reward those who have experience with other fandoms with a little Captain America "Ah, I got that reference" moment while they go along.

I set that type of fic aside as I developed other interests and hobbies throughout my high school and university days, but that's with a quasi-asterisk, and I was playing RP forum games, and even tried to play a character or two on some RP games on LiveJournal and Dreamwidth. So, it wasn't that I stopped writing fic, it's that I stopped writing a specific kind of fic, and instead participated in creating works that were part of a braoder universe. Subreality, the Boardieverse (BRIIIIICK!), the QFGC, and the like. With the occasional fic effort all the same, set in those spaces. In a largely text-based medium, textual stories flowed out all the same, just as collaborations, rather than as a single author doing a more defined story work. I suspect similar things are happening these days as well, but they're probably happening in Discord servers, hidden from curious and prying eyes, instead of on mailing lists, phpBB forums, or bulletin board systems (BBSes). Or in MUDs.

Mostly, my return to the type of fic that I started with coincides with collecting an AO3 account and then using it to sign up for a pinch hit for an exchange, and then from there, basically doing a lot of exchange signups. Many authors, but I remember hearing this specifically from Seanan McGuire, who may have heard it from elsewhere, say that the imposition of constraints is what gets creativity to flow. This is true for me. Left to my own devices, I often flounder, but if some idea or constraint or exchange prompt comes along and gives me some parameters to work with, then the ideas start happening and eventually I can come up with something that works and I can post. I could say that means I'm not very creative on my own, but that would not be truthful. I'm plenty creative, I just am better as a riffer than as a whole cloth creator.

I didn't come back to the form of fic that I started in until gathering up an AO3 account and doing so to participate, somewhat timidly, as a pinch-hitter, and then a participant, in various exchanges. I'm not usually someone throwing themselves wholeheartedly into new fandomms, nor necessarily following along with the most popular ones at the height of their popularity. I don't engage with media mostly for the possibilities of what fic I could make out of it, but I do find that enough stories leave holes, gaps, and room for interpretation for a lot of the things that fic covers, or there's a reasonably clear path for me to take from where the canonical version of something is to the version that's been requested. Sometimes I write fix-its out of spite. Sometimes people say that it's foolish of me to do so, because it was obvious the way things were going to go from the foreshadowing, which rather misses the point of a lot of fic writing. Sometimes I wriite something because there was a pun sitting there that needed using, and the only way to get it out is to craft a story around it. And sometimes there's got to be a story behind things, and nobody says what it is, or there's more stories to be told than the canon was allowed to tell.

I think fic helps keep my brain moving on things, and having a few different projects in the works at any given time also helps me when my brain doesn't want to work on one thing, but will want to work on another. It's the presence of the neurochemistry that I have that I like to have something to do at all times. Being bored and without something to do is not helpful for me. Meditation is different than boredom, since meditation is about paying attention to now, and trying to pay your entire self's attention to now, rather than being at loose ends about what to do with your time, or thinking about all the other things that you could be doing with your time. Or, worse, being on call for someone who will call at some arbitrary time, but otherwise will make you wait until they call, so you don't have the ability to pick up and put down various things, or do things that will take a short amount of time and then come back to being attentive. That becomes worse when the person who expects you to be on call expects you to be on call now, rather than "will you find a pausing point and attend, please?"

This is not to say that the process of writing fic is easy and all the words flow smoothly from beginning to end. This doesn't happen for essay work, either. Having multiple projects going at once means that if I get stuck on one, I can backburner it for a bit, let my brain work on it in the subconscious, and do something else where the words are coming more easily, and eventually get back to the thing that has the block. Or write some other scene anachronically that needs to be there and come back to the problem once I've figured out what the end point looks like, or what needs to go in between to get from one point to another. It's also nice to draft most of these things in text editors, rather than word processors, because I don't have word processors trying to help me, and because if I do it in a text editor, I can also just drop the semantic HTML in and not have to do any changes to it to get it ready for posting. (Because I'm so used to Dreamwidth and AO3 and other such things, I think in HTML. And a little bit in Markdown, but I kind of like being able to handle everything directly rather than needing to have something get interpreted back to me. I do like that Markdown strives to be readable even if it's not being rendered in HTML, so I should probably be a little kinder to it, but I don't always have a markdown parser or interpreter handy for when I'm doing things, and it's just faster at this point to go directly.

