Rangers vs Reds.

Tuned in now to 105.3 The Fan – Dallas, for the pregame show then the call of this afternoon's MLB game between the Texas Rangers and the Cincinnati Reds. The MLB Gameday screen has just activated, too, so I'm ready for the game which will be starting shortly.

And the adventure continues.

4 Days. I know, tragic. You probably thought something meaningful happened. Maybe a breakdown, maybe some grand realization, maybe I finally became a better person. Relax. I didn’t stop writing because I was sooo busy. Let’s not lie to ourselves like that. I stopped because there was nothing dramatic enough to decorate with words. No emotions to exaggerate, no chaos to pretend was depth. No exhausting person exists in my veins.

Just quiet, and I don’t hate it. I’ve grown to like it, of course, I have. Give me something slightly empty, slightly miserable, and I’ll keep it around like it’s something valuable. Like it means more than it actually does. This boredom, though. it’s. Different, I could say. It just sits there waiting for you to admit that this is all there is. And instead of fighting it like a normal person, I made myself comfortable.

Naturally, of course So I’ve been doing puzzles. Yes. Puzzles. A thousand pieces of pure insignificance. Hours of my life spent connecting cardboard like it’s going to unlock some hidden truth about existence, spoiler: It doesn’t.

But hey, at least now I know where a tiny blue corner piece belongs. Life changing, right? I don’t even enjoy it, which makes it even better. Imagine doing something you don’t like, for no reason, consistently. That’s discipline. That’s probably what self-help books would call “ building character.” I call it killing time creatively.

Picked up other habits too. Random ones. The kind people label as “finding yourself.” Trust me, folks. I’m not finding anything. If anything, I’m confirming that there’s nothing to find. But sure, let’s call it a journey. Sounds healthier. And between all that? Drinking. A lot. Smoking too. Not in a “cry for help” way, don’t make it dramatic. It’s not a movie. It’s a routine. Predictable. Almost boring, which fits perfectly with everything else.

It smooths things out. Takes the edge off the already dull edges. Makes the boredom feel. Intential. Like I chose this. Which, technically. I did. And somehow (this is the part people love), I feel better. I know, disappointing. No redemption arc. No emotional growth. Jus me, reverting back to factory settings and calling it an improvement. Turns out, when you remove all the unnecessary noise, what’s left is.. functional. Cold, maybe. Detached, definitely. But efficient. I’ll take that over whatever mess I was before.

Oh, and I’ve been looking into things. Nothing specific. Nothing worth explaining yet. Just possibilities. Limits. How far something can go before it stops being a thought and starts becoming something else. You know what I mean. You can call it “old hobbies.” Whatever helps you sleep better.

So yeah, four Days gone. No stories, etc., no progress anyone would be proud of. Just boredom. Habits. and a version of me that’s a little quieter, a little worse, and somehow a little better at the same time. Funny how that works.

Sincerely, no surprises here.

We fixed a bug that’s haunted our Rich Text editor for a long time, where editing a post that has special HTML or shortcodes would cause the whole thing to break. Now you can create these more custom posts in the Plain Text editor and switch over to Rich Text without worry!

#updates #editor #improvements #writeas

It was an ordinary Tuesday evening. The package had arrived by courier that morning, but I'd only opened it after dinner, with that silent ceremony I perform every time new hardware arrives – as if opening a box quickly were a form of disrespect toward the object. Inside was a MINISFORUM UM690L. Small, almost ridiculously small. A Ryzen 9 6900HX in a form factor that fit in the palm of a hand. I put it on the desk and looked at it. Looked at it again. And then something uncomfortable occurred to me. I had ordered it from a Chinese retailer, with a credit card, through a completely traceable payment infrastructure, from one of the most centralised and surveilled commercial ecosystems in existence. To build a homelab that would let me escape centralised, surveilled ecosystems.

The funny thing – funny in the sense that it makes you laugh, but badly – is that I'm not alone. Every day, somewhere in the world, someone orders a mini-PC, a Raspberry Pi, a Mikrotik managed switch, with the declared goal of taking back control of their digital life. They order it on Alibaba, pay with PayPal, wait for the courier. And they see nothing strange in any of this, because the contradiction has become so structural it's turned invisible. This article is an attempt to make it visible again. Without easy solutions, because I don't have any. When did I ever?

The homelab promise

When, in 2019, I began self-hosting practically everything – Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Navidrome, FreshRSS, Open WebUI and about twenty-five other services across roughly twenty Docker containers on Proxmox LXC – I did it with a precise motivation: I wanted to know where my data lived, who could read it, and to have the option of switching it off myself if I ever felt like it. Not when a company decides to cancel a service, not when someone else changes the licensing terms. Me. This came after a long period of reflection on myself, on the work I was doing and still do, and on the technological society I live in. It's an ideological choice before it's a technical one. Technology as a tool of autonomy rather than control; infrastructure as something you own rather than something that owns you. I hope no one is alarmed when I say that some of these reflections began, in part, with reading Theodore Kaczynski's Manifesto, before naturally moving on to more authoritative sources. Yes, I'm eccentric, but not quite that much.

When you pay a subscription to a cloud service, the transaction doesn't end the moment you authorise the payment. Shoshana Zuboff, in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, calls this mechanism behavioral surplus: the behavioural data extracted beyond what's needed to provide the service, then resold as predictive raw material.

“Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, however, the first text does not stand alone; it trails a shadow close behind. The first text, full of promise, actually functions as the supply operation for the second text: the shadow text. Everything that we contribute to the first text, no matter how trivial or fleeting, becomes a target for surplus extraction. That surplus fills the pages of the second text. This one is hidden from our view: 'read only' for surveillance capitalists. In this text our experience is dragooned as raw material to be accumulated and analyzed as means to others' market ends. The shadow text is a burgeoning accumulation of behavioral surplus and its analyses, and it says more about us than we can know about ourselves.”

