Category Archives: Personal Life

August Lightworker Download

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Today I received a pretty steady stream of inspiration and wrote a fair amount of what is bouncing around in my mind. I was writing to a close friend, but it is pretty much meant for everyone.

It was why I was sent here. What I was supposed to do. But I can’t. Wabbits scatter. So I just have to remain in the core vibration and be strong. That’s the primary advice from my channel. I have to be strong for people. Possibly you all. Possibly for when shit hits the fan.

First contact. Natural disasters. Mass ascension. Helping people with the endless cavalcade of release and integrate energies pouring from Gaia to us via the Schumann.

This planet is alive. Conscious. With it. Awake. She talks to us with weather, the sun, and even yes, the Schumann gap.

The reason why everyone has been spicy, grumpy, scattered, shitty sleeping, bazonkers dreams, and sudden shadow work just bubbling up from below previously riveted deck plates.

The Earth is ascending. She’s rising in vibe and the Sun is helping. The Sun affects Gaia, and she is affecting us.

The higher the lightworkers help everyone anchor and raise vibe, the faster the trip. We’re headed to a kind of New Earth. Shits gonna start to happen, miracles people will call them. And everything will change. We are leaving the domain of limitation and duality. That is direct and unmistakable.

It will start with unexpected and inexplicable synchronicities. Then people will start to align with their path, their soul contract terms, and they’ll begin to manifest. With all of it, comes inexplicable abundance. Strength, health, money, time, attention, awareness.

You can see it happening in real time. Witness the Harris/Walz campaign. Something to believe in, a source of joy, they are either lightworkers or unwitting anchor-points. But they are vaporizing fear everywhere they go.

As people leave the low vibe behind, as they appeal to love, kindness, compassion, and courage they become the next runner in the relay race to the New Earth.

So as more people pick to be kind, they are emitting that into the universe. The law of attraction is immutable and infinitely powerful. It isn’t that we have to call something to us trying to get in as much as releasing all the shit that wants to get away from us.

The more that we allow our pure inner preferences to be expressed in our lives, the more simple and easy our lives will become. Trust in the process. Release the awful shit, and stop roasting yourself with deprecating inner monologues. That’s my current hurdle.

The more people that do this, the easier life will be for us. It’s supposed to be easy. We have challenges and they are supposed to be set to easy mode. But we call shit we don’t want, and we hold onto it, trapping what doesn’t want to be with us, with us. And so, we are beset with misfortune. Letting the shit that you don’t want go, opens the door to all the amazing stuff that is desperately trying to reach us. Every single one of us. Lightworkers were sent to help everyone learn this, make better choices, be kinder with yourselves, and we are meant to quite literally show the way. We point to an easier life. Abundance. Plenty. Not ever having to fret or worry, regret or dread. But stay here and now. Make your choices and allow us to show you that some of your beliefs are actually gremlins smashing all the good things away from you.

I’m tearing piles of tar out of the world and brightening it. The less tar around me, the more that people near me will not be so angry, upset, and fearful. They will begin to let their shit go. Then, once they start letting go, there is room, a void, a gap, and then all the blessings FIFO queue into your life. They are right up against you, but we are all riddled with beliefs that create cinder block shields. Nothing good can cross, unless you smash a cinder block out of your wall. Then the abundance comes.

But you have to listen to us. The raving ones. The people who are trying desperately to illumine the way. Don’t believe in us, don’t follow us. Listen to us. What we say. Our advice is leading you all to the New Earth. Nova Gaia.

Every person is a fully powered and functional warp core that believes it’s a baseball card stuck in the spokes of a bicycle!!! I am not shitting around! That’s EXACTLY what we see!

Everyone has the capacity of God. That’s the power we see in you all! It’s all the shit that people carry. Thinking that you have to carry it. Your traumas, your karmas, all of it. You all, generally, sit inside a lead casket and since nobody sees any shine, they assume shining isn’t even possible.

So we are to demonstrate our teachings through our living. We are to be powerful and abundant and all the things that each and every human is entitled to feel. To show you all, it can be done. To cajole you into trying to forgive your traumas. Try to release your karmas. It is only you holding yourself in the jail of your own making.

Think of it as red pill exit the matrix. If that helps. We are all in a matrix. Some of us have begun to red-pill ourselves.

Some Of The Best Things Come When You Are Dancing

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I felt inspired, and wrote quite a lot of material and I think it’s a great idea to share some of it with you all. It’s a series of statements I made from everything that I have learned and witnessed as a . As with tarot readings and other intuitive writings, at the very best, simply take what resonates with you and leave the rest. If it doesn’t resonate with you, I invite you to move on, this isn’t for you. None of this is for everyone, there aren’t any “new rules” here. These are presented as I wrote them, blocks of text, some of the prompts are responses and I’ve maintained the privacy of those folks out of common respect. Anyhow, on with the show…

A kind note, I use a lot of movie and GenX Saturday Cartoon metaphors in these writings, if you don’t know what I’m referring to, watching the referenced movies and cartoons might help.

“And all of these things are just “permission slips”, like all the rest of the rituals and beliefs that humans have. You can do all of it without the permission slips of whatever you are doing, all the cruft that surrounds the woo-woo. You can just do it, directly, without the getup and pageantry. People just use the getup because they think they need it, they believe it will work, and in a way, it’s kind of a placebo effect. If you believe it will work, it will. You don’t need it, but your ego does, because it just can’t believe that any one person has such power. Part of the poisoning of belief in your head. How much of what is in your thoughts isn’t yours. It’s someone else’s baggage. So you pick it up, like the Japanese husband in Airplane 2, just having one more camera slung around his neck by his doting wife, until he topples.”

