Motivation

This fall, I’ve been training to race the California International Marathon (CIM) in Sacramento. I’ve run off and on through the years, but more consistently since Covid, and was peer pressured inspired to try a marathon since starting to run regularly in a club a couple of years ago.

It’s nice to show up on race day with a bit of practice under your belt, and given that I’m a relatively new racer, I decided to sign up for a couple non-goal races: The Star City Half Marathon on October 4th, and the Berkeley Half Marathon on November 16th.

Motivation

I’ve used Google Photos to back up my photos for as long as it’s existed, in fact, before, since I used its predecessor, Picasa, including its Web Albums feature.

Recently, I’ve become more interested in keeping and managing my files locally, partially because I’ve gotten close to the size limits of my Google account and do not want to pay for storage, but largely because I’ve been using a non-phone camera recently that does not automatically back up, and it’s annoying to keep photos and albums in sync across two different locations.

I was left in an interesting predicament, where recently I’ve offloaded all my photos onto my computer (while leaving backup to Google Photos on), but also had many photos on Google Photos that were not backed up on my computer.

I used these steps to export and join my photos exported from Google Photos to my local collection.

For reasons described in my previous post, I now have to configure keyboard settings directly through X.

Recently, I switched to using a window manager without a desktop environment so have had to learn to re-configure some parts of my system directly through X that I was previously doing through the desktop environment.

One case where I’ve had to do this is setting my mouse pointer acceleration.

Background

I purchased a Raspberry Pi in 2016 (version 3B v1.2) to use as a web server for serving the static HTML pages I render my journal into. With SSH local forwarding, I can view the HTML pages on other devices over SSH, which limits attack vectors.

I recently decided to reimage this system after having bootstrapped more knowledge of system management over the past several years.

It’s an understandable mistake when listeners pigeonhole the music of Australian electronic musician and DJ Nick Bertke, better known as “Pogo”, into the mood of nostalgia. His music sits perfectly in the intersection of reverb-heavy, dreamy music production techniques and the English-speaking world’s Disney-sponsored childhood. One need look no further than Pogo’s first video, “Alice”, which heavily samples the 1951 Disney movie Alice in Wonderland. “Alice” was a viral hit when it was released in 2007, and has 20+ million views to date.

But spend enough time on Pogo’s channel, and you may find, as I did, that instead of a sense of nostalgia pushing you to watch more Pogo remixes of Disney movies, Pogo’s other work may broaden your own cinematic appetite. For me, this occurred after I watched “J’adore Juin”, a joint effort between Pogo (music) and goldpikpikcarrots (video). I loved the reflective descending harp line and introduction of bass line in the second half, and decided to watch The Apartment (1960), the source for most of the samples in “J’adore Juin”, for context.

I returned to the “J’adore Juin” over a year after I first watched it, having finally seen The Apartment. I wasn’t sure what I was going to get out of “J’adore Juin”; I would have simply been happy with being able to recognize the clips. To my surprise, I found a whole new insight into “J’adore Juin”. Ironically, with the context of The Apartment, “J’adore Juin” transcended its source and became an independent work. It is a critical response to The Apartment, one that eclipses its source material by capturing an emotional narrative better than The Apartment, but one that also realizes an independent standard of beauty.

In a class my friend took in college, he had to think of five labels to describe himself. When my friend gave his labels, his professor asked why he didn’t include “American” as one of them. Intrigued by this exercise, I too, found that “American” was not really a way in which I thought of myself (though my views have evolved on this topic since I started working with many colleagues not from the U.S.). I thought about it off and on for a few years, trying to understand why it didn’t feel right.

Albion’s Seed, historian David Hackett Fischer’s 1989 treatise on four Anglo migrations to the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which he asserts determined much of American culture over the next several centuries, gave me an answer. Fischer identifies four “folkways”, patterns of culture associated with specific populations that settled in the present day U.S.: those of the Puritans settling in Massachusetts, Cavaliers in the Tidewater region, Quakers settling in the Delaware Valley, and Borderlanders settling in the Appalachian backcountry. Many of the attributes being “American” connotes to me: love of guns, hate of government, strong suspicion of elites and academics, originated from the Borderlanders, who emigrated via Ireland from the violent border between England and Scotland to the New World.

On the other hand, Puritan folkways: high regard for education, “improving the time” through hard work, even institutions of local administration: town meetings and selectmen, resonated much more strongly with me (my hometown is mentioned in a footnote).

America has never been a homogenous culture, Albion’s Seed shows, rather, an uneasy compromise between several. Despite Albion’s Seed’s extremely thorough treatment of early Anglo-American cultures, Fischer treads lightly on the several centuries since, though his final hundred pages do include a case study of the presidency through the lens of his four folkways.

Anxious for more, I turned to a newer book. Colin Woodard’s American Nations, published in 2011, incorporates seven new ethnoregional nations—Woodard’s equivalent of Fischer’s folkways—with the original four rebranded respectively as “Yankee”, “Tidewater”, “Midlands”, and “Greater Appalachia”. American Nations focuses more on the evolution of the cultures and updates Albion’s Seed for the twenty-first century.

Or it attempts to. While both Albion’s Seed and American Nations discuss ethnoregional cultures in North America, the similarities end there. American Nations is not at all like Albion’s Seed: not in style, not in substance, and not in attitude. Fischer’s work is intellectually stimulating and fun to read, due to his thorough research and incisive prose. Woodard’s work could not be farther from this; it is intellectually dishonest and upsetting to read: polemic demagoguery in a cultural history’s clothing.

Pentatonix surprises me. For years, Pentatonix has talked about their goal to release an all original album: a goal they finally realized with the release of Pentatonix. Pentatonix claimed that 2015 was the right time to release an all-original album, place their covers in the background, and develop what they have to say as an artist.

I’m not too concerned with what Pentatonix has to say, but rather the manner in which they say it. Pentatonix is a pop album. Not a pop-influenced album, not a contemporary a cappella album in a pop style. A pop album. While some reviews, including those from the New York Times and Rolling Stone have hinted at this aspect of Pentatonix, I’d like to take some time to really argue and explore this in depth.