Fred and Loathing on The Internet

They GNU Linux Was The Best Kernel

2023-Mar-16

I told myself I would not publish a blog post unless I have an update to push to the website’s codebase. That rule has proved onerous when all my planned changes require hours of coding to take effect. The shortcut I have found to meet this change rule is to tweak something with the CSS. I’ve learned enough raw HTML/CSS to make some per element changes. Establishing a more robust style sheet that gets attached to my templating is one of those larger goals I have been avoiding.

Finished The Virgin Suicides. My second Eugenides novel. If you do not mention the author’s first name he sounds like a Classical era Greek scholar. The book began with a plural first person narration voiced by what I guess was a pack of teenage boys in an affluent Michigan bedroom, sometime after the burning riots in Detroit of the late 60s. Their voice was alarmingly authentic. It grossed me out and reminded me of my adolescence, with an audible laugh here and there. The author was a master of making a credible pre-internet high school bullshit story.

I have the feeling I did not ‘get’ what the anticlimactic almost off-camera suicides near the end of the title characters were supposed to mean, or really anything at all when it comes to the Lisbon family’s decisions. For that I can’t exactly say this book has it all. I think it is missing something to elevate it above some polished bullshit story I could hear smoking in the boy’s room in high school.