I've been using Substack.
Originally it was just to subscribe to the paid feed for Blocked and Reported, then I found Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn's show, America This Week. Substack's RSS feed's often are a few hours behind and so I found myself opening the app in order to get the shows as soon as they came out. Now it has become a bad habit to scroll through it in the morning.
At first most of my feed was written content, made up of the muddy blend of blog and journalism that has appeared over the past decade or so. I was pleased with this, finding the content interesting, but without the constant firing of the dopamine receptors found with short-form video platforms. I found engaging writers that I otherwise would not have found if it weren't for the algorithm supplying them to me.
Then a couple months ago I noticed a change in what was showing up in my feed. There were fewer long-form written posts and more snarky quips and comments with an attached photo or video, similar to what you would find on Twitter/X. I didn't necessarily dislike this change at first, but I found myself impulsively clicking on the orange squircle, like I had done with Instagram before I kicked it.
Now when I open the app it is almost solely the sort of dopamine-farming, intellectually-unchallenging cacophony of memes, viral videos, and misleading headlines, that I have been attempting to escape, but inevitably find myself surrounded by. Perhaps it is my own fault for engaging with these posts, perhaps it's the fault of the architects of these platforms, but nevertheless I'm there.
All social media platforms seem to follow the same pattern. A new site emerges, sparsely filled with content of a particular niche (i.e. Liberalism and Bluesky, Trump-flavored Conservativism and Rumble, lip-synced dancing and TikTok). This brings in people interested in that niche to the site and they start creating content of their own. Then there is a fork in the road, the new content either is diverse enough to bring in new people (TikTok), or it becomes an echo-chamber and becomes more or less irrelevant (Rumble (and currently Bluesky but its too soon to say)). For the sites that are able to escape their single niche, more and more people join the site, and in order to maintain engagement with the site, the recommendation algorithm is tweaked to maximize the amount of time spent on the site. This creates many silos, where users are eventually trapped in a box, not seeing large swaths of the content on the site, though highly-viral posts will be served regardless of the box you fall into. Eventually the content of one site is nearly identical to another.
I find myself in the conspiracy box on Substack. Although I am a conspiracy theorist, I don't think everything is controlled by some evil cabal, but nevertheless that is all I am fed the site. It's getting frustrating, because for those first couple months I really enjoyed reading opinions from various thinkers across the political spectrum. Occasionally some variation peeks through, but it is few and far between. It's all conspiracy posts, memes, conspiratorial memes, and the few people I followed before my feed got ruined.
I guess that's what I get for thinking Substack was going to be any different
I got to nerd out with one of my friends over New Years
He's recently started getting into Linux, starting off with a tried and true Arch + i3 setup. I cannot put into words the joy that came over me when he first sent me the photo of his little repurposed chromebook with the neofetch output on the tty. It's good to have someone to share this hobby with, better yet with one of the best friends I have.
We had him over for our New Years Eve celebration and to my pleasant surprise he brought the chromebook. He let me play around with it and check out his config, which was almost nostalgic for me, having not used anyone else's configs since I first started tinkering with window managers back in 2017. It was refreshing to try something different to how I would set it up, seeing what someone else prioritises. One thing that caught my eye was that he was using kitty for his terminal emulator. Seeing as I had just jumped to wezterm, I was eager to see if the grass was truly greener on the other side.
Of course, terminal emulators don't widely vary from one another, but where they do differ often makes or breaks their usability. I had tried kitty years ago before I switched to alacritty and remembered it fondly, except for the "bell" sound which got irritating, though is easily disabled (why I never did originally disable it escapes me). He showed me kitty's image rendering support and I immediately fell in love. I had a preconceived notion it was more similar to ueberzug or w3m-img, but in reality behaved much more like sixels. I felt like an idiot for not having given it a try sooner and working solely on my assumptions.
That brings us to today, where I have now once again migrated terminal emulators from wezterm to kitty. The transition was just about painless, though my font of choice, terminus, was not a TrueType font and thus was not supported. Fortunately there was a TrueType version of it, but I opted to change fonts. Although I find Terminus to be aesthetically pleasing, it is not great for readability, especially in large blocks of text. So I opted to use the Hack font, one I had used in the past, as well as the font my friend had been using. You will also see this for the website, which had used Terminus prior to this post.