You're not the customer of the system – you're its product. Your habits, your schedules, your preferences, your hesitations before clicking on something: all of it is collected, modelled, sold. The transaction isn't monthly; it's continuous, invisible, and never ends as long as you use the service. With hardware, in principle, the transaction is one-off: you buy, you pay, it's done, it's yours. The drive is in your room, not on a server subject to government requests, security breaches, or business decisions that have nothing to do with you but affect your access to those services. This distinction – between a tool you use and a system that uses you – is the real stake of the homelab. It's not about saving money, it's not about performance. It's about who controls what.

The problem is that building this infrastructure requires hardware, time, knowledge, and resources. The hardware comes from somewhere; the time, knowledge, and energy come from a privilege not granted to everyone.

The market I hadn't seen

Search “mini PC homelab” on any marketplace. What you find is a productive ecosystem that has exploded over the last five years in ways I honestly didn't expect.

MINISFORUM, Beelink, Trigkey, Geekom, GMKtec. Zimaboard, with its single-board aesthetic designed explicitly for people who want home racks. Raspberry Pi and the galaxy of clones – Orange Pi, Rock Pi, Banana Pi. Mikrotik managed switches at accessible prices. 1U rack cases to mount under a desk. M.2 NVMe SSDs with TBW calculated for small server workloads. Silent PSUs designed to run 24/7. A market built from scratch that exists precisely because there's a community of people who want to run servers at home. r/homelab and r/selfhosted on Reddit have approximately 2.8 and 1.7 million subscribers respectively – publicly verifiable numbers, and growing. YouTube is full of dedicated channels. There's an entire attention economy built around “escaping” the attention economy.

But it's worth asking: who built this market, and why. MINISFORUM and Beelink don't exist out of ideological sympathy toward the homelab movement. They exist because they identified a profitable segment and served it with industrial precision. Kate Crawford, in Atlas of AI, documents how technological supply chains follow niche demand with the same efficiency they follow mass demand: factories in Guangdong optimise production lines not for a worldview, but for a margin. The fact that the resulting product also satisfies an ideological need is, from the producer's perspective, irrelevant.

“The Victorian environmental disaster at the dawn of the global information society, shows how the relations between technology and its materials, environments, and labor practices are interwoven. Just as Victorians precipitated ecological disaster for their early cables, so do contemporary mining and global supply chains further imperil the delicate ecological balance of our era.”

The mechanism had already been described with theoretical precision in 1999 by Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism. Their thesis: capitalism is never defeated by critique – it's incorporated. When a critique becomes widespread enough, the system absorbs it and transforms it into a market segment. The artistic critique of the Sixties – autonomy, authenticity, rejection of standardisation – became the marketing of the creative economy. The critique of digital centralisation – sovereignty, privacy, control – has become an online catalogue to browse.

Resistance has become a market segment. Every time someone buys a UM690L to stop paying subscriptions to services they don't control, a factory in Guangdong sells a UM690L. Capitalism hasn't been defeated – it has shifted (at least for a small slice of the population: nerds, hackers) the extraction point from subscriptions to hardware.

The accumulation syndrome

There's a further level, more ridiculous and more personal, that homelab communities never openly discuss but that anyone with a homelab recognises immediately. The Raspberry Pi 4 bought “for a project.” The old ThinkPad kept because “you never know.” The 4TB drive recovered from a decommissioned NAS – “it might come in handy.” The second-hand switch bought on eBay for eighteen quid because it was cheap and might be useful. The cables, the cables, the cables.

r/homelab has a term for this: just in case hardware. It's the hardware of the imaginary future, of projects that exist only in your head, of configurations you'll finally test one day – one day. In the meantime it occupies a shelf, draws power on standby, and generates a diffuse sense of possibility that's indistinguishable from the most classic consumerism. The underlying psychological mechanism has a precise name: compensatory consumption – purchasing as a response to a perceived loss of autonomy or control. You buy hardware because buying hardware gives you the feeling of recovering agency over something. The aesthetic differs from traditional consumerism – no luxury logos, no recognisable status symbols – but the mechanism is identical.

That said, there's a partially honest answer to all of this: the second-hand and refurbished market. The ThinkPad X230 on eBay, the Dell R720 server decommissioned from a data centre, the drive from someone who upgraded their NAS. Hardware that would otherwise go to landfill, with its lifespan extended, without generating new production demand. It's closer to repair ethics than compulsive purchasing. But it has its own internal contradiction: it requires even more technical competence than buying new – knowing how to evaluate wear, diagnose an unknown component, deal with ten-year-old drivers. The barrier to entry rises further. And the refurbished market is itself now an organised commercial sector, with its own margins, platforms, and pricing logic. It's not a clean way out. It's a less dirty one.

And then there's the energy question, which is usually ignored in homelab discussions but is actually the most uncomfortable of all – uncomfortable enough to deserve a fuller treatment later. For now let's just say: every machine on your shelf that “draws power on standby” is a line item in the energy bill that the homelab movement rarely budgets for.

It's not for everyone. And it shouldn't be that way.

There's a second level of the paradox that is even more uncomfortable than the first. Building a homelab requires money – relatively little, but it requires it. It requires physical space. It requires a decent internet connection. And it requires time. A lot of time. Not installation time – that's measurable, finite. The learning time that precedes everything else. To reach the point where you can set up a working infrastructure with Proxmox, LXC containers, centralised authentication, reverse proxy, automated backups – you already need to have spent years understanding how Linux works, how to reason about networks and permissions, how to read a log. I've been at this since Red Hat in 1997, and it took me nearly thirty years to get where I am. I should know this by now. And yet it still catches me off guard.

That time didn't fall from the sky. It's time I was able to dedicate because I had a certain kind of job, a certain stability, a certain amount of mental energy left at the end of the day. It's time belonging to the comfortable middle class with a stable, or near-stable, position – not someone working three warehouse shifts a week. Passion isn't enough.

