I have had a wild week since my last post. My friends came over, we drank wine and beer, watched Sideways and The Room.

Both were quite amazing movies really. My friend said that Sideways was kind of a sad movie, but compared to Another Round, this one was kind of a “funny ha-ha” kind of movie rather than a “funny that it happened” kind of funny. I’d really suggest watching Sideways, that’s definitely a “guy movie”!

Things that are getting me down

• I quit doing snus for like the 3rd time again. It’s totally worth it cuz my gums will tell me “thanks bro” when I stop, but the worst part about quitting snus is those few initial days where you just feel so god damn depressed. Nicotine is just a dopamine generator and with out it your brain will have a rude awakening. What do you mean, now the BRAIN has to create its own chemicals? Fuck youuuuu!!!
• I’m so sick of the fact that I have become so reliant for AI yknow, I can’t fucking do my work without AI…. Not because I don’t want to, but I just sometimes can’t fucking pick myself up through my ADHD, get major brain fog, and just can’t get the ball rolling. I know it sounds like a skill issue, but it sometimes is like that. At least with AI I can just say “ok bro just do these couple of things for me”, i’ll get it out within a minute or two, then I’ll be like yea ok let’s commit it and it’s done.
• Somebody dropped the ball big time and now we can’t use AI here without paying through the nose LOL mannnnnn….
• anyway yeah dude like Id totally pay for AI if it actually was good but it’s like “good enough” at best.
• my fucking interest rates are going up and now that AIs eating up all the budget I’m NOT gonna get any extra money LOL.

Things that are getting me up

• yknow there’s one thing that AI will NEVER get into and that’s your own skills. It will never throw the darts for you, it will never play the piano for you. I’ve been practicing both of these quite a lot, and also gotten into writing as well. There was this video about transcribing music and it said that these jazz transcription music note videos are like a burger, and for the person watching those, they’ll lose the opportunity to train their own ears.
• i’m also losing weight properly like I’m nearly down to a 100 kgs. Just 2 more kilos to go. I can also do more pushups than usual. One day I’ll be like this guy LOL
• I’m also gonna see my dear SO over the weekend so it’s GREAT. Gonna drink a bunch of wine and have a great time.
• Like I mentioned before those two movies Sideways and The Room… They were really inspiring. The Room especially. Every time I’m writing out my stories I worry about if the story is logical or not, if the characters are likeable, if the thing itself is fun.. but then Tommy Wiseau comes along and he’s like “That breast cancer thing? It’s a twist, don’t worry about it!” Such a weird throwaway line LOL I knew The Room was a “Bad Movie” but I was surprised there were about 20 minutes of sex scenes! Holy crap! That’s a lot of boning. There’s also some surprisingly good shot scenes as well. Might as well be made by Akira Kurosawa here dude.
• I’ve been playing a shit ton of piano recently…. Not getting mega good yet but like if I would practice the B melody and the chorus in Daisy Bell… I’d be done with it finally LOL I could play it end to end no problem.
• here’s some pianoinspirations dude. I love tarkus (best fucking album ever made) and it was kinda weird to see that the big mega hit “Tainted Love” only has like 2 parts in the song. There’s the verse part, and then the bridge part… which would go into the chorus, but the chorus shares A LOT with the verse itself, so.. there’s just 2 parts to the song LOL

Anyway yeah dudes I think it’s just the withdrawals talking but I am feeling like SHIT. Good thing I don’t have much to do tomorrow at work otherwise i’d be fucking dead LOL.

This is David Wallace talking about being yourself

and here’s the video where some dude talks about typography, and how it’s not about really making things look pretty, but it’s about making the text palatable for the modern audience. I’m like DAMN I wish I knew anything about typography. I need to find out that “thinking in type” book cuz my fucking blog needs a facelift as well, cuz I showed this blog to my PM and he was like “so uh… it’s like a blog or smth” I’m like yeah dude it’s a blog LOL

Anyway GUYS! There are good things and bad things out there, but I think the worst thing about being depressed is that you STOP doing things you like to do… which is the worst mistake you can make, because what are you doing when you stop doing things you like…. probably things you don’t like RIGHT? So that makes you feel more shit. I’m really glad I’m back into blogging and I can just type this shit out because it makes me feel good. It’s like digital scrapbooking yknow.

