千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 43

知過必改

zhī guò bì gǎi

"If one knows one's errors, one must correct them"

You don't generally see 過 used as "fault" or "error" or "shortcoming" in modern Chinese, where it's typically a marker of a past event, or used in phrases like 過生日, "to celebrate a birthday."

This line offers unquestionably solid advice, and like a lot of good advice, it's easily ignored. All of us are aware of our shortcomings, but it's a lot easier to live with them than to deal with them. 

It's not only a personal admonition; it can be applied to institutions as well. I can imagine civil servants in imperial China referencing this line to comment upon the inefficiencies of a particular department, for example, or chiding subordinates with it (which I guess turns it back into a personal admonition).

You don't even have to go back in history to apply it on a bigger scale. America is fully aware of its errors, yet makes no effort to correct them. It's apparently easier to let kids get murdered than to stop teenagers from buying firearms, or to make cops do something other than stand around and demand respect from civilians. What happened in Uvalde the other day is proof of that. 

微臣
史大偉

Warhorse/Tleilax

My laptop, which I've had for less than a year and a half, pulled some weird shit on me today: the enter, spacebar, and backspace keys all suddenly stopped working. Since I have a numerical keypad, the enter and backspace keys can be compensated for, but there's no making up for a missing spacebar. Sure, there's the online keyboard that Ubuntu provides, but that shit sucks.

Enter Tleilax, my old Thinkpad T410. This tireless motherfucker was my daily driver for almost a whole decade of personal computing. I got it in 2011: it was the first computer I'd ever bought, after 30 years of family computers and hand-me-downs. Over the course of 9.5 years, I wrote a novel on it, translated a bunch of shit, accumulated a ton of good music (and deleted at least as much, alas), learned how to use Ubuntu (albeit at a purely luser level), plastered the case in archaeologically valuable layers of stickers, learned the value of mechanical keys (still not sure these are old-school mechanical, but compared to the chiclet trash on modern Thinkpads, it might as well be an IBM keyboard from 1990), and generally had a blast. Its busted corners are held together with gaffer tape. Several fingertips' worth of dead skin cells are encrusted on the keys. Memory chips are still recovering from relentless sessions of Hotline Miami. There are probably interesting textfile fragments and other things loitering in the file system.

Tleilax continues to be a warhorse. It doesn't run for shit on battery power, it can't handle websites made after 2015, it lags even on terminal applications, and it weighs a comparative ton, but goddamn, am I glad to have it around. Keep your old hardware, folks: not only will it save your ass when your ass needs saving, you might be doing a solid for a future generation, too. And odds are the speakers will be a lot better than your current machine. That's the case with this Thinkpad for sure.

Hail Tleilax. Hail old computers. Hail continuity with the past without sacrificing the future. Hail reuse.


Tleilax Resurrection: The Soundtrack (all taken from the Tleilax hard drive)

Mc Lars/YTCracker - The Digital Gangster LP
Perturbator - Sexualizer EP
NY Vice - Smooth Steering
Redbait - Cages
Dieter Geisler + Randy Reynolds - Ultraness
Kitty - D.A.I.S.Y. rage
Bretwaldas of Heathen Doom - Bones In the Ground
Devin Viber - Glitchhikers OST
Crom - Hot Sumerian Nights
Bloodstar - Chorus
Jessie Frye - Kiss Me In the Rain
Pet UFO - My Name is Esther Cohen
Wheels Within Wheels - Wheels Within Wheels/Merkaba split

千字文 / The Thousand Character Classic, part 42

 男效才良

nán xiào cái liáng

"men, imitate the talented and good"


Apologies for my recent lack of writing. Time's been moving strangely, and it feels as if I've got a thousand things on my plate, none of which are getting done. What's even weirder is that when I stop to think about what those things might be, I can't identify a single one. 

Anyway, not a lot to say about this line, other than how it compares against the one before it. Women are supposed to be chaste and virtuous, which is achieved less by what they do than what they don't, whereas men are urged to actively emulate their society's role models. The passive/active dichotomy here could be seen as a reflective of 陰陽 yin and yang, but I don't think that's really the case. This is just women being told to behave one way and men another, and the women get the short end of the stick. Sounds pretty fuckin' familiar, doesn't it?

微臣
史大偉