Son of James sandblasting the edge off

June 23, 2021

(that would be Jameson, btw)

Dang, no sooner did the above leave my fingertips than big raindrops began falling... super briefly, but enough with visual threat in the sky to have me scampering the stuff I brought outside to more well-covered territory. There's still vestiges of drop impacts on the screen.

Oh, wow, the word 'screen' brought back memories of that terminal multiplexer, before tmux hit my terminal joy scene. I'm picturing an old tower computer in my house in Upstate New York, the joy I had getting Linux running on it. Back in the 90's. I have to believe installing it easier these days.

But, then, I'd be crazy to fail to acknowledge the component of accomplishment in that joy.

It felt similar to earlier joy messing with electronica earlier in life. That's when I started believing in a world of possibility in computing – not so much what I could accomplish with software in some money-making way, but a hope software environments could be stimulating “fun to see what we can do with this” in what I imagined to be a less messy/arduous space.

Of course, I eventually learned of file/directory entropy, and how, just like in the “real world”, “out of sight” (e.g. “what file is/was that in????”) translated to a sort of annihilation of verbiage/code until finally found again (e.g. 'find', 'grep', or especially the twain combined).

And <deity> help you if you archived shit via a touch 'o the 'tar' and 'gzip'.

Well, that was the “stateside” aspect.

Another huge aspect was the socializing potential of the likes of USENET and IRC. It was easy to forget what people are really like whilst dreaming of making and regularly interacting with lots of new friends.

And that sort of happened.