Welcome on Alley Fires

We just moved

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We just moved.

So we put these three doofuses in a separate room that will be a spare bedroom. It will remain cat free but for now, we had to put these little dummies somewhere. I moved Pickle and Bean together and Luci last. I let them out and then came back for Luci.

Bean and Pickle, at least at the old house, did wrastlin’ a lot. I did not expect to find this sight, of the two of these goofuses huddled together in the closet.

About

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Who is TB?

TB is a private citizen with thoughts and ideas and nonsense in it’s head.

Yes, but who is TB?

Respect TB’s privacy. If you know TB you know TB, and if you don’t then you don’t.

Where do all these ideas come from?

Random collisions of atoms in the aether of space

I don't know where this was going...

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Context! This was a ramble from a while ago. I don’t really even remember what I was on about. Oh well, read at your own risk.

I would characterize myself as a serial non-participator. I don’t know if others would agree, but I generally shy away from joining group, nor often don’t feel a part of a group nor want to be described as part of a given group.

I don’t get into sports, nor especially ‘have a team’, I don’t understand the concept (I do, but I don’t engage with it) the being a fan of a team. I really do no get football people who speak in this inclusive “we” when talking about things regarding “their” team. It’s illogical. The emotional and psychologic connection there ust makes no sense to me. I’ve never joined a political party. I almost considering doing so a decade ago, a third part in the US, but I didn’t.

The Birth of Jeremiah Joseph

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jeremiah Joseph was born in a cave of limestone. No way in, no way out.

His mother did the birth there, all by her self, had a birthing pool with her. She didn’t bring it, of course, and it wasn’t brought there. It was a natural pool in the cave. Very cold. You’d think that was a bad thing, but….

Anyway, no one seems to know how they got there, but that’s where they were. She birthed him, standing in the pool, in a crouch, basically with her arms on her knees, butt pushed out behind her, and as he crowned, she reached back and pulled him from her birth canal. She screamed a primal scream, having pushed extremely hard to get him out. The effort took a massive toll on her. As she pulled him out of herself, she slumped down, stumbling just outside of the pool. She had some bedding she had made next to the pool, from flax. She made the linen herself. The majority of the birthing fluids stayed in the pool. Later ecologists would be dismayed to find it contaminated the pristine ecological conditions of the pool, but at the same time, it spawned a whole new species and created an entirely new ecosystem.

A New Awakening...

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Today, or well, yesterday, I discovered a thing. Finally, organically, I found the tilde verse. I have yet to enter, but I have been reading up on them. I read Paul Ford’s entire Medium post about the creation of the first tilde server, tilde.club: https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf

This to me sounds like the smol web I had been looking for. The idea of the chat in Road to Gehenna. I was going to make my ramble vault. That turned out to be a lot more work than I wanted and I ended up not doing that. I did find Joplin, which is a good medium. Vaults exist for KDE. That’s nice.

Frost Bitten Feet

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The sages say may things. Sometimes people wonder if the sages make things up to see if we’ll believe them or if we’ll push back. They never say. But they say that Jeremiah Joseph was a strong man, not tall, and really, they say, if you saw him, you’d probably not ever know it. While his feats are recorded as legend, they say he himself look unremarkable. A sort of social camouflage. He is a man of humbleness of personality, despite the stories of his birth.

An Introduction

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have three meow meows.

Luci

Pickle

and Bean

Luci day is April 22 (2023)

Bean day is July 16 (2023)
Pickle day is July 5 (2025)

Poppy day is October 31 (2020)

The Bean Queen

Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Bean Bean, the Bean Dean
Bean Bean, the Bean Queen
The Beanily Bean
The Beanily Dean
The Beanily Beanily Bean Queen

And Pickle is her Jester.

A Strange Encounter

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

10.18.22 Tuesday, October 18, 2022.

A Strange Encounter

Today I had an odd encounter with a guy who goes by the name “Metal”. He made a lot of claims I found to be rather dubious. He also told me I should leave Martinsburg. It all started while taking Poppy for a walk. I left around 1-ish PM. Poppy kept putting her snoot on my lap, so I said okay, let’s go for a walk. We come out onto the road behind the house. We start walking our usual direction, towards the main road, Mall Drive. In the distance I see someone walking towards me and Poppy but couldn’t yet tell if it was a man or woman. As we got closer I see that it is a guy, about 6’2” or so tall with long, semi curly, if a bit thin, brown hair, with black pants, a dark brown pullover fleece, and black Addidas(?) shoes. He told me at one point he usually wears two pairs of socks and folds on over to stay warm. He also seems to only have teeth on his lower right jaw, the rest appeared to be missing. His fingernails were rather rough, a bit long, and discolored a brownish-beige color. Poppy came right up to him and he pet the Poppy. He didn’t seem threating and wasn’t. He was however a little too friendly. He went on to talk my ear off for a good 10-15 minutes. He told me he has something like 10 or 15 cats. Maybe it wasn’t that many, but I remember it being a lot. I do remember specifically that he said at one point he had 25 dogs and 1 cat, Mr. Kitty. Mr. Kitty beat up all the dogs, at least according to Metal. If they get ear mites use sweet oil and dab it on behind their ears. The last time he saw Mr. Kitty the cat came and laid on his lap, bit him on the nose, hopped down and he was never seen again. If this seemed to be told in a weird order, well, that is how Metal told it to me.

