> 6/2/2026 - I'm Tired of Left Tube
I haven't been watching political video essays as much lately after I started using my RSS feed.
I've noticed I'm more interested in radical leftist news websites, middle eastern news websites, and people's blogs for punditry and analysis than I am the breadtube channels or even the mainstream news websites in my RSS feeds. I still keep up with them to get a different perspective. But it feels like more of a chore lately because it feels more "commodified" in a sense. Hell, there's this one youtube video essayist I used to love, but lately have been disappointed in. I might unsubscribe from certain Youtube channels. It's on Freetube, so it's probably not gonna hurt their subscriber count anyway. By the way, if you want a Lebanese news website, Megaphone News, El Nashra and Ujleb are pretty good.
> 6/1/2026 - Here, Have a Shitty Meme I Made
I switched password managers twice, once because I started using SyncThing anyway and another time because I heard the code was assisted by AI. I got into a disagreement over this because someone said that "all (updated) software is either openly using AI or secretly using AI." It got me thinking. Even when I go outside to escape AI, someone will inevitably bring up AI in either praise, judgement, or criticism but from a naive place. It feels like the only guaranteed escape I have from it is software that hasn't been updated in years like Hexchat and old tv shows and movies.
> 5/30/2026 - When Reform Becomes Impossible, It Feels Like Revolution
This is gonna be a politically motivated blog. But I was thinking about more ethical forms of consumerism; stuff like seeing movies in theaters or on physical media, small tech corporations, etc. This is not to judge anyone. Afterall, we're all suspectible to it and have to survive the system we're in. If you're familiar with me, you know that there are times where I take a middle ground between convinience and my ethics unfortunately.
But I think this coincides with the treatment of reformism as "revolutionary" regardless of what side of the reform you're on. For example, in the USA, basic social democractic reforms (like government funded healthcare) get associated with socialism even more than workers owning and managing their workplaces together (you know, owning the means of production). Even the revolutionary left ends up spending more time arguing for reforms than revolution. But at the same time, it's hard to blame people for turning towards more ethical consumerism or millequetoast reforms when literally the politicians and corporations fight so hard against it. It's hard to blame people for wanting to keep certain industries alive when big tech is trying to kill them off along with the workers in those industries when they can't pay their bills. Hell, you could argue fighting for reforms helps. But I don't think we should stop there. I'd get more into it, but quite frankly, I'm not a "revolutions" expert and most people have a simplified idea of what a revolution would entail anyway. If there's something like the Epstein files, the Panama papers, Democrats' willingness to cooperate with the Trump regime, etc. show, it's that these systems themselves breed corruption.
> 5/29/2026 - Switching My Secondary Browser: From Waterfox to Zen
I've heard good things about Zen, but there were 3 things preventing me from trying it. One, I didn't know how to or if I even could hide the sidebar. Two, there's no built-in DRM plugin. While I hate DRM, I still watch free streaming sometimes just to lessen my risk of getting caught for piracy AND because I hate subscription models. Lastly, I didn't know if it had tab containers like other Firefox forks. But I heard that you can hide the sidebar, there's no telemetry, & DRM isn't a problem on certain Linux distros due to Google's reliance on Linux. I figured I'd check it out for myself. I ended up liking it better than Waterfox so far.
The address bar's lack of tabs reminds me of Gnome Web especially with the sidebar hidden, but at least, I get to use my system/native titlebar instead of the default one. Plus I like having a sidebar to slide out, the same way I do with my workspaces on my desktop or my pseudo-dock of pinned apps. I also decided to install ublock and a mod or 2 to customize the UI a bit more. I don't like the default gradient theme that much, since I'm not a huge fan of gradients mixed with flat design. Also free streaming services do seem to work, suprisingly. I'm still gonna use Librewolf as my default because I trust the devs and quite frankly, I don't necessarily need Zen's fancy features that much. But it's still nice to have the option I guess.
> 5/25/2026 - Heads Up to People Who DM Me on IRC
I keep forgetting to mark my account as "away" when I'm away from the computer or when I'm focused on something else. Every time someone direct messages me on IRC specifically, they'll direct message me when I'm away and then there's a message saying they closed the channel on their end. I'd respond but I'm not even sure they'd see it because IRC stores messages locally. I'm not sure if it works the same way for private messages or not. So keep that in mind.
