theophine savio theodore.

God must be made free from the shackles of religion.

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

i really dislike the concepts attached to the mainstream God.

stuff like:

God is an evil dictator who puts humans through torture whenever he (he? that’s another rabbithole, but i’ll just keep saying “he” for now) can.
God keeps a scoreboard for every human, and if you sin more, that means it’s hell time. (but at the same time, God is merciful, so yeah, thanks for clearing up the confusion.)
God made us weak and sinful, and we can’t do shit. and God requires us to cling onto us to basically function.

i dislike this idea propagated by Catholic preachers
that you aren’t enough, you aren’t worthy, but God can complete you.

if you don’t know what to do, just keep on praying and God will tell you what your purpose is. if you wanna do something but you just can’t, just pray and God will do it for you.
who do you think God is: a magic man? a genie?

and what’s worse is, we can’t do anything without God, therefore we should always lower down before him, and basically beg for everything.

i think this is misunderstanding and disrespecting God.

that’s what all these preachers say. that you’re a useless piece of shit, but God can make you useful. so yeah, keep on telling yourself that you’re worthless, but pray incessantly to make you feel better.

i mean, i get it, humans are imperfect.
we do have problems.
but that doesn’t mean we’re useless.
and my questioning doesn’t mean that we don’t require a God.

i too have my times of weakness and desperation where i desperately call God. but i now understand that God has given me the faculties to figure out a solution. and I have experiences where God has opened new portals for me.

let me try to explain how I view my relationship with God with a father-son analogy:

imagine there’s a father and a son.

the father loves the son, does what is required for him, but is careful to not spoil him. he knows that the son is dependent on him, but he knows that one day, his son will grow up, and he will find his own path and be his own person. sure, there’ll be times when the son is lost, but the father provides care and direction to the son. and he doesn’t enforce his dreams onto his son.

what if the father is adamant that the son must rely on him at all times, and not think and choose for himself?

that’s not a loving God, that’s a reddit mod on a power trip.

if your idea of a God is this, then i feel sorry for you.

My God is not like this!

we indians.

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

we indians.

we got all these castes, all these splits within us based on some old stories that nobody knows shit about.

people are superior or inferior based on the clan they’re born, and if it’s a “lower” (replace with marginalised) caste, then they’re doomed for life. and the worst part is they did nothing.

and it’s not just the hindus. i was born in a christian community, so i can speak for mine: we too have divides. rites claiming they’re the superior one because they came from St Thomas or something, or because they’re “Latin”, and then there’s the people who look down on fellow Christians because they’re “Ezhava” Christians or “Naadaar” Christians or converts. and then there’s the whole fight among multiple denominations.

we use anything and everything to look down on each other, and we listen to politicians who make it even more worse. go take a look at r/indiandankmemes, you’ll see what i mean. it’s crazy the hatred has trickled down to the younger generation as well. i thought this shit was old story, and the new generation would reject it. turns out i was wrong. (i too am guilty. i too ate that shit up.)

and then we go abroad, and then we get ridiculed for being Indian, get mocked, and then we have the fucking audacity to decry racism.

the fuck?
first make peace within your own house, bro?
first try to love and accept those around you and THEN demand to be treated well?

jesus.

on caste.

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

tl;dr: caste meh. and don’t listen to politicians.

i don’t like labels.
i don’t like being labeled.

i recently went to a park. and i made the mistake of smiling at this guy. suddenly, he wants to know everything about me. he wants to know my name, where i work.

tf?

then he asked for my caste. and i’m not capping, i don’t even know if i have a caste? because at least in the community i lived, caste wasn’t important at all. i have a lot of friends, but i don’t know their caste. i don’t have to, and i don’t want to. it never mattered to us.

so i tell him what i know:
i don’t know.
and he’s asking me:
“caste ke bina kaisa chalega?”
i turned into the shrug emoji.

now he wanted to know my religion.
am i hindu or muslim?
i replied, i do not believe in a religion.

so, am i an atheist then?
no, i believe in a loving God?

so, bro had to go for the next: my surname. he would now get to know where am i in the social strata. or so he thought. i replied “fernandez”. bro was starting to give up.

then he told me he watched kerala story, and how love jihad is very rampant, and hindus are marginalized in kerala. i was like, what? almost every person i know in kerala is a hindu!

and idk about love jihad, bro. i don’t think it’s as rampant as the media makes it out to be.

but to have my place be known solely for “love jihad” doesn’t sound good, bro. like, we have sabarimala, guruvayoor, arthunkal, all these temples, churches, mosques, cool spots and everything, but we’re known for love jihad. nah bro, not cool.

at last, he had to ask whether his state or kerala is more developed. bro sounded desperate, so, i agreed. yeah, your state is more developed. anything to preserve his echo chamber.

i mean, i don’t blame him.
it’s the fucking politicians that spread lies and divide us.
more on this later. (i hope)

IFS: Second Thoughts

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had been following Internal Family Systems for a while, but now I have settled on a minimal version of it, plus some understanding I have found along the way.

It took me a while to even start writing this blog, because I’ve been putting it off for so long, but I felt responsible, so, here I am, on an airplane, writing this.

I have realized that I saw IFS as a silver bullet to all my problems. I thought I could completely alleviate all the thoughts and incidents that have bothered me since my childhood and be free of the hurt it caused. But now I think I was seeking the wrong solution.

Maybe the hurt would never go, but we learn to be at peace with it, and live with it. Maybe over time, the pain will reduce. Maybe the pain is required. Even though it hurts, it makes you, you.

Maybe trying to make myself free from everything that hurts you makes you devoid of the human experience.

IFS, Parts and the mess #

I love the introspection that comes with IFS, and it’s been real helpful. It has helped me a lot. But now I think IFS makes everything very complex.

First of all, while I love the idea of parts and how they interact with each other, IFS makes it much more complex by attributing them certain characteristics, personalities of their own and a bunch of other stuff. So when we encounter a particular behavior, we have to find the parts involved, classify it into an exile/manager/protector/firefighter or whatever, find what name they’d like to be called, find what kind of person it is, how it looks, if it’s a kid or a grownup (because according to IFS, traumatized parts are stuck at the age when the traumatic incident happened), where they are and all that. Maybe all this is not really needed. It just moves us further away from what we actually should do. And in my experience, it immobilizes us.

And another thing I have a problem with is that certain parts influence other parts and now there’s a “web of influence” and it’s up to us to find it. And what’s worse is, it changes from time to time.

So just to recap, with IFS, we have to track parts, their characteristics, memories and everything, their classification, their position in a certain graph, what they’re influenced by, what they’re triggered by, what parts they trigger, how do they manifest in the body, how do they evolve.

And if you want to debug, you’d have to identify the firefighters first, listen to them about how they were pushed to their current role, and persuade them to let us access the exile. But if you’re stuck in some phase, then you’re in an immobilized state, which is real bad.

Doing this everyday is hard work. But now i’m thinking, maybe all this is not required?

A Better Approach #

A better approach I found was from Morita therapy which straight up tells us that thoughts would come no matter what. Well, that hurts, but phew, what a relief.

Based on what I read, Western psychology focuses more on fixing each symptoms instead of the root cause. I couldn’t agree more.

Morita therapy tells us to accept each and every thought. Trying to control a thought is like trying to nullify the effect of a sea wave with another wave. That would end up in an infinite sea of waves.

Maybe instead of controlling the waves and forcing it into producing a different outcome, we should just accept the thought, make peace with it and move forward. The solution will come on its own. That, I think is a better approach.

I think I was doing IFS wrongly, because it never instructed me to do what I’m gonna say, but thinking in terms of IFS led to me having a negative view of myself and others. Yes, IFS instructs us to practice gratitufe, but because whenever I encounter something, I think in terms of parts and trauma. But now I can just accept that everyone is flawed and it’s okay and try to love them or leave them. (We can pick our battles.)

But there still are problems #

Solitude, the act of sitting with one’s thoughts, alone, and trying to accept them - that’s something I still dread and something I have to force myself to do, even though I think I got a bit better at it. (I was worse before.)

Which reminds me of this quote by Carl Jung that I think is true:

“To love someone else is easy, but to love what you are, the thing that is yourself, is just as if you were embracing a glowing red-hot iron: it burns into you and that is very painful.”

Maybe it’ll get easier.

Say yes to life!

hope.

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

fearmongering, crying for war, hatred, hostility - BORING!

hope, optimism, happiness, kindness, peace - COOL!

moving away from github pages & vercel.

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Moved over some of my websites, including this blog to a VPS, from GitHub Pages and Vercel.

I use Caddy as the web server, and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with nginx syntax (I’m just too lazy to learn, I guess), and I don’t have to set up cronjobs and stuff to renew certificates and stuff.

I also hosted cgit, but with my own theme of sorts. You can find it at https://git.vkdbois.xyz . Tried to make a y2k style logo, but it’s not as bright and colorful as the y2k cybercore ones. But still, I’m happy how it turned out!

resentment kills.

Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

over the past few days, i realized how much resentment i carry within me. burdens i have carried for many years, burdens i should have put down a long time ago. you think you’re over it, because it’s been so many years, but then you got thrown into situations, and that’s when you realize, you merely put a lid on it and kept it away, thinking it would disappear, but right now it’s pulsing and bleeding, like a fresh-cut wound. right in front of you.

one thing i have understood over these past few days is that resentment and hatred slowly mould you into the person or the group you loathe. i know this might sound crazy, but i think it’s true. it’s because you’re giving them a lot of mindspace and their mannerisms and activities, even though it hurt you, becomes second nature to your brain, and thus you unknowingly turn into the people you hate.

how do i know? recently i realized that a certain behavior i have had over the years, wasn’t from anyone in my family. i unknowingly adopted it from a person, let’s say, i don’t have a good relationship with. i mean, this might sound simple to you, but it was very shocking for me, because this thing i exhibited wasn’t me all along, but something alien.

i then stumbled on a luke smith video that kind of tells the same thing.

there’s a reason why the Lord told us to forgive our enemies. not just because it is something noble, but bottling up rage isn’t good for us, and forgiving can be an act of kindness towards ourselves too.

"marco" and censorship.

