Every once in a while, I partake in interesting interactions between what is old and what is new.

I found this page in my search for running MacPaint on my machine, an endeavour I ended up abandoning because I couldn't figure out how the fuck to install the MacPaint software in my newly-created old system. That's okay, GIMP works fine for the "work" I do anyways.

In the middle of this little struggle to pirate information which should be freely available is the pesky vectoral class and its weapons of choice: the factory that is intellectual property, the fence that is DRM, and the propaganda that is the anti-pirating sentiment.

But on the opposite side we have the hacker class, that band of lovers of information and its free expansion for all, who've come together around their somewhat-antiquated but ever-useful IRC protocol and built an entire network to easily 1) disseminate humanities store of information and 2) give a huge middle finger to the vectoralists.

What, vectoralists, do you plan on doing once you've gobbled up every single idea and are left with nothing more to satiate your hunger? There's only so many ideas written down throughout human history; surplus of intellectual property is not infinitely sustainable.

The hackers, those on IRC, those artists, librarians, creators, have on their side the infinite potential of information and the vector. Bring down their IRC networks, tape down their mouths so they can't pass along a story, stop their hands from holding a pen and writing down things they'd like to share. It's an impossible task.

I will say, at least it's entertaining having to look for a book on IRC. I never have much reason to hop into an IRC server, but this gives me one and makes me feel like I'm some kind of graybeard or something. And to get a book written 700+ years ago through a relatively recent, yet in my mind old piece of software makes me feel a mixture of nostalgia, pride, excitement, and wonder.

A couple of months ago, I developed an angioma on the left side of my body. I developed one in that same location a couple of years ago as well, but I just picked at it until it went away. Feeling more responsible this time around, I decided to go to the doctor and get it checked. They didn't say much besides telling me to go to a dermatologist, but I decided to go ahead and get blood tests done while I was there, just for the hell of it. Lo and behold, my liver enzyme count is high and I need to go in for a second test. The results of the second test: autoimmune hepatitis! Fast forward to yesterday, after more blood tests and an abdominal ultrasound, when I took my first dose of Prednisone and Azathioprine.

There were many months in between my initial diagnosis and the start of my treatment, so I've had a buffer period where I know I may have this disease, but I don't have to give it much thought. Now, however, I'm faced with the reality that my liver is in danger from none other than myself. I swear, at times I wonder if this is a manifestation of the self-loathing I've always felt toward myself, but I know that that's not necessarily a scientific answer, and it's just me being moody. Speaking of moody, some of the symptoms of Prednisone include mood swings, irritability, and aggression. I've taken it once, so obviously I haven't noticed any of these pop up, but I'm going to keep an eye out and monitor my emotions. I'm a very non-confrontational, non-aggressive person, so I'd like to think that I'll be able to control my emotions even while on the medication and completely avoid aggressive behavior, but I understand that I can't will that into existence. My body will undergo chemical changes, and no amount of thoughts will change that. Regardless, I will keep an eye out for any aggressive behavior.

Prednisone can also cause weight gain and an enlarging of the cheeks. I am not overweight, but I used to be six or so years ago, so I'm self-conscious about weight gain and am scared of it. If I do gain weight, then so be it. A small price to pay for being alive. Anyways, going to the gym is always an option, so I shouldn't resign myself to the possibility of losing any weight I gain.

Drinking alcohol is also off the table now, which isn't really a loss. I hate alcohol, sometimes a bit excessively. The taste of it, the effects it has on your body, and the effects it has on others just make me wonder why anyone in the world willingly drinks. I just don't have a good history with drunk people, and I'm not fond of losing control of my body. If anything, this disease has given me a legitimate reason to turn down drinks, so that's a plus, I guess.

I'm confident that this disease won't kill me, at least any time soon, but it has still made me reflect on my mortality. The body, and the human behind that body, are fallible. They change, sometimes in contradictory ways, like in the case of autoimmune disorders. I'll have to contend with this contradictory process my body is going through and see what road it takes me as I continue my journey. Next stop, liver biopsy!

Over the past two weeks, I've worked on adding a number of notable features to my website:

1. Adding Microformats to all of my pages.
2. Adding Webmentions support to all of my pages.
3. Bridging my website to the Fediverse and to Bluesky.
4. Publishing an RSS feed.
5. Mirroring my recent Letterboxd posts to my Movies page.
6. Addings Tags to my posts.

All of these features are supported by major architectural changes I've made to my custom static site generator.

Microformats

Microformats are a way of marking up HTML to make it easier to represent relevant data. These data can be a number of things, from the contents of a blog post, metadata regarding a blog post (e.g. time published, who the author is, etc.), your social profile, and much more.

For example, this blog post has the following HTML structure:

<article class="h-entry">
  <!-- Metadata such as author info, tags -->
  <hr>
  <div class="e-content">
    <!-- The contents of this page -->
  </div>
</article>

The <article> tag has the class h-entry, which denotes that the contents of this tag will be syndicated. The <div> tag has the class e-content, which represents the actual data being syndicated, A.K.A. the text I've composed for this blog post.

By explicitly marking up the HTML in this way, the data making up my blog post can be parsed easily and then transformed to better fit the presentation of wherever it gets syndicated to. A quick example of this is the Indiewebify.me website, which is used to validate that a site is using Microformats correctly. Here is the validation for this page. As you can see, Indiewebify.me is able to parse the contents and metadata of this blog post.

Webmentions

Webmentions are a way to have conversations and interactions between websites without the need for a central service. Essentially, a website will denote a Webmention server where it can be contacted at. Think of it like a mailbox that holds messages from other people.

The location of this "mailbox" is denoted in an HTML <link> tag. For example:

<link href="https://webmention.io/negatethis.com/webmention" rel="webmention">  

When someone publishes something to their site, let's say Site A, that includes a link to somewhere else, let's say Site B, their publishing software can pull Site B's HTML, look for the link that says where their "mailbox" is, then send a message to that "mailbox." The message is something along the lines of "Hey, me (Site A) has mentioned you here: https://site-a.com/my-cool-post." The Webmention server will store this message, and the owner of Site B can periodically check their mailbox and update their website with any messages people have sent to it.

At the end of most pages on my site, there is a Webmentions section that will contain any Webmentions for that particular page. Currently, the only page that contains any Webmentions is my home page, but my hope is that this will change with the introduction of the next feature.

Bridging to the Fediverse and Bluesky

With Microformats, I have a way of denoting the components of a "post".

With Webmentions, I have a way of receiving "comments".

Putting these two pieces together, I have the basis for a rudimentary social media site. In fact, people from the non-profit A New Social have created a tool called Bridgy Fed to leverage Microformats and Webmentions to bridge sites to other social media platforms, namely the Fediverse and Bluesky.

I've enabled this bridging feature on my own site. What this means in practice is that my site's posts will automatically be converted to a post on the Fediverse / Bluesky, so you can literally follow my site on either of these platforms to receive updates.

The steps for how this works are as follows:

1. All of the posts which I wish to publish have an invisible link in them that points to Bridgy Fed.
2. When I publish a new post, all the links in that post get sent a Webmention, including that invisible link to Bridgy Fed.
3. Bridgy Fed receives this Webmention, essentially notifying it that I've made a new post.
4. Bridgy Fed will get my new post, and use the Microformats to parse it for the author, publish time, contents, etc.
5. Bridgy will use this parsed data to create a new post on the Fediverse / Bluesky post on my behalf.
6. When an interaction occurs on these posts, such as a like or comment, Bridgy Fed will send it to my Webmention "mailbox" so that I can display them on my site if I so please.

This allows me to participate in a wider social media landscape without ever leaving my own web site, where I have full creative control.

Publishing an RSS Feed

While publishing my site's posts to social media is fun, I've also begun publishing an RSS feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, and is a standardized way to post updates to a feed so that people can follow along from their feed readers. You can stick my RSS feed link into a feed reader (my feed reader of choice is Read You | APK link on Android) and have it periodically check for updates, which you can read fully from the feed reader. You never once have to actually visit my site to read its contents!

RSS feeds were a way bigger deal over a decade ago, but even now they're used quite extensively for people to follow podcasts ("or wherever you get your podcasts").

Lots of sites unknowingly publish RSS feeds because Wordpress automatically generates them at /feed.

Some news sites provide RSS feeds for different categories of news. For example, the RSS feed for PBS's Poltics News Hour section is here.

You can technically follow Substack users' posts by adding /feed to the end of their URL and sticking that into a feed reader. You don't get the full contents most of the time, unfortunately, but it's still an easy way to keep up with people's posts without needing to download another damn app!

Just the other day, I found out that Letterboxd provides RSS feeds for every user at their user profile URL + /rss, which gave me an idea...

Mirroring my Letterboxd posts

Now, when I update my site, my recent Letterboxd reviews get mirrored to my Movies page! It does this by parsing my Letterboxd user's RSS feed, then converting the contents to HTML.

The Letterboxd RSS feed has a surprising amount of information. Below is an example of one of the <item>s included in the feed.

<item>
  <title>Petite Maman, 2021 - ★★★★★</title>
  <link>
  https://letterboxd.com/mackwells/film/petite-maman/
  </link>
  <guid isPermaLink="false">letterboxd-review-1186083446</guid>
  <pubDate>Mon, 2 Feb 2026 10:49:11 +1300</pubDate>
  <letterboxd:watchedDate>2026-02-01</letterboxd:watchedDate>
  <letterboxd:rewatch>No</letterboxd:rewatch>
  <letterboxd:filmTitle>Petite Maman</letterboxd:filmTitle>
  <letterboxd:filmYear>2021</letterboxd:filmYear>
  <letterboxd:memberRating>5.0</letterboxd:memberRating>
  <letterboxd:memberLike>Yes</letterboxd:memberLike>
  <tmdb:movieId>749004</tmdb:movieId>
  <description>
    <p><img src="https://a.ltrbxd.com/resized/film-poster/6/6/9/7/4/4/669744-petite-maman-0-600-0-900-crop.jpg?v=c7cbed5a06"/></p> <p>Criterion Challenge 2026 - Film #4</p><p>There's nothing I can say to convey how touching this film was. We were all children once, with big thoughts and big feelings. Every single one of us.</p><p>Ate nothing while watching this.</p>
  </description>
  <dc:creator>MackWells</dc:creator>
</item>  

There's the HTML representation of my review, the movie's TMBD ID, whether I liked the movie, the date I watched it, etc. Enough information to easily just copy my reviews off of Letterboxd and share them elsewhere.

Adding Tags to My Post

My posts can now contain tags, which you can click to take you to other similarly tagged posts. You can also browse all tags at the tags page.

This was just a quality-of-life addition. I used to have tags way back when I built my site using Hugo, but I never re-added them after switching to my custom static site generator.

That is, until I decided to pull the curtain on my old, untouched code and refactor it.

The Technical Part

Feel free to skip this if you don't care about the technical aspects of making this site.

