AubsTalk

JFC, It's November

2026-11-06T00:00:00Z

Holy hell, it's already November 2026.

I'm giving Eleventy a try. It was simple enough to transition my former Jekyll blog over to Eleventy, even though I did have to write the theme from scratch and implement the templating. I am hoping to eventually shift Left Is Best over to this sort of system, so that I can more easily statically generate a large number of pages without having to manually futz with every single little detail of the HTML every time. It's already enough of a pain as it is.

Concerning Left Is Best, I've put up a couple more texts, and I'm currently working on formatting the entirety of Luna Oi's translation of the first installment of the Vietnamese textbook on Marxism-Leninism. It is tedious but I enjoy document formatting.

I've been spending a lot more time doing theory reading, especially with the new friends I've developed over in the October Institute community. I've come to the conclusion that I have to leave the DSA, and I have to leave my party. I've really got to join a party where I can actually devote my time and effort toward something productive, rather than the opportunist nothingness I'm currently in.

I did make a new friend at work who is also a union steward and is properly organized, and I'm hoping to make some connections there.

A shift in the tide

My thoughts on the revolutionary potential of the US has shifted greatly over the past year. Of all the motions toward consciousness have become clear, so has the reactionary impulse implicit to the system of settler-colonial white supremacy and all of its tentacles of hegemonic psychological domination. Human consciousness is not determined primarily by ideas, as those ideas do not arrive uninfluenced; the material structures that influence consciousness also reify and empower those ideas.

I need to connect with my neighbors. I need to improve my ability to communicate, on a human level. Despite my deliberate strides, I am still very limited in my ability to make these connections. Part of that is my own shortcomings, and part of it is the seemingly impervious scope of the problem. I need to get organized, and I need to grapple with people who similarly understand the nature of the beast, and want to effect a better world without compromising to the brutality of imperialism.

How to do this, in practice, in day-to-day life, still eludes me. It cannot be done alone, of that I am certain. I will keep striving. I will keep fighting. I will keep learning. Hopefully I'll keep posting too... I have a lot of thoughts I'd quite like to get down in writing, and have simply kept to myself in the bits and bytes of excerpts and forgotten diary entries.

I know no one will read this, and I also know that making public my political wrestlings carries with it some risk. I hope to find a decent path, and comrades with whom to walk it.

June Musings

2026-06-24T00:00:00Z

I’ve been up to quite a bit lately, on and off. I’ve been trying to maintain the Labor Working Group at my city’s DSA, to limited effect; I’ve been trying to be an active steward at my store for my union, to limited effect; I’ve been trying to participate in picketing at nearby labor strikes, in a limited capacity. I did see Kshama Sawant, veteran to Seattle socialist politics, at one strike. That was neat. I wound up briefly in one of the videos she posted to her socials.

My apprehensions about my party persist. It is still scarcely active, with limited to no communications. It exists in a state of perpetual pre-germination after the forcible dissolution of the prior club. I remain willing to give a great deal of my time and effort toward party work, but there seems to be no work to do. I’ve been working on an analysis of the hintings of national chauvinism, American exceptionalism, and rank opportunism riddling the party program. Based on the minimal discussions that do happen in internal club channels, and the materials put out by national, I have difficulty identifying what distinguishes it from a social democratic mass org.

In the meantime, I have been getting active with a lovely group of MLs through Madeline Pendleton’s discord server; the incredible people there have been working hard on a streamer collective and server ambassadorship system for principled Marxist-Leninists. I’ve been doing theory readings and discussions three times a week there, and it has been marvelous for my morale and excitement to get involved and do more.

I finished transcribing and formatting R. Palme Dutt’s Fascism and Social Revolution and published it on Left Is Best, which also got a sexy redesign. I need to revisit the downtown library to scan more magazine articles.