Fic-writing helps me relate to the fandoms and things that I'm in, by giving me a platform to work on, and people who might be appreciative of the work that happens there. It's nice to build a little bit of community with my writing. I tend to approach fic writing and fandom more like a storytelling situation, rather than an opportunity to play with the dolls, if that makes sense? Nothing wrong with fic writers who are up for any excuse at all to make their blorbos do stuff, or kiss people, or more, but I find that I have trouble writing things that don't have at least a minimally cohesive plot. It doesn't always have to be very fleshed out, but I work best in fic when I can see a clear reason why a character is doing this thing that I want, or a clear reason why this character would be interested in this other person. Which sometimes means I write other people's crack pairings, because I look at it and go, "Yep. I know exactly how that would work, regardless of how well it would work in canon." I like being able to make something that I would enjoy reading. That others do as well is important, but not quite as important as me creating something that I would want to go back and re-read. If it doesn't meet my taste, I won't be as happy with it as I could be. It's pleasantly surprising to occasionally get a comment on something that is older, and re-read it, and find that I still like it. And while I like "number go up" as much as everyone else, being on the exchange circuit, and often writing for fandoms that are older or pairings that are rarer, I know that the numbers that are going to be associated with any given work will be much smaller than they might be for catching a megafandom in its height. My most-everything'd work basically did that, and it was something I wrote for the joke at the end, and it struck a chord with the fandom. I doubt I'll write anything else that gets that kind of numbers. If I wanted to base my self-worth on the numbers I was doing, I probably would have left fic writing altogether. And possibly essaying as well, just because I am unlikely to ever become the biggest fish in the pond, regardless of the size of the pond. I'm not the kind of person who wants to tailor my content to the engagement algorithm, so I will never have influencer contracts or sponsored posts, or, for that matter, anyone who would throw money into a Patreon or similar for access to my writing before everyone else gets it. I don't need it, and I think there are better places for the people who would likely become a patron of mine to put their money. If some rich billionaire decided that I should have a million-dollar monthly stipend just to keep turning out what I'm turning out, sure, I'll take that, but most people are passing the same twenty dollar bill around to whomever needs it the most that month, and that's a far better thing to do than spend it on me.

That, and I prefer to keep my own schedule of when I post and to where. Having to do it for money would probably sour me greatly and make me worry when inevitably I didn't have an idea in time for the patron line. (I fall more on the idea that fandom should be a gift economy, for the practical reason of the less money changing hands, the less legal problems that follow that money, and also because I think that everyone should already be given what they need to have a fulfilling life, so they wouldn't need to turn their creative output into something that makes them money.)

You can read my work and judge for yourself as to whether I'm prolific, good, bad, or someone to avoid. All I ask is that if you don't like it, use the back button and pretend you never saw it. If you do like it, please leave at least a kudos, if you have the spoons and desire to. (Comments are lovely, but they're additional work.)

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

18: Essayist

Text is my most comfortable medium. It's certainly where I've put most of the points into my skills. And there's more than enough material in the archives, if you want to go have a look at other pieces of writing that I've done. Most of the time, I'm engaged in the essayist's form, although probably not formal or informal or styled enough to be a regular newspaper columnist, or some nationally-syndicated pundit. For one thing, about the only thing that someone can be a pundit about on the kinds of deadlines that newspaper columnists have is the news or politics, and you see that I can only manage it every so often. At best. I am the infrequent contributor to the discourse, and I would like to believe that my infrequency allows me to do something more than have a hot take and shout it into the aether as swiftly as possible, so that mine is the one that gets re-shared endlessly across all the social media platforms before someone else can have the same thought and post theirs.

Plus, weren't we all supposed to have pivoted to video a long time ago? The hot take in the microblogging form is certainly alive and well, and especially in places where the algorithm rewards that kind of behavior, and especially that kind of behavior if it originates from people who are trying to make their takes as antisocial as possible, so that they will be "engaged" with by others, because in that world, all heat is good heat, regardless of whether it's X-Pac heat or not. Pictures and short videos are the spaces where we receive all kinds of hot takes now, only some of them provided by people with journalism classes, or with the appropriate expertise to be knowledgeable and correct about what they speak of. Which is not to be crass and say that only the finest experts should be platformed, because I also think the finest satirists should be, as well, and those who are good at making us laugh at jokes that don't require you to be a racist, classist, sexist, misogynist, or otherwise punch down at people instead of punching up. Bill Gates getting a pie in the face? Spread it far and wide. Some elected official or influencer trying to tell me that the real cause of my problems is that we let women get out of the kitchen? Obliterate it, from both my timeline and from the platform, if you please. I know, however, that platforms continue to believe that their best options are to promote the people who get all the eyeballs, because the point is not to have content that is anything other than what will draw wyes to the advertisements that come with the content. Or ears, in the case of podcasts. If we had decided to do something more sustainable than capitalism and advertising, we would just have people doing things, secure in their ability to have a good life while doing the things they want to do, whether that's art or otherwise. (Sure, you can incentivize work that people don't normally like to do by making it possible to have a better life with that, but nobody should be a starving artist in a world where there's enough for everyone to live comfortably.)