Kitty is trying to accomplish more than what I normally look for in a terminal emulator, but it is executing it well and the image protocol seems to be being adopted as a defacto standard. It's nice to have a config you feel comfortable and familiar with, but it's also nice to have some change every once in a while.
This is a nice change of pace for the new year
Ok, maybe the internet isn't all bad
A couple months ago I received an email from a reader of my old gemini capsule, let's call him Artem, as I'm unsure if he would like to be identified. I, now regretably, did not make a post saying anything about abandoning my capsule and he was wondering where I had ended up. He explained how he initially found my capsule, mentioning a few keywords that caught his eye: Russian language and culture, Linux, and communist politics. I've not had the chance to speak with a Russian who still resided in Russia, let alone one who shared many interests with me, and had a number of questions for him. The conversation kicked off from there. We've shared stories from our lives, separated by thousands of miles, years apart, now connected by electromagnetic waves and the ingenuity of our forefathers.
These interactions have reawakened a latent Russophilia that has been with me since high school. There's something about the unique character of the country and its people that fascinates me; a landmass bridging West and East, sharing characteristics of each, while maintaining its own bold identity, being made up of a smattering of nationalities and subcultures. Through my raging communist years, the songs of The Red Army Choir taught me how to connect with music on an emotional level, from the euphoric bellows of В путь, to the longing melancholy of сулико (Though the latter is Georgian in origin). Since my interactions with Artem, I again find myself putting on music from the other side of the Iron Curtain, but connecting in a stronger way, no longer tied to the desire of the music to hold any form of ideological rigidity, enjoying it as a reflection of the human experience. One song that has been particularly connecting with me through this dark Winter of mine has been тёмная ночь, as I trudge through each day knowing things will improve, surrounded by a vacuous steppe.
This connection has also stoked an inner conflict that has plagued me since first reading Industrial Society and Its Future: is technology good? In many ways it has isolated us from our communities and has made us servants to an ever-growing behemoth that strips us of our natural connection to the Earth. In many ways it allows us to connect with people we never would have crossed paths with otherwise and collate the wealth of humanity's wisdom and knowledge, accessible for all to see. Technology is simultaneously a slaver and a liberator. Although it was before my time, hearing hopeful descriptions of the wonders of the information super-highway from the 90s makes me dream of a better world, a world where this great leap forward of communication was used how it was intended. I dream of a world where the powers at be are laid bare by the masses, no longer able to contain the centuries of pent up subjugation. Yet I awake in a world where these tools have been used for control, wielded ever so craftily by the very people it threatened to destroy.
Through these communications with Artem, I have concluded one certainty: technology that serves to enable self-expression and technologies that serve to expand the range of what was once the domain of traditional letter-writing are wholly beneficial. Without it, I would have never had the guts to publish anything nor had the chance to meet this remarkable individual. If you have the chance please check out his website and his collections of quatrains, many of which are quite humorous:
Be warned for my fellow non-Russian-readers, software translators are not your friend for this language. You'll be far better off using https://en.openrussian.org or another dictionary of your liking.
Reach out to people online! Connect with others! Use the internet for good, but don't be a slave to it!
The Atom feed format is bad
As I mentioned in my last post, I'm re-writing my RSS feed reader, Feedie. With Winter break going on, it has been the main thing I have been doing for the past week or so. I've made pretty good progress and have mapped out how it's going to work in my mind. The one thing that frustrated me was writing a parser for Atom feeds.
Atom feeds kinda suck. While the Atom standard is fairly well defined, the implementations are kinda all over the place. Some use a combination of RSS and Atom XML elements, some prepend each tag name with "atom:", some identify themselves as Atom feeds, i.e. using "xnls=http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom", while actually just being RSS feeds. This is bad. Instead just checking for one element, you have to check for multiple, some of which are nested inside other elements. Additionally, they complicate it further by placing some things in the text values of the XML element, while putting others (mostly urls) in the attributes of it. In the end it's not difficult to parse. I just copyied the RSS parser code and added a few more values to check for. But still, since there is a standard, it's frustrating that it isn't followed.
