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Created: Jan 14, 2025

Modified: Jan 17, 2025

2025-01-14 - Not dead yet

Windows96 - Enchanted Instrumentals and Whispers

Return

I haven’t really written here in a long time. So much for making this a regular habit. In my defense, the usual thing happened, where I got thrown out of the saddle by a lot of things at once, especially health. I do hope I manage to make this a habit again as of now. I also plan to do another daily type of post on this site, combining this will probably make me stick to it more. More on that tomorrow.

Health

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me post about being in the hospital last month. I had a bad case of pneumonia on both sides of the lung. It wasn’t that great. The antibiotics made me get a different kind of infection right after and I think there may be more things that need attention, I will be going to the doctor again soon. Even though I don’t like or trust doctors, they have access to equipment and medication I don’t.

Hospitals are Hell on earth

Speaking of doctors, the stay there was hellish. Literally. These people are straight up demons. When I got to the ER, I could hardly breathe and was slightly hyperventilating. Now I am not mentally retarded, I know hyperventilating isn’t good, there was no need for 5 people surrounding me to yell at me to stop doing it, and literally telling me I’m stupid for doing it because the oxygen levels look fine on screen. It horribleof them to try to force a shitty covid plastic mask on me a third time after I ripped the other two off in panic while suffocating already, then angrily shouting at me from all sites that they’re sick of me and that I basically should stop pretending. The doctor asking me a ton of questions in a rapid-fire manner, then getting extremely irritated about me not answering them in the half-second she was willing to waiting for an answer at best and then leaving the room saying “If you’re not gonna talk to us, we can’t help you”. The fact that they went out to my wife to ask her if I am mentally ill is almost comical.

I really thought I was going to die. These people were not just gonna let me die, they were gonna cause a heart attack. At some point I even cried out asking “Why are you being like this to me?” with what little breath I could gather. There was little reaction to it other than more angry complaints.

They sent me to the Xray, and when I came back, the tone shifted entirely.

The Jordan Peterson Experience

I’ll spare you the details of my hospital stay, they were mostly uneventful aside from a few things that are however not that interesting.

Anyway, it turned out I had pretty severe Pneumonia on both sides, unusually strongly visible on the Xray, which is bad. They wanted to perform a bronchoscopy on me, meaning the want to shove a camera tube down my throat into the lungs to see what goes on in there, and to possibly extract some mucus out. It was nonstop arguing about the damned mask again, until eventually they sort of gave up, but I was freshly traumatized from the ER and very on-edge about it. They put the sleeping gas on me and I remember vividly how the world suddenly turned grey and I was gone. What I don’t remember is that apparently the moment they tried to put a mask or the camera on me I would turn into a wild beast and go completely berserk, fighting for my life and crying out about not wanting the mask put on me. The doctor said he had never seen something like this before, and that they had to get 5 people to sit on me and inject such a strong dose of Benzos into me, that the doctor said it would’ve killed him personally. He thought I was an addict, because the only other explanation was, that my liver must have an insane metabolism. If I hadn’t just experienced the worst trauma in my life and wasn’t shaking and in terror like I had just been raped without even remembering what happened, I would’ve told him about Ray Peat.

Long road to recovery

Now, a month later, I am much better, but still not recovered. I still cough up mucus sometimes, and I still can’t really do anything exhausting. Hopefully this will be the last month of all this. And I hope all the other things turn out to be nothing.

In the meantime I will just continue, or rather resume, working on the game and myself. Although the game almost feels cursed. Every time I even think of working on it, I get hurt somehow.

Here’s the music to the cover posted above

Created: Dec 25, 2024

Modified: Dec 25, 2024

2024-12-25 - Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas

Created: Nov 04, 2024

Modified: Nov 04, 2024

2024-11-04 - Headache

DNP

Today I have a terrible headache. I still managed to work on my my game for an hour and am writing this Journal entry for today.

The reason for this headache is most likely the fact, that I have been experimenting with DNP¹ for the last 3 days, and I don’t think my body can take it well, so I have decided to stop and cease all future attempts as well.

The effect is just very counter-intuitive. It’s not going to help a whole lot with cutting if it weakens you to the point you can’t work out or be productive anymore.

I wanted to write more, but my head is killing me right now. I still have to prepare my tripe soup (Never eaten any before. I am curious how it will taste.)

Dinitrophenol, I don’t recommend it. ↲

Created: Nov 03, 2024

Modified: Jan 14, 2025

2024-11-03: - I like my computer

I love my puter, all my friends are inside it

Trial and Error

A few weeks ago I installed Linux on my computer. While there were a few good reasons, like it being supposedly better for working with Godot (which I decided to make Project Remiworld in, after RPGMaker has turned out to be more of a burden than a crutch) ultimately it was just spontaneous and on a whim.

