Patrick Stewart on how Fictional Characters Can Make You a Better Person

Patrick Stewart on how Fictional Characters Can Make You a Better Person

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Earlier this year I began ever-so-slowly working my way through Les Miserables. The first section is devoted to the story of Monseigneur Bienvenu1, the bishop who will later give Jean Valjean some silver — the only place you see Bienvenu in the musical.

But in those first 80-odd pages you might think that the book was only going to be about Monseigneur Bienvenu. The character is so good in such a believable way it made me want to be more like him, which raised the question: what does it mean for you to want to become a better person, in the way of a fictional character?

Bishop Myriel aka Monseigneur Bienvenu, depicted by Gustave Brion, 1862. By Gustave Brion – Maison de Victor Hugo, Public Domain,

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74553495

Bishop Myriel, depicted by Gustave Brion, 1862. By Gustave Brion - Maison de Victor Hugo, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74553495
Patrick Stewart speaking at the 2019 San Diego Comic Con International, for “Star Trek: Picard”, at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California.
By Gage Skidmore

In an interview with NPR, Patrick Stewart is asked if his iconic character from Star Trek — Jean Luc Picard — made him a better person, his answer:

It gave me an idea of how I might become a better person, yes. I was able to absorb that and make those feelings a strong and firm part of my life.

Emphasis mnine.

I love that idea. For me personally, I don’t need to become more like Victor Hugo’s imaginary character, but I can use the character as an ideal to light the way to being a better person.

  1. Bishop Muriel is the character’s name and formal title. He is known to his community as Monseigneur Bienvenu, which can be translated as  “My Lord Welcome” or “Welcome, My Lord,” where ‘My Lord,’ is a title in the sense of a bishop or king. ↩︎

⚠️ 🤔

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Alt text: Screenshot of a news article from "The Washington Post" titled "Election 2024: Some Democrats worry Biden's team is ignoring political warning signs." The subtitle adds, "Of particular concern to the president’s allies are indications that his support among Black voters, who were critical to his victory in 2020, may be softening." The article is by Tyler Pager and Dan Balz. Below the article headline is a link to "MORE COVERAGE" with a related story titled "Analysis: An ominous poll for Democrats, and what it says about a Biden alternative." The time at the top of the screen indicates 7:50, and there is a Wi-Fi icon with the signal strength and battery indicator showing 47% remaining.

They worry because this is clearly true. The D political machine is ignoring the risks, or burying them, out of fear of rocking the boat and losing the election.

Nothing But the Truth?

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Politico has a medium-length article out today that reports testimonies and verified emails that contradict President Biden’s stronger denials regarding his relationships with the family businesses.

None of it would be the smoking gun that congressional Republicans are looking for to impeach Biden. However, it does cast a negative light on Joe Biden and will impeach the character that he and Democrats more broadly have built up of himself.

The allegedly false denials will cause way more of a headache than the actual events denied1. I think he could have come clean in 2020 and these things would 1000 news cycles ago, nearly forgotten. It isn’t just Joe Biden’s denials: the long-term insistence that the stolen Hunter Biden laptop is a big nothing-burger is appears untrue.

I don’t imagine that there is any Democrat who went on record refuting the importance of that laptop care to revisit those statements now.

Drip drip drip of small-lies and half-truths are a problem for any campaign2 but it is potentially disastrous for a campaign where the winner will be chosen by those on the margins. The handful of Americans who — somehow — have not made up their mind up either candidate.

I think Joe Biden is poor candidate for president and the Democrats would fare better if he decided not to run again and endorsed someone else.

  1. I don’t see anything in the article the promotes the allegation that Joe Biden pressured Ukraine to fire a prosecutor looking into a Ukrainian company with ties to Hunter Biden. That would be a guaranteed impeachment. ↩︎
  2. Except, possibly for Trump, where bigger is always better. ↩︎
The Difference Between Israel and Hamas

The Difference Between Israel and Hamas

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WSJ quoting Robert Habeck:

“After the Holocaust, the founding of Israel was the promise of protection to the Jews—and Germany is compelled to help ensure that this promise can be fulfilled,” Habeck said in a speech posted on X. “Of course, Israel must abide by international law and international standards. But the difference is this: would someone ever frame such expectations of Hamas?”

Robert Habeck (Vors. Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) Foto: Stephan Röhl
Digital Ocean simply doesn’t support multiprocessing on their app platform.

Digital Ocean simply doesn’t support multiprocessing on their app platform.

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I use used Digital Ocean’s App Platform for a docker run application. I also use celery for asynchronous processing and cronjobs inside of this application. For months it worked without issue, and then one day my logs started filling up things like Errno 38 above, all with celery, billiard and SemLock errors.

I wasted a lot of time troubleshooting so now let me save you time.

Digital Ocean simply doesn’t support multiprocessing on their app platform.

At least as far as I can tell, this thread finally made it click for me: https://github.com/Koed00/django-q/issues/522

The ultimate fix was to run a separate instance of the app in docker on a VM instead of the app platform (which yes, defeats the purpose of having the IaaS app platform in the first place).

Hopefully I got enough keywords in here that you, dear reader, can save yourself a day of development work.

CRITICAL/MainProcess] Unrecoverable error: OSError(38, 'Function not implemented')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/celery/worker/worker.py", line 202, in start
self.blueprint.start(self)
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/celery/bootsteps.py", line 116, in start
     step.start(parent)
     File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/celery/bootsteps.py", line 365, in start
     return self.obj.start()
     self.on_start()
     P = self._pool = Pool(processes=self.limit,
   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/celery/concurrency/asynpool.py", line 464, in __init__
     super().__init__(processes, *args, **kwargs)
   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/billiard/pool.py", line 1045, in __init__
     self._create_worker_process(i)
   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/celery/concurrency/asynpool.py", line 482, in _create_worker_process
     return super()._create_worker_process(i)
   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/billiard/pool.py", line 1141, in _create_worker_process
     on_ready_counter = self._ctx.Value('i')
   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/billiard/context.py", line 179, in Value
     return Value(typecode_or_type, *args, lock=lock,
   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/billiard/sharedctypes.py", line 81, in Value

     lock = ctx.RLock()
File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/billiard/context.py", line 108, in RLock
return RLock(ctx=self.get_context())
     SemLock.__init__(self, RECURSIVE_MUTEX, 1, 1, ctx=ctx)
   File "/usr/local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/billiard/synchronize.py", line 70, in __init__
     sl = self._semlock = _billiard.SemLock(
 OSError: [Errno 38] Function not implemented

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