The worst part is that it muddies everything up while not adding that much new functionality. All of it could have just been done by extending the RSS specification, something which is supported from within the RSS specification, but no, we have to have a nearly identical standard with a few things renamed.
I'm excited to get Feedie to a working state. The back-end is almost done and I'm intrigued by NotCurses for using in the front end. ChatGPT has come in handy a few times for writing very basic, but repetitive code. Even if this project is all for naught, I've gained a better understanding of C++. I see why there is a lot of hate for it online, but dammit I like it.
At least when C++ is bad, it's consistent about it
I want to rewrite my tui rss feed reader
I wrote Feedie a couple years ago with the one goal of having a terminal rss feed reader with thumbnail support. I got it to a functioning state, but it has a number of issues and is poorly designed. I've been meaning to rewrite it for more than a year, even making a pretty good start back in March, but have been to busy with school and life (read too lazy) to actually make real progress. With the semester having ended this week, I'm making it a goal to work on the Feedie rewrite over the winter break.
For the original Feedie, I used Ueberzug for image drawing to the terminal. Ueberzug is pretty good, but after the original creator nuked the repo out of frustration, proper documentation is kinda hard to come by, and it generally seems like the utility is being used to a lesser extent. For these reasons, I wanted to look for something else. After some research, I found Sixels, short for "six pixels". It almost sounded too good to be true, a terminal and display server agnostic method to print images to the terminal? Well, there is one catch. Most popular terminals do not support it. However after scrolling through https://www.arewesixelyet.com, I found that there are a good number of them that do. Alacritty, the terminal emulator I was using, did not.
Oddly enough, XTerm does, if you run it in VT340 compatibility mode. I opened it up with the absolute eye cancer that came from the default configuration. It didn't matter what it looked like for now, I just wanted to see this sixel format for myself. I downloaded one of the various sixel reference images and gave it a shot.
Note: not on XTerm, hence the reasonable color scheme
Honestly this is better than I could have hoped for. The image quality is pretty good, there's some pixelation, but in an odd way it's sorta fitting, in a way better than having the full fidelity image. It looks more at home on the terminal than a regular image. It reminds me of graphics used in textbooks from the early 2000s, probably because they were also using dot-matrix printers and sixels were invented for dot-matrix printers. They also behave in a more cohesive way than Ueberzug and other terminal image-drawers. Instead of having a separate program being called and drawing the image over the terminal where the image is supposed to be, the sixel image takes up space where characters can't be drawn on, and is rendered by the terminal. I foresee this being useful, as Feedie currently just gives the whole top right quadrant of the window to draw the image, because it was unpredictable to get the exact size the image would take up. I kept accidentally covering other elements of the screen when I tried having the description go immediately bellow the image. This problem should not exist with sixels.
Changing terminal emulators
On the list of sixel supporting terminals, I noticed that ST, suckless terminal, had support through one of its patches. Having had some experience and general satisfaction with other suckless projects like dwm and dmenu, I gave it a shot. Then I remembered why I stopped using those tools, suckless's patching system is a pain. The first patch I tried installing failed, so I had to copy over each line from the diff by hand. This wasn't actually all that bad the first time around, just being a single copy and paste job, but when trying to add the required patches for mouse scrolling, the patch also failed. This one was less trivial, with two dozen different segments I needed to insert. I stared at the procession of interchanging red and green highlighting of the diff, sighed, and decided to look for another option.
I scrolled through the list again and saw one that a vaguely remember hearing about before, Wezterm. It had native support for sixels, was gpu accelerated, and in the Void repos, so I figured I'd give it a shot. After installing, I was initially unimpressed. The default theme looked pretty tacky, made worse with the ever present tab-bar. I was half-certain about looking for a different option again, when I decided to look through the documentation just to see how hard it was to make it useable. I was quite pleasantly surprised to see how fleshed out and straightforward the configuration was. Over the course of a couple hours I got it to be pretty much one-to-one with my Alacritty configuration and swapped out as my default. So far so good! Albeit, it's been less than a day using it.