“The getup works even in Christian traditions. You go to church, you pray to God, you tithe, all of it… all slips. Ways to get what you want because you were told that was the guardrails of existence, it’s how everyone does it, it’s how we all do it. It’s normal do this, this way. But it is all the same. Prayer in Church, a circle cast with an Athame for a high pagan ritual, putting Officer Howie in a Wicker Man and setting him on fire. It’s all just permission slips to clear some artificial hurdle you were told exists. You do the thing, and the universe responds accordingly. The same for a religious zealot as it is with someone in a New Age shop buying a Cassanova Candle for true love. LOL. It’s all the fucking same thing. How we all channel the power we all have but were never taught how to use.”

“And then taught that we are inconsequential little sprockets, individually as effective as a firefly in a meadow. Inconsequential, powerless, just a floating nothing, a wisp just transiting the void. Except, there’s that awareness deep down. The thing that the thoughts adore deep within you. Which then leads to the idea that thoughts are pollution, filling your head, robbing your attention and your awareness. I often times think about the double-slit experiment when I’m considering the power of human awareness. If we don’t attend, the experiment displays wave diffraction. If we move our awareness onto it, it suddenly bellyflops over to particles. Heh, I did this when I was a kid, maybe late teen years. I had three plastic light polarization filters, longitudinal polarizers. Set up a flashlight, shine it through a polarizer, dimmer light comes out the other side. Then position a contrary polarizer beyond that, and there is no light at all. Smiling and nodding, makes all the logical sense in the world. Then put another polarizer in any orientation in between and poof, light flows through all the polarizers. So you have a paddock full of chickens, put up a single fence and only some of the chickens get through it, set up the other side, and no chickens get through it. Put a third fence in the way, and now chickens can get through all of it. LOL.”

“So anyways, if our awareness can do that, amongst all the other neat things, like how awareness can alter how water crystallizes, and you have all this very subtle effect and all you do is just sit and observe. That’s your bit, that’s what you bring to the party. That awareness changes reality on a teeny tiny level. And we stand around, absolutely cocksure that we’re helpless little fireflies in that grassy meadow. The fuck we are. But we never figured out how to train ourselves to USE our awareness in any manner, so it went into an atrophy state, and we live our entire lives with vast untapped reserves of power because we were taught we are individually powerless little nothings and we let that belief just sit there, ruling us, thinking there is nothing to it because it’s “normal” and nobody ever displays anything truly amazing or bombastic, so obviously it’s the truth, we’re helpless, because look… nobody can! Heh, but can they? ;)”

“How much effort is put in, before they figure they did enough, link their caboose to the train of Hope and figure, hey, I gave it a love-nudge, obviously that was enough to get the engine chugging along, toot toot! Here we go! …. why aren’t we moving? ;)”

“Like why positive thinking really can’t make a dent. Positive thinking is sweet wine, it can do incredible amazing things. So you have a lifetime of despair and thinking-of-yourself-as-powerless, filling your cask with sludge and bullshit. Then, years of collecting this sludge and suddenly you stop and decide to pour in some of that positivity. A few drops of sweet wine in a cask of sludge. WHY IS THIS CASK NOT ALL SWEET WINE.”

“Yeah, pretty much. The constant drumbeat is still present… “You are not to ask how.” which is sooooo pregnant a statement coming from the great beyond. Don’t ask how. Okay. It sort of begs the question of why. What does the ignorance of how impact everything else? It feels like it leads to “don’t ask how, you won’t believe it anyways…”

“A lesson I found really speaks to this. A rather lovely presentation that links hardcore physics with the metaphysical art of manifestation. We all know that empty space is not empty, it’s frothy with virtual particle pairs, blipping in and out of existence all by themselves, so this level is wild and rich, but also has zero energy, because all the positive and negative particles created all tally up to zero. So in walks human awareness, thoughts and emotions plenty, and as the lesson goes, your thoughts create a empty structure in this quantum space, like an empty Energon cube, borrowing a metaphor from the Transformers, and then your feelings and emotions are a box of crayons, adding color, style, and actual “mass” to this empty “Energon Cube” until it fills up completely, then you pivot, and you draw this thought linked with feelings and pull it closer to you, lavishing it with attention and rehearsal and repetition. Do it enough, and supposedly, the Universe will render it for you, start the wheels turning, acting in the deep backstage, and the whole while, “Don’t ask how!” and… boom… you get what you created.”

“The trick of it is, sometimes you exercise your power by lavishing your attention on something, and sometimes you exercise your power by utterly ignoring something. HAHAHA Aaaaaand in walks so many Zen teachings I can’t even. “Do without doing, standing at the gateless gateway.”

“And you can see it happen for real. Countless stories of a small group of passionate meditators all sitting and lavishing their attention and awareness on peace and love, and then the city crime rate drops like a fucking stone. Inexplicably. Over and over and over again. Heh, crime, frozen water, stupid flashlights and plastic polarizers, yeah, we’re ineffectual little fireflies just floating around a meadow, totally inconsequential. Hah. And this is the shit we’re doing with all this atrophy. What could we do if we actually had a handle on any of it?”

