Finally we’re back to having two working cars. We picked up a ‘24 Equinox for my lovely wife to wheel around town with and I’m driving her previous car. It’s just a relief to not be strained getting everywhere we need to go with one car or borrowing cars. I’m still mad at myself for fucking my car up. That shit sucked. It was a 2020 and it was paid off completely.

At some point somewhere in the past I said to myself a dangerous mantra that I think we’ve all told ourselves at one point or another. “Just a few more weeks until {x} and then it’ll all be good from there.” The {x} can literally be anything from a life event to a large purchase or an activity or gathering. It can be anything. The time window can be anything too.

I guess this post is about the meaning of life, given the fact that the title is absolutely the meaning of life. Yay, capitalism! I mean, this is what you wanted, right? Planned obsolescence with no way out of heavy metals leeching into our soil, poisoning our land and our wells? Sounds fucking awesome to me! Thanks, capitalism! And, yes, capitalism has indeed turned what it means to be American into a giant “Fetch Quest”.

I guess it’s time for another meme dump.

Legitimately. No, really. Man, I don’t know. We’ve got all this bullshit going on with, like, nuclear fusion. And maybe we have room temperature superconductors? Man. I really do not know. This species seems absolutely doomed while duly inflecting some genuine charm as well. It’s just stupid, really. I am not the smartest person in the room. I know this. I absolutely never feel like the smartest person in the room, and in all honesty I feel like I would be a good bar for the low end of acceptable stupidity.

Read this moronic bullshit first. Archive, just in case. Okay. Lets start taking this fucking moron apart, shall we? If done right, the trick would help ensure that Rotten Tomatoes logged positive reviews but not negative ones. First of all, why are you so fucking hell-bent on imparting your own personal bias on a content aggregation site? Are you mentally handicapped, Lane Brown? Do you have an issue with the “tyranny of the masses”?

I have to admit, life is uniquely creative in how it can eviscerate you when you least expect it to. I guess I should’ve known when I had seen so many people yell “BINGO” with bone cancer and really awful shit like that. It’s a hint as to how absolutely abrasive life can be. Now I’m not equating events in my life to some horrid diagnosis, not by a longshot. I’m simply highlighting the seasonings of life.

Just because I don’t appreciate the miseries introduced to the world by the Christian faith, doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the artistry that has accompanied it’s multi-millennial existence. That said, I’m re-watching “Mother!” for the fiftieth time, because it really is a piece of art in film. Right at the beginning you start in strange territory, with the wife being battered and consumed by flame, then extinguished. Saved, somehow, miraculously. You see the husband put a giant gem on a stand and the charred house seemingly comes alive again.

It’s the wildest thing to be watching. Wild claims coming out of South Korea about room temperature superconductors popping up out of nowhere. Apparently we’re edging ever closer to breakthroughs in Quantum Computing as well as goddamn nuclear fusion. There are wild new technologies being developed for space travel and all sorts of wildly exciting things on the horizon. We could be on the verge of becoming a Type One civilization.

Holy shit. It happened. Ruby Franke has finally met with the law. And I totally called it. They’ve arrested Ruby Franke on suspicion of child abuse. Wow. Wow wow wow. I mean, it’s been THREE YEARS since I wrote about this lady, but it finally happened. What blows my mind even more is that her daughter said “Finally!” when she was arrested. I just… I don’t even know how to process it right now.

Sometimes I feel guilty about the advantages I’ve enjoyed over the years. At work I find myself pretty consistently applied to things. There’s never a shortage of stuff for me to work on, ever, it seems. My coworkers complain pretty frequently about working help desk, or even help desk having no tickets for them to handle. I’m rarely ever left alone to just dick around for a day. Part of that probably comes from me pressuring my employers to pay me more every opportunity that I get.

I don’t write as much as I used to. I’ve gone through periods where I could write page after page of all sorts of thoughts popping into my head and I could just bang out idea after idea. Actually, I don’t really know if that’s true or not. I think I’ve been more prolific than in recent times, but I don’t have numbers to support that theory. One thing I do know is that I’ve sat at this keyboard, at a post not unlike this one, and I’ve erased the first line.

It has easily been something like two decades since I’ve been to the Renaissance Festival. I’m excited, but my excitement is also tempered by the reality that I was far easier to impress twenty years ago. However, the absolute redemption I’m expecting from this is that you can get a giant ass turkey leg and a beer. I think that should be a decent enough trade-off for middle-aged me versus myself two decades ago.

I started using Byobu with tmux for sessions on my various machines, and overall I have to say I’m really impressed. It’s an awesome addition to the arsenal, but if you’re not super familiar with some of tmux’s finer points, byobu can really fuck with your head. I noticed that disabling the “F-Keys” in byobu gives you access to F1-F11, but F12 is still fucked. That’s because it’s added as a second prefix.

Twitter, to me, is an excellent example of why monolithic platforms are bad for society. Jack Dorsey had ultimate authority to manage Twitter as he saw fit since Twitter’s inception. As soon as Elon bought it, you could see Musk starting to shift the “culture” surrounding Twitter to his silly little man-child libertarian bullshit. Facebook, Myspace, Twitter; They all share the same problems. They also all share the same fate. They’re destined to die.

I’m currently running a simulation on this PC. For reference it’s a Hewlett Packard z440 with an Intel Xeon E5-1620 with four cores and two threads per core. It has 64GB of RAM and a M.2 SSD. The simulation is taking half an hour so far. It’s not even a hard simulation. The problem is the simulation software, it’s not exactly utilizing the power of this machine. The calculations are done inline, single thread, and the virtual machine has a maximum of four gigabytes of allocated memory to work in.

