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We are few and distracted, and most of the information comes from ephemeral social media. Here is a place to list all the semi-permanent interviews and declarations linked to Agency, starting of course with those before publication, but also to include those that will appear later, specially as I am not sure we will get a promotional tour this time. I am also surprised that they are all from 2017, and in many cases linked to Archangel (I omitted some that only focused on the comic). There are also many articles written by using the Twitter posts information, but I do not consider that worthy of inclusion here. I would like to focus on what he actually says, not what others read in what he says. I have found only a few but I am sure there may be more. I put them in chronological order, as earlier ones may become obsolete by newer declarations. 3rd of May 2017. The Verge. It also showed for the first time the cover, and focuses in the structural changes due to the Trump victory in 2016. 24th of August 2017. Vice. It is really about Archangel but has several tidbits about Agency and its connection to The Peripheral. 6th of September 2017. Marketplace. The full interview rather than the condensed version, touching many things. A bit rambling, but it is good to have a spoken interview as it is less focused than the short printed ones. 22nd of September 2017. BoingBoing. Cory Doctorow on Archangel, but touching on the Jackpot and Agency. 25th of September 2017. Barnes & Noble. Another Archangel piece that segues naturally into time travel and Agency. 4th of December 2017. Omni. Elizabeth Hand, surprisingly short stopping when it starts to get interesting.

So bad news is, GR, the minibots and I are going to be kicked out of our house. Good news is, we're not quite yet homeless (again). Docu-signing miles of legalese all morning, just smashing that 'place electronic signature here' button like a 13 year old in a Steve Bannon-puppeted crypto-fash Fortnite stream smashing like and subscribe and 'buy lootbox' buttons. Or alternatively, like some kind of mortgage-acquiring xillennial(?) mofo while waiting for our current house to be auctioned off. This bucket of termites, murderous fireants and decades of neglect; this collateralized Goldman yacht-payment obligation of rotten pine and corrugated rust overgrown with alien invasive trees and subprime overpricing; this victim of years of squatters who housed goats in the master bed, left mountainous trash piles inside and out, tore the 70's paisley wall paneling off another room's walls in opioid and meth-addled daymares... 90% probability this 'asset' will be bought back by the same bank-like entity parented by a megabank Matryoshka dolled within a holding company on behalf of an unjailed financial WMD-user who helped bankrupt the original Portland hippy owners with exhorbitant cancer-rent and 401k-stealing economic collapse. So yes, on the bright side, it looks increasingly likely that I'll be the first in three generations of Hawaiians on my dad's side to not be a neofeudal peasant for my entire life, living in a ghetto and working till I'm dead paying rent and undying fealty to some fucking son of a WASP Puritan American missionary or other assorted flavor of crazy rich Chinese money-mover, Silicon Valley surveillance capitalist 1984-creator, Saudi F-35 purchaser, or other billionaire making homeless and under-housed people by storing their money in empty multi-million dollar condominiums. But most importantly, it looks like GR and the minibots and I will have a place to sleep that isn't the back of a Mazda tribute, a van in a Wal mart parking lot, a 7 x 9 foot closet in my parents' house, a $2000 /month studio wedged between meth labs, or any of those other places we've previously called home. Our real estate agent is especially un-realestateagent-ey. As GR mentioned, 'we had no idea he was one for months, which is NOT normal'. 50's, grey, balding but no combover, always brings big buckets of gourmet food to get togethers and friends with a ex-Cuban food critic lady friend in her 80's, fond of anti-Trump Facebook diatribes. A good guy who works his butt off and who genuinely wants to help out. I found it interesting though, an oft-repeated comment was, "You could take that unattached studio, rent it out for 600, 700. Pay for your mortgage with that, and use the proceeds to work on eventually flipping the property, getting another. Maybe another two places, rent those out... Nobody lives in a home forever, you're always looking to what you can make of it." I didn't say it but GR and I had the same thought on the drive home from showings at the actually exceptionally room-ey place: "We just want to live inside of it. Not be rained on. Not have our laptop stolen, birth certificate and green card lost. We don't need to make money off of a house(s)." Another one of the older mainland transplants commented, "I feel so out of place on Sunday, taking six hours off from working." I read Americans work 499 hours (three months) more than the French, on average. Even 137 hours more than the goddamn 6-day-a-week bushido-ass *Japanese*. "Nobody lives in a home. Homes are just there to make you more money." Wild calvinist imperial capitalist suicidal conditioning shit. Anyway, dad has helped co-sign. As I mentioned, he forked over the majority of his income of his entier adult life to exhorbitant rents, helping pay for my sis' stupidly expensive and mostly useless college degree, and dad lost most of the rest to stock market crashes. Aunt is bankrupted as well. Just like my grandpa who sent all his meager life savings off to sweepstakes scams over the last 10 years of his life, talking to me about how he was going to, 'win that milion one day, and buy you, your dad, and all of us a big house to live in'. He died penniless. I could tell dad was tearing up a little at the idea that we actual Hawaiians might have any property whatsoever to our name. He was like, "Chris, when the next crash happens and we're screwed out of everything we have and they gentrify our place into 10,000 dollar condos, I'm driving your mom and I in a mobile home onto that property." I was like, "It's ok dad, we'll have like five rooms to live in." Cause homes are for fucking living in.

