September 02, 2019 | Author: Mircea Popescu

Pretty much all I did all day today was shopping, and through it all I was thinking...

First, at some ungodly hour in the morning, we took Florimund in to have its drivetrain calibrated or however you call it when they mount those strobe lights on the wheels and make the disco with your car, and bought some odds and ends needed there, then a spare wheel for the spare tyre, a coupla lighter plug to usb converters, a grid-to-car-battery "redresor" aka AC-DC converter, distilled water, a one euro plastic safety thing for the gearbox oil gauge because if you take it off to measure the oil it supposedly breaks off (mine didn't -- and if you care the oil's teardrop, and to the max), a flashlight (Ima throw it out though, it's blue, fucking useless store can't check whether they're useful or not, next time I'm carrying batteries), work gloves for the trunk, locks, a bunch of other stuff we won't go into... but through it all, I was thinking.

Then we drove fifteen miles out of town, to an unmarked location where a guy with no shingle made more electronic keys on the basis of taking apart and reading out the contact assemblage, right out of his house. He had one of those cool Mercedes cabriolets in his garage (which he said he'd owned for the past twenty years, German plates, the works). We exchanged memories of the 90s under the worried gaze of a bimbo ("is this even legal ?") and parted amicably. It's always nice to know people, especially in the shape of a piece of paper with a name and a phone number delivered by courier, coincidentally just like in the fucking movies. Yet I was thinking...

We went besides to every type of shop available, and bought just about everything there is conceivably available to buy, five pounds of fresh salmon and a bunch of fresh oysters, ten gallon glass jugs in plastic cover as well as a buncha smaller ones (for home-made liqueurs and cordials and such), short handled spade, champagne, phones, fiddy jars or so of zacusca, two packs of 24 toilet paper rolls (these go together), an outside broom, nipplepins (though I hear some people also use them to hold up their clothes on the line), fiddy galons or so of mineral water, pharmaceutical vaseline and mega buttslapping paddle (they think it's for grilling), cute plates, fans, fruits, matches, moustache stickers (for srs), wine... we even took a special trip to the special textile mill outlet store where Viorica makes us sweatshop shit on the cheap to order towels and cute/humiliatory aprons in heart shapes and more bedding and whatnot, easily a ton of materiel all toldi in two or three trunkloads (it's a 695 litre trunk, you realise). But all the while... I was thinking.

Then (meaning, after cooking and scarfing salmon etc) we went to town, and had iced lattes and icecream aside and sat and watched the girls go by, while I was thinking... and then we went to the mall, where I marched the sluts into the pet shop, bought them doggy collars and doggy leashes, most pretty leather ones ; I even got a glow in the dark, usb-powered pink one, for optimal humiliation. Then I collared them right then and there, in front of an ever-growing crowd of gawkers (no doubt this'll be the "social media" event of the month in this sad, inconsequential subcultural space) and we walked through the entire mall, leash in my handii -- first to the key copying guy, then to the Gatta stocking store across the mall, where we bought stockings and whole body things ("are those crotchless ?" *blushing* "yes"). The girl tending the lingerie counter, like the boy tending the key stand, like everyone else really really fucking tense while trying to pretend not so much that nothing's happening, but that they're oh-so-very-ok with whatever-the-fuck-this-is. Girly even shuffled a small pile of evidently hand-written notes into our bag, "oh, are those your journals ?" "no, nonononon" "well alright... but I hope you're publishing yes ?" "oh, no... I... I don't want to publish anything 18+ just yet". Right ?

It was fun, did you ever fantasize about being casually collared and publicly humiliated for all the mall rats one day ? Casually, you understand, none of this was pre-planned, let alone discussed afore the fact, as I drank milk from the liter bottle in the sexy undies store because I was thirsty and we coincidentally forgot to buy water it occured to me just how fucking livresque the scene is, yet there it flew, as it flew. And still, all the while...

What the fuck was I thinking about, enough of the charade ? Fine, since you ask, here it is :

I. We will be serving http for a while yet to come, it's unavoidable.

II. The one way to serve http is the Apache server. This is inescapable, nginx is roughly speaking a useless pos (that has to be run atop Apache anyways), and everything else is nothing else -- flask especially is comedically bad (not to mention -- also to be run atop Apache necessarily), hutchenhoot might work but so far this yet seems unlikely to me.

II.a. Even should hutch work out, CL (or any "proper" flavour of Lisp, for that matter) is and remains a terrible tool for munging strings -- while the entire object domain of serving http is munging strings.

III. Since one gets mysql for free from (l) A m p, mysql is gonna be the db system, like it or not. It's inevitable.

IV. Since one gets php for free from (l) A m p, php is gonna be the string munger slash "scripting language", like it or not. It's just as inevitable.

That is the stack - L, A, M, P. There's nothing else, and nothing that can be really done about it as things stand. Yes you can use python (or bash, or moontalk or malbolge or whatever the shit) "instead" of php -- but it won't be instead. Php will still be in your system, you'll just opt to add some more dependencies. You can't have a http server "without php" because you're not writing a patchy server by-hand, and that's the end of that matter, paint it whatever color. You can have a system "with php" or a system "with php and also python", but that's all the practical optionality open to you. Similarily, yes you can use postgres (and I suspect there might be very good reasons to actually use it), but it won't be instead of mysql, it'll be alongside mysql. Meaning, the minimalistic system will be without postgres, like it or not.

I've been thinking through thick and thin, through all the foregoingly described today and all the undescribed thus unknown yet just as happened days to make up the rest of the two weeks intervening, because it's such an intolerably unpleasant conclusion. Nevertheless, it's what it is, unpleasant or not, tolerable or otherwise : 1. we will in fact be serving http ; 2. we will in fact use apache-mysql-php for this ; 3. everything else's just masturbation. Yes it can be included, but no it doesn't have to be included, nor does it actually come free. It comes at a cost, and the cost's an extra helping of madness. Writing www data displayers in php means one avoids that ; writing them in anything else means one eats that. It's ineluctable.

I'm not about to ban development outside the minimalistic set ; but the extra cost one assumes (and, in turn, forces upon future people) through going outside can't simply be ignored. It's there, it must be addressed.

I very much want to have a clear and complete discussion now, before we're grandfathered into expensive unhappiness ; I don't think it can be further avoided. So...

What say you ?

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  1. Ask ye me not of price, for I buy by weight not by the dollar. []
  2. You realise this is not exactly trivial, walking with multiple girls on leashes. You're best advised to hold the ends behind your back, and they have to walk in certain ways... it takes some doing to do elegantly right, you can't just leash rando girls off the street and avoid looking ridiculous for whole minutes at a stretch. []
Category : Meta psihoza  | 55 responses.