So… I’m not sure if this is an entirely rational thought.

I’d always wanted to do ham radio but hadn’t bothered. Before my time, ham radio let you do amazing things that weren’t otherwise very easy. Like have a group chat with a bunch of people all over the world. Except when I was looking for things to do, you could get on the Internet and chat with a bunch of people all over the world … without the antennas and hardware and all.

Lately some stuff happened and my spouse’s friend who lives near Asheville NC and lived through the flooding there where ham radio was the only working form of communications, so my spouse got pressured into buying a radio, which means that I got myself a license because … well, radio works without much infrastructure?

Mostly I figure I needed to fill the void that was getting on Twitter if something happened locally.

My household celebrates two different winter-related holidays, Christmas included.

I have some connectors there on my ESPHome devices to string up intelligent LED strands. I even got some RGBW LED strands so that I can have more pleasant-looking lights.

I’ve got a fake tree and some other decorations, plus a blob of older LED and incandescent strands.

…and I just haven’t felt any real holiday spirit the past few years so none of it’s been put up.

The hard-to-solve problem with the news is that reporting on suicides causes suicide (as in: more people commit suicide, not just people who were on the ledge decided to go) yet people also want to know things.

I’m unclear if the usual disclaimers added to the article actually help or just are the only sounds-like-it-might-help thing that comes to mind so at least the publisher can feel better about the added deaths that, statistically speaking, they might be causing. I just remember it being covered in one of my college gened classes and the way it was presented was that everybody threw up their hands in frustration and gave up.

An acquaintance who screwed up her leg really bad and went through a whole process of getting bolted back together et al decided that she wasn’t going to tell people what happened. Because everybody always asks “how’d you do it?” as if it was some curse that she had personally triggered that they could avoid. And I thought about how the first question in my mind was “how’d you do it?” and I guess it made me think about the inanity of making sure to check for flying herring while traveling backwards hanging out the window of a train going between Albuquerque and Phoenix after having signed up for a triple indemnity life insurance plan… or something like that.

The only exception, of course, is you are doing something that the news orgs consider “wrong” like doing drugs or being certain categories of mentally ill or riding a bicycle for transportation.

I’d ended up having a conversation with an archivist about the somewhat related question of “What was the Soviet Union’s history of itself, absent the editorializing that the rest of the world has been doing?”

For example, Tamim Ansary wrote Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes that explained a lot of things about the middle east through that sort of lens, so I was hoping that someone would write a history of the USSR in a similar fashion, which I didn’t find.

One of the problems we have when approaching the more successful world governments is understanding … well, I guess good intentions? There’s kinda two sides to the story of Dear Leader. On one side, the self-aggrandizement as the father of the country, on the other side the act of actually trying to be the father of the country. Obviously a strongman today is mostly running the show almost entirely for selfish reasons but what you kinda see in the USSR and modern day China is at the same time an attempt to make the state better off. Which, of course, falls prey to effective use of power. “Do this or you will be executed” doesn’t work very well… not with the US approach to the death penalty, not to the totalitarianism of the attempted Communist state.

But, even today, there’s tons of “Good idea, bad implementation” things that the Chinese government does where the rest of the world governments just let things get worse.

The vibes I was getting in the days of Lenin from my reading was interesting. Lenin was the leader of the USSR but not in the way that Stalin was. The Bolsheviks of the time insisted that things be discussed and debated and worked through and not even Lenin was above that. And there was a very forward-looking idealistic sort of viewpoint. They could reject everything and do things right for once and many of them were new to power so they were freed of that worldview. And a lot of those things didn’t pan out as well as they wanted it to and people started to need to be “convinced” to do the new thing. First the “useless” hereditary upper-class, but then everybody else. And then eventually Lenin died and Stalin didn’t have that much patience for the Bolshevik old-guard and took over.

tl;dr: In a sense, it’s as if a bunch of Star Trek fans had toppled a government and were trying to build the best government ever for the future, using whatever means necessary.

I feel like Starfleet in Trek accidentally but directly led to the modern US Space Force.

Trek always had to soft-sell some of the socialist ideals (e.g. “we don’t need cash” without really explaining how things really do work) and then also a lot of science fiction that was popular in the more literary side of things during the 80s was actually frighteningly right-wing.

There’s not really a good version of conservatism that works in this modern era, especially when you come to where the parties are staked in the US, but even in general. You can’t have a modern society with all of the complexities and interrelations and cost and then have it be entirely hands-off conservative capitalism. This is why even when you talk to people who are nominally part of the right wing and actually go through the checkboxes of things that they must necessarily adhere to, you see a lot of people who are so-called RINO people … and then a bunch of weirdos who nobody likes.

The brain’s got a bunch of structures probably to prevent us from spiraling into depression when we were hunting the African savanna when our buddy got eaten by a tiger and there wasn’t anything we could have maybe done about that that cause today’s cognitive dissonance.

So basically the only way you can get a frighteningly actually unpopular platform through the electorate is by taking advantage of cognitive dissonance. Because you have to project this idea that a fundamentally backwards idea is going to move us forwards somehow.

If Copyright hadn’t been extended for so many centuries, Trek characters would already be in the public domain and we’d see them fictionally used much in the way that we use all of the characters from actual public domain works. Shakespearean heroes, for example. But, even as things are now, the characters of Trek have had such a presence in the media scene that they do kinda take that aspect on. Thus, basically repeating the plot of part of the Babylon 5 episode “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” where you have the crew of Babylon 5 being used by a new fascist empire being holographically simulated to say 1984-esque things… one of the weapons to maintain a state of cognitive dissonance is to go back and kinda put fascist words into leftist mouths.

So it’s a bit of an accident on the part of the person, who is being dragged along politically, but it’s very much part of the conservative movement to “reclaim” old media and the relatively milquetoast treatment of alternatives to capitalism and a complete abandonment of queer issues in middle-era Trek makes that kinda easy, which I guess is why NuTrek does go through some pains to state things a bit more forcefully.

Well, one option, which can be pushing the boundaries of selfhosted for some, would be to use a hosted k8s service for your public-facing stuff and then a home real k8s cluster for the rest of it.