the founding of nintendo

Sakoku. (鎖国, “closed country”) was the isolationist foreign policy of the Japanese Tokugawa shogunate (aka Bakufu [1]

wikpedia

In the mid-16th century, Portuguese traders introduced Spanish-style 48-card decks to Japan. Almost immediately, the Japanese started making their own decks, called karuta (derived from “carta”, card).

During sakoku, the western-style playing cards were banned, and so were the karuta. People liked playing cards, though. They’re portable and extremely versatile. A small item that can fit in your pocket and go with you anywhere, and holds within it the potential of any number of games.

Japanese manufacturers created new card types that concealed their Portuguese origins.

These were banned too.

They gave it a few more tries: Karuta

The 19th century saw the creation of hanafuda (“flower card”) decks. Instead of 4 suits each with 12 cards, like the Portuguese decks (which had no 10s!), Hanafuda decks have 12 suits (12 months!) each with 4 cards. Once they got popular for gambling they were banned too, in 1816.

brightly coloured hanafuda cards spread out in a jumble — some hanafuda cards

aren’t they beautiful?

Sakoku ended in 1853 when the American kurofune (Black Ships) commanded by Matthew Perry arrived with guns and forced the Shogun to sign the “Treaty of Peace and Amity”. The UK signed the Anglo-Japanese Friendship Treaty at the end of 1854.

Five years later, Fusajirō Yamauchi (山内房治郎, Yamauchi Fusajirō) was born! Fusajiro would grow up to be an artist and entrepreneur.

On 23 September 1889, Fusajiro opened a shop called Nintendo Koppai, selling hand-painted hanafuda cards crafted from the bark of mulberry and mitsu-mata trees. They were among the only cards it was legal to sell, and they got very popular very fast. Fusajiro had to hire some more artists to help keep up with demand.

When the cards became the favoured brand of the Yakuza, Fusajiro had to create a system for mass producing them. The gamblers opened a new deck for every game.

Once Western cards were legal again, Nintendo started making those too. Nintendo landed a deal with the tobacco monopoly JT to sell Nintendo cards in JT’s cigarette stores, and that’s when they really started making money.

under which, for a period of 214 years, relations and trade between Japan and other countries were severely limited, nearly all foreign nationals were barred from entering Japan and common Japanese people were kept from leaving the country ↩︎

complete and utter lack of oomph

the tremendous pain and emotional exhaustion is one thing. tight, pulsing pain at the base of my skull; crying because half of a cherry tomato fell out of the toasted sandwich i was making for my partner; a curdling feeling in my plasma; not knowing if i’m upsetting people because my sense of their feelings has been cut off. those are, like, intense and present.

ever-surprising though is the complete and utter lack of ümph. like, do you ever… you know when you… it’s like inside you you have a match hanging, bobbing against a spinning disk of coarse sandpaper and at some point it bobs enough that the match lights…. like, you have an idea like “i’d like to make a cup of coffee” and you put it in layaway until you have a spark of energy and you grab that and jump up and go do. a small spike in your fluctuating will power that’s enough to ignite you. and your inertia is no longer such that you can’t start, but such that you keep going.

well that’s missing.

i have been, since 8am, trying to take my half a hormone (none yesterday) and make coffee and gashouse eggs. or even just any one of those things. but i can’t get up. i can’t actually move. and if i put things on layaway they never get picked up. i’m going to have to synthesise willpower from something else. maybe i can imagine that a large rodent has been dropped on me, or that the house is burning down. i think if the house was burning down i might still just lie here. maybe if i just,,, lean to the left and roll off the sofa onto the floor then the jolt will shake something loose

maybe i could order some coffee to be delivered, then hopefully my pathological desire to never be an inconvenience to anyone will mean i get up to get the coffee from the hallway so none of the neighbours have to be reminded that i exist

if only abe was awake asking for eggs, then i could use that as fuel. okay, i’m going to try again. i’ll close the laptop and i’ll synthesize willpower out of something. maybe if i throw my vape onto the laundry basket then eventually the power of nicotine addiction will overcome the frozen executive function

— chee (hi@chee.party) 2020-06-11

reduced capacity

i’m having a really hard time atm

hormones postage has been delayed and i’m running out, down from 6mg a day to 1mg every 2 days, and will soon (3 days) be on 0mg a day

it’s better to have a little every couple days to suddenly have 0 for a week

i learnt that in the winter we stayed near the ice skating rink

my skin feels like it’s being scraped off from the inside with tiny forks

and i’m tired and exhausted and can’t think straight or do anything right

they were ordered in April, and they left Vanuatu on 11th May on a fiji airlines cargo plane

apparently Royal Mail is taking a long time to process international orders

i tried to make a gluten free hollandaise sauce for breakfast, but instead i made a pot of yellow brains. that was about 100 times fancier a breakfast than i should have tried. i tipped the pot into the trash and somehow missed the bag and had to pick it all out of the sink with a wooden spoon

the pharmacy made an agreement with Vanuatu Post to pay an extra fee so they can ship via a fiji airlines cargo aeroplane, it’s some of the only mail going out of Vanuatu

they aren’t passing these extra shipping costs onto the customer, which is great of them

but they’ve said that if you’re in the United Kingdom (i’m in the United Kingdom) an order might take 4-8 weeks to arrive.