And the place we are hopefully probably buying (waiting to hear back from our realtor who is waiting for the seller's response) has plenty of room for us, TM's home office, the kids, as well as extra space for if when the Oahu family needs a backup.

@dbThe place we're in is being auctioned and we're working on buying a new place with family. It's not in the bag yet, but our real estate agent seems pretty confident about it!

We have been figuring out how to connect to a Google Big Query database, luckily my new staffer has some skill in this and the capacity to learn very quickly (I am pretty sure he has a serious case of ADHD). Once we figured out we really didn't NEED the SQL portion of BQ it was obvious that this was a good choice. Unfortunately it was a choice driven by the unwillingness of our government to continue hosting the data in a free, public server that a lot of folks used. Perversely, our ability to host this data, query it and build stuff with it, will raise our value. But since it is public data the idea is that it be hosted PUBLICLY, not by a couple of assholes at an NGO.

my day so far... ...got to work at 9:30, fixed a bakers rack I'd modified earlier in the year, putting three times more shelves had flared out the legs and the wheels fell off. sorted a few hundred pairs of shoes by vendor, repackaged and sent back. made coffee, cleaned kitchens. 6 fridges, two dishwashers, cafeteria seating took out recycling from shipping and kitchens, repainted a seamless on set 8 repaired a heater for a fitting room on set 5 hung a mirror in same fitting room getting ready to drive downtown to our HQ, hitting building 865 for normal pick up & drop of merch from shoots also have to return several pairs of shoes to bldg 805, then off to flagship for a Product Group project i have in corporate, and a salesperson video project in the store. I should be back at the studio by 1400 hours. off at 1830.

Scottish Twitter

I have to admit, I always enjoy the Scottish Twitter subreddit. 😹

Stahp!

Visited the doc two weeks ago--up to 333 pounds. The last few weeks, tho, I've been walking 21 km / week. Down to a "mere" 318 pounds now. I'm obviously still fat, and I realize scales can be off by a certain amount, but 15 pounds in two weeks actually *is* totally something that can be done, *particularly* when you are as massive as me--I need a lot more energy per km than smaller-bodied models

Not much. Good to be back...sorta. How many others never made it over? It's a Peter Wright, made in England. Classic lump of steel. The guy with the hammer is a smith who learned his trade, no shit, in the Derbyshire coal mines.

@heavyboots haha, yeah it's got some silver linings but also a pretty dark cloud! We're optimistic about the house situation working out but it's not 100% certainty right now. Supposed to open escrow today, which I'm just starting to wrap my head around with the help of the great agent we have. This is all brand new shit for me, my dad, most my entire family who have all rented for generations like I said, but if it all works out, it will be a great development for the Minobot family(s).