Mon, 29 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

noticed the uproar when “marco” came out. an R-rated movie which was advertised from the beginning as extremely violent and not meant for children. but anyway, it made people fume. the reason: it’s a bad example to the children! the prophets of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt/disinformation) have listeners galore. and once again, they had to blame everybody else instead of themselves.

they say “the current generation is doomed”. and the reason: movies, drugs, social media, mobile phones. but oh no, it’s not the neglect, the lack of love, the lack of honesty, the comparison, emotional manipulation, and the lack of understanding. and it’s definitely not them judging and loathing the younger generation.

think about this: how about, just, how about you consider parenting your own children instead of asking everybody else (the government, the creators, the bureaucracy, the police, the teachers) to take care of them for you? you can’t monitor what your children consume, you can’t sit down and have a conversation with your children, you can’t listen to them, you can’t teach them how stuff works, and your children don’t feel safe sharing their thoughts with you. but yeah, mobile phones are the problem. everything should be censored, artists must be wound up, because “oh, think of the children!”

plus asking the government to censor and regulate everything is another disaster waiting to happen. sooner or later, everybody would require age verification to browse the internet. oh wait, that’s actually happening now.

and if you think censorship and banning is the solution, then how about we start banning alcohol and cigarettes? well, that would result in less taxes, so, no can do, eh? how about banning all phones and computers? ban the world wide web too. hell, you could go so far as make children walk around blindfolded, so they wouldn’t be exposed to “this dark world”.

on the other hand, artists clearly have a social responsibility as well. but when more profit is goal #1, that’s when we get recycled storylines, more brutal action scenes and completely deranged crap.

well, my aim is to not make “entertainment” more “family-friendly” or “inclusive” or whatever, because my question is: why do we need an unending morphine line of entertainment? why do we need to be satiated all the time? this is a crisis all of us face, including me.

“How many adventure films does it take to compensate for a lack of adventure? How many superhero movies must one watch, to compensate for the atrophied expression of one’s greatness? How much pornography to meet the need for intimacy? How much entertainment to substitute for missing play? It takes an infinite amount. That’s good news for economic growth, but bad news for the planet.”

- Charles Eisenstein

converting markdown to pdf.

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i used to use obsidian, and exporting markdown files to PDFs was pretty easy. but since i no longer use obsidian (because electron), i had to find a workaround.

luckily pandoc exists, but for conversion to PDF, it uses pdflatex by default. i didn’t want to install anything latex in my system, so i decided to use weasyprint . here’s the whole command:

pandoc input.md\
 --pdf-engine=weasyprint\
 --css=style.css\
 --embed-resources --standalone\
 -o output.pdf

compliments.

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I try to compliment others on even their little feats. Most times, they think I’m crazy or I’m trying to mock them. But I’m not, this is my genuine reaction. They still think I’m weird.

But it got me thinking:
Am I the one who’s weird, or is it our society in which nobody who does good is appreciated and congratulated, but the moment when someone makes a mistake, even if it’s a tiny mistake among a thousand successes, they jump upon them, try to tear them down and say absolutely nasty things about them without even wanting to know what actually happened or what the person has to say?

Some think, “Well, this guy is paid, so I can just pay and be rude to them”. But every human being deserves to be treated with respect and dignity. When that doesn’t happen, when a person is not appreciated, it makes them weary, sad, unwanted and lonely.

Sure, we can all agree that we can be nice,
but I asked myself:
Why can’t we treat others nicely?
What is stopping us?

The “answer” I got back is:
How are we treating ourselves?

Each of us has a brewing internal conflict within us, where an inner drill sergeant inside us wants us to be disciplined and driven and ambitious, and it tries to beat us up into those perfect men and women it wants us to be. Meanwhile, those binge-watching, booze-drinking, addicted and hypersexual parts wait for a split second where the drill sergeant goes to rest, and prance upon us and make us do things it thinks will make us happy, but leave us drained and sad.

We think to ourselves, like St. Paul:
“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” (Romans 7:15)

We don’t even know what is happening within us, and both the drill sergeant and those deviant parts are in an eternal conflict. The parts keep on becoming polarized, the conflict rises even further, and we become more and more unhappy. And yet we think we can abuse and beat ourselves up into perfection.

We never think those “deviant” parts have a reason to do what they do: perhaps it is to turn our focus away from a bigger problem that they think will destroy us. perhaps they think we’re in an unsolvable mess and they’re trying their best to soothe the pain.

if this is the way we treat ourselves,
then how can we treat ourselves with kindness?

(if you resonate with this, then please, please don’t think i’m blaming you. i understand you.)

children, phones & love.

Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i hear people say that children nowadays are so addicted to their phones. kids who scream like crazy when their phone is taken away from them, kids who need their phone to even eat.

they blame the parents because they give their kids phones at a very young age, so that they wouldn’t disturb them while they’re working or watching TV. they conclude it by saying “it’s the end times” and “this generation is doomed”.

their solutions range from:

“you gotta stop giving children phones.”
“parents must spend time with children.”
“turn to God, every one of your problems will be solved.”

they blame smartphone & social media companies for creating addictive user experiences.
but are these really solutions?

i think the real question to ask is:
why does this happen?
why do parents give their children phones at a very young age?

i think i got to know why when i recently spent some time with a child.

unconditional love is a prerequisite for the development of a child. i’m no expert, but from an evolutionary perspective, children are made very cute and adorable to kind of align with this prerequisite. they require so much love and attention, so much up to the point where the parents have to be so selfless and devoted to the child.

and it is possible for the parents to do so if they’re unburdened. it should be - that’s how we’re built. but most people, including myself, carry burdens of their past and are deformed by previous experiences. therefore it’s hard for us to love and be completely in peace with ourselves. and if we cannot love ourselves, how could we love anyone else?

empathy would not arise from a heart that has been riddled by internal conflict.

that’s what i learnt when i spent time with the 3 year old. at first, it felt joyous and genuinely fun, and i had so much love for her, and i made it my mission to make her feel loved and happy. but after a while, it started getting real difficult for me. the kid kept on demanding for love, (i don’t mean in a bad way) and in the end, i was completely drained of energy. to give the kid the love she wanted and rightfully deserved, i had to be selfless. but in my current state, i was incapable of it.

most people, like me, are incapable of it, but instead of working on ourselves, our parts try to fix the symptoms. (eg. addiction, closing in, burying memories etc.)

giving kids the phone is such a shortcut, in my opinion. no need to be with the kid and attend to everything, they could just evade the whole thing. but that comes with serious costs.

i made a website for my father.

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

before i start, i’ll link the website here: https://songs.theophinetheodore.xyz

my father is the leader of our church choir. ever since i was a kid, i have seen him singing. and whenever he goes to the church, he takes me with him. i remember sitting at the bench near him while he sings. i remember the days when i run through the sacristy while he sings with the rest of the choir. one day i tripped on a cable when i was running, and a mic fell down hard on the floor and made a noise so loud everyone in the church stared at me for a solid minute. i remember the ball thing of the mic breaking open into two. and many other shenanigans.

good times. (hehe)

my father used to have this big “vanity bag” of sorts. it was full of diaries with song lyrics in them. and it’s not just the lyrics, it also has some kind of notations and stuff only choir members understand.

everyday before the evening mass, i saw him writing song lyrics on the diary. he had a couple of diaries for each type of song, such as offertory songs, communion songs etc. he wrote the lyrics by hand, and he maintained a whole index by himself. and sometimes, i’d see him copying lyrics from one old diary to a new one. and i’d ask him why he’s doing it. he told me he would have to replace the old diary soon, since it’s too old.

i knew there’s a better way. but if i started doing it then, i would have done something with microsoft word or something, because that was the only way i could do it back then. but now (i think) i know a thing or two about the web. so i decided to make a website for him.

the tools i used #

hugo #

for the website, hugo was an obvious pick, since i have already used to make this blog. i used to use svelte, but i don’t wanna go into that hellhole again. by hellhole, i mean the dumpster fire called the javascript ecosystem.

as for the structure, i don’t do any structuring of the files into separate folders. i dump all the markdown files into content/songs. but in its frontmatter, i have included the title of the song and the category with which i would sort them.

to display song-specific notation stuff, i went for a <table> based approach, but then replaced with regular <div> soup. (i’m sorry :( ) initially, i had a python script that would read a file and spit out a table that i would have to paste it directly in markdown manually, but it proved to be too messy. i try to implement the same logic with hugo syntax, but i couldn’t get so far. so i had to write some javascript that did the thing. it would only be added to the page if the markdown frontmatter had notation: true in it. here’s the code. i know it’s ugly and a mess, but hey, it works!

initially, i went with the /tags page, since i didn’t know how to group the songs based on its category, but later i learnt how to find the total list of pages in a section (say posts/ or songs/), and how to sort pages in a section based on their taxonomy. here’s the code.

later on, i included stuff like scale (eg. Dm, G), time_signature (eg. 2/4, 4/4), tempo (eg. 135bpm) into the song markdown frontmatter. if it exists, it would be displayed inside a blockquote. it can be found here .

i also disabled RSS, because i don’t see a reason.

typo #

i used the typo hugo theme, since i have already dabbled with it, and it seemed like a clean enough slate for me, but i had to make a lot of modifications for this website.

first of all, i replaced the default literata font with malini from smc. i disabled breadcrumbs, enabled hardwrap, and unsafe for embedding html directly in markdown. typo has this homeCollection thing which displays a list of posts or whatever in the main page, but since it wasn’t what i needed, i disabled it.

and i added a bunch of CSS too.

pagefind #

pagefind was very interesting, but i had to paste the CSS variables into themes/typo/assets/css/vars.css and modify them to work with dark mode.

another problem i had is, all the search results had the site title as the result title, instead of the page title. turns out, pagefind assigns ranks to headings (eg. <h1> all the way down to <h6>) and since the site title is the first <h1> on the page, it assumed it was the page title. i edited the header.html partial to replace the <h1> and that problem was solved.

misc #

i made a lil build.sh “build script” of sorts, and it does three things:

trash the docs/ directory. (it’s where the publish the website to.)
hugo build --minify -e production: building with minification enabled.
pagefind --site docs: builds a search index based on html files.

other tools i used #

kate : my text editor. previously obsidian. both have vim mode and good malayalam support.
evil helix : for when i write js and edit html files with hugo syntax in em.
tesseract : for OCR (installed tesseract-data-mal for malayalam support.)
sed : quick text replacements across multiple files. i love good, ol’ reliable sed.
git : version control, and quick restore in case i messed up with sed.
yazi : fast terminal-based file manager.

i also “compiled” a font! #

i do not know if “compiled” is the correct word for it, but yeah.

for the website, i use a font called Malini . It’s a very beautiful font, but there’s one thing that kinda irks me: how it handles certain groups of characters. for example:

the first version is how the word “sneham” is rendered, but it’s not what I want. I like the second version, the split one. But to have that, I have to insert a ZWJ (zero-width joiner). I have no problems using it, but it gets in the way of search, because most people use keyboards on their phone and it does not insert ZWJs. But since I use ZWJs in lyrics, they end up getting no search results at all. but it’s all the same thing.

hopefully, malini has features , but it doesn’t have what i need. so what i did was, i got the source code, and deleted the glyphs of those “stacked characters” (and the ellipsis glyph) and “compiled” the font.

here are the steps: (nothing crazy)

git clone https://gitlab.com/smc/fonts/Malini
cd Malini
virtualenv -p python3 venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install fontmake fontFeatures pyyaml munch ufonormalizer Brotli fontbakery

# this is the part where i delete the files from Malini/sources/glyphs, namely
# ക്ട.mp, പ്ത.mp, പ്ന.mp, യ്ത.mp, ശ്ന.mp, ഷ്ക.mp, ഷ്ക്ക.mp, ഷ്ട.mp, ഷ്ട്ര.mp, ഷ്ഠ.mp, ഷ്പ.mp, സ്ക.mp, സ്ക്ക.mp, സ്ത.mp, സ്ത്ര.mp, സ്ന.mp, സ്പ.mp and a bunch of others, i forgor

make -j4

# this is the part where i install the font

# and this is to verify whether the font has been installed
fc-list | rg -i malini

i also convert the variable .otf font to WOFF2 using woff2_compress.

and here are the results:

the left one is OG malini, and the right one is my “modification”. hopefully, my “solution” works, at least till now. again, maybe compilation wasn’t really needed, and there might have been some other way (i’m no expert in opentype features), but yeah.

my experience with the iphone.