I have mixed feelings about the commodification of subscultures on social media. On one hand, I get the argument that the values of these subcultures are lost along with its sense of community & that social media aesthetics contribute to "fast fashion." But on the other hand, you don't need to be a part of a subculture to have those values, there have always been debates about "posers," AND quite frankly, I can't be bothered to care about how some kid dresses. People complain about aesthetic/fashion trends being "inauthentic" now, but I always saw subcultures as somewhat inauthentic. Ironic given I'm a part of the indie web userbase & open source fanbases.
But if you think about it, even if you have a community centered around certain values, music, etc, the problem remains the same. Some people might fit some aspects and not others, but force themselves to fit completely regardless in an attempt to fit in. What I don't miss is the subcultures themselves but the sense of rebellion people had. Even then my experiences in mutual aid and keeping up with the news show that that hasn't been completely lost.
I think what people are complaining about is not the "inautheticity," but the even more blatant commodification of it & the lack of collective identity. As I made clear, I don't think the lack of an in-group and out-group is inherently bad. In some ways, it might even be good. But it's easy to see why people would miss it in an era where people are isolated from one another and individualism is touted in subservience to modern society rather than against it. There's a reason none of these subcultures challenged the status quo in the long run and got co-opted. They were easy to commodify to begin with. Don't rebel, listen to music about rebelling. Don't help your neighbor, complain about "posers." All that happened was the mask got taken off.
I was gonna talk about my mixed feelings about the movie, The Drama and how while good, kinda muddled its own messages by not really exploring why Emma did what she did except through Charlie's eyes. It also undermines Rachel's own feelings about her cousin's traumatic experiences to the point where she's kinda a cartoonish Karen. But then I got to thinking about 7/10 ratings in general and how some people nowadays see it as "mediocre" and not "good." I get it's because of the school grading system, but it makes no sense. If 3/5=6/10 and 4/5=8/10, then 3.5/5=7/10. It's basic math. Are you saying 3 and a half stars is bad? In short, the school grade system sucks and we should NOT be trying to emulate it in our leisure time.
> 5/10/2026 - Influence & Responsibility
For some weird reason, I kinda get the feeling I'm more influenctial over indie web hosters and forums than I was over social media. I remember someone mentioned they were switching to Linux because of me. I don't know how much of it is my website being cool, me coming off more mature now than I was on social media, or me just seeming like a nice person. People have gotten into I2P because of my blog probably. But I'm worried about the possibility of being too influenctial, especially if I introduced someone to political ideologies. Like in one sense, it's good to have people be so understanding, I do wish my ideologies were more popular and maybe I'm reading too much into things like always. But if you think my political ideologies are cool, don't take my word for them. You can read books & articles on subjects relating to it, not just political theory, but also history, anthropology, economics, etc. by experts. (Granted, experts disagree with each other sometimes.)
For example, I'm reading a book on a well-known science fraud scandal. I not only learnt some physics, like palladium filtering out hydrogen molecules, but also how misleading it can be to treat a charismatic expert in one field as a genius in every subject. Basically, the people behind "cold fusion" were electro-chemists but not physicists. But since they were already well liked and smart, people trusted them. I can take that and encorporate its message about "Great Man" theory into how I see systems and how I see the world at large. But even then how I interpret it is always gonna be influenced by my perspective in other areas. No one is without bias and that includes me.
> 5/9/2026 - The Eepsite's Legacy & Should I Bring It Back?
Just a week after I decided to not do the eepsite anymore, I just noticed it's listed on NotBob's directory. AAAAH! Now I could bring it back. But that would mean setting up the Apache server on I2Pd & possibly having duplicates of my files. Since I've been using Syncthing to connect to my friend's VPS & it automatically saved it in a specific folder. I'm speaking into the void at this point because my posts have no comment section.
> 5/5/2026 - My Brother Has Gamer Rage and It's Scaring My Cat
My brother is screaming because of gamer rage and it's so loud that my cat has been scared to come upstairs for literal hours now. I wish I lived alone.