Holy Shit! Sup, Lithos?

Yeah Odo's a badass.

Indeed. Yet I am in a peculiar mood. Alone in a foreign soulless hotel tends to make it so. I better get some good warm food in me...

For the last year I have spent 4 hours a day on a metro bus. Not doing that will improve my mental health.

corruption is something I have had to learn to ignore. There will always be corruption, it is a strong social motivator. Being a non conformist tends to make you into a soft target for those among us who define themselves by other folks metrics. Funny thing about alcohol.... It has been safe for human consumption longer than we've had clean drinking water. In the middle ages, they had spirits, wine, mead and ale, but they had no clean drinking water. People were drunk all the time, from sunup to sundown. This means society, governments and laws were basically created by drunken cave men. It might not make you feel better, but it sure does explain a lot.

I guess shit could be worse.

Jesus was a black libtard.

lmao. I just think Quentin is the wrong choice to add to that particular canon.

Does he look like a petaq?!

looking forward to... uhh... a Romulan interrogator brutally severing a Ferengi's ear?

Yeah, me too. Though, you're closer than I. I was asleep. It would have to shake enough to throw me from the bed to wake me up. I sleep deep.

ahh... it was 95. I might very well have read it, and just forgotten. 1995 was a lot of drugs ago, and nearly the precise center of a prolific and barbaric bender. Glad I get to enjoy it for the first time. Again?

https://robocop.fandom.com/wiki/6000_SUX

Ian, that would have been fine if it said "asshole"

Yeah, I've come to the conclusion that social networks are a detriment to society. We're too dumb to make any good use of it.

Well, I don't know whether to heart that post or not. But congrats to the whole MinoBot family on the new home at least! And @editengine, I nearly pass out pretty frequently too when I stand up too fast. Glad that sounds like that's all it was. o_O

"general formula for designing a (singlet bispherical?) lens"

Although it is probably the only "African book" that many non-Africans have read I recall enjoying Things Fall Apart quite a lot as a teen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Things_Fall_Apart

Got it, read it, loved it!

Is this some kind of euphemism?

Reminds me of the Florida gear I lived in. I had more short pants than long pants when I moved to MD. I spend most of my day swaddled in bland norm-core. But its summer now, and I can let the Florida flag fly boldly around home.

For the past month, we've been trying to migrate one physical server to the cloud (and by "we", I mean colleagues, as my part only comes once they figure out how to hook up web service in a completely secure fashion, which they are literally still fighting with). What's really funny is I get the feeling I'm actually better at IT than the lead on the project. I managed to talk him through setting up email in about 30 minutes after he'd been struggling with it for two or three days, for example. But they literally won't let me have access to any of the controls because they have super weird ideas about what constitutes security. TBH, all it means is less stress for me, so I'm just rolling my eyes and tolerating it so far. But be that as it may, just today, Azure GovCloud tech support has admitted "you can't do that here, only in Azure" on one requirement, which means all our setup may have been on the wrong cloud, as it were. So I think our next move may be to light everything we've done so far on fire and kick it over the edge and start building the server again on a different cloud, lol.

My dad used to rent Durangos often when traveling, and he was pretty happy with them. Drive it in good health!

So far I just do a hell of a lot of eye-rolling… that ish about cucks and stuff definitely makes me just scroll past your posts a lot more often, I'll say that. It's the online equivalent of me edging away from people who start spouting off about how Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones told them some truths… Toxic sites are toxic whether they're online or IRL. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Oh yeah, and @Wanderer check out 3rd party Twitter clients that let you set up a filter to hide retweets. Makes Twitter much more manageable when people have to take the time to write some words as well as just click the RT because 90% of them don't bother.

I do mind someone going out of their way to insult me on a website that I run. It doesn’t make me cry or anything, but I sure don’t give much of a damn anymore. 🤷‍♀️

it's that time again, folks

Not really sure whether this one counts as metal, but I just find it mesmerising. And find myself singing it, even though it's in Icelandic and I don't know the words. Great video too.