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

ever since i got this iphone for my kid brother, it has been a constant source of frustration for me. every single thing i need to do requires a workaround or i’d have to forget about it and do it in my computer instead. i’m convinced iphone is peak mental retardation at this point.

maybe i’m not using it the “right” or the “intended” way. if you know how, please let me know and i’ll change all my opinions to an “I was wrong” with humility. but until then, this stays.

camera #

camera is pretty good.
it’s the only good thing about it, in my opinion.
credit where it’s due.

files #

it got no proper file manager. and files app is a joke. gallery and files app are two completely different things.

sending files to and fro is made unnecessarily difficult. right now i use pairdrop and it works between ios and android. but for some reason, it doesn’t work between ios and linux. don’t know if it’s ios’ fault or linux’s fault. maybe both.

well, at least the USB works.

SIKE! it doesn’t. well, i can copy photos and videos from the iphone to my computer via USB, but not vice versa. why? and i can’t paste anything into the Downloads folder either. everything is so isolated to the point where it makes no sense.

recently, a friend of mine sent an MP4 via telegram. when i click it, it shows the filename, its extension and size, but it won’t play, and it won’t tell me the reason. i accessed the file through my computer and turns out, the MP4 was corrupted. i mean, you don’t have to use mediainfo or file like i did, just open it in VLC or something and it’ll give a meaningful error message. what the heck.

apple app store #

apple app store requires a shit amount of details to create a fricking account. i need to give em a billing address even though I selected none as my billing method. and i need to input the password before installing an app? as if i’m some kid who needs constant supervision?

iSH #

installed iSH because i hoped it would make the phone a bit usable. turns out it doesn’t.

can’t run iSH in the background for more than a few minutes because of apple restrictions. iSH storage is again isolated from files, which means i have to move things into iSH storage all the time.

well, i abandoned it, because ffmpeg doesn’t work. either it segfaults or it says “illegal instruction”.

i hoped iSH would be close to Termux, but it’s nowhere near it. maybe there are better apps? i dunno.

update: tried a-shell, and it has ffmpeg, but no package manager, and this time, a-shell storage just won’t show up in files app. if it did, i could have copied the files manually.

altstore #

the altstore situation is sad. i had to look into altstore classic version because PAL only supports EU phones. but apps sideloaded via altstore expire after 3 days. and only 3 apps can be installed at the same time.

haven’t tried sideloadly or sidestore yet.
and forget jailbreaking.

misc #

i like the malayalam font it uses.
and all the malayalam translations are well done.

how do people even use it?
right now, this phone got no SIM, got no apps.
we solely use it as a camera.

javascript ecosystem is a meme.

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

this is the size of node_modules of a barebones nextjs project with typescript and turbopack:

$ du -sh node_modules
502M node_modules

this is the list of packages installed in an astro “minimal (empty) template”:

$ bun pm ls --all
├── @astrojs/compiler@2.13.0
├── @astrojs/internal-helpers@0.7.4
├── @astrojs/markdown-remark@6.3.8
├── @astrojs/prism@3.3.0
├── @astrojs/telemetry@3.3.0
├── @babel/helper-string-parser@7.27.1
├── @babel/helper-validator-identifier@7.27.1
├── @babel/parser@7.28.4
├── @babel/types@7.28.4
├── @capsizecss/unpack@3.0.0
├── @emnapi/runtime@1.5.0
├── @esbuild/aix-ppc64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/android-arm@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/android-arm64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/android-x64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/darwin-arm64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/darwin-x64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/freebsd-arm64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/freebsd-x64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/linux-arm@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/linux-arm64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/linux-ia32@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/linux-loong64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/linux-mips64el@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/linux-ppc64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/linux-riscv64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/linux-s390x@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/linux-x64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/netbsd-arm64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/netbsd-x64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/openbsd-arm64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/openbsd-x64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/openharmony-arm64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/sunos-x64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/win32-arm64@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/win32-ia32@0.25.10
├── @esbuild/win32-x64@0.25.10
├── @img/colour@1.0.0
├── @img/sharp-darwin-arm64@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-darwin-x64@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-libvips-darwin-arm64@1.2.3
├── @img/sharp-libvips-darwin-x64@1.2.3
├── @img/sharp-libvips-linux-arm@1.2.3
├── @img/sharp-libvips-linux-arm64@1.2.3
├── @img/sharp-libvips-linux-ppc64@1.2.3
├── @img/sharp-libvips-linux-s390x@1.2.3
├── @img/sharp-libvips-linux-x64@1.2.3
├── @img/sharp-libvips-linuxmusl-arm64@1.2.3
├── @img/sharp-libvips-linuxmusl-x64@1.2.3
├── @img/sharp-linux-arm@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-linux-arm64@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-linux-ppc64@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-linux-s390x@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-linux-x64@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-linuxmusl-arm64@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-linuxmusl-x64@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-wasm32@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-win32-arm64@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-win32-ia32@0.34.4
├── @img/sharp-win32-x64@0.34.4
├── @jridgewell/sourcemap-codec@1.5.5
├── @oslojs/encoding@1.1.0
├── @rollup/pluginutils@5.3.0
│ └── estree-walker@2.0.2
├── @rollup/rollup-android-arm-eabi@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-android-arm64@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-darwin-arm64@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-darwin-x64@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-freebsd-arm64@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-freebsd-x64@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-linux-arm-gnueabihf@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-linux-arm-musleabihf@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-linux-arm64-gnu@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-linux-arm64-musl@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-linux-loong64-gnu@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-linux-ppc64-gnu@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-linux-riscv64-gnu@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-linux-riscv64-musl@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-linux-s390x-gnu@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-linux-x64-gnu@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-linux-x64-musl@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-openharmony-arm64@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-win32-arm64-msvc@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-win32-ia32-msvc@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-win32-x64-gnu@4.52.4
├── @rollup/rollup-win32-x64-msvc@4.52.4
├── @shikijs/core@3.13.0
├── @shikijs/engine-javascript@3.13.0
├── @shikijs/engine-oniguruma@3.13.0
├── @shikijs/langs@3.13.0
├── @shikijs/themes@3.13.0
├── @shikijs/types@3.13.0
├── @shikijs/vscode-textmate@10.0.2
├── @swc/helpers@0.5.17
├── @types/debug@4.1.12
├── @types/estree@1.0.8
├── @types/fontkit@2.0.8
├── @types/hast@3.0.4
├── @types/mdast@4.0.4
├── @types/ms@2.1.0
├── @types/nlcst@2.0.3
├── @types/node@24.7.2
├── @types/unist@3.0.3
├── @ungap/structured-clone@1.3.0
├── acorn@8.15.0
├── ansi-align@3.0.1
│ └── string-width@4.2.3
│ ├── emoji-regex@8.0.0
│ └── strip-ansi@6.0.1
│ └── ansi-regex@5.0.1
├── ansi-regex@6.2.2
├── ansi-styles@6.2.3
├── anymatch@3.1.3
│ └── picomatch@2.3.1
├── argparse@2.0.1
├── aria-query@5.3.2
├── array-iterate@2.0.1
├── astro@5.14.4
├── axobject-query@4.1.0
├── bail@2.0.2
├── base-64@1.0.0
├── base64-js@1.5.1
├── boxen@8.0.1
├── brotli@1.3.3
├── camelcase@8.0.0
├── ccount@2.0.1
├── chalk@5.6.2
├── character-entities@2.0.2
├── character-entities-html4@2.1.0
├── character-entities-legacy@3.0.0
├── chokidar@4.0.3
├── ci-info@4.3.1
├── cli-boxes@3.0.0
├── clone@2.1.2
├── clsx@2.1.1
├── comma-separated-tokens@2.0.3
├── common-ancestor-path@1.0.1
├── cookie@1.0.2
├── cookie-es@1.2.2
├── crossws@0.3.5
├── css-tree@3.1.0
├── cssesc@3.0.0
├── debug@4.4.3
├── decode-named-character-reference@1.2.0
├── defu@6.1.4
├── dequal@2.0.3
├── destr@2.0.5
├── detect-libc@2.1.2
├── deterministic-object-hash@2.0.2
├── devalue@5.3.2
├── devlop@1.1.0
├── dfa@1.2.0
├── diff@5.2.0
├── dlv@1.1.3
├── dset@3.1.4
├── emoji-regex@10.5.0
├── entities@6.0.1
├── es-module-lexer@1.7.0
├── esbuild@0.25.10
├── escape-string-regexp@5.0.0
├── estree-walker@3.0.3
├── eventemitter3@5.0.1
├── extend@3.0.2
├── fast-deep-equal@3.1.3
├── fdir@6.5.0
├── flattie@1.1.1
├── fontace@0.3.1
├── fontkit@2.0.4
├── fsevents@2.3.3
├── get-east-asian-width@1.4.0
├── github-slugger@2.0.0
├── h3@1.15.4
├── hast-util-from-html@2.0.3
├── hast-util-from-parse5@8.0.3
├── hast-util-is-element@3.0.0
├── hast-util-parse-selector@4.0.0
├── hast-util-raw@9.1.0
├── hast-util-to-html@9.0.5
├── hast-util-to-parse5@8.0.0
│ └── property-information@6.5.0
├── hast-util-to-text@4.0.2
├── hast-util-whitespace@3.0.0
├── hastscript@9.0.1
├── html-escaper@3.0.3
├── html-void-elements@3.0.0
├── http-cache-semantics@4.2.0
├── import-meta-resolve@4.2.0
├── iron-webcrypto@1.2.1
├── is-docker@3.0.0
├── is-fullwidth-code-point@3.0.0
├── is-inside-container@1.0.0
├── is-plain-obj@4.1.0
├── is-wsl@3.1.0
├── js-yaml@4.1.0
├── kleur@4.1.5
├── longest-streak@3.1.0
├── lru-cache@10.4.3
├── magic-string@0.30.19
├── magicast@0.3.5
├── markdown-table@3.0.4
├── mdast-util-definitions@6.0.0
├── mdast-util-find-and-replace@3.0.2
├── mdast-util-from-markdown@2.0.2
├── mdast-util-gfm@3.1.0
├── mdast-util-gfm-autolink-literal@2.0.1
├── mdast-util-gfm-footnote@2.1.0
├── mdast-util-gfm-strikethrough@2.0.0
├── mdast-util-gfm-table@2.0.0
├── mdast-util-gfm-task-list-item@2.0.0
├── mdast-util-phrasing@4.1.0
├── mdast-util-to-hast@13.2.0
├── mdast-util-to-markdown@2.1.2
├── mdast-util-to-string@4.0.0
├── mdn-data@2.12.2
├── micromark@4.0.2
├── micromark-core-commonmark@2.0.3
├── micromark-extension-gfm@3.0.0
├── micromark-extension-gfm-autolink-literal@2.1.0
├── micromark-extension-gfm-footnote@2.1.0
├── micromark-extension-gfm-strikethrough@2.1.0
├── micromark-extension-gfm-table@2.1.1
├── micromark-extension-gfm-tagfilter@2.0.0
├── micromark-extension-gfm-task-list-item@2.1.0
├── micromark-factory-destination@2.0.1
├── micromark-factory-label@2.0.1
├── micromark-factory-space@2.0.1
├── micromark-factory-title@2.0.1
├── micromark-factory-whitespace@2.0.1
├── micromark-util-character@2.1.1
├── micromark-util-chunked@2.0.1
├── micromark-util-classify-character@2.0.1
├── micromark-util-combine-extensions@2.0.1
├── micromark-util-decode-numeric-character-reference@2.0.2
├── micromark-util-decode-string@2.0.1
├── micromark-util-encode@2.0.1
├── micromark-util-html-tag-name@2.0.1
├── micromark-util-normalize-identifier@2.0.1
├── micromark-util-resolve-all@2.0.1
├── micromark-util-sanitize-uri@2.0.1
├── micromark-util-subtokenize@2.1.0
├── micromark-util-symbol@2.0.1
├── micromark-util-types@2.0.2
├── mrmime@2.0.1
├── ms@2.1.3
├── nanoid@3.3.11
├── neotraverse@0.6.18
├── nlcst-to-string@4.0.0
├── node-fetch-native@1.6.7
├── node-mock-http@1.0.3
├── normalize-path@3.0.0
├── ofetch@1.4.1
├── ohash@2.0.11
├── oniguruma-parser@0.12.1
├── oniguruma-to-es@4.3.3
├── p-limit@6.2.0
├── p-queue@8.1.1
├── p-timeout@6.1.4
├── package-manager-detector@1.4.0
├── pako@0.2.9
├── parse-latin@7.0.0
├── parse5@7.3.0
├── picocolors@1.1.1
├── picomatch@4.0.3
├── postcss@8.5.6
├── prismjs@1.30.0
├── prompts@2.4.2
│ └── kleur@3.0.3
├── property-information@7.1.0
├── radix3@1.1.2
├── readdirp@4.1.2
├── regex@6.0.1
├── regex-recursion@6.0.2
├── regex-utilities@2.3.0
├── rehype@13.0.2
├── rehype-parse@9.0.1
├── rehype-raw@7.0.0
├── rehype-stringify@10.0.1
├── remark-gfm@4.0.1
├── remark-parse@11.0.0
├── remark-rehype@11.1.2
├── remark-smartypants@3.0.2
├── remark-stringify@11.0.0
├── restructure@3.0.2
├── retext@9.0.0
├── retext-latin@4.0.0
├── retext-smartypants@6.2.0
├── retext-stringify@4.0.0
├── rollup@4.52.4
├── semver@7.7.3
├── sharp@0.34.4
├── shiki@3.13.0
├── sisteransi@1.0.5
├── smol-toml@1.4.2
├── source-map-js@1.2.1
├── space-separated-tokens@2.0.2
├── string-width@7.2.0
├── stringify-entities@4.0.4
├── strip-ansi@7.1.2
├── tiny-inflate@1.0.3
├── tinyexec@1.0.1
├── tinyglobby@0.2.15
├── trim-lines@3.0.1
├── trough@2.2.0
├── tsconfck@3.1.6
├── tslib@2.8.1
├── type-fest@4.41.0
├── typescript@5.9.3
├── ufo@1.6.1
├── ultrahtml@1.6.0
├── uncrypto@0.1.3
├── undici-types@7.14.0
├── unicode-properties@1.4.1
├── unicode-trie@2.0.0
├── unified@11.0.5
├── unifont@0.6.0
├── unist-util-find-after@5.0.0
├── unist-util-is@6.0.0
├── unist-util-modify-children@4.0.0
├── unist-util-position@5.0.0
├── unist-util-remove-position@5.0.0
├── unist-util-stringify-position@4.0.0
├── unist-util-visit@5.0.0
├── unist-util-visit-children@3.0.0
├── unist-util-visit-parents@6.0.1
├── unstorage@1.17.1
├── vfile@6.0.3
├── vfile-location@5.0.3
├── vfile-message@4.0.3
├── vite@6.3.6
├── vitefu@1.1.1
├── web-namespaces@2.0.1
├── which-pm-runs@1.1.0
├── widest-line@5.0.0
├── wrap-ansi@9.0.2
├── xxhash-wasm@1.1.0
├── yargs-parser@21.1.1
├── yocto-queue@1.2.1
├── yocto-spinner@0.2.3
├── yoctocolors@2.1.2
├── zod@3.25.76
├── zod-to-json-schema@3.24.6
├── zod-to-ts@1.2.0
└── zwitch@2.0.4