some people started receiving their May 11th orders on 28th May

but it’s up to luck really, about how good the route is for the package through Royal Mail to your home

and you don’t get shipping updates, because it’s on these cargo aeroplanes, not ordinary mail

i had a shower today

i’m going to shower every day, get smooth and clean, and accomplish 1 (ONE) thing every day, and eat 3 meals a day, and sleep before midnight

and when i wake up i’ll drink a glass of water, fizzied up with 2 alka-seltzer and a berocca

i will be strong girl

dvd

i remember this man who worked in the hardware store who had a scar that some people said was a lobotomy scar he liked me, he was not very smart he sold pirated DVDs and he had a folded up list of them in his pocket his friend made them, and he sold them for his friend i had a fast internet connection at home, i didn’t need pirated DVDs i don’t think i even had a DVD player but i’d buy them sometimes he’d come up to the trade desk, where i worked, and he’d say “i have new movies” and i remember one time very vivid, he came and he said “there’s a new one called.. ‘no country few(???) old men’ or something” and he kept saying it: ’no country’ then he’d pause and say ’few?’ then he’d pause and say ’old men or something’ he took the list out of his chest pocket and pointed at it and said “few old men?” and i read it out loud, i said “no country for old men” and he said “it doesn’t even make sense… no country.. few old men??” and i said “i’ll have that one” and gave him £3.00 i’ve still never watched that film

i think that as you go through life, more and more things have memories attached to them and it becomes too exhausting to do anything, because of all the memories all dates are anniversaries every verb or noun is about someone or something and it becomes too much work to do anything, because of having to process all of the past and that’s what kills you

but then i guess people with no memories would never die

— chee (hi@chee.party) 2020-04-15

Winter books

Over the winter holidays I read some novels. I don’t normally read fiction very often. Angus Croll says that life is too short to read anything but fiction, I’d like to agree with that but I have that thing where if I’m not actively working on something Death is in the room.

Over the winter holidays, though, I made an effort to read some fiction. I got a little pink-and-white ebook reader (a rakuten kobo) and I decided to read a book.

When I was 17 or 18 I got a job in B&Q. B&Q is just like Home Depot, except it’s in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. I was living in Northern Ireland at the time, in my parents house, and it was my first proper job. I saved up my pay and took a trip to America. I got a flight to Chicago and a flight home from San Francisco, and traveled on the Greyhound bus through Des Moines and Denver and Las Vegas (where I was on my 20th birthday).

The men at the Trade Desk had taken a liking to me and they asked the people at the front if I could be made the permanent checking staff at the Trade Desk. The front accepted, and I was moved to the back to the Trade Desk. It was good there, there was a little room and I had access to the Trade Door where I could escape at lunch and go to the local electronics store. It only got busy a few times a day when tradespeople would come in and buy concrete and bricks.

One day when I was at the electronics store I saw they had a netbook computer available for like £30 and I was really interested. A tiny little computer of my own. This was 2007.

The person in the store told me “you don’t want that, it’s not a real computer”, i said, “i do want it”, they said, “it doesn’t run windows”, i said, “i don’t mind.”

Soon I was meeting wpasupplicant and installing hundreds of tiny linux distributions on the netbook’s tiny flash disk and having a great time. The screen was bad, the keys sometimes snapped off the keyboard. It was the first computer I truly owned.

Up until then I’d been teaching myself to write HTML and CSS on my father’s old Dell desktop computer (he’d recently obtained an abandoned eMac from a friend who taught at a school), and also on a computer that was right there at the Trade Desk. The Trade Desk computer didn’t have an Internet connection (but I did find a lot of fun intranet pages). I’d save the web page I was making on a first generation iPod Shuffle that appeared to Windows as a removeable disk. They were all bright pages full of large block text, with different CSS on every page and quotes from books or intrusive thoughts.

A few months later, I’d settled on some tiny linux distribution or another for now and was browsing the web on the 1-degree of viewing angle the screen had. It was around this time Cory Doctorow released Little Brother under a Creative Commons license. I was hugely into Creative Commons and other licenses like it, and still to this day release nearly everything I write or make under an open license of its kind.

I downloaded the book, and I read it during the many hours when the B&Q trade desk traded nothing. I had it on my iPod shuffle too, so I could also bring it up on the computer beside the till and read it there.