Johan Söderberg documents this in Hacking Capitalism: the FOSS movement was born as resistance to capitalism, but reproduces within itself hierarchies of skill and merit that make it structurally exclusive. Freedom is technically available to anyone, but effective access requires resources distributed in anything but a democratic fashion. Söderberg goes further than simply observing exclusivity: voluntary open-source labour produces use value – working software, documentation, community support – which capital then extracts as exchange value without compensating those who produced it. Red Hat builds a billion-dollar company on a kernel written largely by volunteers. It's not just that not everyone can enter: it's that those who do often work for someone without knowing it. The homelab inherits this problem and amplifies it.

“The narrative of orthodox historical materialism corresponds with some very popular ideas in the computer underground. It is widely held that the infinite reproducibility of information made possible by computers (forces of production) has rendered intellectual property (relations of production, superstructure) obsolete. The storyline of post-industrial ideology is endorsed but with a different ending. Rather than culminating in global markets, technocracy and liberalism, as Daniel Bell and the futurists would have it; hackers are looking forward to a digital gift economy and high-tech anarchism.”

This isn't a peculiarity of the homelab movement: it's a recurring structure across every technological wave. Langdon Winner, in his influential essay Do Artifacts Have Politics?, argued that technological choices are never neutral – they embed power structures, distribute access non-randomly. Amateur radio in the 1920s, the personal computer in the 1980s, the internet in the 1990s: every time the promise was democratising, every time the actual distribution followed pre-existing lines of privilege. Not through malice, but through structure.

The irony is this: those who would most need digital autonomy – those who can't afford subscriptions, who live under governments that surveil communications, who are most exposed to data collection – are exactly those least likely to be able to build a homelab. Not for lack of interest or intelligence. For lack of time, money, and years of privileged exposure to technology.

Homelab communities don't usually talk about this. They talk about which mini-PC to buy, how to optimise power consumption, which distro to use as a base. The conversation about structural exclusivity exists, but at the margins – in Jacobin, in Logic Magazine, in EFF activism – while the centre of the discourse remains impermeable. It's not that no one talks about it: it's that the peripheries talk about it, and peripheries don't set the agenda. All this conversation takes place in a room to which not everyone has a ticket. And nobody inside seems to find that particularly problematic.

A technological cosplay?

So is the whole thing a joke? Is the homelab just anti-capitalist cosplay while you continue to fund the same supply chains? In part, yes.

The UM690L was designed in China, assembled in China, shipped via container on ships burning bunker fuel. Global maritime transport accounts for roughly 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions – a share the IMO has been trying to reduce for years with slow progress and continuously deferred targets. Then: distributed via Alibaba, paid by credit card. Every piece of technological hardware carries an extractive chain that begins in lithium mines in Bolivia and cobalt mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo, passes through factories in Guangdong, and ends in electronic waste processing centres in Ghana. The hardware travels that supply chain exactly like any other consumer device. And hardware has a lifecycle. In five years the UM690L will be too slow, or it'll break, or something will come out with far better energy efficiency to ignore. And I'll buy again. The mini-PC market for homelabs depends on the obsolescence of previous purchases – exactly like any other consumer market.

The critique of capitalism, when widespread enough, isn't suppressed – it gets incorporated. The system absorbs the values of resistance and transforms them into a market segment. Autonomy becomes a selling point. Decentralisation becomes a brand. The rebel who wanted to exit the system finds themselves funding a new vertical of the same system, convinced they're making an ethical choice.

The other side

But there's a structural difference that would be dishonest to ignore.

When you pay a subscription to a cloud service, the cost isn't just the monthly fee. It's the ongoing cession of data, behaviours, habits. It's Zuboff's behavioral surplus: you're not using a service – you're being used as raw material to train models, build profiles, sell advertising. The transaction never ends, in ways you often can't see and can't opt out of as long as you use the service.

With hardware, the transaction ends. Your data stays on a physical drive in your room, not on a server subject to government requests, breaches, or business decisions that have nothing to do with you but impact your life. The software running on it – Proxmox, Debian, Nextcloud, Jellyfin – is open source and yours: if something changes in a way you don't accept, you can leave. This resilience has real value – but it's worth noting it's asymmetric resilience. It works for those who have the skills to exercise it. For those who don't, the theoretical portability of your own data from Nextcloud to something else requires exactly the same skills already identified as a barrier to entry. The freedom to leave is real. Access to that freedom, much less so.

And then there's the energy question I've been putting off long enough. The major hyperscalers – AWS, Google, Azure – operate with a PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) between 1.1 and 1.2. For every watt of useful computation, they dissipate barely 0.1-0.2 watts in heat and infrastructure. They have enormous economies of scale, optimised industrial cooling, significant renewable energy investment, and above all: their servers run at very high utilisation rates. Almost always busy.

A home homelab works radically differently. The machine runs 24/7 even when it's doing nothing – and for most of the time, it's doing nothing. Navidrome serving three requests a day, FreshRSS fetching every hour, an LDAP container listening without receiving connections. You're paying the energy cost of the infrastructure regardless of usage. The implicit PUE of a homelab, honestly calculated against the ratio of total consumption to actual workload, is far worse than a data centre's. IEA data (Data Centres and Data Transmission Networks, updated annually) shows that major cloud providers progressively improve energy efficiency through economies of scale that no individual homelab can replicate.

This doesn't automatically mean cloud is the ethically correct choice – the problem doesn't reduce to PUE, and surveillance has costs that aren't measured in kilowatts. It means that anyone with SolarPunk values who chooses the homelab must reckon with a real contradiction: the choice of sovereignty may be, watt for watt, energetically more expensive than the system they're trying to exit. I don't have a clean answer. But ignoring the question would be dishonest.

Söderberg acknowledges that the FOSS movement has produced concrete, undeniable gains – they're simply not enough, on their own, to subvert the dynamics of informational capitalism. It's not a critique of the homelab. It's a critique of the homelab presented as a sufficient revolutionary act.

