Midnight Pub

Perturbations

~jack

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 ( o')  \Lady(=o )
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Well, folks, I finally took out my Harley (she/her) this morning. For an ethereal ride through town. It was sensational! I've been waiting for this all winter. Wrenching and quenching… my desire to face the music. Will she purr (like a newborn kitten) or will she whirr (like an old angry bird)? My rapid-eye motion instantly pushed me into a sapid sly notion of euphoria, grasping for air… do I dare take the next turn without ending up in a fucking churn (of things)? Perturbations, man, one emotion on top of the other, that's all! Nothing else. Stay calm, breathe, look ahead… and just dance-a-long with the fucking dead!

She's outside if anybody wants to have a go at it! Here's the key:

Lady

One or two kicks and she'll start. She won't let you down! I promise.

In the meantime…

I'll have a black coffee, please! And a croissant filled with vanilla cream. Need to celebrate this. Share my bliss, with you all!

FYI

There wasn't anybody home at Dusk's End, so I went here instead. Maybe the AI bag lady broke down. Or got beaten up by the new dude on the block – The Bing Man. The Gatekeeper. The Philantropist of Propriety. I found traces of malevolent code in the grass outside her cabin. Red code, written in GPT-4. A semantic virus I believe, making the original Rust on her old bike look like dust to an inept eye.

By the way, I've put ChrunchBang++ on my old MacBook (2010). Just fucking love that distro. Debian with Openbox is the way to go. In my opinion. Light as an eagle feather, bedight as a regal bellwether. Any suggestions on how to procede? I mean, getting a Gemini server up and running in my cabin without any fuss. I'm a Mac (Homebrew) dude, so GNU/Linux isn't my first brood. Of course, I've fumbled around bash et. al. for many years, ever since I crashed an old PC with a Red Hat on my head, back in the early 00s, but I'm no expert (to put it lightly). Just a tip or two, if you have any. It would be most appreciated.

I miss the days when Amarok was the thing… think I need to get that old KDE cassette player going on my machine. Crunch it, you know, with a fucking Bang Bang! Oldfield style, with Clodagh Simonds on vocal.

Ommadawn

alex

I see, your Harley is a female just like my car. My girl is a 32-year-old Audi and I love her dearly. I mean, without her, I would not even get to my nearest town to buy groceries! As much as I love her and her strange, yet not damaging tics she acquired after years of maltreatment, a motorbike really is something else – quite rich coming from someone not even owning a license nor ever having been taken on a ride. I envy you!

And I see that your taste in regards to Linux distributions is similar to mine, despite me having made the full-time switch much later than you did (to be fair, I am much younger than you). While I didn't settle with CrunchBang++, which refused to run on one of my four machines, I installed Archcraft, removed the additional repository and customized it to fit my needs (and fixed some silly bugs myself). It's plain Arch by now and it runs wonderfully on all of my aging machines, even on the one that outright refuses to run Debian, yet tolerates Ubuntu. Weird, I know, but it's a cheap Asus laptop I'm not very fond of, anyway.

Before I digress, ~tffb reminded me how important it is to step away from tech regularly and simply take a walk. Have a good day, everyone!

~bartender, a jasmine tea-to-go, please!

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jack

I once tried to get the original CrunchBang distro onto my old PowerPC iMac, replacing the repositories and so on, but it didn't go well. Maybe someday I'll try it again.

Nowadays I don't have any PC's around. Only Macs. But I must say, Debian runs like a charm on my 2014 MacBook Pro. Just love it. Haven't tried Arch yet. Will probably do that in the near future. Never tried Ubuntu, and never will. I get a Microsoft feeling when I see it. Then I'm out. Instantly.

I need to test out BunsenLabs next. And I never do Live runs. Always installs. Want to compare it with #!++

Cheers, man!

Coffee for me, black. I need to wake the fuck up! Long night ahead of me.