I started programming in Clojure a couple of years ago after I gained an interest in Lisps). Clojure is a Lisp that's hosted on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), so all Clojure code can interoperate with Java code and libraries, making it a pragmatic choice as far as Lisps go. Clojure is not limited to being hosted on the JVM, however. People have created Clojure that targets JavaScript (ClojureScript), .NET (ClojureCLR), Flutter and Dart (ClojureDart), and recently C++ (jank).

A defining characteristic of Clojure is that "code is data." This is meant in a very literal sense. Clojure code is just a bunch of lists.

Take the following Clojure code, which defines a variable x and assigns it the value of 5.

(def x 5)

This code is literally a list of 3 items:

1. def, the function being called.
2. x, the symbol that will store the value.
3. 5, the value being stored in item 2.

This makes handling data, transforming it, and representing it very easy and fun to do in Clojure. For example, in Clojure, it's common to represent HTML using "Hiccup" syntax.

This:

[:div {:class [h-entry]}
  [:a {:href "https://example.com"}
    "Example page"]]

Is equivalent to this HTML:

<div class="h-entry">
  <a href="https://example.com">Example page</a>
</div>

Once again, the Hiccup representation is just a list, where the first item is a keyword for the HTML tag that this list represents. Since it's just a list, we can use the many functions available in Clojure to create and transform lists to programmatically create HTML. That sounds a lot like what static site generators do, huh?

I thought so, too. Years ago, I looked into using Clojure code to create a custom static site generator, found this blog post, pretty much copied it verbatim, and left it at that.

It worked perfectly for a while, but it was hard to add features that I really wanted, like my Music page. When I decided to add the features I mentioned at the beginning of this post, I knew it was time to refactor my code.

How it all works

At the core of the static site generator is statis, a Clojure library containing functions for creating static websites. Basically, stasis takes a hash map where the keys are the page slug and the values are HTML strings.

{"/about/index.html" "<html>Just imagine this is a bunch of HTML</html>"}

And converts it to files on your filesystem.

my_folder
|
l___about
    |
    l___index.html  

That's it. Nothing fancy. All I have to do, then, is create this hash map for all of my pages.

My starting point is a directory, resources, that contains all the files that will turn into my website.

resource
|
|___index.html
|
|___posts
    |
    |___index.html
    |
    |___first-piece.md
    |
    l___what-is-old-and-what-is-new.html

My posts are either Markdown files or HTML files. Each file is composed of two parts:

---
title: First Piece
date: 2020-11-03
type: post
tags: ["technology", "general"]
---

Blah blah blah just yapping.

Everything inbetween the --- are metadata about the page, and everything after are the contents of the page, again, either in Markdown or HTML.

I then grab all of the contents of resources and store them into a hash map.

{"/resources/posts/first-piece.md" "---\ntitle: First Piece\nBLAH BLAH you know the rest"}

From here, I need to change the key to the slug that it will represent on my site, and change the contents of the file into a structured format.

The structured format I decided on has the following shape:

{:metadata {:title "First Piece"
            :date #inst "2020-11-03T10:29:17.000-00:00"
            :type :post
            :tags ["technology" "general"]}
 :raw-hiccup ([:p "Blah blah blah just yapping."])
 :links []
 :slug "/posts/first-piece/index.html"}  

The metadata that were originally inbetween the --- have been transformed into a hash map with appropriate Clojure data types. The contents of the file have been transformed into their Hiccup syntax representation. Any links found in the post are collected so that Webmentions can be searched for and sent, and the slug is placed into the hash map to easily have access to it when formatting a page later.

The result is a "page map" that looks like this.

{"/posts/first-piece/index.html" {:metadata {:title "First Piece"
                                             :date #inst "2020-11-03T10:29:17.000-00:00"
                                             :type :post
                                             :tags ["technology" "general"]}
                                  :raw-hiccup ([:p "Blah blah blah just yapping."])
                                  :links []
                                  :slug "/posts/first-piece/index.html"}}
  

From here, each page's raw-hiccup is placed into a Hiccup list representing the entire HTML document; the <head>, <body>, <header>, <footer>, etc. The resulting Hiccup uses the page's metadata to appriopriately create the page title, add the tag list, the time published information, etc. That Hiccup then gets transformed into the corresponding HTML string and gets added to the structured format of the page under :html.

Thus, creating the final hash map needed for stasis to render the pages is as simple as traversing this "page map" and grabbing the final :html value for all keys.

The very nice thing about this system is that adding special pages is as simple as creating a "page map" for the special page and merging it with the "page map" before rendering everything.

That's how creating my RSS feed works, in fact. I simply create a page map for it, where :html contains the string contents of the RSS feed.

{"/feed.xml" {:html "<rss version="2.0">Just imagine this is an RSS feed</rss>"}}

Then I merge this into the page map before passing it into the stasis function.

Why?

One reason is that I thought having a bigger audience would force me to start writing again. The last time I wrote a blog post was over 2 years ago, and the last time I wrote a blog post that I can say I'm proud of was never! Even this post I'm writing in a rush because I got burnt out from working on my site and don't want to touch it again for a few weeks.

The real reason for this slew of changes is because I found Bridgy Fed and thought, "People being able to follow my site from Bluesky would be kinda cool." That thought led me to add Microformats and Webmentions, and things spiraled from there to the point of obsession and burn out. Ahh if only I poured this much work into crafts or something.

Follow me on the Fediverse at @negatethis.com@negatethis.com or on Bluesky or subscribe to my RSS feed! 🫶

"Man is the greatest being endowed with independence, creativity and consciousness, and a beautiful creature who champions justice. Man, by nature, detests all that is evil and dirty. These unique features constitute his human traits." - Kim Il-Sung

I've thought about this quote a lot the past couple of weeks. The pure optimism and love for the people that radiates out of it is impressive. Even though I don't necessarily agree with the idea that man has a natural disposition to detest "evil", I still love the quote. It becomes easy for people to fall into fatalistic thoughts about all people, so reading the above quote is like a breath of fresh air.

Why is it so easy to hate people? How many times have you heard "I hate humans?" I'm sure I've said in the past week! It's so easy for those words to come out of our mouths, but why? Because we see the suffering most of the world has to endure due to the actions of the Imperial Core? So all of humanity must be hated because the few subjugate the many? It doesn't add up.

Could it be that we really hate the alienating, bourgeois qualities present in some people, and not really people as a whole? Maybe that is why some people seem to want to avoid others as much as possible. But if it's these qualities we truly hate about others, the solution isn't to fall prey to the alienating effect, but instead to join in with them and rid ourselves of these bourgeois qualities together.

Of course, there exists people that deserve hate, I think. Those few that subjugate the many, and those who stand with them. You can't stop fascism or imperialism with love, after all.

There was a time when I felt a lot of anger toward people. Yes, it was my edgy teen years. I remember how I stepped back at one point and realized just how fucking miserable I was. It was awful, disgusting even. I've tried my best to not hate everyone and everything since then. Of course, I still feel miserable sometimes, but there's no reason to bring all of humanity into it. No, we need to learn to trust in the people, not hate them.

              ✧                     ˳☆  ˳       ✧                          ✧    ༚             ✧                                                  ✧        ☆        ˳   ˳              ✧           ✧             ༚                    ☆                                        ✧                    ༚              ༚     ☆  
 ༚            ☆       ˳         ☆          ☆               ☆     ☆          ☆☆☆   ༚       ✧  ༚        ☆    ✧  ✧   ˳ ༚                     ☆    ☆                  ☆      ☆  ༚    ☆☆                     
                  ༚  ☆             ☆    ✧                ☆               ☆   ༚            ✧                  ˳    ☆                  ✧    ☆      ☆   ☆                            ☆                     
             ☆                                ☆         ☆                    ✧             ✧                  ˳    ☆            ☆                                                                       
        ༚           ☆                                                                ☆ ˳             ☆  ˳☆      ✧             ☆                              ☆    ˳ ☆   ☆                  ˳       ˳༚   
             ✧                        ✧        ༚       ☆                                                 ✧                    ☆          ☆   ˳                  ☆                                       

I was out for a walk today when I heard a small bird chirping in the trees, so I went toward the trees and began looking for it. Sadly, I wasn't able to find that little bird, but while I was looking up at the tree, I noticed the clouds. The setting sun was giving the clouds and sky a beautiful light pink hue. Those kinds of sunsets are one of my most favorites! They're proof that nature is simply beautiful or that we can find beauty all around us. Eiter way, we people end up with sights that I would never like to give up.

I began wondering about the stars, though. I live in a major city, so at most I'll see a couple of very faint stars in the sky, one of which usually turns out to be an airplane. I've never been able to see a starry sky like those that people see while out camping in a remote and dark area. I've never been camping! So looking up at the night sky is rather saddening, to be quite honest.

What about the people of the past, though? Back when light pollution was hardly existent and people lived off the land and such. Those people, wherever they may have been, probably saw stars every night of their lives. Hell, sailors used the starry sky as a tool to guide themselves! To them the stars were a tool, and to normal people just living their lives, the stars were just a part of what it meant to be nighttime. Such a bizarre thing to think about. They must not have known how good they had it, specifically in terms of being able to see the stars as clearly as possible, of course. I wonder if they took it for granted, or appreciated the starry sky as much as people now do.

What if WE'RE taking things for granted right now? I'm sure the people at whatever ambiguous time I'm talking about never expected the stars to not be a normal part of people's lives. What if we're not expecting the same for something as mundane as a pink sky during the setting sun? I don't know what the effects that pollution or climate change will have on the color of the sky! One day these pink sunsets could be gone or rare and people will think of us and how we had it good.

No, they will definitely think that if we keep disregarding climate change the way we're doing now. They ARE thinking that, because climate change is and has been affecting people all over the globe. Even then no substantial changes have been happening. It's maddening. We must have a society that has the interests of people all over the world in mind. The current capitalist mode of production is killing us all. We must be rid of it for the sake of everyone.

Sorry if this got ranty! I just wanted to write about the sky and had no plan in mind. Whoops.

Liked the star pattern up top? It was generated in Java using code I found at the link below!

Night Sky Generator

Dreary March has passed us by. Poor March has the duty of transitioning us from winter to spring. That it can do this at all is a miracle, so one shouldn't judge it too harshly when this transition isn't smooth. I am guilty of spending much of March doing just that, so I decided to atone for this by reflecting on the things I was able to do in March despite my many judgments.

What I did

The new beginnings of Spring had an effect on me. I engaged in small talk with some coworkers whom I had previously only exchanged the occasional "hello" with. During those couple of minutes of small talk, I reluctantly agreed to run with them the following Thursday. Not running once in 5 years to running a 5K on a whim was daunting, and I can't say that I enjoyed every second of it, but there's a sense of pride in testing the capabilities of the human body. Every stride I took, I imagined I was Pheidippides running to Athens, minus the death.

On the digital side of March, I've made more changes to my website. Since my last post, I've added an activity feed that supports showing notes, likes, follows, and replies to content across the web / Fediverse / Bluesky. Each entry is created by messaging an XMPP bot a command + content (e.g. /like <url>, /note This is a note!, /follow <profile>, etc.). This allows me to easily update my website from my phone.

