Thank you for inadvertently personalizing the experience of our entire audience, at perhaps the best possible moment in the film to pull it off. The noble sacrifice of your dignity—and presumably many future nights laying awake about it—was worth the cost of admission all on its own. Your flatulence single-handedly elevated the cinema of over a hundred individuals, and I hope that you can look back on your mishap with a smile someday soon. However, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's set the scene for my dear readers!
Towards the end of last year, I was requested to get some data off of an old computer for a relative. It was an HP from the late 2000s, and time had clearly not been kind to the device. Either that, or it was an economy class tower, which even back in the day would've been sluggish to use. What I can tell you is that it took several minutes to fully load into its Windows 7 installation. Its strained hobbling to the finish line left me with a desktop that—even with performance optimizations I went through—was just barely tolerable to navigate with. I had my fun using a classic exploit to bypass the login with a burned Windows 7 DVD I hadn't used in over 15 years, absconded with the important data, and left the PC to collect dust. Recently however, a bout of spring cleaning gave me a thought: could it run a current GNU/Linux system?
Every so often, I'll stumble across a simple, feel-good story about an animal being rescued by some folks, after getting caught in some sort of predicament. Often times, it's unfortunate interactions with human infrastructure—and this is no different—but I can still appreciate that some of us care enough to give aid when the need arises. After all these years, I've finally had my own personal experience with a rescue, so I feel obligated to share the story here.
In early January of 2026, the communications tech giant Discord posted a survey regarding various types of AI integration on their platform. The questions posed included several invasive monitoring ideas, such as analysis of audio and video chats, seemingly in real time, with no distinction for private servers—or direct messages.
Seemingly due to overwhelming backlash, the survey was taken down a mere several hours after it initially launched. In the free form section at the end, I wrote a couple paragraphs airing my concerns. While I've entirely moved to Matrix now, I still felt it worthwhile to respond, and also to mirror this text elsewhere.
I barely noticed you by the window sill at my workplace. I was surprised a creature as large as you could be so inconspicuous; I'm so used to your vigor and curiosity. You weren't moving, and I had thought you already passed away. Instead, you were so weak, I accidentally flipped you over from a puff of air, to check that very thing. The inside of a building is an insidious place for insects—a prison beyond understanding. You were succumbing to its uncaring walls, and my guilt weighed more than my fear.
As I've been using WriteFreely, I've found that the dark mode support oddly starts—and stops—on the blog writing page. While there is technically a toggle for dark mode on the instance reader page, you can only make out a few sentences before you're whisked away to another unforgiving flash-bang. While I'm not exactly sure why this is the case, I do know that I have some power to change it; more power than expected, actually. This brings us to where the magic happens, assuming you know what you're doing: custom CSS rules. The thing is, I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, and the things I want to do are seemingly uncharted territory. How; genuinely how‽
Two statements uttered countless times since the dawn of the Internet, and once again at the helm of ushering in an indie web project. As the bells chime, and the customary heavy equipment is waved into position for their role as a two frame GIF, we come together and welcome to the world: another blog. This serves as both an intro and a test post—and before you start carving the headstone—I assure you, I have plenty of writings to the void on the horizon. The thing is, I already do this entirely on my own in LibreOffice, so a lot of this will actually be me reviewing, and posting those words here over time!