Mom 12:37 – hey when are you getting home? Dave You set the disappearing message time to 3 hours hey you doing better lol yea i really didn't sleep much what's up u didn't set timeout for that yea is what Brian said true what did he say about how Tom worked at operant? yea why? you know that's where my dad worked and he kind of went crazy too do you know what he did there? not rly my mom gets real upset when i bring it up it was some math shit with magnets wanna come over and ask her lol I did not want to have a conversation with Dave’s mother. 12:55 – haha im good but im just chilling at home if you want to come by here The doorbell rang again. Resolving to be less of a pussy, I answered it. I was prepared to talk to the cops. Polite, short answers, step outside and lock the door, find out what they want. Not a pussy. Not a pussy. Not a pussy. It wasn’t the cops. It was my Mom’s friend Anne, and I told her she wasn’t here. It was always strange to me that that generation would just drop by. Like she didn’t text her first? She said she was in the neighborhood and had extra bagels she wanted to drop off. I thought about telling her that I hadn’t heard from my Mom since yesterday and that she didn’t reply to my text, but decided against it. I didn’t know the dynamic of my Mom’s friend group. Maybe she is out sleeping with Anne’s husband or something. I didn’t want to be a link in the chain of Anne finding out. I was vague but very polite. Anne left the bagels. I didn’t touch the bag. I went up the stairs to my Mom’s room. Did I mention how much I like true crime? It’s probably done bad things for me personality wise. I know that the people on there are out of the normal distribution of people, but those podcasts are one of my only exposures to the outside world. The world beyond this little slice of Brooklyn. So you kind of start thinking everyone is like that. I’d always just assumed my Dad was like, a Wall Street guy. Boring. Get money, fuck bitches. When I was little we had tons of money. We lived in a huge house in Cobble Hill. I flew first class to Europe when I was 7. We spent a week on a yacht in Monaco. My mom loved the luxury lifestyle, and would put up with a lot of my Dad’s eccentricities to keep it. When he left she didn’t seem that upset though. I think the money was still coming in from him, which was the main thing she cared about. It clearly wasn’t as much, we moved out to Sheepshead Bay and never went back to Europe. But she didn’t work and I always got good birthday presents, and she never said anything bad about my Dad, so I assume that’s where the money was coming from. The first drawer I opened had sex toys in it. I saw a vibrator and a butt plug before I quickly closed the drawer. The second drawer had socks. The third drawer had tons of scattered papers. My college rejections. Some essays from high school. A note written in crayon about how I wanted a Nintendo Switch for Christmas. I guess this was the “me” drawer. The fourth drawer was papers, but more organized. My parents marriage certificate. My mom’s birth certificate. My old passport. As far as I knew, they never got a divorce. He just left. Then, something I didn’t know. A document entitling one Jessica Baker to $10,000 per month, to be paid out on the first of every month by the Triangle Trust, for the rest of her natural life, or until the trust is dissolved. That was nice of my Dad. I went through the rest of the drawers, but didn’t find anything else interesting. I put everything back as carefully as I could. I considered that someone might dust for fingerprints. I wondered if I did anything illegal. I live here, right? I checked on the text message to my Mom and noticed that it hadn’t been delivered. This was really unlike her. Sometimes she’d go out drinking and meet a guy and stay out all night, but she’d always at least text me by the morning when she sobered up. 2:14 – are you okay? Not delivered. Maybe her phone died? Nah but it’s the afternoon she probably would have charged it by now. I tried calling. Straight to voicemail. I checked the Mercedes app to see where her car was. She’d let me take the car sometimes, so we were both on the app. It asked me to login. I copied the password from 1password. Incorrect Password Maybe she changed it? I tried to set her up on 1password but she didn’t get it. She’d just reset the passwords when she needed to login. Ugh, logging into stuff is the worst. I clicked the reset password and typed in the e-mail. There is no account with that e-mail Okay, that doesn’t make sense. My Mom and I shared an e-mail for this stuff, and she wouldn’t change it without telling me. I clicked forgot e-mail. It needed the VIN of the car. The title was in the fourth drawer with the other papers. I went and got it and typed in the VIN. The e-mail associated with your account is: skinner666@gmail.com A jolt of anxiety coarsed through my body. I’d never seen that e-mail address in my life.