That, and I claim very little expertise on most matters, and one of the chief requirements of being someone who makes their living on hot takes is to believe yourself an expert in all things such that you don't need to do much more than do a surface reading of something and declare you have it solved. (And, if you turn out to be wrong about that, to not acknowledge it and simply have new hot takes to provide to others.) It is not possible for me to inhabit that kind of space without doing significant damage to myself. Or that damage already has to have been done to me to get me to be that kind of reckless and brash about it all. I don't like it, and I don't want to encourage that in myself.

Just today, as I was helping someone at my job, and explaining that we don't have audible alarms for when computers are about to sign you out for inactivity because we don't want to contribute to the cacophony, the same noise that the person was indirectly complaining about, that person looked at me and asked me if I was a writer. "Not professionally," I said. (Yes, I've had my writing published, and yes, I have been paid for some of those essays and/or received contributor's copies gratis for it. No, I'm not a professional.) The person asked me what a cacophony was, and then if it was close to shenanigans. I said no, shenanigans is more like actions and deeds done, cacophony is related to sound. "But you do a lot of writing, I'll bet," the person said, before walking away. Now wrong, certainly, but that felt like I was being dissed for pulling out the silver-dollar words from my vocabulary.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have caught flak in my early years when perfection failed to manifest. I have also repeatedly caught flak from others in those years for earnestly trying to do well at my schoolwork, and also for being someone who wasn't afraid to show off their smarts. (Why would I be? I'm white, going through parochial and then public education, and because I'm sufficiently middle-class as well, I am already aiming for the university education. It's to my advantage to demonstrate my knowledge.) The usual form of the complaint is a variation on "Stop making the rest of us look stupid." The other form is a variation on "Okay, suck-up. Stop being a teacher's pet." When people talk about anti-intellectualism in the culture of the States, this is what they're talking about: our politics, priorities, and peers are consistently putting the message in our head that there is an upper limit to the level of intelligence any person should display, and showing more than the amount you've been allotted is a fast way for a thresher to come by and try to cut the tall flower down to size. As with everything in the States, of course, the amount of intelligence you're allowed to show is dependent on your perceived race, gender, and level of success at capitalism. Which is why rich cis white men without two brain cells to rub together and make a spark are hailed as visionary and successful businessmen with Big Important Opinions, who deserve their oversized salaries because of their great intellects, and who are clearly good candidates to be leaders of industry and politics, while a Black girl who could do the equivalent of Neo fighting Agent Smith one-handed against all of them together is treated as unable to understand even the most basic of concepts, except when she's supposedly scamming the welfare system and taking away money from the proper and deserving white poor. There's real cultural issues around showcasing the ability and willingness to learn, because that's often classified as "acting white." While there's obviously some amount of that necessary to survive, and to learn how to code-switch, the pervasive and racist stereotypes of all not-white people mean that someone genuinely showcasing their intellect as a person of color becomes the "articulate, well-spoken" exception to the racist stereotype, no matter how many intellectually savvy people of color there are around this stereotype-enforcing white person given the power to shape reality according to their prejudices!

The freedom I have to be smart also often means that I tend to jump in on things faster than I should, rather than allowing my coworkers to demonstrate their obvious capability and smarts themselves, and only coming in when I have to be the heavy about something, or when I'm asked to join in. When I realize I've done it, I apologize, but I don't have to weigh the consequences of every word and action that I take to determine whether or not I will be in greater danger for having done so. There are times where I've had to be called in to take over something from a colleague of color because the person refused to believe that my entirely-capabale colleague knew anything about anything and would only accept that the white perceived-man could help them do what they were doing. But, magically, when I showed this person the thing that my colleague had been trying to show them for the last several minutes, they listened and it worked. And when they left, they left with a snide comment about how nobody else in the library knew what they were talking about. (I'd like to believe it says I've managed to clear one of the bars, at that moment, that I recognized that entire interaction, right form the jump of my colleague passing it off to me, that there was definitely racism involved here, and I didn't give any credence to the barb thrown in departure. Not in a "give me the cookies!" way, but as in "Congratulations, you've met the minimum. And now, the next moment of your life.")

