Since my previous post, I haven’t posted about Asahi Linux. This is for a simple reason: I wasn’t using it. I never took the time to set up a tiling window manager, get dropbox working, and all the things I felt I needed, and I slipped back to using my trusty Dell Ubuntu laptop for Linux, and using my MacBook M1 just for macOS.

But then I tried again! And wow, has Asahi Linux changed! It’s Fedora, not Arch now, and installation was much easier! So I wanted to share how my experience has gone. I’m not particularly stoked to spend too much time on sysadmin tasks for my personal computing, so this is more a narrative about what actually has happened in my adjustment to it, rather than a reflection of Asahi at its best, but I thought I’d share where I was at.

I enjoyed reading Atomic Habits, which was recommended to me by my therapist. I found this blog post basically finished in my attic folder while sorting through things, and I found it up to posting, even though my records show I read Atomic Habits way back in … October 2022.

Self-Help in General

Atomic Habits is pretty fundamentally a “self help book.” This is a pretty controversial genre in my experience. Some people roll their eyes at self-help books in general – I once even read an “anti-self help” book that basically did so for the entire length of a book. Others swear by them – literally, I had a friend once who said The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck was her Bible and who used it as such for an (informal but serious) oath. I’m generally somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. I read them with solidly middling expectations.

This was a great read about how the United States should reframe many of its basic political assumptions.

It is tempting to think of life as a zero-sum game. Having more for me, even enough for me, means less or even not enough for others. Usually, we have the open-mindedness to feel like we can cooperate with some few – our family, our community, or perhaps our nation or religion or even (problematically) our ethnic group. But at a certain scale, there is a sense that there’s not enough to go around to all the people who might want it.

I already enjoyed the Monk and Robot series by Becky Chambers (A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy). It’s now one of my favorite books. so I was excited to also read her earlier work, the Wayfarer series, starting with The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, and it did not disappoint me.

Both these series are science fiction. While Monk and Robot is solarpunk, a relatively new sub-genre focused on imagining a world with major environmental (and economic) problems solved, the Wayfarer series much more reminds me of the kind of science fiction I used to read as a kid. While it’s described as space opera, it reminds me more of Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke or even Niven, who are considered hard sci fi. I’m not sure whether this is because it focuses less on accuracy and logic than those other authors, or if it is because it does not do so at the expense of character development, or perhaps because it is written by a woman.

I bought my M1 Mac over a year ago with the intention of installing Asahi Linux on it, but I never got around to it until now. I am still thrilled to be using an ARM workstation made by a major computer manufacturer, and it’s good to be able to run the operating system of my choice on it (though macOS is acceptable for entertainment and video calls, Linux is what I work and do my organization in). And I don’t particularly do GPU-intensive things in my day to day computing – I run XMonad, of all things! – so I don’t really feel like I’m missing out by not having a “proper” graphics driver.

I enjoyed Plain Truth by Jodi Picoult. I finished it a couple of months ago, when I was feeling very restless and impatient about everything going on in my life. At the time, I desperately needed fun books to read, but I was simultaneously having a lot of trouble finishing books.

This book pulled me the whole way through when other books were failing to: It was in a setting, the Amish communities, that had always interested me. It was competent enough dealing with that community to not drive me away. It made nuanced and smart enough points to keep me engaged, without being so subtle or so sophisticated as to be too heavy or dry or otherwise difficult to get through. All in all, the perfect balance for where I was just then.

We decided to write up our thoughts on each of the short stories nominated for the 2022 Hugo awards. Of course, here be spoilers, spoilers galore. If you don’t want these stories spoiled, go read them, and then come back here.

This is the same concept as Jimmy’s review of the 2021 nominees, and so we shall adapt the explanation from that post:

As an exercise, we read each of these stories and told each other what we thought the themes were, and I reference that throughout these reflections. Themes, as we define them, are thematic statements: the point the story is trying to make. Themes are distinct from thematic concepts, in that they are complete sentences rather than just nouns. They are distinct from premises, in that they are the take-away for the real-world, not a statement about the world of the story. And, to be clear, there can be more than one completely valid answer. Both of us would posit what we thought the theme was, answering independently without consulting each other, and then we would discuss the story in greater detail.

NB: These are for the 2021 Hugo awards, not the recently-announced 2022 Hugo awards. That one is coming soon.

I decided to write up my thoughts on each of the short stories nominated for the 2021 Hugo awards. Of course, here be spoilers, spoilers galore. If you don’t want these stories spoiled, go read them, and then come back here.

As an exercise, a friend and I read each of these stories and told each other what we thought the themes were, and I reference that throughout these reflections. Themes, as we define them, are thematic statements: the point the story is trying to make. Themes are distinct from thematic concepts, in that they are complete sentences rather than just nouns. They are distinct from premises, in that they are the take-away for the real-world, not a statement about the world of the story. And, to be clear, there can be more than one completely valid answer. Both my friend and I would posit what we thought the theme was, answering independently without consulting each other, and then we would discuss the story in greater detail.

I like beer, and I like comic books, so I was excited to read The Comic Book Story of Beer.

And it was overall quite a fun read! It contextualized how important beer was in antiquity – including theories that beer catalyzed the agricultural revolution – and how important it’s been in society ever since, taking a social approach to the entire history, while also explaining a lot of the science alongside the primarily social narrative. It was a really fun read, and I recommend it to anyone who enjoys beer or who cares about history, which I think is most people.