I really enjoyed watching Python: The Documentary (from CultRepo, formerly Honeypot, same makers as the TypeScript documentary). Personally, I don’t write much Python and am not involved in the broader Python community. That said, I love how this documentary covers a lot of the human problems in tech and not just the technical history of Python as language. For example: How do you handle succession from a pivotal creator? How do you deal with poor representation? How do you fund and steer open projects? How do you build community? How do you handle the fallout of major version changes? And honestly, all the stories around these topics as told from the perspective of Python feel like lessons to learn from. Here are a few things that stood out to me. Guido van Rossum, Creator of Python, Sounds Cool The film interviews Drew Houston, Founder/CEO at Dropbox, because he hired Python’s creator Guido van Rossum for a stint. This is what Drew had to say about his time working with Guido: It’s hard for me to think of someone who has had more impact with lower ego [than Guido] For tech, that’s saying something! Now that is a legacy if you ask me. The Python Community Sounds Cool Brett Cannon famously gave a talk at a Python conference where he said he “came for the language, but stayed for the community”. In the documentary they interview him and he adds: The community is the true strength of Pyhon. It’s not just the language, it’s the people. ❤️ This flies in the face of the current era we’re in, where it’s the technology that matters. How it disrupts or displaces people is insignificant next to the fantastic capabilities it purports to wield. But here’s this language surrounded by people who acknowledge that the community around the language is its true strength. People are the true strength. Let me call this out again, in case it’s not sinking in: Here’s a piece of technology where the people around it seem to acknowledge that the technology itself is only secondary to the people it was designed to serve. How incongruous is that belief with so many other pieces of technology we’ve seen through the years? What else do we have, if not each other? That’s something worth amplifying. Mariatta, Python Core Developer, Sounds Cool I absolutely loved the story of @mariatta@fosstodon.org. If you’re not gonna watch the documentary, at least watch the ~8 minutes of her story. Watched it? Ok, here’s my quick summary: She loves to program, but everywhere she looks it’s men. At work. At conferences. On core teams. She hears about pyladies and wants to go to Pycon where she can meet them. She goes to Pycon and sees Guido van Rossum stand up and say he wants 2 core contributors to Python that are female. She thinks, “Oh that’s cool! I’m not good enough for that, but I bet they’ll find someone awesome.” The next year she goes to the conference and finds out they’re still looking for those 2 core contributors. She thinks “Why not me?” and fires off an email to Guido. Here’s her recollection on composing that email: I felt really scared. I didn’t feel like I deserved mentorship from Guido van Rossum. I really hesitated to send this email to him, but in the end I realized I want to try. This was a great opportunity for me. I hit the send button. And later, her feelings on becoming the first female core contributor to Python: When you don’t have role models you can relate to, you don’t believe you can do it. ❤️ Mad respect. I love her story. As Jessica McKellar says in the film, Mariatta’s is an inspiring story and “a vision of what is possible in other communities”. Python Is Refreshing I’ve spent years in “webdev” circles — and there are some great ones — but this Python documentary was, to me, a tall, refreshing glass of humanity. Go Python! Email · Mastodon · Bluesky

Dave 2:41 – yoo i took a nap wanna play minecraft? actually i need your help with something what just come over kk i gotta shower Dave knew stuff about computers. Don’t let the being high all the time fool you, he was the smartest guy in our friend group. And he was the most chronically online. He showed up on his bike 20 minutes later. “Yo,” I yelled to him across the lawn. “Dude what’s up? You look rattled” “My mom is missing and she isn’t answering her phone. Then I tried to track her on the car app, but somebody changed the e-mail.” Dave came inside the house (I locked the door behind him) and opened his laptop at the kitchen table. I messaged him the VIN, and he tried the reset e-mail again but on the website. Same result. Same skinner666 “What did the e-mail used to be? Do you have access to that account?” “Yea,” I brought up the password to bakerfamily43@gmail.com on my 1Password and Dave logged in on his laptop. We saw like 15 e-mails notifying that account details were changed for various services. Ranging from 2 to 3 am last night. Most interesting was the first e-mail. It was from Google saying they blocked a login attempt to this account. From Atlanta, Georgia. Dave explained, “They probably tried to log in to the GMail, but when it didn’t work, they changed the e-mails on other services to an account they controlled” “From Atlanta? Who’s in Atlanta? They got hackers down there?” I was imagining…well never mind, you know what I was imagining. “It’s probably a VPN, hang on, I’ll check the IP.” Dave copy pasted some numbers from the Google e-mail into the terminal. “Yea, NordVPN exit node.” “What’s a