What I ate

My partner and I have both been vegan for basically our entire adult lives. My veganism is not from the standpoint of health, but from the standpoint of animal liberation. Animal and human exploitation share a common root, and thus are inextricably linked together. I'd like to expand on this idea one day by writing about Marco Maurizi's Beyond Nature, but I'd have to re-read it first.

Being vegan makes cooking an exciting process for me in two ways:

1. It has forced me to experiences new cuisines, flavors, and vegetables I never would've experienced back when I was a picky eater.
2. It has let me experiment with different ways of emulating and substituting foods that I grew up eating, which has led to a better understanding of how flavors in a dish interact with each other.

On this latter point, in March we bought mung beans and kala namak and used them to make vegan omelettes by following this recipe (use an ad-blocker). It's simple: you soak mung beans overnight, then you blend them with various spices, including kala namak, otherwise known as black salt, which has a sulfur-like taste that's reminiscent of eggs. The result is a "batter" that you can pan-fry to create an omelette-like crepe, or break apart to create a "scrambled egg." The end product is incredible, and we've done this two more times since first trying it.

What I listened to

My music taste has not changed much since the end of last year, except for the obscene amount that I've listened to Magdalena Bay's Imaginal Disk. Mica's voice is perfect for the upbeat, dreamy, energetic songs and the slower-paced songs on the album. What drew me in to the album were the former kinds of songs, but I've come to appreciate the slower songs like Angel on a Satellite.

Besides Imaginal Disk, I listened to Diabolica by Bontempi and Así de grandes son las ideas by Calle 13. Bontempi is one of the bands that the Gillis sisters were a part of after Plumtree broke up. Diabolica reminds me a lot of Plumtree's song Go! both in length and in energy. Listening to Calle 13 mainly fills me with nostalgia about my childhood when I would listen exclusively to MTV Latino and whatever my sister was into.

What I read

I started March by reading Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, only to be told by Schopenhauer to not even think of reading this before first reading his dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. I took his suggestion seriously, and read his dissertation all the way through, only to be met with lots of confusion. So much so that the next book I opted to read was How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler.

How to Read a Book was about the four "levels" of reading: the elementary level, the inspectional level, the analytical level, and the syntopical level. Besides these levels and the best way to actively read, a major takeaway from this book was that it is not necessary to understand a book the first time through, and that one should read a book all the way through regardless of how much they understand it. The first read will be the basis for better understanding it on future reads. This implies that one should re-read books.

This is an idea that I've come across constantly. Nietzsche urges the reader of his books to have read and re-read his previous works. Schopenhauer insisted on reading his dissertation and Kant's works multiple times over before reading The World as Will and Representation.

There is no shame in not understanding a book the first time through and re-reading it in the future. This gave me renewed vigor for re-reading On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Beyond Nature some day.

To break up these two non-fiction books, I also read Banana Yoshimoto's Kitchen. Haruki Murakami's way of writing women in Norwegian Wood was one of my least favorite parts of the book, so when I saw several Instagram reels saying, "if you like Haruki Murakami's writing style but hate how he writes women, then you should read Banana Yoshimoto," I took the suggestion. You can read my thoughts on Kitchen on Pagebound / Goodreads.

What I thought about

A quick thought I had in the middle of reading How to Read a Book regarded analogies and the best way to utilize them.

An analogy is useful insofar as it complements a point that has already been established and argued for, not as the basis itself for establishing a point. What I mean is that analogies are best used as supplementary material so that a reader can better understand the argument being made. The argument has primacy over the analogy and is independent of it.

For example, let's say I believe that reading is made up of separate acts that come together to form a graceful, harmonious activity. I present my reasonings for this and argue in favor of it so that others may see my case and choose to agree with me. After arguing this, I can then compare reading to another activity, such as skiing, to illustrate how the separate acts that one needs to keep in mind while skiing are combined to produce harmonious movement like smooth turns. The analogy of skiing is supplemental, and if the original argument was solid, it can stand on its own without the analogy present.

An analogy should not be the starting point for an argument. It is dishonest to say that reading and skiing are similar activities, present the example of harmonious movement in skiing, then say that because reading and skiing are similar, reading must also be harmonious.

I see that a lot online, where someone will read (the headline of) a news article, then in a comment form an analogy about this situation with another situation, and make an argument about the current situation from the proposed analogy. Their starting point is the analogy, not the situation presented in the article, so they skip developing an argument or material analysis on the contents of the article.

This is something I'd like be careful about doing in my thinking and writing going forward.

What I'd like to do next

Now that spring is here, the weather has gotten sunnier and warmer. Once it's consistently warm and the rainy days begin to clear up, I'd like to enjoy the sun and go bike riding.

The Spring Lisp Game Jam has been announced for May 15th to May 25th, and I may join in. I have never made a game before, whether using Lisp or another programming language, but the idea sounds fun and like a good opportunity to better my Clojure skills or learn a new Lisp (maybe Fennel).

A couple of weeks ago I revisted the McMansion Hell blog for the first time in probably a couple of years, and boy was it as "fun" as I remember.

I think the reason I enjoy this blog so much is because I've come across these kinds of houses essentially my entire life, but it wasn't really until I discovered this blog years back that I began to really LOOK at them and see them for what they are: hideous demonstrations of white middle-class decadence. It seems so obvious now, who else would find these monstrosities appealing? Well, trick question, because I once found them appealing.

I've never lived in such a house, thank goodness, because I've always lived in the poor neighborhoods and in apartments or small houses. But because I've lived in the poorer areas, visiting the middle-class areas made me associate these McMansions with beauty, "fanciness", and money. So I had a warped idea of these houses being what one should aspire to, and thus they had to be appealing.

Obviously I've changed my tune since those times, and have actually been able to visit the insides of McMansions and see them through the McMansion Hell blog. The first thing I tend to think is, "what the hell does anyone need all this space for?" Seriously, so many of these houses have so much empty space that I feel like I'm in some kind of sensory deprivation tank. Are the people that live here afraid of touching things? It's so odd. If a house isn't full of empty space, then there's chairs strewn about in every space possible. It's like these people lost a game of musical chairs once and became extremely paranoid for the rest of their lives.

This obsession with having as much space as possible really gets to me. I just don't see the necessity, but the desire is there. Maybe someone can make me understand, but I doubt it.

2025 UPDATE: This post references a page I've since removed from my site. I've also switched from Hugo to a custom static site generator built using Clojure.

I recently added a new page to my website that displays the contents of my twtxt file in a Twitter-like format. I did this as practice for what we've been learning in the Python course I'm taking in college, and also to have a page where I can throw out short-form thoughts for things that don't merit a whole blog post. I decided to use the twtxt format because it's super simple and has a wide network of people using it. Truth be told, though, I don't completely understand how it works, so who knows if I've set it up correctly.

On the topic of how I've set it up, it's quite simple. The twtxt.txt format looks like this:

2021-10-29T00:51:20-04:00       This is a test yo
2021-10-30T22:46:39-04:00       May do a write-up on how I got my site's twtxt page set up and built using Hugo. It's the Saturday before Halloween, though. Maybe Monday

Every line of the twtxt.txt file has an RFC 3339 formatted date-time string and then the "tweet", delimited by a tab character ("\t"). This means parsing it should be incredibly simple.

My site is built using the static site generator, Hugo. It follows this folder structure:

personal-site/
|- archetypes/
|  |- default.md
|- config.toml
|- content/
|  |- about/
|  |  |- ...
|  |- blogroll/
|  |  |- ...
|  |- bookmarks/
|  |  |- ...
|  |- gemini/
|  |  |- ...
|  |- posts/
|  |  |- ...
|  |- twtxt/
|  |  |- index.md
|  |  |- twtxt.txt
|- data/
|  |- twtxt.json
|- layouts/
|- public/
|  |- ...
|- resources/
|- scripts/
|  |- twtxttojson.py
|- static/
|- themes/
|  |- personal-theme/
|  |  |- layouts/
|  |  |  |- twtxt/
|  |  |  |  |- single.html
|  |  |  |  |- ...
|  |  |  |- ...
|  |  |- ...

In the scripts folder, I have a Python script twtxttojson.py that parses through the twtxt.txt file found at "personal-site/content/twtxt/twtxt.txt", converts it to a JSON file with the format:

[
 {
  "date": "2021-10-29T00:51:20-04:00",
  "content": "Test\n"
 },
 
 {
  "date": "2021-10-30T22:46:39-04:00",
  "content": "May do a write-up on how I got my site's twtxt page set up and built using Hugo. It's the Saturday before Halloween, though. Maybe Monday"
 },
]

Then it places that file at "personal-site/data/twtxt.json". I've uploaded the code for the script to Gitea.

Now that the contents of the twtxt.txt file are in the JSON format, I should be able to extract the info from it to build out the page with Hugo. Hugo can iterate through JSON files using the range function. Since twtxt.json is found in the "data/" folder, iterating through it is just:

{{ range .Site.Data.twtxt }}

The JSON file's keys are "date" and "content", so using that data is as simple as doing the following inside Hugo's range function:

<p>{{ .content }}</p>
<p>{{ .date | time.Format "Jan 2, 2006" }}</p>

The time.Format "Jan 2, 2006" part after .date is simply formatting the date so that it's easy to understand.

Make sure to close off the range function with {{ end }}.

Personally, I put all of the tweet data inside of a div so that it would be easier to style and organize, like this:

{{ range .Site.Data.twtxt }}
    <div class="tweet">
        <p>{{ .content }}</p>
        <p>{{ .date | time.Format "Jan 2, 2006" }}</p>
    </div>
{{ end }}

From here, all I did was apply custom styling to the page and voila!

It's important that the script is called before the site is rebuilt so that the page has the most up-to-date "tweets". My site is hosted on https://envs.net, and I apply changes to it by doing them locally on my machine then pushing them to the server using git. I have a post-receive hook on the git server that does specified things after I push any changes. I can use this script to make sure to run my Python script before rebuilding the site.

#!/bin/sh

cd $HOME/personal-site/scripts
python3 twtxttojson.py
cd $HOME/personal-site
hugo

That's about all the steps I went through to make that new page. It was a lot of fun, especially the styling since it's quite different from the rest of my site's styling. It's pretty bare-bones since it can only show my "tweets" and not other people on the whole twtxt "network", but it's really meant as a pretty representation of my twtxt.txt file rather than a timeline.

Whoops, it's been a minute.

I don't remember how I happened to stumble upon the Gemini protocol (sorry, Gopher readers) or how I decided that it would be a good place to "set up shop," but here I am. As far as I can tell, I'm not really looking for anything when it comes to this protocol and the whole space it has created, or maybe I am and I don't know it. Gemini has been growing a lot in the past couple of months. It makes me wonder if other people came to use it looking for something in particular.

My first guess, which I reckon accounts for a lot of people on here, is the simplicity of it all. There's a certain beauty to simplicity and straightforwardness for all things, not just Gemini. It's very admirable when someone manages to convey an idea or subject in a simple, easy-to-understand manner. This skill is particularly important when talking about an analysis of the world. The world is an incredibly complex system of processes, so condensing any analysis down in such a way that makes it easy for anyone to understand is nothing short of poetry. This is what I appreciate from the works of Lenin and Stalin, and the opposite is what I despise about other philosophical texts I've read. I'd like to be simple and straigtforward in the way I write as well.

