Rolling Blog

Entry is not time-dependent Boring day today. Might as well put it out while trying to edit something fiddly on my tablet; Apple disparged the concept of stylii when they launched the iPad in 2010. Then, they brought it back. Anyone find that a bit funny? No? Well, i guess it's indeed more convenient to not need a stylus, but even they realised how important it really was for those precision operations, y'know? idk.

Also, I know what month it is. I kinda feel holiday-agnostic as of late.

Entry is not time-dependent ....so not much has happened since the last post. Too little, in fact. It is making me very uncomfortable......almost depressed, really.

A lot of it has to do with.....not being able to get things done. Especially schoolwork. Just two days ago, I decided to compile Cool VL Viewer (i didn't name it dont ask me) on Baby, my RPi4. Baby, being Baby, chugged through the job, and had to devote every fiber of his concentration to it. I wasn't able to do anything...even use the desktop, so I dropped into a virtual console and opened Htop. Just sitting in front of the monitor with that on was enough to waste all of my time.....somehow.

Things have been slow. Yes, My tablet had Firefox disabled. My parents forgot about Samsung Internet, but I kinda really want that to be a moot point. More and more, I feel like my mind has been wired to believe that screens = happiness. Some Black Mirror crap right there. I never really watched Black Mirror but from what I heard it sounds like some kind of dark tech eulogies series. So there, too.

I've not really been browsing Neocities sites that much recently. In fact, I have no idea what the hell I've been doing these past few days. Scary, innit? I got in and out of Pinterest (the 90s had the best aesthetics), and regained an interest in, of all things, the PBS Kids mascots. Especially the first two, Dash and Dot. There's a DeviantArt group devoted to the topic, for some reason. There's been for some time.

I've been listening to a podcast, Elwood City Limits, on and off for the past few months. I started from the pilot, and intend to go through it in chronological order. Being "the episodic Arthur podcast" as Will and Lucas always put it every intro, I really doubt I'd ever get to the last episode I've been using Spotify for this. I think it came with my tablet when I got it last Christmas, I don't really know. Tip: You don't actually need the Premium tier to select tracks on Spotify, At least, YMMV; IIRC this is an Android only thing. Apple users may have to pony up the cash. Spotify sometimes tries to roll back that feature to get me to switch. This normally happens once a month, and after leaving Spotify for a few days they let me have the feature back. Very annoying when that happens.

I wonder if there's some way that modern websites subliminally influence your mind to keep coming back. Perhaps, between the flat light-pastel coloured shapes, there's some greater scheme at play. Maybe the colours are chosen to invite the subconcious mind. Maybe the shapes are laid out in such ways that they spell, in the deep recesses of the brain, some bliss. I don't really know how such things would work.....but is it beyond the realm of possibility? I think not.

Entry is not time-dependent

[High-res version (is??) on Tumblr]

.....I've been thinking, and I think this is just nitpicking on my part. I, for one, can't justify running Blender, editing a web site, or having six windows open on a small tablet running Android, but i cannot shake the feeling of tablets being limited in terms of flexibility. Even where it's not needed, or even where said limitations may not even exist. I can offer one example: most of the time, tablet apps save your stuff outside of the folders visible in the file manager. No neat files with extentions. Maybe that is changing because I don't really have a lot of tablet apps to begin with, anyway.

3:30 pm

(So Elax is the edgy Alex.....?)

entry is not time-dependent Dreamlog I had a lucid dream some time ago. It wasn't really that exciting. I was in the house at my computer when I looked down at my tablet and saw that a large number of my apps were disabled. By what, you can probably guess. Not SNS either. The notifications showed apps with internal-sounding giberish names. The purge included i guess my contacts, file manager, calender, music app, system stuff like that. I go over to my mum and she suprisingly says she'd look into it. I got back to my desk to resume something, and checked the time. My tablet clock claimed it was 17:something, but it was dark out and it felt very late at night. Confused, I check another clock on my desk, this time a souvenier from a Disneyland, but realise that it was working when it IRL actually hasn't for some time. I do a finger check, and find the pinky and ring fingers on my left hand melted or distorted or something.

Once I was finally fully lucid, I didn't really do anything exciting. I walked across the house to the front door, then tried to elbow it down to see if I can grant myself some superstrength. I failed. I was worrying my mind would suddenly conjure up some nightmares. I walked out the door, into the front yard, and flew over the street into darkness. My worry was gone. After flying up a while, the surroundings were all gone, too. I let myself fall, and the wind rushed arround me, but the ground never reappeared. The last thing I remembered, was, out of everything, a white letter H.

