A friend told me that they read The Nihilism Algorithm and that it had been stewing in their head for a few days. Because I have an awful memory, I had no recollection of anything I said in that post, so I reread it and was astonished at my own brilliance and wit. "How fortunate I was to have captured those thoughts in an engaging manner such that there is something of a time capsule I can return to at any future point!" I thought.

Let this be another time capsule.

But, before I get to packing things into this capsule, let me remind you that, as I have noted prior, I am astutely aware that I am sending these very keystrokes into a void of eternal obscurity. This very reflection fills me — perhaps strangely — with something akin to pride; I have no expectations and thus no delusions that anything will come from this blog. And yet, in the introduction of this very post, I seem to have broken my prior-stated rule of not referring to the comments of others in response to my own posts — that is because I have forgotten that now clearly overzealous rule. My poor memory, need I remind you, was implicitly the reason for these posts: to leave artifacts that I can use to later jog memories I cannot recall on my own.

I suppose, objectively, the last few months have been double-plus-ungood. I have a heart condition now. My mother never told me that she had a heart condition when she was 19 until around 23; so, not knowing this, I freaked out when I woke up with what was later diagnosed as Atrial Fibrillation with Rapid Ventricular Response. Test results from a genetic test shows rs3903239(C;C). Thanks, Mom. (I've been having more and more heart-related episodes since then and have had a loop monitor implanted. My future — if there even is one — likely holds an ablation.)

It hasn't all been bad. I moved! I gave my car to my mother because my condo does not have parking. That's not a very equitable trade, is it?: awful genes for a one-of-a-kind car? (I just realized I never posted anything about my super-duper cool car here! Oh, well.) My new place is about twice the size of the last one. Maybe once I finally get fully unpacked and setup things how I like with more artwork I plan on creating, I'll document it with a blog post. For now, me sayin' my new place is super-duper cool will have to suffice.

When I'm not hyper-aware of my pulse and paranoid of another heart episode or (even worse) stroke, most of my time is spent working. Outside of work, I've found myself getting back into more and more abstract/higher mathematics (I say "back" because there was a solid month right after the move and diagnosis of AFib where I stopped reading in my spare time entirely and just watched Star Trek (ToS & TNG); I still haven't unpacked all my books yet). I've also been listening to a lot of talks on quantum mechanics (mostly on a philosophical level lately since I've already listened to most of the Feynman lectures and other somewhat technical talks — so more foundational stuff nowadays dealing with things like the principle of statisical invariance and the like), post-quantum cryptography (I "attended" the Third PQC Standardization Conference, which, in COVID-times, doesn't mean much — the future of cryptography is fairly grim, IMO, especially if IonQ's roadmap can be believed), and on philosophy (again, mostly foundational stuff here, too, dealing with ontological and epistemological issues — a lot of this is over-lapping with the quantum mechanics talks — but I have also been putting a great deal of focus on the foundations of mathematics (Wittgenstein's conception of the foundations, particularly)).

I still have that philosophical project on the back-burner I hinted at in my last post (what do you think all the foundational stuff I've been researchin' is for?). The main difficultly in that project is where to begin in the articulation! I pretty much have a complete philsophical system in my head that does exactly what I wanted it to do. I don't want it in its articulated form to be something someone could simply write off as circular! The more I think about it, there doesn't seem to be any good way to start articulating it at all.

In fact, it's at this point in earlier drafts of this very post in which I ventured to illustrate the difficulty of articulating what I've been thinking about by actually attempting to articulate all the messy and admittedly inconsistent philosophical musings that have been multiplying in my gargantuan and graceful head. For reference, I started this very blog post originally in May or so (about a month after my AFib diagnosis). Now, I've revisted it many times, and I always get to this point and end up working on that impossible-to-satisfactorialy-articulate project. Then, of course, I get side tracked after spending a couple of weeks writing nonsense. This has happened enough times that, after enough attempts (and if my heart condition doesn't outright randomly kill me before I get the chance), I at least think I know now how I would like to format/arrange what I've been working on.

Wittgenstein is often credited with inventing truth tables. If you've ever worked with what is conventionally called Boolean logic (George Boole's actual own algebra was a little different and had important things like uninterpretable terms), then you will know how good and simple an invention they are. Truth tables, though, I think are not Wittgenstein's greatest information-representing-related invention; he should be credited with the ultimate form for presenting and arranging information/ideas/thoughts: the nested form he used in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It's only with relatively modern technology can the format be easily traversible (as it is here): the entire work really consists of seven propositions — from each one, the reader can drill-down into extensive elaborations and comments. Wittgenstein's hierarchical/numerical representation is a really good way of formatting complex elaborations of ideas, from a writer's perspective, at least (actually reading the Tractatus in its entirety is immensely painful, I know). I've written a python script that allows for that kind of formatting to be done in Markdown (I may extend it to LaTeX in the future) that I might later use.

For now, I'm not going to attempt again here what has repeatedly proved to be impossible for me and instead bring this post to an end (so that it actually gets published). I hope when I'm revisting this post in the future that I can look upon my current heart problems with relief (and maybe even a completely articulated philosophical system with satisfaction). I also hope that I have a future to do so at all. But if not, that's cool, too, I guess.

WARNING: The narrator of this nearly-unhinged mess is a frivolous distortion of myself — I'm no Kaczynski. (This is partly just filler content to prove I have a pulse, since I haven't posted anything in over a year.)

