First post. Some things about me.
I live mostly in Emacs. I am a programmer by trade, though not currently
working. I use Emacs to read email, chat on Telegram and IRC, now access
gopher holes, to read RSS feeds, and if I can get the client working
properly, hopefully mastodon too.
I mostly use my own config developed over years and years, and re-written
several times in different ways. (I keep the config at
https://git.sr.ht/~j0ni/neumacs if you're interested.)
I have ADHD, or so I'm told by my doctor and a psychologist she referred me
to, though I have not been through the (costly) process of getting a
psychiatric evaluation. I'm a grown-ass human and didn't figure this out
until a handful of years back, and honestly I have no time for being
patronized by doctors. I will use my strategies, and quit my jobs, and live
with the consequences damnit.
I joined the SDF a while back, but haven't spent much time with it. Just
since the twitter diaspora I find myself watching from the SDF mastodon
instance, enjoying the chaos. I really appreciate the supervisory work
happening on that site by the admins. This has been a tough week for them.
Now I'm getting into the details though, and messing with the retro tech,
which is reminding me of my 1990s and early 2000s. I started out on a Vic20
in 1980 or around then, learned to program in BASIC "properly" on a BBC
Micro Model B, acquired my first PC in 1994 and started using Slackware
Linux in 1995 - thanks to my buddy Ken, an electronic musician known as The
Black Dog, who ran a BBS out of his home in Mile End, London. I was
mystified and captivated by the incoming calls and scrolling text that he
would interrupt to chat live with friends sometimes. He was bad at
explaining, and was also a discordian pope, so I just became increasingly
stoned and absorbed.
In 1996 I went back to school for a masters that would these days barely
pass as a boot camp, and then worked for SUN Microsystems for over a decade!
Can't join a cult any harder than that.
But the thing that's made me feel most at home here, and made me want to
engage properly, is the way that this organization is not in fact a hellish
bro-scape. Retro-computing and nerdery in general, even the kind with a
political bent, is mostly not the home of radical collectivism. Often it's
the opposite - it's more likely to be libertarian individualists than
collectivists. But SDF seems to be different, and I'm loving it. Maybe
that's because my view of the scene is outdated (did I mention I'm old?),
but I'm happy about it nonetheless.
So here I am, in Toronto, unemployed and possibly uneployable, trying to
figure out how to live. I find myself falling back on my earlier training
from my first degree more frequently than ever before; that was a
history/philosophy liberal arts program ("History of Ideas") and trying to
figure out ways to contribute to slowing the collapse of our civilization,
or hasten it if there's no way to cut it loose from capitalism.
I know it sounds silly, but SDF is making me feel more confident about my
seedling idea of a computer game as propaganda both of the pen and of the
deed.
