SUBTERFUGUE's LATEST

I restored the Auditorium Subterfuguem. I enjoyed sharing music and making playlists last year. So here it is for a bit. But this is just fussing. I need to make a decision about whether this website is going to continue to just be a toy I am playing with or if I'll use it for an actual purpose.

I pulled the site offline in April to save money. Yesterday I learned about Cloudflare's free plan. So as of this morning, Subterfugue is back online. Next step, probably, is to remake the website, but this will do for now.

Today through my computer screen I witnessed the Shifa massacre. The Shifa hospital is destroyed. The dead lie in pieces on the ground. I scream. I writhe with disgust. I rage at my government. I want to die. The genocide continues indifferently. I alone can do nothing. I am ashamed. Too often I stand alone. This weekend many stood against the Gazan Genocide. They stood for humanity. They stood for life. I was not with them. Too often I stand alone.

If the results of elections are supposed to represent what the public wants, then we should always first look at voter turnout. The results on turnout for Alameda County during this presidential primary suggest that the public does not believe it will get what it wants at the ballot box.

Fascist societies rot from the inside out. The need to dominate ultimately turns everyone into an enemy. And murder doesn't sit well with most people.

On the Shame of Living Through Times of Genocide

I suffered from suicidal ideation yesterday. No, that’s not right. I shouldn’t say that. Mental illness is still a taboo. I shouldn’t say if I ever have

I wrote a tool for scraping metadata for IP addresses from the whois database. I wanted to find all the IP addresses for Azure, AWS, and Google-Cloud.

Aaron Parr / IP Scraper · GitLab

GitLab.com

I worked out a method for archiving parts of the site without deleting the content and it works well. So I decided to remove the Auditorium. I also removed my old writing, and most of the social media posts. I should be focusing on creating new work - writing, music, painting - and being selective about what I share. I treated this too much like social media and got distracted.

Subterfugue is immune to this: But I am annoyed. So I escalated my server admin beyond robots.txt and fail2ban and now I give these assholes the ol 444.

The Osage Nation, Koch Oil and the New Trail of TearsLong Knife (trailer) - Ambrose, Palast To be released in Spring 2024. Killers of the Flower Moon, that Oscar nominee everyone is talking about, gets to the heart of a deep, personal betrayal to steal oil from the Osage in the 1920's. The betrayals continue to the present. For example, the Koch's have been entangled in lawsuits for stealing oil from the Osage too. Greg Palast's investigation into the Koch's oil thefts is the basis of Long Knife.

I ported my site generating code to a command line tool called Site Builder. I should have done this from the beginning.

Aaron Parr / Site Builder · GitLab

GitLab.com

We can learn much from Palestinians about strength and resilience.

These men are Palestinian journalists, Wael Al dahdouh and Motaz Azaiza. They covered the genocide in Gaza on the ground from the beginning, and are now recovering abroad.

An in depth review of the ICJ case brought against Israel by South Africa concerning genocide in Gaza.

The US worker is grossly underpaid. Median income is 30% of what a typical worker contributes to US GDP. Remember this so that you understand just how undervalued labor is in the US. Modest increases to minimum wage are far less than we all deserve and certainly not a job killer. And increasing wages also improves the public and private sectors of the economy since almost all of it is either taxed or spent on essential goods and services. It is far better for the economy when workers have more money to spend on their needs than it is for rich people to have more to stuff in tax shelters.

Deeply sublimePass Over - Anastasia This is my favorite track from my favorite film soundtrack. The film is Before the Rain and a work of art itself grappling with the cycle of hate and violence amidst the backdrop of the civil war which tore apart Yugoslavia.

My goal is to "federate" this website via activity-pub, meaning that I want Mastodon users to be able to subscribe to my content, respond to posts etc... Since the site is static, I created an application on the server which responds to particular requests following the activity-pub protocol. Step one, responding to webfinger requests, is complete. This site is now searchable on some Mastodon instances. Next up is handling follow requests.

The Auditorium's playlists now play from one song to the next without interruption. A playlist can include tracks from both SoundCloud and YouTube. This took longer than I expected because I had forgotten to setup SSL certs locally for serving on my dev machine and didn't immediately realize this was the source of bugs I was seeing. My favorite playlist so far is

Holy Room - Somi

Quiet ecstasy. Dulcet tones. A deep breath. Peace.

Today I discovered YouTube's API for embeds:

YouTube Player API Reference for iframe Embeds

Embed a YouTube player in your application.