The programmer's loathsome fate is not that they are forever condemned to the futility of squashing bugs that multiply with every stomp; it is the constant spam they receive from recruiters. My general policy is to completely and remorselessly ignore spam in all varieties and I take pride in that I haven't logged into my LinkedIn account since a time well beyond the reach of recollection, despite the email notifications LinkedIn deperately, to no avail, sends me. One such invite, with accompanying pseudo-cordiality necessarily baked into the template, was from a company that clearly had not done their research, as I have not been bashful in my expressions of opinion regarding the particular company in question, as demonstrable from this exemplary instance (from a press release a few years ago):

"With decentralized applications, you can have the utility of a Facebook, without the evility of a Facebook — that is, a company or a Zuckerberg."

(I really don't like the company that has vainly been attempting to 'recruit' me — 'recruit' is a word I'm glad is used, as it cannot escape the connotations of recruitment in the context of militaries or cults. To me, the instance with the company in question is worse than when Pearson tried to recruit me — and I had a legitmate grudge since their software routinely counted answers represented as fractions instead of imprecise decimals wrong when the desired format was unspecified.)

I doubt I would have even bothered to write this very post (pronouced 'essay') had it not been for the development that occurred despite my unacknowledging dismissal, which started (save for the conventional addressing not excerpted) as the following follow-up (itself a followup to a prior pathetic plea — also ignored — for a response):

"Thanks for your connection/response!"

I did not need to read any further; the rest of the message appeared to my periphery to be a description of the next steps in the process, but the message itself is predicated on something that is not the case. I did not 'connect' with the recruiter (in both the LinkedIn sense and — to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge — in the vulgar one), nor did I respond. Despite the instability of my personal memory (Memento is a film I find somewhat biographical), a response to a recruiter for this particular company was something that was completely incompatible with every fiber of my being — and if I somehow ever did, I'd expect to have written so on my wrist, though, not as an impression of Leonard Shelby, but as a failed impression of Seneca the Younger.

Either the recruiter had made a mistake and intended to send the message in response to another user, or, a kind of deception — which is what sealed this incident in recent memory — was being attempted.

"I'm not going to be had by some kind of Vassily Kuragin!" I thought to myself, relishing my own literay allusion and profound intellectual supremacy (this is a joke). I immediately knew by this perceived tactic that working for the company in question would eventually result in me finding myself in the midst of a snowy duel before I ever realized the superficiality of the initial enticement. (I had recently watched the Soviet production of War and Peace (and I highly recommend it!) — that, much to my dismay, was available on HBO Max after I had scoured the internet-presence of the Russian company that did the restoration in order to find their unlisted YouTube uploads — which reinforced much of what I garnerd from my initial reading.)

The recent reminder of this encounter with a mistaken or (as I prefer to see it to support the narrative of this post) malicious recruiter reveals to me that I haven't quite enumerated the issue I take with companies such as the company in question. There are quite a few monolithic companies that all have the same odious feature in common with this particular company, but, in the midst of development of an articulation of a personal philosophy (that is very much under wraps as I research better the body of cognitive science that I feel must underpin it), I thought it a good exercise to articulate what exactly the overarching issue, as I see it, is.

Yet, before I am capable of articulating my disdain, I must wallow in it, catch my breath, and dive far into the deathly depths before I can hope to reach what lurks amongst the sediment. Hopefully, I will not drown.

Companies, such as the one in question, are duplicitous. While their public relations departments profess a kind of montmartarite — a crafted virtuous aspect — to their services, what underlies the virtual virtuosity is really a kind of ulterior motive: the ad-revenue business model.

Now, allow me to clarify that I take no inherent issue with companies that offer actual products and services and I can tolerate advertising when it's in the form of reasonable and responsible descriptions of what they offer. It is the ad-revenue model of social media platforms — modern-day medicine shows — that I find particularly distasteful.

The beating pulse of the heart at the problem can be sensed with the following stethoscope: Does the social media platform have your best interests in mind? With this question, we have found a pulse! "Bone cutter, please!" (invoking the prototypical Sprachspiel of Philosophical Investigations within the metaphor.).

Well, considering a general person's best interests are so varying person-to-person and cannot be abstracted into a singular platform, the answer, when proposed generally, cannot be 'Yes' and must — to somewhat erroneously employ the principle of bivalence — be a resounding 'No!' (Or, at any rate, I do not think a singular platform has my best interests in mind.)

So, then, what is the general function of one of these social media platforms? What are the interests of social media platforms? To rephrase, since I've already given what appears to be my grievance: What exactly is the problem I take with ad-revenue business models? To rephrase yet again (since the title may telegraph) — refer to the definition of 'algorithm,' then ask: What is the purpose that the algorithms of social media platgorms set out the achieve?

Outside of the public narratives they profess, they might give an answer that uses the term 'engagement' when dealing with the developers who maintain their platforms that did fall to the manipulations of their recruiters, but their purpose of 'engagement' is not to facilitate marriage or whatever manufactured meaning they ascribe to the word, but is, in actuality, to grab user attention in the slyest manner possible (to not be jarring and so-obviously intrusive) so that they can maximize the number of eyeballs and clicks on advertisements. So, really, what they call 'engagement' might better be called 'engorgement' with content consumption, so that more and more advertisements can be shown (along with other data-mining purposes, where user data — "Likes" and prior ads one has interacted with or even simply not scrolled immediately past — is either outright sold or used to sell specialized advertisement-space). There are hints of this motive of continually providing content one will respond to: they call the stream of 'new' or 'relevant' content your feed, which is close, but, more accurately, would more aptly be rendered in full as your feed trough.