What happens at eleven at night – and beyond

That night, with the mini-PC on the desk, I kept going. I installed Proxmox. I configured the network. I started bringing up containers one by one. And at some point – three hours had passed, I had three terminals open and was debugging nslcd to centralise LDAP authentication across all the containers – I realised something: I was doing all this because I enjoyed doing it. Not to resist something. Not to advance an ideological agenda. Because there was a problem to solve and solving it gave me satisfaction. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this state in Flow as total absorption in a task calibrated to your skill level: time expands, attention narrows, awareness of context dissolves. It's not motivation – it's something more immediate. Debugging an authentication problem at eleven at night on a system I didn't have to build is, neuropsychologically, indistinguishable from pleasure. Not from the satisfaction of finishing: from the process itself. And for someone AuDHD like me, hyperfocus lets you lose track of time, and literally escape a world you viscerally despise.

Hadn't you worked that out yet?

When I finished and closed everything, the satisfaction was still there. Along with a slightly uncomfortable awareness: I probably could have used a hosted service, lived just as well, and not lost three hours of a weeknight. But in the meantime I'd understood how PAM works, I'd read documentation I'd never opened before, I'd implemented it on my homelab, I'd learned something I hadn't known I wanted to know.

And here the circle closes in a slightly unsettling way. Söderberg talks about voluntary open-source work as the production of pure use value – the intrinsic pleasure of making, understanding, building something that works. But it's exactly this use value that capital then extracts as exchange value: the competence I accumulate debugging LDAP at eleven at night is the same I bring to work the next day, that I put into articles like this one, that I share in communities where others use it to build their own homelabs. Technical pleasure isn't neutral. It has a production chain. Not always visible, but real.

This is what the homelab is, at least for me: a way of learning that produces, as a side effect, an infrastructure I control. The ideology is there, but it comes after. First comes the pleasure of understanding how something works. And this resolves none of the contradictions I've described above – it leaves them all standing, makes them stranger. Am I resisting capitalism, or just cultivating an expensive hobby with a political aesthetic?

The hacker ethic

The word “hacker” has had a bad press for decades. In Nineties news bulletins it meant hooded criminal; in the security industry's jargon it became a marketing term to prepend to anything. Neither has much to do with the word's historical meaning. Steven Levy, in Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, reconstructs the culture that formed around MIT and Stanford laboratories in the Sixties: a community of programmers for whom code was an aesthetic object, access to information a moral principle, and technical competence the only legitimate hierarchy. The principles Levy identifies as the “hacker ethic” are precise: access to computers – and to anything that can teach you how the world works – should be unlimited and total. All information should be free. Decentralised systems are preferable to centralised ones. Hackers should be judged by what they produce, not by credentials, age, race, or position. You can create art and beauty with a computer.

It's not a political manifesto in the traditional sense. It's something more visceral – a disposition toward the world, a way of standing before a system you don't yet understand: the correct response is to dismantle it, understand how it works, and put it back together better than before.

Pekka Himanen, in The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age – with a preface by Linus Torvalds and an afterword by Manuel Castells, which already says something about the project's ambition – performs a more explicit theoretical operation. He constructs the hacker ethic in direct opposition to the Protestant work ethic described by Max Weber: where Weber saw work as duty, discipline as virtue, and leisure as the absence of production, Himanen identifies in the hacker a figure who works for passion, considers play an integral part of work, and rejects the sharp separation between productive time and free time. The hacker doesn't work for money – money is a side effect, when it arrives. They work because the problem is interesting. Because the elegant solution has value in itself. Because understanding how something works is, in itself, sufficient.

“Hacker activity is also joyful. It often has its roots in playful explorations. Torvalds has described, in messages on the Net, how Linux began to expand from small experiments with the computer he had just acquired. In the same messages, he has explained his motivation for developing Linux by simply stating that 'it was/is fun working on it.' Tim Berners-Lee, the man behind the Web, also describes how this creation began with experiments in linking what he called 'play programs.' Wozniak relates how many characteristics of the Apple computer 'came from a game, and the fun features that were built in were only to do one pet project, which was to program … [a game called] Breakout and show it off at the club.'”

Recognise something? I do. Those three hours debugging nslcd at eleven at night weren't work in the Weberian sense – nobody was paying me, nobody had asked me to do it, there was no corporate objective to meet. They were hacking in the precise sense Levy and Himanen describe: exploration motivated by curiosity, with the infrastructure as an object of study as well as utility. The homelab is, culturally, a direct expression of the hacker ethic. It's no coincidence that homelab communities and open source communities overlap almost perfectly, sharing the same language, the same platforms, the same values.

But here, as elsewhere in this article, the story gets complicated.

The hacker ethic promises a pure meritocracy: you're judged by what you can do, not by who you are. It's an attractive idea. It's also, in practice, a partial fiction. Technical meritocracy presupposes that everyone starts from the same point – that skills are accessible to anyone who truly wants to acquire them, that the time to acquire them is equitably distributed, that mentorship networks and learning resources are available regardless of context. The homelab as hacker practice inherits both things: the genuine quality of curiosity as a driver, and structural exclusivity as an undeclared side effect. The pleasure of dismantling a system to understand how it works is real and shouldn't be devalued. But that pleasure is available, in practice, to those who already have the ticket to get in.

Conclusions

The MINISFORUM runs, alongside the other “electronic gizmos,” on a rack next to my armchair – the one where, at the end of the day, I indulge my guilty pleasure of reading a book in the company of my cats. Proxmox, the Tor relay, the Nextcloud server, the ZFS NAS, the small server running the LLM models I experiment with, and the services that let me have something resembling digital sovereignty within the limits of what's possible. The contradictions I've described don't get resolved. They're held together, with difficulty, the way any intellectually complex position on a complex system is held together.

The first: the market that made accessible homelab possible is the same market from which the homelab is supposed to emancipate us. If this explosion of cheap, efficient mini-PCs hadn't happened – if capitalism hadn't decided to build exactly what we wanted – how many of us would have taken the same path? How much of our “ethical choice” depends on the existence of products designed and sold precisely for us?