> 5/4/2026 - Plex is Better and It Still Sucks
Plex, out of all the streaming services, is the best one. It lets you select what other streaming services you watch & tells you if a movie or show you want is on there. It has media server support. It has both paid and free tiers. BUT it is a buggy mess, less "free" than other media servers, and media servers themselves are kinda an overrated middle ground between streaming and piracy or physical media. It's worth it for my friend's server, but I just had an incident where 2 movies I wanted to see and only those 2 won't load anything other than seemingly random pixels. I looked it up and tried a bunch of solutions (disabling hardware acceleration, changing the default resolution, reinstalling it after using the "flatpak uninstall [package] --delete-data" command, etc), only to realize it was because I torrented those 2 movies before realizing they were on the official streaming service & it confused it because it wasn't sure whether to use my local files or the site's. The sad part is that this is the best streaming service and that's not even getting into other bugs I've run into because of misconfigurations and whatnot. Overall, if you're gonna use a media server, probably go with Jellyfin.
> 5/2/2026 - Falling Out of Love With I2P Plus
I recently had an issue with I2P plus, my preferred I2P fork. I liked the router console a lot & the performance. However after the DDOS attack, things have never been the same even after it was officially over/fixed. Sure, things will work for a while and then something will break unexpectedly. Plus hosting the eepsite has started to just feel like extra work. So I'm switching to I2Pd or Purple I2P. It seems more consistent to me in terms of sheer effiency. Plus I can still torrent over I2P if I set it up properly.
> 5/1/2026 - Celebrating Mayday With Movies I Guess
I feel performative saying this. But since I'm not a position to do the general strikes or protest currently (I still do activism, just not those things yet), I decided to celebrate May Day with a movie watch & maybe some reading. I watched Sam Raimi's Send Help because I've been meaning to see it & it deals with asshole bosses. I would've planned something else, maybe more "revolutionary" focused. But I didn't even realize it was Mayday. So I figured why not. It was alright. The cinematography and acting was great. But the CGI felt too obvious even if I understand why it was used & (spoilers) it was kinda weird seeing the 1st human death be a black woman with a mostly white cast in 2026. Also the ending feels too "celebrity girlboss" for my liking. (end spoiler) I'm also gonna watch another movie maybe, either Battleship Potemkin (a film on a Russian naval mutiny) or Libertarias (a film on the Mujeres Libres) depending on which I feel like or maybe both. I'm not sure
> 4/29/2026 - I Switched to PipePipe Over Tubular
I switched to PipePipe after Tubular (the Newpipe fork I use for Youtube) had trouble loading longer videos. It works great & has the same features as Tubular with added support for BiliBili and NicoNico, which I don't watch much. But it's nice to have the option.
> 4/27/2026 - I Reinstalled Tubular to Unsub From All My Channels
For those who don't know, on mobile, instead of Freetube or Newpipe or Piped, for Youtube, I use a fork of Newpipe called Tubular. It has sponsorship block and returns the youtube dislike counter. However I got tired of having to sync categories & subscriptions between Tubular and Freetube and kept putting off. So I figured "why not just delete all my subscriptions?" I pretty much only use Tubular for links people send me anyway.
> 4/26/2026 - Is It Staged? About Recent Events Surrounding Trump
I was debating whether or not to post this because I don't wanna promote conspiracy theories. But is it me or are these "assassionation attempts" getting more half-assed? They didn't security check anyone at the event. They told a Fox News reporter the event was "unsafe" before the attack and then her call to Fox News gets cut. C'mon. Maybe I'm gonna make a fool of myself. But like still.
> 4/26/2026 - Why Do Most Decentralized Meta Search Engines Kinda Suck?
I've tried SearX, SearXNG, LibreY, YaCY and 4get. SearXNG is apparently "vibe coded" now. YaCY also has LLMs. Almost of all them either get rate limited or have shit search results. The only exception is 4get, but the problem is I can't get past the "edgy" 4chan-esque marketing. I still listed it on my list of degoogled search engines because the search engine itself is great. But like I don't know I don't like the fact that it feeds into this image of privacy/FOSS advocates as neckbeard redditors. I do think FOSS is more popular now that big tech is shitting the bed. But there's still this image that if you're more on the "extreme" end of it, you're a probably rightwing techbro.
> 4/22/2026 - Are RSS Feeds Worth It?