It's not that profit-seeking is the core problem (I'm not demonizing capitalism); the core problem is the effect that the unconstrained, non-reflective pursuit of the ad-revenue model eventually produces. The core problem is not limited to 'social media'; it extends to the 'regular' media, too, (the "news") which fundamentally relies on the same ad-revenue models. The news media does this in a more polarizing manner than social media does, and often disingenuously distorts and sensationalizes narratives, which is plainly observable by contrasting the narratives purveyed one media company with another media company that caters to a base of differing ideological viewpoints. As an aside, media companies that purport themselves to be objective (a phenomenon largely unique to America) make a slanderous mockery of objectivity to those who actually practice it; if the media is as objective as it claims to be, then why is there the constant disputation on what should be basic matters of fact? Oh, right — they just want to obsequiously churn out content that caters to their readers, for purposes of ad-views and ad-clicks (and in some cases, selling the metadata it plunders from their readers to third parties).

The general public's revulsion of advertisements generally led to a large repulsion of the ad-revenue business model, which I suspect is as adequate an account of the rise of streaming platforms as any. Unfortunately, streaming platforms do oftentimes engage with a more-subtle form of advertising (advertising other content that is available on the platform — sometimes in the form of mandatory trailers and usually in the form of burgeoning banners built into the user interfaces (though, it might be more accurate to describe the interfaces as constructed around the banners)), but the purpose of this type of advertising is to "hook" customers on other offered programs so that the users will continue their $ub$cribtion$ to the platforms. Because of this, the same underlying issue I take with social media platforms and news media platforms is also present for streaming media platforms (which, I'm aware, is still something I haven't yet directly articulated — have patience, please).

Still on the subject of streaming platforms: The programs offered are more-or-less interchangable in terms of the business model the streaming platforms operate according to. With particular programs that make their appeals on any number of custom-tailored levels, the fungibility of content may not be immediately apparent to those encountering their seemingly unique features, but (with a fair and not-unhealthy dose of cynicism) allow for some contrived promotional examples that capture the real-world contexts that cross-promotions seek to ignore (NOTE: any resemblance to real programs — of which I really hope there isn't — is entirely coincidental; these are very easy to generate, took no thought, and anyone could continually generate pilots in this sort of manner to the point where one would inevitably be produced):

• "Hey, you could be spending time with a dear loved one before they croak, but how about watching this reality show about shallow soccer moms that have undergone extensive plastic surgery? Don't take them at face value!"
• "Hey, sure, you might be wanting to improve yourself via dedicated study of the mathematics underpinning the best-to-date understandings about the nature of reality, but watch this cartoon about a dog that likes to inhale narcotics! Spot puts the dime in doggie bag!"
• "Hey, um, instead of mastering the violin, you should, uh, watch this documentary about umbrellas! You'll never believe how shady their past is!"

So, with the illustrations that telegraph my point sketched, here's this post's penultimate paragraph: The generalized description of the common algorithm employed by streaming, news, and social media platforms fundamentally does not presuppose any meaningful pursuits outside of consuming their cheap and meager content, since any reminder of something that would lead to their subscribers or readers/viewers or users off of the platform is against their ad-revenue interests. The goal is nonstop consumption of their offered content; they do not encourage meaningful pursuits (of which there are many) because such pursuits are against their own interests, so I think it is fair to condemn the common goal of the algorithm (which is unvaryingly continuous in implementation) for being, at its core, nihilistic.

To close, I should clarify that I'm not declaring that all entertainment is evil like I'm some kind of dogmatic puritan — some entertainment every once in a while makes a useful reprieve from the onslaught of horrors life can craftifly nearly murder one with, but the infinite scrolls, misleading headlines in ever-present columns always in view, non-stop suggestions, autoplaying of trailers without any means to disable them only functions to intentionally be as addictive as possible. My perspective is such that it's simply just the case that these platforms never afford one the opportunity — the necessary moments of uninterruption to be introspective — to take inventory of what actually matters personally and then to pursue what one finds. There are those that are being (and have been) raised by the nihilism algorithm, like pigs being fattened by the trough, who, because of the nonstop, systematic influx of foppish fodder, have been imbued with impetuosity and can rarely realize that the 'boredom' they desperately evade is a hallmark of a lack of aims or goals that is impossible and cannot arise within the context of meaningful pursuits; they only know to eat from troughs when they feel the hunger of meaning. If pigs are fattened as preparation for an upcoming slaughter that they are unaware of, what are the children of the nihilism algorithm fattening themselves for?

NOTE: This post has been given the publish date of when the image was made, with the words written on 8/24/2020.

I heard someone cringingly say "I hack, therefore I am," but I realized René's life did overlap with Guy's, so I made what has been configured as this post's image (the whole point of the post).

I don't really have much to add, though. I just thought the image would be a fun thing to make. Since the title might lead to some expectation of a frenzied manifesto about hacker philosophy, I guess I better provide something broaching the topic. While I was no Zero Cool (though, my father was), I am somewhat sympathetic to the conventional hacker ethics.

I'm sympathetic but not dogmatic to the principles (for example, I don't feel an imperitive to share everything, so I don't think that all 'information' should be 'free'). There is always the point where any set of principles devoutly adhered to devolve into an idyllic ideology that undermines the entire utopic enterprise.

I'm satisfied with the preceding sentence (it could serve as an epitaph for nearly any over-zealous movement), but dissatisfied with the rambling and miniscule word count — I . . . need . . . more . . . power content!: One 'ethic' I particularly reject outright is the notion that code can be a form of art. This is a result of the conflation of art and craft (I only subscribe for the Tostoyan definition of art). Well executed works of craft might pass as art for some, and that's alright by me, but I don't seek to be self-deluding and instead am content with the less glamorous principles of quality and efficiency (something not unique to the hacker ethos).