Give Sixel images a try, Wezterm is a good way to view them
I had a dream this morning
I was back in my room from high school, living in my little renovated basement, everything the same as I remember. An old friend I haven't seen since the Summer after I graduated was coming to visit. Things didn't end well the last time I had seen them, but it has been so long that it no longer mattered. They arrived and everything was like how it was again during those glory years. We reminisced over those fond memories we shared through the night. Before we retired for the evening, I brought up the last time I saw them, apologizing for the way I acted and forgiving them for what had happened. Immediately tears started bursting from their eyes, they turned and hugged me; holding on as if they were not wanting to let go of me ever again. Between bouts of tears they said to me, "I'm sorry, I'm so so sorry". I held them too, telling them it was ok, happy that we had finally moved on from that dark chapter in our friendship, excited for all the memories to come. I had my best friend back, that's all that mattered, and in that moment all was well. We fell asleep still holding onto one another.
And then I woke up. None of it was real. In that brief moment of realization, I begged for a moment to return to the dream, to return to that world where I was with them, so we could share a few more moments together. I felt tears well behind my eyes and a single drop run down my cheek as the young morning's light started illuminating my room.
There was no going back
Our dryer broke
Okay well it still dried clothes, however it let out a constant, deafening banshee cry that rang out throughout the house. It started as an intermittent squeak last year, which became more frequent over the past few months. In recent weeks, the squeak became more of a squeal, lasting for about 30 seconds, before working itself out. As the squeaks and squeals became more frequent, I kept thinking to myself, "that belt needs to be replaced". On Monday, I did a light fluff-up on some clothes before I folded them, when the squeal became a horrible cry. I turned it off and hoped it would work itself out like it had done so many times before. Then Roomie used it yesterday.
I was not in the house when it happened, but the cry was still there, if not louder, and it was constant. We determined we needed to get it fixed. Unfortunately, the dryer was considered "personal property" in our rental agreement, even though it is part of the rental, which meant it was our responsibility. I thought I'd crack it open and see if there was anything I could see that would be blatantly obvious as to what was causing the problem. I opened up the bottom panel, removed a lint cover, and saw an old, cracked, fraying belt. We aren't planning on being here a lot longer, so I tried spraying it with some belt conditioner, which did not help. The belt needed to be replaced. I looked up a video on how to do it, and all in all it didn't seem like a ton of work.
I somehow managed to move the dryer to the living room on my own, with only slightly tweaking my back. From there I removed the top panel, a few brackets, and unplugged the control board. At last! I was only one step away from removing the drum, but did not have a replacement belt. I called around; Most appliance stores only offered repairs, and the local Home Depot did not carry any dryer belts. I called the closest Lowes, which said they didn't have one in 92.25". I checked their website to see if another location may have had it, when it said the one I called did. Having worked at a hardware store, I know that there are times where the website lies, and times where it is right, but the item is so far tucked away that an employee may not see it. I crossed my fingers and hoped it was the latter. On my way to work, I swung by and sure enough, tucked behind the other belts, there was my 92.25". I walked out of the store $13 poorer, with a big grin on my face.
Time at work seemed to fly by, all my mind could think about was how as soon as I got home I was going to put it all together and pray I don't start a fire. It's an electric dryer which makes that a little less likely. As I came in I went straight to the living room, took out the drum, slipped on the new belt, and gave it a test-spin before I put it all back together. At first I was relieved to see it all spin together at once, but then my heart sank when I turned it a little faster, the squeak was still there. I took out the drum again to inspect the rollers. Sure enough, one of them was not freely spinning like the others. Fortunately they are painfully simple to disassemble, and so I cleaned it up, relubricated it, and put the drum back in for another test-spin. The squeak was still there.
I pushed my head to the floor, keeping my eyes on each roller as I spun it, when I finally saw it. Although the other rear-roller was freely spinning when no weight was on it, every time I heard the squeak, I saw it stop spinning. Eureka! I took out the drum again, lubed up every roller and the tensioner pulley just to be safe, put the belt and drum back in, and watched it spin in silence. A flood of relief and joy ran throughout my body. Soon after I had the dryer put all back together, and me and Roomie hoisted it back onto the washer. I plugged it back into the 240v socket, listening for any pops and smelling for the familiar scent of burning electronics, which were not there. I pressed the power button, watched the display illuminate, and started a test cycle. It spun to life and filled the room with a faint burning smell. I panicked, before remembering I did not hook up the duct yet, and once that was back in place, the scent disappeared. It's running better than ever.