This was not the first time, as over the years I must have tried it out at least 3 times in total. So far I had tried out Linux Mint (Debian Editon)¹ multiple times, failed on plain Arch because I couldn’t get my Sound to work among other things, failed to install Gentoo because I didn’t have LAN, had constant krashes on KDE Neon after using it for almost a month(!), etc etc. Every time I ended up going back to Windows. Especially the releases of modified versions of it, that rip out Microsofts Telemetry and whatever janky, broken garbage their outsourced indian “engineers” manage to cobble together, starting with the Ameliorated Windows Project up to my favorite RevisionOS² - which I still install on any friends or relatives PC whenever I have to play tech support for them.

I use Arch, btw.

So I was contemplating to switch to Linux, when a friend of mine told me about EndeavourOS, which is basically just Arch without the hassle of going through an Install script myself + having various things already set up and configured. I am not some /g/tard that wants to spend all day working on their computer, instead of using their computer for work.

So I eventually went ahead and just installed it. I got convinced to give KDE Plasma another try, which EndeavourOS offers during the install. Something about better performance by using Wayland(which my beloved XFCE doesn’t support yet) in games and stuff. Although I stopped playing those because they were quite the time sink, in a day, that already never seems to have enough time for everything I want to do.

As I was using it for a while, not really caring much for taking on the beast of customizing anything yet, things started to get a little on my nerves.

KDE sucks

While overall it worked, and surprisingly there were no trademark KDE krashes, little things were bugging me or did in fact not work. Discord screensharing is an example. Eventually the frustration pent up; I didn’t even like looking at Plasma. The KDE design philosophy wastes way too much space and is honestly quite ugly. I could have fixed that by theming and customizing myself for hours, but that wouldn’t have fixed any of the other issues.

No human wants to read manuals

So I dared to do something risky. First I installed XFCE. And then upon booting it up I immediately decided “Yeah. I am going to remove all this Krap.” So I spent a good 2 hours in despair, ripping out the HRT-fueled nervous system of my OS, wrestling with a billion packages that are in a dependency circle and for some reason include OS-critical software like libblock and udisks2 probably breaking things I haven’t even discovered yet. This made my password manager for (ungoogled)chromium entirely broken, because apparently that is linked to my KDE keyring. It took quite a while to figure that out. What took even longer was fixing my Login manager, because I accidentally managed to break it, so I could not log in anymore, after I installed gtk-mini-greeter for lightdm.

What I didn’t mention yet, was that the only reason I was able to do all this, was thanks to ChatGPT.

While it isn’t perfect, and sometimes makes up solutions using commands or configs that don’t even exist, most of the time it is a splendid troubleshooter and instructor, that saves you the time and sanity of going through horrible, either verbose or entirely incomprehensible manuals yourself. This is invaluable.

Where it couldn’t help me however, was my fuckup with the mini greeter. Even AI couldn’t fathom someone being so stupid, not to read the warning that tells you to add your username to the config right after installing. Oops.

My beloved Mouse

So there I am. Back on XFCE. A beautiful desktop Environment from the start. It’s fast and it just works. Even my Discord screenshare works now. Perfect.

Xfce Logo I am fond of the mouse logo. You may know that I have pet rats and also used to have mice.

But since I somewhat know and remember how to customize XFCE, I kind of get the itch to do so. So I go look at themes, and to my delight, I see that someone made an improved Version of the Windows95-style Chicago95 theme, called Redmond97. Old tech just has SOVL. I don’t care what you think.

Win95 PC A typical PC before the 2000s. Mogs all modern, soulless, sleek, minimalist globohomo designs into oblivion.

Then I change some color schemes, customize my panels, get a nice wallpaper and adjust it’s hue to match the DE, and there we have it. A beautiful Computer that brings me joy to use, by aesthetics alone. I think this is very important. It helps motivating you into work, if said work requires your computer. It is also important to look at beautiful things often - I will write about this some other time.

“holy fuck that looks disgusting” - immediate response upon sharing a screenshot of my desktop on discord

To conclude this entry, I want to share my wallpaper with you. Maybe you enjoy it as much as I do.

red remco wallpaper

I liked Linux Mint, but I have a dislike for Ubuntu, so I chose the Debian Version. Unfortunately a lot of packages are out of date, which also ironically makes it especially hard for a beginner to follow guides and such. ↲
They don’t offer an .ISO anymore - only the post-install playbook-script. Luckily I still have the latest .ISO they published. ↲

See more

Created: Nov 02, 2024

Modified: Nov 02, 2024

2024-11-02 - Habits

A Windows96 Album Cover

On writing and thoughts

I think I want to make it a habit to start writing at least one daily note into my Exocore. Writing is something I have long been putting off to actually start doing. I think it is good for organizing your thoughts, especially when you look at how the best way to really understand something is when you put it in words to explain to someone else - at least that is how it is for me.

