So,
Brevity Quest 2023. Again, apologies it took so ironically long. It's been tough to decide how to judge this, there was a good deal of support and good quality. Nonetheless, here I go with my thoughts.
I want to especially reward nicolasstag for sheer gutsy numbers and some nice astronomicals. JD too gets a special mention for both quantity and quality (Star Wars Kid: The Rise of the Digital Shadows took me down a rabbit hole). For individual writeups, those that most held my fancy were: Share Some Soul by e2reneta, through the water and the waves by Maevwyn, frap by Tem42, every day she stands there, waiting. every day, she's gone when i get there. by etouffee, and This is why I wear my shawl low over my eyes by Chord.
I mentioned in the original quest announcement that I would be giving prizes to participants. So if you're willing, please give me a working meatspace address, whereupon I will dispatch a little something by way of thanks. The least of the prizes will be a postcard from me, and for those who've moved me, I will try and find some small gift or mathom for you.
And now, I must rant.
I have, after thirty years of being an ISP customer, finally met the very worst internet service ever. I lived in rural California for five years and used to gripe about connection speeds, congestion-insipred horrid ping times and occasional outages (for example when some drunken casino wanker knocked down a telephone pole), but honestly, it's nothing compared to the service I'm getting in this university town.
I live in an apartment complex "served" by an ISP whose customer is a Bay Area company landlord, who clearly doesn't give a tinker's cuss about us as long as they get their moolah. We've access points scattered about the complex, and to be fair, when the service is up, it's actually pretty decent. But it is oversubscribed for the number of units and presumably, the number of devices. As a consequence the poor setup collapses during most peak hours, as each access point becomes saturated and the whole beanstalk collapses.
The real kicker is that this happens most in the early evenings and at weekends, but their customer service lines are not open and there's frequently a wait of up to an hour while the system sorts itself out. Sometimes the fall is too great and it stays down for the weekend. It could be fixed, of course. Each access point could be configured to perform a sanity check, and restart if it overloads (I'm familiar with this concept after years of using cheap home routers that need such treatment every so often). For the want of a couple of scripts we have to deal with the creeping horror. Honestly, this tale feels like it qualifies for Libera te Tutemet ex Inferis: The 2023 Halloween Horrorquest (but it doesn't, gosh darn it).
I honestly never thought I'd miss the wet-string connection I used to gripe about, out in the sticks. At least out there there was a fella who you could actually call and talk to when the connection pooped out (Thanks, John!).
Postscript. Oh, and YouTube? You have the most annoying message in the whole world right now. "Experiencing interruptions? Find out why" as it tries to be all helpful when I know all along it's because some sodding tech company cheaps out. There is, of course, a Reddit thread about it because I am not the only one who doesn't need to be constantly reminded that my ISP is a steaming great pile of rancid tramp's underpants.
In other news, I read that Gavin Newsom signed a bill outlawing junk fees in California. Good, and fuck you, Ticketmaster and everone else of that ilk.
Anyway, thank you for listening to today's rant, and if you were involved in Brevity Quest 2023, don't forget to send me a postal address. So I can go postal.
xclip -o | wc -w
666