hopper

thoughts of an irl disaster child

CW politics, suicide

The real world is marching ever closer towards a hyper-capitalist, mega-consumerist hellscape. Some might even say that we already are in a cyberpunk dystopia, minus all the cool shit.

So then why is one of the highlights of my week pretending to be a criminal in a hyper-capitalist, mega-consumerist hellscape with metahumans, dragons, drones, and drek?

It's simple. It's a great escape because in that world, I can actually change things. I don't feel nearly as powerless as I do in real life. Sad!

I've been going through a “rough time” for the past 10 or 15 years, but the past three years have been a special kind of hell partly of this dumpster fire of an administration and partly because of my own personal bullshit. There have been more than a few times in these past few years where I felt like giving up altogether.

And like my coffee, my soul is black, and I can only hold so much...darkness...inside. – XxFallenAngle87xX

Writing has always been an outlet for me, and by creating characters modeled after myself or after people I've known I've been able to channel the rage, depression, joy, hate, love, humor...I've felt throughout the years into them.

So whenever something goes wrong in my life, I have this one particular character suffer through a version of that, but much, much worse. She is, after all, just a more traumatized, even more socially inept version of myself. There. I said it! I can't deny it anymore!

So anyway, my father died less than a year before I created this character's backstory and because of my unresolved grief and general penchant for angst I felt I needed to make it the tragic sort of backstory. Naturally, that meant I had to kill off both of her parents, in front of her during what ought to have been a routine pickup, just a few days after her birthday.

The anger and frustration I've felt (or rather am feeling) with my current employer translated into my character being a victim of a megacorp's (her employer's) transgressions, being made into a test subject for a nefarious clinical trial involving simulated torture and psychotropic agents, suffering an abundance of emotional trauma to the point where she makes two attempts at her life...you know, light subjects like that.

I never said I was kind to my characters.

And don't worry, I'm already in therapy.

(Seems appropriate the song I was listening to while writing this kept repeating “Dying on the inside”.)

Hoi chummer, is it me you're looking for? If so, then yes. This is going to be a collection of my opinions about...everything, really. But mostly about video games, free software, engineering, tech shit. One of my goals this year is to write more, and so here we go.

About the Name There's a character from a certain popular show that people associate my handle with. But no, this alias isn't a reference to that particular character, but rather to one of my own. In the “canon” of the fictional universe she lives in, she chose it to pay tribute to Grace Hopper, the pioneering computer scientist with whom she shares a birthday.

So why am I using this then? The simple and boring answer is I'm bad at coming up with usernames. The more interesting response would go something like this:

Hi my name is hopper and I have medium-length enoby black hair parted on the side with an asymmetrical cut and a lot of people tell me I'm a lot like Grace Hopper (AN: if u dont know who she is get da hell out of here!). I'm not related to her but I wish I was because she was an admirable computer scientist and mathematician! I'm a human but I'm taller than (1) elf. I have brown (?) skin. I'm also a decker and I work with REDACTED. I'm a rigger (in case you couldn't tell) and wear mostly hoodies. For example it was raining and there was no sun which I was very happy about. I was walking outside. A lot of wageslaves stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.

So there you have it. Hope that answers any questions you may have.

btw I use arch

Not too long ago I started replacing propriety services/software with open-source ones after an incident with a propriety app lead to me losing something important.

So far here's my list of apps and services I've replaced with an open-source/free software alternative.

Computer Drek

Btw I use Arch. Sorry, I couldn't resist. (If you're wondering, there's a stereotype that Arch users will tell you right off if they're using the distro unprompted.)

I've been an Arch user since..the late 2000s? On and off, because from 2011 to 2015 I had a certain fruit-flavored laptop that was primarily a Mac OS X shop.

My first setup was on an economy-class Acer laptop with an H key that would fall off every time I used it and that I would need to charge after every class in university. I loved it.

I use Arch as my primary OS on both my work (Dell XPS 15 9560) and personal laptops (a Thinkpad T480).

The former has been...disappointing in terms of compatibility because our (former) IT person at work got that from a Costco sale. It's a great machine, but I need to do quite a bit of tinkering to get it to work well. More work than it took to set up my Thinkpad.

But anyway...this is starting to be like those annoyingly long personal posts that precede recipes on food blogs.

Apps

I'm in the process of replacing all the crap I used. I used the propriety drek on my old personal laptop (a crapple machine).

Services

Well, I guess I should stick to this handle from now on since clearly it isn't going away anytime soon. (I can't believe that what started out as a one-off handle that I made up on the fly for a character is now...so integral to my identity that I apparently want to use it everywhere.)

So who am I, really? What a loaded question.

I have the resources to self-host a blog, but I can never get myself to commit to writing on one for some reason. So I'm taking this out for a spin. Maybe there's something to these minimalist writing platforms.