To give an example: Often my wife would ask me to explain various things to her, say, something nutrition related. Then, in the middle of explaining something I would have an epiphany and not all too rarely I would stop mid-sentence, telling her that I “must research something quickly”, because I suddenly grasped something I didn’t before and mentally envisioned a path to gaining greater understanding of the topic.

Music

From new habits to old ones - I want to talk about music. Sitting here in front of my riced out (I am quite happy with it) Linux PC, late in the evening, writing this note, while I honestly should have been in bed continuing to read Don Quixote stories in Infrared- and Candlelight an hour ago already, I really get this wonderful feeling of melancholic Nostalgia. It feels like a virtual metaphor of watching the stars.

Don Quixote Book The book is quite large and I think it looks very unique. Note that this is not my photograph.

A big part of this feeling is attributed to the music I started listening to again quite recently. Music has sort of fallen out of favor for me in recent times. Usually I just prefer the sound of my surroundings or simply the silence. But every now and then I stumble upon something like a new(or old) Album by Windows96.

Windows96

And I start listening to it almost out of subconscious action. I can not pinpoint why exactly I like this type of Vaporwave music so much. It just invokes that strange feeling of nostalgia for a place that doesn’t even exist. Maybe, it can be attributed to the ethereal, dreamlike or retro aesthetics that almost everything in the genre exudes. Years ago, I even had a double digit gigabyte archive of all kinds of Vaporwave tracks, from popular (although less so, since I kind of despised nu-Vaporwave like Blank Banshee or the skinwalking future funk genre often confused with it. (which has grown onto me by now)) to old and borderline, if not entirely, lost tracks to completely unknown ones from promising new artists I would scan Youtube and Soundcloud for almost daily. I don’t think I have ever even remotely been interested in collecting any media/data like that before or after, but Microsoft put an end to all of it anyway when I woke up one night to see my PC in a forced 7>10 Windows Upgrade (this was around 2016?) I had previously declined the day before.
That update corrupted my hard drive entirely and everything was lost.

Thanks, Bill.

I still listened to it semi-frequently up until a certain point I don’t remember, but I keep going back to it every now and then anyway - usually to listen to the aforementioned Windows96. His discography is simply unmatched and I can not think of a single bad work, which is incredibly impressive when you consider the sheer amount of output he has as well.

Here is another all-time favorite of mine.

My old website, I unfortunately lost all files for, had an auto-playing Youtube embed of this in the center. I often liked just going on my own website and taking it all in. It had pleasant colors and a night-sky background not too dissimilar to the one used as the default Exocore theme. Although it was not animated and a bit simpler. I miss it.

Plans

As told in the first section, I plan on making a habit on daily notes. These will be more like personal blog posts, and I doubt anyone will find much use for them. They are merely stream of thought writing. Thought practice. This is my brain gym. Fittingly for the topic of the day, I just realized I was writing these in the wrong category and Journal category is meant for posts like this, as opposed to the Daily one. Honestly, I don’t like the ambiguousness of that naming system. I would rather switch these names But I just moved this one, as well as the previous post either way. I won’t edit the use of the word “daily notes” in this or the previous post. Stream of thought. I don’t care.

Created: Nov 01, 2024

Modified: Nov 02, 2024

2024-11-01 - Setting up the exocore

Today I finally got around to setting up an exocore. I had way more trouble than you’d think and it wasn’t even my own doing. When I tried following the tutorial and edited various things like exocore/data/user.yml, none of the changes would be reflected in the site.

Since the exocore package hasn’t been updated in a while and Charlie said that it was “on hold”, I figured that maybe some default configurations I had to change weren’t in the tutorial

especially when you consider that the link to the tutorial isn’t correct anymore on some pages(!) -

and spent hours opening configs and scanning them for anything suspicious, constantly opening the same ones after I’ve checked everything, like when you open an empty fridge over and over, because the result doesn’t satisfy you. I was going insane.

I even went as far as searching for other exocores on github to compare the settings and ended up forking a customized one when I finally found the issue.

It was none of my config files, settings, or anything of that sort. Netlify simply failed building the site every single time ever since I opened Obsidian for the first time. The reason? Obsidian created an empty note with a faulty date which apparently is reason enough to break the entire site. Awesome.

However, now everything works perfectly fine and I am quite happy about it, especially after I found this great “heaven“-theme in styles.scss.

The only thing worth complaining now, is the fact that my provider of choice does not offer any option to set the nameserver of a subdomain, so as of writing this you will still see that rather ugly .netlify.app domain instead of core.sevensevenseven.net.

Also I ended up customizing my OS for fun. Have a look if you want. customized desktop

Charles Sneedworth