June, 11, 2023 archives

our missing hearts by celeste ng is not a dystopian novel. it is set in a plausible near-future version of the united states where anti-immigrant and anti-asian policies are accelerated. it is very informed by the policies pursued under the trump administration and the quiet complicity of many or most americans (especially us white ones) in the rise of a new fascism.

structurally, i really liked how the story circles back on itself to re-tell different aspects of the story from different points of view.

it is pretty devastating, and i highly recommend it.

the deluge by stephen markley reminded me of the ministry for the future by kim stanley robinson but it is almost exclusively focused on the united states grappling with the climate crisis over the next decade instead of the whole world. that means there is a lot more domestic politics, and while the characters are pretty broadly drawn it is altogether plausible in a pretty unsettling way.

one of the threads in the ministry for the future that stays pretty much in the background is the actions of eco-terrorists, but this is developed much more extensively in the deluge. as a result, it ties into the other story lines in a more organic way.

the domestic politics also echo our missing hearts in some aspects. definitely another book from the post-trump era. (he hopefully calls it, rather than mid-trump.)

it is hard to look back at how the pandemic has played out and see any hope for the climate crisis being addressed in any meaningful way. it has been less than a week since much of the east coast was blanketed in smoke from canadian wildfires, and it already feels like everyone has moved on. but the fires are still burning.

another book i would recommend, if you are up to reading quasi-apocalyptic plausible fiction.

i am not sure what triggered it, but i started diving into the public record of my early involvement with linux via the usenet archives on google and collection at oldlinux.org, particularly the archives of the old linux-activists email list.

the first version of the linux kernel that i was able to run was 0.11. (the 0.10 kernel wouldn’t run on my machine because i still just had a monochrome monitor and mga video card.) at the time, the release consisted of two floppy disk images. the “boot” image went in first and was the linux kernel. once the kernel was loaded, you had to pop in the “root” image which had a basic collection of utilities that you could use to install the system.

there was no networking support in the kernel yet, so “installing” to a hard drive basically consisted of setting up a couple of partitions for the kernel and root disk, and copying things into place. there was a utility called “mtools” that could read DOS-formatted disks or partitions, but what i often did was just dump tar files to a floppy from DOS and read them back after rebooting into my linux partition. eventually you could bootstrap your way into having some sort of serial communications so you could use a modem to dial out and transfer files with something fancy like kermit. (i think we had hardwired serial connections in our dorm rooms at harvey mudd college when i first started working with linux.)

at the time, there were no other distributions. gcc had been ported and you could download the binaries and then start compiling anything else you could find. people would upload things they had compiled to tsx-11.mit.edu and nic.funet.fi, the two hubs of linux distribution. my first mail to the linux-activists list was saying that i had ported unzip and zoo and some other things to linux. (which probably did not involve much porting, really.)

i don’t have records of how this happened, but somehow i volunteered to take over maintenance of the “root” image from linus, and so the official release of linux 0.95 was a boot disk (kernel) from linus and a root disk from me. there was an INSTALL shell script which you could use to get things set up on a hard drive partition. we did a couple of releases that way, and then distributions kind of rapidly filled the space, starting with mcc interim linux.