Yes, I told my friend all this a few days later and he said the H saved the boring dream for him.

entry is not time-dependent I don't know why I didn't post this sooner. I had a dream some time ago, Almost certainly arround September 29, as I recorded a video after I woke up, specifically at 3am, and that was it's datestamp.

Basically in that dream there was a part where I watched a show called "DreamWorld" (yes) or something similar to that. (As a side note I usually view videos in dream in a mental fullscreen state if that makes sense.) The show itself was IIRC part Adventure Time part DHMIS the TV adaptation, and seemed to be a 2000s production in a relatively low budget 3D style. It follows a group of three or so kids exploring dream worlds, but I never found out what their names were. The charecter that i do know the name of was the Adventure Beside You, or AB. I remember thinking that was such a mystic name, but then again I don't know who he was. Probably related to the narrator. Yes, there was a narrator.

One of the episodes involved time loops. There was a part where the footage started to loop (tracking through an exhibition hall), and the narrator got confused. Another had the kids in a desert. They were playing with this thing called "sling treasure" where you toss it somewhere and wherever it lands, it spawns a two-walls-one-floor-isometric-thing thing. This time, it spawned a bedroom, and they tried to sleep in it, but then a large gust of wind blew one of them under the bed, as well as a "monster" (actually a just as unwilling mushroom guy person with a knife) under the bed. What happened to the kid, I don't know, but it was notable enough that I rewatched that portion several times over. After discussing for a moment, the rest of the kids decided to use a "sling house", which was the same thing except for instead of generating part of a room it generated a small house. I don't know what else happened. Maybe I stopped watching or I woke up.

After I did woke up, I recorded a video recording all this, as I said earlier. I doubt I'd be able to ever do that again, but my heart was beating so hard as I dictated everyting down.

entry is not time-dependent Went to a local mcdonald's a few days ago and saw this thing:

This was mildly interesting. I guess it's some kind of air spreader for the AC unit. It was spun passively from it's air currents. There were some problems with the unit when we arrived (it was leaking), so they turned it off, and sure enough, the fan thing eventually stopped. Sooooo that's all I know about this thing. First time seeing it.

And also i think it's fair for me to say here that I've since gotten a new phone after Trudy. It's a Smasung Galaxy A02, boring modern thing from a major company but because of that, it's actually cromulent for once. It's not meant for anything heavy, however, as evidenced by the twenty-thousand or so people flaming this thing for being trashware. I actually felt a bit defensive reading all that. This phone was meant so I can record sparring matches at a martial arts gym I'm forced to go to. One test later and i decided to just use the Galaxy full-time, as Trudy's camera is, again, rubbish and I felt stupid carrying two phones with me.

And if you're thinking that i sounded a bit NPC-like last post, yes I thought so, too. I'm not rewriting it. TLDR again using disks as an analog to accounts is interesting to me.

9:03 pm showerthought ramble? I have a mild interest in the concept of user accounts? Well I wouldn't really say it's even "interest" level, let's be real, but the concept of "whatever you need, wherever it's needed" is a nice one. Except for one caveat.

Google has been backing up some photos online, BTS, and now that my GDrive is almost full, it's starting to tell me "uh, yknow, your Google stuff is gonna all stop if you don't subscribe to our storage plan". Google gives 15GB free tier. IMO that's peanuts compared with what we have these days I'd imagine. That subscription is gonna outpace the price of a good SSD very quickly. And of course, theres no clear way to clear the backups. Ive disabled photo backups as of now and am looking to clear them sometime later.

And so, accounts without accounts, IE., disks that you carry arround, holding your digital life. I can only recall two examples of this. One, SIM cards, that you can store contact details on to be taken between phones. Two, the early run NeXT computers from the 90s where the entire userland is stored on a removable MO disk IIRC (search result for context). In fact, I have a USB drive with my site data on it, and an Apache site profile that sets Apache to read from that drive. In theory, this would let me do this pseudoaccount thing for any Apache localhost i can get my sudo-ey hands on. Mildly cool.

That's all I guess.

5:23 pm One thing that has happened to me before is me sitting down, and spending a little time here and there on "stuff" that's kinda insignificant and shoudn't take a long time individually. When I check the time again, I've wasted half my day T_T , and the worst part is, I don't know how, apart from how it's generally "the Internet did it".

Sooooo that just sucks. There too. It happened today, and my exams are next week.

3:56 pm Uh....I decided to de-stroke my last post. Even the de-stroking heads up notice I wrote after had a stroke.