So (1) I should be able to get full playlists to queue for playback in the Auditorium, (2) but the intention is to play videos from any source, rather than just YouTube. (3) I have to think through how to implement this with Soundcloud and others. What about small websites which host their own and don't have an API? This will take a minute.

TL;DL: The genocide in Gaza is a harbinger.The Genocide in Gaza (2023 Dec 6) - Chris Hedges Chris Hedge's speech is about 60 minutes and difficult to hear. Worth it, if you need context for what Israel is doing in Gaza, and appreciate his analysis. Chris Hedges is a journalist who spent years as a war correspondent, and is also a minister - which means that he is both a realist, and moralistic. Be prepared for a mix of sermonizing, facts, and hard truths.

Orwellian decrees distract us with arguments over the meaning of words.

Exploring the difference between Judaism and Zionism

In light of current events, it is imperative to distinguish between Judaism and Zionism and the difference between criticism of political ideologies and prejudice against a particular religious group

A resolution equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism passed in the U.S. House of Representatives on December 5.

Lamenting the poisoning of joy.Sex Kills - Joni Mitchell (on T.V.) Very much a song of our time, of my entire adult life, and one I've felt down to my bones. Her line, "You can feel it out in traffic, Everyone hates everyone", strikes truer today than it did back in the 90's. Too easily Joni is written off as merely bitter here, but bon vivant that she was, I don't believe it. Our culture, our militarism, capitalism itself turns lust for life into a culture of death, our base instincts manipulated to over consumption, and we are poisoned to our core - our love and joy twisted until we are governed merely by greed and lust.

African rhythms reclaimed from the HeadsBorn Under Punches (talking heads) - Angélique Kidjo Angélique Kidjo covered the full album, Remain In Light, by the Talking Heads. She's explored African musical influences throughout the Americas for over twenty years. (The original was inspired by African polyrhythms.) But to remake North American pop culture in one's own image is bold. I love it.

Scintillating stringsHungarian Dance No.5 (Brahms) - Rusanda Panfili and Marcel Lazăr The range of expression she pulls out of her violin delights me.

Pensive crystal notes ...First Light - Harold Budd and Brian Eno ... in a clean room with white walls, red wine, and warm company. I remember her scent, sweet and earthy, with a hint of onion from our dinner.

Playful little criesChoro (Mozart/Guaraldi) - Vince Guaraldi and Bola Sete This popular piece is so much fun. Guaraldi adapted a theme from Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in a popular Brazilian style, choro music. And Bola Sete, the Brazilian virtuouso on guitar, brings it home.

Celebrating the birth of a daughter.Wassiyé - Habib Koité Shared this with a friend as we drove through the desert to Chaco Canyon. "This is the perfect music for this," she said. It was.

Quiet ecstasy, dulcet tones, peace.Holy Room, Somi "Your love feels like a holy room" Playlist: Holy Room Neria Choices Bitter Sweet Symphony By Your Side Save Room Andomeda and the Milky Way Skin on the Drum Ginger Me Slowly

Haunting, low rockTake Me With You - Morphine Mark Sandman died before this was released, performing on stage in Italy. At the time, Morphine was my favorite band, and this song sounded to me like a call to someone on the otherside before he joined them.

All you ever were ...Thorn in My Side - Eurythmics ... inspired me to learn how to play guitar. The chord hook shares enough with Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles that the two songs are forever linked in my heart. And teen-aged me crushed hard on Joniece Jamison, the backup singer holding her own with Annie, in all her gorge-80's-ness.

The Auditorium Subterfuguem now has a jukebox. Unfortunately you do have to click play for each track rather than just let them go in the background. I have not figured out how to directly tap into YouTube's or SoundCloud's audio streams. I suspect they lock that down anyway so for now you'll just have to play one track at a time.

Subterfugue's Tunes

Bending your ear like the arc of justice.

Grifters (and fascists) thrive where critical thought dies. Indicators of uncritical thinking include tuning out because "everything is bullshit" as well as accepting information from particular sources because "they are on our side".

Shit's about to go down ...Hurricane by Bob Dylan ... propelled by indignance at injustice, and fun at the same time. We enjoyed the song for ten years of Rubin Carter's incarceration, and twenty eight years of his freedom.

Industrious rhythmsBrandenburg Concerto No. 2 (Bach) - Claudio Abbado and the Orchestra Mozart This is one of my favorite compositions. I love the long notes of the solo horns and woodwinds when they emerge from the strings' industrious rhythms like birds soaring above a city.

Sublime harmonics.Gimme Shelter (Rolling Stones) - Michael Hedges He was a brilliant composer on guitar as you can hear on Aerial Boundaries, both the album and the track. I love this cover though, the tense rhythm releasing bright, harmonic chords like kisses on your ear, brief and ephemeral. Michael Hedges died far too young, 26 years ago. He would have been 70 this year.