“Just makes me wonder, if we all got together and agreed to manifest a world without all the ugly in it, really poured our hearts and minds into it… all the unlikely events that could pour out of such an endeavor humbles the mind. Imagining a world where we are all living in peace and harmony, manifesting it all, the more you exercise this part of yourself, the more effect you’ll have. Not even looking for results, but having such an outsized effect. LOL. And here’s the on-ramp to unity… the function of the dark in our world is to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt across each of us, so we don’t unify. We don’t come together, we stay separate, little islands of light, flickering and doubting itself, easily cowed, easily controlled. Easy to manipulate for whatever ends you like. Fear is what keeps us all from unity, so if we simply elect to fuck fear, maybe through the LItany Against Fear maybe, a little handy saying that can remind us about the nightmare fuel that fear is and what it is doing to us all – if we could just get past it, and come together with one unified passion… All those little teeny lights all joining up, aligning with each other, crests matching crests, troughs matching troughs, amplification. Enough collective power, perhaps, to fucking change reality itself. Warping the past, changing histories, fingerpainting the future. We see many mandela effects, the past is a patchwork quilt that is constantly fading in and out of truth and existence.”

The Realms Of A Lightworker

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Many years ago, when I was twenty years old I experienced a massive and radical awakening through what I later discovered was a Kundalini experience. What I never realized was what this single experience did for me, for the rest of my life. In the intervening years, into my mid-forties, I explored everything. I resolved, in a poetic way, that the unexamined life wasn’t worth living, so I explored as much as I could. I intentionally opened myself up to everything that would come to me, and that’s when the synchronicities began.

At first, they were curiosities, coincidences and happy accidents. I was beset by strange memorable dreams, deja vu, and a whole host of little oddities that I could comfortably ignore. My explorations included a bunch of discoveries, and realizations that not everyone starts their life like I did mine. From eight years old, I knew what my life purpose was, I wrote it out, and I never revised it since, and it’s been with me for forty years of living and I have no reason to change it now. At twelve years of age, I lost what little drabs of organized religion were impressed upon me by everyone else, and I lost it in the most amusing of places, the Church Library at the First Presbyterian Church in Ithaca, New York, which was my maternal grandmothers church, and the one where I was baptized and grew up frequenting on Sundays. Then zoom forward, seventeen years of age, and I encountered a medium / psychic fellow who helped me remember a previous incarnation. I was an Irish Catholic priest, mid 1800’s, and being inducted into that understanding was at the time just another amusement, but turned out to be fundamental for all the things that came afterwards. All of these events, little accidents, little nudges, all to place me on a certain path, and now that I look back in retrospect, it is hilariously obvious that I was always going to end up here.

Then several years ago, I started knowing things. I would be able to guess, with shocking uncanny success, if I was posed with a problem or question, and in the first heartbeat, that answer, which more and more started just happening all by itself would just land in my lap. After a series of self-exams where I would honestly test myself, test this gift, and after I was rocking nearly 100% accuracy I accepted it and let it become a part of who I am. I don’t use it intentionally, instead my instincts guided me to regard it as just another worthwhile input, pouring all of what the world had for me, all my perceptions, the events that happened in my life, all into a central pool and let everything mingle. I later discovered that this gift has a name, it’s called claircognizance. The ability to acquire knowing, gnosis, immediately without having to expend any sort of mental labor to reach the answer. I still had no idea what was happening to me, but I wanted desperately to follow all these breadcrumbs left for me, like a trail of M&M’s.

Over time, I picked up many more skills, through my young adulthood I picked up Tarot, Runes, and Bibliomancy and started to appreciate the more numinous and subtle shadings of existence. I started asking the big questions, the purpose of life, why we exist, and trying to understand this world that I exist in, what it means and my place within it. Then I had three lifelong lessons to cope with co-dependency. The first lesson was co-dependency in my family, then in my love life, and finally in my public life. Each time I thought I was done with the lessons to learn, only to careen into the next lesson. All of this set me up for my development, but also encouraged me to start addressing all the shadows in my life. Early traumas, sadnesses, and hurts that all goaded me into a kind of compartmentalization. Every interaction with others was jarring and painful, unpleasant and upsetting. Turns out, my nascent empathy was traumatized and as such, I created barricades around this, to protect myself. Everyone who wanted to grab a token and hurt me could line up, get their abuse jollies and I would just sit there and take it, stoically. It was just dissociation, which I came to understand much later in life. You can’t reach me if I’m not here, so I would leave. Leave within myself.

Years of this, of being the black sheep of my family, to being isolated and lonely, a permanent outsider, never once fitting in properly anywhere, never a part of anything, always browsing from outside and looking in on a world that seemed to be really quite wonderful, but also not for me. So I decided that I could just do it all alone, I was isolated and lonely anyways, nobody could understand the vast sweeping ideas that I was having, so I just determined to keep it all inside. That I could explore where I wanted to go, how I wanted to evolve in this lifetime and I would do it as a solitary practitioner. It felt right, I had mile-high barricades built around me, I kept my caring parts, my empathy, close to me, protecting it from a rude and nasty world full of rude and nasty human beings, and I resolved that I would live the rest of my days, cut off and happy. Happy in my separate peace.

And then, suddenly and unbidden, I started to channel. I would talk to myself, or more clearly, I would hear my own voice talking to me, and there was both messages and feelings to this exchange. I didn’t think I was losing my faculties, I felt like it was another gift from the Universe, maybe something like a consolation prize for an unhappy childhood, perhaps. And I accepted it, if it was going to be a part of me, then I would welcome it, add it to the chorus that was feeding into the central pool of experience building slowly within my mind. By accepting it, it doesn’t upset me, and some days the channel “pops open” several times a day, and sometimes it doesn’t for weeks at a time, it comes when it comes, it says what it says, and always the messages are advice, suggestions, and above everything else, this pervasive feeling of love and support. I can’t make anyone proud of me out there, but I apparently can for my channel, and whatever is on the other side of the line. For good or ill, I accept it.