Because words are my most comfortable medium, I also like to use them as much as possible, and the rarer and less-common ones, too. I'm afflicted by the mindset that wants to use the most specific word that I have in my lexicon to describe something. While you can use the widely-applicable form of the word and get meaning across, I want to also express nuance and shading with the words that I choose, so that you understand that I'm enraged rather than annoyed, or enraged rather than furious. Because text is devoid of the emotional and non-verbal context, I have to try and make up at least some of that with word choice. Which sometimes means I get sniped at by someone who feels like the use of those words is showing off, ostentatious ornamentation of language, silver-tongued threads and tailoring holding together brocade and silk meant to shout "Look at me! I have so many intellectual resources to spare that I can devote them to these frills, fringes, and embroidery of language!" Someone who sees themselves in simple, homespun shirt and trousers, fitting loosely but covering everything important, reacts to the finery with various emotions. If you spun a wheel with all the possible ways to take it on there, you might have to land on 00 to find a reaction that's not negative. Among people who also like to use words, it's not as much of an issue, and I would like to believe that people who come here to read these words, as I pontificate about things that I may or may not have the requisite experience and expertise in, also like words and their usage and some of the less-common ones showing up.

I think I helped a coworker this week regarding words and their meanings, when one of them used "in my hubris" with the thought of chia seeds expanding themselves beyond the jar that they had been put in for a touch. I joked "Well, I'm not entirely sure which god it was that you defied there, but if that's the way of things…" At which point, my coworker seemed confused, so I explained: Hubris has a connotation of excessive pride or arrogance, and often specifically, pride or arrogance toward gods or in defiance of them. At which point, my co-worker said they've used the word to mean poor planning. "Oh," I said. "I might use 'in my ignorance' there, then." And the co-worker thanked me for helping out, and it seemed genuine, so hopefully, hooray, lucky 10,000 about this particular thing?

Required schooling was hard for me not to demonstrate the fullness of my vocabulary and that desire to match up meaning. Plenty of people who would tell me to "talk normal" or even ask "Do you even swear?" as a way of shorthanding the question of "Do you know how to sound like a normal person?" Which, yes, I do know how to swear, and have since I was of age to recognize the power of certain words. Not, perhaps, with the skill that R. Lee Ermey had, but because I thought of it as an odd question, when I used one of those words, the others laughed and made fun of me because it sounded like a Jeopardy! response rather than someone who knew how to curse inventively or instinctively, whien it was "Yes, of course I know how to use those words, and I'm not using them right now." University was less of an issue, because all the people at university are nominally there to broaden their horizons and collect knowledge that will be helpful to them in whatever field they choose to work in. Graduate school was where I learned most of my High Librarian, which usually comes out when I'm ticked off about something. It's one of those quirks I have - in an environment where throwing bleepable, unprintable words about decisions or people is not permitted or would be a bad idea to do, my formal register ratchets up significantly. My most formal language is almost always my most aggravated language as well. And then the creativity starts to come out, turning what might otherwise be a single, emphatic and profane word into a razor-sharpened and beautifully-decorated iron fan to flutter in front of my face. Decisions are foolish, regrettable, ill-thought-out, and the people behind them may have trouble finding their own backsides with two hands, a map, and a flashlight. All in the service of whatever newest initiative has come our way. (Some of my coworkers have commented on the sharpness of some of my remarks, while also noting that despite my meaning being clear and pointy, I didn't say words that could be easily perceived as negative. Figured speech achieved, I guess.)

