Goals:
Current Level: Novice. (33 XP)
I don't know whether or not real magik (I'm told its more effective if you spell it with a "k") exists or not, though I expect it does in some capacity. That said, the closest I'm likely to ever actually come to casting a fireball spell is the expert shooting of electricty across the world-wide series of tubes. I've always admired and been impressed the old dudes with ponytails who seem to haunt to basements of every corporate building. The slighly pudgy just beyond middle aged men who somehow magically know what spells to cast in a terminal prompt in order to get a network up and running again, or who know the proper incantations to put in a text file to make a perl script manipulate a database. At this point in my life, and my chosen career path, I'm never going to be an Expert Coder, but, I can be better than where I am now.
Vauge fantasies of magical ability aside and all that, I'm also interested in becoming a technomage from a freedom and self-sufficency standpoint. One of the big reasons I am part of the Web 1.0 / Retrofuturism movement is that I think we've collectively made some really bad turns. Handing over ALL our personal data to nameless/faceless multinational companies subject to really no government oversite whatever and run by billionare lobbiests just seems like a recipe for Orwellian Nightmares. I want contorl over my own digital life again and that means free and open source software, my own website instead of a social media giant, communities instead of corporations. As is the case in all things, if you give someone power over you they become in some small way (possibly big way) your masters. I don't want to serve Facebook or Google, letting them spy on me so they can sell my data to ad companies in China. Of course, unplugging from the mainstream entirely is difficult, but, again, little by little, one gets very far.
More troubles... And troubles of the sort that highlight EXACTLY why life was better in VHS. I've been trying to install Mint on this laptop but the old OS (Mac) has all these protections on it. All these little things you have to disable constantly in order to get it to do what you want. I don't want my technology to lock me out of features and capabilites on my own machine... It's all part of what I've come to call "The Great Dumbing". Once upon a time, to use a computer, you had to both accept responsibility for your own mistakes and be intelligent enough to operate a command line. That's all gone now. Like everything else, computers are made to suit the lowest common denominator of user. I'm hoping that linux will give me back some automy.
Well, i finally acquired an old laptop! Time to begin the linuxing! Unfortunately, I'm already encountering problems.... but, that's to be expected. Trisquel was my distro of choice becuase it's endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. But... the download keeps crapping out on me, I think because it is specifically such an old computer I am using. It starts fine, but about midway through the download the computer seems to get tired of trying and just short of shrugs its shoulders and gives up on the matter. Fine. I looked into some other distrubutions sponsered by the FSF but none seemed quite as good, although Dragora looks fun, if for nothing else that it's logo is a Dragon. But Dragora doesn't seem quite as developed nor to have as much of a community behind it, and since one of the goals is to actually use this computer for work, I want to have make sure whatever I'm using has the ability to do most of the basic stuff. So, that being said, I'm currently attempting to download Mint and my ambition is to run a virtual machine within Mint to run Dragora and test it out. Anyway, PROGRESS TOWARD GOAL! +2 XP!
The website is up! Hey! Look mom! It works! (Badly and ugly but, it works!) I am officially making headway on item number 3 of my technomage goals. And, if I do say my self, this IS looking very 1997. Well, okay, right now it's more 1996 but I'm working on it. In the past few days I've figured out the basics of html and made some rather spectaular mistakes (which is good! Mistakes are where you learn). For a few hours yesterday my whole site was just one giant spinning laptop gif, which, honestly, was pretty dope. I've done things like, alter the css to figure change the background image. Change the font color. Make subpages and link them to my pain page, etc and so on. Watch, I know the proper incantation to open a portal to a truly wonderful youtube video:
See! Isn't that cool! Fourteen year old me sitting in my room playing making custom Starcraft maps would be VERY impressed. I've still yet to procure my referb laptop for the Trisquel install, but I am shopping around looking for a good deal. If you're not familiar with Trisquel, check them out Trisquel GNU/Linux They're my kind of people. Everything that runs on the Trisquel operating system is guaranteed free and open source software, labors of love made by the community. Computing should be empowering to the masses, not enslaving them to more and more corporate masters. Support the Open Source Community! (+1 XP)