Each time I do a repair like this, I am filled with an immense confidence. I feel proud that I didn't have to go calling for help. I found the problem, learned a little bit, and fixed it myself. Sure I could have saved a little time by spending some money, but the knowledge and experience I have gained more than make up for it. Now when something like this goes wrong, I know immediately what I have to do, whether it be my own dryer, a friend's, or a neighbor. I can be helpful and give to my community in a way I could not do before.
I am capable.
For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught
- My Way, Frank Sinatra
How is it that one of the largest tech companies has some of the most infuriating software known to mankind?
The first issue I took care of today at work was one we semi-frequently run into. A student was unable to access a document because his personal MS account did not have a MS 365 subscription. Fortunately the school provides one through the student's school email. Unfortunately, on MS websites, if you are on Windows, it will use the account you are signed in to on your computer under by default. This kinda makes sense. However, even when you select your other account, IT WILL STILL USE THE DEFAULT ONE. This is such a pain, telling them to select their school account only for it to make no difference! We've had success setting up a different chrome profile where they never sign into their personal account, and it mostly works, but when we get a call regarding this sort of issue (or most issues actually), the person is not tech savvy and so you have to struggle through walking them through making one, hoping they didn't do anything wrong, or just have them open an incognito window each time.
The second issue came up immediately after I got off the phone with the student. A new staff member couldn't view a particular folder in our network drive. She simply wasn't added to the list of users who could view it, no biggie, that makes sense. The issue was that when you typed the path to it, instead of saying something like "Hey this is a restricted folder, you can't see it, punch sand" or something like that, it said the folder did not exist. Fortunately it didn't take long to troubleshoot because I had my admin account to verify that the folder indeed existed and it was straight-forward enough to add her to it.
The third issue was assisting one of our elderly faculty members with getting her personal laptop set up so she could use it for entering in attendance and viewing her work email. Fortunately another tech had set it up for her months ago, it was just that the time and date somehow thought we were in June and so all the TLS certificates were invalid. The old turning the auto-set time and date setting on and off again didn't work and so I just manually set them, and prayed it won't drift too much while it's still my responsibility. However getting her logged into everything was made all the worse with MS's stupid MS Authenticator for MFA. With every other MFA authenticator, you're able to have it either text you a code or set up a third party MFA app, But not MS, no that would be too good of them. No you have three times that you can use a text code before they force you to download their app, and you have to enter in a two-digit code each time, no simple "Verify login" button like Duo or Google's MFA through gmail. This sweet little old woman was struggling to tell the difference between a browser window and the start menu. I don't think she'll ever be able to log into her work email without a ticket to IT, which she can't send because she can't log into her email! Does nobody at MS have any older, non-tech-savvy relatives? Can they not see how forcing them to install an app on a phone they barely know how to work is just going to cause headaches? Are they not allowed to use modern tech?
The fourth issue I can't fully blame MS for. For whatever reason one of the departments uses excel to build their documents. I don't understand why, but they do and I'm not going to tell them to just use Word, and definitely not LaTeX or markdown. Well one of them was having an issue where the top of the text of one paragraph was being cut off because the paragraph before it was too long. Even though there was a solid third of the page that was still available and blank, Excel decided to put it on top. Of course there weren't too many good solutions online, because all of them were for formatting the cells in the application and not in printing, but adding a newline above the cut off paragraph fixed it, even if that's a little janky.
I just can't wait until we are fully switched over to Google at work, at least their software actually functions.
I hung out with some fellow CompSci majors after class
It was kinda nice talking with people who were interested in programming, but it kinda felt like a competition on who knew more. One of the guys was really knowledgable and very involved in the clubs, which he had me join. At one point he asked me if I was interested in AI, no not really, then data science, no not really either. Then he asked me what I did like, and I said configuring servers and self hosting. But the question has had me thinking, what do I actually want to do with this degree when I get it?
