You know how when you watch a show for a bit, you begin to feel a part of that world? Like those are your friends? You buy into the make-believe; you think, "Yeah, this apartment in Seinfeld could very well exist."

My place would be Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Its edges are not as clean and concise as its older sibling, TNG. The setting is the transport hub across the stars. There's an element of adventure and wonder that 90s TV could never capture. Maybe the best shows have an element of that, that something special is right on the edge of tomorrow...

...but, it's NOT real. Just a shared longing in the imaginations of a roomful of lonely writers...a lingering reminder of seasons bygone...

...what I find disheartening is reality. There is nothing new. On those TV shows, no one ever said,

Nope, you're not gonna make it. That plan you've been working on for a long time—yeah, that's not gonna happen. You're gonna fail.

...and perhaps what I find the most endearing about those television stories is how through the adversity and complexity, they supported one another—they encouraged each other...

...but, here in the real world of scarcity, we just tear one another down, pulling each other down from climbing out of the mud. There is no ascension...

...and Death lies in wait.

So much of life is meaningless. I look out across the morning traffic in the pre-dawn hours...

Today is the first day of October. It is the first day of many things, a life beyond constructs—those people, places, things and ideas that have limited me.

There is one less person among the 1.8 BILLION in the sphere of Google. After a relationship that has spanned back from when a Gmail account was exclusive, an invite-only among geeks, I return to the driver's seat of my data. Those data miners' pickaxes now shatter against a chest that powerfully guards this heart.

You can have my seat at The Cool Kid's Lunch Table; the view is abysmal.

On a recent install of Windows, I got fed up with all the machinations I gotta do to prevent content from being piped automatically onto my desk view. I'm leaning that way toward my M1 MacBook—who knew that its News app about what's now required to be believed to sit at The Cool Kid's Table is a critical core feature to the OS and CANNOT be deleted by the casual user?

I don't know why those who are circling the drain have to shout how wonderful it is to be dying and say I'm crazy for not jumping in with their lot.

Thus, I have installed Linux Mint 20.3 with Cinnamon as its window manager. This edition is a little older with its release date back on January 5, 2022, the last one based on Ubuntu's Focal Fossa.

That said, it is an LTS that also runs on my converted Chromebook print server that's stable: when I shut it down to move to a new house, it had 87 days of uptime.

I purchased a year of Tutanota to host my custom domain email. They went up 3x the price, but there remains a good value at $36.

My phone is missing its mama, but in time I'll blank it and remove Google with ADB...not that I'm wholly apart from Google's services. I am listening to Deckard's Blues from a music livestream.

When I began this whole process yesterday, I sang along with a live album I've never heard before, Simon & Garfunkel's Concertgebouw Amsterdam (1970). Funny how those songs have meant so very much in my life as the stories were written.

Now the years are rolling by me
They are rockin' evenly
I am older than I once was
And younger than I'll be, that's not unusual
No, it isn't strange
After changes upon changes
We are more or less the same
After changes we are more or less the same

Simon & Garfunkel, The Boxer (extended lyrics)

A great feature in this moment of digital pruning and renewal is that I got to consider the value of things. Yeah, I still have active memberships, but to what end? Does it matter? Am I building anything by the end of their subscriptions?

There is substantive value in an analog life. I don't know if anyone sees this, paper-based tech mirrors a clearer portrait. What is the digital world? How does it change our perspective on the world around us?

The digital world exists solely on the whims of an electric charge. That world is created and then blinks off existence on whims promulgated by light switch logic. On the intimacy of an individual level, a person is no longer something spatially existing, but rather just a two-dimensional avatar fixation. If we so choose, we can flip their light switch off; they no longer exist...

Blocked.

Canceled.

Aren't these the words of these final times?

However, there's a problem with that approach: "I'm still alive."

Everybody's gone
They left the television screaming
that the radio's on
Someone stole my shoes,
but there's a couple of bananas
And a bottle of booze

-Counting Crows, Holiday in Spain

...and this begins my move toward something new...

An auto-save feature would be desastrous because it would take away the workflow from you.

-LibreOffice forum user

My knee-jerk reaction to the above post was to think it was utter nonsense. However, there was something about that which made me return to the idea. My EFL poster is absolutely right: taking the necessity to save my work takes away from me. Who doesn't remember Wall-E? Do we really want that dystopia?

...and perhaps, I spend too much time maintaining tools and another enough time using them?...

I am convinced to go with Linux, USB drive backups and FLAC rips from old CDS for music. I just have no interest in being part of the religion of The Cool Kids Lunch Table. I just want to be completely disconnected from this new-fangled, "All your base are belong to us" world. Make a big return to the computing I knew...the world I know...

...and yet?...

Do we need more than a pencil and a stack of paper snapped into order with a clipboard? Far too often we are shaped by our tools—shouldn't it be the other way around? Life becomes a disjointed text with all the semantics of a concrete brick.

...I'm torn because I want the conveniences of centralization?...

Have I been shaped by the mindset of centralization as opposed to any real need? I don't want a life of a VAX terminal; I want my space. I have no interest in Big Tech's coding of demagogy.

...can focus be unfocused?...

After a Takeout, I lamented Google's wrecking of the organization of my uploaded music. "Just throw every file into one big ol' directory." What, is the sysadmin at Google a 5-year-old? On a Windows box, I used to run mp3tag to sort this thing out. But on Linux, well, I knew something might work out better. And wholly thanks to ChatGPT, it generated (after some prodding) a script to rename songs with their track number followed by their title and move it into a folder with their album name:

#!/bin/bash

# Directory containing your FLAC files
input_directory="/media/intjbill/Quark/test"

# Iterate through the FLAC files in the directory
for flac_file in "$input_directory"/*.flac; do
    if [ -f "$flac_file" ]; then
        # Extract album name from FLAC tags (assuming it's the album field)
        album_name=$(metaflac --show-tag=ALBUM "$flac_file" | cut -d= -f2 | sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//')
        
        # Extract track number and title from FLAC tags
        track_number=$(metaflac --show-tag=TRACKNUMBER "$flac_file" | cut -d= -f2 | sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//')
        
        # Use awk to remove leading zeros if present and ensure it's a number
        track_number=$(echo "$track_number" | awk '{gsub(/^0+/,""); if ($0+0==$0) print $0; else print "01"}')

        song_title=$(metaflac --show-tag=TITLE "$flac_file" | cut -d= -f2 | sed 's/^[ \t]*//;s/[ \t]*$//')

        # Sanitize album name, track number, and song title
        album_name=$(echo "$album_name" | tr -cd '[:alnum:]()[]{} ')
        track_number=$(echo "$track_number" | tr -cd '[:alnum:]')
        song_title=$(echo "$song_title" | tr -cd '[:alnum:]()[]{} ')

        # Create a directory for the album
        album_directory="$input_directory/$album_name"
        mkdir -p "$album_directory"

        # Generate the new filename with track number and title
        new_filename="$album_directory/$track_number - $song_title.flac"

        # Move and rename the FLAC file to the album directory
        mv "$flac_file" "$new_filename"
    fi
done

...just because I can install Linux on an M1 Macbook, should I?...