The Long Road

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One day, Jeremiah Joseph was talking from his town to the next one over. It was a hot day, but it was morning, so it wasn’t too hot yet. It was, however, quite dusty. It hadn’t rained here in a few weeks. It was late spring, so that was a little odd. Even for the mountains, it was already hot, but at least it wasn’t that humid.

Jeremiah had brought a small amount of food with him and a small goat skin he used as a water flask. Jeremiah was wearing his usual linen tunic and rough work pants. They were beige and a bit scratchy, but they were his. As the sages and scholars say, Jeremiah Joseph wasn’t a particularly notable man. His hair was a sandy brown, his eyes a forgettable shade of eye color. He looked you in the eye when you talked, but he wasn’t one of those people who looked into your soul or had fidgety eyes, darting around. He just regarded you. He was of a medium build and medium height; his laugh could be infectious, but often it wasn’t his appearance that people remembered. His feats were what they remembered, you’d just never know by looking at him.

Too many Baskets, Not Enough Hands?

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hands in every basket and nothing to show for it… Well, I found commiseration, and maybe even confirmation, putting a name to a thing that I too apparently have experienced, though to a lesser degree than some.

I recently discovered a website called the 512KB club in my pursuit to make my own website. Not really sure what I’d want it to be, but a part of the small web, and I am glad to see I am not the only one that wants to make a little page with things like my thoughts and rambles, interests, just a repository of things I wanna have stored some where. So that’s good. Not myspace or facebook, because those come with other dipshits and their need to express their unwanted and likely stupid opinion, but if I make my own, it’s mine. I’m not at the whims of some dumb as billionaire or CEO, not making them money by having 10,000 ads all the time, not catering to or feeding the algorithm, not putting my thoughts and ideas out there for some other assclown to get rich off of while some other ignorant ass gets their rocks off at disparaging my thoughts so they can feel better about their own stupid existence.

When Jeremiah Walked on Water

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are rumors out there that say that Jeremiah Joseph can walk on water. At least that is what people say around the village on the lake.

The people around the lake are already a superstitious folk. Weird things are said to happen around the lake, especially at night, and so, much like sailors, they have their own superstitions. Unlike sailors, the people of the village by the lake refuse to go out onto the lake to fish. They believe that there are creatures in its depths or something. Odd things are said to wash ashore on the occasion, and storms can be particularly devastating.

The Tales of the Two Towns

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When Jeremiah Joseph was a about 7 or 8 years old, he came to live in a village by a river. It was known that he was without a family, having no mother or father to speak of. He had been found wandering in the wilderness, surprisingly adept at taking care of himself. He had learned, apparently all on his own, how to make a sling and find the right rocks to hunt small game like rabbits and small rodents. Some suspected he had been abandoned or orphaned in a village raid or minor war. When asked about this by the village elders he said this was not what happened. When asked why he was alone and why he was wandering the wilderness alone, all he said was that that was how it always had been.

The Linux Open Source Transition - an opening of the eyes?

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Anyway, I guess I am interested in talking about this slow burning, but increasing more rapid, transition towards FOSS solution/alternatives. I fully realize that there are just compromises we have to make, but let’s talk about that.

A history. To start. I guess I would say it sort of started the time I first dabbled with linux. That wasn’t for any ideological reasons, per se, it was because a friend wanted to make on of the sand box topo tables things, and the instructions strongly recommended using Linux Mint. The table never happened, which is fine, but it created a small spark.

While Fishing

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One day Jeremiah Joseph was fishing in the local stream. This was a somewhat lively stream with many rocks and boulders making for narrow channels and small places for the fish to hide, the currents odd and the eddies seemingly random. But no, the longer Jeremiah looked at it, the more it did make sense.

As he peered at the water, the ripples and waves, created by the flow of the water over, around, and under the rocks, he saw that the fish would take refuge in the shallow places, others in shade, some in the deeper sections.

Social Media doesn't make sense

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So, I’m not on facebook anymore. Not since 2019, and even that took way longer than it should have. Social media doesn’t make sense to me anymore. I recently deleted my LinkedIn page as well. The original idea of that was an interesting one, but it’s become increasingly obvious it’s not really about networking, it’s just more data collection and probably a way to cross reference identity online. There is your entire career history and a photo of you right there.