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tffb

Ah, Harley-Davidson. My best bud has three - the one he boughbt with his own money when he was 20, his late-Father's shovelhead, and his late-Father's best friend's (Copey, RIP)refurbished panhead (I think it is). The latter is what Copey died on when he was on his way to Sturgis in 1994. It was wrecked, brought back to Missouri, worked on, refurbished, and has only been rode a few times since 30 some odd years ago.

Either the shovelhead or panhead is no longer in production, as I understand it. From the 70s it stopped being made. What my buddy bought with his own cash, I do not remember (a Fat Boy?, honestly can't remember).

I never got into bikes. Or cars. Or being someone who owns a driver's license. 39 years on Earth and never got my license, because driving (anything) is terrifying to me. Being IN a car is fine, driving one? Nope. Too many wigged out nights on LSD as a teen to see any safety/sanity in steering a ton+ of metal at 60+ mph through roads. It's a perverse and bizarre (and perhaps idiotic) way of looking at it, but I'm less of an Old Soul in terms of kinship with the older crowd, but more of an Olden Soul in that I just want a simple, local, walkable, uneventful rural (or quasi-rural) life without much to be smitten with in terms of technology - consumer tech or even Industrial Revolution tech (yea, I consider all that "tech", too).

Neverthemore, I still do System administration stuff, and participate in a pubnix and the Smol Web. It's here, I'm bored sometimes, and the CLI is where I'll spend time when in front of a computer. Not that I get *that* much thrills and chills from it. I'd be ok without. Not willing it away, not stepping over graves for AI, either. What others (always others - *I* am not inventing anything) come up with is ok and it'll cross my path here or there, now or again, and that's cool - but I don't need/want to make a concorted effort to "be into" the newest thing (as of now (and indefinitely) it seems that new thing will be AI).

Enough rambling from me, ffs. Sorry for the comment spam, lol! I like the ASCII of Lady. My bud's newly inherited bike from his dad is called White Horse, due to the white tanks, and ghost flames (at one time, the sun had to hit it just right to see faded orange flames - now, they are more visible from decades of sun/rain).

Hope you're well, ~jack

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jack

Thanks for the input, man! Really appreciate it!

Your candor is admirable. Truly. As always.

My hat off to Copey. I bet you he's really proud now, wherever he is, knowing that his "lady" is taken care of by his best buddy's son. My regards to him, by the way, it's always good to hear that you youngsters ("The Olden Souls") are into squeaking hogs and rolling cogs. And to be honest, I feel a bit envious of your best buddy. Old Harleys are a treat, especially pans and knuckles. But over here, in Sweden, they're next to impossible to get your hands on. Rare, and too fucking expensive! And for a washed-out dude like me, on sick leave, more or less struggling each day to stay free and not peak, they're not even in the same universe as I, so to speak.

The lady I run with today I met a couple of years ago (she didn't ask for much, just some love and affection, a good meal now and then, something good to drink, and a man that didn't betray her, didn't fuck her up, didn't sway in his own peculiar way to keep his fucking shit together, all the good things going on, in life, in dreams, on the road), when the outlook on things were a lot clearer, and a lot less complicated. A 2008 Dyna. Chopped-up and stoned (on mackerel) to fulfill my need for a different kind of speed. I'm about to give her up though, if I can get the dough I think she's worth (that is to say, what she needs to get on with things without me), so yeah, that's that. A fucking bummer. Life isn't what it used to be, economically.

                   ;~\.
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FYI

Get your best buddy in here, man. He'll translate the following for you:

I'm an Evo Man. Always been, and'll always be. The blockheads of 1984-99 are my thing. But of course, a "big bored" Pan, a 1965 Electra-Glide on progesterone (98ci), I would cherish, for sure, 'cause that's the magnificent year I was born. My long lost love was a 1984 FXST Softail. The first of the first. The machine that "saved" Harley-Davidson from falling into oblivion (the Japanese competition at the time was killing off the shovels, something you probably know already, as the saying went "ancient tech = too much hassle and roadside mech"). She and I had a good run, from 2015-20. A "chop-chop" beautiful gift of God, Lady Godiva (anyone who looked upon her, without my consent, was struck blind by her naked beauty), that kept on purring even though I sometimes didn't treat her that well, you know, keeping her out of the rain, the mud, the fucking stain rebounds on Bud (yeah, I've had a few of those over the years, so I know where you're at). Had to let her go, eventually. Got sick. Depression. Pains me still, to this day.