I would be perfectly content having a mid-level job, whether it be in IT or development, not truly invested in what I'm working on, clocking out and then doing things outside of work that I enjoy. I feel like this is a reasonable expectation. I've never been the type to do things just to have a shiny resume. I'm not wanting to climb the corporate ladder, nor put my blood, sweat, and tears into a start-up. If it's something I find half-interesting, all the better, but I just want a life outside the office.
The things I actually enjoy writing are little utilities, applications that the user works with directly, or that makes their life easier by working in the background. Although the only user I've ever had is myself, which makes it easy. I want to make Linux apps. I want to write free software. I don't want to have to put on a collared shirt if I don't feel like it. I don't want to be sitting through meetings, staring at the clock, begging for the hour to be over. I don't want to be a slave to the machine.
So I feel conflicted, do I somehow attempt to make writing the little programs into a profession to live a fulfilling career, or do I take the safe and easy path and put up with the mundanity of an office job in order to have more of a disposable income which can be put towards other things I enjoy.
This conflict caused me to work on an old half-finished project: Xax. It's a wrapper for the xbps package manager inspired by Yay on Arch. There's no aur or anything like that, just makes searching for and installing packages a little faster. I wrote the bulk of it a couple years ago, and it's certainly far from my best work, but it does function. I've been using it for a couple years now and figured I should finally publish it. I refactored it a bit and split it up out of the one larger c++ file it originally was.
Even though it ain't much, I enjoy doing this more than anything
I have mixed feelings on Large Language Models
When ChatGPT first entered the zeitgeist in early 2023 I couldn't care any less. I'm skeptical of hot new things, especially when it comes to technology, and its reporting had all the red flags of a new tech fad. Eventually I gave it a try and tested it with attempting to replicate my very simple fetch script, (i.e. neofetch, fastfetch, etc.) jfetch. Most of it's attempts were pretty good, but would have a couple errors: using systemd utilities even after saying I'm on Void, not getting the colors right, randomly rewriting working code after asking for revisions. I though it was a neat utility, but nothing earth-shattering. With all the jokes about it's content filters going around I, naturally, tricked it into saying naughty things which was enjoyable.
Then over the course of the year, AI became the new buzzword for software projects. I got tired of it pretty fast, all the rebranding of software features as "AI enhanced", even when it seemed dubious if AI was really being used at all. Everything being labeled AI didn't bother me that much, but what really irked, maybe even worried, me was how it was being treated as it was in some way concious. It simply is not. It's an auto-predictor on amphetamines. Yet all the talking heads were treating it like an omniscient, terminator-esque being. This was in no small part due to Sam Altman's constant fear-marketing to the media of how he was scared about what hyper-intelligent sentient Skynet could possibly leak from their labs.
Then this semester started. My professors (mostly) no longer had a "Just don't use it" policy. One of my friend's classes even had a required section of their paper that had to talk about how they used AI for the assignment, even if they didn't use it. However even with the permission of the professors, I just don't find it that useful. Most education related topics have boundless websites with examples from universities or sites like GeeksForGeeks. These sites often have relevant links for connected concepts which you'd have to purposefully ask for while using an LLM.
I got the opportunity to be part of a focus group for shaping the policy of AI use in writing classes. A lot of the language describing the focus group talked about the hazards of "misinformation" related to AI, which made my eyes roll. Anyone who has used these things seriously knows how hard it is to make it say anything close to the sort of "misinformation" they were worried about: anti-establishment politics. This motivated me to be a sort of anti-alarmist voice for the discussion, though the actual conversation took a different turn.
The leader started off asking us how we used AI, things we liked about it, and things we didn't like. The table was pretty much unanimous in our conclusions: it was a useful assistant when we needed it to be, but unless you already know about a subject and know what questions to ask, the information it provides is very surface level. It was kinda relieving to hear. I thought I may have been one of a few dissenting voices on the actual abilities of AI, but everyone was mostly in agreement. When it got to the more writing specific questions, a few of the members had some good points about it being useful for a sort of peer-reviewer, not taking it's words verbatim, but using its suggestions to improve their essays. Overall it was a fun opportunity and I hope that our discussion can help form an effective policy.