Creative High Librarian often comes out the most when I'm penning articles to submit for a publication, because if I'm moved to write something for a call for proposals or a publication, it's usually because there's some aspect of it that I have complaints about. This is a failing of my organization, because they do so many things that they should be dragged through the mud over. Or it's a failing of a national or international organization who similarly deserve, in my opinion, to be roasted for. I would love to have more positive things to talk about in my profession, but the things that are positive in my profession tend to be practical (and therefore suited to the presentation format over the essay format) rather than political and policy-related. Which often gives the presentations a tinge of "despite the obstacles in our way, we succeeded at this thing," or "if we weren't too busy fighting crises heaped upon us by others, we could do this cool thing," or "if our policymakers weren't dunderheads about this, we could be doing this cool thing instead of these uncool things." So much of the ambition and optimism I had coming out of graduate school has been boiled off from all of the constraints that come from working in an actual library system, with its budgetary, community, and administrative concerns. I still harbor grand dreams, just in case an opportunity comes along to enact one of them, but for the most part, I've resigned myself to the understanding that my sphere of influence over everything is greatly reduced from what it should be, and that the practical parts of running a library often mean that there's no spare capacity for creative things or for exploring things that could be very valuable to our communities, if only we could offer them.

You could make an argument here that the ease in which I can create something that showcases all the negativity says something about how I don't see the positives in life, and you would be right about it. Strong emotional memories for me are usually negative, because easily and regularly recalling strong negative emotions are another one of my maladaptations, one meant to protect me from getting hurt again. If I remember that when I did this thing, I got scolded and told off for it, that makes me less likely to do it again, and since some nonzero number of the things that I get scolded and told off for are things that I'm not fully consciously doing, associating strong negative emotions either makes it less likely I'll do the thing, or makes it less likely that I'll do anything in the ballpark of that thing, which qualifies as a good result, too, in the avoidance of things that could lead to hurt. And since I've always been a "sensitive" person and prone to big feelings, you can see how that closes off some things for me if I try to approach them directly. And why I don't like to be perceived when doing things that I'm not fully confident in my ability to execute them at a level where I'm confident it'll meet my tastes and yours. ("Take a fucking compliment!" is something you could say at me, and you'd be right.) I have extensive experience working with text, and because of that disconnection, where you only read words and have to imagine what the person saying them is like (except for those of you who have seen and heard me recently), I can say things that I might not otherwise be able to put to audio of any form. It is easier to write the words than to say them aloud. And, quite possibly, it is easier for you to read the words and take them wherever they will best go than it would be to hear them and do the same. (We're funny creatures about that.)

I don't intend to stop writing any time soon, regardless of how it's received or perceived by others. It would not go over well for me, not being able to get my words out. And at the same time, while I have an extensive back catalogue of materials to look at, I still have to approach the idea of writing somewhat obliquely, and to gather the fabled courage of the mediocre white man to submit things to publications where I have crafted them, or to hit post on some entries. Indirection and trying to convince myself of the truth of "the worst they can say is no" is important in this regard. Often, what starts as writing up notes and snippets soon becomes a full essay, and then, when I've created the damn thing because my brain wouldn't let go of it, I may as well submit it, and see whether it gets accepted. It often has, and so I use those strings of successes as the benchmark of "well, I'm a mediocre what man, and I'm submitting, so, you, person with perspectives not generally heard, and who I consider to be competent and either a peer or better-suited to this than I am, will you also submit, please?" I will probably never actually know when this happens, but I think it would be thrilling to submit something for publication and have it sent back with a rejection of "this is a great piece, and we think it will go somewhere else, but we've just had too many people with perspectives and lived experiences we don't usually see submit great essays, too, and so we're going with them." I'll be disappointed that I didn't get in, but I will recognize that reason as one of the best possible reasons why I didn't get in.

And in the meantime, I'll just keep writing.

It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.

17: Persistence

As someone who is comfortable with installing and reinstalling and restoring configurations and working my way back to what it was before, just with time and scripting, and exporting and importing, it's not the end of the world when an entity or a corporation pulls a milkshake duck, or decides they, too, are going to chase the snake oil bubble and start cramming LLM-related features into their browsers, or operating systems, or any other piece of software they can control. I will freely admit that it sucks to have to do all of those operations on the regular, or even on the occasion, but it is something that I have become used to, as I've been throwing things around here and there, and making it work better. The hardest part, sometimes, is re-learning where you've stashed all your configuration tweaks and where they get applied to. But the more it gets done, the easier it is to remember where all the pathways are, and what you want to do with them. Perhaps in some future world, I'll remember to save the configuration files first, and back them up, and then retrieve and paste them back in and all will be well.

And, when I make these kinds of decisions, as it turns out, sometimes I learn some new and interesting things, like the way that some apps, even if they don't exist in the package manager, are self-contained enough to run on the system. Therefore, I now have my preferred browser running on a system that doesn't have it in the package repositories. At least, not at the moment, since the new version is built on one version up from where my current distribution wants to be.

