Quasi-Lucid Ravings
I don't understand time.
I don't understand this weird 80-year period of life, bracketed by glory.
I don't understand squinting and sweating under the sun, waiting for our Rescue.
I don't understand the Creator's insistence of running the simulation of humanity on such a flawed and cantankerous scratch file.
I don't understand the wisdom of incarnating spirits as ants to help other ants, and to be evaluated on the extent to which we helped.
I don't understand being broken, being given a crutch, and waiting for the bones to heal when bones are no more.
I don't understand the point of funneling breath into dirt, which only then longs to be freed from the dirt to which it was bound.
Please help me understand the point of this entire exercise, the parameters of which seem very strange to me.
And help me have compassion on the other ants that think they are only ants, who live, kill, extort, abuse, and die so that they can pile up more dirt on their ant mounds.
I just don't get the point of it all.
This is a very strange simulation to me.
Don't Go Back There
Content warning: discussion of religion and politics. If those subjects are triggers for you, I fully understand, and offer instead this lighthearted post instead.
Note: this post is in some ways a continuation of this one from 2024, but you don't need to read that first.
There's a phrase found …
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A New Socratic Sign, or: Writer's Block as a Work of Grace
This image is protected under the "Fair Use" doctrine of US copyright law regarding derivative works and low-fidelity reproduction
I wrote previously about my experience of a "Socratic Sign" as a student: how my experience of wonder and exhilaration in my studies kept me going through the relative stress and …
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Mind the Shards
Photo source: Marika Vinkmann
I was listening to one of my new favorite podcasts, Don't Listen to Us with Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody (his wife). As I mentioned in a recent post, Mandy is one of my favorite actors, nay, favorite humans on the planet. I can't get into …
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Package Manager Tier List
I was thinking about Arch's pacman this morning, mentally noting once again how insanely fast it is compared to all of the other package managers I've used.
So, I thought I'd put out an informal package manager tier list, based primarily on speed, and just going on my own …
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Breakfast at Der Waffle Haus
Disclaimer 1: A heavy "[sic]" is implied on all intentional butchering of the German language in the references (and URLs) in this post
Disclaimer 2: This post deals with issues of grieving, but in a lighthearted manner
Disclaimer 3: This post may be best enjoyed while listening to this track …
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Re-thinking Sci-Fi Space Battles
I don't watch a lot of YouTube anymore, and I'm trying to bring my TV watching down by a lot and read more.
But one of my guilty pleasures is Retro Badger Gaming. This guy uses variants of the Bridge Commander series of games/mods to put together intriguing, insane …
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My Mirror is Surely Alive
By Dorkface Rickens
Ready or not, the future is here! This evening, I installed a new technology in my bathroom called a "mirror."
I was excited to see what this could do, and skeptical of the claims that mirrors merely reflect the light coming in.
Imagine my astonishment when I …
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Mocking-up Photo Sharing over SMS
Background
I've been catching up on one of my favorite podcasts, recently: Tuxjam, and I just finished listening to Episode 120: Tunnels & Texts.
In this episode, they were reviewing a FOSS app called Deku SMS which initially seemed to promise the ability to send photos by SMS (not MMS!), but …
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I Loved Computers Before the Internet was a Thing
A reconstruction of the Commodore 64's BASIC prompt, adapted from Wikipedia
I loved computers before the internet was a thing, and I will continue enjoying them long after the internet becomes an unusable hellhole of mass surveillance, age verification, deplorably invasive technical "standards," and hyper-aggressive advertising.
I've seen truly enormous …
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