I'm a genuine, bona fide curmudgeon. I even love the word.
[...]
That's me to a tee. Funny thing is, I've been something of a curmudgeon for longer than I've been old. I've recently begun to realise that it's my my curmudgeonly personality is the fire that powers many of my most intense creative efforts. I am highly opinionated and extremely stubborn. I'm also very non-confrontational. An interesting mix that leads to some serious passive aggression. Some of my most productive and weirdly enjoyable programming sessions are prolonged instances of my Angry Programming flow state: listening to metal and reprogramming the whole fucking system if that's what it takes to get my way. I've lost days. It's also strongly related to the oddly-tuned fight-or-flight reflex that caused me to whole-heartedly dive into emacs rather than submit to the evils of my macos work environment and to frequently entertain fantasies of fucking off to a shack in the wilderness (which in reality would no-doubt end with me starving to death because I'm a serial plant killer) because modern society annoys the piss out of me on almost every level.
Wanted to test out image embedding on this site so here's a teaser of some cleaning. Translation for chapter 1 has finished and I should be able to get it cleaned/typeset in the next day. I forgot how much I enjoy the monotonous task of scanlating.
I have owned computers since I was ten years old, when my dad brought home a genuine IBM PC XT in 1983. They shaped my life and my thinking, even as they shaped the world at large. I loved the magic machines for a good many decades, but now I find much to regret, on both the personal level and in society at large.
I've had to step away from computers, for two reasons. The first is aesthetic. Computing has become a kind of ugly necessity, in which the productive work we do must run in tandem with an endless arms race against corporate and criminal scum. Another firmware vulnerability, another third-party database breach, another search engine rendered useless by AI-generated SEO garbage. The walled gardens get tighter and smaller; the end-user profit squeeze more pronounced.
Using light mode at night hurts my eyes, but when I first discovered how to set dark mode some fifteen-some years ago, it was difficult to automatically change back and forth. I would have to manually change *every* single setting. It was so tedious. So I left my devices on dark mode constantly, even though that actually strained my eyes in the daytime.
And so I progressed until the present day assuming that it was still difficult.
But it’s not! Not anymore! There’s just a little toggle I can select in Cinnamon to switch my system. And Firefox (well, Floorp, but same difference) automatically changes when I tell it to! And so does Sidebery! And Dark Reader toggles itself! And so does Discord, and so does the shiny Mastodon userstyle I installed, and I can make my custom Dreamwidth userstyle turn itself off when I’m in light mode, and I just discovered Sublime Text can *also* automatically switch between light and dark mode, and and and.
I’m used to higher resolution being an expensive upgrade, so the idea of nearly double resolution for a few dollars took me by surprise.
I’m talking about 3D printing. It was a couple of months after buying a 3D printer that I learned that you can buy different sized nozzles for the Prusa MK3S; that they’re so cheap as to be effectively free; and that while the default nozzle size is 0.4mm, it works fine with a 0.25mm nozzle—almost doubling the resolution.
So! I ordered some nozzles: and most importantly, the 0.25mm and the 0.8mm nozzle.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.