Well, what else can I add whilst I'm on the subject? Mr. Robot's a pretty entertaining show; I'm pretty sure that Jeeves and Wooster's adaptation of the Comrade Bingo story contains the origin of Christian Slater's character.

Yeah, that's . . . that's about it. I'm afraid I can't talk about hacking more thoroughly without consulting a lawyer about statutes of limitation.

I simply felt like recording some stuff just in case I come down with ALS and need to prove later on that I could play the guitar, but I probably should've planned what I was going to say.

Most guitarists that take the instrument too seriously look down on capos as a way of "cheating," and I demonstrate that I used to take that perspective, too, by playing "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" without a capo.

Then, I demonstrate how I learned to stop worrying and love the capo by using one in my arrangements of "Body and Soul," "Take the A Train," and "My Little Suede Shoes."

Anyway, here's a video of me playing guitar and mumbling on the subject of capos:

I moved relatively recently. While laboriously packing all of my beloved belongings, I found an unopened envelop from almost three years ago: my college diploma. That's right, I still haven't opened it.

I graduated from Arizona State University almost three years ago; they give you some fake stand-in diploma shaped thing for the actual graduation ceremony because the real diplomas get mailed out a couple of weeks later, since the grading isn't necessarily finalized by the ceremony.

There's no real reason I haven't opened it other than I found academia to be over-taxing and I'd rather not have anything to do with it. While I had some decent professors that I truly respect and am glad to have met, I'd say that I had more that didn't take their professions seriously.

I wanted to major in physics, but I didn't want to teach high school kids, so I let myself be talked into taking a major that was new that year: a combination of arts, media, and engineering called digital culture. Being a new program, it was less structured than the established majors and it offered a lot of concentrations.

I originally concentrated in interdisciplinary arts and performance, but I changed it right after I started my second semester to media processing, the most programming-intensive concentration. My guidance counselor explained that if I were to change to another major instead of just changing the concentration, then I would've had to do an extra year, and I wasn't fond of that prospect, since my scholarship was only for four years (and I detest debt and academia equally).

Maybe in two or three years, I'll go back to school (probably abroad) and get a degree that I'll actually be willing to look at. Perhaps physics or mathematics (with a focus on cryptography).

I think I've already mentioned that, in the past, when I had enough to drink, I would end up purchasing books online. Usually, since I'm not a fan of softcover books getting abused in my backpack, I'd go for hardcover copies, and, preferably, old, leather-bound copies that have that wonderful smell of vague death.

Well, over the years, I've bought several of Tolstoy's nonfiction works and various poetry collections, and on one occasion, I was delighted to find that one of the previous owners of a well-regarded book had inserted the following newspaper clipping before the title:

In his recent address at the dedication of the new Chelsea library, Hon. James Russell Lowell uttered some sound sense as to the petty kind of reading in which many people spend a good deal of time. Referring to the scholarship of the men of three centuries ago, he said:
"They were scholars because they did not read so many things as we. They had fewer books, but these were of the best. Their speech was noble, because they lunched with Plutarch and supped with Plato. We spend as much time over print as they did, but instead of communing with the choice thoughts of choice spirits, and unconsciously acquiring the grand manner of that supreme society, we diligently inform ourselves and cover the continent with a network of speaking wires to inform us of such inspiring facts as that a horse belonging to Mr. Smith ran away on Wednesday, seriously damaging a valuable carryall; that a son of Mr. Brown swallowed a hickory-nut on Thursday; and that a gravel bank caved in and buried Mr. Robinson alive on Friday. Alas! it is we ourselves that are getting buried alive under this avalanche of earthly impertinences!"

This article was written sometime not too long after James Russell Lowell's address on December 22, 1885.

I found it interesting enough to snap a pic of it before I loaned the book out (which has since been unaccounted for but replaced) because, when I first encountered it, I suddenly became aware that Lowell's sentiment has somewhat been echoed throughout the generations. Sure, he was looking upon the news and other petty kinds of reading of "popular" novels of his day with disregard, but that "Kids these days!" attitude is the same demeanor that several have looked upon the popular works (and mediums) of their day.

• "Radio programs destroyed books!"
• "Television and film destroyed radio and books!"
• "Video games destroyed television and film!"

Either this sentiment is justified in that it accurately points out the degradation of that supreme society by an influx of mediocrity or it is not wholly accurate as it discounts the value in the some of works of modern times. Now, I'm inclined to agree with Lowell, but that is not to say that there are not great, new works—only that they are relatively increasingly-rare in the sea of mediocrity. There has to have been terrible works in the past; it is only that the terrible works were filtered out by the previous generations (and what remains isn't always that grand, either).

I'm also inclined to think that Lowell would've had a stroke if he could have a peek into our present future—the amount of distractions available to us now! Sure, all the information of the past juiced up by the giants of that supreme society is readily available to us. We could metaphorically dine with Descartes via the tap of a screen, yet we choose to literally talk to our smart televisions and make them play Dexter on repeat while we eat microwavable meals. This is something to reflect on.

It was only a couple of years before I bought the book carrying this message that I decided to largely stick to the classics. My time is valuable to me. I learned that picking out a new book from a bookstore's best-sellers stand is, at best, a crapshoot. We've all read books we've found to be terrible. We might not realize that most of the books we've read (especially in our childhood libraries!) are seriously awful until we've happenstanced into a genuinely good book. Once I was only a few chapters into Anna Karenina,  I realized that I regretted reading nearly all of the other books I had read up until that point in my life.

After that moment, I concluded I'd have a better shot at picking a good book if it were a book well-regarded nearly universally throughout multiple generations.

These days, it takes accidentally brushing into a truly good book to learn what not to read.