I bought a DRM-free copy of Little Brother on the Kobo over winter, and I started reading it. I only got as far as the first dedication (every chapter is dedicated to a different book store) which mentions the book Little Fuzzy. I stopped and bought that.

Little Fuzzy

This is a good book about the nature of sentience. An influential book, in the public domain. There are little furry people in it, the word-to-word writing is pretty good and the story is good too. I read Little Fuzzy and its sequel, the only ones released in the author’s life.

I enjoyed them but they had so much gender, implicit and explicit society gender all over them as far as the eye could see and nose could smell.

Content warning

Some of the content is a little rough.

It’s pretty pro-colonialism, kind of nostalgic for the East India Company
The one time someone’s skin colour is mentioned, it’s pretty racist
lots of basic gender bullshit
lots of use of “males” and “females”
men writing women. women walking boobily down the stairs.

Tensorate Series

After reading Little Fuzzy, I wanted to try something with less basic gender bullshit. I started looking for some fiction where I, a smol enby, could finally relax.

I opened duckduckgo and I typed “books with non-binary characters” and “sci fi non-binary character” and opened up some tabs.

On one of the lists, at the top of the list, was a series of books called “The Tensorate” by JY Yang. the description included the word “SILKPUNK” and the author was a person with whom I share pronouns. I was excited.

JY Yang is a Singaporean non-binary person who writes very nice prose about a vivid world.

The first book was The Black Tides Of Heaven. In this world, gender is not assigned at birth but is chosen later. Some people choose not to choose.

Over the next 10 days I gobbled up all 4 books in the series. The Black Tides Of Heaven, The Red Threads of Fortune, The Descent of Monsters, and Ascent to Godhood. The magic in the world, the way it is described, is so tangible. I know what it feels like to perform slackcraft.

You catch the larger story in glimpses between the faster paced stories of humanity, and you can feel and smell and taste the world. Plus, it’s gay.

— chee (hi@chee.party) 2020-01-02

secret hot dogs pt i

chiatown dog

chopped heirloom tomato
french’s mustard
brioche bun
frankfurter

british woofing dog

poppy seed bun
hp sauce
sweetcorn relish
bratwurst

dulwich open dog

sourdough bun
smashed avocado
flock & herd italian sausage
sprinkle of himalayan rock salt

basic friend dog

lemon and herb piri piri sauce
xx hot piri piri sauce
chicken sausage
mashed potato
papo secos

— chee (hi@chee.party) 2019-12-03

snoot.club

I set up snoot.club so i could have a place to throw up quick ideas, and also to provide my friends with places to host their ideas. The goal was that I’d be able to run a script and very quickly have a new domain with a folder i could put things in that would show on that domain.

The DNS records are set up with a wildcard A and a wildcard AAAA record pointing *.snoot.club to the snoot.club linode. This way the moment a process starts listening on a given name (like chee.party), it is available on the net.

I’ve got a wildcard letsencrypt certificate set up on the site, so any subdomain of snoot.club is covered by the same certificate. Those are a bit of a nightmare to maintain because you have to do deploy two more DNS records every three months, but it’s worth it for the convenience during the other parts of the months.

I’ve thought about automating the 30 minutes it takes me every 3 months, using dig(1) and the linode api but that only ever seems like a great idea during those 30 minutes.

The idea was that a person (let’s call them jimmy) would ask me for an account, i’d run a script (create_snoot jimmy) and that would set up a base configuration for them that would give them a place to put files they wanted to be on their site jimmy.snoot.club.

do the easiest thing that could possibly work

Once I had the SSL certs and DNS sorted out, I wrote a collection of scrappy bash scripts to try out the idea.

The script generates them a user account on the snoot.club linux server, and puts them into a group called undercommon. It makes a directory for them that contains only their ssh[1] public key (which will let them log in), and a folder called “website”.

There’s a section in snoot.club’s sshdconfig [2] file that checks if people are in that group and then disallows them from using any program other than FTP software, and doesn’t let them view any files outside of their directory.

Match Group undercommon
	ChrootDirectory /snoots
	PermitTTY no
	ForceCommand internal-sftp

trust issues

I wanted people with more advanced needs to be able to do more advanced things, but I didn’t want them to have access the whole system.

After creating the unix account, and the ftp entry point for the snoot, the script also creates a docker container for them. That’s a kind of tiny machine of their own, that lives inside the snoot.club machine. The docker container forwards two ports: ssh and web (80). The http server configuration that is built when jimmy is created points jimmy.snoot.club at the whatever the docker container has running on port 80 (the web port).