need i say more?

sure, one could argue that it’s all actually required. but as far as i know, none of these frameworks ship with database support, auth etc out of the box. and setting em up requires manual intervention and more storage. when you run bun run dev, you’re greeted with a cutesy logo, and a counter app which isn’t all that useful. and things keep on changing. svelte switching to runes and older svelte projects breaking once you update packages was the final nail in the coffin for me.

anyways. theo out.

the best dock on linux is... a plasma panel?

Tue, 07 Oct 2025 01:04:02 +0530

i use docks ever since i started with linux. i used plank with cinnamon, latte-dock with plasma, the xfce4-panel-but-dock-like-thingy with xfce4. if you can count the glassy sidebar in unity, that one too. but somewhere along the way, i stopped using it. until today.

this is my current desktop. i don’t like the windows-esque icons-on-taskbar thing, i use the “pager” plasmoid widget instead. (the one on the bottom panel, extreme left.) it’s handy, but i can’t launch applications with it. and i don’t use an application launcher (start menu equivalent) or an application dashboard. idk, a separate dock makes sense to me.

and on the left, that’s my dock. that’s where i have kept my dock, on the left. and it’s a regular plasma panel. but how the hell did i get here?

plank #

plank is really good, and it has recently been forked . but it doesn’t work on wayland. (i’m no wayland shill, i just happen to use what endeavourOS shipped with.)

latte-dock #

latte-dock was the best. but it hasn’t been ported to Qt6. and the last time i checked, it didn’t work on plasma 6.

the regular plasma panel #

what i did was:

go to edit mode
create a new empty panel
change its position to the left
only add the “icons-only task manager” widget

well, i added the “panel colorizer” plugin too to get that border. it has a lot of options, but i just sticked to some preset. and it works well!

internet radio.

Thu, 02 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i used to listen to a lot of radio as a kid. i had a nokia back then, and one of those earphones that come with the phone. it had a big black button with the iconic nokia logo printed on it. i used to sit in the terrace all day so that i could listen to the radio in peace. but i only had malayalam radio stations. i always wished if there were radio stations in english or genres like EDM.

after a few years, i got access to the internet and that means i could download music and not have to listen to whatever my father’s friends sent him, or whatever was in the radio. but i didn’t know a thing about internet packs, so i spent 10 rupees for a 3 megabyte song, and since my phone’s SD card slot was busted, i could only store a single song in my phone’s meagre internal storage. and i would listen to the song for a whole month, until i would have to delete it, which was indeed very painful. sometimes the download would fail at 98%, and poof, the money is gone, and the song too.

anyway, enough talking about downloading stuff. back to internet radio. a few months ago, i started listening to internet radio stations for classical music, but i guess i was too addicted to the music-on-demand “feature” that i abandoned it after a while.

i don’t use spotify, but i have used my own stuff: raga, a jiosaavn frontend made with sveltekit, and halo , which is the same thing but made with tkinter, and i still use it once in a while.

and on phone, i have used 3rd-party apps in f-droid. but every now and then, something breaks, something stops working, playback stops and errors out all of a sudden. not the app developer’s fault though. and the incessant forks: vimusic, rimusic, kreate etc. i mean, even the dev loses interest in playing this cat-and-mouse game with corpos.

but after reading this blog on internet radio, i was excited to try it again. gnome’s shortwave is what i picked, but libadwaita…. but although gradience is orphaned, i was able to install it from the AUR. and it works!

shortwave works very well, and a feature i like is: it records music and saves it in a directory. pretty handy, i would say.

gems of kde plasma malayalam.

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

recently set malayalam as default language for KDE plasma.

i assumed malayalam might look funny, but i actually love it! it’s creative and sometimes serious and sometimes funky. and i gotta say, hats off to the people who wrote this!

here are some of the gems i discovered along the way:

my most favorite word of all: clipboard as ഓർമ്മച്ചെപ്പ്.
that. is. smart.
and so beautiful.

launcher is പ്രയോഗവിക്ഷേപിണി?!! LESGOOOOOOO!.

the trifecta. chef's kiss.

cursors are ചൂണ്ടുവിരലുകൾ!

so, tabs are കിളിവാതിലുകൾ, and windows are ജാലകങ്ങൾ!
കിളിവാതിലുകൾ sounds cute, i'm gonna steal that one.

gparted - partition manager. meh.
പാർട്ടീഷൻ സംശോധകൻ? GOES HARD!

wallpaper is called പശ്‍ചാത്തലചിത്രം!

styles == രൂപഭംഗികൾ!