It destroys my heart, cracks my shellRemedios Amaya, Turu Turai Brings me back to a one room bar tucked in the alleys off Puerta del Sol.

After months of rejection, we finally gave up on trying to acquire Koons' balloon animals for free (to smash into shards for a glass wall mosaic of course), and put up some of our own pictures in the gallery instead.

Subterfugue Gallery

Stuff to look at.

In a womb of soundTool, Fear Inoculum The slow crescendo of guitars hums like a hive of bees. I love cranking this up in the car as I head out to surf in the fresh light of a new day, and take the curves of the empty road as fast as I can.

Greetings from Voyager I love the spirit of these friendly greetings from our species. These greetings are stored on the golden records carried by each of the Voyagers. The golden records will outlast the people recorded on them. Even humanity will likely be extinct before either Voyager is within 2 light-years of another star, approximately 40,000 years from now. I wonder how many things like them move through the space between the stars.

Classic comfort musicCanon in D (Pachelbel) - Stringspace String Quartet I love this piece. Incidentally Canons and Fugues are both contrapuntal musical forms, multiple melodies complementing one another, none dominating.

I restored the YouTube embeds with two work arounds. 1. lazy load their content 2. obscure the embed behind a screenshot You now have to wait a bit for the video to buffer. But whatever YouTube's scripts are doing, they don't execute until you click on the Image of the video.

Feeling this tonightJellyfish, The Man I Used to Be I did not appreciate Jellyfish in their time, but I always loved this song. Their music recently inspired me to listen more to Janelle Monae and Queen.

New features: - more dynamic templates which enabled me to cut down on clientside javascript. I created some helpers for handlebars templates which test conditions. - cards for posted links like you see in social media. pushed upstream:

Aaron Parr / Subterfugue Base · GitLab

GitLab.com

Palette cleanseThe Internet, Come Together The bass rolls down my spine like a massage after a workout.

I prefer "Shut the Fuck Up" to "Loose Lips Sink Ships" after listening to this lovely public service annoucement from the National Lawyer's Guild.

When people are treated like shit, eventually many start to believe that they are shit, to hate themselves. Every day we blame the poor for their poverty.

This Memorial day I remember Jacob George.Soldier's Heart Rest in peace.

Ah yes, rock music with an actual libidoMåneskin, Own My Mind You've been missed.

"Is it real or is it AI?" has replaced "Is it live or is it Memorex?"

It is good to brush your teeth, bathe, and dress nicely to offset the impact of your farts.

We persuaded our librarian to install a card catalog. So far it is rudimentary, but so is our collection.

Subterfugue Library

Stuff to read.

More rainSomi, If The Rains Come First Good for chilling with friends when you don't want to be bored by the same old jazz. Somi's arrangements groove.

Raining todayHendrix, of course What I was listening to back in 90-91 when the Zuni folks turned me on to Mexican metal, Sonic Youth, and Nirvana.

MoodMolotov, No Manches Mi Vida Breaking Bad Ep.1 features their music. Although this was recorded in 1999, their music brings me back to the early 90's washing dishes at Zuni Cafe, and Osvaldo cranking up some metal.

Implemented two new features today. - A 'Publish List' for a piece of text, identifies other pages to feature the text. (eg. Texts in the library have their own pages, and are also on both the Library page, and in 'Latest'). - A 'Digest List' for an index page identifying other lists to copy and repurpose (The Home page digests all content and shows the most recent item)

Fixed the two bugs with

Aaron Parr / Subterfugue Base · GitLab

GitLab.com

The solution was to collect data first, then after all the data was collected, compile web pages from it.

I saw this:

Eleventy, a simpler static site generator

Eleventy, a simpler static site generator.

That's Eleventy, another static site generator, and similar to what I am working on here. Eleventy does many things the way I like them done, and it is far more developed than what I am working on. For a moment I questioned my life choices. Why then am I "rolling my own"? Because fucking around and finding out is a valid life choice.

My first project for Subterfugue was writing a framework to develop it within. I settled on rolling my own static site builder from scratch. It is also an ongoing work in progress that I am using in production. And since I rolled my own, I am able to design it to my needs as I figure out what I want, and as you would expect from such a process I discover new bugs of my own making, daily. Latest problems to solve: - changes to child don't trigger recompile of parent - needs 2 builds to gen all lists Following along at home?

Aaron Parr / Subterfugue Base · GitLab

GitLab.com