Imagination Driver To Support The TI AM62P SoC In Linux 6.20~7.0
Jan. 15th, 2026 09:27![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
phoronix_feedFandom Snowflake, Challenge #3
Jan. 15th, 2026 10:17![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_wanlornI! Am! So! Behind!
Okay this is probably more a love-letter to having friends than it is to fandom as a whole because, uh, you know how some large percentage of anything is garbage? That is true about fandom-as-a-whole, too.
But this is not about that. This is about finding your people.
It is (unfortunately?) not an exaggeration to say that without fandom, I would have like. No friends. I have met every single friend I have through fandom in one way or another. I am, after all, essentially a recluse in real life. And, I mean, once you're out of school how do you even make friends as an adult? Who knows.
(I mean, you leave the house and do things with groups of strangers, and then sometimes strangers turn into friends. But I digress.)
This is, perhaps, curmudgeonly of me, but I find great swathes of fandom intensely annoying and/or angry-making. What can I say! People have wrong opinions and put them out there on the internet for everyone to see!
The cool thing about having friends, though, is you can use them to curate your experience. Between blocking at the drop of a hat and mostly only following friends, I have gone from an Angry Youth, getting all het up about things, to a Normal Emotions Adult, who does not see things to get het up at.
The other cool as shit thing about friends is that you can convince them to join your fandoms and then you don't have to interact with people outside of your friend gr-
Oh my god. Am I also a recluse online??? Fuck. What the fuck. I need to think about this. Post aborted for today. wtf.
(no subject)
Jan. 15th, 2026 10:13seekingferretDoing my periodic reread of Heinlein's Starship Troopers. I don't actually love the book, I mostly find it confounding. But it seems so seminal to SFF, it feels worth rereading every now and again to remember why SFF is the way it is. I've probably read it a half dozen times, it doesn't hurt that it's a quick read.
The discourse on Starship Troopers always surrounds the question of whether or not Heinlein is championing fascism. Heinlein describes a society where only soldiers can vote, where in one chapter an officer advocates beating dogs as part of a metaphor in defense of beating children, a society whose only values are power and loyalty. But is he defending this society? That's a little more unclear.
Contra many depictions in successive SF of Bugger-like races, Heinlein makes it clear from the get go that the Buggers are not a voracious race of mindless monsters but an industrial society not very different from that of the humans. The very first scene shows Johnny Rico down on a raid attacking not an enemy defense force, but shooting rockets at warehouses and other production infrastructure- the first thing Heinlein wants you to know about the Buggers is they have factories.
If the Roughnecks are not attacking civilians, it's not out of moral qualms but because it's not seen as militarily productive. Killing Workers is a waste of ammo, he literallysays. Never once does any theory of the rule of war come up in the book. The Geneva conventions are routinely flouted.
And whenever the Buggers's casus belli comes up, or whether the war could end, Johnny Rico is evasive. That's a question for the top brass, above his paygrade, he says, as if it weren't the whole point of the book that by serving in the army he will obtain the right to vote and participate in bigger picture decisions about the continuation of the war and its prosecution.
So the thing that is confounding about Starship Troopers is how easy it is to read it as self-undermining, how easy it is to wonder if the humans are the bad guys.
And in fact, you can imagine reading it as a sort of SFnal PT 109, another book about the making of a humble lieutenant who maybe aspired to more. The key scene where Rico describes being convinced to become an officer features a prediction that he will ascend to high rank. So we could say that maybe the book is full of transparent bullshit because it is, Watsonianly, pro-war propaganda by an older Juan Rico who is running for office or bucking for general and trying to raise his profile and defend his participation in the war.
Did Heinlein mean this? Who can say. But it's interesting to me that this reading is available.
Pluses and minuses
Jan. 15th, 2026 14:54oursinThis is being one of those weeks when I'm not sure if Mercury is in retrograde or in the opposite of retrograde, if there is an opposite.
In that some things are going unwontedly smoothly and unexpectedly well, and other things not, and plans being thwarted, etc.
E.g., further to the expeditious renewal of my library membership, I was going to boogy on down to the relevant institution to pick up my card and do a spot of light research (I think I may have copies of the books I need to look at but they are not in any of the places where I would anticipate them to be). However, it is chucking down rain in buckets, I think I will leave this until a drier day. Dangers untold and hardships unnumbered is one thing, sitting around with wet shoes in an airconditioned reading room is another.
However, in connection with the research, I remembered that Elderly Antiquarian Bookdealer/Bibliographer had mentioned to me a Person who has come up as Of Interest, and I thought I would see whether they are still around, and apparently they are at the latest report though nearly 90. And not only that, last year, why was I not told, there was published a limited edition from a small press of various of their uncollected writings, including an essay on the very person. This is something I would have bought anyway had I known it existed.
And lo and behold, I ponied up for this hardback, limited edition etc: and got a massively discounted price in their winter sale calloo callay.
On the prehensile tail, I managed to break a soup bowl at lunchtime. Fortunately not containing any soup.