I guess അക്ഷരശൈലി == font, and അക്ഷരസഞ്ചയം == typeface. i'm not sure, but me likey.

user feedback is ഉപയോക്തൃ അഭിപ്രായം. SICK!

nothing goes harder than the malayalam version of "authentication failed" (unless you're locked out of your system, and if that's the case, RIP.)

i have no idea how many times i have read this, no cap: such a beautiful text. idky i just like it so much. whoever wrote this deserves an... oscar equivalent but for writers or translators. (shrug)

this is only a few. there are others like “ശബ്‍ദ നിയന്ത്രണം” for “Volume Control”, “വിജയിച്ചു” for “Success”, “സംരക്ഷിച്ചു/സൂക്ഷിച്ചു” for “Saved”, “വിന്യാസരീതി” for “Sorting”, “ഗുണഗണങ്ങൾ” for “Properties” and so on.

now, you might call me crazy for being so excited and in awe like a child about these translations, but i don’t care. i just love em, and it makes me happy.

linux is a miracle (day 1429)

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

these are some of the packages i have installed: the flutter SDK, thorium, chromium, obsidian (electron), inkscape, kdenlive, thunderbird email client, floorp, krita, wine-staging, obs studio, qbittorrent, beeper (electron), simplescreenrecorder, lutris, audacity, handbrake, kate. these are the big ones. i have a bunch of little command-line tools too: eza, aria2, ncdu, tty-clock, yay, hyperfine, yazi etc.

and all of this fits in ~8 gigs.

size of root (df output).

what i did #

use btrfs compression. (compress=zstd:3 in /etc/fstab)
remove packages not required anymore.
- some packages are now split into multiple packages (eg. linux-firmware), so pick only the ones you need.
clear the pacman cache with sudo pacman -Scc.
- not really a good idea tbh, because you wouldn’t be able to downgrade if your pc has some problem, so you’d have to live boot, chroot into the installation and fix. but i have cleared the cache clean for like 3-4 years at this point, and nothing ever went wrong. i guess i’m lucky.
clear old journal logs with sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=3days.
- the given command retains logs of the past three days and deletes everything else, so if you need more logs, adjust the vacuum time accordingly, or just don’t touch it. (lmao)
clear unwanted locales.
- all these locales in /usr/share/locales were taking up 800 megs, and i only use english. cleared it with bleachbit.
- NB: be careful while using bleachbit. before cleaning, be sure to disable cookies, saved passwords of your browser, and disable the free space option as well.
clear coredumps in /var/lib/systemd/coredump.
- well, not all, there was a lot of stuff from programs i didn’t use anymore. this prolly won’t be good advice, but anyway.

tools i used to monitor #

ncdu
- amazing tool, but be careful while deleting.
df
- part of coreutils.
- use df -h to see total, available and used space of partitions.
pacgraph -c
- installed from AUR.
- when executed with the -c flag, prints a list of packages with their size in descending order.
- ditch the -c flag and it renders an SVG. (i don’t use it.)
- pacgraph -c | less or pacgraph -c | nvim -R for ez.

how call of duty unironically made me a peace advocate.

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

NB: ik battlefield is even more real, but i never played it (except for bad company 2), so i can’t talk about it.

i used to adore war. i thought joining a war would grant me a sense of purpose, belonging and brotherhood. i thought it would make me “stronger” and “more masculine”. i thought maybe i’m missing some war in my life. hell, if the pope had called a crusade, i would have joined instantly.

related meme.

my teachers gaves notes on the wars, the “reasons”, the parties involved, the aftermath, all in perfect bullet points. they jotted down the names and years in the blackboard and told us to memorize so that we could regurgitate it onto the paper for more marks.

but none of these teachers of mine taught me war is hell, that war is something we should not aspire for.

it was call of duty who taught me that.
well, certainly not the modern multiplayer slop xD.

my first call of duty game was call of duty 4: modern warfare. i remember getting “fun” out of shooting people and running around, but then i’d die, and then i’d see quotes like these:

“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” - Gandhi
“Before you embark on a journey of revenge, you should first dig two graves.” - Confucius
“It is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.” - Douglas MacArthur
“In modern warfare there are no victors; there are only survivors.” - Lyndon B. Johnson
“Revenge, at first though sweet, bitter ere long back on itself recoils.” - John Milton
“Those who plot the destruction of others often perish in the attempt.” - Thomas Moore
“Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.” - Herbert Hoover

and i was like, what? why am i seeing quotes about the dangers of war? i’m having “fun” killing my enemies.

but as time went on, it dawned on me: this ain’t fun. who would want to live in a world torn apart, riddled by violence and hatred, where people have no hope of the future, and are constantly living in fear?

i know call of duty does not absolutely portray the gruesome experience of real-life war, but it has given me a peek into what war might look like, for someone who has never lived through war, even though it’s primary focus is entertainment.

hours of gameplay, ears ringing, ruins and fire all around, the cries, the despair looming in the air.
to put it mildly - a tiny replica of war.

certain missions gave me a very different outlook.
the infamous no russian mission in call of duty: modern warfare 2 (2009), oh God. it is a wild ethical dilemma. what would you do: willingly be part of a war crime, killing innocent people and children, because you don’t want to blow your cover as a good guy masquerading as a terrorist to get wind of their movements and alert the higher-ups, or fight against it, get spotted and destroy the single source of information the good guys have?

davis family vacation in call of duty: modern warfare 3 (2011) is another mission that comes to mind. in this mission, we play as a father holding a camcorder, capturing a video of his wife and his sweet little daughter joyously walking through the streets of london. as they’re having fun, a box truck beside the road explodes, killing the family while the camcorder keeps on recording it. we just lie there, helpless.

hometown in call of duty: modern warfare (2019) is one of the scariest missions i have ever seen.

passenger in MWIII (2023) drew a lot of flak and criticism, but i think it was impactful. this reddit comment describes it best: “can you imagine being on that plane? seeing an arabic-looking woman strapped with a bomb vest and holding a gun? the desperation of the people trying to stop her, then the woman frantically picking up the phone at the end and everyone dying is f—— haunting.”

truly makes you think.

we see it everywhere:
perpetuating war and hatred is one way of increasing the vote bank in the name of “nationalism”. ragebait and hate speech spreads 100x faster than wholesome news, and gathers more reactions. cricketers politicizing sports events.

but hatred is never a solution. i realized it through my own actions. the initial kick of power feels good, but the guilt that follows and the hearts you broke in the process, the friendships you destroyed, it quietly kills you. but fortunately, i was absolved and they were kind enough to forgive me. i thank them for that everyday. and it taught me a lesson: aggression and rage is never an answer.

strive for peace, not war.

evil helix.

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

the problem with neovim. #

the first time i saw helix, i was very excited to try it out, because i was so sick and tired of the nvim configuring process. i use neovim, but i never enjoyed configuring it.

it always breaks, everything changes from time to time, there’s a lot to do to just get the most basic stuff working.

and there’s a hundred package managers: vim-plug, lazy, this, that.
and even expected stuff requires plugins: autopairs, tree, comments, indent lines, errors, file pickers etc.

you know things are bad when yazi’s file previewer has good syntax highlighting out of the box when compared to nvim.

and let’s not forget the elephant in the room: LSP and autocompletion. idk bro, having to watch youtube videos on how to configure LSP is the most frustrating thing ever. some guy uses lsp-zero, some guy uses mason, i really don’t know what any of this does, to be honest. tbh i never managed to get lsp and completion working at all.

i stopped my config at 212 lines and went back to regular nvim.
meanwhile there are others who cling onto their mini-sized linux kernel level nvim configuration.

i occasionally cycle through vscodium, lite-xl, lapce, zed, kate, sublime and i dunno, nothing just feels right.

and i would try helix too, but since helix had kakoune-style keybinds, i could never switch to it.

until i learnt of evil-helix .

evil helix. #

install evil-helix-bin from the AUR, and you’re good to go.

everything just works out of the box: LSP, syntax highlighting, themes, autocompletion, diagnostics, autopairs, file pickers, comments, indent guides, file pickers, leap.nvim style jump thingy, git stuff (tracking unsaved changes and stuff like that) etc.

it’s pretty cool that i don’t have to do set j gj and set k gk to enable visual line traversal. it’s on by default. this is one of their sane defaults.

it’s been great so far.

my config is available at https://github.com/theophinetheodore/evil-helix-config . i have added some keybinds to make it more similar to nvim, cause muscle memory too strong. other than that, absolutely no problems.

EDM.

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i was there when it was the golden era of EDM.

i remember the time when EDM was the rage. every guy i know listened to tomorrowland mixes. during christmas and easter, guys used to stack up boxes and play EDM tracks while everybody played at the beach and the sea. there was a time when people used to argue over whether spinnin’ records or revealed recordings were the best.

i think i accidentally got introduced to edm in 2013 or something, when a friend gave me a usb full of tracks from axwell, swedish house mafia, afrojack, david guetta etc. (he also introduced me to linkin park. )

and in search of more songs, i found this website called songspw or something. it doesn’t exist anymore. i chose this website because it was the only website that provided 128kbps MP3s, plus good metadata and artworks. i remember, i had to recharge a 5-day 150mb pack for 29 rupees, which would last me a day max, because i will be downloading all these tracks in a jiffy. and my internet speed was 20kb/s, for real. so a single song would take like half an hour to download. i used to be so crazy about EDM, i would wait for DJ Mag to release their Top 100 DJs list or something like that.

there was this another website called songslover or something, but they basically pasted their name all over the artwork and the metadata, and it was a big no-no for me. i like clean artworks, and i indeed had a collection of them in my SD card. i was using windows, so i used mp3tag to clean up artworks and metadata, and even make custom artworks for youtube rips and IDs (unreleased tracks).

i think people know about hardwell through spaceman or the bella ciao song, but i was introduced to him through this track called “eclipse”, from the “united we are” album, and it was a sick banger. i had never something like that, it was so different. well, the whole album was unique and very favorite to me. and that’s how i got to know about revealed recordings and the artists related to it: kaaze, and the likes.

don diablo, another personal favorite. i still rock his “on my mind”, such an energizing track. and his “forever” album is just.. chef’s kiss. and he got a lot of innocent sounding tracks like “stay awake”, “where we started”. listen to don diablo if you need a serious uplift, guy is the master.

“payback” by dimitri vangelis & wyman x steve angello was when progressive house peaked. it’s my most favorite EDM track of all time.

speaking of steve angello, i loved his “wild youth” album: “wasted love”, “stockholm skies”. he’s a very unique artist.

dyro’s remix of axwell’s “centre of the universe” is a favorite of mine. sebastian ingrosso’s “reload” too.

swedish house mafia, oh man, another gem: “save the world”, “don’t you worry child”, etc. (idk about the new ones, didn’t bother to listen.)

i got to know about matisse & sadko from their remix of m3ox’s “beating of my heart” featuring heidrun. that track was part of SHM’s “until now (deluxe edition)”, or so i think. since them, i have loved matisse & sadko: dragon, break through the silence (both featured by martin garrix). forever is a personal favorite.

martin garrix. most of his tracks sound the same, but i love his “mistaken”, featuring alex aris and tom taped? i don’t remember. and “spotless”. “WIEE” is a fun one. “pizza”, sounds generic but i love it.

today i learnt W&W is responsible for the spinning cat meme track lmao. but i love them for the track: “the one”. i LOVE it.

steve aoki is another unique artist. i love his style and he has all these cool collabs, with linkin park, alok, crankdat. he even got neil degrasse tyson & bill nye! (in noble gas). man, i carried his neon future i, ii, iii, iv around like trophies. steve aoki is soooooo cool.

sick individuals is, damn man, i love them for the raw and intense sounds. sick individuals is easily in my top 10. personal favorite.