I've using RSS feeds for peertube videos, news articles and blog posts. It's been helping me get more into reading. Unlike social media, where it feels like you have to rush through the article linked, I feel like I can take my own pace because I don't have to comment on it immediately. I can also categorize feeds which is nice. For example, I have articles, mainstream news, leftist news, educational articles, tech news and posts on the indie web are all separated. For leftist news, there's mostly anarchist news orgs like Abolition Media & Black Rose Federation, with People's Dispatch being the odd one out. (Yes, there's anarchist news orgs other than Crimethinc.) For mainstream news, I had trouble finding a working feed for Reuters in a topic other than finance because apparently, they hide it behind a paywall. So for that, I just have the Guardian, the CEPA, and the CBC from Canada. For tech news, it's mostly the EFF, Privacy Guides, and some stuff focused on open source like the Linux Mint blog. For educational articles, I just have NASA & the Smithsonian for now. For the indie web blogs, most of them are either personal, photography, or analyzing social problems without a ultra-specific ideology behind it.
> 4/19/2026 - Switching Web Hosts Again
I switched web hosts again to https://lakes.glamour.ovh/ because my XMPP pal offered and I said "sure, why not?" I kinda have problems with Nekoweb's file size limits & them not allowing searches on the "free" text editor despite it being a basic feature of website anyway. I'll change my nekoweb to an iframe too. I plan to make a RSS feed for both the blog and art pages. So people can get updates, but I've been sick these past 2 1/2 weeks & keep forgetting.
> 4/19/2026 - Why My Attempts to Get Into Gaming Seem to End in Failure
Sometimes a friend will recommend me a game and I'll think about trying it, but at some point, in the process, I end up giving up. Here's me getting into the reasons why. None of these are directed at the games themselves. I don't wanna seem like I'm demeaning gamers and games as an art form.
1) When I get too frustrated, I quit.
I tried playing Persona once and ended up quiting when trying to navigate at one point. I think a lot of people get "gamer rage" when a challenge frustrates them, but me, I just give up. I'm not sure if that's better or worse. Since it still shows a lack of patience from me.
2) Most games people want you to try require payment & pirating games both ends up being too complicated & somewhat riskier than pirating other art forms.
Stuff like the Metal Gear franchise, the Yakuza franchise, Disco Elysium, all sound cool and I'm sure the story and gameplay are awesome. But pirating them always feels like a hassle. The games are almost always in a zip/rar file because the games tend to be split up into various executable files, except when it's just the ROM/ISO. This causes a higher risk for malware because executables and ISOs have more control over your system & the amount of files can be a bit confusing to run at 1st. Granted, there are trusted websites like fitgirl-repacks & steamunlocked. You could argue containerized game launchers, emulators, & forks of WINE on Linux mitigate the issue of risk by giving it less access to your system. However it does add an extra step or steps to the process by having to add it to the game launcher or emulator.
> 4/14/2026 - Always Having an Opinion But Make Sure It's the Right One
When I was on social media, I was always worried about having an opinion immediately or at least some joke. It didn't matter what platform it was. I don't think it was just the social media because a lot of times, I worry about not having anything interesting to say here or saying the wrong thing in real life. I do want to talk about other things here, but I am worried about how to formulate my thoughts. Plus there's the privacy concerns about posting pictures of your pets and getting doxxed & such things. It doesn't help that people misinterpret what I say or I misword things a lot. That said, here it's a bit more managable because I can go at my own pace & while there is some arguing & disagreements on the indie web, it isn't as constant as social media. I also have this concern in the back of my head when I get a bad vibes from an interaction with someone, that I'm "reading too much" into things. I had an ex-friend online who was a mod of a group chat I was in. I kept trying to choose between being charitable to her & being patient but firm with her. But ultimately, I worry I made things worse. Truth is when my gut instinct is right, I often "doubt" it and my gut instinct is wrong, I end up going with it. Maybe this is rambly. But the point is that social media, to some extent, is reflective of real life. The problems with social media: the toxicity, the politics, etc. are all because sometimes people are just like that even offline, but bad moderation and the like amplifies it.
> 4/13/2026 - gemget gemini://tryingoutgemini.no/notthat1.gmi
I'm trying out this protocol, "secret web within the web", called Gemini. It's based on a protocol from the 90s called Gopher & is meant for lightweight text-based websites. You can hear more about it from their website. Despite the title, I'm not using a command line browser or tool for Gemini as of now. I'm actually using the browser, Kristall. I like the favorited sites homepage & the way the theme engine interprets my desktop's theme. The only downside is that since it's an App Image on Linux, it's neither added to the start menu plugins nor the Applications Finder unless I wanna do additional tinkering. Sometimes app images do get added to the app menu automatically, but in my experience, it's rare. But I understand why it's an app image because it's a universal package format & depending on how Gemini works, it might not need frequent updates.