Then after a while, with a lifetime of material building up within me, I started feeling this unfocused foreboding sensation. Like I could feel something coming towards us, from the future, something we were all blindly stumbling into, traipsing into. That’s when I tried to reach out, I didn’t know what sort of warning I could give, so I started to try to help people. My gift comes with a curse. The curse of Cassandra is the closest mythological story I can come up with. Gifted with knowledge, the gnosis from the claircognizance, but the curse that I would never be believed. I came to understand that I was still an outsider, but oddly enough, I started to also find people who could actually hear me. I think they would be proud to call themselves neurodivergent, and when I would share with them, they would hear me. It was jarring and shocking. The curse was always with me, making me othered, separated, an outsider with those that surround me, except for the neurodivergent.

Over time, I came to learn that everything that was happening to me was suited to a much greater purpose. Ticking boxes, checking off elements, and slowly evolving my way into becoming a Lightworker. I had this sense of foreboding still, and I carry it to this day, it’s still with me. I then encountered a dear friend who I never considered interested in any of this stuff, but he started helping me by saying the exactly right things, at the right time. The channel kept on telling me that someone would walk into my life, sometime very soon, and that they would help me to grow and open up. So, with my channel telling me it was the best path for me, and nudging me with synchronicities and unexplainable coincidences, I gave up my barricades and let each one of them crumble. This one person, this one very special person, enabled me to share all that I had become, all I had discovered, and everything that I had to say. This person could hear me, they would listen, and they offered kindness and support. I then started to dream again, I wasn’t remembering the dreams like I had, but I felt this irresistible pressure build within me. I wanted desperately to grow, to relax, to unclench. I knew exactly what would be my next step in my personal evolution, and that was that I needed to be Bright. As a Lightworker, I am told that I have a presence and a glow to me, perhaps I do, but I also feel this urge to actually try. Not just to accept what the channel and other sensitives and empaths share with me, but to grab the reins and pursue it. This pursuit has become one of the most exciting and passionate pursuits of my entire lifetime.

I know what I am supposed to do, my role in all of this. As a Lightworker I am supposed to inspire others. I am to follow a path of ever increasing emotional vibratory frequencies. I have to ask at every juncture, what do I prefer? What choice would lead me to where I want to go, this image in my mind of a world that we all want to live in. One built out of kindness, compassion, love, and respect. That’s my path, and as a part of it, I felt this overwhelming revulsion to all my prior low-frequency emotions. Hate, Fear, Anger, Rage. So I actively spurned all of those, at each juncture picking hope, kindness, compassion, and deep feelings of love over all the awful feelings. I was so angry, all the time, and I have come to understand that anger and fear are just messengers from beyond me, helping me to push myself towards the light. More than just abandoning the low frequency feelings, I embraced them, felt them, let them reach expression through me and as I did, they one by one faded out of my life. As it turns out, I was doing shadow-work, without even knowing that it was called that.

For me, in this world, I see the realm we exist in made up of three spheres. The lowest sphere is what my channel has termed “The Tar”, it’s hot, black, sticky, and has a breathtaking undertow that will grab you and pull you under with it. The Tar is a world of hate, fear, risk, suspicion, and scarcity of everything. It’s repugnant to me, and when I feel it, I try to steer away from it if I can. The next sphere is “The Dim”, and that’s our current world. You can see the light, it isn’t bright, but it is visible. You know what you should do, you see the path, you just need courage to walk it. We all live in The Dim, it’s the work-a-day world, the subsistence of living, the endless trudge of Same Shit, Different Day. The last sphere, the sphere I am working to enter, to champion, is “The Bright”. This sphere is one of kindness, compassion, respect, understanding, and is the home of my irrational altruism. That impulse to do something nice, unbidden, without any recompense because to give of myself in this way feels authentically vital.

I figured, as my journey started to take me down many unusual and out-of-the-way avenues, which I term my “woo woo” landscape, that really all of this, how I got here, what it all means, can all be reduced down to me simply wanting to have the Bright feelings, kindness, compassion, love, hope… the things that gain and generate and produce without working for it. A balm to the scarcity of The Tar, I suppose now that I have laid it all out for the first time from thoughts to words. My Lightworker nature just gives me a kind of vector, not only do I want to be more in The Bright, but I want to bring more of The Bright to everyone around me. All the advice that I get from my channel and all the sensitives and empaths that I have gotten to know on a personal level all give me little nudges. At first I wanted to scoop up everyone that I cared for, like a kind of shepherd of my flock as it were, and try to literally drag them into The Bright with me, because I didn’t want to lose any of them to The Tar. I could help them rise above The Dim, if I could just be strong enough, and convincing enough, to try hard enough. Once I had started trying, the channel and my sensitive friends all started to beat the drum to correct my path, another nudge. My place wasn’t to force or cajole or even prompt people, but instead to understand that what really matters in everything isn’t hard power, but soft power. Hard power is slapped down by Karma, where soft power is supported by Karma. So I shifted my approach and now I am concentrating all my energies on picking the right options in each juncture, and flowing from trying to make people hear me, to trying to inspire people. I can’t inspire without actually sharing myself with others, and so, this blog post was born in my mind and I write it out in an effort to be Bright and to shine.