RIP avicii. true, stories, tim. levels, silhouettes, all those gems. RIP.

eric prydz’s opus, i still play em during workouts. it’s just so intense. and his “call on me”. and “nopus”. love em.

david guetta’s “nothing but the beat”, “nothing but the beat 2.0”, “listen”. he got em all: touching tracks, fun tracks, intense tracks. i love his tracks with akon, flo rida, nicki minaj, bebe rexha. they all just blend well. david guetta and sia is a really GOOD combination. stuff like “the alphabeat”, “she wolf”, “titanium”, oh my god.

i hold tritonal close to my heart. tritonal is so unique sounding. same with nicky romero, so unique.

deadmau5’s strobe, monophobia, his tracks with kaskade (kx5 and the rest), he’s just different. guy is his own genre. and with the release of “where’s the drop?”, he’s practically at the top of his game. 100/10 recommend “where’s the drop”.

cheat codes’ “i love it”, “balenciaga”: i visit em once in a year.

lost frequencies got this remix of dimitri vegas & like mike’s “hey baby”. it’s so simple, i love it.

alesso had these amazing touching tracks: “heroes”, “remedy”, “take my breath away”. i love alesso. such a unique artist.

alpharock is kinda not that known, and i think obscure?, but there’s this track called “the new normal”. oh man, i love it.

breathe carolina, another hidden gem. they got this track “can’t take it”, featuring bassjackers and cade, oh my god, just the best. and their stuff with dropgun and kaleena zanders. favorites of all time.

dropgun has his very unique sound. nothing can replace dropgun.

not really a great fan of armin van buuren’s trance-y tracks, but he got some really good ones: “i need you”, “heading up high”, “strong ones”, “gotta be love”.

afrojack, where i started from. the bangers with pitbull, “ten feet tall”… afrojack is the OG. sometimes i wonder where he is.

quintino is versatile. his “unbroken” with yves v is one of my favorite EDM music videos: two police officers helping the poor in the day and partying hard at night. pretty unbelievable for a story, but i like it.

reez and kshmr released this remixed version of bassjackers’ “savior” and it’s just so… raw. one of the best.

vicetone is another artist who has developed his own style. he even got a track called “hope” featuring barack obama! actually, it was a track with obama’s speeches from his presidential campaign ig. i don’t care about politics, the song is top tier.

dimitri vegas & like mike’s “mammoth” is one of my earliest EDM tracks, and i still love it. wasn’t much of a fan of their mainstream tracks, but man, i loved their IDs. sometimes i think why didn’t they released their IDs.

mike williams is the king of future bounce imo. his “jetlag” with brooks is easily in my top 10 favorites.

i don’t care about marshmello’s mainstream tracks, but i loved his joytime albums. he is real nice.

r3hab, deorro, jay hardway, brooks, tommy trash, nervo, alok, meduza, kream, tiesto, lucas & steve, benny bennassi, kshmr, radiology, moti, galantis, oliver heldens, zedd, sander van doorn, ummet ozcan, so many others.

i feel grateful to God, because my childhood was fun because of EDM. thank you God and thank you DJs.

the story of how i met rajendra prasad.

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

today i went to the park to meet my friend.
but he was getting late,
and i had no way of contacting him,
since i didn’t recharge my phone.
i had to ask someone.

i walked up to the security uncle,
and he was kind enough to give me his phone.

after talking to my friend,
i handed him back his phone.
and we started talking.

i asked his name,
and he replied: “rajendra prasad.”
i was like, whoaaaaaaaaaa.
isn’t that the name of the first president of india?
yes it is, he replied.

“i guess your parents are very smart”, i said.
“ah no, actually i chose this name for myself”, he said.
ayo damn.

and he told his story:
his name was actually sujaathan.
sujata is a girl’s name, and nobody would name anyone sujaathan.
at least in this generation.
it’s very, very rare, i guess.

when he was 8 years old,
his family and him were at the bus stop waiting to go somewhere.
and then my guy saw this bus,
with “rajendra prasad” written on it.
i guess the name must have struck into his mind so much,
he started yelling at his parents to change his name to rajendra prasad.

“didn’t your parents ask you, ‘are you crazy?’” i asked.
but i guess nothing is impossible.

life never fails to surprise you.

blog changes.

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

the reason i selected typo is because
it looked safe, and pretty serious,
with its serif typeface and stuff.

but one day it felt like it was too serious.
swapped literata out with playpen sans.
colorPalette is now ‘base16-default’.
typo has catppuccin by default, but it’s too light for me.

as each day goes, the website looks lesser and lesser like the default.
and i love it.
it feels like i own it.

incidents in my "prank career".

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i was reading iWoz, the autobiography of steve wozniak. and he was sharing his experiences of pranking people with a TV jammer he made: him using it to jam TVs while people were watching sports. he’d make them do all sorts of crazy stuff, like making them believe whacking the TV would make it work. and sometimes he’d jam the TVs and people would gather to fix the TV and when some guy places his hand in front of the TV, he would unjam it and the TV would work. he made them so sueprstitious, it was so funny.

and then i remembered i too had pranked people when i was in college.

well, i am no genius like steve wozniak, and my pranks only worked because the professors used my laptop for presentations and stuff. the laptops my college gave out were old bulky laptops with windows 7 on it. (maybe it would have worked better with linux mint on it, but anyway.) and the DVI input would rarely work with the projector, idk if its the laptop’s fault.

so once, sir was showing us some presentation and teaching us. and the girls were, you know, writing every single point down as fast as they can. us boys in the back bench used to sleep or talk or draw or have food or whatever. but this day, i had an idea.

i had my phone with me. (we were not allowed to carry our phones into the classroom, but anyway.) and i had KDE connect installed on both my laptop and my phone.

so, sir was currently on slide 3, and all the girls were looking up and down and writing stuff down. via phone, i changed it to slide 4. well, sir was facing us, he didn’t know what happened.

all the girls were like “sir, sir, please change the slide back, we haven’t finished writing.” and sir was like “bruh” lmao. everyone thought it’s some one-time error. sir walked to the laptop and changed it back.

after a few minutes, i did it again.

and once more. by then, both the sir and the girls have started to feel the sus in the air. i mean, some girls saw the slide just change in front of their eyes, and there was nobody beside the laptop.

after the class, i was talking to this girl called aparna, and i asked her about the incident, and she was like, damn, yeah, that happened. apparently, the girls started thinking it was some ghost activity.

lmao.

another day, a friend of mine was conducting a presentation using, again, my laptop. and this time using kde connect, i slowly move the cursor. and the girls were like, “why is the cursor moving on its own?”. damn, man, i was trying so hard not to laugh.

fun times.

quillpad.

Mon, 25 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i usually don’t use a notes app on my phone. tbh, the first thing i do when i get an android phone is to uninstall all of the preinstalled apps using adb, and that includes google keep. but a notes app is handy, to take down lists, things to remember etc. these days, i try to carry a pen and paper with me, because i spend some time at the church, and i don’t wanna use a phone in there. but yeah, notes apps can come in handy.

over the years, i have tried a very few apps, including standard notes, joplin etc. i have tried termux & nvim, but it never really stuck.

then i went to using whatsapp and telegram, i mean, you know, the message yourself feature, or a private group in TG’s case. but sooner or later, paranoia took over.

till a few days back, i was using some app called notally i found in f-droid. but i had to search for another app again.

since i use obsidian on desktop, i have gotten pretty used to its “live” editing feature. i mean, a <h3> looks like a <h3> until you click on it and you can see the three octothorpes in front of the text. same with every other thing, including lists, images, callouts, mermaid diagrams, everything. and it grew on me. i dislike the two-pane setups where you type in one pane, and the preview shows up in the second one (like in ghostwriter).

so what i basically need is markdown support + live editing feature.

i kept on searching for such a note app for android, and i only found quillpad . quillpad is pretty good. actually, i’m typing this on quillpad right now. quillpad good. it’s pretty well built. ~~but, it’s discontinued.~~ it has been forked .

the only qualm i have with quillpad is, usually when you add a newline in midst of a list, it now becomes two lists, even in the rendered version. but quillpad renders it as one list. that was kind of a bummer for me, but i don’t mind now.

"dual apps" in linux and stuff.

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

btw i was thinking if an application can be run as a “dual app” in linux.
for example, i use this application called beeper .
put simply, you can use whatsapp, telegram, slack, and a bunch of other stuff
all in one place.

but the free beeper version can only have one whatsapp account connected.
(unless you have the plus version, which starts at $9.99/month.
it provides 3 accounts per network.)

and beeper lacks any kind of profile functionality.
and it stores all its stuff in ~/.config.

i just needed to have another whatsapp account.

first, i created another user. (let’s call it user2 for now)
tried su -c user2 and then running beeper, that didn’t work.

then i thought, maybe firejail would have something similar.
turns out i was right.

## creating a directory, just for now
~ $ mkdir beeper

## --private` is for a private home directory,
## when .config and everything will be stored.

## --noprofile cause idk how to create firejail profiles,
## so skipped. but i think it's powerful though.
~ $ firejail --private=$HOME/beeper --noprofile beeper

and it works!

but then i saw a guy in a HN thread doing HOME=$HOME/beeper beeper.
and it worked.
i mean, this ain’t about sandboxing, just fooling the application.
but a friend in GLI told me it’ll only work if that application followed the XDG specifications or sth.

well, nice.

maybe flatpak is a better option.
but meh.

"animal" - thoughts.