> 3/24/2026 - w3m: https://mysite.net/Screenshot-of-My-Current-Desktop.png
I have it so that each workspace or virtual desktop has its own wallpaper. I also made a user account for work, just in case I get another job where I can get away with LibreOffice or OnlyOffice. It has one of the many Redmond97 themes, a pixel-y font, & 2 rows for the taskbar. I'd show you but I wanna keep certain stuff relating to my offline live private.
> 3/19/2026 - Not Sure How to Balance Privacy with Personal
There are things I wanna talk about here other than tech, like movies, past experiences with jobs, etc. But with more offline stuff, I'm worried about giving clues to my offline identity even though I've probably already shared similar stuff on Discord which is selling that data anyway. Maybe I'll add stuff about tv shows & movies again.
> 3/15/2026 - A Non-Serious Review of a Windows 11 Laptop: First Impressions
I got a work laptop from a family member. I dred using Windows 11, but I know that the latest version of LibreOffice for Debian can not be installed due to dependency issues which sucks because the newer versions are compatible with MS Office formatting. 1st things 1st, I do think the dark mode taskbar & start menu look a bit more sleek than on Windows 10. I hate the light mode and rounded corners for the windows though. I also hate how Windows post-Win8 divided the settings into 2 vaguely named programs. I don't mind having different programs for specific/different types of settings as proven by my experience with XFCE. But even there I kinda hate how Window Manager & Window Manager Tweaks are 2 different programs. I bring this up because setting up a new account & making it administrator was confusing because I assumed they had replaced the Control Panel completely with Settings. This on top of having to set up an online account. Another thing is I noticed when I clicked on an AI app (of which there's multiple) accidentally or just to see what it was, closing it took a long time, even though nothing else did. They also replaced the Windows key or Super key on the keyboard with a Copilot key. Another thing is if you click an icon on your desktop, instead of immediately launching the program, it launches a drop down menu where you can launch the app. Admittedly this might be me just not being used to laptops, since there's no way to differentiate right and left clicks without a mouse. I do think it is more responsive than I thought it would be. But for some reason, it should me an error message when it 1st started up too. I was gonna give this a 4/10 and say if it wasn't for the AI stuff, it'd just be kinda mediocre. But then I remembered that I saw pop up ads in the corner of my screen. Not sure if my family member downloaded malware or it's just a default thing in Windows 11. But make of that what you will.
> 3/13/2026 - A Strange Nostalgia-bait Video on Youtube
Everytime someone mentions AI & Linux in the same sentence, I remember that one guy on Arch Linux who asked ChatGPT how to install Windows Vista & accidentally gave it root access by talking too loud. I never watched anything else from that guy.
> 3/10/2026 - Huge Bot Attack on I2P, Nekoweb, AI, and Stressful Environments
Because of trouble with the sybil attack on I2P and finding out that an AI ignored my robots.txt, I switched to nekoweb. The original plan was host exclusively over I2P but then the sybil attack on the network happened. I2P seems to be working better now, albeit with a spotty connection. I like nekoweb so far. I always thought the main site looked prettier than neocities. The nekoweb also has 2 built-in text editors, one based on VSCode with a live preview plugin which is nice. I also left a friend group. I originally thought I left because of stress. But after being away from them for a while, I realized I had to compromise on my standards a lot in that friend group, not because they're bad people or anything. But because I kept having to choose whether or not to argue over certain stuff and it was tiring. I tried to be understanding about certain things, but it seemed the mods could get away with more than other users, while new users were more likely to be distrusted if they made one wrong move. I don't think they're bad people. I won't get into it because I'm not big on calling people out publicly. But I wanted to vent about it a little.
> 1/17/2026 - My 1st Post of the Year - My New Hard Drive
My new hard drive seems to be working. Sorry to fans of the eepsite because my failing hard drive kept making me have to make a new b32 address several times. I'm gonna style this page later. I feel like switching it up for a bit. Something other than the Windows-style pages.