> The Darkener's Console

You dodge as the thief comes in low.

Hollow —

It sounds like you
But it’s hollow
It’s soul is ruined
It’s so shallow

Replicating nuance like autotune
Fooled some, but not all
They say it’s coming soon
You won’t be able to tell

It’s hollow
Tomorrow
You can’t emulate the soul
Impossible

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Energy, IMO —

Reality is, and always has been, in perfectly balanced chaos.

When things become unbalanced – such as more negative vs. positive energy or vise versa, the other side fights with a vengeance to find that equilibrium. Most times it ends up overshooting and creating an opposing imbalance. I think that’s just the way it works.

Once in a great while, the two energies seem to dance, to sing; they’re in harmony. Rather than oppose each other, they play. Balance. But just for a moment…

All actions produce an equal and opposite reaction. Also, energy doesn’t ever go away, it only changes forms. This is fact.

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Ah, life —

One of the most sobering things I’ve experienced in life is watching videos I’ve taken of my friends and myself in my late teens / early 20’s (I’m in my early 40’s now).

We originally recorded them all on camcorders (yes kids, with actual tape) over the course of a number of years. Parties, outings, hanging out being bored together…

I’ve watched these videos in total many times. However it’s been years since I have. To see my general disposition and personality then is really fucking embarrassing to watch honestly. I guess I’ve grown up a lot. But back then, we thought we *already were* grown up (I guess in comparison to our earlier lives we were). But shit….we were still just kids, mentally and emotionally.

Maybe it’s the reflective mood I’m in the past few days but something’s drawing me to those videos, to learn and grow some more – to stand at the side of the cliff and see how far I’ve come.

I’ll take it.

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Progress in My Own Mind —

I want to change my thought process when I’m studying something particularly challenging/intimidating, to seek out a flaw of any kind (a spelling/grammar error, for example) to dismiss it entirely. It’s like I do it subconsciously to guard myself from feeling inadequate for not understanding the material.

I feel this is something that I’ve carried with me for most of my life. I think I’ve identified it, and I must eliminate it if I want to bring progress to my way of learning new things. Maybe in the process of documenting it here, I will start to learn how to drop it from my thought process.

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How to Conquer a People —

To conquer a people, you simply need to eliminate what binds them together: mutual trust, cooperation and love. Once these are gone, it’s simply a matter of directing them to serve your selfish fucking purpose under a guise of hope to get back to where they were before you infected them in the first place.

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Firefox —

I love how Firefox bookmarks have “Separators” (lines you can insert between bookmarks in bookmark folders). It is a very simple but elegant tool in bookmark management. I have an extensive collection of bookmarks and this really helps me find what I’m looking for quickly.

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Dam —

I build and
I fill
This dam
I’m so dumb

But when it’s all over
And I fill it back up
It’ll be like
I come

Dam brought up to the brim
With poison
But the rain’s coming…

I’m gonna flush it all out
And close up the gate
Let time replenish
And life will thrive again

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Muhahahaha!! —

I’ve been playing L.O.R.D. and have been sacrificing a lot of time saving my gold instead of incrementing up and losing a ton of gold in the process. My standing was on a steady decline. I was getting my ass handed to me on a daily basis.

I was saving though, and marking milestones in my savings for when Seth Able would double my gold in ‘ye old bank’ (“Somewhere, magic has happened!”) to provide an opportunity for me to buy matching upgraded weapon + armor as a pair. I kept passing milestones and going, ‘Ok… this is good, just need to double my gold.’ But for so long, it felt like I was being taunted by the decades-old function that randomized what gift Sethy-boy would appropriate me each day. I passed many-a milestone where I could get a proverbial leg up on the pile. Paralleling things happening IRL it felt like I may be forever doomed to steadily decline in status. But then…

Today was the day.

I just surpassed 10M gold (I know, @ Level 8) and after a streak of what seemed like a utter fucking eternity where magic had *not*, in fact, happened…

It happened.

I doubled my gold.

Crystal Shard & Magic Protection, beeyotch!

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The Innocent —

Through the greed of others, the innocent will pay
Through the greed of others, the innocent will pay
Through the greed of others, the innocent will pay
Through the greed of others, the innocent will pay
Through the greed of others, the innocent will pay
Through the greed of others, the innocent will pay
Through the greed of others, the innocent will pay
Through the greed of others, the innocent will pay

The innocent must fight
The innocent must fight
The innocent must fight
The innocent must fight
The innocent must fight
The innocent must fight
The innocent must fight
The innocent must fight
The innocent must fight

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Nada Surf —

I got High/Low at a thrift store a few months ago – I almost didn’t, but always did enjoy “Popular”. Low and behold, this album has become one of my “new-old” favorites. All of the songs seem very well done and are thoughtful pieces for that genre. I always thought they were one-hit wonders but to me, exposing myself to the whole ablum really opened my eyes to them as a band and a sound of their own.