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

warning: spoilers.

finally watched animal.

some people adore it. they blindly worship the main character. they resonate with him, and they want to be like him. be a badass like him. fight like him. treat women the way he treats them. they think women should be subservient, but now society has become a mess because women finally have the opportunity to work and be free. women no longer “need” men, they say, and it’s destroying the very fabric of society. we need to get back to the “good old times” when women used to stay at home, and feed kids, and ask the husband for money, like a “good wife”. uhh…

another group of people hate the movie. they label it offensive, misogynistic, and everything. they call for banning such movies, because “ban alcohol and nobody would drink!”. they say women are expected to be subservient and forgive every single time, and the whole reason is the patriarchy and it must be dismantled. power must be wielded by women, because “look at the mess men have created! we will do a better job than them.” not accounting for psychological conditions, merely attaching merit to gender, and lumping all men into one group is not a good idea either.

what i understood from movies like these is: it’s a portrayal of how trauma and unresolved issues can destroy lives and relationships.

you see how generations passing down hatred is detrimental. you see how trauma can have a destructive impact on the self. you see how a father’s misunderstanding and ill-treatment of the child can skew the father-son dynamic, and leave the son clamoring for his father’s love. you see how dysfunctional families end up in chaos. you see how trauma leads women to stick to toxic circumstances and create a dependency on their oppressors, even though they want out. you see how infidelity denigrates the sanctity of marriage, reduces the individual to a mere accessory, and destroys respect and trust, no matter how much one justifies it. you see how unresolved issues can lead to rage and destruction.

moviemakers are not preachers. you can’t expect them to pause the movie in the middle of the scene and show a text box saying “look guys, how this father is treating his son, and how it messes him up. don’t be like anil kapoor’s character.” that’s for you to understand.

but i agree that people laud and try to mimic the cautionary tales portrayed in cinema and TV. everyone loves walter white’s “i am the danger” edits, but i guess nobody remembers how messed up his family became and how it all went down. everyone remembers how michael corleone killed all the key leaders of the five families during his nephew’s baptism and thought it was the rise of the new don, but i guess nobody remembers how absolutely F-ed up the family became: connie, fredo, michael, kay, mary, santino, vincenzo, just to name a few. every “sigma” wannabe kid worships patrick bateman, but fails to realize that’s the guy you should not become.

to be honest, i don’t have a solution to this.

btw, i gotta say, i never knew rashmika could act this well. i mean, that scene where she has a conversation with ranbir’s character, oh my God. so much depth, and, idk man, i’m no expert, but her performance beats diane keaton’s (kay adams) in the godfather part ii. i used to dislike her, and i think it’s because every other director used her as a mere eyecandy.

"nadikar" - thoughts.

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

warning: spoilers ahead.

watched nadikar. and i didn’t watch any reviews or roasts of the movie. i don’t want to be influenced by others’ opinions. i’d like to formulate my own opinion.

i like the movie.

for those of you who have no idea, the movie is about the story of a very famous yet rude and arrogant superstar named david padikkal and his gradual transformation. while it’s easy to dismiss him as just a rude and arrogant guy without understanding him, i think there’s a reason he became who he is.

i am analysing the movie based on the internal family systems approach, created by richard schwartz, so a lot of the IFS related terms are mentioned.

he was abandoned by his mother as a child. the feeling of betrayal, loneliness and the loss of love had resulted in a trauma in david’s mind. he eventually became a very successful superstar, who is loved by many, but the abandoned inner child who thinks he’s worthless remained inside. and his protector parts, in their limited sense of the world, did what they can to make him happy - they introduced him to alcohol, drugs and sex.

those protectors thought these elements would keep david happy, and keep him from accessing the inner child. and the protectors exiled the inner child who they thought was causing david a lot of pain. but the decisions taken by protectors thinking it’s good aren’t good in most cases, because the protectors themselves are burdened by hurt and fears, plus the Self hasn’t yet emerged from within the individual.

with that said, i expected the movie to be a bit more deep, because the subject deserved it. and in my opinion, all the cussing and the random stuff could have been avoided. the traumatic memories of david, inserted in different parts, felt like it was more of an afterthought. i personally think certain movie sequences could have been completely avoided, and the movie could have given more emphasis on the psyche of david padikkal.

there was this part where david opens up to a random stranger. well, it seemed kinda weird when he opened up to a stranger, but hey, i can’t say that because i have discovered a lot of friends in strangers. but the way that guy responded, downplaying david’s trauma as some sentimental sad crybaby stuff and equating it to his rejection, and telling david some cheap advice like “set aav bro, power aav” really irked me. and the worst part was david was somehow okay with it.

the movie was “unbearable” in the sense that 60% of the movie is david padikkal faltering, being rude and arrogant towards people, and that was bothering me. but later i learnt that it was a part of me who was becoming frantic because “why won’t the guy just get his act together”. we all have that part, that inner critic who tries to blame yourself, and force yourself to be perfect or whatever. but is that the way to betterment? no. that was more of a reflection of my mind more than the movie.

that is to say, you treat others the way you treat yourself. love and compassion comes from within.

and the “movie scenes” inside the movie looked kinda weird, but maybe that’s the whole point. maybe the team made them look outlandish so as to create a contrast between the “real world” and the “movie”.

and soubin’s character might be a good acting coach, but he seems disoriented at times. i dunno.

and i saw a lot of people hated the climax, but i actually loved it a lot. i’ll let you know why.

in the climax, david padikkal was to enact a scene in which his character talks to his father, who he is meeting for the first time in his life. similar to david, the character was abandoned by his parent. his character feels the rage, the pain and the sadness, as david does. but while he enacts the scene, within david, there’s an internal conversation going on.

it is that he finally is able to let the hurt inner child have a conversation with his mother. if the exiled inner child is able to finally talk, that must mean the protectors have finally found trust in david, and so they let their guards down and let the exiled part come out. you can see the effect of the protectors leaving their dysfunctional roles when david talks to people very calmly and joyfully, when he does things for others, when he goes out of his way to apologize to people. and finally the inner child is able to find closure and heal.

of course, all of what i said is not evident, but in the light of IFS, i would like to interpret the movie as such.

after watching the movie, i was very impressed with it, and i looked its reviews up on youtube, only to find the most shallow and ragebait-y takes. constructive criticism is always welcome, but this is something else: pure degradation. zero analysis. just cherrypicking and mocking. i think they have some agenda or something.

people in the comment boxes are something else: it’s as if they’re trying to find faults in everything, and it’s as if they want to see everyone fail. they criticize everything mindlessly. i guess they have very unhappy lives.

here’s one thing i learnt: don’t listen to youtube reviewers and roasters. don’t watch their videos. if you wanna know if a movie is good or not, then watch the movie, formulate your own opinion. use your brain. don’t outsource your thinking capabilities to anyone else.

tiling WMs.

Tue, 12 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i think i got used to the tiling window manager paradigm with i3. but i never liked i3 that much. somehow, i heard of herbstluftwm and i switched.

i loved herbstluftwm. i had to create horizontal or vertical splits manually, and then spawn windows, it was nice. but eventually i got bored. and that’s when i switched to bspwm.

bspwm was very nice. i didn’t have to create splits manually, and i stopped spawning more than two windows max, side-by-side. three was when it was absolutely necessary. and i think i got introduced to monocle mode in bspwm.

i briefly switched to sway, but came back to bspwm.

but at one moment, i realized i had been wasting my time editing rofi and polybar configs all day. so i had to switch to something else.

and there it was, KDE Plasma.

plasma was hella confusing at first, it was so overwhelming. it had a gazillion options, and it kinda is a mess to be honest. i just got used to it. but i love it. plasma is so nice.

back in plasma 5, i used kwin-bismuth for tiling. when plasma 6 was released, bismuth broke. so i had to look for alternatives. i tried krohnkite, and it was working till now, but recently when krohnkite was enabled, the windows would start flickering so bad, i had to turn it off. and polonium crashes the kwin session at startup.

so right now i just set all windows to maximized, use alt-tab to switch between maximized windows in the same workspace/virtual desktop. and i use virtual desktops all the time.

alt-q to close the window, alt-g to toggle the window between maximized and centered. alt-{1..8} to switch between virtual desktops.

on the off chance, if i need two windows side by side, i do it the traditional way: super+left/right.

tried to switch to cinnamon and xfce, but plasma is just too good. gonna stick to it.

the kid and love.

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i was talking to this kid.
apparently, he has a crush on some girl.
he likes her a lot.
but no matter how much he tries to connect to her,
she’s like, “yeah, okay.”
on the other hand, she talks to other boys in a cutesy/friendly way.
and it bothers him.
he’s very sad.

i asked him how this whole thing makes him feel.
he told me he feels worthless,
that nobody loves him.
(it affirms his past thoughts of himself.)

i asked him, “what would be a potential solution?”
he thought he could love her more.

“okay”, i said.
“so imagine you’re loving her more.
you’re trying to make it more evident that you like her.
you draw her, you sing songs for her, you do everything.
yet she treats you the same way.
or even worse, she might distance herself from you.
now what?”

frown in his face.
he said, “well, i’ll be alone,
i’ll be sad for a long, long time.
and i think i’ll stay that way.”

i asked, “well, it might sound easy,
but living through pain is actually very, very hard, you know.
plus don’t you want to be happy?
what would you do then?”

he answered, “well, then i will talk to my friends.
right now, i have you, i think i can trust you.
and this priest, he treats me very nicely, he makes me happy.
he is a good person.
i’ll talk to you guys, and you’ll make me happy.”

i said, “well, sounds good.
but what if, just what if, the priest gets a transfer to this new parish,
and whenever you try to call him, he’s very busy,
and you can’t blame him for not giving you time, because he’s very very busy.
and i die. uh, so, you can’t talk to me anymore.
so yeah, you lost your friends: the priest and i.
you have no one to talk to.
what would you do now?”

he became even sadder, as he imagined the plight.
“well, i’ll sit at the church all day.
i’ll pray to God.”

me: “what are you gonna pray about?”

him: “i’ll pray to God to fix the problems i have and face.”

me: “What if nothing changes?
What if things are the same?
What would you do then?”

him: “I will be pissed off at God.
because He won’t listen to me, or fix my problems.
I will stop going to church.”

me: “well, think from God’s point of view.
God certainly might not make her fall in love with you, because
what if that girl is destined for something else?
And He might not bring the priest back, because
what if the people at the new parish need ?
and He won’t bring me back from the dead,
because what if my time is up?
Are you sure God will do it, even if he can do all these things?”

he’s like “uhmm… yeah”.

“and let’s go back to the start.
her treating you the way she does
makes you feel more and more worthless, you say.
you think all your problems will be solved
and you’ll have peace
once she starts loving you?
no, brother, that’s not how any of this works.”

“thinking that a girl is the solution to all your problems is rookie thinking.
i did that. multiple times. it never works.
you solve your problems.
but for that, you have to look into yourself,
love yourself, create a sense of peace within yourself.
no amount of possessions, bikes, cars, money, girls, muscles
would make you feel content and happy.
it’s all in your mind.”

i don’t think he understood anything,
but he will, eventually.
and it’s not like i have figured everything out or whatever.
i’m still learning.

where is the empathy?

