Benjamin Esham @bdesham@parcel5.social
Admin
My *parents* live in Cleveland. *I* live in the moment.
Joined Aug 2018
The air cools. Crisp leaves dance on the breeze, leaving the aromas of apple and cinnamon in their wake. Sipping my annual pumpkin spice latte, I send the annual text to my family warning them off of the new iOS because it’s still buggy as shit
Benjamin Esham
boosted
Brilliant project that tidies up public domain ebooks.
Gutenberg and Internet Archive are wonderful resources, but the texts are poorly formatted for actual use, especially on ereaders.
This is a volunteer driven initiative to bring these texts up to date with modern standards and make them look as good as possible on the page.
Benjamin Esham
boosted
New blog post: What’s the smallest amount of currency that can’t be represented by a floating-point number? https://esham.io/2020/05/currency-in-floating-point
Between March and November, if I need to mention my time zone I say “Pacific time” because “Pacific Daylight Time” sounds too pedantic but I’m sure as hell not going to say “Pacific Standard Time.”
Note to self: if you’re debating whether your website should drop compatibility with an old browser so you can use some new-ish JavaScript feature, don’t forget to check whether that browser’s old TLS stack is *already* preventing it from connecting to your site at all!
Benjamin Esham
boosted
$ configure
checking if it's 1974 .. no
checking if it's 1975 .. no
checking if it's 1977 .. no
[...]
$ make
[checks again]
Benjamin Esham
boosted
covid
there is an alternate socialist present in which non-essential workers just get time off during the pandemic, or are incentivized to retrain for essential work to expand critical capacity, but that time off doesn’t force businesses to shutter because rent doesn’t exist. after the pandemic, imagine just going back to work. the restaurant is a little dusty, but with a flick of the switch and a few hours cleaning, you’re serving food like nothing changed.
Benjamin Esham
boosted
"Chromium-based browser found to be three data collection systems in a trenchcoat"
“Let’s start on the recipe for our new ‘vegan tiramisu cheesecake.’ What are you thinking?”
“Well… it should probably have no ingredients in common with either tiramisu or cheesecake.”
“Oh, for *sure*.”
My favorite thing about paying $300 a year for EpiPens is that if everything goes well, *I won’t even use them.*
Benjamin Esham
boosted
Your beauty lasts beyond the grave
The angels call you, sainted maid
Although you're nameless here, forever more
Your voice is like forgotten lore
I'm rapping at the chamber door
I cannot compete with you, Lenore
Lenore Lenore Lenore Lenore
I'm begging of you please don't haunt my man
Benjamin Esham
boosted
For real like Bandcamp is exactly the kind of service we *hoped* the internet would give us: “hey, people make things, they set their own price inc. free, we provide the storefront, you buy it and the money goes to the creator, you get it in a DRM-free format and can play it however you want, we just make money to keep going & improving and aren’t a VC-funded nightmare company of rampant reckless growth that will do something nightmarish and implode.”
We need more media platforms like that.
Benjamin Esham
boosted
i feel like i should get into org-mode because i do a lot of things with spreadsheets and i like plain text and stuff but it feels like the dwarf fortress version of notepad just saying
The hottest gig-economy service in 2020 will be “Uber, but for opting out of mandatory arbitration clauses.”
Benjamin Esham
boosted
do you understand? it was never technology that made humane relations possible. it was you and i, and our commitment to each other.
Benjamin Esham
boosted
a courier arrives from the next village on horseback with books, zines, letters, art prints, and a hard drive full of music and movies. we offload the drive while the courier joins us for lunch, sharing news — harvests, births, deaths, the goings-on of various governance councils — while we load a drive with our own new media. the courier leaves as full as they came, and well-fed besides.
Benjamin Esham
boosted
in the alternate socialist present, i am herding goats with a cane and melody while replacing batteries in the mesh routers the ‘ware guild has hung from trees. later i dine at the village commissary and watch a movie projected on the side of a barn.
Admin
My *parents* live in Cleveland. *I* live in the moment.
Joined Aug 2018
