beltane 2025

I hobbled together a news aggregator, aeolus. evolution has been productive enough for email and calendars, but the RSS configuration and interface was holding me back. I wanted something online so I can scroll on the go, and after surveying what's on the shelf it turned out to be dangerously easy to roll my own crawler.

The heart of the thing really, simply syndicates a list of feeds, generating Hugo-compatible input to render a combined view. I'd prefer Nikola, but there's already a Hugo theme based on a Wordpress theme that apparently looks familiar because of its popularity amongst digital newspapers. Plus the meta taxonomy has been productive! The bulk of the bespoke logic I've had to implement so far is date sanitization and glue.

Broader access to the news came as The White House launched its own news-skinned blog this week. I can find candlestick doodles of the S&P's psychotic episodes in any report of the world, but I can't readily see budget allocations by agency. The Executive could center a crystal ball that reveals the overall health of all its departments. Instead we got an Oops, All Opinion rag.

Having my own opinion page front and center was fun for a minute, but the constant sound of my own voice had an averaging effect, a piece of quartz resonating into a steady state. Was my frequency set at the factory or could my buzzing of the bells and whistles of the anxiety machine contour new forms from the static? I installed a puzzle collection on my phone a year or two ago to pass time while waiting for food. Then I have the TV, radio, and Internet all shout at me while I eat the food.

The electric chatter is a soothing break from humans weighing my soul. I'm not proving my humanity to a robot designed to be bigoted to other robots, I'm killing time by burning calories looking at traffic lights and bicycles. Who's got the mop to soak up the collective excess wrung out of our scrolling? Beyond the veneer of "bot detection" I've wondered if I could CashApp my daily tithing to Amazon and enjoy the privileged freedom of "Known Good". An indulgent life on Olympus! This side of the line is the human side, however, so I couldn't pay even if I could.

This island is big and small. My resolution to a dual existence as writer and publisher was to aim the shrink ray at the mirror and have aeolus breeze by my blog simultaneous to the streams he slurps. I currently categorize my posts under Social, which also aggregates Slashdot and the Y Combinator front page. There's a vanity in shortcutting to the front of that line rather than submitting my posts and hoping to see them again, but as long as I'm doing more than the Literal President I can live with a little pride.

I also spun up cstate and monitorbot on ionos1 and ionos2, who are hosting all of this, then configured the crawler to scrape the status pages. For now each node monitors the other plus the abstract "yieldsfalsehood.com".

As for life, Dany is scheduled for surgery next week. I found a lump that the vet recommended for removal and biopsy so that's the plan. Aria and Renzi are staying with us this week keeping Dany and Teemo company while I write and garden. I found a peach growing on the tree, a sweet treat for generations that follow.

The generations that preceded have been their noisy selves, notably Nietzche's decaying brain insisting on its own rationality and begging anybody in earshot to linger with it a little longer. The American solution to the problems causing and arising from Pope v. Anti-Pope was to aim the shrink ray at religion and let anybody be A Pope. The proportionate position was profitable, but Fred's untreated infection and a wave of mermaids followed War across the World. Twice! The US was recovering from a lobotomy, dismemberment, and replantation, a weakened state greeting the bug's arrival. Now we're back to Kings and Popes and King-Pope camaraderie.

Internet atheists ran west to hallucinate in the desert with Descendents of Reagan Dads Doing it Differently and distill fascism out of half baked communism. The retreat from Christianity left an historical blindspot that opened space for a return of the dark age Christianity that the retreating were retreating from. Not that I'm promoting a holding onto Christianity, either. The flight of the mermaid is a fundamental force in the universe lifting us to these heights from where we were before the bang. Damn it, I did Nietzche again!

Koch contrived his postulates in 1884 while Zarathustra was in delivery down the road. The contrarians claimed they like coughing, actually, and a wave of pro-infection programming propagated forward. Now the brain damaged Secretary of Health and Human Services leads the charge against germ theory.

The young Catholic bleeding heart is contoured and cut by Northeast comfort until some holier than thou slice sloughs off to hallucinate with Those Who Know Everything About Everything in one of the many forests we used to have to cushion the exploratory before this latest wave of explorers burns down the woods where they were found burying their soiled sheets alongside Orion's ironic lack of self awareness.

The journey could be our Great American Buddha, but a friendly disposition towards disease combined with proud distrust, blind arrogance, and judgmental embarrassment drives a hard line between consecutive generations. A real challenge in "overcoming" for frothy philosophers wielding words like "will to power" would be talking like a human. Maybe even with their parents!

I'll see mine soon. I'm taking my dad to a baseball game.