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Nov. 3rd, 2021 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavscattershot updates for this one ... i don't have time to make all of these individual posts yet, so here goes.
tfw you hear the deep lore gossip (tm) at the company that instantly makes you remember why 'avoiding any and all juicy gossip for sanity reasons' was the motto for the past two years. you-said-how-many-people-are-leavin'?? drama, deep fuckin' org change drama, extremely quirky ceo drama, to put it in the nicest way possible (they all are??? what is their deal man), all of it rolled into one.
anyway, uuhhh ... shit's going to go sideways before christmas. :'D [ eats popcorn and brushes up the resume because i may need to have an exit plan ]
system 76 ubuntu-based lemur pro arrived! :DDD
i want to do a proper review / unboxing writeup (with pix) so that way it's actually useful to people who are on the edge about buying anything from system 76, especially coming from a 'literally no linux experience' background. overall it's pretty cool so far, not perfect, but pleasantly surprised - and i think my biggest emotion is ... relief?? i feel like i'm not constantly *fighting* mac or windows. the bits i wanna touch on later
book rec! Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man's Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan (available to read for free on archive.org)
... if you've been researching hate groups for a while, you'll come across the anecdote of 'that Black man who befriends KKK members and eventually deradicalized hundreds of them'. to the point a former grand dragon named him his godfather of his daughter(!!!). Me being me, I wanted to read the actual lived encounters and mindset from his side because in my experience, hearing all of that directly is way more powerful than third-hand (and often incorrectly) from the media. (Malcolm X's autobiography is another more well known of the legend getting a wee bit fuzzier from the man).
my official review on goodreads was 'the most powerful book i've read with the worst cover i've seen', which is all true, ha. this was the kind of book you marathon in a night or two, pacing occasionally and croaking out a '...jesus.' what the fu-' 'JESUS.' at the sheer. helluva. balls. of ... everything, courage, kindness, grim conviction, faith that Daryl had ... like, gonna be honest, there were a few scenes/interactions that nearly broke my online-poisoned brain, because in this day and age all of the pieces and coincidences needed for those amicable (!!?!) encounters between him and avowed racists / bona fide white terrorists simply doesn't happen like. that. but it did. and it does. this dude's still living and doing his thing, this isn't even "back before 2016".
it is a deeply complicated (some would say dated ig) book that left me with some deeply complex, mixed feelings and there's a lot that i'm leaving out because i'm still chewing on it / the book honestly deserves a lot longer and more subtler review, but yeah. i do think it's a little telling that he gets a lot of articles written about him but his book isn't one of those instant best seller autobios - it's actually technically out of print; there's a sense of "realness / rawness" that i can see being a bit... Much? idk.
tfw you hear the deep lore gossip (tm) at the company that instantly makes you remember why 'avoiding any and all juicy gossip for sanity reasons' was the motto for the past two years. you-said-how-many-people-are-leavin'?? drama, deep fuckin' org change drama, extremely quirky ceo drama, to put it in the nicest way possible (they all are??? what is their deal man), all of it rolled into one.
anyway, uuhhh ... shit's going to go sideways before christmas. :'D [ eats popcorn and brushes up the resume because i may need to have an exit plan ]
system 76 ubuntu-based lemur pro arrived! :DDD
i want to do a proper review / unboxing writeup (with pix) so that way it's actually useful to people who are on the edge about buying anything from system 76, especially coming from a 'literally no linux experience' background. overall it's pretty cool so far, not perfect, but pleasantly surprised - and i think my biggest emotion is ... relief?? i feel like i'm not constantly *fighting* mac or windows. the bits i wanna touch on later
- the box itself is adorable, and the laptop is so fucking light. like 'is there even anything in here???' light, not even 'encounter with a super thin macbook for the first time'. some of the reviewers on youtube were bitching at the build quality but imo this is a better build quality than my supposedly ""durable"" and "military ruggedized' cursed fucking asus i brought from ..... was it bestbuy? yeah. it's not apple engineering, but it's better than mid-range windows imo.
- i find it helps to think of this overall as a small software/hardware upgrade and/or sidegrade from my 2010 mac - and a quantum upgrade in terms of removing the bullshit that companies have steadily added on "their" machines since then. it feels so much more like that old laptop (rhythmbox vs that old old basic bones version of itunes, etc).
- i did get an instant crash error message after initializing ... lol, classic linux, but it went away after a restart. the only other out-of-the-box "bug" i'm encountering is "ubuntu software" (the shopping bag icon for apps) not working after a while but that's also after i've had it on and running for 36+ hrs counting so that one feels more like a 'have you tried restarting?' than a persistent thing.
- getting the wacom intuos 5 worked ... instantly ... seamlessly. :o holy shit i was so impressed, i had more issues getting a fucking tablet working on a 2018 (work) MBP than this thing. straight up just plug in the USB and it fucking worked. likewise firefox is effortless, mouse magnification was easy to find and i could set up a custom key bind that's very similar to my old mac...
- loling at the classic linux quirkiness of not being able to drag and drop from the desktop to "files". y'all gotta fix that, man.
book rec! Klan-destine Relationships: A Black Man's Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan (available to read for free on archive.org)
... if you've been researching hate groups for a while, you'll come across the anecdote of 'that Black man who befriends KKK members and eventually deradicalized hundreds of them'. to the point a former grand dragon named him his godfather of his daughter(!!!). Me being me, I wanted to read the actual lived encounters and mindset from his side because in my experience, hearing all of that directly is way more powerful than third-hand (and often incorrectly) from the media. (Malcolm X's autobiography is another more well known of the legend getting a wee bit fuzzier from the man).
my official review on goodreads was 'the most powerful book i've read with the worst cover i've seen', which is all true, ha. this was the kind of book you marathon in a night or two, pacing occasionally and croaking out a '...jesus.' what the fu-' 'JESUS.' at the sheer. helluva. balls. of ... everything, courage, kindness, grim conviction, faith that Daryl had ... like, gonna be honest, there were a few scenes/interactions that nearly broke my online-poisoned brain, because in this day and age all of the pieces and coincidences needed for those amicable (!!?!) encounters between him and avowed racists / bona fide white terrorists simply doesn't happen like. that. but it did. and it does. this dude's still living and doing his thing, this isn't even "back before 2016".
it is a deeply complicated (some would say dated ig) book that left me with some deeply complex, mixed feelings and there's a lot that i'm leaving out because i'm still chewing on it / the book honestly deserves a lot longer and more subtler review, but yeah. i do think it's a little telling that he gets a lot of articles written about him but his book isn't one of those instant best seller autobios - it's actually technically out of print; there's a sense of "realness / rawness" that i can see being a bit... Much? idk.