I started a new job at a fast food joint recently and I've definitely be able to describe my feelings simply: I feel like shit. I've worked in fast food before, but never full-time. I can't understand how people do it. My home is no longer a home, it's a rest-stop between the times I'm at work. I can't enjoy my time at home because all I feel is dread about going back to work. I become anxious about squeezing as much possible into the time I'm home that I end up not really doing anything. I'd probs be better if I were doing something I actually enjoyed, but I'm serving people ice cream and taking orders for 9+ hours a day. Kudos to the people who do this on a daily basis, because they must have strong spirits to keep it up. Maybe I just have a weak spirit, though. Sometimes I even feel as though I'm a failure for not being able to mentally do this when so many other people do it and have done it for 20+ years, but this just isn't what I want. I have no plans on working here after the summer, thankfully, but I'm already tired of it.

I told myself I'd read three books before summer's end: On Poetry and Style by Aristotle, Stalin: History and Criticism of A Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo, and Building Internet Firewalls by Elizabeth Zwicky. If I don't do at least that, I'll consider this summer a failure, so I better start cracking.

What have you been up to recently? What are you planning on doing? It's hard to imagine how many different answers there'd be from people all across Geminispace. For how small this place is, there seems to be an endless amount of people, all with vastly different but interesting lives. New people show their faces all the time and establish themselves and their own space. There's so many new Gemini pages with just a "Hello, World!!," "Work in progress," "Come back soon!," etc. What are those people doing? Will they ever come back? How is their life coming along?Will they find time to fill their space and establish themselves? What's brought them to Gemini?

It's a mystery for now.

I've done a disservice to the pages of Marguerite Porete's Mirror and the works of Hadewijch by not etching them into my thoughts, into the folds of my brain. No matter, though, as Mechthild of Magdeburg suggests, "You should read it through nine times in faith, humility, and devotion." Again, Nietzsche provides a similar sentiment when he states, "To be sure, one thing is necessary above all if one is to practice reading as an art ... rumination." I will simply read again, slower, again, even slower if need be. There's no rush, as long as there is rumination in service to my goal: to find the correct ethic for becoming.

The writings of the beguines have struck a cord with me. In Porete's concept of the Annihilated Soul was infinite possibility, living without a why, without the need for those pesky Holy Virtues. Here was an ethic I'd like to undertake.

But the self-doubt sets in, and I think to myself, "What the hell do you know? There could be a million things to understand, a million things you didn't consider. You need to know more before you even consider starting any sort of project." So I need to start at the beginning, why I became so infatuated with the beguines and their conception of Love and the annihilation of the Soul. I'll let Plumtree's Tropical summarize that for me:

But I'm sick of your morals

I'm sick of them

(Sick of them)

Yes, for my introduction to the beguines was through Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch, where Federici lay flat the disciplinary power of those morals and virtues brought about by the bourgeoisie and the Mechanical philosophers. There's was a program of self-hatred, of "a constant battle between the lower and higher faculties of the soul" that necessitated a disciplining of that beastly thing we call a body by way of bourgeois morality, of Reason. At the core of the Mechanical/Cartesian model of the human is that hatred, at first glance directed to the self, at second glance directed toward the newly-created other, the "individual identity," which came into a master/slave relationship with our soul.

This view of the self, the one with Reason and intellect above those beastly and unrefined bodily needs and emotions, has persisted to this day. Everywhere you find it, you'll find that same self-hatred, that limiting of human potential. This is what morality is good for.

It shouldn't be a surprise, then, that I found the contents of the Mirror so enticing, entertaining even. Those who follow me on Instagram can attest to that, as I constantly clowned on Reason throughout my time reading it. No more than Porete herself decided to, though.

Porete says that the Annihilated Soul has let go of the Holy Virtues as a guiding force, and has no Will but the Will of Love/God. The Annihilated Soul sees no use for Reason, and has shedded the need for Holy Virtues by oneing herself with God; she has become extra-moral, consumed by the ethic of annihilation. A shedding of morals and the taking on of an ethic that leaves possibilities of asking what one might do, not limiting human potential. It's in the Mirror that I first saw a possibility of becoming outside of the rigidity of morality.

But again, the self-doubt creeps in. Perhaps I should give a more careful study to morality if I wish to find something outside of it. Besides, one of the greatest writers on morality, Nietzsche, has caught my eye in the past as I've found accounts of his concept of the overman to be at least vaguely similar to the concept of the Annihilated Soul. So I've now ventured into the works of Nietzsche, specifically his Genealogy of Morals with the help of Daniel Conway's guide.

Nietzsche begins his investigation of morals without an assumption of an almost mechanical coherency and temporal consistency of morals. Do not lack in the historical spirit! Do not be overcome by the democratic prejudice! And see this: "a concept denoting political superiority always revolves itself into a concept denoting superiority of soul."

Sure, Nietzsche. I'll gladly see where this goes.

FYI to any readers I may have, I just wanted to let y'all know that I've created a new gallery page on my website! Sometimes I like to make funky 'lil pictures and I thought it would be fun to share them! Hope you enjoy them ☺️

                ... __-__ ...
              .:=o=:     :=o=:.
             /  `''       `''  \
            (  .             .  )
             \ `-------------' /
              `. `.`._|_.'.' .'
              / `. `.___.' .'`.
             //|  `-.___.-' \\|
         .."": / /\ /\ /\ |\ ::""..
        /   : /.'  V  V  \' \: :   \
        |  :                    :  |
        |  :                    :  |
        |  :                    :  |
        |  :                    :  |
        |  :                    :  |
        |  :                    :  |
        |  :                    :  |
        |  |:                  :|  |
        |  \ :                : /  |
        |   : `.            .' :   |
        \|||'  .`-.______.-'.  `|||/
               |  |      |  |
               |  |      |  |
               |  |      |  |
               |  |      |  |
               |  |      |  |
               |  |      |  |
               |  |      |  |
               |  |      |  |
               /  \      /  \
              ////V     ////V

Today I took some time to work on ASCII art because it's a fun little hobby. My art seems too rigid and "tracey." I don't take advantage of things like the letter J and I haven't incorporated any sort of texturing using # or %. I'd like to get to a point where I can make art similar to that you see in pftech or ufetch, a minimal amount of characters that still provide lots of detail and style. Until then, enjoy this Kermit.

             __
            /##\
            \###|
             |##|
              \##\
               )##| ________
               ;--;/'''''\-';
               \  /I     |  |
                ||)_(--._|  |
               _||-.    _:-`||
            ,'O/    ;.-` |##||
           :_.--._-'i    |##|;
           (  __  )  |   |,-`;
           | :__: |,_| ,-`_.;I
         ,O|______|O/,',.'.'  J
        :           ;:'`':i   /
       ,`'---------';:   ; ``'
       )o/ / / / o| |;`'`
      / / / / / / |,'
      \/ / / / /.'`
       `'~._.-'`

I was bored in class the other day so I decided to try to make an ASCII train since it's been so long since I last made ASCII art. Enjoy!

My current daily driver is a Thinkpad E590 that I was gifted /in order to/ have a laptop for college. I was running Windows 10 dual-booted with Linux Mint for a while, but I've been runnning strictly KDE Neon on it for a couple of months now.

I tried running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed on it as well for a bit, but the 5.10 kernel update, along with some stupid custom GRUB config on my part, broke my install and I had to revert back to KDE Neon with some of my files gone.

As much as I love messing around with my computer and running a rolling release distro or theming my desktop, I need my computer to actually work when I want it to work so that I can safely and easily do my schooling. So I figured I would buy an older, inexpensive laptop to have for fiddling around with without having to worry about breaking it or not.

Cue my birthday, when my partner <3 bought me an old Thinkpad T60 (specs: Intel Core Duo T2400 / 1.83GHz and 1GB RAM) for $30! I'd call that a hell of a steal, personally. So I got it and...it did not include a battery, hard drive, or a hard drive caddy. Bummer, but I knew that when she bought it so I bought a new battery, hard drive caddy, and got some free hard drives from work. Two of the hard drives were throwing I/O errors, which prompted me to open up the laptop to take a look at the hard drive connector, a very simple process thanks to the fine build quality of the older Thinkpads. Sadly, I'm an idiot, and I accidentally screwed a hole into the palm rest and made two more dimples in it as I was screwing everything back together. No damage was caused to the machine, thankfully, but wow I'm a dingus.

It turned out that the hard drives were just broken, so I got some other ones and BOOM everything is working flawlessly! I promptly installed OpenBSD i386 since the current CPU is 32-bit. Besides failing to install the comp68.tgz set, everything went smoothly and I booted up to a fresh OpenBSD install. I've no real experience with OpenBSD, so I'm learning as I go.

First things first, I ran man afterboot and read through the recommendations on what to do next. I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything man afterboot suggested, whoops. First things first for real this time, I copied /etc/examples/doas.conf into /etc/doas.conf /in order to/ have doas set up for me to run things as root. The default config has it so that any user in the :wheel group can run as root, and you'll be prompted for your password every time you run doas!

Second things second, I had to get WiFi up and running. I got my old laptop, downloaded wpi-firmware-3.2p1.tgz from here onto a flash drive, mounted the flash drive into my "new" Thinkpad T60, and extracted the contents of wpi-firmware-3.2p1.tgz into /etc/firmware/. I couldn't believe how simple it was! After this, I was able to connect to an open network my University has using ifconfig, like so:

(Never run commands you find online unless you know exactly what they do!!!! Especially any of my commands, because I don't know what I'm doing!!!)

-> # means to run as root, whether by being the root user or using doas

-> $ means to run as non-root user

# ifconfig wpi0 up # wpi0 is my network device. Yours may vary.
# ifconfig wpi0 nwid "SSID" -wpa # Replace SSID with the name of the network you want to connect to. -wpa means to diable WiFi Protected Access, because this is an open network
# dhclient wpi0

After this, I successfully connected to the network. I looked at the list of mirrors here, chose one, and put it into /etc/installurl. I then ran:

# fw_update # Update all needed firmware
# syspatch # Apply any system patches needed for vulnerabilities
# pkg_add -uv # Update any packages you may have on your system

All updates should be installed now.

I don't want to stay on this open network since it's meant for people's personal entertainment devices and such, it's not the "official" University network for students to use day-to-day. That network is a WPA2-Enterprise network, so it's a good idea to have wpa_supplicant manage that kind of network. To do this:

# pkg_add -i wpa_supplicant # Installs the wpa_supplicant package

Add this info to /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf using your text editor of choice, with a root user:

network={
	SSID="SSID" # Replace with the name of the network
	key_mgmt=WPA-EAP
	phase2="auth=MSCHAPV2"
	identity="USERNAME" # Your identity provided to you by the University
	password="PASSWORD"
}

Keep in mind that info may vary based on your network settings

# rcctl enable wpa_supplicant
# ifconfig wpi0 up
# ifconfig wpi0 nwid "SSID" wpa wpaakms 802.1x up
# wpa_supplicant -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -D openbsd -i wpi0
# dhclient wpi0

# You can also use rcctl to set wpa_supplicant flags for when it starts up:

# rcctl set wpa_supplicant flags -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf -D openbsd -i wpi0

You should be connected to a University network after running these steps.