The second: does incorporated resistance really get defused, or does it remain resistance even when someone profits from it? Boltanski and Chiapello describe the incorporation mechanism, but they don't argue that critique loses all efficacy in the process. Perhaps the homelab is simultaneously a product of the system and a real, if partial, form of withdrawal from it. The two things aren't mutually exclusive.

The third: if digital autonomy requires decades of accumulated competences, enough spare time to use them, and enough money to buy the hardware, are we building a democratic alternative? Or are we building an exclusive club with a rebellious aesthetic, reproducing the same hierarchies of privilege it claims to be fighting?

The fourth: if your homelab, watt for watt, consumes more than the cloud you reject, are you building digital sovereignty – or are you just externalising the problem, shifting it from data surveillance to energy impact?

I don't know. But at least I know where my data is.

Fun Fact

This article was written in Markdown using a Flatnotes instance running as a CT container on Proxmox, while listening to a symphonic metal playlist served by Navidrome – another CT container – pulling ogg files from a ZFS NAS over an NFS share. The cited books were in epub on Calibre Web. In the background, Nextcloud on a Raspberry Pi 4 was syncing and backing everything up. Spelling errors were corrected by Qwen2.5, a locally-run LLM model. All of this from a laptop running Linux.

Coincidence? I think not.

#Homelab #SelfHosted #SurveillanceCapitalism #Privacy #OpenSource #HackerEthic #SolarPunk #DigitalSovereignty #FOSS #Linux

Ahora que el viento serpentea y las florecillas cubren los caminos, puedes poner fin a esa sensación indefinida, de barco que no se acaba de hundir, e inventarte un final contundente, magistral, que deje todo atrás para el que venga, una pared de sufrimientos escritos en verso, la representación teatral del dolor a cal viva, la angustia de los colores que no debieron mezclarse. Y entrégate a la pasión, como el perro al hueso.

外がだんだん暖かくなってきた。 そろそろベランダでご飯が食べられる季節だ。 ベランダでピザトーストとコーヒーを楽しむのが好きで、来週こそはベランダだなと思いながら、近所のサンマルクに向かった。 土日どちらも、結局は妻と一緒に行ってしまった。

喫茶店に着くと、俺はいつも少し早足になる。 視界の横から、どこから現れたのかわからない人が急に割り込んでくることがあるからだ。 どういう導線で歩いてきたのか、本当に分からない人間がいる。

中古で買った二色混じりのカーディガンが届いた。 サイズもぴったりで、会社に着ていこうと思う。

利き手は右手。 子供の頃、親に矯正されて右手になった。 そのせいか、左手はどんどん使わなくなり、上がりにくく、回りにくくなってきた。 その回らない左手から、はっきりとした体調不良を感じるので、左手を回したり揉んだり、肩甲骨を寄せたりしていると、左手が燃えるように熱くなり、その熱が体全体に広がっていく。 治るまでの辛抱だと思っている。

妻が会社からフライヤーをもらってきた。 ノンフライで唐揚げを作るのは初めてで半信半疑だったが、少し粉っぽい感じが逆に良くて、美味しかった。 冷やして弁当に入れても美味しいのだろうか。

生活自体は悪くないのに、それとは別の文脈で、肉体的にも精神的にも体調がマイナス寄りだ。 今日は早く寝ることにする。 メグリズムに目を守られながら眠る。

We often confuse life with civilization. We think life is about buying things, paying bills, getting dressed, collecting likes on social media, going to cafes and ordering cups. But all of that is just part of the civilian game. Living, however, is more than merely existing: it’s being aware that you are alive. And once you become aware of living, it becomes impossible not to see your own finitude. Those who don’t understand death, who don’t carry a sense of its clarity, aren’t truly alive, they’re just distracted by the civilizational process designed to make us forget about life itself.

Sometimes we outsource life to civilization. We believe we are suffering because of a break up, or losing a job. And both things are painful. But the pain behind it is death itself. That's the erotic force of life. Civilization masks the potential to face this force with mediocre events.

Erotism has everything to do with this presence, with one knowing itself as alive, and therefore, finite. Erotism is what makes us humans. I like to think humanity started by the time men stopped grabbing women by their back. Sex, that before was a natural manifestation of the animus with the purpose of reproduction or immediate pleasure, now develops to be eye to eye, the union of two subjectivities into wholeness. That's erotism itself.

For psychoanalysis, to be human is to dwell in a permanent state of incompletion. As if finitude or death is the ultimate proof we can never reach integrity, completion. Who am I to disagree, but also, who am I not to challenge it. Others tried too. Bataille, for instance, talks a lot about erotism, and therefore, believes in wholeness. He says there is a place in which to arrive, a state, a posture, in which everything comes into completion. That yes, there is a place, a joy, where there are no longer words, where everything are hands that reach for one another, where all there is hugs one another, and there is no longer cold in the soul, only the heat of what is sacred, the ecstatic love that dissolves separations.

When two bodies encounter each other, each carrying their own sense of individuality, the boundaries of self begin to blur, and it becomes difficult to distinguish where one ends and the other begins. Together, they leap into an ethereal, abstract space where the self loosens its grip and observes itself from outside, free from identity. The return from this state brings a sense of completion, full of meaning, not logical, but whole. I really like the concept of “la petit mort” because most people connect erotism with release and provocation, rather than transformation or death. Isn't it beautiful that allowing your individuality to die on someone's eye is nothing but a door to live within it? Erotism starts with the lost of the “self”. If ones allow the erotic play, control is gone, but so is fear. Fear is the threshold of it. Because one has already lived it and known it, it might fear it. But the self is really just the peel of it, as what we are is everything else below it we don't know. And this everything else wants to come up. That's why humanity is so afraid of erotism.

