OpenPLUTO

Doing it different since 1981.

Category: Short Essays

  • Amor Fati

    Amor Fati

    Amor Fati “Those who receive the bare theories immediately want to spew them, as an upset stomach does its food. First digest your theories and you won’t throw them up. Otherwise they will be raw, spoiled, and not nourishing. After you’ve digested them, show us the changes in your reasoned choices, just like the shoulders…

  • on Leaving Hipstamatic

    on Leaving Hipstamatic

    Each fiscal quarter, I put my Yearly subscriptions under a very harsh and unforgiving lens of scrutiny. The second quarter of the year puts DayOne, Hipstamatic, Obsidian Sync, and Digital Blasphemy under this lens. We reflect and contemplate the pros and cons of keeping the service around. We debate the value it brings into our…

  • Life is an RPG

    Life is an RPG

    Once upon a time, I found myself immersed in the world of Skyrim, leveling up my character and gazing at the enchanting skies, pondering which attribute to kick up a notch. It was during this gaming session that a sudden realization dawned upon me. Skyrim, just like my cherished game series Fallout and even Final…

  • Breaking Up or Making Up? My Q3 Subscription Showdown

    Breaking Up or Making Up? My Q3 Subscription Showdown

    The first of the Q3 bills start in the first days of August. In fact, all of the subscriptions due for renewal during Q3 are in August. 🤘 1Password Renewing without question. The passkey things is incredible and I hope they pioneer more major players to adopt it into their authentication protocols. Important shit like…

  • on Learning Darktable, part 1

    on Learning Darktable, part 1

    March 8th, 2023 I first dipped my toes in the water that is Darktable, the RAW image editor. It pretty much scared the living daylights out of me and it wasn’t shortly thereafter that I was tinkering around with RAW Therapee. That was much more accessible for someone who knows absolutely nothing about editing RAW…

  • Love Letter to Espanso

    Love Letter to Espanso

    Many moons ago, I first heard of Text Expander and although it seemed pretty neat, I had most of the things I typically paste often enough baked into my alfred installation under the “snippets” extensions. In there I have almost every SomaFM station and a command for mpv listed there so all I have to…

  • on Maintaining streaks

    You know what our Grandparents never did? Beat their chest telling their friends and coworkers how long their streak is in DayOne or Habitify. They did things and did so routinely with no expected praise, like, comment or heart. I’ve often wondered if the act of adding an app somewhere in your workflow instead of…

  • Why Everything Sucks

    Reflecting on the passions that excited me as a child, it’s intriguing to consider why what we once cherished seems to be merely a shadow of its former self today. Is it possible that the decline in quality stems from an attempt to cater to a broader audience rather than niche communities? Consider video games,…

  • Breaking Up or Making Up? My Q2 Subscription Showdown

    Embarrassing amount of subscriptions in my world, I’m sad to say. I break them up into fiscal quarters and review them ahead of time to decide whether or not to send them to the block. Currently the only monthly subscription that is proved unworthy at the moment is Audible due to my backlog of credits.…

  • on Taking Photographs

    on Taking Photographs

    I’m taking pictures with a camera again. 📸 Back When Five Hundred Dollars Got You a 5MP camera About fifteen years ago I walked away from digital photography for a couple of different reasons.  First, and the most pressing issue at the time, was the world events going on in the world around me.  The United States…

  • The Future of Gaming

    The future of gaming is looking bleak, my friends. As we move towards a service-based model, the days of single-player-story-driven games are numbered. Instead of quality games that can be cherished a generation later, we’re being sold on the idea of games as a service, much like the old syndicated network programming on television. One…

  • No Artificially Influenced Intelligence

    Artificial intelligence really has sucked the wind out of my sails regarding publishing text online.  These technologies are being improved at such a rapid pace that it gives the authentic author the desire to turn this computer off and go back to pen and paper and give up on all the rest. Take those above 295…

  • The Best Pasta Salad in the Midwest

    Most people don’t give a shit about the backstory, so it is at the bottom. Ingredients Fresh Assume everything is organic. Grocery/Pantry Seasonings Method Cook your pasta as per the directions for the type of pasta you are using. In most recipes we found online, they suggested using “cold pasta” for the recipe or left-over…

  • Thoughts on Tana, Part 1

    Been with Tana now for just shy of a week and it was until last night when my brain could finally grasp the concept of not having files. Nodes, nodes, nodes. It worried me so much that I had a hard time inputting anything into it in fear I would lose it or something goofy…

  • Thoughts on Twitter & Medium

    Thoughts on Twitter & Medium

    I fell into the Twitter trap once again, innocently trying to explore the Obsidian world, but then I got sucked in. It happened almost instantly. I followed a couple of people to spice up my feed, and before I knew it, Twitter algorithms thought they had me all figured out. They started showing me things…

  • Seven Applications I Actively Use Every day, (And 8 That Don’t Get Enough Love)

    Seven Applications I Actively Use Every day, (And 8 That Don’t Get Enough Love)

    While this is geared toward Linux, you will find that almost all of these applications are available on all platforms. Admittedly, I have a very hard time keeping focus. Twenty years ago I thought it was going to be something I would one day just snap out of, the reality is quite different. I have…

  • Quick Searches — the unsung hero of the modern-day web browser

    It is easy to never mind how much time we spend online searching for things. One moment you need a color to match Dracula’s purple. Then you want to learn more about Dataview in Obsidian. Then you want to know when Carl Jung was born. Going to a website to search for the information you…