As a programmer that's written a fairly long and technical whitepaper, I've gotten fairly used to using LaTeX (pronounced "lah-tech"). I've used it at work, too, in order to document various things about programs, such as what API methods are being consumed, or to give rundowns of various parts of an application. The final results look darn impressive and many times are quicker to produce than with normal word processors (especially if you're fairly proficient).

If you haven't heard of LaTeX before, it's basically Microsoft Word for programmers (and the open-source community). As such, it's fairly technical (and debugging what you would consider to be trivial things can drive you insane), but it's a very powerful typesetting program that lets you do practically anything and everything you want with text. You can create variables and macros so you don't ever have to find-and-replace (and you can type less) when you need to rename something, and you don't have to deal with pasting text with or without formatting (I don't know how anyone can stand Microsoft's persistence of formatting and "smart quotes" in nearly all their applications).

Recently, I've gotten the idea of using it to typeset tablature for guitar, and found that there are some solutions out there.

Enter LilyPond

LilyPond is based off of LaTeX and comes prepackaged as its own application. Now, this blog post isn't meant to be a tutorial in getting everything set up, especially since I installed a lot of things in trying to get things working how I wanted it, and I can't really make a reliable tutorial without starting over with a fresh OS installation (something I don't really want to do since I've got it working).

The LilyPond application really only lets you write sheet music, but it does support tablature for most instruments (including guitar). I was more interested in including regular LaTeX markup in the form of explanations alongside some tabs of difficult guitar licks, so the LilyPond application wasn't exactly what I was after.

However, LilyPond comes with additional utilities, such as lilypond-book, and after adding the LilyPond bin directory to my PATH, I followed the documentation and used the lilypondfile{filename.ly} LaTeX command.

lilypond-book can take a .tex file using LilyPond-specific commands, parse the commands and produce a new .tex file with the LilyPond-specific commands replaced with LaTeX-compliant markup.

As far as editors go, something like Visual Studio Code is adequate. There are some syntax highlighting extensions for both LaTeX and LilyPond, but at this time, there isn't an extensions that automates the workflow.

One can easily write a simple bash or batch script to run the lilypond-book command and then the appropriate pdflatex command (or other command from their TeX distribution of choice) to produce a final output. All in all, not too painful of a setup.

Enter TuxGuitar

I've been using TuxGuitar for as long as I've been playing guitar, which is something like 11 years now. It hasn't really changed much throughout all the time I've been using it, but it turns out that it has support for exporting music to a LilyPond format!

Now, this export feature is currently broken, but it is fairly easy to correct the output. Also, some of the ways that TuxGuitar exports doesn't exactly produce tablature with the exact notation that one would prefer, but that's not too bad to fix, either. One of these days I'll patch TuxGuitar to format exactly how I want it to, but until then, I'll keep hand-keying changes in the LilyPond output.

The first fix you'll want to make is to change this line:

\clef #(if $inTab "tab" "treble_8")

to this line:

\clef #(if inTab "tab" "treble_8")

Removing the $ is all you need to do do get your output to work with lilypond-book.

If you're keeping the music score in with the tablature, you might want to take the _8 out, too. You also might want to remove the \ottava #0s and \ottava #1s from the actual notes in the .ly file, but again, that's up to your preference and what you think would be most readable by your target audience.

TuxGuitar also doesn't seem to export legato (hammer-ons and pull-offs) correctly (it annotates with "H"s instead of using a slur), so you can adjust the LilyPond file according to the official documentation to get the results that you want.

Enter GuitarChordSchemes

Lastly, you might want to write out guitar chords and scales, too. There's a LaTeX package for this: guitarchordschemes.

For scales, when debugging what I thought might've been a padding issue caused by the aforementioned package, I wrote the following custom command that you're free to use instead (keep in mind that it is much more limited!):

\newcommand{\scdia}[2]{%
\begin{tikzpicture}[scale=.5,note/.style={circle,draw,fill=gray!50,minimum size=1}]
  % poorly named variables used for calculations
  \def\ns{6}
  \def\nf{#1}
  \def\es{\nf - 1}
  \def\ed{\nf + 1}
  \def\fw{2*\nf}

  % strings
  \foreach \x in {0,...,5}
    \draw [thick] (1,\x)--(2*\ed,\x) ;
  \draw [thick] (1,0)--(1,5);
  \draw [thick] (2*\ed,0)--(2*\ed,5);

  % string names
  \node [right, scale=.75] at (0,0) {E};
  \node  [right, scale=.75] at (0,1) {A};
  \node  [right, scale=.75] at (0,2) {D};
  \node  [right, scale=.75] at (0,3) {G};
  \node  [right, scale=.75] at (0,4) {B};
  \node  [right, scale=.75] at (0,5) {E};

  % fret lines
  \foreach \x in {2,...,\nf}
    \draw [thick] (2*\x - 1,0)--(2*\x - 1,5) ;

  % notes 
  \foreach \x/\y [count=\i] in #2 {
    \node [note] (0,0) at (2*\y, 6 - \x) {};
}

\end{tikzpicture}
}

You'd use this command in the following way to make a three-note-per-string major scale shape:

\scdia{8}{{
  1/4, 1/6, 1/7,
  2/4, 2/6, 2/7,
  3/3, 3/4, 3/6,
  4/3, 4/4, 4/6,
  5/2, 5/4, 5/6,
  6/2, 6/4, 6/6
}}

The first argument is how many frets should be displayed, and the second argument are the actual notes that should be fretted (in the form of string/fret.

This looks like the following:

The scales command from the guitarchordschemes package can produce very similar output and has more flexibility (as well as support for fingerings, indicating roots, and positions) because it was not written in less than an hour.

