The Ruby community was always marked by an especially playful character. I haven’t written Ruby in over 5 years, but I still remember that feeling of play. It always surfaced in the oddest moments where someone would go off on a tangent and you could see the humorous stinger coming from a mile off and then you’d think: “Wait, they’re going exactly were I thought they might be going with this.”

A notable moment was when David Brady noticed the irrepressible urge of Rubyists to misdirect so that they could land a joke once you resolved the cryptic crossword-like clue of the naming algorithm:

Avdi: I’m working on a gem [a library] called gem-love

[Other conversation happens]

David: I literally design around…[the question of names including “-” or “_” confusion]…by only using one word. And so, Avdi, I would have recommend that you rename your gem to glove. [Laughter]

David (continues): However, there is a cultural thing in the Ruby community that you must give your name just a weird ass freaking name that is surprising but inevitable. It’s like, before you hear the gem name, you should have no idea how to intuit the name of the gem. No way to predict it. But once you hear it, it should make sense. It’s the opposite of intuitive. So, your gem name Sir, isotoner.

After some laughter, James puts a capstone on the idea:

JAMES: [A] lot of languages, you have your extensions or whatever, your libraries being called something like XML::Parser, or whatever where it’s very self-descriptive. In Ruby, we don’t like that. We like the creative, Nokogiri means chainsaw…

Hearing James say this, I immediately worked out the chain…

After previous (Ubuntu Mate) posts (Debian) about open-source Linux on cheap hardware, I decided to try out building/working on FreeBSD in a series under the Longform content. TL;DR: I got it working; I’m really enjoying it; and I’ve documented how to get to victory:

“My Journey to FreeBSD: Building a ‘Just Focus’ Laptop”

Portrait by Marco Grob

As soon as you put things in words, no one ever sees the film the same way. And that’s what I hate, you know. Talking—it’s real dangerous.

David Lynch in The Guardian, 23 June 2017,

A few years ago on this site, I bade reverb-drenched farewell to Angelo Badalamenti, the inimitable creator of the lush soundscapes of David Lynch films. Last month, Lynch joined Badalamenti in whatever surreal nothingness follows this world. Our world, on the other hand, will be all the poorer for it; the surreal nothingness beyond will find itself dull in comparison to the imagination by its new resident.

Lynch leaves us with a body of work that defies categorization and continues to haunt our collective imagination like a half-remembered dream. Could the hideous be beautiful? The banal, profound? And Lynch excelled at doing cross-hybrids of these questions: Is there hideous banality or beautiful profundity?

In Lynch’s world, absolutely yes: beautiful suburban streets with American flags and fire engines host that one overgrown, weedy lot on the corner that – shockingly and inexplicably – features a human ear, loosed from its owner by unthinkable means.

For the singularity and artistry of his unique visions, film students and cultural theorists will be pondering him and the meaning of his work for years.