I think it's a little unnerving that I can just go back to anywhere in this feed and edit whatever, and not have to tell anyone.

5:45 pm Allright, I've looked into my new old phone a little more, and it turns out that it's not just the apps that are "Go". It's the entire OS that's now "Go". This [OS] is actually impressive considering that [it can all run within] a single gibibyte of RAM.

The state of the RAM after playing device files on Youtube Music for thirty or so minutes.

This wasn't without sacrifices, however. Most jarring is that widgets can't be added or removed from the home screen. Back when I first got that phone, [in my mind] having widgets, was like, the most Android thing about Android. I remember being so confused as I held down my finger on the home screen and finding no widget edit option appearing.

More pain points:

• Camera is fixed-focus, therefore can't take clear photos of wierd trinkets.
• Apps took forever to load (duh, but I didn't know why, of course)
• Was my only device with a parental time-limit at the time. The phone would lock up at 8pm. The cherry on top of utterly useless vibe the phone gave off.

It didnt help that I was starting off with my iSheep period at the time. My main device was an iPad Air G1, and eventually I got an iPhone 4 and 2011 MacBook Pro off my parents, and planned on being full Apple untill adulthood while I had that crapphone in a drawer upstairs on shutdown.

(It feels so outrageous talking about owning so many Apple products here.)

Despite all that, there's still one thing we can all learn from this slim brick; most phones these days ommit the headphone jack. This phone ommits a second speaker. All audio comes through the earpiece speaker. It's both cromulent and interesting, and provides me with the perfect thing to end this blogpost on.

5:44 pm uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh update on my phone rooting process:

it's ded.

I have an old ZTE device as a backup, thankfully. However, it's so slow. Google Go does NOT help. Having a stock Android is cool tho.

Honestly I'm kinda burned that I now have a new expensive paperweight. I also kept hearing that Vivo phones were super hard to root, or maybe it's just me. IDK, moan.

(Oh, BTW i think i should tell you why i wanted to root my phone in the first place; remember yesterday's Nexus ROM? Well the Gboard included requred a shared library missing from the Vivo. I thought I could simply push the library to my phone via USB debug, but yep i needed root yau. Don't root your phones, kids.)

4:20 pm uuuuh update on my phone rooting process: my phone may need a ROM reflash, or worse, it's bricked. I managed to reboot into Fastboot and it seemd to work at first, but it then failed to wipe itself.

I'm worried some flag has been set in some presistent internal memory that now can't ever be cleared.

3:17 pm Sooooooo last night I had a dream and it's two CPUs and late in it, me and my grandma were driving along a dark road back home. It was fairly late at night when we passed an interactive info kiosk planted into the middle of the road, like those fairly recently installed arround town (they were more like TVs, really. Quite useless IMO). I remember this because I wanted to stop and snap a picture. Grandma wasnt really happy about that, but she turned arround anyways. Something happened, however, and I don't know what. Maybe the scene changed, or I woke up, but I never did remember ever stepping out onto the road to snap the image.

Uhhhh...back IRL, I've got two weeks 'till my next exams so yau. I'm not dead BTW. Don't worry. Yep, I have no idea what to do with a blog like this. Like, be free, IDK.

Good news is that I no longer am practicing my emo mentality. It only works if you truly feel you've lost everything. I can't really sustain that mentality and I suspect anyone who can will end up experiencing.....side effects...i guess. Altered brain chemistry, i'm just tossing junk here.

I'm currently trying to get an old Gboard onto my phone. It's an Android 5.1 system so Play Store doesn't work, and APKmirror wasn't too safe, apparently, so I decided to try the safest source I can think off: Google-hosted Nexus restore images. Super first-party as far as I'm concerned. The .apk files can be got after unzipping and converting a few files. The real problem seems to be compatibility. I got Google Camera to work, but not the Gboard itself, annoyingly.

Yes, I do have a period-appropriate Gboard downloaded from APKmirror. It's a fallback RN. Get this: the keyboard provided with my phone gives adverts when idling, and they increase as you try to type on it. Some chineese thing after all. But then again it's a f*ng keyboard. r/boringdystopia. Stay away from Touchpal 2015, kids. My vantage point is stunted, but boy do I not approve of what that was, trust me.

8:27 pm Situation has indeed devolved somewhat since last post.... i'm begining to wonder if i even need a website up at all. no, I'm not going to be too personal here. or bawly perhaps...