I provide jimmy with a port for them to use when they are sshing in, (so they’d do like ssh root@snoot.club -p 33532) and then they ssh not into snoot.club but into the docker container that is jimmy.snoot.club. this way they get to do anything they want without having to have full access to the snoot.club machine!

the default app in the docker contain is a static server pointing at the “website” directory, the same one the user can see when they ftp in.

fun doesn’t scale

this system works fine until there are more than like 30-40 people. that’s fine. if it ever got popular it could be rewritten. it’s so easy to lose momentum of your ideas if you’re trying to plan for what if it ever gets bigger. most of them won’t, and it doesn’t actually matter! build things you want to for you and your friends, and if you ever need to make it better then you can do it then!

while i’m on that subject: we don’t need to all pretend to be brands, we should be doing silly things like having a completely different style sheet on every page and the web is mostly people, not companies. and the companies are also made of people. be people.

the rewrite

over the christmas and new year period i was in a barn at the bottom of a some rich folks garden in putney, and i rewrote the shell scripts in javascript. the bed there was very cosy and i also made a christmas dinner (but i didn’t cook the chicken right and it got scary).

this one works pretty good! the things it does are the same. it offers to download a new snoot’s authorized keys from github (thanks jake for this idea), and it prints out coloured messages and has emoji and feels pretty good.

i created a special image for the docker container that contained perl6 rakudo, and started the script with pm2 on boot and would restart the server if there were any changes.

time

so this worked really well for 6 months! kj built the facepainting and rowan did a throwback and abe built a shop and chee built some stuff. but then I started wanting it to be simpler. some problems had started to occur. here’s some things that we’d run into:

it was difficult to work together
docker containers take up so much space and memory??
it’s so complex
there were lots of ports, two per user, it didn’t feel right
i actually ran out of available docker network nodes or something? i dno

I started to look into other options. I created another chroot-based system that worked similar to how the ftp thing works but allowed more control. That still felt too heavy.

socks

Reading the node.js documentation i noticed this in the http module docs: server.listen() Starts the HTTP server listening for connections. This method is identical to server.listen() from net.Server.

and in the net.server docs one of the signatures listed is a Unix Domain Socket. now, i love unix domain sockets. i built a window manager in javascript that used a unix domain socket as its main form of management. it was cool. everything was a command. i used it irl as my main window manager for 6 months. the use of sockets was inspired by my favourite window manager wmii which was in turn inspired by the plan9 operating system created at bell labs. the same place that invented unix, lasers and wifi (also transistors and nearly everything else). (though both wmii and plan9 use the 9P protocol, not Unix Domain Sockets).

trust

Anyway, so, this is the solution. I’ve rebuilt snoot.club again and i’ve decided just to trust everyone. All the snoots have access to the main machine, they have read permissions on eachother’s website files (by default). And instead of ports the contract is that every snoot’s server listens on a file called sock.

`subs(1)`

in order to get this to work i needed to run a command simultaneously in every subdirectory of the /snoots folder and restart only jimmy’s server if only jimmy changed. For this i built a new tool called subs. it’s built in rust and it’s on crates.io. you can install it with cargo install subs.

Usage: subs [options] PROGRAM [root_dir]

Options:
	 -t, --type TYPE     set the management type [choices: watch, socket, none]
	 -s, --socket NAME set the socket path. sending the socket a message like
	 "restart xxx" will restart the process running in the directory
	 "xxx". [default: ./subsocket]
	 -i, --watch-ignore PATTERN pattern to ignore when watching (matches whole path)
	 -h, --help get help PROGRAM will be run in parallel in every subdirectory
   (SUB), as SUB's owner. A placeholder "{}" is available to PROGRAM, it will be
   replaced with SUB.

[default: none]

git

In a kind-of unrelated move I’ve been trying to pull back from using Google, Facebook, and Microsoft products.

Facebook I’m free from, the last thing was WhatsApp which i just straight up deleted and that’s been fine. email me

Google is off my phone and out of my search bar, but I still use their office suite at work.

Microsoft I had been fairly free of, but then they bought GitHub and I got unfree. So I’ve gone back to emacs from Atom (i’m enjoying it) and I’ve deleted or archived all the code that was on github.com and set up a cgit server and put them all there.

If you’re a snoot you can add your own things to git.snoot.club by making a bare git repo in ~/git/whatever.git and pushing to it.

the next thing i need to work on is some kind of documentation site for talking new snoots through how to log in, set up git repos, run their page locally, deploy etc. after all recent changes, the helpful getting started guide that was provided to all snoots is wrong and bad.

also a doc page for explaining that installing dependencies and building assets is their responsibility, but the start script will be run by the server.

also so many other things.

Footnotes:

— chee (hi@chee.party) 2019-08-17

ssh is software that lets people securely log into one machine from another over the internet ↩︎
sshd is the software that runs on the computer you are using ssh to log into ↩︎