Parker Higgins @xor@mastodon.xyz

A lot of people in my life, when they're trying to cheer me up, offer a "judgment-free zone" type of thing. And I want to thank them for that, and sometimes it's what I need. But then sometimes I want to know that I would make it through judgment! Like, my actions are good and acceptable by some neutral standard, evenly applied!

It's two very amiable probably-middle-aged men talking with infectious curiosity and in Scottish accents about nature and agriculture

If you have precisely my brand of anxiety, you might find that BBC Scotland's "Out of Doors" podcast is a nice way to soothe some of the inner monologue https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074hjr

It's satisfying that the language of UK shipping is so densely packed with Britishisms. I put an item in my basket two days ago and now my parcel has been dispatched

Should I make a podcast

I gotta start writing again. I don't think any media people are still on Masto but if you are and you've got tips for who I should be pitching (to write the sort of thing I write) hit me up

As I've gotten more confident as a programmer, I've really started to see the value in looking at the source code underlying APIs I'm using, and I've also learned that most software is hilariously bad

Does anybody have a working example of an actual package on PyPi that uses markdown for its project description, and it works?

I haven't been good about it lately but blogging is such a Good Thing. I have a few years of my life now where I organized and documented my thoughts, and it's so incredibly valuable to me. (And maybe sometimes other people, too!)

I had to pick a nice-looking free font to bundle with this project I'm working on and I went with Noto and I've been seized all day with the worry that maybe that makes me look really 2014-y

What are the actual (case sensitive) filenames of some plain serif fonts that I can expect to find one of installed on various systems? I'd been using 'LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf', which is great for my computer but not everywhere, obviously.

I have learned so much packaging my first Python module for PyPi distribution! It's really hard and it sucks and I love it

How annoying is (manual, selective) cross-posting from birdsite? I presume a lot of you are over there, and a lot of you are not...

It's also the site of a good Google Maps glitch: it mapped mid-demolition photographs onto a pre-demolition building shape and labeled it with post-demolition business names

The hotel the two men each stayed at, the Franklin Motor Inn, was knocked down some time in the 2010s and was replaced with a Whole Foods, but used to be quite a place. Philadelphia Mag did a nice story about its last days as a Best Western bar https://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/02/06/philadelphia-best-western-bar-bw-whole-foods/

I looked up the preceding document in MLK's FBI file—the 17k page one, not the 200 page one the FBI positions as the full thing in its "FOIA vault"—and found that agents had staked out a hotel in Philadelphia looking for MLK, and saw Mr. Domino's car and mistakenly drew a connection.

I got Fats Domino's FBI file, and it consisted of a single page, which was a document titled "Subject: Martin Luther King" and just listed New Orleans reports on Domino's three Cadillacs https://foiathedead.org/posts/fats-domino/

About to post a little thread I put on birdsite that I want to clean up into a blog post, forgive me if you follow me in both (or heaven forbid ALL THREE) places