I spent the past week as a counselor at the inaugural session of Camp St. Joseph of Damascus.
My experience there was absolutely grace-filled and I made strong connections with fellow Orthodox Christians that I know will last a life time.
We were blessed to have Fr. Joseph Kimmett as our session priest and to have visits from Sayidna John and Fr. Bogdan Bucur.
This session’s focus was on the Theotokos and on her Dormition in particular.
We particpated in orthros, vespers, and paraklesis services throughout the week as well as fun activities, sports, and Christian education classes.
These activities and services prepared us for — and culminated in — the celebration of the divine liturgy on the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos.
Since I started tinkering with computers and free software in
2019, I’ve been deeply in the vim camp. The majority of my professors
and classmates in uni, however, used emacs or some derivative.
So, recently I thought I’d give emacs a shot and see if I could
recreate my neovim setup, and I have to say that I think my peers were
onto something…
I certainly haven’t explored even a fraction of emacs’ features, and
obviously emacs is more than just a text editor, but the text
editing is amazing and seems more openly configurable than vim. What
rocks is that I don’t have to completely abandon the familiarity of
vim binds because emacs can run pretty much everything in “evil” mode
(and I get to keep the native emacs binds!)
I spent the past two weeks travelling throughout New England: I spent two days
in New Hampshire hiking the White Mountains and Flume Gorge, got to spend a day
sailing with a friend, and I hit up New Bedford’s whaling museum. Here’s a few
photos I took from the trip:
This was my first time in a monastery — I really enjoyed it.
The church and monastery grounds were beautiful, and the services were prayerful and somber.
Although we missed the myrrh-streaming Holy Theotokos Iveron Icon, the analogion it had rested on was thoroughly soaked with extremely fragrant myrrh and we had the blessing of venerating that.
Owning physical media is more important than ever; moreover, DRM is evil.
If you purchase your movies/music through Amazon, Spotify, SiriusXM, AppleTV, &c. you really only purchase a license for use that can be revoked at any time.
This makes your media access fragile: your access to the things you have purchased is one inter-corporation lawsuit away from being revoked.
Whether or not you should be consuming mass-produced, copyrighted media is another question, but purchasing (i.e., legally obtaining) DRM-free versions of your media has never been easier.
In fact, buying/ripping CDs or downloading music from Qobuz can be cheaper than a spotify subscription.
These days, you can even play Blu-ray discs from the command line.
(Generally speaking, you can find most Blu-ray disks on eBay for less than the digital asking prices for the same movies!)
