Listening To: Swim Team - Hurricane

Site temporarily moved to Dretch.Com

This experiment worked well but it’s time to move on. While I love Hugo this unit wanted to play with a less DIY CMS while concentrating on other projects.

A bit more effort would have overcome the hurdles I had but one has to choose battles!

Listening To: Swim Team - Hurricane

Photo: Wildfire smoke from Hope Slide, BC (Highway 3 near Manning Park)

I’ve not abandoned this. Just felt no real need to fling words into the void over the last months.

Have been taking photos and having adventures of all sorts. Applying for passports and plan to go travelling shortly. Following a friend to Asia. Going to see the town I was born in. Backpacks and hostels. Strange foods and the resulting discomforts. Cannot wait!

The plan to travel across Canada by van has been scuppered by gas prices. ANY form of travel will be costly and anti-environmental. But will take care to use the least impactful forms. Besides a quick jaunt to Halifax this spring I’ve not flown for over a decade and rarely drive these days. Lucky enough to live within biking range of most needs. More on electric scooters and other more sustainable transport shortly!

Listening To: Primetime - dumbhead

Just so we’re perfectly clear. Ghosting somebody (the act of suddenly cutting off all contact in a romantic setting) is:

emotionally abusive.

Stop it.

Is it really so hard to type out a couple of lines of text to “sign off” if you can’t simply can’t continue a dialogue? To give the other person some closure? Even the slightest attempt at respect goes a long way to preventing harm.

Ya. Online dated a bit during the pandemic lockdowns. Bleh!

–

further reading:

Ghosting Is Emotional Abuse And Our Generation Needs To Stop Doing It

Why Ghosting Hurts So Much

Listening To: Collate - Medicine b/w Genesis Fatigue

Photo: Gaming with Willy (really, anything with Willy, except dishes. Too much splashing.)

More a crib note than a guide:

Ensure “wine” and “winetricks” are installed via GUI or command line. During all the below winetricks kept notifying about 64 bit. Ignore. Annoying.

Follow the DXVK WINE install section on the archwiki (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wine#DXVK). I used this following string to set up the default prefix:

WINEPREFIX="/home/christopher/.wine" setup_dxvk install

I’ve always installed corefonts and Visual C DLL’s via winetricks. GUI or:

winetricks corefonts vcrun2005 vcrun2008 vcrun2010

Download the latest EVE installer and install via shell or winetricks. The latter created desktop launch icons for me.

wine EveLauncher-blahblahblah.exe

Follow along with eve’s wizard and you SHOULD be good to go.

A final tip: configure Timeshift to run often and add an entry to back up the Eve Launcher directory (Timeshift will exclude home directory content by default). That way if there are issues with an Eve Launcher or Manjaro update you can easily roll back and get playing while you check the forums and figure out the problem. I run once an hour/day/week/month to a second data drive in the system. Boot, hit ctrl-alt-F2 (kick GUI and back to shell) and run…

sudo timeshift --restore

…to start the process.

further reading:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Mcnster/EVE_Online

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Wine

https://kevandrews.uk/eve-online-arch-linux

Footprint as of this writing:

Operating System: Manjaro Linux KDE Plasma Version: 5.18.5 KDE Frameworks Version: 5.69.0 Qt Version: 5.14.2 Kernel Version: 5.6.11-1-MANJARO OS Type: 64-bit Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40GHz Memory: 15.6 GiB of RAM Video: Nvidia Geforce GTX 970, driver 440.82

Listening To: Dishpit - Dipshit

Photo: A trip to Bowen Island to visit friends (when that was a thing)

Canada’s main opposition party members reject proposal to recognize climate change as real

That’s right. Made headlines around the world yesterday. In this day and age, despite nearly unanimous consensus in the scientific community.

And it’s not because many of them don’t believe in science, it’s because the population doesn’t. That’s doesn’t pay attention, doesn’t care, doesn’t want to think about it. You can fill in the rest.

This is the the political party which garnered the most votes in the last election (but because of mechanics, didn’t “win”).

This is the party “most” Canadians favour.

