Charles Pence @pence@scholar.social

Stress levels off the charts today. Getting harder to deal with the fact that my former home is on fire while I sit here comfortably in Brussels and look out into my sunny garden. Cognitive dissonance abounds.

I swear every morning I wake up (in Europe, so, time zones) and have to spend a good twenty minutes figuring out what fresh hell the US is descending into

I think this is what's now settling in the worst about the pandemic: academia for me is really a *planning*-based affair. I need to think now about book proposals and syllabi and conferences and projects for next year. I need to build my writing calendar, start opening coauthored collaborations. But, given everything... I just can't. No data to go on, not much inclination to do it. So it's just day by day, a surefire way to move sideways. And the tenure clock ticks.

Last "class" of the "semester" today. Weirdly mixed feelings. Glad to be done. Wish I knew anything about the future.

This has really been a year for me of thinking about unbundling and decentralizing my internet presence. (Pandemic silver linings?) I'm moving backups over to rsync.net, doing more social media here, code at Codeberg, mail moved to Mailfence.

Anybody have a super-clean, inexpensive replacement for AWS-type static site hosting? I'm almost certainly stuck with EC2 for my (grant-funded) web application cluster, but I could at least get my plain site hosting elsewhere...

Hey, @steko and others, thanks for the heads-up about @codeberg! Just opened an account, going to move my repos over this weekend, and will probably start paying in as a full member shortly.

There's something both reassuring and zen-garden-calming about working through data management and backup procedures. Ah... safe data... nice...

Fuck.

Just got rumors from our administration that we're out of office now until September.

I'm in the middle of an ECR grant funded project. This crisis is now going to cut out months 9-15 of a 24-month project. There's no recovering from this anymore and really doing the project, I just have to try to play damage recovery.

Unless I'm misreading it, our masters degree reform project dissolves something like half the courses I planned to teach in my long term planning. More than that short term, as I have a course release for a few years pre-tenure.

So that's great. Glad I've spent two years working on these syllabi. I have no idea what I'll even be doing here in 2 years.

I find it incredibly ironic that the Venn diagram of

- people who complain about effeminate latte drinking soy boys

and

- people who are throwing temper tantrums and giving up on social distancing because they couldn't go to the beach for two weeks

is a perfect circle

Hey, I feel like I heard people on here talking about/recommending Rambox. Any testimonials? I feel like I could use something like it, to be honest. (Also, it would let me log entirely out of social media on my proper Firefox, which has to be good from a tracking perspective....)

Hey all – if you needed to host lecture videos online and freely available for streaming, what would you do? Is there a nice AWS/S3-self-hosted solution around? (I'm comfortable/familiar with the tech needed for whatever.) I'd really rather not put them on YouTube if I don't have to.

I'm glad that a quick YouTube search revealed that I'm not the only person for whom this is now permanently engraved in their brain https://youtu.be/q_A1GNx0M9M