The foreboding of what is coming is still with me. The world has sputtered and coughed in recent years, and there is this sense of something on the horizon that we are witlessly marching into, all of us. I don’t know what it is, nor when it is supposed to be, but I do know that I am right where I need to be. I need to tell people who I am, what I can do, and to simply inspire and shine as best that I can, being as damaged as I have been – and to rise above that trauma, all the reasons deep inside me that are screaming at me to not write any of this, to not share it, to not shine. If I don’t shine, I won’t be noticed, and I’ll be safe. If I ignore all of that, if I chase this Bright down and embody it myself, then I will shine, I will be noticed, and there might be risk. Then I smile and recall that I am to pick whichever choice is brighter at every juncture, and so, it’s brighter for me to share this with you all, knowing that an act of deep disclosure of a personal vulnerability is a monumental act of grace and trust, fills me with such joy and happiness. It’s scary, it’s frightening, and it’s also incredibly liberating! As with many things, when you are up close to a thing, all you can see is that thing, so this feels huge and monumental, but over time, and perspective that develops, this is just a blip, a pebble on the path, not a mountain.

The time for me to inspire, to learn to shine in time to reach my loved ones, if not more people, is running out. I don’t want to convince anyone of anything. I want to only share ideas, not beliefs. Ideas are fluid things, they can be endlessly revised and they don’t pick up the kind of baggage that comes with belief. Soon the foreboding event will happen, and I, and the other sparsely distributed Lightworkers will be standing alone again, but instead of being alone and separate from the rest of everyone, we are supposed to stand and guide. To be independent and strong, and to show the way.

That’s what occupies my time now, all my thoughts, every motive is bent to pursuit of this Brightness, and right now my channel is open, and whatever lies on the other side has this to share here, “The thing that scares you the most is quite often your next step. Be brave. Do your best.”

And that’s what all this comes down to. Do my best. My gift to give is giving itself. I am to give my shine to everyone, in hopes that they understand what it is that I want of the world. To leave the Tar and the Dim behind, to be Bright.

Walk in the Light.

Kludgey

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This post was written on Mastodon so it has an informal writing style with jargon and a manner for a specific audience. All the spelling and grammatical errors are intended.

I love creating my own problems and then finding a rabbit hole and chasing it until I have a geek solution that is likely foolish. If I load too many tabs on my Macbook, it gets sluggish. So, can I start xQuartz? Sure! Update however…

Okay, that done, can I SSH with the -X flag to my little Raspberry Pi? Yes! Sluggish. Wah.

How about to my “Security” laptop, running Linux? Yes. Sluggish still.

Google Search, find x2go, install it. MUCH BETTER.

So I’m using x2go, running Firefox-esr and connected to my not-work-tabs, including this one. Not seamless, but it works acceptably well enough.

Sitting here, marveling at all this exceptionally complicated computing technology before me, everything has “multiple cores” yet you really couldn’t tell. So instead of running everything from one single computer, we’ve got serious work stuff on one, then a remote desktop window to another running “fluffy stuff”, and then playing Spotify from my !@#$ iPhone. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Shitty apps, each written by devs that believe that their app is the “King Of The Realm” and you can malloc() forever without having to fret over anything at all. Leaks? Who cares! Look how pretty it is! So, multiple computers, multiple OSes, failures aren’t less, but they are spread out so they don’t block real work quite as badly.

Of course, there is also I/O Blocking to contend with. When the filesystem is doing anything, everything stops. Because I/O is super smexy.

So we contend with shitty development choices by simply throwing entire chunks of technology at the problem. Two laptops, a Raspberry Pi, an iPhone, and an iPad. Each device is good at individual things, but no, we can’t do everything on one single device. Watch that device just chug right to the fucking ground. Ah well. The modern response is “throw a hypervisor on it” and that, wow, what a great way to make an even bigger mess of things.

Bullshit hypervisors make for hilarious blown-out-afternoons. So, Windows 10 on an HP Elitebook laptop, install Hyper-V from the OS, and the Radeon display driver commits hairy suicide. Not only does the driver break, but it cannot be “upgraded” or “fixed”, the only thing you can do, is remove HyperV and… poof, uh, there was a problem? No! No problem! So, you shrug and chuckle and look at the icon for VirtualBox. Yeah, hey buddy…

There are some situations where I start thinking that I should buy a cheap $200 Chromebook just for some things. More technology. SMH. Of course.

Two days ago I remembered the glory-promise of X-Windows and SSH tunnels, with the Display being sent elsewhere. Oh my god, the promise of that… so glittering. So… disappointing.

Oh it works. But it’s like watching slugs have a romantic dinner. Maybe I should just read a book while you request that website, hmmm?

Obviously you turn to Google, the eminent sage and eternal junkie for answers. Ah yes, X-Windows over SSH is a ping/pong nightmare, half the traffic is consumed by just making sure that all the lower layers are functioning properly, constantly. Fine. But then you spot things like x2go, give that a shot, eh… it’s somewhat better.

In the end, the promise bends to tools you already have. Like TeamViewer connected to Windows 10 on a different laptop.

Heh, assuming TeamViewer stays functional that is.

Technology is bittersweet. We have such command of so many wonders. I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all an immense house-of-cards. I suppose I’ve seen too much, I know too much, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe” kind of running through my head. Like looking at Layer 1 connections secured by… chewed bubble gum.

And all the various cheats and hacks, because you naturally want something, but you can’t get it because the people who provide the thing, won’t provide the tools for the extra things you want. They aren’t going to write the code, their codebase is secret, you can’t submit code yourself, and so you just sit there, google searching and finding kludgy-as-fuck solutions to your headaches.

Yeah, that’s fine, be a prat. I’ve got a python script that scrapes your shit and does what I wanted to do.