I think i’ll pick up some typography books and get to work on the blog. AI is really good, but the big problem AI has is that it can’t design for shit. Let me rephrase that: most sites out there are complete garbage. Just because it loads up some React BS and takes like 900 megabytes of ram to render your fucking landing page, it doesn’t mean it’s good!! Hell, when ppl at work give me their fucking vibed out artifacts that have all these effects that when you scroll down it says shit like “This model is not X…. it’s Y” or “A NEW WAY TO SOLVE THIS PROBLEM”

i’m like motherfucker dude…… get to the fucking point. Where is the real data you need me to read.

Hey like we’re already here so I’ll go on a rant here: we are blowing the budget because ppl vibe out docs, and you know how chatty Claude gets right. So ppl don’t wanna read that shit, because it uses architectural terms to talk about code. So they let Claude read it, and then claude guesses what needs to be done. And hey! there goes my Christmas bonus!

THANKS ASSHOLES!

anyway here’s an actual documentary I’m planning to watch tomorrow: Al Lowe yapping about Leisure Suit Larry 3. Now THAT’s a game dude. I love Leisure Suit Larry, such a weird game lol

Y’know all these vibe coded games are coming out but the MAIN PART of any game is the question: is it fun or not. And guess what! If it ain’t fun, why bother?. A lot of these fucking games these days are just job simulators. I don’t mean whatever Simulator slop games, but I mean “gather XYZ crap and craft a thing then you can go to then next part and craft some bullshit. Also! when you log in every day and do dailies you can get the shagging dog emote!” and I’m like fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck dude I can’t do this anymore LOL. Am I a player or am I getting played? Why am I playing anything to get a shagging dog emote…. Why do I even care if I can get the shagging dog emote or not.

I guess I’m just a scarred individual with a shit ton of complexes and growing up poor was kinda rough on me. Now that I got it good it’s like man I NEED to guard all this otherwise i will lose it all. that’s where ACT comes into play: rather than trying to cock-and-ball torture my thoughts into submission (cuz thats what CBT stands for), ACT lets you to make space for it. You can say THANKS BRAIN! and it’ll be OK. Let it flow. Allow yourself to feel vurnerable.

ACT’s been a real lifesaver fr. I need to get my book back from my buddy though. I always give out these books and then expect these clowns be like “oh hey I read that book you gave me, thanks, I’ll give it back to you now” next time we meet. Like it would be nice right? If I wanted them to keep the book I’d tell them that, but the implicit part is that I’m lending out the book from my library, so please treat me like a library and bring them back lol.

Yeah I could re read this blog post and make the posts more “readable” and what not but yknow what

I’ll allow myself to write out this shit and post it AS IT IS. Rawdog my blog.

Rawblogging. Now that’s a tag I should go with LOL Read less

I don’t know why we love to collect all these knick-knacks, and small things and all the tables get occupied by stuff. Why all the dust gets all over the place, and we run out of all the freaking drawers to put our crap into.

The worst part is that whatever thing you decide to finally throw away, the very next day you will be like “oh shit, NOW I need that crap I just threw away”. Ain’t that a bitch!

But now my friends are coming over, and the house is clean. How clean will this place be AFTER the party is a different story ;)

And so the story goes…

IDK I’ll try a haiku about this:

Friends come to party. Wine and dine, open the bottle, clean my house again :)

Phew there we go. So artistic! Yea like I’ve been getting in touch with my artistic side again, playing the piano etc. IDK, there’s like so much more to life than just working. Ya know what I mean? I’ve been really been reconnecting with the stuff I liked to do, and I’m like why did I ever stop. I guess like I fell into the trap that I thought I don’t have the time to do it, and then I put it away, waiting for the perfect time.

The perfect time will never come haha. But the present will always be here :) Read less

A little taste of how I was feeling at bed, it’s a great song, but definitely NOT something that would help me sleep. This is probably my favorite music video fr, I’m a sucker for cute girls bullying fat dudes. Absolutely blessed concept, I never get tired of that.

I was hoping that listening to some dude yammering on about whatever would get my ass to sleep, but instead things got weird.

This video was pretty good, it’s about how computers can actually be kinda cool. And yeah, they totally can be cool. It’s the people and the deadlines that suck around it. I was like so close to quitting my job, but then all my office bullies either got demoted or fucking fired, and my new manager told me I’m doing a great job. That’s some real boss ass shit.

If there’s ONE career advice I will give, it’s that NEVER doubt yourself. Always bee yourself, no matter what they say.