I’ve been reading a lot of books lately. Some include:

Against Empire, by Michael Parenti
Liberalism: A Counter-History, by Domenico Losurdo
Western Marxism: How it was Born, How it Died, How it can be Reborn, by Domenico Losurdo
The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America, by Gerald Horne
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

The last two books I read as part of a funk I’ve been falling into lately about the 250th “anniversary” of the U.S. I wanted a better, more varied understanding of the United States, what it is, what it has always been, and just how different that is from what we are taught and how that manifests in the cultural hegemonic normative narrative.

I hope to write more of my thoughts on this soon. I have numerous draft posts unpublished, needing a great deal of polishing. It is too hot outside to think, most days, and I am very tired.

Left Is Best library up

2026-01-19T00:00:00Z

Over the past month or so I've been working on a new site. I was reading some works by Anna Louise Strong, the legendary communist journalist, and I found that at least two of her works (The Stalin Era and In North Korea) were technically in the public domain, their copyright having expired, but were not widely available online except on Archive.org in mediocre PDF format. I wanted to remedy this, so I worked on transcribing them into a much more readable, browseable format.

Left Is Best is the product of that effort. So far I only have those two books, in a few formats, but I'm interested in doing this for more works in the situation of their copyright having lapsed.

I found both works to be extremely interesting for different reasons. It's an invaluable perspective, contemporary voices from the inside of AES states, with all their merits and flaws, with a special focus on the actual people living within those projects. In particular, the lack of western imperialist sullying is notable.

I hope people find this project interesting.

I have a lot of other life news and activism news, but I'm very busy. :D I'm having a lovely time reading, learning, and staying involved in my local left. Updates to come.

DizzyPrice NetHack Price ID beta

2024-09-12T00:00:00Z

So like 7+ years ago when NetHack 3.6 came out, they changed how prices were calculated in shops compared to 3.4.3. I wrote a command line tool in Python called DizzyPrice that served as a way to do price identification for the new 3.6, since all of the old tools no longer worked. I put it up on my server at this address but it was never fully finished, and the PHP front-end was kind of garbage.

Now that NetHack 3.7 is in development, I decided to take a whack at making a more fully featured version that looks better and would work on mobile. I haven't fixed up the CSS to make it nice on mobile yet, but I've made enough progress to post this update.

As you can see, you can now select which version you are using. The tool has calculation methods for both 3.4 and 3.6+, as well as item sets for three versions of NetHack. I've also added the ability to determine the sale offers if the shopkeeper only can offer you credit, something I never implemented in the original DizzyPrice. It is written in pure Javascript.

There's still plenty of things I'd like to fix up, namely:

A note explaining that probability calculations are determined based on standard item generation, and monster drops (like potions of object detection from nymphs) will make this unreliable.
Probability calculations are currently based on the 3.6 object lists rather than each individual version.
As previously stated, mobile CSS stylings
A more robust interpretation of the Description field, so you could enter "buckled boots" and it would search for any of the terms being in the description field. Spaces currently make the search not work.
Form validation at the point of clicking, with sexy pure CSS red border flashes on the improperly formatted or empty field.

~~You can find me as Aubses in the Libera IRC #nethack channel or the Roguelike discord server #nethack channel if you want to give me feedback or feature requests.~~ [Note: I no longer hang out on IRC] The current unfinished (but still functional) version is available to use here.

Recording Chess Moves in Casual OTB

2024-03-07T00:00:00Z

If you want to record chess moves during casual over-the-board play, the most common way is to write the moves down on a piece of paper. This is what's done during tournaments, particularly because most technology is not allowed because it could allow cheating.

But what if you're playing casually with friends, and want to record your moves? I was playing OTB the other day and I realized hey, I have some codey skills, I should write a web app. So I started coding a very simple, not smart, no chess board on screen, no evaluation, no move validation web page where you can input the moves with your phone face-up on the table.

It's not very pretty, and there's still a lot of functionality I have yet to implement, but it does allow you to save a properly formatted PGN file for later import and analysis after the game is done. I think it's a fun project. I have it running over at this address for now, although I'm likely to update it in the near future with the new functionality. Maybe I'll make it so you can save it directly to a Lichess study for your records, since Lichess has an open API. Anyway it was a fun little javascript project.