Case in point, Signal. I love Signal. I will always love Signal. But I want to search on metadata within the Signal app. No. Like the soup nazi, no metadata for you! Only search on stuff in primary stream. Fuuuuuuuu.

So I have a group chat, it’s all my friends, in Signal, and we use it as a blazing-bright thread, it connects us all, geographically spread throughout the United States. It made the COVID-19 Pandemic less lonely. It was a community of dear friends and we could be together without risk.

So, I journal, have an app for that, but obviously Signal doesn’t work with the journal app, so I can’t just hoover all the Signal content into the journaling software. Sometimes I forget to review everything we said in Signal, so the date-of-chat just slides off primary display. You could scroll, but wouldn’t it be nice to search on metadata? Like take me to the first thing shared on Sep 01, 2021? That would be nifty! NO. NO SOUP FOR YOU.

So, no metadata searching. Fine. So, enter the raw kludgy “fuck it, this is also a solution, damn you all” solution. Can’t search on metadata, but just on raw data, so, lets add the data markers we want to the stream! At 6am, write the date into the stream, every day. Then you can use the tools in the app to search on what was shared, and since the metadata you want is “shared”, now you can search on it! Well, okay! “Sep 01, 2021” look! YAY! That’s what I wanted!

Obviously this creates a “Forking House Of Mirrors”… one bullshit kludgy solution leads to a new problem. I don’t want to wake up at 6am to put the date into Signal stream. OK. Lets automate that. Enter Signal-CLI. shakes head fine. So, lets try to connect to the service, that was a hard climb. Okay, now it’s as group, what groups are there? No groups. What? No. Send something to someone, then ask again. Okay. <<send>> how about now? OH YES, THIS GROUP!? You need a special hex code for this.

If you have this hex code, you’d think you could use that without having to ask going forward. No. New install? You can’t just simply use what you know to peek around the corner, no. You need to run around Robin Hoods Barn all over again, and now you can use it! HUZZAH. FUUUUUUUUUUU.

So, finally, we can send signal data from the CLI. Next, lets figure out the date commands picky-picky formatting rules. How to get Sep 01, 2021?

We’ve got that! YAY! Okay, so lets write a Bash script! Get the date, and at 6am write it out to the Signal group. Write script, change mode on script so it can execute, plumb the foggy memories you have of crontab, and boom. Failure.

FUUUUUUUUUUU

Ah yes, cardinal sin, I didn’t explicitly declare the specific paths to signal-cli, echo, mv, fuck, any command at all. Call the script yourself, works, cron calls? Lost. Fixup. Dive into vim. Find your cheatsheet. Gah.

Finally, good god watch it work. 6am every day, a machine you “rescued from the landfill” with some half-forgotten linux distro you can’t remember is actually working and that’s fine. Now, when it’s Sep 03, 2021, you can search on Sep 01, 2021, to get back and manually journal what you remember telling people, because there it is. Click-drag.

All because metadata isn’t searchable. I got what I wanted. Everyone can benefit from it too. But it is complete mess.

This is why entire afternoons are incinerated on the pyre of “Fuck, I wanted XYZ, but the devs don’t speak English, their angel investors aren’t interested, and nobody but me would ever want this feature… so… fuuuuuuuuuuu”

I suppose I could attempt to ask for whatever it is I think would be good, but devs live on the moon, or as much as would be useful, they do. So no. We don’t tell devs anything. We just muck about, finding fragments on GitHub, trying not to get sick that Microsoft owns them now.

So you find gists, you find forked projects, you find python code fragments. The dependencies aren’t circular-misadventures-into-the-fog, you try to remember basic linux stuff because you haven’t had to screw around with any of it for decades and crontab went off to the same Elysium Fields that Trigonometry went off to…

Google Fu. Another worrisome “house of cards” right there too, but lets not look too closely at it, lest it collapse. Or sell our identity to Belorussians.

It doesn’t take much at all. Fragile houses of cards built on other fragile houses of cards. People mobbing on top, like hapless Eloi sitting down at the picnic tables and never having a single bright shiny thought in their pretty little heads because food is always right there, on the table, same time every day. Meanwhile, underneath, the Morlocks are banging on pipes, and every once in a while grabbing an Eloi for a snack.

That’s the Internet. Humanity on top of the Internet. The rot in Layer 8.

And all you really do is shrug. You hope for a better world. Every once in a really long while you stumble blindly over something truly elegant. It’s like tripping over Rivendell and spotting an Elf walking along a curated beautiful path of perfectly carved scrollwork.

And it’s only momentary. The pile of constantly shifting wreckage we call the modern world continues to shudder and throb. It all works, and you marvel that these people manage to continue to live in all of this… wreckage.

Catching Up

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Welcome to the end of July 2021! So much has happened, and most of it has passed without a blog entry. Life is a box of chocolates and sometimes you run into a really thick caramel and have to slow down.

COVID-19

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In the time I’ve been away, I discovered that on Saint Patrick’s Day 2021, March 17th, that I had contracted COVID-19 when I could no longer smell or taste anything. My test came back positive, but I didn’t have a strong illness associated with it. Then my mind cast back to January 2020, and when I thought that I had Norovirus, but upon reflection I think it might have been COVID-19 as well, except in January of 2020, COVID kicked my ass. So perhaps it was, perhaps it wasn’t, I didn’t get tested at the time. Then we all got the happy news that we were invited to have our first vaccination series with the Pfizer mRNA vaccine. Mine was on 3/30, and then subsequently again on 4/20. Now I have at least one true COVID-19 infection, and the mRNA, so that puts me in a pretty strong resistant category.