Conclusion

Eventually I'll make a template and perhaps even a proper Visual Studio Code extension and tutorial for getting everything setup, but I feel that this post achieves enough for now.

There's a couple essential facts about me:

• I'm somewhat obsessed with Art Tatum,
• I like to buy books online when I've had enough to drink.

Over a year ago, I found a book listed on Amazon simply titled Art Tatum that I couldn't find much info about elsewhere. It was only about $10 from what I recall, so I went ahead and ordered it.

Once the book arrived, I saw it was subtitled A Guide to His Recorded Music and I flipped though it and found that's what it entirely was: a giant list of every single recording Art Tatum had ever made. Pretty cool, I thought, and I tossed the book in one of my bins.

Some amount of months later, I was digging through my book bins looking for something I wanted to reference for a whitepaper I was working on, and I saw the book again, picked it up, flipped through it, and found that at the back, there's a musician index that lists to the recordings by who Art was playing with.

"Interesting," I thought aloud, annoying my sister by shoving the book in her face, "I didn't know he played with Tal Farlow."

"Mmm, yeah, interesting," she said, not even glancing at the book, responding even though we both knew she had know idea who Tal Farlow was. "Pretty cool."

"He played with Les Paul! Did you know Les Paul started on the piano but gave up and switched to guitar after trying to do an Art Tatum run?" (It was a descending Eb minor pentatonic scale — but not a glissando.)

"Oh, that's cool. Pretty cool," she said.

Then I saw the name that filled with joy: Billie Holiday.

"There's recordings of Art Tatum, my favorite pianist, and Billie Holiday, my favorite singer? Those must be my favorite recordings. I must listen to them."

"Yeah," said my sister, as I was still talking aloud.

There are five listed recordings of Art Tatum performing with Billie Holiday, from two performances. The first three are recordings of Do Nothin' Till You Here from Me, I Love My Man (Billie's Blues), and I'll Get By recorded at the Esquire All-Store Concert from the Metropolitan Opera House on January 18, 1944. (From further research, it's possible that the date was actually the 13th.)

The other two recordings are of Fine and Mellow and All of Me from a June 25, 1944 radio broadcast titled "New World A Coming" (program 17) on WMCA.

After some quick searching, I found one of the recordings and was content with that for a little while.

A couple of months later — a couple of months ago — I tried to look for more of the recordings, and when I searched for the other two from the first performance, I was overjoyed that the Esquire All-Star Concert in 1944 had easily-accessible recordings, and is a fairly famous jazz performance (and was somewhat well-documented, photographically), what with Roy Eldridge, Jack Teagarden, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Oscar Pettiford, and more. I still have to buy the full album on vinyl, but I got caught up with the photos of the performance.

"There are some photos of Art Tatum with Billie Holiday!" I shouted.

"Oh, that's pretty cool," said my sister, as I am always annoying her with Art Tatum and Billie Holiday stuff.

The photo I found that I liked the most was a picture of a slightly scratched and somewhat dirty black-and-white, mildly light-damaged photograph — the highest resolution version I could find was hosted on DeviantArt, of all places.

A week later, I decided that'd I'd colorize and restore the photo. And I did.

This isn't meant to be a tutorial or anything like that (and there are some imperfections), so I'm not going to get into how this was done. I spent a little bit of time of this during the last couple of months, and most of the time was researching the flags in the background.

I did use Let's Enhance to upsample and overlaid that result with a vectorized version and had it printed on canvas for my apartment.

This ain't one of your typical, run-of-the-mill self-promotion blogs! Ha! It's more like your typical, run-of-the-mill self-demotion blogs!

I'm not fond of those types of blogs where the blogger blogs hollow content for the self-serving purpose of churning out SEO-able fodder to lure in saps to create some illusion of a digital following to help further a career and develop some kind of meager celebrity.

So, not being fond of those types that blog about bloggin' and building a brand, I figured I'd do exactly that. Here's a fantastic listicle about building brands that I know you'll find extremely valuable. Winking face.

1. Don't Do Any Research At All

You're building a brand, not writing an academic paper! Just start working on the brand immediately. If people don't dig whatever you come up with for your brand, then that's their problem. If you end up coming up with a brand logo or name that is already used by someone else or something else, then that's not your problem!

2. Don't Pick a Focus

Why limit yourself or your brand to one domain? If you build up a following by providing excellent observational humor, your following will absolutely love your constant drunken golf tweets! Write about whatever you want, because, hey, your brand only lives once!

3. Irregularly Provide Content

You don't want people to expect content on any reliable schedule. It's not like you're trying to become a regular part of their routine in any way. Think about it! Your goal is to build a brand so that you don't have to do anything else, so why even spend much time creating content? Just create content whenever you get bored.

4. Don't Care About Quality

Proof reading is for nerds dont worry about grammar or nuthin. oh i remembered that i used to have that book, the sound and the fury. whatever happend toit? did i lend it to sri? i cant member . . . oh and another thing is that if u r writing listicles it helps to do lists of three five seven or ten. don't do any other list-sizes

I despise art for art's sake, so it's only fitting that I'm writing a blog post in the same spirit that I bemoan.

In actuality, there's several ways I could be using this time better. I could be rebuilding some of my endurance and muscle memory for some of the Shawn Lane-esque runs I used to do; I could be cleaning up the last strain of Art Tatum's Tiger Rag; I could be writing more code for the CLI to my secret project that I've been working on for the past 5 months — or I could be working on any of the other 8 projects I'm simultaneously working on!

But for whatever reason, I'll work on this darn blog post that no one'll ever read; a blog post that even I don't care about. I'm not even sure why I am compelled to write this very post. This I actually find somewhat bizarre.

