• a [[post]].
  • this would be a post in my [[blog]] if I wasn't too lazy to keep a separate blog nowadays, so here it is.

My laptop battery is at 33% as I type this and I wonder if I'll get to commit this before it runs out of power -- does the substandard [[Github]] UI auto-save anything you write in the inline editor? Unlikely, as that would require a separate write path.

Perhaps I do it for the rush of knowing that these lines might be lost forever if I lose awareness of the passage of time; my laptop is a bit old by now and I run a barebones window manager only so I know that the first sign that I screwed up will be a sudden turning off of the screen, and a sigh of exasperation or maybe relief as I realize that I didn't make it -- that what I was writing was lost, an offering to the gods of the crappy cloud and the substandard editors.

I'm down to 25% by now. I took a break to talk to a 75-year-old lady who was begging on the streets -- begging on the streets of Málaga while I was sitting on this fancy café typing on my laptop. She had a dog named Rufo; her name I have forgotten, and for that I am sorry. We gave her five euros as we didn't have more -- but did we? I could have given her my fancy laptop, although it belongs to my employer -- or perhaps because of that, I should have given her that first. I could have given her my clothes, but that probably wouldn't have been very useful to her as she was small and I am large. More realistically I could have walked with her to an ATM, but I didn't do it; in general I didn't think of these things at all while she was around, the same way we don't usually consider most of the actions we actually have available at any given point in time; very often we think there are two or three choices we could take, even though the luckier among us have millions.

If you had 22% of battery left to write something and publish it to the world, what would you write? What would be most useful? Useful to whom?

When in doubt, I usually write about the [[Agora]]. Perhaps by now it is by now cozy and safe a topic, by virtue of the Agora 1. existing and 2. somehow continuing to grow -- slowly but surely, albeit with marginal odds. But how useful that is? Could the owner of Rufo care about the Agora and what I write about it, about the Agora as it exists today, a promising but small and in the grand scheme of things likely rather irrelevant community assembled around writing, online first and still mostly online? Probably not, as the poor tend to be offline; the old tend to be offline; and she was old and poor.

Her name was Leyla or Leila -- I had the impression and my partner just confirmed it independently. Leila comes from the Arabic; it means "night", perhaps "beautiful night". She was from Melilla, so that actually makes sense.

If I had 17% of battery left (in my idiosyncratic and perhaps lightly crazy number system, 17 means [[Maitreya]]) I'd consider writing about [[Flancia]] as it could be for Leila -- but then I'd close my laptop and go looking for her.