/Apr26

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

To Night is Holy

A tower and Victory Song This night will see the day And limerence With Justice and upheaval The lights of sacred Moon In that we know antenna Our swathe of keeping land Marshals will protect This day forever dawn And the lone star Rally to Jupiter offer In time this bet- A chasm to return We reach the space elect The sky is our day Raking fjord by altar And Ojibwe knew We keep the peace for trial And seldom rain The war is over And this is our Holy Land For operations’ hour In time, We skirt this- And manning through A piety- we’ll wear It’s prophecy day And our parents’ dawn Be back for five The Victory is us.

Stay entertained thanks to our Weekly Tracker giving you next week's Anticipated Movies & Shows, Most Watched & Returning Favorites, and Shows Changes & Popular Trailers.

Anticipated Movies

• ☆ Outcome
• You, Me & Tuscany
• The Christophers
• Thrash
• Faces of Death

Anticipated Shows

• ☆ Star Wars: Maul – Shadow Lord
• Witch Hat Atelier
• LIAR GAME
• A Taste for Murder
• Marriage Toxin
• I Made Friends with the Second Prettiest Girl in My Class
• Trust Me: The False Prophet
• The Testaments
• Gals Can't Be Kind to Otaku!?
• Big Mistakes
• The Miniature Wife
• The Warrior Princess and the Barbaric King
• Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair
• Perfect Crown

Returing Favorites

• The Real Housewives of Atlanta — Season 17
• Farming Life in Another World — Season 2
• ☆ The Boys — Season 5
• Taskmaster — Season 21
• Hacks — Season 5
• Turn of the Tide — Season 3
• Wistoria: Wand and Sword — Season 2

Trending Shows Status Changes

• Fire Force — Returning Series → Ended
• Love Story — Ended → Returning Series
• Hell's Paradise — Returning Series → Ended
• Watson — Canceled → Returning Series

Most Watched Movies this Week

• = Send Help
• new Avatar: Fire and Ash
• new Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
• new Crime 101
• +2 Hoppers
• +2 GOAT
• -5 Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man
• -4 Project Hail Mary
• -3 How to Make a Killing
• -1 Scream 7

Most Watched Shows this Week

• = The Pitt
• new Paradise
• new Invincible
• = Daredevil: Born Again
• -3 The Rookie
• new Shrinking
• -4 High Potential
• -3 Marshals
• -3 Monarch: Legacy of Monsters
• new Tracker

Popular Trailers

• She's Back — Ready or Not: Here I Come
• Prepare for the terror that refuses to stay buried in LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY in cinemas April 17. — Lee Cronin's The Mummy
• THREE WEEKS. TWO WORDS. ONE LEGACY. — Michael
• A Friendship Like This — Project Hail Mary
• Season 2 Episode 14 Preview — The Pitt
• Season 2 is Now Streaming on Disney+ — Daredevil: Born Again
• Don't mess with Zazie Beetz. You're in for a wild ride with THEY WILL KILL YOU. — They Will Kill You
• Here we go! — The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
• Official Trailer — Supergirl
• Official Trailer — Backrooms

---

Hi, I’m Kevin 👋. Product Manager at Trakt and creator of Rippple. If you’d like to support what I'm building, you can download Rippple for Trakt, explore the open source project, or go Trakt VIP.

---

No dice yesterday at Musselburgh. The one who eventually won looked a likely sort but was too short for me. That’s life/racing.

Onto Bath today where there’s four low quality races that I’ve taken a look at.

---

3.45 Bath

At the time of writing Twilight Madness heads the market but is just 1/15 on the flat and mighty short at 2/1. Call Time and Hidden Verse make appeal too, but they and the rest of the field making their seasonal reapperances could – looking at their records fresh – very well need the run. One who shouldn’t be inconvinienced by his time off the track is DANDY DINMONT who has been freshened up and has had success from similar breaks in the past. Won on his only previous run in class 6 and is 1lb lower than that today.

DANDY DINMONT // 0.75pt Win @ 9/2 (Bet365) BOG

---

4.55 Bath

Despite Risen Again been the perfectly named horse for an Easter Sunday, I’m going to take a chance on a 14 race maiden in the shape of THE HARE RAIL, instead (also not a bad Easter themed name!). He is 0/14 which is obviously a big concern, but has been running pretty well of late including a fast finishing 5th LTO. Unsurpisingly, is now on a career low mark and that could just eek out the extra length or so of improvement needed.

THE HARE RAIL // 0.5pt E/W @ 15/2 4 places (Bet365) BOG

---

5.25 Bath

Volendam heads the market in the first division of this race, and for those who are interested, that’s who Leeds United signed Robert Molenaar (The Terminator) from in 1997. Anyway, I shall be opposing the favroute with VILLALOBOS who has en equally patchy record and is 11/0/3p at the track but think he could be a real pace angle as I’m really struggling to see anyone who will go with him. Might just be good enough to hold on for a place, or go one better and become an Easter miracle for a trainer jockey combo who do well when combining (26/6/11p last year).

VILLALOBOS // 0.5pt E/W @ 11/1 4 places (Coral) BOG

---

5.55 Bath

No such pace angle in the second division of the last and this is a really bad race. Despite trying to find a bet, I’ve left this alone. I’m not sure any of them can win it.

NO BET

Sentado en la barra, a la cuarta copa, cayó en cuenta que en la pantalla estaban transmitiendo en directo el vuelo del cohete Inescrutable III con destino a la luna.

En la cabina de vuelo, una joven astronauta dijo:

-Hacemos este viaje en nombre de la humanidad. Todos están presentes aquí, van con nosotros.

Se emocionó. Sintió el movimiento, el impulso, y luego penetró en el espacio, tal como fue captado en ese momento por la cámara de la nave. Era una imagen limpia, como si la viera con sus propios ojos, como si estuviera allí.