This is also a crossover post with the Adventures in Home Automation series, because, for the third time, I have managed to get my television with the attacked Raspberry Pi and the broken IR receiver talking to Home Assistant, and being controllable from there. In the previous incarnations of this situation, I managed to clone some git repositories, recognize that some of the things they wanted to do with containers and running the thing as they would like to wouldn't work, because they were asking for some much older versions of Debian, which were probably the newest versions of Debian at the time, but whose archive pointers had completely fallen off and were no longer available. One promising entity written in go worked for a little while, and then the go language changed versions, and the old script just went "nope" compared to the new version, and I don't program in go, so I couldn't fix it. The second promising entity was written in python, and in a previous version of Debian, I seemed to gather all the right libraries from the system tools and get very close to making things work, before I dropped a piece from a completely different script, meant to make it possible for a remote control to function as a game controller, I believe, into the other script, because it looked like it might work. And it did, to my surprise. So that was version two, running stably and with a systemd service for running on boot, happily working its way along.

Then the Debian version underlying the single-board computer's Linux changed, and that meant not only rebasing, but reinstalling, reconfiguring, re-adding, and otherwise bringing things back into the system I had, and reinstalling and reconfiguring the communication broker so that the SBC could communicate with Home Assistant (and the router, now that it had some Optware installed that would send information about router operations and connected machines over that same protocol, using that SBC as the broker for the messages.)

The last component that needed to work was the bridging script that reported information using HDMI-CEC to read the bus for status and then transmit commands from Home Assistant to turn that screen on and off. In the intervening time, the library that the python program used to communicate had jumped a major version number and changed its entire syntax in the process. Luckily, the error that appeared mentioned that a single flag could be set so that it would use the old version of how it was set up, and that saved me a lot of grief trying to figure out how to re-spec the script to use the new library. The flag may deprecate at some point, and then I will have to walk the script up from the previous version to the current version. Hopefully, when that's necessary, there will be a nice conversion guide posted somewhere that explains what the equivalent commands are, and where to put the components of the previous command in the new syntax. For now, however, the scripts themselves are sorted, thanks to adding one piece of code at the right place to the thing itself.

What's not working is that in this new version based on Debian Trixie, the library I had installed from the earlier version was no longer present. And that meant a significant amount of looking around to see if there was something suitable that would serve in its place. The testing repository, the one that would be in the next release (Forky), had the library I thought I had installed on the previous version. So, I did something that is recommended against, and added the testing repository and pulled the version of the item from there, expecting it all to set up and go.

No dice. So I uninstalled that particular set of libraries, because pulling from different releases is a good way to break it. Option two: since it's a python script, I can potentially set up a virtual environment for Python, separated from the system-managed Python installation, then install the necessary libraries through the pip package manager to the virtual environment, and run the script out of that, so long as said script can communicate out and have Home assistant pick up what it's laying down. That's easier to manage with some software packages like pipx to handle the creation and management of the virtual environment. I get the environment set up, and the library that I think will work installed, and the script bombs again with the same error as it had before, So the virtual environment approach isn't going to work, either.

All this time, I'm using my search engine skills to try and figure out what the error is, but there aren't a whole lot of posts on the subject, and most of the time, it keeps coming back to a couple of places, including a GitHub issue that seems like it's exactly about the problem that I'm having, and that somehow the problem was fixed in a subsequent release of the software, but I don't see how they got from point a to point b, as I read and reread the information and keep trying to figure out where the library is that I need to install from the package manager to get the functionality I had before.

This is one of those things where sometimes you need to let your brain background solve a task. Humans are, after all, persistence predators, and while flashes of insight are often cool, they often come more after you have been chewing on a problem for a while, letting it background-process while you work your way toward greater understanding. There was a study, I believe it was in one of my graduate school texts, where a professor gave students a list of riddles to try and solve over the course of a day. At the lunch break, the professor collected the tests and had the students do their lunch break activities, but at places along the way in the building, the professor had placed representations of riddle solutions, and the thing that was being tested was whether the presence of those solution prompts helped the students solve more riddles. I can't find the study, and so I may not be representing it accurately, but sometimes you go through an entire something and as your brain twists and turns on it, and eventually, you do some up with something that actually qualifies as a solution to the problem. It's the idea of "distracting" your conscious processes so that some other process can take over the solving of things, or the integration of information. Sometimes sleeping on it is the right answer to the situation.

