I wish there was an alternative to pdmenu in Debian. Honestly, though, the value of pdmenu had dropped since the move away from Debian Menus to that stupid standardized menu structure.

I've sort of wanted to roll my own Linux distribution for a while. The problem is that I also do NOT want to roll my own Linux distribution.

If I were to roll my own, though... I'd probably have to go with my "White Label OS" idea where I make it easy to adopt a custom theme for the entire OS...

Standard packages with generic functional names and generic icons.

At one point in my past, I used "francine" to let me have a login screen that featured an ASCII-art version of my face. I want to make that -- and more -- available to everybody.

You are a brand, so you may as well use a branded OS.

When it comes to reading and #writing, I love to read #fantasy novels, but I hate, hate, hate epic fantasy novels.

The notion that all high fantasy novels are also "epic fantasy" is saying that Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is the same subgenre of fantasy as J.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings or what's-his-name's Game of Thrones. It's absurd and nonsensical.

Epic fantasy is also -- by definition -- richly world-built. The kind of stuff people spend most of their time behind the scenes fiddling with which delays the release of their books.

My current favorites are translations of Japanese light-fiction. "Isekai" just means "other world" so all isekai novels are also high fantasy.

The thing is, though, light fiction is typically released serially and -- more than that -- it frequently feels like the author is playing fast-and-loose with their world-building. It's a style of writing that can only be done when you don't overthink it.

On a fundamental level, it is the opposite of epic fantasy. They're NOT the same.

Something to remember when buying technology: All that 3G-only wireless technology is now permanently offline. Even if you could find a device that could bridge your local network with 3G data, the 3G band partially overlaps the new 5G band so you'd be breaking new devices in your area.

This isn't an issue with corded devices. Is there a weird, ancient cord with an unusual connector? It may take some hard work to replace, sometimes it may take expensive, custom work to replace, but ancient cables stretching across your room won't harm any of your fancy new stuff.

You can always keep using old corded devices.

The Windows 10 update that allowed Windows 10's WSL to integrate with GUI Linux applications is both really nice as well as pretty weird.

Windows 11 had this functionality previously, so I was glad to see it make the way to Windows 10. (This system can't upgrade.)

It really is the best of both worlds now.

Now I've finally had a chance to try out the "cool-retro-term" that I've heard people talk about. It's pretty cute.

It just occurred to me that with a standard song structure you can directly map it to #kishotenketsu by making the bridge the "ten."

It even has the same essential purpose: to hold interest through change, to transform the earlier section with new understanding, to generally throw an amusing wrench in to things, etc.

Someone pointed me to a TikTok of someone giving the argument that Santa Claus is a deity.

I'm totally down with that. I've been saying that for years.

They mentioned "egregore". I'm not sure I'd go that far, but then I believe in an infinite number of deities with an infinite number of forms and an infinite number of names. If you want one called "Santa Claus" with a certain set of traits and abilities, one already exists.

(I do, however, believe "The Veil Between the Living and the Dead" is an egregore. though that's a very spicy take.)

I go so far as saying the Spirit of Santa Claus lives in people's hearts and guides them toward the right presents for people. (This allows Santa Claus to still work for adults.)

There's songs of praise and worship, altars, and a dedicated area of governance.

Even dressing as Santa and becoming him maps to religious activities.

Also... "letters to Santa" are a type of prayer. They are holy things treated with respect by the parents and children.

I've been spending my time off from work to do some development on the software for my website.

The current work has been focused on how I handle my metadata. Since my site isn't document-centric, I don't need to write a text-post just to post a piece of music.

I do, however, need to manage the metadata so that I can generate a webpage for whatever sort of thing I want to share.

I also kind of, sort of, want to make a weird sort of text-based search tool that leverages my metadata. Something from back before folks thought full-text search was the only solution.

I spent a good chunk of yesterday organizing my digital files. Things are still a mess, but I think I have a solid path forward.

On a related note, my website (that hasn't seen an update in over two years) should be seeing a bunch of new stuff before the new year.