This video was truly terrible. This guy takes like 30 minutes of using mega big philosophical words to say “slop games make you feel like you did something with all these flashy effects, when all you did was just hold down a button and open up your wallet”. But to be fair, I haven’t read a book for about a half a year now, and I am feeling quite atrophied in that regard. I used to be a writer y’know. The one idea I did get was that the button press becomes the action, and the observing you becomes the character. Like playing Sekiro, you can do a shit-ton of things with the controller, but all you are doing is just mashing the buttons. You aren’t jumping in the valley getting chased by the snake or whatever, you, the player, are on the couch pressing buttons. But you, the person observing, think that you are now the dude on the screen, doing all those things.

It’s what the Japanese call 人馬一体 , jinba-ittai, typically meaning the man and horse become one, but can also mean that you and whatever become one. Not in a sexual sense of course, but more in a way that your conciousness melds together with whatever outside your body. This word was also used during motorcycle classes, and it was a very important concept to get it. You could not ride a motorcycle without melding together with the motorcycle. You could not just operate the motorcycle like a car, where you just push and pull levers and spin the steering wheel. You had to FEEL the motorcycle, where to look when turning, when to lean to take the curve, when to accelerate and when to change gears. If you did not FEEL the motorcycle, you would fall over. Simple as that.

The fact the human conciousness can do that is exploited by companies trying to make a quick buck out of you. Since you can feel things that are not happening to you, imagine things that are not real, then with some fancy effects they’ll trap your attention and make you feel like you did something more substantial than staring at a LCD screen and holding your thumb against it.

The point I’m trying to say is that be wary of where you put your feelings into. It’s so easy to become misled, but it’s also easy to get back on track when you pay attention on what’s really going on.

a video about making documents… mmmmmm BOY this video would’ve saved my ass if I had seen it before I had started doing these fucking projects at work

Programming rabbit holes…

Some video about escaping web dev. I’m like yeah web dev is cool and all, but it’s so saturated with all the riff-raff. I really miss the 2020s when you could just get a big ass job by just having a pulse.

Anyway yeah I watched a bunch of videos, finally got my ass to sleep. Now it’s 22:32 here and it’s past my bedtime. Wish me luck!!

GOOD NIGHT Read less

Goodbye, Retropi! Hello, Pihole!

I had this Raspberry Pi with retropi set up, but recently I haven’t had much time to play video games through it. Usually when we’d go on a vacation, then we would play Panel de Pon on the SNES. Now we can do the same thing through the Switch, so my Retropi kinda started gathering dust.

Reddit has been introducing me to the homelab subreddit, where nerds set up their computers to do… pretty much whatever, it’s kinda hard to describe WHAT they’re doing, since I literally don’t know. Everybody’s just posting their home servers there. Anyway, there was a thread about what got you into homelabbing and 90% of the answers were just “pihole”.

Apparently a pihole is just a raspberry pi that will block ads for you. Quite nifty huh!

Man I can’t believe how many ADS I am seeing per day. Like I’m sure it has happened to you as well: you just wanna get a recipe for dinner, and instead the recipe site will start with a life story about their dog or whatever, then open up 4 different VIDEO ADS and start autoplaying them. God help you if you forgot to turn on the wifi, since your mobile data will be obliterated. Did you even get to the recipe before that? NOPE!

Well, with the Pihole, this problem will be gone, as long as you set it up all nicely.

The way it works is that you tell the router to get DNS info from the raspberry pi, and raspberry pi (the pihole) will then do it all.

The setup process is actually VERY easy

Things you need: Pi with an ethernet port (recommended), Memory card, card reader, ethernet cable, and Pi power supply (you can also use old phone chargers as long as the voltage/wattage is fine).

Or if you keep your PC on all the time then You can go the docker path. Idk how different it is. Here’s how I setup mine on a Pi4B:

Install Pi Imager from official website

Install RPi OS Lite on the memory card, set a username and password during installation alongside other settings like wifi, keyboard layout etc.

Insert card in Pi and connect it to your router and check what IP was assigned to. Also set that IP as static so that it never changes.

SSH using that IP by opening cmd.exe (Windows machine) and typing “username@ip” (replace username with the one you set and IP with the one your router assigned it.

run “sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y” command once you login to your Pi. This will update and apply all the settings.

Install Pi-hole using the command on their website.

Keep pressing yes/continue. If you’re asked to select DNS upstream, select Cloudflare (recommended) but you’re free to use Google or anything else. In the end you will be greeted with installation complete and a password for yout Pi-Hole interface. Change it if you want to by running “sudo pihole -a -p” command

Login to your router and go to something similar to DHCP settings (It is different for different routers, never used Sagemcom).

Assign “Primary DNS” as your Pi-Hole’s IP.