Working From Home & Working In The Office

During the entire pandemic, the state of Michigan opened and closed. We played the flirt game with spikes and surges and it was very ugly for quite a while. Restaurants closed up left and right, the only real dining game in town was those joints that decided to adopt a strong take-out offering. I bounced from Home to the Office, and in one of those bounces, I contracted COVID-19 from my workplace. Since then, I have had weight issues which naturally led to hypertensive issues as well. Since April I think, I’ve been back in the office, and back in the swing of things. I still quarantine myself, I still mask, and I still have lots of hand sanitizer. COVID-19 has changed how I behave, it created a host of new habits and since they can only help me, I have kept them going. I don’t know if I will ever let go of them.

Noom

On April 16th, 2021 I started the Noom program. I started at 331.4 pounds, and now I’m down to 291.4 pounds, on the program, with a lifetime goal of 220 pounds. The program is very good, the educational components are really quite valuable and I’m almost done with the education parts. I don’t think that I’m ready to “be free of the program” as I think what I need most is the discipline that the app offers me, the rigorous control over my food intake, and being careful so as to not over-indulge and gain back the weight I have lost so far. I definitely think that Noom is a diet that everyone could really benefit from, I don’t feel deprived or starving, and I still am losing weight.

Crochet

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Over pandemic, I picked up a new hobby. Crochet, which is a style of working with yarn to make various fabrics and items. So far I’ve made many blankets, hats, gloves, and “Cat Pads” for donation to Kalamazoo Animal Rescue. I have discovered that Bernat Blanket, which is a 100% Polyester yarn works amazingly well for animal applications. The yarn is very strong, it can stand up to sanitization methods, and it doesn’t suffer when cats dig in with their claws. I started a WordPress.com blog Bluedepth’s Crochet and there I cover all the neat things that I’m exploring with the yarn arts.

One of the obvious and unfortunate things about yarn arts, and Crochet and Knitting is the gender issues that surround them. Both are seen as “women’s work” and so, much of the education and pattern supply is led by and for women. Obviously, there are some things that are unisex, and I do wish quite often that more people would try something like crochet or knitting, they may find something they truly love and celebrate as I do when I make something beautiful and it is instantly useful.

COVID-19 and Temperature Checks

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I see a lot of companies starting to “open up” during our running COVID-19 pandemic. Right at the top, almost invariably I find the line item that, paraphrased “All employees are temperature checked before they start work.” and then it goes on and on from there.

I think it is worthwhile to start a conversation to illuminate understanding on what temperature checks really are. They are not quickie medical tests to determine if someone is infected or not with COVID-19. They are simply a very easy diagnostic tool to isolate vectors of COVID-19 transmission. Remember, that COVID-19 can infect you without your knowledge, it can replicate in your body without your knowledge, and by the time your immune system calls for a fever, to begin work on fighting the infection, COVID-19 has already been in your system and active and spreading the entire time, back to a standard period of about two weeks.

What temperature checks that fail do, is show you that you have a vector in your midst. Save your bus fare, because when someone is showing a temperature elevation they have been sick for at least a week if not two. These people should be interviewed to see where they have been so that those who have come in contact with them can be tested and quarantined.

So, while companies want to re-open because of economic pressure, which I do fully understand, a temperature check, a good thing to do mind you, is pretty much just identifying a bomb that has been slowly going off for two weeks. It is not testing, it is not contact tracing, and it is not quarantine. You haven’t found a sick person as much as you have found a Typhoid Mary or a Typhoid Marv.

We need to test everyone. We need a vaccine. We need masks, hand-washing, and social distancing. Everything else is just a carefully monogrammed pillow invitation for COVID-19 to spread and kill more people.

Crochet Yarn Estimating

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I have been thinking about starting a new crochet project and it struck me that there were no measurements or calculators online that could give you an estimate of the amount of yarn you would need based on the measurements of the projects result, with fixed terms such as the weight of the yarn, the hook used, and which fundamental stitch was used to create the final result. The goal is to answer this question,

“If I wish to make a square of fabric that is 34 inches by 34 inches, made of half-double crochet using a 5mm hook and worsted weight yarn, how much yarn would I need to complete the project?”

So I decided to find out the answer manually. I worked several styles, including:

  • Foundation Chain
  • FSC
  • FHDC
  • FDC
  • SC
  • HDC
  • DC
  • SC Strip
  • HDC Strip
  • DC Strip

Where the strips were just a single row of that kind of stitch, and the non-strip measures were measuring the yarn after creating a complete work in the square based on the index, which for all of this was five inches. So, a SC Strip is 5 inches long, one row of SC, and SC is 5 inches wide by 5 inches high.

Here are the numbers that I measured, these are inches of yarn consumed for each category (YCR – Yarn Consumption Rate):

Stitch Five Inches LengthAverage YCR per Inch
Foundation Chain 25.54.8
FSC8016
FHDC8717.22
FDC8215.5
SC 785.531.42 (per sq inch)
HDC 80232.08 (per sq inch)
DC 79031.6 (per sq inch)
SC Strip5310.6
HDC Strip78.515.7
DC Strip10220.4

What surprised me was that Double Crochet uses less yarn, a little bit, than Half-Double Crochet does, and then just how close the three fundamental stitches are to each other when you hold width and height at a fixed value.

