Winter update and Linux
Written December 21 2025
So, I haven’t really posted much here at all for a couple of months. I’ve been decently busy with university (and also I was sick a couple of times, like, actually sick, flu-sick) and just didn’t have the motivation to write much. I hope that next year I’ll find a bit more time for writing. For now, though, don’t expect too much, please.
I have been reading a bit, however. I read The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers, which I’ve been meaning to do for quite while actually. It’s nothing like I expected. I was under the impression that it was this really weird cosmic sci-fi horror book, because I heard that it influenced H.P. Lovecraft and other horror writers of his time quite a bit and they also keep referencing it (the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG also has tons of references to it in its sourcebooks). The very first story, The Repairer of Reputations, sort of goes into that direction, but even there the horror is more psychological and weird. The actual play itself, The King in Yellow, is only ever really mentioned in passing and is only quotes (as far as I can remember) in the very first story. It doesn’t feature prominently at all in the later ones, which are more Parisian love stories than anything else. It was a weird experience, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it. I do really like the idea of The King in Yellow, the book-within-the-book, though. It’s always just there in the background, not always contributing to the story, but always there, and by that it ties all of the stories together, somehow. Maybe I should include something like that in my writing as well, some weird cultural artefact that is referenced obliquely in evertyhing I do but never really relevant or discussed.
I also started reading A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which is also not very similar to my prior conception of the book. I was only familiar with its adaptations before (yes, the Muppet one), but Scrooge gets converted so quickly in the novel, it’s almost scary. I do get it, though. He is human and I’m sure Charles Dickens thought that even the biggest, most miserly villain couldn’t stand a constant onslaught of supernatural visitors going “You know, people are dying in the streets and having to spend Christmas Day in a poor house, while you hoard wealth like a dragon, you miserly f***” for so long before they caved in. I certainly would, though I hope I’ll never end up like Scrooge in the first place. Also, Charles Dickens can write. Damn. I should read some of his other works. Thankfully, they’re all public domain by now and I actually charged my e-book reader for once, so I really don’t have an excuse now.
Also, I just installed Linux Mint yesterday and I am so happy with it. Windows 10 has been bothering me for quite a while now, so I kept thinking about switching to Linux. What really convinced me were Microsoft’s end-of-life plans for Win10 (I live in the EU, so I didn’t even have to pay for the extended security updates, but they still kept bothering me with pop-ups and so on to switch to Win11) and the mess that is Windows 11. All the computers at my university use Win11, including the one I have to work at, and it’s just a terrible experience. So much of the stuff I regularly have to do just takes a tiny bit more effort in Win11, just a couple more clicks. That you don’t even get the normal context menu by right-clicking on something, but that you need to do one more click to get all the options, is infuriating. It wanting to save everything to OneDrive, wanting me to try their new Adobe PDFs, wanting me to use Copilot etc. So many annoyances.
I finally switched to Linux Mint (Cinnamon) yesterday. It took a couple of hours, I got some error messages along the way and had to spend some time to configure everything, but now it just works. It feels nice. It looks nice. There is no ‘AI’ assistant. My files are right here on my own PC. And it runs smoother. Or at least it feels smoother. I also got rid of around 300 GB of data, so who knows, maybe it’s because of that. Anyway, try Linux Mint.