Hot take: Slow and steady wins the race is kinda nonsense. I've heard it attributed as the moral of that hare and tortise fable before, and everyone knows why the tortoise won in that story. I have to go for long jogs for a martial arts class, however, and I get winded easily, so I ran "slow and steady". I was last. I prefer seeing humility listed as the aseop for that aseop, and thankfully, i see that being done, too.

I have decided to drop my what seems in hindsight like very unstable happiness, and fill my head with guilt. I know how bad it sounds written down, and yes, it's not that effective as a motivating force. However, I'm one of those people who daydream a lot and therefore i have many ideas about what my life in the future is going to look like (currently it's living in a small caravan, with a network engineer job and an old but beyond cromulent convertible tablet/laptop as a daily driver). The problem is really how to get there. It was worse two weeks ago, and i realised the guilt was replacing the daydreaming, and also forcing me not to get distracted (another thing that i'm great at doing. And yes, i now forget to feel guilty sometimes). So there, i have a justification. there's probably a better way obv. woohoooo

My parents have set a rest day for me where i don't really have to work at all. I don't have the energy to purse projects currently, so i just sat in front of my desktop for several hours. It was very tiring emotionally. It took me two hours to finish adding every single cover to my Bill Wurtz collection from where I left off a few weeks ago. After all i've been through, this seems like a quaint achievement, but it's done.

Looks to be about over seventy covers. Clementine can't even write covers into the files even where possible, so i have to set them manually when importing the songs into my devices. Or i can auto-organise the library and set a little "cover.png" to be placed in each folder where it's needed, then see what happens. Apparently, it's a bit spotty whether this works.

and yes i also kinda don't care if my punctuation and spelling isn't formal at this point. i know what i said before.

9:50 pm One of my additional maths papers came back... it wasn't pretty. I wasn't fast enough to awnser anything and honestly kinda slacked revision before the test. I ended up with a measly 25% for the first paper. I can't do anything but pick myself up, and press onwards with purpose.

Imagine how depressing this blog would be if it recounted my loss of drive and life. 2024 Dec, failed my finals. 2025 Mar, Internet time restrained. 2025 Jun, Dartha's HDD crashed. 2044 Feb, Sacked from janitorial--you get it.

False start is better than none. Get here neko....

7:34 am Another night of being lazy. There was a big exam last two weeks (actually there's one more subject I should be studying for next Monday, so I hope I get my act together within the weekend today seeing what the upload time is.)

Also I decided to switch back to Ubuntu 16 LTS. I just like it better, it feels more apt to use on this system. I made some efforts to retheme Fedora's GNOME Shell and failed. Maybe some other time. Besides, being a Debian-based system, Ubuntu still has better support, even though support for my particular release has ended some time ago.

Like the previous change, this was on impulse. DankPods released a video detailing how the new iPad Pro is trash and how Apple should get their act back together and rehaul their software a little. I kind of agree that software has taken center stage in the computing experience as of late. Computers have kinda peaked IMO since 2006-ish. Any machine back to that period can handle multimedia which is kinda all I really need from a machine, even if some close corners have to be cut.

The switch to Fedora was because I think Ubuntu kinda jumped the shark when it ditched the Unity desktop and all their other weird experiments to please investors last I remembered. I also planned for Limbosystem to run Fedora anyways once I get it back up and running. It has stock GNOME Shell by default which also last I remembered was some new paradigm for cross-platform computing or something. I also wanted some OS consistency. I don't really care anymore, however. Once Limbo is working again, Ima just install Fedora and leave every other OS on all my other computers untouched.

Unlike then, however, I'm again actually pleased I switched back. I like it better, it's more frutiger aero, it's also smoother than Fedora ever was on this potato.

I don't think my test results are going to be too good when they come back. I hope nothing bad happens.

6:28 pm Apparently, Bing went down yesterday, and it took down DuckDuckGo, too. You can't keep a good procrastinator down, however.

I spend most of my online time on YouTube anyways so I guess the Duck shortage is kinda a moot point.

11:43 am Well I'm dying alright.

i spent 3 days doing idk with this stupid thing and now i cant load .deb files and i want to change the theme to look older yay

GNOME Shell

9:14 pm Switched to oneko.js, which seems to work better. Doesn't seem to have all the animations and don't seem to have the time to make a Webneko that does '= [

9:18 pm Today's updates:

• Managed to extract the HDD of an old 1.9TiB disk that's been underused to this point. Originally the terrabyte disk was to be used in the Touchmart and Daria would keep her old 70-something GB disk, but in the end, it was the other way arround, becasue hope for the Touchsmart being fixed is slim. Therefore, Daria is now Dartha, and she has 1.9 TiB. Limbosystem, the Touchsmart, uses Daria's old disk with an Ubuntu 16 LTS install and has been put into "denial stasis" (I play with it) awaiting a repair oppurtunity.