Has it just been so long since I've written? That may be it. I used to write a lot. I still write a bit, only it's mostly writing pertaining to my daily work. Whilst I'm a programmer, a good portion of what I do is on paper. I write out of my own necessity. I don't have a good memory, so I have to write everything down: notes from meetings, TODO lists, pseudo-code, actual code, file paths of importance, URLs, designs, commands, and even the bathroom code (which I literally have to check everytime — I am unable to remember it; I've tried to rely on memory for this, but I've found I need to walk back to my desk and look at my note after failing at the code with multiple attempts).

The really odd thing about my memory is that, while I can't remember things all that well, I can usually remember exactly where I've written down what I can't remember — that is, if it's something in the last month; else, I rely on my own organizational system. It's fairly primitive system: I buy a bunch of college-ruled notebooks every back-to-school season, and as I fill them up, I write on the backs of the notebooks what the books usually contain, and I number the fronts. I always skip the first two pages in a new notebook (making a ToC of sorts as I progress), and I always leave a few pages at the end (in case I ever need paper later and don't have a spare notebook).

The approach I take to programming big projects is to make successive TODO lists, but I don't strictly use the TODO lists. I have a draft of an explanation of how this process works. The gist of it is this is something I've stolen from Tolstoy after observing how he worked: if you read his diaries, you'll find that he had a habit of making exhaustive lists of things he needed to do (he was inspired by Benjamin Franklin), but it would appear he wasn't always directly getting to the items (he was frequently chastising himself for this). Despite these lists that apparently were somewhat neglected, he did manage to get much of the stuff done (writing Childhood, for example).

Somewhere in an unpublished post on an abandoned blog, I theorized, after experiencing this type of thing this myself, that the very act of making a highly detailed TODO list functioned as a simulation of the overall task at hand — a simulation that provided the planner with enough insight at what was required that the work on the overall task could occur essentially non-stop without any real additional planning that could turn into extraneous work or distraction. With this kind of insight into the work, one doesn't need to refer to a prior plan while working (and they may not be compelled to update their diaries, in Tolstoy's case). At the end of all the work, or as it's coming to a close, one might remember they had an initial plan. In my experience, at the close of a large project, I've forgotten writing the initial plan almost completely, and it's strange to see a detailed prophecy of what I had done written in my own hand. On rare occasions, the plan reminds me of an aspect that I missed during the implementation or the plan was over-prescribing and some aspects were not needed to be done in the manner initially laid out.

Despite all the writing I do, my handwriting is completely illegible. It doesn't help that my handwriting style varies significantly; I've changed handwriting styles several times during my life and sometimes there is a resurgence of the past. Most of the time I write scribbles that I can't even read: the letters are incorrectly formed, and words are either misspelled or half-written. I can usually remember writing the words — that's how I know what they say; I can't actually read them (I can make some guesses, since I have distinct shapes for most letters, and I can guess a context that might help unlock any meanings I can't exactly recall).

So, with discussion of writing, planning, and penmanship, where do I find myself? Sitting in my bed at one in the morning, scratching my head, still uncertain as to why I felt compelled to write a blog tonight. I scratched my hand at some point today . . . and we're out of hydrogen peroxide.

I think I'll get back to coding; I've got to implement a ECDH key agreement scheme, amongst other things.

This blog is a sham — but we all already knew that. Very little commitment has been made to this, especially since there is only one post prior to this one from more than a year ago that was recycled from an earlier blog type thing I had going a while back. I didn't approve any of the comments on the genesis post because they were all from my mother. No other posts were made. There is a reason.

Every once in a while, I stumble onto an old, dusty blog where the blogger blogged to an empty wall, à la Rupert Pupkin, and I read the blog in a state akin to pity, as the blogger usually seems to lack the prescience to grasp the futility of their Sisyphusean task.

But now, I find myself suddenly, finally accepting Camus's proposition a little bit as I am currently embarking on the same task — though I will not admit the common delusion that anyone will care to (nor will) read these blogs (and to maintain this, I shan't allow any comments, nor shall I even acknowledge any that anyone attempts to make). I think this intent to merely conduct my pointless blogging task with no expectation that anything else will come of it will actually result in a series of blog posts that'll heroically subvert the typical blog format into a real-time digital journal that'll have value in that it'll be a way to spend time that won't be a total loss, as something will be produced.

The last year, while I know it was actually 'productive', has gone by far too quickly, and with a memory that doesn't retain much, it doesn't seem very 'productive'. In fact, I've completely forgotten most of what has transpired in the last year and a half; I've forgotten what most of the projects I was working on even were. With these apparently pointless blogs, I will have left artifacts that may be of use later, as something I can peruse to recall just some of the what will later be considered random fragments.

And I appear to have squandered the time I allotted for the preparation/revision of my presentation next week. Drat.

So, yes, this blog is a sham — but let's get that boulder rolling!

A while back, I ran across one of those funny YouTube videos. You know the kind. It was a video of some comedian telling a classic joke and after I memorized it verbatim and found delight in retelling it to people and annoying them, I researched the genre of long form jokes. There are quite a few, such as Nate the Snake, Edward and Tobias, Green Golf Balls, Hole in Juan, and Orange for a Head. I'm not even going to mention the most infamous one, but there has been a documentary made about it. The fun of these kind of jokes is to only know the punchline, and then make up everything until you get to it.

After running out of jokes, I came up with a new approach to telling the first joke I've probably heard, told it to a few people, and annoyed them to the point where they reciprocated with violence. Such a telling is rendered here, in grandiose, historically-accurate detail.

