a little respect, for I am Costanza, lord of the idiots !!!

reddit writing prompt entry

The old man paused, smiled and picked up his cup.
I don't remember how I got to talking to him at the library's cafeteria, but there I was, wolfing down the sandwich on which I'd put ketchup. One buys sandwiches at the library for the same reason we look at our cellphones even when we know there's nothing there. Then we put ketchup on it and wolf it down, or unlock the thing and play with a couple of buttons and then put it back in our pockets again . It's a pretense.

"I don't get that type of music", he said. "Never got past the first track of any record ever... "

Ah yes, we both had been standing at the bargains shelf, looking at $1 CDs, and I had picked up a Jazz one.
It had a black & white photo of a man in a checked jacket holding a saxophone on the cover looking .. well ,looking blank.
But I too had never gotten past the first track of any jazz record myself. And here was Bob saying the exact same thing.

"Coincidence !", I said to myself, as I filled it in my trip report. The console blinked and the detailed-incident-report indicator flashed on. I flipped the device to voice mode and started narrating the incident in detail - where I'd landed, what I looked like, when it was , how I met the man in the library named Bob , and what his thoughts about music were.

My next case was an investigation. A senior agent had died recently, somewhere in Ardennes, in 1941. This was surprising, because the agency has all sorts of protocol and regulations & permissions in place just to avoid this specific type of event. Contaminating a timeline by choosing it to be your final resting place is strictly frowned upon. Influencing is allowed , interference is not. Time is a place you can visit but not stay - Agency motto. I had been in a future time at that time, sneaking some hashes into certain bankchain thus short-circuiting the spiralling growth of a certain family-run business . The agency believed in redistribution whenever possible, and interference in events before they were extensively manifest. Actual interference needed approvals. Influencing by nipping in the bud was supervisor-sanctioned. I remember a couple of us had visited his graveyard, in the middle of a war, to see if we could make some sense of the act. We found a minimal grave with the most basic headstone . The epitaph, also carved crudely and in a hurry, read " God split himself into myriad parts so that he could have friends ", which was decidedly off for that age. Scans revealed skeletal remains which matched our agents', and spectral scans confirmed it. A Timeline Archive Search Report flagged the epitaph to be the contaminant. Nobody'd've noticed anything odd about the grave or its contents at this time or place, but someone could find the epitaph anachronistic,said The TASR. It said it shouldn't exist until 1973. - to be completed

toymatic

http://toymatic.herokuapp.com has been launched. This has been a long effort, crawling slowly from page to page, stumbling past each half-baked python module and its pathetic documentation, past half-assed requirements and vision and google drive sheets and images and whatnot.

Past the limbo of framework-choosing and deciding on flask - and to think I rejected this because it used annotations, and that was too Spring-y, and it took me one dropwizard application and a rewrite and a spring boot almost-complete attempt and numerous abortive Spring-non-Boot attempts -which was very similar to standing next to a smouldering garbage dumb and inhaling burning plastic - until I became numb to the @ in flask.

After that came the minefield of login-logouts , which has been a superior grade of fcuk-you all along - even in Boot where adding the auth package to the pom kills all your end points behind an auth wall with a randomly generated password, and I haven't been able to figure it out eva - in Flask the battle with the multiple options has been a consistent problem ,with every extension doing a half-assed job and fitting in like a square peg in a round hole -( Flask-security how do I Bootstrap style your lame forms ?)

Now that we have 24X7 heroku and google analytics, I realized I forgot the other big thing - SEO.
So googling and downloading and printing stuff.  Maybe I 'll read it some time. Notice how so much of life revolves around google ? It is the Mega prosumer !!! And oh, reddit/r/seo has neat articles, unlike google's search results, so my conclusion in the last sentence was baloney.
Update :
I have moved toymatic to rails. devise solves  the login-logout problem. spent some time styling the user forms etc so that the page looks halfway decent. All pages are still not working - I think it might be better to start with the REST/CRUD combine and style that .To go the other way, the cart functionality needs to be added , then the checkout and mailer, then the add-inventory page - this one doesn't need styling, but it does need 'authentication_needed' .

My heroes are gone

- Terry Pratchett
- Raymond Smullyan
- Alvin Toffler

And I seem to have internalized being continually disturbed by people around me. I now stop doing whatever I do automatically every few seconds. I have internalized the self sabotage. Abyss in me