toki pona

once again in the state. it makes me want to write poetry, you know, since i have something to make a poem out of, but i just cant really figure out what a good poem would look like. im too blunt.

i want to be perceived like i am. i want to get past my behavior, my style of writing, my phrasing, my movements, my faces, my words. i want to make anything that can cause someone to see me as i see myself. but i have no idea how. anything i do or make, any output of mine carries the taste of my behavior, and i dont know how to change it or what it really looks like. i dont know what i look like. i dont know what my voice sounds like because my skull's vibration changes how i perceive it. i dont know what my face looks like because i see it too literally to see the same gist of myself everyone else does. i dont know how i move because my only perspective is my eyes. i want to stop being a caricature of myself. i want to be seen as me. i want to see my own caricature. i want to see how im seen.

i got a lot of new music. i got volume III and IV of Jungle Fatigue. i really like Jungle Fatigue. i first heard volume III in maybe 2023, and Growing Sprout really changed my view on music. i mean, it wasnt my first foray outside of the horrid pop that plays on the radios, but it was really unique to me. i also got a rip of the vinyl version of LTJ Bukem's DEMON'S THEME / A Couple of Beats, which i knew i liked some of Bukem's music because i have an ancient mp3 of DEMON'S THEME PART II from like 2019. i also got 東風, which is a Sawteeth album (surprisingly, it's his first album, he's only ever released compilations, singles and EPs), whom is an artist i really enjoy. a copy of the Peshay Studio Set from 1996 was also acquired. the Studio Set is probably one of the most comprehensive compilations of ambient/intelligent d&b music, which is definitely one of my favorite genres (the other being Drill & Bass, a more intense version best seen in Mushuto's The Social Structure (2006) and reyush's flatgrass (2025)) in the general technologic-style (which is to differenciate it from Argentine rock, a more analog-physical feel which i enjoy more or less the same amount as the heavy-sampled/digital D&B and rave).

i also set out to try Sway, which is a wayland implementation of i3, the keyboard-centric window manager. its main thing is that, instead of opening every window as a popup and letting you tab between them or whatever, setting aside virtual desktops as something for Power Players, it splits each window in half and so if you have two windows open it defaults to splitting your screen vertically in half and each window taking full use of as much of their share of the screen as they can get (that is, a program's window, by default, takes up all of the screen, and when there are two windows they each take up half of the screen, and when there are three they each take up 1/3 of the screen...), which makes for a cool looking display when you're doing some complicated task that needs more than one terminal or a lot of concurrent programs. i dont tend to need so many, but i figured i'd try it because it looks cool and haxxy. it totally is. you dont have a desktop configuration app like in most desktops (e.x. KDE's systemsettings), instead you have a single text file (~/.config/sway/config) and you just edit the file. it isnt written in a specific coding language, thankfully, so using it was easy (for example, to make a program run automatically when the desktop initializes, you just keep a line of "exec programnamehere" somewhere in your file). i have a custom app launcher (fzf in a fullscreen Konsole window) and a custom taskbar (a minimal rice of Waybar). i like Sway just because it doesnt use nearly as much resources as KDE. on the computer i installed it on (Solus Serifa), i tend to use the tty, so i usually dont have a desktop running anyway, which means i tend to not use very much computing power at all. now, i genuinely prefer Sway over the tty, even if im doing something that exclusively requires the command-line anyway.

also, i (FUCKING) finally figured out and fixed the long-standing issue i'd had with K3B, which was that i couldnt burn any CDs because i got some generic error about wodim's permission to access the disc drive. or something. i didnt write down the solution because i dont really see myself doing any disc-burning on any other device (Slab Serif has an internal DVD-RW burner) in the future, seeing as discs are generally obsolete outside of music enthusiasts and paranoid data hoarders. anyway, i honestly, cant remember any of the process, or what i did, besides changing the permissions and accessibility of some programs. anyway-anyway, i did this because i decided i would burn two CDs, for two of my classmates. i now have a disc labeled "THE PREDATOR - ICE CUBE + BONUS TRACKS - VARIOUS ARTISTS" and another "A FLAIR FOR THE DRAMATIC - PIERCE THE VEIL / THREE CHEERS FOR SWEET REVENGE - MY CHEMICAL ROMANCE", which will be out of my hands tomorrow. you should be able to tell none of these are my kind of music (except for + BONUS TRACKS), but it brings me a sense of connectivity to be able to give the gift of disc to people whom i otherwise basically only talk to on-site. in fact, because of this, i've been able to successfully talk to these two people over the phone much more often (within the timeframe of announcing that i am burning the discs to now, which is about one day, though, so take this development with a singular crystal of salt). the bonus tracks on the first disc are ones i picked out of my library, which means they probably wont be as enjoyed, but i added a two second gap and even informed the recipient of the existence of these, as well as their exact track names, so hopefully it won't do anything malignant, plus the guy is pretty open in listening to music anyway. the second disc has no bonus tracks because that recipient is much more close-minded about music, and there wasn't much space for it anyway.

