Cratering

go look at scholvin.com

[socialmaya]

[lowrentkicker]

I feel like if I reblog this it will make @schmidlap appear.

[schmidlap]

:-)

[schmidlap]

passing through

Hi. Not quite sure what to say, or if I even have the right to say anything after ten months away, except that I hope you’re hanging in there. My crew and I are fine, as things go.

May the new year restore to you some measure of what this previous one took, if that’s possible. Tell people you love them, even if that makes it a little weird.

[schmidlap]

There's a new post up on the new blog.

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There's a new post up on the new blog.

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There's a new post up on the new blog.

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There's a new post up on the new blog.

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After a substantial amount of thought, and for a whole lot of reasons that don’t bear spelling out, I’m checking out of tumblr for good. I’m not quite ready to delete my blogs, though I may somewhere down the road. But I won’t be writing or scrolling here any longer. 

I will miss so many of you, and I hope to see you on insta or facebook. Please find me there. I’m generally a pretty easy find on google, so get a hold of me however you want, if you want.

I still need a place to put my words, so I fired up a blog (remember blogs?). You can check it out at scholvin.com. For some period of time, I may share links here when new posts go up there. I realize that’s spammy and annoying as fuck for a guy who’s otherwise bailing out, so I won’t do it for long, promise.

It’s been just short of 11 years for me here on the blue hellsite. They’ve been good ones. Be good to each other.

Safe travels.

[schmidlap]

how to back up your tumblr

It’s easy.

Log in on the desktop; you can’t do this on a mobile device.

Go to Settings. (First click on the little thing that looks like a person on the upper right side, then find Settings.)

Click on the blog you want to back up in the right-hand column. (You have to do them separately if you have more than one.)

Scroll down to the bottom, and click on the button that says “Export <your blog name>”. This will take some time; tumblr is now creating a large archive file of all your stuff.

You’ll get a notification when it’s done. Navigate back to that same blog settings page and click the button that says “Download backup”.

A large .zip file will download to your computer. That’s your backup. Keep it safe.

What’s in there?

a “media” subdirectory that contains every image, GIF, MP3, and video file you’ve ever uploaded. Each file is named with a long, unique number, not whatever you uploaded originally.

a file called “messages.xml” which contains all your message/inbox activity

a nested archive, called “posts.zip”. Inside this archive, you will find:

posts.xml, which is a giant XML file containing the text of every post you’ve ever made. The posts are kinda sorta in HTML format, but with some of tumblr’s encoding in there, too. This might be their “neue” post format as you get to the newer ones.

an “html” subdirectory which contains every post rendered as an individual HTML file. 

What’s not in there?

Comments and likes, as far as I can tell.

Who follows you / who you’re following.

In other words, the content is mostly all there, and in a format that seems usable for someone suitably tech-minded. From here, you would need specific conversion tools to extract what you want from this archive, to, for example, import that into some other blogging platform or whatever. I don’t know what the universe of those tools looks like; I’d guess it’s sparse. Maybe some enterprising “competitor” to tumblr would provide an import kit.

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Longtime mutual @janetisserlis tried to log in and post this morning, and was greeted with a message that her account was terminated, and she should contact support to learn more. Sure enough, her blog is gone, and so is any evidence she was here, like likes/comments/messages. They nuked her completely.

Apparently there was no warning, and if you know Janet, you’ll find it very surprising this happened. There’s no chance she was abusive or violated any terms of service here.

If anyone has any experience resolving such an issue, please let me know.

[schmidlap]

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy–they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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It’s time.

No longer sparking joy.

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I could have done better today.

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Neil Peart, Rush Drummer Who Set a New Standard for Rock Virtuosity, Dead at 67

Hall of Fame drummer succumbs to brain cancer

Well, this is just absolutely fucking awful.

[schmidlap]

What if humanity is an instance of the Peter Principle? A group of hominids on the savanna with above-average cleverness and opposable thumbs woke up a few dozen millennia later and found themselves in charge of a civilization of nearly ten billion, and stewards of the planet to boot? And they are way, way over their heads? We’ve all seen this at work or school. We know how it always ends.

I have two bosses, one good and one evil. A large part of my ~anxiety~ over the situation at work is because evil boss has done nothing but trash and belittle me for the last two months. He thinks I’m stupid and has no problem saying it to me or to others. But I had a talk with good boss this week. He has observed all this, and been generally supportive, but he made that support more explicit this week by telling me there’s only one person whose opinion matters, it’s his, and in his mind I’m doing fine. This makes me feel better, of course, but it’s not like evil boss will be changing his tune. The berating will continue. He is, however, really old and rich, so maybe he’ll just go away.

I’m still not 100% recovered from the flu. Going up a flight of stairs winds me, and I still sweat through a shirt or two each night. This shit is no joke. More than once it occurred to me how very old or very young people, or anyone else in less than full health, would literally not survive it. (Yes, I had a flu shot. Sometimes they guess wrong. I’ll get it again next year and every year.) (And you don’t get to say you have “the flu” unless it’s actually influenza. 48 hours on the shitter is most likely a norovirus, and a bad cold is a bad cold. Nobody dies from those.)

I have my favorite Democratic candidate for president, 1-2 others I could vote for without hating myself, and of course I’ll vote for whoever I have to when it comes down to it in November; most likely someone I loathe, that’s what always happens. But if one of them would come out and say that they will turn everyone in the current administration who has committed, abetted, or pardoned war crimes over to the ICC, and actively assist in their prosecutions at The Hague, that candidate will have my sword.

I wrote the following as my Facebook status last week:

I really fucked up and overcommitted myself this fall and winter. The combination of that plus my work travel schedule has affected my mental and physical health. So I'm hereby announcing that March is a "do nothing" month for me. Please don't ask for my time for anything. Like if you want to go get a beer or whatever some random night? Fine, hit me up, but I am not painting any chunks of my calendar as "busy" for literally any reason. (Immediate family is of course exempt.)

I mean this. I have sabotaged myself for too long and I am stopping to reset. But I think there are people who don’t believe this applies to them, and I’m already feeling some stress about the conflict to come. No means no.

[schmidlap]

A thing I should not do, probably, is devour everything I can about plane crashes. But I do. It's my way of confronting the beast that looms over me weekly. It also happens that over the course of the last year I've spent a fair amount of time on technical aviation blogs/boards. Mostly they're places where similarly nerdy folk talk about interesting-to-me aspects of a thing I spend a lot of time doing.

Today, the intersection of those interests along with just where The Discourse is these days leads to a reckoning and a change for me. Because those same neckbeards, it turns out, are arguing today that the best response to what happened to that 737 in Iran yesterday is to put all of America's democratic leaders on a firing range, and take anti-aircraft cannons to them, just like Kim is alleged to have done to his rivals in North Korea.

The logic to get there doesn't exist, but of course it doesn't matter. Those people will not stop until they kill us all.

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Do the Germans have a word for the sudden realization that, while I'm still not sure why I'm here, I am damn certain it's not to spend my intellectual and emotional prime in service of someone else's capital, all in the desperate hopes of licking up whatever crumbs may fall off of the machine along the way?

Or maybe the Portuguese? Maybe they're more in touch with this kind of thing than the Germans?

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A miracle happened overnight.

Obviously I’m never doing this again. Gonna either leave it here somewhere safe, or ship it home.

Thank you for all the good mojo.