emotionally volatile

when i started writing this comic, there were courses on duolingo for klingon and dothraki, fictional languages that are only spoken by characters on television shows who don’t exist, but the course for yiddish, a language spoken by jews – real, living, breathing people – for generations, didn’t exist until april 2021.

in 2017 a jewish employee at the anne frank museum was asked to put a baseball cap over his yarmulke. yeah, you read that right – an employee who worked in the house anne frank and her family hid for two years was asked to hide his judaism when he came into work. 

But then the teacher realized that only Janie was left. “Janie, do you have a story to share ?’ ’‘Yes madam……My daddy told me a story about my Mom ” “OK, let’s hear” said the teacher.

“My Mom was a Marine pilot in Operation Desert Storm in Iraq and her plane got hit”. “She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol and a survival knife”. “She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn’t break and then her parachute landed her right in the middle of 20 Iraqi troops.” “She shot 15 of them with the pistol, until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke and then she killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.”

Pin drop silence in the class !!

“Good Heavens” said the horrified teacher “What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story ?”

“One or two bad movies does not make for an inflection point in these troubled times, true. But there is something about this accumulated slippage of quality, and the emotions and ideas presented to us, that reflects something cheaper in the culture. We have been awash in remakes of nerd shit for nearly all of the 21st century, and the loop between past and present grows tighter. Every couple of years, they give Ghostbusters another shot; three actors have played Spider-Man in the last 15 years; the charming and seminal Disney cartoons become laughably crappy live-action interpretations; there’s a fucking sequel to The Shining, which climaxes with the phantasms of the Overlook Hotel, now in CGI form, showing up to exact vengeance on the film’s villain; they did another Space Jam, one that conceptualized every Warner Bros. movie ever made — The Matrix, Casablanca, Harry Potter, etc. — as existing within the same interconnected metaverse of marketable IP.

The homogenization of Hollywood, and the race to monetize every piece of intellectual property under the sun, is nothing new. In 2017, The Ringer dedicated a week of coverage to “good bad movies,” the zany action movies and hokey dramas that are objectively sort of ass but subjectively enjoyable, and how they no longer exist. More than any referendum on taste or quality, I think what characterizes a good bad movie is the ease with which you can just… watch it. It doesn’t require any prior knowledge, any informed context. Meanwhile the highest grossing movie of 2019 was Avengers: Endgame, a three-hour film that would be completely incoherent without having memorized at least a half-dozen movies before it.

I’m married to someone with severe memory problems. Automation of household appliances & systems helps him a lot and helps me a lot because it reduces the number of things I have to keep in my brain at all times. I love doors that lock themselves, being able to schedule dog food being delivered, a thermostat I can manipulate from wherever. Beyond my little bubble it should be noted that voice controlled appliances can be really good for people with mobility concerns. Appliances that can measure and talk and remember little tasks can be such a blessing for people.

- Voice activated smart speaker: Mycroft (can be purchased as a complete unit, or DIYed with a Raspberry Pi and microphone+speaker array) https://mycroft.ai/

- Smart Home automation: home-assistant (cannot be purchased, originally developed by MIT) https://www.home-assistant.io/

- Zigbee (the wireless protocol for smart lights and other smart devices) bridge: Conbee II (this takes the place of a Phillips Bridge, for instance. And is in many cases better because it works with all brands of smart light that use Zigbee--which is almost all of them, including the cheap IKEA ones--and also works for devices that aren’t lights. Cannot really be DIYed because Zigbee needs special hardware, not just software) https://phoscon.de/en/conbee2 

Because of the market, most smart appliances and devices are Alexa enabled, but unless they’re made by Amazon, that doesn’t mean they’re Alexa exclusive and even then, someone is hacking their way into the API and pulling the endpoints. Right now, the only thing I can’t work in here (yet) is my Nest Thermostat and HA is working on adding that back in right now.

Home Assistant is fully compatible with the zwave and zigbee standards as well as wifi and bluetooth; you can directly control zwave and zigbee items or link up your existing hubs for it to control like SmartThings.

https://www.home-assistant.io/

It can be run in several ways; I’ve done it on a Pi 4 both 4G and 8G and a VM on my Ubuntu server and while the Pi is recommended--I recommend it too for convenience--it’s one of several possibilites.  Currently I’m using a Raspberry Pi 4b 8G with a solid state hard drive instead of SD card.  You can purchase z-wave and zigbee modules to add to it for direct control of z-wave and zigbee devices or use your existing hubs (or both). Beneath the HA umbrella is also links to the blueprints of building your own zigbee and zwave devices with Arduino just to start that HA can also control. I’m not saying you’re going to be building your own smart thermostat on the weekend, but apparently, some people are doing just that.

This does not require a high tech start value; most integrations are automatic, you just say yes and login and let it happen, it even creates your Dr. Doom dashboard with TABS.

Again, you DO NOT NEED TO KNOW ANYTHING BUT COMPUTERS EXIST AND HOW TO CLICK YES AND NO TO USE THIS. For me, it was actually easier than a lot of setups with shit I had to pay money for that said they were easy.  This is open source, but that is not synonymous with user unfriendly; a lot of work was done to make this accessible to the casual automation user. The UI is card based; when you first start, HA does it all for you and creates discrete cards that control different things on your dashboard; no effort on your part, you can turn on and off any light in here or turn them red while someone is in the bathroom because that’s fucking funny.  But as you get more comfortable, you can start to create your own configurtions, take direct control of the UI, and mix it up; it’s up to you.

But.

If you are a DIYer or just want to be or never knew you wanted to be but feel the vibes and need a place to start, this is the perfect sandbox for learning and escalating.  There are a metric ton of tutorials, community add-ins, and message boards to consult. If you can imagine it, it can be done and its likely someone is working on version eight right now. The primary languages are python and javascript with yaml for configuration files for DIY.  You can create your own layouts, your own sensors, and your own cards if you don’t like what they have. If you’re like me, you may also go in to community addins and add new stuff to their code so it runs like you want it to; it’s all up to you.

I am not a dev pro, I’m a QC analyst with a scripting hobby; I do this quite literally for fun on weekends or when I’m bored or anxious and need to soothe myself with coding.

Here is the home page of my MULTI-TAB dashboard. Yes, that is a floorplan of my apartment and those glowy orange and dark grey bits are things that I can turn on and off from the comfort of my bed.  It’s fun.

I seriously would kill to get more people into this and have someone to play with and enjoy the feeling of controlling all within my (apartment) kingdom with but a single command.  Dear God tell me if you’re into it; we’ll be best friends and hopefully you’ll be okay with that.

Here’s an intro to Home Assistant I wrote back in September in DW when I first started, with screenshots.  You’ll also be able to see my Dash when I first started compared to the dash above. Feel free to ask me anything from the perspective of someone not a dev professional, an engineer, or even has a degree in anything, much less anything like this, and yet is a QC lead who codes their own testing tools and for whom this is just something cool and fun.

reminder:

"The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public-house; the less you think, love, theorize, paint, sing, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour—your capital.  The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life—the greater is the store of your estranged being.