Canadians are shitty people. Sure, it’s a generalisation, but drive in Vancouver’s rush hour traffic and see if you don’t agree. And don’t wave to the electric car drivers. They’ll only save the world if they run on renewable energy. They don’t., better to buy something used and drive less.

https://extinction.fyi/

Listening To: Muncie Girls - From Caplan to Belsize

Photo: A Civia Halsted fitted with a open topped dog crate

It’s a warm summer afternoon today. A seasonal tipping point. And time to do something about it.

This year has been a bit different as many of us have become accustomed to driving. Normally it would be biking on good days and the bus during the cold and wet winter weather we have locally. But, despite the “masks mandatory” signs on the local transit, every one I’ve tried has a few to half a dozen no-maskers aboard. Fuck that. It’s not that I’m a weather wuss (and indeed used to bike year round) but hauling Stanley’s ass about has changed that up. I had two spectacular wipe-outs on black ice with him aboard and while we were both (eventually) OK, it’s taught me to be more cautious.

The cargo bike pictured was built to transport Stanley and I between cities (Vancouver to New Westminster) when I commuted to a film lot there. A couple of big hills were too much to ride a heavy bike up manually so the electrics were installed. It wasn’t a low-end job, at thirty three percent assist I could apparently make it a hundred kilometres. It’s my summer transport of choice, and that starts about now. Just needs a bit of regular maintenance and a wipe-down. If doofus isn’t coming along, there is a road bike presently hung on the wall. I don’t love it, truth be told. The Brodie Romulus had a cool name and does work well but my body has never loved the “swoopy” handlebar setup. Crap, they’re expensive now (I paid less than half MSRP), Perhaps trading across for a something with a more upright posture may be in order.

There are some restrictions to biking in general, Vancouver is a high-crime city which features a significant amount of bike theft, no matter how you secure them. Luckily our studio communal space is empty now so I can store it and go about my business. Otherwise it’s a lovely ride down to the waterfront and along it even all the way out to “Spanish Banks”, which is on a peninsula by the local university. There’s a dog beach that has shade and lets Stanley dig holes to his little heart’s content.

Just walked to the grocery store in shorts and a T-shirt. Awesome.

Listening To: Hacked Podcast - The Year Double Zero

Photo: “BOO”. Another one of my old medical fosters. I’ll write about her on day. And cry doing it.

Just listened to the Hacked podcast linked above. It’s about the Y2K bug. The issues with computers had when hitting the year “Double Zero” and the chaos it caused society.

Somewhere in the late 90’s I had cause to rent some office space, and found it in a place chock full of what could only be described as “grey beards”. Lovely bunch. They were a group of COBOL programmers who came out of retirement to fix some of the problems computer code had with… time. And make stupid amounts of money doing so. Sometime about 1997 governments and corporations around the world woke up and started throwing serious cash at the problem. The rent was cheap and the company good. Learned a lot from those folks.

Millennium New Year’s Eve itself was spent in Germany. The media had not been so “doom and gloom” about the issue and, frankly, I’m not sure your average German would care. I remember standing on a elevated railway crossing, beer in hand (no such prudish rules there) and watching a 360 degree panorama of fireworks being set off across the city. It was awesome.

Early the next day we headed out for a walk and found a dance band still playing in a city square at 8:00am. A few slow dancing couples still at it. I sat there nursing a hangover and watched bulldozers get to work as the number of bottles strewn about had made the roads impassible.

A very good start to the millennium.

Listening To: Alien Boys - Night Danger (“Mother Chaos” is my fave)

Photo: Alien Boys play a boxing ring.

I’m not one for celebrating commercial holidays, but Valentine’s day was still still a bit rough.

Running into a lot of “science-unawareness” in my attempts to date in the midst of a pandemic.

No choice but to continue. Spending the next years (what, you think this is gonna be over in the fall?) single just isn’t an option.

ps. From The Guardian: No more drunken random snogging, perhaps ever.

Listening To: Liquids - Life is pain Idiot

Photo: Damn cat’s gotta photo-bomb everything.

Had a nice walk, took some pics. Hard to do when it’s overcast. Think a chair and lamp by this big window would be nice for reading.

No thanks world, not today.

Bonus Item: Pop music made on a warm summer day. In Spain: Russian Red - The Sun The Trees

Listening To: Supermoon - Playland

Photo: A Sunny Day Out With Stanley

Minus fourteen (Celsius) in the forecast. Spent the day hanging in the sun.