it happened with etcher, and then continued to happen with rufus. i didn’t even try dd flash mode at first.

what’s crazy is, it WORKED ONCE. ONCE!

I almost wonder if windows somehow detected that another OS ran on the silicon and said “ohhhh no you fucking don’t, FUCK YOU ONLY I GET TO BE YOUR OPERATING SYSTEM!!!”

… okay so uh

i’m probably gonna have to go somewhere more help-focused and immediate than this but

something weird happened.

i bought a brand new USB drive to act as my linux mint boot media and flashed the iso onto it.

it booted into the temporary instance easily! instantly! I started to install thinking i could just set up dual boot with the extant windows instance.

well… it got to the point where it said “hey wait you have to disable secureboot or you have to reformat your entire windows installation”

okay maybe i want to check ONE MORE TIME to see if there’s anything in this windows instance that I still want.

so i halt the linux mint installation process and go back into windows. I take one last catalogue of stuff i’d want to reference later, and then try to boot back into the linux mint live session straight from the usb stick

… nope.

it says ‘something has gone terribly wrong’ and ‘failed to load UEFI’ or something

but that’s not the thing that really spooked me because I thought I could go back into windows, reformat the USB key, and just re-flash the linux mint iso and start over from scratch

that’s all background stuff, here’s the important crazy thing:

the USB key is now reading that it only has a size of FIVE. MEGABYTES. FIVE.

EVEN IF I TRY TO REFORMAT IT, IT STILL IS CONVINCED IT’S ONLY FIVE MEGABYTES

the linux mint iso can’t even FIT on it now

i can’t even reflash it

i … but … how do i even …

WAT

yeah that ancient Sony Vaio is loooong gone. it was manufactured in 2008 or something and was a hand me down from my aunt. we haven’t had it since like 2021

but i do have a laptop outside my main rig and I’m gonna try booting mint off an external drive just to try it out and see how i like the feel again!

i appreciate the encouragement ^_ you know, maybe. I’m haunted by this fear (I try to tell myself it’s an irrational one) that attempting to get into linux now would mess things up for me and that i’d end up stranded and unable to get back but … mint is admittedly VERY APPROACHABLE… hm. Maybe I can drop by staples and buy a spare thumbdrive, put a mint boot image on it, and try it on my battlestation today.

i tried mint on an old laptop for a little while and it was nice. i’m thinking of adopting linux for daily-driving when windows 10 stops being supported entirely. But i’m considering going with Bazzite when that time comes, maybe…

Hey you know what counts as both resting and productive in furtherance of your life goals?

Meditation.

Several times in the past few weeks, I’ve caught myself in a quandary wondering what I can do, but then realized, “oh. I can meditate.”

look. you have a lot on your mind. Letting that shit process is good for you. And you process it by sitting comfortably and letting your thoughts wander while you mindfully sit back and commit to

a b s o l u t e l y   n o t

acting upon ANY of them right now.

This is their chance to stretch their proverbial legs and get some fresh air. You’ve taken them to the park. This isn’t anywhere but a park. This period of time is not for engaging tasks or running errands or indulging vices.

Focus on the quiet things. The sound and feeling of the air moving through the room, entering and leaving your lungs. Or just … your own heartbeat if you can actually feel it. Or just counting without a goal in mind. If you lose track, it’s ok. Losing track is actually the point.

Listen, fam, you were going to waste the time anyway. Committing to this is the opposite of wasting it because you made a choice. At least until something you definitely do want to do pops up. As long as you ‘can’t decide’, default to this.

What will eventually happen is your thoughts will come and go and you might notice that you don’t create them. Your brain is just generating noise and attempting to extrapolate it arbitrarily into various forms. Those forms are driven by your experiences, especially the more recent and/or intense ones. But you didn’t CHOOSE to ‘have thoughts’. The thoughts show up all by themselves. What YOU choose, as the observer process, is whether to entertain those thoughts.

This is how you access your brain’s proverbial ‘dev console’, and how you tweak the ‘settings’: your attention reinforces neural patterns. If you can mindfully select which patterns you wish to reinforce and which ones you will neglect and allow to atrophy, you also tune which kinds of concepts are more likely to show up more often.

everybody should really do this more often. it has helped me get a grip in some very wild times.

all the people who refused to vote for kamala must be so pleased with how little palestinian genocide is about to happen. aren’t they? well? aren’t they?

no?

gee it sure sounds like their whole little plan backfired in the worst possible way come to think of it, ACTUALLY.