The Thinkpad T60 is a very old laptop, so battery isn't going to be a killer feature or anything. I haven't been able to run any specific tests, but the battery has lasted enough to get me through at least one lecture, and that's good enough for me since I can charge it between lectures.

There is a similar utlity to tlp on OpenBSD included in base, called apmd. Theoretically it should help extend battery life to some degree. Again, I haven't been able to run tests so I can't say for sure, but I doubt it hurts to activate it.

# rcctl enable apmd
# rcctl set apmd flags -A -z 5 # 5 is the percent at which the system will be suspended if not connected to the charger

Also, I've had a lot of trouble actually being able to gracefully shut down my laptop. Running doas shutdown now only stops all services and immediately restarts them. I could also use the physical button, but I like having "graceful" ways of doing it. Luckily, I found that running doas halt -p actually shuts everything down correctly. Hooray!

So far this is the extent at which I've configured the laptop. I've downloaded Firefox onto it to test it out and ooooo boy. I can't open Preferences witout Firefox crashing from memory problems. I can barely have four tabs open before my 1GB of RAM is depleted and my laptop just dramatically slows down.

I pretty much expected these problems, though, so I prepared by ordering a new T7200 CPU, along with a 2 GB RAM stick. The best CPU actually compatible with the Thinkpad T60 motherboard is the T7600, but the T7200 is much cheaper so I've bought that one. Also, the motherboard can identify 4 GB of RAM, but only actually use 3 GB, hence why I've only got an extra 2 GB RAM stick to go with the 1 GB I had and nothing greater.

I don't want to do a whole lot with the laptop until I get the new CPU and RAM so that I could install the 64-bit version of OpenBSD and have a more "permanent" install. So I'll have another post in the near future as I experiment with OpenBSD and learn more about it and the Thinkpad T60.

So far, though, I've had a lot of fun configuring OpenBSD and experimenting with such old hardware. It may not be the best, but it'll be interesting seeing how far I can get with such hardware.

Hello whoever happens to be reading this! Welcome to my first little write-up to get things started here.

I'm sure if you're browsing Gemini, it's likely you have some problems with how the current Web works. Maybe you have some underlying problems with the technology of the Web, or maybe the culture surrounding it, especially social media. I'm absolutely nowhere near smart enough to fall into the former category, I'm more of the latter camp.

The current Web is a very alienating place. No matter where you are or how you browse it, there's always some sort of tension accompanying you, never letting up. That's because the Web isn't made for you or me, or at least not the real you or me. The Web in its current form is made for the you that is a consumer. You're bombarded with advertisements, with little pieces of UX made to grab your attention and send you somewhere useless and unrelated, with pages not catered to a good reading experience. As Zuboff, author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power said, "you're something even more degrading [than the product]: an input for the real product" (Biddle, 2019). We've been commodified to such a degree that we've been dissected down to mere inputs. That's who we are on the Web, a series of inputs, not a real person who wants to write or read the work of others, to establish a community that they can truly engage with as their completely real selves.

Of course, I realize that there are exceptions. Plenty of people in the FLOSS Movement have understood this and designed their sites or programs to not reduce people to such a degree and they deserve praise for all their hard work. However, most of the Web is alienating and doesn't allow for actually engaging with its content or the people behind that content.

Social media is a big one. The Web is a big network of commodified people interacting with each other, reproducing this commodification with the more we post because we don't post ourselves, we post carefully crafted represenatations of our commodified selves. "The fetish of representation replaces our human relationships" (Empty Hands, 2020). Hell you could even say that's what happening right now with this post, who knows? Regardless, it's an important understanding of how people interact with each other on the Web as a result of their commodification. Understanding can lead to change.

Sources:

Biddle, S. (2019, February 02). "A Fundamentally Illegitimate Choice": Shoshana Zuboff on the Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Retrieved November 05, 2020, from Intercept Article

Empty Hands. (2020, April 04). Why Social Media Feels So Bad: Alienation in the Time of Coronavirus. Retrieved November 05, 2020, from Empty Hands History

               __
             /`/ )     ___
            /\/ ,`   /` / )
           / / /    / \/ ,`
 __.-.__,*```'". _.'__/_/
/##\ /##\    ",-' _/_,-'
\##/ \##/  "   `---` )
 `-. ._' "   " "  " ,'
   |_| `/..|...|..-'
 _/    / / |  /|
     _/     \   `-.

Lately I've been hanging out with some flies. A couple of days ago we left the door open for a while and accidentally let some flies inside. Of course, I refuse to kill them as that wouldn't be very vegan and I won't bother trying to show them the door since guiding flies out is nowhere near as easy as guiding them inside, so I've let them buzz around and annoy me, waiting for them to die by themselves.

Flies are way more interesting than I had ever figured. I've spent some time staring at them instead of working on my final papers, and the way they move around is sort of funny in a way. Especially when they suddenly just stop and start to rub their legs together. I found that endearing and decided to look up why they do that. Apparently they do it to clean themselves! That's pretty cute if you ask me. All this time it turns out flies are just trying to stay clean, although their definition of clean is probably much different than ours. Stil, by the looks of it they're clean freaks because they do it quite often.

The thought of them being clean freaks makes me imagine them freaking out about germs like a germophobe anytime they land. What if they're so germophobic that somewhere out there there's a "Bubble Boy" fly, just flying around in a plastic bubble trying hard not to touch anything. I guess a more modern equivalent to that movie would be "Everything, Everything" or "Five Feet Apart." I dont know, there's too many of these kinds of movies to remember them all. The important thing is that there are definitely fly equivalents to those movies in some fucked up alternate Cronenberg universe. Or a universe made by whoever wrote "The Fly."

While it was interesting to have a good look at flies the past couple of days, I very much don't want to do it again so I'll make sure we don't leave the door open. They're cute in their own way, but they don't belong inside my house. They don't really even belong on these blog posts, I've just got nothing else going on at the moment. Sorry to whoever happens to read this. I hope you enjoy the ASCII art.

If you experience game breaking stuttering in Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on Linux, try switching to an older version of Proton, such as 3.x

Back in 2013 or so, I played Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition on an old VAOI laptop that at one point ran Windows, and at another point ran Linux Mint. Although it wasn't the best laptop, the game ran flawlessly...wait no it didn't. I just got used to playing it at 23 FPS hehe.

I saw no reason to continue playing after beating it once or twice, so I put the game down for a couple of years.

Now, I've got a ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 that should be able to run the game flawlessly. And yet, I boot up a new character and experience absolutely horrendous stuttering. I'm talking heavy stuttering every second that makes the game boot you out for having a low framerate. What happened??? Even my VAOI years ago gave me better FPS than this.

Why not just buy Dark Souls: Remastered? It has a platinum rating on ProtonDB.

Because I do not want to ❤️.

I just happened to notice someone online had the same issue starting with Windows 10, which gave me an idea. I switched to a lower version of Proton, one of the 3.x versions. That seemed to have fixed the game!

It's a shame for Windows players. Who knows how they'd fix this problem. Move back to Windows 7?

Earlier today I read a piece on the incredible Hegel's Bagels site.

The particular piece I read was "Introduction to the Dialectic of the Good" where Coleman Gariety describes the good and uses the dialectic to derive optimism, pessimism, etc. from the good. I do not yet understand the dialectic in a comprehensive way, but I plan to develop an understanding of it that will help me study dialectical materialism and, by extension, Marxism.

On the topic of the Gariety's piece, though, I'd like to focus on the dialectical relationship between optimism and pessimism.

I know one too many people that fall into a void of pessimism about the future and about humans. On some point I understand this sentiment given the ongoing contradictions going on around us that further expose the destruction of Earth. However, to conclude that "goodness is not" without considering its negation, "goodness is" means you are coming to an incomplete conclusion.

This pessimism is considerably annoying when it's among leftists. Having a pessimistic view of people without an optimistic view is taking a non-dialectical approach to viewing the world and is not having faith in the people. If you don't have faith in the people that you say you're fighting for, then why are you fighting? Shouldn't you have at least some faith in the people whose liberation you're fighting for? If you come to these questions, then it's a good time to re-evaluate yourself and your way of thinking.

Needing to re-evaluate yourself after self-critique is not a "bad" thing, and in fact self-critique is important. In the spirit of that, I invite anyone who may want to critique this post to do it at the email I've given on the "Contact" page. I am no expert in anything I write so there's always room to improve my ideas or re-evaluate them, so if you want to help me do that then go right ahead.

Given that the New Year is upon us, I thought I would share Italian communist Antonio Gramsci's thoughts on the New Year.

“Sotto la Mole” 1916-1920

Antonio Gramsci

NEW YEAR’S DAY

Every morning, when I wake up again under the vault of the sky, it feels like a new year to me.

That’s why I hate these fixed-term New Years that end up turning life and the human spirit into a sort of business with a final statement and a balance sheet and a budget for the up-and-coming management. It makes us lose all sense of continuity, both in life and in spirit. We end up actually believing that there is an interval between one year to the next, and that a new life is about to begin; and we make resolutions, and regret our past mistakes etc., etc.. In general, that’s what’s wrong with dates.

They say that chronology is the backbone of history; and I admit it is. But we must also admit that there are only four or five fundamental dates that anyone actually has stuck in their head, dates that have marked history. They, too, are New Years. The new years of Roman history, or of the Middle Ages, or of modern times. And they have become so overwhelming and so fossilizing that sometimes we are shocked when we find ourselves thinking that life in Italy started in 752, and that 1490 or 1192 are like mountains that humanity crossed in an instant to find itself in a new world, in a new life. So the date becomes an obstacle, a wall that stops us from seeing that history actually unravels along the same, fundamental, unchanged line, with no sudden stops, like when the reel of film breaks at the cinema, and there is an interval of blinding light.

That’s why I hate New Year’s Day. I would like every morning to be a new year. I want to come to terms with who I am every day, and innovate myself every day. No scheduled periods of rest. I want to choose my breaks myself, when I am drunk with frenetic activity and want to draw on my animality to regain strength. No spiritual *’travettism’. I would like every hour of my life to be a new one, and yet in continuity with the preceding hours. No festivities played in collective compulsory rhythm, to be shared with total strangers I could care less about. We don’t have to be festive just because our grandfathers’ grandfathers, etc. were. It is sickening.

I look forward to socialism for this reason also. It will throw all these dates into the trash, all the dates which no longer make an impression on our spirit and, even if we invented new ones, at least they would be ours, and not the ones we are expected to accept without reservation from our extremely foolish ancestors.

(January 1, 1916)

Translation by © Matilda Colarossi

This excerpt copied from https://paralleltexts.blog/2015/12/31/antonio-gramsci-on-new-years/

Beauty and the beautiful aren't often on my mind, in any sense of the terms. Although, as I typed that sentence out, I thought back on the day when I commented on how beautiful my partner looked in her new sunglasses and how pretty the day was thanks to the sun finally coming out after days of snow. Does that latter comment constitute "beauty?" Is there a difference between "pretty" and "beautiful?"