In my case, the actual solution came when I finally realized that I was making an assumption that one of the forum posts explicitly denied was a good one to make, and that instead of installing a package from a repository with a similar name, but not actually containing what was needed to succeed, what I instead needed to do was follow the instructions that were given in the right place and compile the damn library myself. Which there was definitely a recipe for, and for the specific architecture and device that I was using. Download source, pass appropriate flags to the compiler, make, make install, all of the things that are involved in compiling a library from source, and guess what? As soon as I had compiled the correct library, the script worked perfectly as I ran it, with the "use the old version please" flag set for the library that did some of the work.

I felt very stupid afterward, because everything kept funneling back to these posts that said "no, that package is not the library you need, you have to compile the library from scratch, and this is the way to do so." I didn't want to do that because I'd rather use the package manager to produce the thing that I needed, instead of compiling something from source. Actually doing what the thing said only took a few minutes and would have avoided many months of grief and not understanding why things weren't working, even with the ability to search up the specific error message and find the post that described it accurately and said what the solution was. Once I managed to read the post correctly and drop the preconception I had, things went much more smoothly.

So this is about the persistence of solving problems, of trying to get to a solution that works for me, and sometimes the disappointment that comes when someone is satisficing rather than looking for a full solution. It's about persistence, because apparently I keep wanting to tweak and shuffle and suggest and do things until they're exactly right, instead of mostly right. It's also about how that persistence sometimes means it's hard to let go of the situation if it's not perfect and optimized and works in all cases. And how it can be annoying to have to deal with people who deliberately want to keep introducing nonsensical edge cases into your perfectly working system, or who believe that if you don't debate them on their nonsensical edge cases or absurd questions, they have somehow "won" and proven themselves smarter than you, because you refused to engage with bad faith tactics. As the somewhat ineffectual advice given would tell us, we can only control ourselves, we cannot control other people. (In pursuit of perfection, we seek control, and sometimes the control that would produce perfection is the control of others, and therefore, perfection will always be beyond us. In theory, this realization is supposed to help us not seek that level of control. In practice, there's still a lot of frustration that comes from not being able to do the things flawlessly and well, and sometimes even more aggravation when things are going out of our control and we don't even know why.) Given how often I end up having to engage with the absurd and the nonsensical, I'd like to believe I have a greater tolerance for other people being Wrong on the Internet (or in my workplace), but there's still sometimes that bit where I want to believe that with enough persistence, I will be able to prevail over the things that bother me, or the people that bother me.

It's also, though, about persistence, the concept that we first learn about when object permanence makes it into our head, that the world is not, in fact, limited to what we are experiencing with our senses, and that our senses (and our minds, if you want to get Zen about it) are misleading us about the nature of our reality. Just because the ball disappears behind the paper doesn't mean it winks out of existence entirely, only to return into reality when the paper is raised. (At least, at the Newtonian mechanics level. Quanta and their friends behave very differently, and we are finding more and more that the act of observation collapses all the possibilities into an observed real, such that whatever organ we are using to perceive the possibilities with inscribes what the result will be onto those possibilities.) The past and the future are constructions, only Now is reality, and only for the now that we experience Now. Many of those constructions are useful, and society rests on our ability to construct things about past, future, and pattern so that we can attempt to impose some amount of order upon the chaos, so as to make it livable and manageable. (That's karma, baby.) We persist in things all the time. Error. its opposite. The horrors persist, and so do I (or but so do I.) Nevertheless, she persisted. He's baaaack! So many things that we have in our history and our lives are about the application of human-sized amounts of influence and force until the desired result is achieved, sometimes even with a great array of things standing athwart, sabotaging, or attempting to cause failure in the way. Because we are not the kinds of beings that let go easily, or give up, and we do much greater work when there are more of us, so we can each take a turn at persistence while someone else rests up for their next turn. The idea about the arc bending toward justice is not a thing that happens by itself, it happens because there are people bending the arc into the desired shape. We will not complete the work in our lifetime, but neither are we excused from doing the work during our lifetimes. And through the ages, thanks to our persistence, we build and sustain things that are greater than any one person and one lifetime. (It's frustrating not to see when it finally clicks into place, but ours is not to know the day or the hour, apparently.)

Only a little while longer, and some of the decisions that I made in the past, decisions that were absolutely correct, will finally have discharged their consequences. It always seems impossible until it is done. Keep at it.