The Project so Far

 I have named my fleet of discarded laptops after characters in batman. So far there is Alfred (Mint), Batman (Arch), Catwoman (Mint), Dr. Hugo (Arch), and Etrigan is just sitting with Windows, waiting for another chance at life.

I forgot my password on Batman, one of my chromebooks-turned-ultrabooks, so I decided the easiest way to deal with it would be to just install a new OS. Ha ha.

The USB I have been using to install Arch didn't work -- Python, Traceback, something, something. Fuck it. I'm not a real Arch user; I just use the archinstall script. Next up, I went to my go-to Mint. But man, holy shit, the difference in Mint Xia (version 22.1) versus Una (version 20.3) is massive. It is a full gig bigger, with represents damn near a 50% increase on the size of the ISO. And while that worked really well for the cheapo new computer I recently bought and set up for my mother-in-law[1] Batman absolutely could not take it...

I am not going to stand having to wait for a window to open. I see it as a moral principle that the user should not have to wait for a basic I/O operation. And what makes for a moral principle (versus an opinion) is a willingness to make sacrifices in its defense. And so I feel it is now time for Batman to move to AntiX Linux (or Tiny Core, or Puppy). I am now running into the position where my problems may be caused in no small part by the size of systemd.

Good. Now I have reasons to try to be punk as hell about something. (Uh -- that I can actually do something about).

[1] I did not use the Batman naming convention on her computer, instead naming it "MethodistBook." If I ever take the computer back, I'll wipe the OS and rename it in the Batman convention.

Out East 1

 
I had previously been exposed to what a superstitious shit show Buddhism had been prior to the Victorian period, but I had not investigated the matter very deeply. Today, I listened to the Stuff You Should Know podcast [1] and learned that mindfulness (sati) was not known to common people, instead confined to monasteries. The claim is that the event that led to these practices becoming available to commoners in the area, let alone Westerners was the British take-over of present-day Myanmar. The Buddhists priests were forbidden, and so for Buddhism to survive, it had to move to lay leadership and produce texts... It was some form of these processes that became the first wave of Buddhism to spread through the West, to be read about by figures such as Emerson, Thoreau, and Nietzsche.

The problem is that this was a pre-screened, pre-influenced type of Buddhism, which ignored the rituals, folk ways, and relic worship that Buddhism for somewhere in the high 90 percent of all practitioners for centuries.

I don't know if knowing this earlier would have helped me to avoid going too deep down Eastern thought or not. I would like to think it would have, as it would have shown how much of what I agreed with was false positives.

[1] That podcast is my main intellectual diet right now, as I am burying my head in the sand around politics and the replacement of humanity.

In Offence of Food

 I have been eating a lot of food lately. And by "food," I mean in the sense of Michael Pollan's book "In Defense of Food," where he points out how much of we eat wouldn't be recognizable as food by previous generations, and offers this manta: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."

My current diet is informed by experiences, years ago, with the Slow Carb Diet. Six days on, with a cheat day. But instead of no carbs from grains on those days, I am allowing myself one small serving, usually from toast. But, yeah, beans, meat, and vegetables.   

This started because my wife was unhappy with what the standard American diet was doing to her, and it was making her feel. Also, she wasn't liking food costs. So I drew a little chart showing three overlapping circles: cost, health, and variety/novelty. And in that moment I won an argument that is over a decade old, one I had long given up any hope of winning. I feel like my partner in life is finally willing to strike back at the evil nature of consumerism and the American Way.

One bite at a time.