VPN?” “No wonder you can’t find hookers on the Internet.” I’d asked Dave about this once. He was high. I didn’t think he remembered. “Even Brian knows what a VPN is.” “You think we should call the police,” I asked. But I already knew Dave’s answer. Dave hated the police more than all of us. Back before the suicide, his mother would take him to Black Lives Matter protests. And as dumb as it was, those were probably some of the best memories he had with his family. It was a day outside, there were people, there were food stalls. And his mother was happy. Or maybe angry? But not depressed. “Fuck 12,” he mumbled. It wasn’t just the politics. After Tom’s suicide, the cops harassed his family. Well it wasn’t the police, it was child protective services. It became standard practice to investigate all cases where young people who still lived at home killed themselves. Nothing ended up happening with the investigation, but to Dave, one government mooching pig was the same as the next, and none of them were on his side. “Okay, no police. I don’t like them either. You think my mom is okay?” Dave thought for a minute, “I think I know how to find her car” As the number of sensors on the Internet grew, the availability of data about the real world skyrocketed. Tons of people were willing to put cameras outside their house or dashcams on their car to earn a couple dollars. There were news articles predicting that this would end all crime. But of course this isn’t what happened. Ending crime was always more a question of will than a question of ability. And most people never made back the money they spent on the camera, the data wasn’t all that useful and not that many people bought it. But if you knew where to look, you could access it. “Do you have the license plate number of the car?” I didn’t know it, but I went back upstairs to get the title. I also grabbed the Triangle Trust document. Dave typed it into website billing itself as the world’s data marketplace. “Search millions of dashcams for a license plate” was one of the options, along with a bunch of other video search options, including “search millions of CCTV cameras for perky nipples.” It seemed like there was a whole Internet that I didn’t know about. $0.78 for the query. He typed in his credit card. I offered to pay him back. He thanked me for the bagel. “Three hits in the last 24 hours” It was $8 each to download the video clips. One of them wouldn’t download, it said “Dashcam Offline.” It still took his $8 for that clip. He downloaded the other two and dragged them into ChatGPT. No point in watching them manually. Clip 1 Timestamp (overlay): ~5:36:12 PM, Sat Jul 12, 2031 Location (inferred): Manhattan Bridge lower roadway, westbound into Manhattan. Overhead signage OCR fragments: “CANAL ST / CHINATOWN”; steel truss pattern matches the bridge; skyline and arch glimpses align. What’s visible: Mercedes (body/DRL signature consistent) in center lane, moderate traffic, dry pavement, dusk light. No notable tail vehicle persists across frames. Clip 2 Timestamp (overlay): ~11:29:47 PM, Sat Jul 12, 2031 Location (inferred): Sheepshead Bay corridor. Streetfront OCR: “EMMONS AVE,” “BAY DELI,” and a marina awning; sodium-vapor lighting; parked fishing boats visible for 2–3 frames. What’s visible: Mercedes eastbound along Emmons Ave, signals right at the next intersection and turns toward a residential side street (likely Knapp/Bragg area; exact street name unreadable due to glare). Traffic light cycle and storefront shutters consistent with late-night return. I pondered, “That doesn’t make sense. That second clip is right by our house, but I got home an hour after that and she wasn’t here. What’s the third clip?” “It won’t let me download it. Because of how this marketplace works, the video file isn’t uploaded to them until somebody buys it. If the user’s device is offline, we can’t download it.” “Do we know anything about it?” “Not really. Sometimes the user has a profile, but all he has is a username. It’s liducksfan” For once, I could actually be useful. “The Long Island Ducks! I went to a game once!” I wasn’t actually that useful, Dave had already Googled “liducks” and that was the obvious first hit. “So she was on Long Island?” “You’re the true crime guy. I’m just the tech guy.” I had a hunch. I think she came home around 11:30, something happened here, either she saw something or met someone, and she left again and went to Long Island, all before I got home. I looked around for James Reese’s business card. I couldn’t find it. However, in plain sight, there was a note from my mother on the refrigerator. I guess it had been there the whole time; wow I’m a bad detective. “Met a guy. Going to the Hamptons. Might be out of cell service.” and then Mom in a heart. She always signs her notes like that. I showed the note to Dave. He shrugged and asked if he could have one of the bagels that Anne left. Sure. Was this just me being paranoid, or is that the exact note my mother would leave if she didn’t want me to worry and that’s not at all what happened? Who logged into her accounts? Who was skinner666?

Here on a summer night in the grass and lilac smell Drunk on the crickets and the starry sky, Oh what fine stories we could tell With this moonlight to tell them by. A summer night, and you, and paradise, So lovely and so filled with grace, Above your head, the universe has hung its … Continue reading Dreams of Late Summer →