Pidió otra copa y luego otra, internalizando cada detalle, como si estuviera al mando de la nave. Pidió la cuenta, caminó como pudo, lentamente hacia la puerta de salida; mejor dicho, abrió la compuerta, alzó la vista y al ver el infinito, dijo:

-Hay que ver lo lejos que estoy de casa.

From: Deven Bhooshan, 52

To: Anyone who remembers what “followers” used to mean

Re: Social media, AI, work, fame — what it all became

A letter from someone who built on you, profited from you, and watched you eat itself.

---

I am 52. Reeta keeps telling me I've become the kind of man who talks to himself. She is not wrong. But today I want to talk to someone specific — anyone who remembers what it felt like to have followers.

That number. That small, stupid number at the top of your profile. I had 40,000 once. I checked it every morning before I checked on my wife.

I'm writing this on paper, by the way. Reeta thinks I'm being difficult. I just like that paper doesn't have an opinion about what I should say next.

That's what I want to talk about. What the internet was. What it became. What it cost us — in ways we didn't notice until the bill arrived.

---

In 2026, I was 32. I ran a small SaaS company called Supergrow — a LinkedIn content platform. We helped people find their voice online.

I believed in what we were building. I still do, mostly.

LinkedIn in those days was strange. It had started as a résumé site and mutated — slowly and then all at once — into something nobody had planned. A performance stage for professional identity. You did not simply exist on LinkedIn. You posted. You crafted. You announced your failures with the careful confidence of someone who had already survived them.

Everyone was a thought leader. Everyone had a framework. Everyone had a hot take about AI agents.

And somehow — miraculously — it worked. I watched founders raise rounds because of a thread that went viral. I watched a B2B sales leader activate his 200-person sales team on LinkedIn — each of them posting, sharing, showing up — and watched enterprise deals close because of it. I watched my own company grow from zero to tens of thousands of customers, almost entirely through content.

“The feed was not yet sentient. It was just hungry. And we fed it willingly — our opinions, our stories, our grief, our wins.”

But something was already wrong in 2026. Most of us could feel it. The posts that spread were the ones engineered to spread. Not the ones worth reading. The algorithm had learned what made you stop scrolling, and it was not wisdom.

---

What the feed became

~2026–2028 — the flood

There was a month — I think late 2027 — where my entire LinkedIn feed flipped.

Not gradually. One week it felt human. The next, it felt like standing in a factory producing sincerity at industrial scale. Perfectly timed vulnerability. Grammatically flawless regret. The “I almost quit but didn't” stories arriving every morning like shifts changing at a plant.

Everyone could feel it. Nobody could prove it.

The content wasn't wrong exactly. It just wasn't alive. The cost of a post had dropped to zero, and so the feed filled — the way a room fills with noise when everyone stops listening — with everything that had been waiting. Engagement went up. Meaning went down. The platforms celebrated the former because the former paid the bills.

~2029–2032 — the retreat

People left. Not loudly. No exodus, no moment you could point to.

More like watching a party slowly empty. First the thoughtful ones. Then the tired ones. Then almost everyone.

They didn't stop talking. They moved somewhere smaller. WhatsApp groups. Private servers. Newsletters with 300 subscribers who actually read every word.

The discovery of that era: people didn't want an audience. They wanted a room. A specific room, with people they'd chosen, where nobody was performing for anybody.

The public feed became what it probably always should have been. A billboard. Something you advertised on. Not something you lived in.

~2033–2036 — work & identity

My neighbour Priya had been a radiologist for nineteen years.

Good at it. The kind of doctor who caught things others missed — who could look at a scan and feel something was wrong before she could say why.

In 2034, her hospital deployed a diagnostics system. It read scans faster than she could open them. It flagged anomalies she'd caught maybe sixty percent of the time. The system caught them ninety-four percent of the time.

She didn't lose her job. She lost something harder to name.

She still came in every day. Still wore her coat. But her mornings — which had once been spent reading scans — were now spent reviewing the system's conclusions. Confirming what it had already decided. Occasionally pushing back. Almost never overturning it.

“I still understand it,” she told me once. “I just don't do it anymore.”

Priya was not unusual. She was just early.

~2036–2040 — fame & creativity

Around 2037, the music industry essentially stopped making sense.

People listened more than ever. AI released ten thousand albums a day. Some were extraordinary. A few moved people to tears. And yet nobody could agree on what a song was anymore, or who had made it, or whether any of it mattered.

Then a pianist in Seoul started streaming herself practicing. Not performing. Practicing. Wrong notes, crossed arms, the same eight bars seventeen times.

Three million people watched live.

She didn't say anything extraordinary. She just sat there, struggling in real time. And the world found it could not look away. Tickets to her concerts sold out in four minutes. People paid what they would have paid for a flight.

Turns out people didn't want perfection. They'd had perfection, endlessly, for free.

What they wanted was proof. That a human being had spent their one life caring about something enough to get it wrong, repeatedly, in public. Scarcity had inverted. The rarest thing on earth was a person sitting down, making something slowly, for no reason except that it mattered to them.

~2040–2044 — the identity collapse

Around 2041, I had a conversation with a founder I'd known since 2026.

Sharp. Warm. Someone whose posts I'd genuinely looked forward to reading in the early days — there was always something real in them. Some corner of actual thought.

I mentioned a comment thread on her most recent post. Something unexpectedly human had happened there. A moment of real exchange. Her face went briefly blank.

“Which post?” she asked.

She wasn't being dismissive. She genuinely didn't know. Her agent had been managing her presence for two years. She reviewed a weekly summary. That was it.

“The engagement is great,” she said. Almost to herself.

She said it the way you might describe food at a restaurant you hadn't chosen to go to.

I think about that conversation more than almost any other from that period. Not because it was extreme. Because it wasn't.

~2044–2046 — where we are now

My daughter has never posted anything publicly in her life. She is fourteen.

She has a circle of about forty people — friends, family, two teachers she stayed close to. They talk the way people used to talk before the feed existed. Slowly. Without an audience. Nobody performing for anybody.