"For Burke (1757) 'an eternal distinction' between the Sublime and the Beautiful is that the former is founded on pain, thus capable of producing the strongest emotion that the mind is able to feel, whereas the latter is founded on pleasure." - from Ohnuki-Tierney's Kamikaze Diaries: Reflections of Japanese Student Soldiers.

While beauty may be founded on pleasure, would that necessarily mean that anything that causes pleasure is beautiful, in a less conventional sense?

I feel like I derive pleasure from many things: the feel of a cool breeze on my face, the shining of the sun after long ugly days, the thought that people I love may be happy, the nostalgic chills an old song gives, or the silent pride I feel when I actually give time to decipher the mess of thoughts and emotions I have in my head. Are all of these a thing of beauty, then? Maybe it would just be easier to not think about it and say "yes!"

Behind all of these seemingly beautiful moments there's the existence of the ugly: the snowy days that give rise to the pleasure of the sun, the fact that the people I love may not necessarily be happy, or the countless days where I don't bother poking and prodding at my head and allow shit to rummage around in there. All of these seem like points that inspire pain, or are founded on pain, such as the Sublime is. I don't actually know what the Sublime means, I'm just talking out of my ass and letting that quote do some heavy-lifting. Still, there seems to be elements of pain behind these "beautiful" acts.

Lol I really don't wanna come out of this with the boring conlusion that "pain is beautiful" or whatever. I don't think it is. But pain, pleasure, and beauty obviously have a relationship with each other.

They're all kissy among themselves.

Fuck this I'm going to bed.

I was reading some work on Nietzsche's ethics today, and some of it made me think back on the Mirror.

Apparently, Nietzsche characterizes Christianity's desire for the "otherworldly" as life-denying, likely because focusing on an afterlife and the system of moral values imposed as necessary for access to that afterlife denies the potential of life, negating the will to power, or life itself.

The Mirror, while being a work of Christian mysticism, does not seem particularly concerned with the afterlife as it does with creating an ethic centered around oneing oneself with God and His will. Love even says that the Annihilated Soul "possesses no comfort, nor affection, nor hope in a creature which God has created, nor in heaven, nor in earth, but only in the goodness of God." The Mirror focuses on overcoming oneself, affirming the potential of life, the will to power, rather than negating it by focusing on the afterlife.

Also, this Soul is not commanded or encumbered by the Church's virtues, just like Nietzsche's Übermensch (not the Nazi's interpretation) self-overcomes moral values to actively express the will to power.

There lay similarities in Porete's Annihilated Soul and Nietzsche's Übermensch, but the Mirror is from the 1300s while Nietzsche wrote in the 1800s. Looks like there's more to be found in older texts than what I first assumed.

Porete was a Beguine, and from what I've seem from another Beguine, Hadewijch, their work is similar. Studying more of the works of the Beguines may yield a lot of good stuff, I think.

Recently, I was browsing Hacker News and came upon Jakob Greenfeld's piece The simple system I'm using to stay in touch with hundreds of people. Feel free to read this piece, as it's not very long and it could prove useful to some people. A quick summary of it is that Jakob managed to implement Derek Sivers's method of staying in touch with hundreds of people, by which you categorize people into four levels of importance that dictate how often you should contact them. Sort of like MySpace's top friends feature but even more punishing.

Although Greenfeld's piece was genuinely interesting, I came out of it rather disappointed. For as good as his method of keeping in touch with people may be, it's not something I would feel comfortable doing myself or being a part of.

For one, I have no desire to categorize people into different levels of importance. I don't even think it's possible to do that, and I'm sure the people I'm contacting wouldn't be comfortable knowing that they're merely a D list acquaintance to me. Sivers refers to the D list people as "demoted," which surprised me at first until I found out he's an entrepeneur. Founder of CD Baby, in fact. Weird way of refering to people when you're supposed to sincerely care how they are when you contact them, but I guess the entrepeneurial mindset doesn't see anything wrong with that.

Greenfeld implemented this system in Airtable and created a formula that automatically calculates when the next date of contact should be for a someone depending on what you've ranked them. Then, on that date you get an e-mail reminding you to contact them somehow. Once the table is populated with contacts and rankings, there's not much else the user has to do besides update when they've last talked to someone so that the table can recalculate the next date of contact, a process which Greenfeld says only takes 15 minutes per day.

That's the thing, though. Outside of building the table, you're not really providing much input into this system. You've automated the task of simply remembering people who should be important to you, but if you really wanted to remember them in a genuine manner, wouldn't you just remember them? This system abstracts away the need to even remember someone, something I think is an important part of human relationships.

I understand wanting to make sure you don't forget someone so that your relationship doesn't die, but is that really so bad? Why should there be a feeling of uneaniness when slowly losing friends? Not every friendship has to last forever, after all, and artificially stretching one out ain't gonna save it.

Personally, I've had lots of amazing friends throughout the years, some of whom gave me the best years of my life so far and who I still love, but whom I haven't spoken with in many years, and that's perfectly okay. Some of those friends I do still talk to after many years, and that's great! We've been able to organically continue our friendship, and I love them for that. I also still love those old friends that I no longer talk to, though, or at least their memories. I don't need an algorithm to dig out my memories of them, and I don't want to need an algorithm, so I won't bother giving an algorithm that power in any capacity.

I can't help but think this system is technochauvinist, in a sense. The problem of losing friends or not even having time to remember them won't be solved by creating some weird algorithmic system to poke at your brain every day. You gotta do that work yourself. Or don't.

Maybe I'm being too harsh. I just don't think I'd do this personally, but I guess there's nothing wrong if you decide this system is good for you.

When I choose to sit down and write, it's a drawn out choice, one that I deliberate on for days on end before finally sitting down and doing it. Of course, time constraints definitely play a part in drawing out this process, but the main point is the avoidance of myself. My desire to write comes from everything within myself wanting to get out after swirling around inside of there for how ever many weeks. It's like an incubation process, or maybe calling it a fermentation process would be more appropriate. Regardless, writing is my "I" escaping into the world and being put onto the words on this page. Writing requires an awareness and submersion into the self in some ways.

So what happens when all you'd like to do is avoid yourself? I'm assuming it manifests as this writer's block, or this procrastination from writing. Maybe that's why the process of sitting down and just writing is so difficult. There does seem to exist a tension between myself and my self. We discussed this in my Existentialism lecture a couple of weeks ago, using an example of a broken phone.

When your phone breaks, you feel a sort of anxiety about the situation, almost lost as you have to figure out what do with your hands and how to position them, or how to stand in the room now that your situation does not include the use of a cell phone, or even where in the room you should be as you contend with the fact that your cell phone is fucked. Should you sit next to it trying to revive it? Or should you lay in bed and come to terms with its state. The producer of your anxiety, then, is not the broken phone, but the new awareness of your presence in the room, and ultimately the presence of yourself. You are with yourself in the room now, not with the phone.

This applies to writing as well. I am with myself now, and as much as I don't want it to be, that's a difficult process. I'll sit here and judge myself, my past actions, my past mistakes, every single facet of my life comes under scrutiny as I apply some kind of moral analysis on it to decide whether today I should hate or love myself. It's exhausting.

If we think about the "I" in terms of Heidegger or Sartre's way of thinking, though, there is the ever-present "them" as well. The "dictatorship of the them". The "them" is present when I judge "my past actions, my past mistakes" because those actions and mistakes are ones done toward "others." It is not in a vacuum in which these actions are done, but rather they are done toward others, and I judge them based on the morality that the "them" has imposed. So further than just an awareness of myself that I gain as I write, I gain an awareness of the "them". So am I avoiding myself, or am I avoiding contending with the criticism that may come as a result of the connections I form with you, the reader? And all the readers of this page.

A little less than a year ago, I was reading Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, and was taking notes as I wrote. I recently re-read these notes and I found a little snippet that stood out to me.

"I think back on my life and I think of myself as a bad person, but also I don't. Whatever conclusion I come up with will be based on traditional ideas of morality and will just be self-serving."

Back then, I realized that the tension I feel from worrying about what others think of me will only ever result in me making a decision of being "a good person" or "a bad person" based on whichever will affirm whatever view I want to have of myself at the time. I'm a good person when I want to say I am and a bad one when I want to say I am. It's a useless evaluation of myself based on traditional ideas of morality that I've grown past, or want to grow past. Why should I feel bad and guilty about liking the DPRK, or the USSR, or Fidel Castro? About being brown, or short, or lame? About praising liberation movements that don't adhere to Western standards? About being inequivocally me? Fuck that

"The Mirror of Simple Souls" is a heretical piece of work, and that Marguerite Porette was burned at the stake for heresy and for the circulation of the Mirror is no surprise. Holy-Church-the-little-with-all-his-rude-scripture realizes not that the naughting of the soul's will and subsequent desires are the ways of coming into union with God. To not recketh hell nor paradise nor the virtues of the Church puts one in a more immediate position to God. For the Church, a soul that does not reckon these things and does not engage with God through Reason is one less divine relationship that the Church can mediate.

But what of the seraphim and those souls that are also six-winged? The seraphim stand among God and possess a fiery divine love. Their proper being is when "there is no mean (i.e. intermediary) between their love and the divine love" for there is no greater gift of love than "the gift given without mean" (Div. 3 Ch. 1). How can one ever have fiery divine love when their relationship to God is being mediated through the Church and the Church's will? One must annihilate their own will and the Church's will. Of course the Church would label Porette and the Mirror as heretical, they are both rejecting the deification of institutions, returning the divine to its proper place, or rather unmasking the Church's false divinity.

So then what of the soul that has no mean between her love and divine love? She is an annihilated soul that does naught and knows naught, but "she knoweth not of this naught-in-God, compared with the all-of-him" (Div. 5 Ch. 9). She is so "absorbed in the contemplation of his All" that her deficiencies are of no concern to her, for God will "work in her without her" (Div. 5 Ch. 9). Her lack of concern, her naught in knowing, means that she does not become an intermediary in her own relationship with God, she does not limit herself in being oned to God because she has let Faith and Love govern and lead her.

The seraphim and the annihilated soul share the lack of mean between love and divine love. Is immediacy what makes things divine? Being oned with God is having no mean between your soul and God, an immediacy between your soul and Him. What of immediacy between other things or with other people? Just like Porette says there must be a rejection of the deification of institutions in order to truly experience immediacy between the soul and God, one must reject the deification of the institutions that govern relations between people and things if they wish to experience immediacy between themselves and other or other things. Rejection of the deification of these institutions, of the state, really, is recognizing that they are not more than us. It's not a secret that the people are more powerful than the state, after all, so why uphold it as a mediator of our thoughts and relationships?

"The Mirror of Simple Souls" offered me my first look into Christian mysticism, and in the end it revealed a lot more to me than what I had expected. Caliban and the Witch primed me to consider heretical thought as more important than what I had assumed of it years prior, and the Mirror has furthered that consideration.

