Kitty (and GNOME generally) with the Monaspace fonts. 🔗
You can tell it was a long weekend because I was experimenting with alternative terminal emulators, starting with kitty because … I saw someone mention it? I don’t remember why, but here we are.
In the process of configuring it I came across something I’d just pushed to the background, which was that none of the terminal apps I was using were picking up on the Monaspace fonts as legit candidates. So I decided to run it down and learned that the font system doesn’t see those fonts as actually monospaced.
Here’s an incantation you can stick in ~/.config/fontconfig/conf.d/20-monaspace.conf, then run fc-cache -f.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE fontconfig SYSTEM "fonts.dtd">
<fontconfig>
<match target="scan">
<test name="family" compare="contains">
<string>Monaspace</string>
</test>
<edit name="spacing">
<const>dual</const>
</edit>
</match>
</fontconfig>
Seemed to fix it.
Anyhow, what do I like about kitty?
- Quick access to launching URLs from a keyboard shortcut.
- The whole “kitten” extension system, which includes some good ones for theme selection, file transfers, and hyperlinked grep
- Its pared-down, simple vibe sitting on top of all the customization.
My first game of Cards Against Humanity 🔗
… was this weekend, with a room full of people I don’t know very well. How to approach this?
I guess I’ll say this:
I’ve got a particular sense of humor and I am okay with it, but it is not for everyone. Given what looked like a big box full of thousands of Cards Against Himanity cards, it is entirely reasonable to me that there would be something in there that would exceed my own capacity to shock or to be shocked. There were a few “ick” moments, and a few “lol” moments, but many, many more “I’d have to think this is funny for this to be funny” moments, but not because I found those things offensive so much as just … not funny?
The whole exercise was a little lost on me because there is a difference between “I am wound super tight and this is a transgressive thrill that allows me to occupy a space I do not ordinarily permit myself or permit for others” and “I find all sorts of shit funny and understand not everyone else does, so I am not going to communicate some of those things in some contexts.”
So I didn’t find the whole thing liberating or freeing or transgressive. It reminded me a lot of what David Graeber had to say about “play” vs. “games”:
“Freedom has to be in tension with something, or it’s just randomness. This suggests that the absolute pure form of play, one that really is absolutely untrammeled by rules of any sort (other than those it itself generates and can set aside at any instance) itself can exist only in our imagination, as an aspect of those divine powers that generate the cosmos. Here’s a quote from Indian philosopher of science Shiv Visvanathan:
“’A game is a bounded, specific way of problem solving. Play is more cosmic and open-ended. Gods play, but man unfortunately is a gaming individual. A game has a predictable resolution, play may not. Play allows for emergence, novelty, surprise.'
“All true. But there is also something potentially terrifying about play for just this reason. Because this open-ended creativity is also what allows it to be randomly destructive. Cats play with mice. Pulling the wings off flies is also a form of play. Playful gods are rarely ones any sane person would desire to encounter. Let me put forth a suggestion, then. What ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play.”
Cards Against Humanity is definitely a game. And it is not, as Dungeons and Dragons can be, a kind of game that allows you to poke at the edges of play very much.
Launching Emacs from systemd 🔗
It happened a few versions ago, when I was busy running it on a Mac, but Emacs ships with a systemd unit, so you can fire it up like a service and use it with emacsclient. That simplifies a few things. Bozhidar Batsov on how it all works. I came across this while I was busy trying to make my Hugo posting script work across Linux and macOS machines, and cursing the whole daemonized Emacs situation. His whole blog is a treasure trove.
I’m wondering, given the way I use Emacs these days, why I insist on running the GUI version. I should try not for a few days and see what comes up.