After the discussion I've actually found myself using it more. Instead of looking up how to configure apache2 to log in local time, I asked Claude, and didn't have to click on annoying "accept cookies" buttons.
So far I've been using LLM and AI interchangeably, not mentioning the audio, image, and video generators. For the image generators, they're cool and useful. I think a lot of the artists who were outraged about their work being used to train these models are kinda telling on themselves that their work is so uninspired that it could be generated by a machine. If your work is inspired, you have nothing to worry about. It's also a told-you-so moment for posting things on Big Web platforms. As for the audio and video generators, these are also awesome and the memes are top-notch.
In summary, AI is kinda cool, useful in a number of scenarios, but not the major step forward in humanity that it's being made out to be. This is not Skynet and we're a far ways off from that.
If I'm proven wrong, I'll eat my shoe
Last weekend I attended the Mendocino mushroom festival with my father
We had a good time! There were lots of very knowledgable people and information-dense displays, as well as a lot of creative booths selling their wares. A lot of the information kinda went over our heads since they would pull out all the Latin taxonomical names. Me and my dad agreed, we much prefer the common names. However I gained the understanding that the genus is useful for understanding the relatedness and characteristics of the different species.
I wish I snapped a photo of the table they had from the morning's foray, they had such a variety and little post-it notes with each of their names. They even found a amanita muscaria, one of those kinds of mushrooms. One of the booths was selling some tea made from it, and I kinda wanted to get some, but seeing as my dad was right there with me, decided not to in case he would not be happy about that. I wonder what the effects would be like, seeing as the psychoactive element is muscimol and not psilocybin, the latter of which I have experience with.
We attended a really interesting hands-on demonstration of using mushrooms as a dye. It was a spur of the moment decision, but both me and my dad thoroughly enjoyed it, seeing how they made really beautiful earth-tone colors. We decided that we wanted to give it a try, and it turns out a few of the mushrooms that grow at my parents' house are used for dying.
At the festival we found out they were going to be doing another foray the next morning at the Caspar Scales, and we decided to attend. We are not very familiar with the area so we decided to drive around and see if we could find the location, as to not need to find it in a rush in the morning. One of the hosts gave us some vague directions and we roughly followed them, when we found a parking area for a set of trails. We didn't think we were in the right location, but we decided just to walk around for a bit and explore. This was some really beautiful forest, redwoods surrounding us, their fallen needles coating the floors, small creeks lined with dense ferns on nearly every hillside. It was so fresh and quiet, in that moment I was truly at peace.
On our way out we ran into someone who was also leaving. We asked him if he knew where the Caspar Scales were and it turned out we were there! It would be useful if they had some signage saying as such. The guy was friendly and it turned out he was also a mushroomer. He showed us his haul of chanterelles and various other mushrooms before we said our goodbyes and got dinner. We went to a nice little Mayan fusion restaurant that had live music from a guitarist/singer playing some 60s classics. After stopping by a brewery on our way back, we saw an illuminated cross section of an old-growth redwood log.
On it were little markers on the tree's rings of important years. To think of all the history one being lived through. The tree was about 1800 years old before it was cut down. I wish my photo captured the true scale of it, absolutely massive. I can't imagine a tree that large, and I'm disappointed I likely never will get the chance to see one in person.
The next morning we went back to the Caspar Scales for the foray. There were about 25 people in attendance and we were led by a CalFire ranger and part-time mycologist. He took us to a spot from where we all split up and hunted for about an hour. Most people were looking for edibles, but not knowing what was edible or not, I just went around collecting, hoping to get them identified after we finished.
These were a few notable ones that I found really beautiful. The second one looked like the button mushrooms that you could get at the supermarket, and so I thought maybe could be edible, but was mistaken. I showed my collection to the leader, but his explanations used all the scientific terminology that I was not familiar with and it all went over my head, but the message was clear: none of these are edible or all that interesting.
It was nice to be able to go on it, but I would like to be a bit more educated on the terminology and species in order to properly be able to participate.