Really, truly, random ramblings straight from /dev/urandom

50% physics student, 50% developer, 50% hobbyist writer, 150% not what this blog is about qwq It's just fandom rambling and rants about free software I have freed myself from the social pressure of curating my thoughts Background image source: https://i.redd.it/tpveste801k81.png

[evillinuxuser]

Status update/what I'm up to with this blog

IRL

Hi all... i've been gone for a while! Uni has been a bit stressful this spring/summer, especially preparing for a robotics tournament at the same time, but I got a job as Tutor (basically, helping first year students learn physics and prepare for exams) starting next semester.

I'm currently in Rome with my family, so expect some tourist photos soon. Super excited about going to the Colosseum, Circus Maximus and some catholic stuff ig? The airport is like a giant fucking shopping mall

Things I'm recently excited about

Hollow Knight Silksong (just started playing it and omg its as good as the first one, although i def would recommend playing Hollow Knight first)

Notpron (basically an internet steganography focused Schnitzeljagd/puzzle game)

Crossview (seeing 3d pictures without 3D glasses, see the r/crossview subreddit for intro and some great examples)

NixOS (I configured my entire system, from partition layout to mail encryption keys and Firefox addons, declaratively. Never had an easier reinstall with all my software on a new laptop)

Markdown (you can use pandoc to convert Markdown to LaTeX, meaning I can write actual papers in Markdown)

MCR's 2006 masterpiece of a studio album The Black Parade

Things I'm still excited about

Conlanging. Expect some more conlang development later today; I've made a personal wiki to document my conlanging/worldbuilding

Fiction writing in general

Physics of course

Free/open source software and freeing myself and others from the confines of Silicon Valley platforms/web 2.0 capitalists

Good Omens and Terry Pratchett's work in general

Ancient history and mythology, especially Bronze Age/ancient Egypt lately

Reworking this blog

I wanna make a custom theme and some "About" pages. I've experimented with a custom theme in the past, but as you can see, it's not flashed out, basically just a Solarized-dark reskin of default.

Still don't know if I should split this blog into sideblogs for my actual work/oc/irl content and reblogs, but for now I'm just gonna dump all of my interests and thoughts here as accustomed - making this a space where, if I were to disappear from this world, you could reconstruct me from the me-shaped hole in this blog ;)

For now, tagging all posts with either rb, oc or meta for your convenience.

[mouse-doubleo100]

the more i watch star trek tos, the more it becomes abundantly clear that the reason why modern trek doesnt get kirk at all is because they dont utilise mccoy nearly as much anymore

in modern trek, they always present the idea of logic vs emotion, with spock being logic and kirk being emotion, but thats not how tos has it. in tos, the logic vs emption debate is spock vs mccoy. kirk is supposed to be the mediator between the two, sometimes siding with one side over the other, sometimes finding a middle ground between the two. thats why hes the captain, hes able to see all angles and pick the best course

when you make kirk the emotional one, it completely breaks the format, because 9 time out of 10, it means kirk has to be correct. theres no more balance

mccoy is just as important to tos as spock is, and while i do understand why spock is as popular as he is, without mccoy, the show doesnt work. you need them both. kirk spock and mccoy are the three leads of the show, and removing one requires you to change the others, which is whats happened to kirk

[evillinuxuser]

TVTropes agrees with you

[sokkigarden]

the fifth race is truly the thesis of stargate. every other alien race is saying bruh you guys are babies u cannot be exploring space like this. and jack o'neill is like well we are doing this anyways !!!

and that's literally stargate. that's the point of the whole show. humans are so curious and hungry to learn and grow and find new things and the beauty of stargate is showing humans Doing Space Travel in present day. star wars is past, star trek is future but stargate is right now and thats The Thesis.

"we are a very curious race" jack says and that's the whole point.

[rochnan]

⚪ ⚪ ! It's getting darker outside, and I have three cats. And one of them loves to sit in the bushes just a few paces from the door and windows. And he stares. And his eyes are two glowing orbs emerging from the leaves. It took a while to get used to being watched from the bushes as you sit on the couch.

So yeah, this painting was inspired by my cat, and also some wildlife photography a friend showed me. I think the 'camera data' on top really sells it 😁

Have a good spooky time today! And read the image description, if you dare! 🎃

Boo! 👻

[definitely-zen-browser]

[evillinuxuser]

m dia

nvi

[daily-mc-block]

Trick or treat?

heart shaped strawby!

[lowrifaberart]

I did this on the train to work bc silly me didn’t have a Halloween post bc silly me posted it like two weeks ago instead.

This meme comes around every year and every year I think it’s the funniest thing in the world.

‘Tis ween my fellows!!

[evillinuxuser]

Trick or treat, or, as we say in Germany, "I am a little ghost and like to eat glue"

[retrofeather]

happy hallowyeen

[evillinuxuser]

happy hallowyeen ^'.'^

[atalanta133]

[sharkfiinn]

playing hollow knight for the first time, doodled these stupids

! ive been avoiding spoilers so dont say anything about either game !

[aaaaaves]

It should be illegal for a computer program to grab focus when its done loading

Load in the background like a good program and don't interrupt what I'm doing in the meantime when you finish

[evillinuxuser]

Reached act 2 of Silksong yesterday

Needles to say I've been hooked to the screen since

Yeah they just said "What if city of tears was a whole second world instead"

The confession booth is hilarious as a concept (Minor Spoiler: HK Act 2)

[evillinuxuser]

wtf is up with this new ui

why did the devs make it harder to reblog something with tags? Tags are like the *one thing* on tumblr that actually works? And makes posts searchable, and also spreads them in different communities? Tags are the best thing about this site, yet I have to click two times to reblog something with tags, and three times to see reblogs with tags

Do these people use their own site

[positivelyqueer]

”I have this artistic idea but not the skills to achieve it to the standard I want.”

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

Don’t let the fear of it not being perfect on the first try stop you from being Weird About It!

[jaseroque]

Please view Hokusai's gradual working towards The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, over a period of 39 years.

An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.

A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.

This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.

And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!

Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.

And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.

It's all there; Mt Fuji, the ocean, the wave. The boats are gone, but replaced with birds, flying with the wave instead of fighting against it. It's not as famous as The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, but that's not what motifs are for -- each successive work does not have to surpass the previous in terms of success, especially in terms of external success. They're there for you to keep playing with, keep remixing and re-experiencing, for as long as you think you have something to say.

[jaseroque]

I also want everybody to know that Google and most of the internet think that all of those paintings bar the last one are called "The Great Wave Off Kanagawa", so I had to do a sort of middling deep dive just to find their actual names. And then I was like "I don't think those translations are very accurate", so I went on a second quest to retranslate them, which was particularly difficult with painting three (A View Of Express Delivery Boats) because for some reason he titled that one entirely in hiragana, and it's all archaic words that were very hard to chase down without their corresponding kanji. Google suggested "the push-off is a transportation route", which wasn't particularly helpful.

All of which is to say that I probably spent a bit too much time on all of that, but it was fun; and at least I know what those paintings are called now.

[wodeworm]

8,000-BCE

Pla de Petracos

Alicante

Spain

A ritual is being preformed

[staticvn]

Studying physics? Why? To examine the existence of other men beyond their mind and body — reaching for the stardust they were formed from? What are you? gay or something?