ross' lifestream

City Pop (Vibes) Immaculate Delusions

It’s a bizarre aesthetic (and rhetorical) leap from Richard Mayhew’s Delusions to the similar strong chromas, hues, and deep values of Japanese City Pop album art. But how many colors are there in the world. Every visit to SFMOMA I drift to Mayhew. Into his drives, spirals, through …

Things I like: Jazz Vol. 1

Closure was small, TypeScript is big (thinking w/ Dan Vanderkam)

The dangers of premature optimization are well understood among software engineers who’ve been frustrated when the secondary effects of the efforts end up compounding maintenance cost. (Does this principle play out in other milieu?). What’s perhaps more interesting to ponder is when …

Posession: Ruby, JavaScript, D/s, Mycology

There exist happy little clouds of coincidence when studying new languages. And not just across the computer ones, mind you! Ruby and Indonesian share a frugal brevity and disinterest in flairs of punctuation when managing possession. Itu bukuku. vs That's my book. And… me = …

What other optimisms lie in wait on the Enterprise NCC-1701-D?

Ruby vs JS: the onest one-liner

Coming from JavaScript, I was not expecting Ruby’s Enumerable module to have methods for selecting min and max values from a collection. Especially with an added parameter that lets you “take” a range starting from zero. For comparison, what if we needed the lowest x number of …

Rspec vs js, let vs let

I love comparison pieces like Steve Hicks' article What JavaScript Tests Could Learn From RSpec that juxtapose the syntaxes, rules, shibboleths of two programming languages. Comprehension comes more quickly. Interesting. In describing the perceived advantages of rspec’s let method to declutter …

Excerpt from Decision Making in Brainless Organisms by Raechel Anne Jolie from collection Make the Golf Course a Public Sex Forests

Just discovered Sun Ra’s recording at Haverford College, 1980. The story of this record is bonkers. Students running concert series book jazz after previous acts flop - the Talking Heads! (Elvis Costello was also booked but cancelled after said flop) 🤦. Ra appears suddenly after cancelling two …

Abolish The Family by Sophie Lewis

But uh oh those summer nights. Right on the heels of a transformative family weekend! When Theo laughs, the world is a single flower. What is your family’s pronoun? Mistake: are the flower and Theo the same or different?

With Anne-Marie Willis, professor of design theory at the German University in Cairo.

Another world is possible. But what of worlding? How to world? When a Farley’s barista is a strong current; wow the level of shine escaping her mouth. And I loved it. The slightest tickle of maple syrup was a great recommendation! Per usual I sent myself something to read and didn’t cite …

Naur, goodies, 1985 years after Jesus Christ

There are so many goodies in Naur, 1985. Filter, some(): Declares there’s no right way to write software (Further) rebukes the scientific method Calls out lack of empirical study of software methods The programmer as “manager” of computer activity Thank you ceejbot for further …

Naur, the optimist, 1985 years after Jesus Christ

The year is 1985. Certain kinds of optimism abound in programming circles. From Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building: "It may be noted that the need for revival of an entirely dead program probably will rarely arise, since it is hardly conceivable that the revival would be assigned to …

Power Moves

During her novel workshop on estate planning, Sarah Deluca of Move Money Shift Power poses the question: Is holding onto control after your death something you want? If part of our life’s work is to strengthen connection, relinquish power, share power, redistribute, does a Trust actually …

Can you jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace?

No. You can’t. Not yet. It’s quite possible that my work in computers today is a last ditch to actualize a childhood fantasy of solving neighborhood crimes with my friends in Brooklyn with the help of a friendly ghost that communicates via word processor. You type, then we type, …

The other day I played the dérive along Valencia after a salad with a colossal heft of blue cheese. I found my way to Dog Eared Books. I always end up there. However, this time I grazed through atypical sections; like the politically charged cabinet below the register with the latest thunder for …

Bringing back sweet memories. Atmospheric pressure. La lluvia frames colored paint. The real miracle is how long Chevron kept the oil burning. Rise Judea. Upcycled hellenism is my streetwear idolatry. Labneh and cacao soda; another probiotic day with a credit score!

TERFism studies: Naziism for Transmisogynist Feminists

I’m still processing far too much from Week 1. Feminists Against Women: the Politics of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism. This is a course I didn’t realize I needed. It’s been a no-brainer to support the trans community against the likes of J.K. Rowling and other …

Summer lewks leaked. Sunscreen is a conspiracy, cover up with a shirt or heavy layer of clay. I want to be a bird. Humans have become meh. Go lay down. I want to read space operas with shopping and hair braiding and tea. Life is maintenance. If you live with others make sure to balance the house …

With each new day it doesn’t rain I lose hope about the future of our species. But I did have a good performance review this week. Aaaaand adding some lemon juice and gojuchang to this breakfast soup was CORRECT. The slap heard round the world is LAPD riot cops descending on climate scientists …

Redis Poem set things set them to expire set them to be exclusive set them to expire, be exclusive (inspired by a chat with mike b)

Well-known ways that JavaScript coerces objects to strings

It’s a proper cliche of commercial computer programs to bind audit reporters alongside code at important relay nexuses. There are a panoply of reasons to extract information this way: producing audit trails for legal compliance, gathering product insights, collecting debug traces for quality …

Language ergonomic studies: Summing ranges and most frequent terms

Pennies per day (by day count) in Clojure: (defn pennyPerDay [numDays] (reduce + (range 1 (+ numDays 1))) ) (pennyPerDay 30) Pennies per day (by day count) in JS: function pennyPerDay(numDays) { return Array(++numDays) .fill(0) .reduce((sum, _, i) = sum + i, 0); } pennyPerDay(30); Most frequent …

Language ergnonomic studies: 52 card deck

Javascript: const cards = () = ['♥','♠','♣','♦'] .map((suite) = (['2','3','4','5','6','7','8','9','10','J','Q','K','A'].map((card) = suite + card))) Clojure: (defn new-deck [] (for [r [\♥ \♠ \♣ \♦] s [:2 :3 :4 :5 :6 :7 :8 :9 :10 :J :Q :K :A]] [r s])) 💻

Reading my streaming fancies with Le Guin's Carrier Bag of Fiction

Why do I have such a big attraction to teen fictions (like _Never Have I Ever_)? For a while I've been thinking it was the force of a stream, a soak, a wash of saudade made lighter by revisiting that time from a better place; a chance to relive with empathy for myself, to reclaim that time from the …