Reconnect all the devices.

This is just a TL;DR version that should get you up and running. Things like keeping piOS and pihole updated, the blocklists updated, adding more, using other features are covered in the docs.

Unbelievably, once I had it all set up, I would no longer see any ads on the recipe sites. Amazing!

I really don’t feel it’s made my browsing that much faster, but I’ve only had it up for about an hour. Already I have blocked about 800 queries, with 23% block rate. Hmm. I’ll think about making it more strict and set up all the automation later.

Hugo beats Wordpress every single day

It’s like so easy to just type in the

hugopost my-cool-new-post

and bam I got it all going! I can literally do all the crap I wanna do as long as I have the time and willing to put in the effort lol.

I used to have a bunch of blogs, I’m sure my old blogspot is still up somewhere, but idk, it kinda hits different when you got your markdown files and you can just push them straight into github and it’ll do all the posting for you automatically. Right now my Github Actions will publish straight to neocities and the github pages.

I don’t know man, at work I let AI do all the coding for me, but these days I’m reconnecting to computing by making things more physically tangiable. The Pihole was one thing, but this blog is also more “mine” than my code at work will ever be.

I don’t even care if this crap will look good on the CV or not - like who cares! As long as I’m getting paid, it’s all good.

How to have fun with your computer

• idk just go for it man. I’ve been playing Transport Tycoon Deluxe (well, OpenTTD) and it sure scratched some itches I didn’t even know I had.
• I finally played that Theme Hospital game I really wanted as a kid. It’s p cool but idk, I’m not getting how to play it “properly”. All my doctors end up having melties and quit their jobs. Maybe it’s a part of the simulation haha
• set up servers, connect to them through ssh or whatever lol
• set up blogs and screw around github actions.
• just bee yourself. :bee: (oh man this would be dope af if I could figure out how to get emoticons working on my blog dude, somebody write it down for me LOL)

I’ll put up some stuff I learned today, such as

How to set up your hugo to instantly post!!

alias hugopost='f() { hugo new posts/$(date +%Y%m%d_%H%M%S)-$1.md; }; f'

this will allow you to create a post mega quick by just going like “hugopost my-cool-post” and it’ll just do the rest. Amazing!

neopost github is great, but you needa understand what’s going on

Then what else I found: the neopost github repo is real good, but the basic_info.md is wrongly named in the sidebar folder. it should be basic-info.md !

There are a bunch of other problems with that repo as well, such as you need to have a posts.md archetype. Plus it’s like using the YAML settings while files are in TOML etc. It’s kinda nuts, if I feel like it, I’ll maybe open a PR but not day lol it’s been a day.

imagemagick ROCKS

Also I got a new PFP here. Imagemagick came in CRACKED yo with all the dithering. In order to install imagemagick in WSL it was a bit bullshit:

echo "=== 1. Updating system and installing dependencies ==="
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install -y build-essential pkg-config libtool git \
  libwebp-dev libheif-dev libde265-dev libx265-dev \
  libjpeg-dev libpng-dev libtiff-dev libopenjp2-7-dev \
  libdjvulibre-dev libwmf-dev libraw-dev libjxl-dev \
  libfreetype6-dev libfontconfig1-dev libxml2-dev \
  libgs-dev liblqr-1-0-dev libglib2.0-dev libgomp1

echo "=== 2. Cloning ImageMagick source code ==="
cd ~/
if [ -d "ImageMagick" ]; then
    rm -rf ImageMagick
fi
git clone https://github.com/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.git
cd ImageMagick

echo "=== 3. Configuring the build with full feature modules ==="
./configure --with-modules --with-gomp --with-lqr --with-security-policy=open

echo "=== 4. Compiling and installing (using all CPU cores) ==="
make -j$(nproc)
sudo make install
sudo ldconfig

echo "=== 5. Verification ==="
magick -version

cuz apparently you need to get “““dependencies””” and “““delegates””” installed properly BEFORE even thinking about getting imagemagick

But then you can do shit like

magick pfp2.png -resize 500x500\> -ordered-dither o4x4 -level 10%,70% -colors 16 pfp3.gif

and it’ll crunch up your files REAL good. If I find any cool crunchers I’ll do it more.

Anyway I hope you enjoyed this cool post! Did a whole bunch of coding instead of browsing Reddit or 4chan like a dweeb! Plus this is like the longest I have written before I let AI take the wheel. Man, work SUCKS but thank god machines will do it all FOR me so I can STAY IN MEETINGS more! Read less