Also...

• Admiring Nekos. You may have noticed one in the top left corner of this page, and the same in the main page. Click it, and it'll do it's thing. However, it's got....issues.

  

  C'mon, it's right there!

  If I wanted to be stupid and crazy I might just go ahead and make a better web-embeddable Neko, and post it online. Here's the link to the Neko used BTW. Worried the original might go offline, as I am not supposed to download the script. Here's another that I may set up in replacement, and apparently the original Neko98 source, which I'm gonna try in WINE. Mewo

9:59 pm I used to think that school was just mid. I never really had a problem having to attend it. That was when I was 8 years old or so. Now that my *ing future existence hinges on it.......I'm begining to hate it.

*k school.

Also in other news, nostolgiamining. Well I don't realy have particular stories of being nostolgiamined, I do remember a time when I was still six or so, and I was at a seafood resturant, having a talk about WALL-E with my mum. Durring the discussion I made the connection that old, battered WALL-E stood up to the norms of the slick high-tech Axiom and Auto, and won, therefore old > new or something (nevermind that WALL-E and the Axiom were created in the same era if you think about it). Then I started getting into victorian lifestyles. Then 80's nostolgia became a thing, and I started dreaming about owning ZX Spectrums and DEC PDPs....

Even today, this old > new mentality is still within me. Currently it's moving to the 2000s, which is closer to my era. For instance, I'm writing this on a 2000's Compaq Presario, and don't get me started on the Touchsmart. If the nostalgia cycle is anything to go by, I may not be the olny one.

(nostolgiaminingnostolgiaminingnostolgiamining....bleh. bleh. There's a better term somewhere I know it.)

11:46 am After I think two days of doing said action, I decided that it's time to give up. Today I spent 1 1/2 hrs on that alone early in the morning. The laptop got very hot but I never got it to show as much as a single white pixel on the screen. Also, that same morning, I found the video I mentioned in the last post. Here it is. Yes I turned the laptop over when I was done.

My next course of action is to see if my parents would let me go to a computer tech on the off chance that one is willing to fix it for me. My other working laptop (I call her Daria for Derpy Daria)'s HDD might have to go along so I'd have a complete system to send in for repair.

(Also if you are wondering why I'd have to donor a HDD for the Touchsmart. It's because of my stoopid reasoning from back then. Well, I throw around my iPad so why not my older, bigger tablet? Well, that's because back then people did not just throw around tablets, and so it didn't factor into the design. The original HDD crashed and I never got a replacement.)

(They really don't make them like they used to, and sometimes, it's for the better.)

8:17 pm IRL I found out a few days ago by now, and you probably have, too, but there was a chatbot AI in the Neocities Editor on April 1st. One of Daria, to be exact. Here is some after-the-fact coverage on the situation ^hover. Oh, and a first-hand announcement on X that site that was Twitter but it's now a letter. It seemingly was up only for a short time, probably explaining why I didn't get to see it.

Also I'm currently trying to do janky ""reflow"" on a Touchsmart Tx2. These fall into the coolest class of device for me. It involves me doing a plug in - power on - unplug cycle for hours, covering the vents with a blanket until the solder bridging the GPU and the motherboard melts. I saw one (1) preson do it online in a Youtube video, except the firmware tried to restart the laptop on it's own, so lucky him. I am the new poster child of desperaton and probably also bad prioritization and maybe even gullibility.

9:23 pm

do i get an award for this

2:58 pm It's April Fools...... so be on high alert I guess?

To be fair, I don't really receive April Fools pranks that much, although there is that one time I was watching Cartoon Network and allegedly won 10,000 gems or something for being the nth Steven Universe viewer.

Anyways Conespiracy said something about an AI assistant somewhere that's bugging him. IDK where it is so far. I am editing this page in the Neocities Editor to tempt fate, but so far, no suggestion box or whatever. Yep, you read me: I want to see an April Fool.

7:51 pm Wanting to sign up for a service may not make good blog content.

i forgot the time I feel like signing up to "status.cafe".

A test involving an existential crisis.

This is a test article involving some words. They look around the page and wonder what the message they're trying to convey is. They find that there is none useful. But, unfonturnately by then, their fate has been cast, and here they shall stay for all thir days untill their untimely deletion. This did much to unease them.