You wanna hear about ol' Henry, right? Well, I don't want to disappoint you. You know the look of terror that flashes in a man's eyes the moment he realizes he is going to die? Well, that look of terror is completely irrelevant to the following story.

Our story takes place years ago, back in the olden days when a young buck could make a living off of his talent and nothing else. Well, there was this promising financial genius that got his start by cleaning after the race horses at the track. His name was Henry McGillicuddy. He wasn't ol' Henry at the time. He was too young to be ol' Henry, as he wasn't old.

After years and years of proving his worth at the races, he finally got promoted to assistant manager and took over the daily operations of the joint. This included an office and a pay raise. Henry was good with numbers, and he turned that business around and starting making a real profit. When Henry got that promotion he bought a brand new LaSalle Series 340 with whitewalls and proposed to the love of his life, the gorgeous Marie Stapleton. He was two years her elder, and she had a promising career in the plays that was getting her a lot of attention for the movies. Why, she had already gotten a part in the first talking picture, The Jazz Singer. She was gonna be a bigger star than Greta Garbo, ‘cause Greta hadn't moved to the talkies at the time.

With the future looking great, Henry and his fiancé bought the old Miller house down by the lake. It was quite the bargain too, as Henry's father, Patrick, was great friends with Art Miller. They were in the Navy together patrolling the Irish Sea during the Great War. How do I know this? I was there! That Art Miller and Patrick McGillicuddy got on together swimmingly, but Patrick perished in the war when our ship, the USS Jacob Jones, was sunk on our way back to Queenstown. Anyway, Art set up Henry with an excellent offer, and Henry could do nothing but accept. He had his life planned out perfectly. He was going to get married in July, when Marie's parents were going to be in town.

A week before the wedding, the entire town was excited. Marie's parents showed up a little early with a big surprise planned for the honeymoon. They were all going to Las Vegas and would see Dr J Robert Pauline, The World's Greatest Psychologist and hypnotist perform. The Stapletons had no problem with money, they had bought airline tickets for the four of them to Vegas. Back in those days, the few commercial airlines that existed were anything but cheap.

When they got to the show, Dr Pauline walked out onstage and selected an audience member at random.
He said, "When I snap my fingers twice, you will think that you are a chicken!"

The audience laughed at the idea, but then Dr Pauline snapped his fingers twice and the man started clucking and pecking. The audience was mesmerized. Dr Pauline then yelled "Rigid" and the volunteer froze. Dr Pauline asked for another volunteer. Marie's father playfully suggested that Henry volunteer. Henry did.

Dr Pauline said aloud for all to hear, "When I clap my hands three times, you will think you are a horse."
Henry bowed his head. He heard the three claps. Suddenly, he started neighing. He got on all fours and ran into the crowd, not without kicking with his rear legs the faces of his new in-laws.

When that hypnotist, Dr Pauline, saw what had just occurred, he panicked (probably because he was still on probation for throwing a waiter from the ninth floor of a hotel) and shouted, "Rigid!" (his usual hypnotism command). When that didn't work, he rushed up to Henry and said in a haste, "When I clap my hands, you will act more civilized!"

Henry heard the clap, looked around and saw the faces of horror and disapproval of his actions, and he ran out of the nightclub in shame. But he did not run as a man would run, he ran like a horse that was acting civilized.

Having too much shame to go back to the hotel and get the return flight ticket from the in-laws that were surely disappointed with their new son-in-law for injuring their precious faces, Henry had to hitchhike all the way back to our great state of Kentucky, for no one back home could—or would—wire him money. This in itself was quite a lengthy adventure that I will spare you the taxing details of, but, I will say that in two months' time Henry was back in town.

He rushed to the steps of his house and noticed a note on the door. His wife had flown back to town, and as a result had arrived long before and had ample time to prepare such a note.

The note read: "You kicked my parents, I'm kicking you out. I am having the marriage annulled, and your LaSalle 340 was repossessed because you failed to make the payments."

Henry regretted putting Marie's name on the deed to the house. He sulked to his job at the racetrack with a slow two-legged trot, he knew he would get some time to relax in his office.

When he arrived at the track, he saw with fresh eyes the atrocities that were being committed: Horses being forced to run—being forced to slave away, all for the amusement of grotesque humans. Henry could not stand this.

Still thinking that he was a civilized horse, Henry ran to the stables and screamed, "Let my people go!" just before he freed the oppressed horses.

The manager approached him immediately and calmly inquired, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WE CAN'T JUST LET ALL THE HORSES GO! YOU ARE FIRED!"

Now poor Henry (the man who thinks he is a civilized horse) sulked and sulked and walked and walked. He had lost everything! His wife, his job, his home, his car. He was the definition of tragedy. He sat down on the curb of the street next to an unkempt vagrant. He asked the homeless man how he was doing.

"I can't complain. All I want is a drink," replied the sad tramp.

Henry thought to treat the man to a glass of whiskey, as he could use the company, and he had no better use for what little money he had left.

"Let's go to the bar. By the way, my name is Henry. I am a horse. I am very tired and depressed. I've lost everything."

When the two got to Mike's, the town’s blind pig (that’s what we called saloons in the dark days of Prohibition), they went inside. The homeless man led the way and approached the counter, with the civilized horse remaining by the entrance of the establishment.

"Bartender, a glass of rye whiskey, if you don't mind," said the vagrant, with the full weight of one who had seen some hard times.

The bartender didn't mind and poured him a drink. Henry slowly went up to the bartender, but his mouth did not work because his sorrow overpowered him. He could not help but feel miserable, so he looked down at his feet (or as he saw them, hooves).

The bartender took one look at Henry and asked, "Why the long face?"

Please don't hit me.