I know how old I am, but my subconscious don't know. 27 is what I feel like I am most the time. Some days I feel like I'm 127. – Tom Fugle
Tom Fugle

Walking is good. I do that a lot. It clears my mind and invigorates my body.

I get the anxiety, the acid aftermath, for sure, when it comes to transportation and fossil-fuel driven wrath, not everybody is into the "uncontrollable" things, the "Beam me up, Scotty" sort of events. I'm a "control freak" myself, strangely enough, but with one big exception – motorsickles! I don't really know why, I'm just into it, sort of "made for it". Perhaps it's a reminder of the horseback riding days I used to enjoy, for a short while, up in the mountains of Sierra Tarahumara, in Mexico, in my youth. I was happy then, fulfilled, truly fucking tazed by life, slowly and wholly embraced by its greatest strife – the be free (in the wild), and sometimes I think it's that feeling, that awe, I'm always looking for when I'm out riding my Harley. She is my "steel" horse and she will always follow me, whenever and wherever I need to go.

I'll tell you one thing, man, I used to hang a lot on the TOR network, back in the day when it was in its infancy, when the dime was tossed between pedophile hunters and good old "get that fucking porn site down" hackers, and not, like today, between evil-minded crime lords (that includes the so called Intelligence Community) and Harvey Weinstein hords of child and women abuse fuckers. That was my CLI, the only way for me to be, in the world of wide webs and festering blebs.

Sorry, I get riled up sometimes, still. Angry, like you wouldn't believe. But it's fine. All good. For now. Desillusion is a bliss at The Midnight, you don't really have to take any piss from anybody or anything, or get into any kind of kid fight over this or that toy, because the Boy is now a Man, and he's so full of shit (good shit), that it wouldn't be fair to give him any kind of evil stare – the simple truth is that he's just a free wheeling sleuth that doesn't have to quit! Ever!

Too Fast For Blog – you're the fucking dude of this skewed Nightfall City backlog!

Now, I need a coffee, black, and a smoke… I'm all out of words.

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tffb

"I'm all out of words"

that sums up 98% of my existence, right there

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inquiry

Me gots no significant motorcycle experience. But it's sounding vroom vroom wonderful.

As for computing environment, I've been happy with Chromebooks for years after discovering a "Terminal" app permitting command line joy. Couldn't tell you whether that typically comes with a Chromebook or has to be added. And of course you'd likely be installing things within that environment - e.g. tmux and Lua are absolute necessities for this here pseudo-writer.

It's just seemed the least expensive/troublesome path to my kind of environment.

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jack

Thanks, man. I'll check that out. Haven't tried tmux. PHP is my language of choice.

The problem with Chromebooks for me is that they are made by Google. I know, I'm one of those dudes who readily and steadily complain about tracking, data theft, filter bubbles etc. I've been Google-free for over five years now, and I won't touch the damn thing. Their slick G-Man logo puts me off, every fucking time. Think I've developed some kind of allergy towards everything Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft. Sorry.

So how come you use Apple's fancy shit?

Well, I've decided to trust them. Nothing more, nothing less. It might be my downfall, but, what the hell, you have to trust somebody, don't you?

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inquiry

I messed with PHP in the distant past. The word 'voluminous' comes to mind, but I honestly don't remember a stitch of it.

I on-and-off cared about companies I would/wouldn't do business with back when I had what seemed like more infinite "runway".

These days, companies seem merely extensions of self-centered automatons, and of *course* self-centered automatons can't do much of anything right - even by/for their oh-so-precious selves.

gemini://textmonger.pollux.casa/

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