Suffering is Beautiful

Eyes, only shine, with the right kind of sad intensity, when the light of pain, swims beneath them.

To have true beauty, one must suffer. Suffering is beautiful. Is it all, or just a kind? No idea, but it is…

In the hazy numbness I presently feel, a song played, while typing to a good friend, my favourite song, so perfect it was for the hazy numbness I feel, while deep words that touched a me I cannot see beneath the me I feel, played upon my heart.

And in the hazy numbness I feel, I felt I wanted to push in deeper, push toward the pain, push toward suffering. Because it is beautiful, because it touches the me I cannot feel, who is deep below the me I can. The me who’s tears I can see, but cannot understand.

I wanted to push toward the pain, to rush and run, to speed through the air, like dancing spirals, skipping past one another, faster, faster, overtaking.

I wanted to get on a train, to feel motion, and to go somewhere, anywhere, unfamiliar, frightening, and watch as everything melts away, and the cold on my skin, and the emptiness and aloneness touches me, the me I cannot feel, and the eerie sense of shimmering all around…

Two songs I have not heard in a long time

I like them very much.

Fields and Glen by Strange Folk

Upland Goose by Strange Folk

Both off the album Unhand Me You Bearded Loon. My dad just recorded them off the vinyl. I looked for digitised versions for YEARS.

*squeaks of delight*

You are reading the blog of a proud owner of a gentoo installation. Ok, so …its not got any shiny desktop yet, but still woo, so excited!

Adventures in Fedora

So a few days ago I downloaded the DVD iso of Fedora 13, after having tested various LiveUSB’s of Linux distro’s I settled on Fedora because it seemed to function most smoothly on my computer (Linux Mint 8 had advantages, but all in all I liked Fedora better). I am currently running Fedora 13 from an external HDD. My internal (and tiny in comparison) HDD is retaining windows a) incase Fedora breaks sometime (and thus to give me the freedom to experiment with updates without worrying about it breaking) and b) because I also just got Oblivion, a game I have wanted for a while and Planescape Torment a game I wanted for over a decade. If I can get all the computer gaming out of my system in this summer I can finally declare myself an adult or something :p.

Anyway, I am impressed with Linux. It seems to get a lot of flack from a lot of people, and I can understand some of the issues, although some of them are a bit outdated (it’s really not hard to set it up nowadays unless you deliberately choose some 1337 distro like Gentoo or something) some of them are fair enough (dedicated teams of paid developers are generally speaking going to be more focused on producing software for customers according to their needs rather than just what they the developers would like). But still, I am impressed for the most part. I am impressed with the stability of GNOME, the appearance of KDE (I installed both just to get a feel for them) – indeed I find going into windows after only a few days of using Linux hurts my eyes with its hideousness. I like the way there are so many open source programs available now. I like the fact that open office seems to be working far better than way back when I tried it before. Most of all though, I am falling in love with the command line.

I don’t know how much you can do in cmd in windows. All I ever use it for is a) formatting stuff b) ipconfig and …no that’s about it these days (I mean, its not even msdos, it’s just an emulator…). So I can’t say “the Linux commandline is far more powerful” because truthfully I don’t know. What I can say is that even in a few short days of experimentation from a zero state knowledge base I have found so many cool things I can do with it. Simple things, but things I definately do not know how to do in MSDOS (or windows DOS emulator).

For instance I have learned how to use m4 to turn things like NAME into either a specific name, or the results of some other sequence of commands. I have learned how to use tr to replace characters with other characters (all this is in terms of output, the original file is unchanged). It’s so cool, there’s tonnes of other fun stuff. I did some of the vim tutorial. There is a perl tutorial I might try soon. It’s also just fun to type commands prefixed with sudo, sure its my computer, they’re my files, I can do what I like with them, but I still feel somewhat of a powertrip everytime I type sudo and my password. Haha.

I’m not a computer person. I’m basically an experienced windows user but only insofar as doing the basic tasks that I generally do, and some minor troubleshooting (or if connected to the internet I would say my troubleshooting skills are actually very good in terms of outcomes, but that basically comes down to my searching skills not my problem solving skills). I say that to make clear that I understand that really this is basic stuff, but its basic stuff that is really getting me into it. I am just so delighted when I try out a command and woooooo it works! So all in all I am really enjoying linux. Fedora is not hard. To set it up was very easy, older versions were apparently not, but 12 and 13 (I started this experiment in linux just before 13 was released as stable so I tried both) were both very easy to get set-up. 13 has so far been a smooth ride. I am looking forward to continuing my learning experience and my experiments in Linux. Once I am all grown up and weaned off computergames, maybe I’ll switch over completely

My dad has been teasing me no end about Linux, when I was trying different distros on LiveUSB and half of them didn’t boot he was all “what do you expect” and generally coming from the “free as in crap” school of thought. But he has never used it. He’s quite wrong. It’s really fun. Even when I broke something major, and it took me two days to fix it (on a LiveUSB with permanence) – it was exhilarating. I had the time, it was a fun challenge. I want more!

Seriously, this rocks. It’s not geeky to think so. It’s true, anyone with any sense of adventure would agree. :p

Ok, signlanguage is now officially cool!

Trying to reign in my flittiness

Thinking about languages has been a hobby of mine on and off for years and years, but I have never successfully learned another language because I have… eyes that dart off in pursuit of every pretty novelty that crosses my field of vision. So here is my plan.

First of all, narrow down the possibilities to 5 languages. Its extremely overambitious for me to assume I will ever know more than 5 languages, if I ever reach a point where I know 5 languages fluently then I can think about a possibility of learning more, until then I need to narrow it down to 5.

Secondly I am not going to do things like take lessons or actually seriously try to learn the language next on the list until I can read a newspaper without it feeling like a huge struggle in the prior ones on the list. Why that specific act, I think because that is the kind of level where I can sustain something on its own without needing to force myself to learn new things in an active way. Of course once I get to that point I’ll still need to practice and keep on reading and talking to maintain that level. That doesn’t mean I won’t be able to curiously pursue “what does this language look, sound like” etc about other things, only that I am not allowed to actually “try to learn” them however interesting or pretty they may be.

Now the 5 that I picked. It was sooo hard to pick 5, and as you see, I haven’t really picked 5 because in two cases I am really torn so I’ve put X or Y on the list.

1. English (not that I want it particularly but I already have it :p)
2. Russian (I’m learning it right now, and slavic sounds are sexy!)
3. Greek OR Romanian (Greek is a language in which so much I want to read is written, Romanian sounds like a language to make angels marvel at its beauty).
4. Tajik (I always wanted to learn Persian, but I’d rather learn it in Cyrillic which I can read than in Arabic script which so far I cannot although…)
5. Arabic OR a Finno-Ugric language (I feel I ought perhaps to give Arabic another try some day, some day far away, but either way I want a non indo-european language, Finnish is gorgeously cute sounding but maybe something more obscure with similar rhythm would be fun to do).

Even this list, it makes me feel anguish, so many things just didn’t quite make the final 5 (Latin, German – which I already know a bit of, Welsh – which would be really convenient to learn because my best friend speaks it) but I think this is a situation where I need to be ruthless to avoid spreading myself too thin on the ground.