If you haven’t watched it yet, absolutely go check out the Netflix series about the “Amber Heard / Johnny Depp” trial. It’s wild to see everything that came out in that trial, and Amber Heard’s ridiculous attempts to cry on demand in front of the court. I also felt really bad hearing audio of Depp himself admit that he was abused. I’m only two episodes in, but I think the third episode (my prediction before actually seeing it) will highlight Heard’s borderline personality diagnosis, which is probably the point that the wheels absolutely fell off the trial.

At our house we enjoy some trashy reality TV from time to time. One of our guilty pleasures has always been the “90 Day Fiance” series. It always seems to be a cauldron of desperation and dirt that makes an amazing amalgam of human trauma. It’s wild to see the rollercoasters these people subject themselves to from the immediate highs when they first meet to their first huge fights, to the almost guaranteed conclusion of divorce or separation.

On my drive in to work this morning I had a thought occur to me that hasn’t really before, but it struck me as a fairly accurate metaphor for how I feel on a day to day basis. Mind you, I’m in no way saying I’m even remotely a possession-oriented person, and I’m really typically a minimalist at heart. I buy few things, but when I buy things I need in life I try and ensure they’re of a substantive quality so that they last as long as I may need them.

I was going to write something here. I really was. I think I had something in mind to dump here. It’s long gone, though. I can’t dig it up quite yet. Whatever it was, hopefully it wasn’t important. I can’t fathom it might’ve been. I don’t think so, anyways. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how I expect to solve the “Wireguard Peer Networks Matching” problem. So, there’s an issue with the ip addressing scheme on my home network.

I have so many opinions on so many things, but mostly I don’t really care about opinions. I guess that’s why I just so freely throw them out into the open; they don’t have any intrinsic value. A secret can have a high intrinsic value depending on what it involves. Just look at Ed Snowden and Julian Assange. They know all too well the value of secrets. Especially secrets of powerful nation states.

I haven’t spent much time on this lately. It’s not that I haven’t wanted to, but truthfully I haven’t had anything to say. I’ve been sort of floating through life. It feels distressing, honestly. I’ve grown accustomed to the emotional purges of unleashing whatever is in my head on this blog. Going extended periods without feeling that sort of “pressure release” can be uncomfortable. Even if I don’t really say anything at all, just throwing something down usually feels at least a little beneficial.

Okay, I need to get this out of my system. It’s an incredibly irritating pet peeve of mine when people connect to an IRC server, join a channel, and then expose to everyone in channel openly the fact that this is their very first time using this protocol by saying “I GUESS NO ONE’S ON RIGHT NOW” and just rage quitting. Bro. What. The. Fuck. Do you not realize that IRC is #IdleRPG?

It seems like I’m back at the travel, yet again. All of next week I’ll be at least a few states over, technically, and it’s not going to be a good time. Sure, I have a lot of distractions I bring with me. I roll out with my Macbook Pro 14" M1 Max, Switch, and Steamdeck. Still, I’d trade all of that crap to be taking my wife, and my kids at least half the time (since they annoy the shit out of me sometimes and still need to see their mothers).

When someone dies, they no longer get to advocate for themselves. They can’t state the position they took on any topic. They can’t defend decisions they had made. I guess the reason they say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead stems from the fact that the narrative becomes one-sided when they cross the great egress. I get that. I really do. My dad apparently suffered crippling depression. I’ve seen artwork he has produced; sketches and paintings, that have more than shone a light on the struggles he lived with on a daily basis.

Yesterday I ate a small half of a cap of Ghost strain of Psilocybe Cubensis. To say that it’s strong is an understatement. I really didn’t think I consumed that much of it, though I didn’t weigh it, it could only have been a gram or two at most. It was small and light. It came on slow. Confusion, wiggling vision, color saturation and hue pulsating and morphing. I thought the initial intensity would be an indicator of what I was in for.

Have you ever felt like a “post turtle” before? Like someone put you on a post way up high and have no idea what you’re doing there or how you even got there? Man, that feels like me damn near every day at my job. It really sucks a lot sometimes, but my god, lately it feels like it more now than ever. I think it’s because I’m venturing into stuff I really don’t have any experience in.

I haven’t used traditional social media in a very long time. Instead I’ve been entertaining myself with both old-school internet relay chat and very new nostr. It’s an interesting culture that has been attracted to it. I don’t need to agree with everyone’s politics or beliefs no matter where I play, but apparently on nostr it truly doesn’t matter. The only recourse the nostr network has is for any individual who doesn’t like you to use their big fat block button.

Well, it’s long past time I finally dove into it and learned myself some proper Linux server administration basics. I’ve been on the struggle bus when it comes to keeping my two Raspberry Pi 4’s in operating condition. I forgot how long it took me to do a manual install of Nextcloud without relying on either Snap or Docker. I’m pretty sure it took me something like two weeks to iron it out, and a month to tweak all of the necessary settings to make the installation happy with the machine it’s on.

If you’ve ever gotten that shitty This application is damaged and cannot be run error on MacOS when trying to run an application or binary you downloaded from the internet, it means that Apple is preventing that app from running because it’s not signed by their development software. The fix is to run this: 1 xattr -d com.apple.quarantine /Applications/YourAppHere.app I don’t think the command even returns anything whether successful or not, but it should stop preventing your app from running at that point.