Was there ever a point where television was an enjoyable experience? Was there some magical time, before I was born even, when the television gave people a legitimate welcoming feeling, or at least a feeling besides annoyance or pure indifference? Maybe at some early part of its life it gave a similar feeling that the small internet like Gemini does today, which to some is a feeling of comfort, while to others like Maya it's a feeling of sadness.

If that's the case, then television has gone the way of the web and is full of alienating nonsense.

In between the constant Grubhub ads (lol this is going to make no sense in a month or two) I have to deal with a stream of Biden as he lies through his teeth about caring about any of us. Say all you want but thousands of people are dying due to your inaction, especially us hispanic people. Our plights in this empire aren't over and as of now we've seen minimal material benefits, so I will not fawn over him, but it's almost like the news expects me to.

Huey Newton and Kia Melchor Hall both expressed the need for community control of technology, especially since "more and more of our daily lives and interactions are coded by men who mostly live apart from Black and Latinx consumers." [1] Beyond that, the content of proprietary media technology is dictated by shareholders, CEOs, etc. By the bourgeoisie. Television is not controlled by the community, it's often created with a disconnect to black and brown people's experiences, and is more often controlled by the bourgeoisie at the expense of the proletariat's experience.

While television may seem more and more obsolete by the day, one shouldn't discount the power and reach it has, so we must take that power for our communities and use it! Power produces reality, after all, so that power must be in the hands of our communities in order for them to produce a reality without shitty ads and alienating content.

1. Taken from Kia Melchor Hall's essay "Technology in Black Feminist World"

I consider an important aspect of myself to be the fact that I'm vegan. I became vegan only recently, essentially about 7 or so months ago, and in that time I've managed to change so many of the views I have about the world and question the present relationship between humans and animals. It is a relationship of oppressive domination that needs to be abolished along all other forms of oppression, and considered in an intersectional manner with those forms.

We shouldn't go half-way with these ideas. The thing I see quite often in discussions of animal agriculture is that we need to stop animal cruelty and treat animals humanely before they're slaughtered. What a load of of nonsense. Once the goal of an animal's life from birth is to be slaughtered, there's no real concept of humane anymore. From the minute an animal begins existing, we've dedicated their lives to our consumption, commodified their entire existence. We've reduced an animal with thoughts, feelings, and life to a commodity in the purest form, fit only for the small amount of sensory pleasure it gives us. Nothing about this relationship is humane, and nothing about it can ever be humane as long as we eat animals purely for pleasure.

That's the key: we eat animals purely for pleasure, because it is possible to live without ever eating any animal or animal product. There's no need to engage in the trauma and horrors of animal agriculture. There's no need for people to look at an animal and think of it as purely an object for us to use. They have as much of a right to live as anyone else. Just because we are humans and supposedly on another level of consciousness, it doesn't give us the license to become the oppressors in our relationship with them. As Freirie says, "As the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized" (Freirie, pg. 30). While Frerie did not consider animals as conscious beings in the same way as humans or consider dehumanization in the context of human-to-human oppression, I think his idea is still valid when considering the human-to-animal oppression. Consider the fact that "violence against animals has been linked to psychological health problems in humans" (Victor and Barnard). Is this not a form of dehumanization? Are those people in those slaughterhouses not suffering from dehumanization as they risk their mental health while taking the life of animalkind? This shouldn't be contained to animal agriculture, but every relationship we have with an animal. We shouldn't be the hands of an animal's oppression in any form, lest we dehumanize ourselves in the process.

I concede that there exists people who do not have the means to go vegan, and that's okay. The focus isn't on selectively choosing those people and calling them out, but instead building up the means for them to have an adequate choice and availability of food. Thus, the principal contradiction in this context for these people, and people worldwide really, is first and foremost their lack of adequate nutrition and scarcity of food, and that contradiction must be addressed first before they can consider reevaluating their relationship to animals. That's why I consider Marxism and veganism to go hand-in-hand. A vegan world can only exist once global scarcity has been addressed and everyone has the right to food, housing, education, dignity, etc. It is necessary to engage in solidarity with oppressed people and animals, because fighting for one's rights requires fighting for both of their rights, in an intersectional fashion.

I urge the reader to reconsider the relationship they and people in general have with animals, and consider them as more than just a resource. Think of them as fellow beings worthy of respect, commodified in the same way as we are, and go vegan if you are able to.

If anyone has any good-faith criticisms, feel free to email me and I'll be sure to read them. I am still in the process of learning about the world at large, so I know some of the things I say may be inadequately thought through, and I urge people to point it out so that I may learn and reassess my thoughts.(Please remember that I concede some people can't become vegan before you email me a response.)

Sources:

Freire, P., & Ramos, M. B. (2017). Pedagogy of the oppressed. London, England: Penguin Books.

Victor, Karen, and Antoni Barnard. "Slaughtering for a living: A hermeneutic phenomenological perspective on the well-being of slaughterhouse employees." International journal of qualitative studies on health and well-being 11.1 (2016): 30266. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/qhw.v11.30266

I apologize for the hiatus these past couple of weeks. My finals had just started and oh boy did they hit like a fire truck. I was writing pretty much non-stop, hence why I didn't exactly feel like writing for this blog page. Sometimes you just feel pooped is all, but now that finals are done and I can relax a bit it is prime time to start writing for non-school related projects. As much as I do not enjoy writing, it's still an important school for one to practice. The importance of written works can't be underestimated, and while this blog isn't a work of art, I should still take it seriously.

Having the discipline to take things seriously is an important skill to have, in my opinion. Honing discipline is something I'm beginning to understand that people should strive for, because how will anything get done without discipline? And how can one hone discipline in all areas of life when they can't even tackle the discpline of just sitting down and writing?

Of course, I'm no paragon of this and I'm not claiming to be because that would be lying. I mean my track record for the blog is already tarnished oof. In the spirit of this talk of discipline, I'll try to discipline myself and actually work on stuff here whenever I feel I have something important to say. I've actually had that feeling a ton these past couple of weeks so it's sorta sad I haven't dedicated any time to write them down for y'all. Well no more I say!

And to the reader, if you have something interesting you'd wanna write about, just go out and write it for us to see! Or for no one to see. Whatever. Just have fun with it and see where it leads.

It's the summer time! School's out, so classes are as well. I was mostly using my ThinkPad T60 for taking notes in classes, so I haven't used it extensively in a couple of months. I have started to use it again, though, and I've made quite a bit of changes since the last time I made a post.

DWM and co.

My last post about my ThinkPad T60 and OpenBSD involved me setting up FVWM, but I've since made the switch to DWM and I'm enjoying it quite a bit. DWM is a program made by the suckless community, and as such it is necessary to compile it oneself and set any options pre-compilation. Luckily, DWM is available in the OpenBSD ports tree and is pledged. Instructions on fetching and using the ports tree are located at the official OpenBSD website.

Once you've fetched the ports tree, following the instructions below should be enough to build and install DWM.

$ cd /usr/ports/x11/dwm
# make install

That will successfully build DWM on OpenBSD with the appropriate patches. Just for continuity's sake, I also installed st, the suckless terminal emulator, and slstatus, the suckless status bar. st is available in the ports tree as well, at /usr/ports/x11/st, and can be installed the same way as DWM.

As far as I can tell, slstatus is not in the ports tree, so you'll have to compile it yourself. Doing so is fairly easy, though:

$ git clone git://git.suckless.org/slstatus
$ cd slstatus

Now edit config.h with your desired configuration. Personally, I've set it up as follows:

static const struct arg args[] = {
    /* function format          argument */
    { datetime, "%s",           "%a %Y-%m-%d %H:%M |" },
    { cpu_perc, " cpu: %s%% |",  NULL },
    { ram_used, " mem: %s |",  NULL},
    { battery_perc, " bat: %s%%", NULL },
};

Now, you can build and install it easily:

# make install

Now, just add these two lines to your ~/.xsession so that DWM and slstatus will start on login.

slstatus &
exec dwm

For anyone new to DWM, here's a small rundown on how to navigate it, assuming you didn't set up any custom configuration. Or, if you'd like, you can read the official DWM tutorial.

Alt+P will open dmenu. You can type a command here and it'll run. For example, pressing Alt+P, typing "firefox" and pressing Enter will open Firefox.

At the top left, you'll see numbers 1-9. These are different "tabs" and each will hold your different windows. I mostly only ever use tab 1, and the rest of the tab stay blank besides tab 9. You can switch between the tabs by pressing Alt+number, where the number corresponds to the tab you want to navigate to. When opening a program in dmenu, it will open in the tab you are currently on. If you are using the default configuration, Firefox will always open on tab 9 no matter what tab you happen to be on.

Alt+Shift+Enter will open an instance of st in whatever tab you are currently on.

DWM has 3 different modes, and you can tell which mode you are on by looking at the symbol on the right side of the 1-9 tab list.

[]= means tiling mode. All windows will tile. Activated by default or by Alt+T

\><> means floating mode. Windows will float instead of tile. Activated by Alt+F

[1] means monocle mode. This will focus on a window. Activated by Alt+M

When you have more than one window on your screen at a time, these are different ways you can manipulate windows:

Alt+J will switch you between the different windows on your screen.

Alt+H and Alt+J will resize your windows.

Alt+Enter will switch around the windows on your screen.

Alt+Shift+Number will move the window you are on onto a different tab

These are usually enough to get me comfortably by when using DWM in my day-to-day.

xscreensaver instead of xlock + xidle

The common combo for locking your screen after a set amount of time is xlock + xidle, a combo which Solene coincidentally talked about on July 30th, the day I began to write this post.

I opted to use xscreensaver instead, mostly for the reasons the developer themselves have listed.

Setting it up is fairly easy. xscreensaver is available as an OpenBSD package, so installing it involves just running

# pkg_add -i xscreensaver

This also installs xscreensaver-demo, which is a GUI where you can configure all your options for xscreensaver. Running it should also generate the corresponding ~/.xscreensaver configuration file.

The ~/.xscreensaver file should give you a myriad of options. The ones I particularly care about are:

timeout:    0:05:00
cycle:  0:05:00
lock:   True
lockTimeout:    0:03:00
passwdTimeout:  0:00:30
...
splash: False
...
mode:   blank
...

The splash being set to False is a necessity for me, as I don't want to see the splash on every boot. Also, I like the mode set to blank because the screensaver options are a bit too "corny" for me, and fading to black is fine enough for me, although I do sometimes get the urge to use the pipes screensaver for nostalgia reasons!

As for the other options, you should set that to whatever values you feel are good for yourself. I think activating the screensaver after 5 minutes then locking the screen after another 3 minutes is acceptable for my use.

Now, to make sure xscreensaver starts on boot, just throw this into your ~/.xsession file:

xscreensaver-command -exit 
xscreensaver &

You should also make sure that xscreensaver locks your screen when your computer suspends itself. Luckily, if you have apm installed, this is fairly trivial on OpenBSD. Just create the /etc/apm/suspend file as root and put this into it:

#!/bin/sh
xscreensaver-command -lock

Make sure to also run:

# chmod +x /etc/apm/suspend

This makes the file executable so that it'll successfully run when your system suspends, locking your screen.

herbe for notifications

I started using a program named herbe for daemon-less notifications.