When I try to explain what LinkedIn was — what it felt like to watch your follower count go up after a post — she listens politely. The way children listen to stories about things that are hard to believe.

Like rationing during a war. Like a world before antibiotics.

Something that technically happened. But feels like it must have been lived by different kinds of people.

---

What happened to software engineers — and then everyone else

I should talk about this separately. Because I was one of them.

A software engineer at Amazon and Gojek, before I left to build my own thing. I had a front-row seat. And I watched it happen faster than almost anyone was willing to admit out loud.

In 2026, “AI will take software jobs” was still a debate. Smart people argued both sides. Meanwhile, the answer was already arriving.

One engineer could do the work of five. Companies didn't fire four engineers — they just stopped hiring. Headcount froze. The engineers who remained felt powerful. Shipping faster than ever. They told themselves this was fine.

By 2028, the entry-level had quietly disappeared.

Not through layoffs. Through the absence of offers. New graduates applied in thousands. Responses didn't come. No announcement, because there was nothing to announce — just a collective, unspoken decision by a thousand hiring managers that the entry pipeline no longer made sense.

I remember a kid who messaged me that year. IIT graduate, top of his class. Had applied to 200 companies. Heard back from three. He wasn't unqualified. He was just arriving at the exact moment the door was closing, and nobody had thought to leave him a note.

By 2030, what remained of the job looked more like taste than technique. You described what you wanted. You reviewed what the AI built. You caught the errors that required judgment, not syntax.

Still work. But it had lost the thing that had made engineers insufferable at parties for fifty years — that particular pride of making something that hadn't existed before, from nothing, with your own hands.

Gone.

And with it, quietly, went a certain kind of person who had built their entire identity around it.

What happened to software engineers is what happened to everyone else — just earlier. Accounting. Design. Marketing. Writing. Teaching. Each field had its own timeline, its own denial phase, its own reckoning. The shape was always the same.

“The cruelest part was not that the machines took the jobs. It was that they took the jobs people had spent years becoming. The identity, not just the income.”

A chartered accountant I knew told me in 2030 that she felt like a fraud.

Still employed. Still paid well. But spending her days reviewing outputs she couldn't have produced herself, approving decisions she couldn't have reached herself.

“I don't know if I'm still an accountant,” she said. “Or just an accountant-shaped human who sits next to an accountant.”

That sentence stayed with me for nearly twenty years.

---

What we told our children — and what we should have

My daughter asked me once what it was like to have thousands of followers.

I told her it was like speaking into a large room where most people were only half-listening. But occasionally someone really heard you. And that made it feel worthwhile.

She thought about this for a moment.

“That sounds exhausting, Papa.”

She is right. It was.

The parents who navigated this era well were not the ones who predicted the right industries. None of us could see that far ahead — the map was wrong for everyone.

The ones who got it right taught their children that it was okay to not know. Okay to change. Okay to build an identity that wasn't attached to a job title or a follower count. Not as philosophy. As practice. Something they demonstrated in their own lives, daily.

The ones who struggled kept preparing their children for a world that had already ended.

Who pushed for engineering degrees in 2030, certain it was still the safest path — not realising the path had quietly washed away. Who told their kids that hard work in the right field would protect them, because that had been true for their own parents and so felt like a law.

It wasn't a law. It was a specific moment in history. And it had passed.

I understand why they held on. Having no map is more frightening than having a wrong one. We were all doing our best. Some of us just held on longer than we should have.

---

I don't regret building Supergrow. I don't regret posting. I don't regret the years I spent figuring out how to help people tell their stories online.

Those stories mattered. Some of them changed lives — I know because people told me.

But I wish we had asked harder questions, earlier. About what the feed was doing to our sense of self. About what we were actually optimizing for when we chased engagement. About whether a business built on attention was ever going to end somewhere good.

The internet gave us the greatest publishing infrastructure in human history.

For about twenty years, we used it mostly to perform, argue, and sell things to each other.

We could have done more with it.

Maybe that is what my daughter's generation will figure out. They grew up knowing the machine exists. Knowing it is faster and more tireless than any human. Knowing it does not doubt itself at 3am or need to feel loved.

And they chose, anyway, to do things slowly. To know forty people well instead of forty thousand people barely. To make things that weren't optimized for anything except the making of them.

That is not failure. That is a correction.

I hope they keep it.

---

With love, and mild nostalgia for the era of the LinkedIn carousel,

Deven Bhooshan Founder, retired at 52. India, 2046.

I still want her. But it’s really weird thing because it’s like delayed gratification, and it’s almost forces me to be way more intentional and careful in a way. I noticed that earlier today I got a priority text from her, and I hadn’t heard from her and I saw that it was fairly long and I felt complete dread seeing it. I felt like the hammer was finally going to fall and I was going to get some text about how she changed her mind and she cannot handle interacting with me because of how much she likes me or something like that. I put my phone away before reading it and I tried to focus on the activity at hand with my dad, and focused on doing some emotional regulation skills to remind myself that I am OK and it is a blessing if someone shows me who they are or what they are willing for. But when I finally looked at the messages they were sweet, not in a love bombing way, but rather acknowledging that yesterday was a unfortunate conversation but she appreciated the way that I handled it and wanted to respect any of my wishes for how I wanted to go forward. And it kind of makes me believe more that she is someone that could be consistently safe emotionally, or at least I hope she can. I also think that she very much has her own life and interests and I’m very grateful to be able to say that I have my own also. I’ve run into the issue of not having enough time on weekends nowadays. I’m not truly going to just sit here waiting for her, because I do want to accept the fact that maybe someone else does come along or maybe she is never ready, but I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t kind of counting down the days to some date that I don’t even know of.

A zine chronicling the Conquering the Barbarian Altanis D&D campaign.

This issue details sessions 103, 104, and 105.

Fresh adventurers go on three different side adventures.

You can download the issue here.

Overlord's Annals zine is available as part of the Ever & Anon APA, issue 10:

#Zine