Miraculous Transformation

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Jeremiah Joseph was sitting with some of the village mothers, helping them weave baskets. Jeremiah had large hands with surprising dexterity. He learned to weave whole roaming the wilds before being taken in. He taught himself to weave reads and braid vines to make baskets and ropes. They were very crude but his talent was noticed right away.

Joseph enjoyed weaving baskets. One of the types of baskets he was taught to make was tall, about waist high, tall and narrow. They had many uses: to protect large wine and oil vases, holding various objects like brooms, carrying kindling sticks, holding dirty clothes, and many more things. Some had kids, others not.

Linux Distros I've used and Opinions on them

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Distros I have used and my thoughts

Mint

Mint is fine. Things just work. It’s not for me though. I get the windows refugees concept and how Cinnamon kind of feels like window 7, but that’s an old and tired sentiment at this point. Windows 7 came out in 2009 and lost support in 2023. That’s 17 years ago. So, I dunno, that’s weird to me. Unless you want a retro late 2000’s look. Whatever. It does work well with NVIDIA drivers and basically just works out of the box. That’s good and nice. It does have a device manager, which is kind of a cool thing as well for those not used to the command line. And it doesn’t do snaps by default even though it is a Ubuntu fork. Good for beginners as many say, so… cool. If you like it, you like it. Nothing really wrong with that, but they don’t support KDE Plasma, so I see no need to be using that.

What the hell is a water bar?

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What the hell is a water bar?

I remember seeing a vinegar bar once. We were working in Staunton for a good while and downtown I remember seeing a vinegar bar. I’m not generally a huge fan of vinegar, so I didn’t go in. I have no idea what actually goes on there. Do people really taste vinegar like they would at a winery or a regular bar like it’s beer, wine, or whisky?

On the Nature and Origins of the Painbow

Sat, 02 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Legends say there is a second type of rainbow, one less colorful, but vengeful. They say it is made of colors ranging from purple to orange to red, with grey and black as well. It is seen as an ill omen. In the ancient world, to see the Painbow was to see death. Very few who ever saw it got to tell the tale.

The Painbow is said to be an ancient being, older than humanity, older than the hills, vomited up from the primordial soup from which all live emerged. Usually evolution weeds out the week, the apex predators don’t survive a large scale environmental shift, the critters who found a specific niche find themselves having a hard time coping when snowball earth occurs.

An Introduction to Knot Theory

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Knot Theory

I was walking down the hall, at my uni, in the Physics building, a place I had never been before. I am here to participate in a newly formed rocketry club. It’s a typical hand full of nerds all gathered together. We don’t really have an agenda, but they have a 3D printer. Thankfully, it’s not hooked up to the scary computer. One of the guys tried to log in and found, when he started it up, it was running Arch. Ack!

Haw Haw Hee Haw Haw Joe Goes On Crusade

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Haw haw hee haw haw Joe, or something, is a good old down home country simple man, but today he is fighting in the trench against the evil Iranian hackers. He is immune to their hacking abilities. He slays them with his axe of freedom. Bringing ‘freedom’ wherever the head of his axe lands.

These little cheeto dust covered scrawny Iranian hackers, hunched over their iMacs, typing furiously in the trenches, they look up to see our ‘hero’ come striding towards the in woodland camo and more american flags than they’ve ever seen, on his shirt, on his hat, on his boots (seriously, wtf?), and carrying an axe. They type more furiously, and then look up, like prairie dogs to see if it had any effect. None. Panic. More furious typing. But to no avail, Haw haw hee haw haw isn’t affect by no computer virus. He ain’t no computer, so how can he get a computer’s virus. He turnt that shit off on his John Deere years ago. Ain’t American. Haw haw hee haw haw.

Introducing Sir Cadbury of Doogleshorn

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Sir Cadbury of Doogleshorn

Race:

Demi-god

He has a +8 to one ability score (or split it up), and his scores can go up to 30. He has inherited every single trait of another race, at any given time, without any of the downsides.

He has “Divine Presence,” which forces everyone within 30 feet to make a saving throw or be charmed/frightened of you every time you talk. If they fail a wisdom and intelligence and charisma saving throw, I will mind-control my allies.

Monstracities

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had a funny idea about this ridiculous centaurs the other day. They are basically the body of a goat with the torso, arms, and head of a chimp, bonobo, or greater ape (sure, a gorialla would be insane too). So I had Perchance generate me some images of what it might look like. Medieval art as a style really captures the ludicrous natures of these monstracities. I would not want to encounter this thing in the dungeon, regardless of whether it has hands for feet or not.