So my answer is, for a 34” by 34” square of fabric, Half Double Crochet with a Foundation Half Double Crochet will require:

FHDC = 34” x 17.22 = 585.48 inches of yarn

HDC = 34” x 34” = 1156 square inches x 32.08 = 37,084.48 inches of yarn

Full Project = 585.48 + 37,084.48 = 37,669.96 inches of yarn, with 36 inches per yard results in 1,046.38 yards of yarn.

So with this information, I know what my project would potentially cost me, outside of the project time itself, so if I select a superwash merino yarn, for example on yarn.com, their Valley Yarns Valley Superwash is $6.49 a ball, and a ball has 97 yards of yarn in it. That requires 10.78 balls, well, really 11 balls. That’s $71.39, with their 20% off deal, their out the door is $64.10.

The really nice part of knowing the rough yarn consumption rate for these stitches is that you don’t have to overbuy your yarn and then end up with extra of anything. There will almost always be partials but there is a big difference between having a third of a ball left versus having 3 1/3 balls left.

If you find these values to be useful, I would only ask that you leave a comment here letting me know that they helped.

Ulysses 18.7 and WordPress 5.4

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I just had a devil of a time with my Ulysses to WordPress integration. Something underhanded happened on the way to the Forum. Either it was something that WordPress tweaked in 5.4, or my host did something clever to get in the way and didn’t tell me. Someone left a very important bit out, which broke Ulysses, my editor of choice for blogging.

The solution was to be found in these two sites:

David Bosman’s Blog – Ulysses and WordPress and

Hans Bruins’s Medium Post – Ulysses and WordPress

So if you were using Ulysses all along, and it suddenly crapped out on you with WordPress, these instructions seem to do the trick, it did so for me!

YubiKey NFC 5 – Disappointing & Useless

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It doesn’t take much for a technology to excite me and then subsequently fail me. Case in point, a YubiKey 5 NFC security key. I bought it on November 6, 2019 for $51.94. I was excited to use this new bit of technology, thinking that it would at least be a valuable experience for me when it came to 2 factor authentication and honing my security skills. The NFC bits were very attractive and the website clearly displayed iPhone as compatible, so why not? Chip in all the way, it’s only $50!

What I got did not at all match my expectations. The NFC doesn’t work, or at least required at the time a different kind of iPhone than the one I had, which was an iPhone 6S Plus, so that was deceptive advertising leading me nowhere. The NFC part works nowhere, so it’s just marketing mumbo-jumbo for me. I then plugged it in to my USB port on my MacBook and was dismayed to see that it doesn’t really do what I thought it would, no way to get any of my TOTP settings onto the device, no applications to make it convenient to use on my MacBook Pro, but there was a way that I could put my GPG Key for my main account on there. So I did that. Then after doing that I realized that the private key had been moved onto the Yubikey and a stub left on my MacBook Pro, meaning any time I wanted to decrypt anything I needed the YubiKey. I didn’t have a choice when it came to having it in both places, and I accepted that because I rarely if ever use my GPG key since it’s a dead-on-arrival technology itself.

All of this was an immense flash in the pan. I did learn a lot, and I guess it was worth the $50 I spent on it. Maybe I can return it to the manufacturer, as I have returned it to factory specs. If they don’t allow that, then I’ll likely put it up for sale on Facebook, Craigslist, or eBay.

What I got out of Yubico and their Yubikey is that it is like a lot of other security tools, pretty much meant for a very niche marketplace where people who would buy into these sorts of things are sold on the how, just looking for the what. I wouldn’t recommend Yubikey to anyone, it is not easy to use and completely unreliable. A little sidebar to mention here as well, if you wanted to use a YubiKey to secure your desktop or laptop computer, which you could do, they strongly recommend you buy two of them, in case you lose one or one gets stolen. The all-or-nothing deal is a huge cold shower.

Gin & Tonic

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Ever since COVID-19 started spreading around the world, there has been mutterings that an anti-malarial medication called hydroxychlorquine had some benefit to people with the virus. Perhaps it is with viral replication or viral implantation it is unclear to me, but the drug did bear a mention by scientists and doctors. I did a little reading and quine, chloroquine, and then hydroxychloroquine all seem to be fully synthetic versions of a very old drug, quinine.

This was exciting, because I knew full well that I had quinine in my house already. It’s an ingredient in Tonic Water. So when COVID-19 was spreading, people were panic buying left and right, and I was buying liter bottles of Tonic Water and a giant bottle of Gin.

I figure that I don’t want hydroxychloroquine, leave that to the FDA, the doctors, and scientists to argue over. I could very well dose myself, very low-dose, with quinine every day in a collins glass filled with ice, a splash of Gin, and top it off with Tonic Water. What is the damage? It’s a very low dose, its a delicious cocktail with only maybe an ounce of Gin per drink, and I spritz it with a little lime juice as a flavor addition when I like. Because the Tonic Water is cheap, $1.89 per liter, has the chemical that seems to work against COVID-19, maybe a regular micro-dose of quinine has some effect either in preventing COVID-19 from infecting me, killing it off when my immune system notices it, or quite possibly I haven’t been exposed to COVID-19 yet. Either way, liters of Tonic Water are very easy to find, making two or three glasses of Gin and Tonic go really well with lunch or dinner, and it can’t really hurt me. So, why not?

So I started to muse to myself on the topic of micro-doses of quinine for COVID-19. I don’t know, I’m not a doctor, and there aren’t any studies. Chances are it’s all placebo, but if it isn’t? What if three doses of Tonic Water, say 100ml each, with ten of these doses in a liter bottle – what if my daily Gin & Tonic drinks are helping?

Maybe it is helping, it certainly isn’t hurting me. What if this was the answer all along and it was in your liquor cabinet this entire time?