I just read about them on Wikipedia and they currently have 9 albums and have been together since 1992 with 4/5 original members. Pretty fucking cool! I have a feeling I’ll be be getting their other 8 albums very soon. :)

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Adjust Official Raspberry Pi 7″ Touchscreen LCD Brightness With Zenity —

Here’s a quick-n-dirty script for adjusting the Official Raspberry Pi 7″ Touchscreen LCD Brightness With Zenity (Tested on Raspbian):


#!/bin/bash
#
# Sets the Raspberry Pi touchscreen brightness.

# Set variables
zenity="/usr/bin/zenity"

# Get desired brightness level
b=$("$zenity" \
--scale \
--value=120 \
--min-value=10 \
--max-value=254 \
--step=2 \
--title "Set LCD Brightness" \
--text "Please set desired brightness level:")

# Set desired brightness level
echo "$b" > /sys/class/backlight/10-0045/brightness

exit 0

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That’s Ok —

This didn’t work the way I wanted
That’s ok
I got this for free
What can I do to help

This didn’t work the way I wanted
That’s not ok
I paid, I paid
You owe me, yeah you sell

This synapse
A prolapse
Stress induced neurotransmission
Get the fuck out of me
What I want is

This didn’t work the way I wanted
That’s ok
I got this for free
What can I do to help

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The Full Truth —

It’s eating at me, but I must protect me
It’s much more than you think
This trajectory
My trajectory

These years go by like days
My life is already starting to wain
I’m loyal, I’ve sustained
This vision in me

I’m stuck in this tree
Trying to break free from trading time for money
But it’s warm, it’s cool
Take a walk in my shoes
You’d do what I did, too

This necessary evil
Is still just a tool
For change, I imagine a
Future without greed
In everyone around me

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i3: A Love Affair —

I don’t remember if I posted about switching window managers from Fluxbox to i3 (Update: Yep) but after about 6 months of a tabbed window manager, and enjoying many aspects of it, it proved to be a bit less productive than what I had grown accustomed to over decades with Fluxbox / Openbox / Blackbox (back in the day). I’ve tried most window managers, from KDE to Gnome, from Windowmaker to twm.. but something has always drawn me to the *boxes. It’s just kinda 1337 I guess, haha.

I’m a minimalist. I value function over form in most cases. What I’ve found with the *nix culture, however, is that I can have my cake and eat it too. A beautifully crafted, extremely lightweight and fast as fuck window manager is all I’ve ever wanted.

I don’t really desire integration between utilities and apps and the window manager (i.e. a DE). It just feels like lock-in and I have an obligation to use the integrated software instead of alternatives..and just to me, it doesn’t feel as free. There are so many options in the F/OSS world and I guess I’m kind of a whore that way.. I wanna try them all ;)

Listen – I don’t *need* pretty widgets – but dockapps are fucking awesome, take virtually no resources, are very satisfying eye candy, don’t ever cause issues and provide valuable, mostly customizable information.

Anyway, I came to a realization today that I don’t *have* to choose, at least 100%, what my standard window manager was. For instance, I’m going to continue to use i3 on my laptop. It makes more sense – the keyboard-does-most-everything approach is great for mobile.

What will never leave my thoughts, however… is that all of this great open source software is hacked out by people that *want* to do it. The development of a piece of software is driven by the developer(s). The motivations are key to the quality of a product. The motivations are also determined by the reward, or compensation, or result of development. What does the dev get out of it? Money? Eh…. Leaving your mark or legacy? Blood sweat and tears go into projects like that. Changing the fucking world?

Count me in.

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Sound vs. Image —

It’s honestly hard for me to get motivated by venues’ emails with upcoming shows. All the relevant info is there – Artist names, genre(s) and styles, the date of the show…a few even have links for Spotify which I appreciate.

But then there’s the professionally taken band image. Everybody trying to ‘look’ like something, like what kind of music they play. To me it’s distracting and gives me, at best, an imperfect impression of them as primarily musical artists.

Can’t we embed even 30 seconds of audio? Maybe a professionally taken live video? Give me a taste of what I’m going there for. If restaurants could transmit smells and tastes over the Internet as part of ads, the world would shit its pants.

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