it also occurs to me i should make a glossary of my devices, for reference in my blogposts:
Sangre: a Steam Deck, which i use very rarely now that it has had a strange failure to boot Steam in Desktop Mode, but is otherwise capable of playing PC video games in a neat handheld-console form factor. it has 256GB of internal storage (SSD), and a 1TB microSD card. the card goes unfortunately unused because i do not use Sangre often.
Paralizer: Sangre's second coming, a desktop box with a homemade Gnapple (GNU (Tux), Apple) sticker on it, which is currently my daily-driver. it has 1TB of internal storage (SSD), and is functionally pretty damn close to how i used Sangre.
Slab Serif/Solus Serifa: a MacBook Pro from 2007, with an unknown-but-relatively-high amount of internal storage (HDD), which is used as the experimental device, for all of my hacky projects and experiments. it has two OSes on it, one is OS X El Capitan (previously Mavericks, which i prefered the UI of a lot more), and one is Ubuntu 25.10, where the Ubuntu partition is named Solus Serifa, but the device itself and its OS X partition are still called Slab Serif.
iocus: a teeny tiny netbook from ~2001. it dualboots Windows XP and some archaic version of Kubuntu. it probably goes the most unused in the list of usable devices. the Windows XP partition is pretty decked out, but it has no driver for the wi-fi chip and so Kubuntu is the only functional part of the system, in terms of complete usability. the version of KDE it runs used to be an elegant netbook-oriented thing with barely any RAM usage, but it was upgraded and now runs like shit. the raw terminal (TTY) is used most often.
Tricuspid: a New Nintendo 3DS. it is completely decked out in homebrew and mods, and has a lot of games and home menu themes. it is quite the used/loved relic and has been in use since ~2017.
Rei: an iPhone 16e. it is unfortunately unable to be jailbroken (it runs iOS 26) but is a daily driver, and is frequently used to make calls (usually to the U.S. Navy Observatory Master Clock hotline, since i dont get many calls) and is used as an iPod via foobar2000 when on public transport.
Sclera: an Oculus Quest 3S. it's usually used with PCVR games, hooked up to Paralizer. it has a few games of its own, though.
Thyde!: an iPhone 4. it's jailbroken and has a lot of apps, and in fact is semi-usable as a daily-driver if necessary. it has a flat battery (100% to 0% in less than 5 minutes!), though, so it isn't used often.
Zincshot: an unremarkable pair of headphones capable of bluetooth, FM radio and wired sound over aux.
an unnamed CRT TV which sits in front of my bed and goes pretty unnoticed. it has two A/V ports and can play CDs or DVDs from its tray.
homebrewery: a jailbroken and heavily modded Nintendo Wii.
Spinball: a thick MacBook that goes entirely unused, but has a very pristine disc drive.
T-Spin: a thin MacBook Air that also goes entirely unused. both devices run OS X Snow Leopard or similar.
Thide: a Flipper Zero which's auto-generated name is very unique and so is used on myself quite often (Thyde! is shamelessly named after this, too), though the device itself tends to go very underused considering its price.
Crimson: a Kodak Pixpro FZ53, which has a pretty good battery life and is used ~monthly for general photography (usually images of places, scenery, etc.).

that whole legally-required OS age-verification thing is worrying me. big brother testing the waters. luckily its pretty much impossible to apply to most Linux distros, since theyre usually run by communities whom dont need to obey since they arent vendors (Linux is Free!) and thus dont apply, or the distro is being sold and so is probably only being used in headless-server contexts where its impossible for the machine to even get the chance to ask since its all automatic on that front. i dont need to do any radical changes in my uses. still, its worrying. if they think they can do that to entire OSes, whats stopping them from requiring surveillance software, or locking you out of every website, which in this age is like locking you out of basically everything? it would suck! if you had to put your face on everything! luckily it seems to only be applicable to corporations, which to me is just speeding up the process of handing all the internet-things back to the communities, councils and people. i dont like companies holding the internet. for e.x., i feel its unfair the google corps. has exclusive access to the .google URL suffix. infinite jest and the ONAN and all really opened my eyes to how ridiculous its all getting. show us your face before you talk to people on the worlds most used instant messenger. show us your face before you are allowed to play games you own. show us your face before you can even use your fucking computer!

also, related to the blogpost wherein i detail a few names of years, i realized a lot of them arent very memorable, so i want to make up even more. this year is the Year of the Blacksmith Sixth Millennium Hyperweapon, or YBSMH. very memorable. but Year of the Boilbai Resuscitation and Concurrent Diffusion Checkout System, or YBRCDCS, isnt nearly as memorable, even as an acronym. i thought of Year of the Canonical Age-Verifying Codec, or YCAVC, which is based upon the whole impossible-to-implement OS-age-verification fiasco (Canonical is the non-US based company that manages/makes/runs Ubuntu, which is a fork of Debian). i like how its acronym sounds, but its still a genuine-corp. name and i still prefer abstract ones or absurd hypothetical ones, so i want to make up another that has the same letters or similar ones. YCAVK? YCMYK? iunno.