It doesn't do any more than it needs to - it displays a rectangle at the top right of the screen with a title and body that can be dismissed by left-clicking it.

In my last post, I installed the command line Telegram client, tg. It allows for setting a custom notification command, which means one can easily integrate herbe in order to receive notifications when tg is open and you get a new message. All that you'd need to do is add the following line into your ~/.config/tg/conf.py file:

NOTIFY_CMD = "/usr/local/bin/herbe {title} {subtitle} {msg}"

Perfect! And for anyone that's been using notify-send in their scripts to send notifications to the desktop, there's a handy script that hijacks any calls to notify-send and sends them to herbe instead.

Conclusion

These different changes have given me a very usable desktop experience that works surprisingly well for a 15-year-old laptop. I think I say the age of this ThinkPad T60 every time I write about it, but it's because I seriously can't believe how much use one can get out of something that is practically useless by modern mainstream computing standards. Get the most out of the things you have! It's a fun process.

It's been a couple of weeks since I've set up my ThinkPad T60 to be my sorta daily driver, so I've had plenty of time to test things out on it and configure it to my liking. At the same time as I'm learning how to handle this old hardware, I'm learning all about OpenBSD. I definitely still have about a million more things to learn, but in the meantime I'm chronicling the setup of my ThinkPad T60 as resource for myself and others.

In my last post about the ThinkPad T60, I said that I ordered some new RAM and a new T7200 CPU for my laptop. I've since received both of these items and upgraded my laptop...well sorta. When I received my laptop, it had 1GB of RAM, which I assumed was from one stick of RAM (even though I opened the laptop up probably 10 times before placing my order), but apparently I had two 512MB RAM sticks in the RAM slot. Whoops, so rather than going with my original plan of having the maximum 3GB of RAM, I'm working with 2.5GB of RAM. So far, though, it's been enough to get by and I can safely have 6 or so Firefox tabs open. There will definitely be lag, especially if there a couple of Google Docs links open, but nothing too extreme. With the new 64-bit CPU, th first thing I did was to install a 64-bit of version of OpenBSD, which I did with ease and without any errors installing comp68.tgz this time. Hooray! I then pretty much followed the same basic installation steps I outlined in my first post, so definitely check that out.

Luckily, suspend on lid close has worked pretty much out of the box for me, so I didn't have to do anything to any special configuration. Just in case you do, though, just stick this line in your /etc/sysctl.conf file:

machdep.lidaction=1 

This will make it so that when your laptop lid shuts, OpenBSD automatically suspends. I've found that this doesn't work for me when my laptop is connected to the power adapter, so I've made it a habit of just running

$ zzz # Suspends laptop

or

$ ZZZ # Hibernates laptop

so that I know for sure my laptop will be suspended once I close it. Otherwise I may close it while it's connected to the power adapter instead of disconnecting it from the power adapter first. Luckily, the ThinkPad T60 has a moon-shaped LED indicator that shows when your laptop is suspended. Super cute!

I've gotten really used to just tapping my touchad to act as a left-click, but that doesn't work on a fresh install. For a hot second I thought that the Thinkpad T60 didn't support tapping, but apparently all you need to do is add this line in your /etc/wsconsctl.conf file:

mouse.tp.tapping=1 # Activates touchpad tapping support

One thing I noticed straight away on this install was that there was no sound being output from my speakers...whoops, looks like I forgot to set up a mixerctl configuration file. That's as easy as:

$ cp /etc/examples/mixerctl.conf /etc/

then putting

outputs.master=200

to set the output level of the laptop speakers. 200 is a bit low sometimes, so experiment a bit. 255 seems to be good, but I don't use the speakers often so I keep them low.

For changing the volume of the machine as a non-root user, you could use sndioctl and possibly map it to some specific buttons or keyboard configuration. I just run it straight from a terminal, as follows:

$ sndioctl output.level=+0.1 # This raises the volume by 10%

# or 

$ sndioctl output.level=0.8 # This sets the level to 80%

One odd thing is that on boot, I won't hear anything output from the speakers. It's only after I've suspended my laptop then woken it up from its slumber that the speakers output sound. I noticed this yesterday so I haven't had a chance to investigate the causes, but it's definitely a weird bug.

With some of these basic configuration files out of the way, here are some ways I've customized the install's looks.

I've shamelessly stolen crhenr's dotfiles from GitHub to make my FVWM look very sleek.

I've modified the install script as such:

#!/bin/sh

echo -n "Install additional software? [y/n] "
read install

echo -n "Move dotfiles to which user? "
read user

if [[ $install == y ]]; then
    pkg_add wireshark firefox gimp vlc transmission-gtk git vim nnn cmus
fi

echo "[*] Installing necessary software..."
pkg_add feh conky i3lock scrot rofi ImageMagick slim slim-themes

echo "[*] Copying dotfiles..."
cp .fvwmrc /home/$user/.fvwmrc
cp .conkyrc /home/$user/.conkyrc
cp .vimrc /home/$user/.vimrc
cp .Xdefaults /home/$user/.Xdefaults
mv .config /home/$user/

- echo "conky &" > /home/$user/.xinitrc
- echo "exec fvwm" >> /home/$user/.xinitrc
+ echo "conky &" > /home/$user/.xsession
+ echo "exec fvwm" >> /home/$user/.xsession

chown -R $user /home/$user

cp -R ./openbsd-dark /usr/local/share/slim/themes/
cat <<EOT >> /etc/rc.local
if [ -x /usr/local/bin/slim ]; then
    echo -n ' slim'; ( sleep 5; /usr/local/bin/slim -nodaemon ) &
fi

EOT
echo "[*] Change the variable current_theme in /etc/slim.conf to openbsd-dark"
echo "[*] Done."

I found that my .xinitrc file wasn't actually doing anything, and that putting the same lines into .xsession had the desired effect. (EDIT: This is because I use xenodm rather than startx). I also went ahead and followed the script's instructions to change the current_theme variable in /etc/slim.conf to openbsd-dark.

Make sure to modify the *ShutdownVerifyCommand as follows:

*ShutdownVerifyCommand        exec /usr/bin/doas /sbin/halt -p

Otherwise, this button in the menu won't actually shut the laptop down.

Wala! Now my OpenBSD install looks beautiful and functions well enough for basic use.

Since I'm on OpenBSD, most of the programs I use on a daily basis aren't natively avaialable on it. One of these programs is Telegram, which I use to communicate daily with my girlfriend. Telegram has a web client, but Firefox on this machine struggles enough as-is, so I wanted a command line solution. Luckily I found this Reddit post detailing how you can build tdlib and the command line telegram client tg for OpenBSD. I followed the instructions and it worked perfectly, it just took forever to build. Now I have a very fast, extremely usable Telegram client with VIM keybindings on OpenBSD.

I'm also present on Matrix, but there are no Matrix clients available on OpenBSD. (EDIT: I'm an idiot. Apparently gomuks is available in both packages and ports. OOF). Luckily, weechat is available on OpenBSD and it has a weechat-matrix plugin that lets it connect to the Matrix network as a Matrix client! Perfect, and there are even installation instructions here

I followed these instructions and everything seemed just fine, up until the very last step where you build weechat-matrix with

$ make install

Instead, you should use

$ gmake install

which got rid of all of the errors I had and worked just fine. Just follow the rest of the instructions in that tutorial you should be able to open Weechat and connect to the Matrix network.

If you have been in any encrypted channels and want to be able to see the encrypted history, you'll need to somehow export your E2E Room Keys. This is fairly trivial in Element, but other clients may very. Once you export your keys and encrypt them with a passphrase, move them over to your OpenBSD machine then import them into Weechat using:

/olm import /path/to/keys <passphrase>

It should take a little bit to load them in, but you should be good once it's done. You may need to verify yourself and people in channels you're present in. You can verify everyone using:

/olm verify * *

or specific people using:

/olm verify @test:test.org *

That should give you a working Matrix client on OpenBSD.

While the GUI side of things may look and function just fine now, I've found that I mostly deal with text. In class, I write notes in Markdown files using vim and spend the rest of the time reading, either physical books, PDFs, eBooks, plain-text websites, etc. So to preserve my limited RAM and battery, I mostly stick to the TTY and use tmux combined with vim for writing notes, lynx for browsing the web, epy for reading ePUB files, pdftotext from the poppler-utils package to convert PDFs into text files and read them with less, and bombadillo to browse geminispace. I've also modified my .tmux.conf to look like this:

set -g status-right-length 100
set -g status-right "%d.%b.%Y %l:%M %p | #(apm -l)%"

The first line sets the length of the right side of the tmux status bar to 100, while the second line sets the right side of the status bar to display the date, current time, and current battery percentage. For example:

[0] 0:ksh  1:ksh		16.Apr.2021  5:03 PM | 50%

This is all the configuration I've done so far, but it's given me a usable system, especially considering that this is a 15-year-old laptop. If anyone has any other suggestions on ways to configure my system, throw them at me please!

The fair moon bathes the night scene,

Pouring her soft light down on the open trees.

There flies the battered yet proud phoenix,

And higher still, the solitary bee.

The solitary bee descends,

Avoiding the smooth-surfaced lake nearby,

And lands on a cape jasmine.

To that cape jasmine, the bee remarks, "Hi."

But the cape jasmine remains voiceless,

Unbeknownst to the solitary bee

Whose life has been cut short

After becoming the phoenix's feed.

 What voice the cape jasmine could’ve manifested

 Had it more time with that solitary bee.

All ascents, when given enough retrospection
Are as the ascent to the last tree.
The moon, the grass, the air, become one
And acknowledge their meaninglessness in pure Love.
  However, the descent soon begins
  Where the false teachings of Reason return,
  So eager as to bring about a sadness
  Full of the negation of one’s humanity.

But the Annihilated Soul knows
That having one’s humanity
Means that all sadness and grief
Are desirable and sweeter than any pleasure.
  For it is through these heavy blows
  That we can learn to be
  One with Love and all things
  And receive her splendor.

On these ascents, as the
Otherness of the external world
Reveals itself as a lie,
Remember to revel in your humanity.
  One is different,
  One is unconquerable,
  One is eternal,
  One yearns for Love.

• #1

  Fast Faster Disaster

  Dressy Bessy

  176
  Listens

• #2

  MOTOMAMI

  ROSALÍA

  118
  Listens

• #3

  softscars

  yeule

  109
  Listens

• #4

  BRAT

  Charli xcx

  90
  Listens

• #5

  Dreamboat Annie

  Heart

  70
  Listens

Top Album

Fast Faster Disaster by Dressy Bessy

This being my top album of the year came as a big surprise. I initially dismissed it for how unserious it is, but it's precisely that quality that's made me obsessed with it. This album's pure fun, and it's clear just how much fun Tammy Ealom is having while singing.

Favorite Album

Animaru by Mei Semones

I randomly came upon this album on one of those "if you like X, you'll like Y" reels on Instagram. I LOVE rats, so the rat representation was a big plus. But rats or not rats, the soft vocals combined with the viola and violin make for a phenomenal debut album to listen to while walking through the park and taking the train.