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.
... ➦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.
... ➦10.18.22 Tuesday, October 18, 2022.
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.
... ➦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.
... ➦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.
... ➦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.
... ➦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?
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?
... ➦