Sat, 09 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i was recently looking into the tea app issue. this blog is not to ramble on the
technical aspects of the so-called “hack”, but about how it was received by the
community.

i saw a lot of memes saying how an app made to doxx men has in turned doxxed the same women who do it. “ha! they deserved it!”, exclaimed some men. i even saw a 4chan post with the leaked pictures of women from the app with the caption “these are the women who call you an incel”. if you haven’t seen that post, it’s that some of these women look “miserable and fat and ugly”, at least according to them. i do not share their opinion.

but i am not oblivious to the opposite side. there might have been instances of men’s lives ruined by slander.

i am not taking sides, i am simply assessing them.

we live in a society where sarpanch patis and water wives exist. we also live in a society where men are falsely accused of domestic violence and rape. one being true doesn’t make the other false. both are true. anyone trying to focus only on a single aspect either doesn’t know, or is ignorant or has ulterior motives.

back to the point.

but what is sad is, people are very quick to create opinions and make remarks about people and stuff without a second thought. tom cruise is a scientologist and had issues with katie holmes? tom cruise bad. tom hanks supported democrats? tom hanks bad. will smith did whatever he did? will smith bad. kanye west? bad. elon musk? bad. jordan peterson? bad. destiny? bad. don lemon? bad. ben shapiro? bad. kamala harris? bad.

i mean, a person is so much more than their opinion or their actions. there are nuances and layers to a person.

where is the empathy?
what happened to listening to the other person?
what happened to putting ourselves in their shoes?
what happened to being friends despite having differences of opinion?

rather than fighting over differences and resorting to labeling and alienating each other, i think what we should do first is listen to each other, with an open heart.

but it’s hard. i know. but we should be able to. to be kind to ourselves and others.

how my metal addiction went away.

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

uhh, yeah, metal, rock, punk rock, alt rock, thrash metal, metalcore - you know what? i’ll just call it all ‘metal’.

to say i liked metal was an understatement. i lived metal. i breathed metal.
it was as if i couldn’t live without it.

if i wanna clean the plates in the sink, i gotta listen to metal.
sweep? metal.
workout? metal.
relax? metal.

if i couldn’t listen to metal while working out,
then there’s no workout.
period.

but recently, i never felt the need to listen to loud music.
it’s surprising to me, because i have always relied on it.
but first, a bit of history:

i listened to my first linkin park song back in 2012.
i had this folder of music my friend gave me,
but i only listened to pitbull, usher and the likes.
there was an MP3 of “crawling” from linkin park’s “hybrid theory” album,
but i didn’t bother opening it.
i found the artwork too grim and depressing,
unlike pitbull’s “planet pit”,
which was red, and his face was on a woman’s upper body,
and her breasts were his sunglasses.
and i found it kinda funny.
you guys can look it up, i ain’t gonna put it up here lmao.

anyway, so one day, i was playing total overdose on my computer,
and my friend joined.
he selected all the music, added it to a playlist and shuffled.
(back then, i didn’t know it was possible.)

windows media player played some pop songs at first,
but then it played “crawling”.
and i was like, wait, this is good.
i don’t know about the lyrics, it’s just the scream and the brutal sounds.
it just made sense to me.

after my friend left,
i had to sift through all the songs in the folder
to find out the song i heard.
and i found it out.

i remember listening to crawling non-stop,
until i wanted more.
i knew linkin park was some kind of a band.

my father had a micromax back then,
and there was this app called mobogenie.
i don’t know if that still exists.
i don’t know why i even used it.
one could download apps, images, music, video - everything from it.

i searched for “linkin park”,
and a lot of songs came up.
but they were all 8 to 10 megabytes of size.
my father had an internet pack of 1 gb per month,
so i better be careful.

i found a song that was 3 megabytes.
that was “castle of glass” - my second linkin park song.

over the years, i accumulated a lot of linkin park music.
listened to all the albums multiple times,
listened to their xero songs, the community EPs or whatever they’re called.
everything.

but i was unknowingly creating a dependency.
something i would rely on for years to come, for better or worse.

well, i loved the sounds,
but i loved linkin park even more when i started to take notice of the lyrics.
for some reason, i found the lyrics very relatable and enjoyable.

for example, here are some lines from ‘papercut’ by linkin park:

but i know just what it feels like
to have a voice in the back of my head
like a face that i hold inside
a face that awakes when i close my eyes
a face that watches every time i lie
a face that laughs every time i fall

‘crawling’ by linkin park:

there’s something inside me that pulls beneath the surface
consuming confusing
this lack of self-control i fear is never ending
controlling i can’t seem

‘chelsea smile’ by bring me the horizon:

it sits in silence, eats away at me.
it feeds like cancer. this guilt could fill a fucking sea.
pulling teeth, wolves at my door.
now falling and failing is all i know.
…
the only thing i really know: i can’t sleep at night.
i’m buried and breathing in regret.

‘drifter’ by wolves at at the gate:

there’s nothing left i’m done with all this pain!
i’m yours to save so help me find my way
fall below and drift out of line
drifting away, i’m yours to save

these are just a few examples.
i have more, but not planning to paste it all here.

for some reason, i resonated very much with these lyrics.
these songs became my refuge.
it was as if someone was talking directly to me.
and sure there were a lot of people who felt the same as me.

but, it was after i was introduced by my friend to internal family systems
i came to learn about subpersonalities,
burdens, exiles, protectors, healing etc.
i know, i just threw a lot of words, but bear with me.

so, subpersonalities or simply, “parts”, when in pain,
make us do certain things they feel are helpful to us,
in order to ease the pain.
but since parts have a limited worldview
and are burdened or shoved into roles they’re not fond of,
what they think is helpful might be unhelpful at best
and destructive at worst. (eg. addiction, self-hurt)

unfortunately, most of us are parts-led, including myself,
and what we think of us,
our interests and hobbies,
might not be what we really are.
it might be what our burdened parts like.

at least that’s what i learnt when i started doing IFS.
after a few months, i realized that
i haven’t felt like listening to metal in a long while.

i tried to listen to some tracks,
and while i enjoyed some,
when it came to others, i was like
“damn that sounds too harsh”.
and i was surprised, because i never felt that way about that song.

after this happened,
i was able to workout while listening to tchaikovsky lmao.
my gymbros would see me wearing headphones while working out,
and they’d snatch it and wear it,
only to listen to stuff like deadmau5’s where’s the drop or waltz of the flowers .

but again, i have barely scratched the surface.
and i still have problems.
but the core of IFS is to have compassion towards yourself.
and from that inner peace and love,
you love others around you more completely.

if you’d like to learn about internal family systems,
i’d recommend reading the book “no bad parts” .

the joy of RSS.

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE: this is about Really Simple Syndication/Rich Site Summary, not Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. ;)

i have always tuned into RSS on and off, but since i was using it to consume news, it wouldn’t work. if i recall correctly, all these news websites (eg. the indian express, the hindu) all have RSS feeds, but either they are broken, or they’re just links to their ad-filled page. or just a summary. so i thought RSS as a thing is broken.

but recently, i have gained an interest in reading blogs by people - regular people, who share what they find interesting. and reading them feels good. there’s no ulterior motive behind it. nobody is trying to sell you something, and the blog comes from the love and joy of writing. i just love it.

i have been using feedflow and it’s a good one. initially i wanted to read blogs in the “native” way, but then i thought webviews are fine, because the author designed the website in a way that he/she feels is nice, and i have no complaints.

as for pc, i tried out gnome’s newsflash, but i am not a fan of the UI and the colorscheme. i don’t like it at all.

btw, some blogs i like:

whisper-cpp.

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 19:00:00 +0000

my brother and i help with my brother’s youtube channel chocoresh .
he does the video stuff, lighting, editing and all.
for now, i just do the subtitling.

i used to use kdenlive’s speech recognition feature that uses vosk under the hood.
now they have also added support for whisper, but it’s the python one.
it needs torch, numba and some stuff like that - i have no idea.
so anyway, it errored out.
it said it required python versions between 3.9-3.13.
but i have 3.13.5.
i mean, bruh.

installed whisper-cpp from chaotic-AUR.
got base.en GGML model from huggingface.

stripped the audio from the video file:

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -an audio.mp3

ran this command:

whisper-cli -m ggml-base.en.bin\
	--max-context 8 -et 2.8\
	-osrt -f audio.mp3

there’s now an audio.mp3.srt in the current directory.

base.en was pretty fast for my intel core i3.
and output is so much better than vosk.

well, on second glance, i still have to work on the subtitle.
and i don’t blame whisper.cpp.
it’s that the model gets confused when two people speak at the same time,
and accents can be hard to interpret, even for humans, so.
but it did a good job.

thank you, whisper-cpp devs.

my current blog "setup".

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 08:00:00 +0000

static site generator: hugo #

well, i use hugo with the typo theme.
i initially wanted to make my own theme, so i yanked eric murphy’s starter theme .
but then i realized i don’t want to make a whole new theme,
figure everything out,
so i found typo and stuck with it.
i just wanna get started with writing.

i’m using github pages.
since i’m using hugo, i looked up ways to host a hugo website in github pages.
and all these blogs have stuff about YAMLs and github actions
and workflows and stuff.
and i was like, nah, man, i don’t wanna do this stuff.

then i figured out github pages can fetch the website files
either from the root (/) of the repository or from the docs directory.
so now i just do this:

# zoxide shortcut to go the repository, or just cd
z blog

# hugo command to serve the website locally
# for editing and previewing
hugo serve

# hugo command to build
# you could lose the '-d docs' part by
# setting publishDir to 'docs' in hugo.toml
hugo build --minify -d docs --buildFuture -e production

a mistake i did is,
i pushed the hugo serve output directly into production,
and the rss.xml had http://localhost:1313 as the baseURL.
therefore, learnt to use hugo build separately.
(i used to do it before, but i just forgot about it.)

and then just do the git stuff: adding, committing, pushing.
no need of workflows and stuff.
one less thing to take care of.

notetaking application #

i use obsidian to write my notes.
i would like to switch, cause electron.

i tried to find another editor that is nice and simple
and has vim keybindings.
tried other stuff: kwrite, daino notes, ghostwriter, all that.
none of em click.

and writing in neovim with a mono font doesn’t cut it anymore.

so i’m using obsidian.
but gotta say, obsidian is pretty comfy.
using it with gitlab sans typeface and mono-black theme.
i use this combo in every vault of mine.

custom domain #

as for the custom domain, i had this issue where i’d set the custom domain in github repo settings and it’d be working, until i delete the docs/ directory and generate a new one. but then when i’m about to push, i have some git conflict, and i’ll run a git pull and push. but the custom domain would stop working.

turns out, i have to have a file named CNAME with the custom domain inside docs/. so i dropped a CNAME into static/ so when i run hugo build, it’d just drop the file into docs/.

custom domain.

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

theophinetheodore.xyz .

thank you brother!
you are the best.

having a custom domain is cool, i guess.
don’t have to be tied to the github pages domain,
and github pages in general.
even though i use it now.

nothing more to add.

fight.

Tue, 29 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

everyone tells you:
fight your laziness.
fight your lethargy.
fight your despair.
fight your rage.
fight your lack of focus.
fight everything you see as a threat.

but here’s another approach:
befriend your laziness.
befriend your lethargy.
befriend your despair.
befriend your rage.
befriend your lack of focus.
befriend everything you see as a threat.

your emotions are not irrational.
if you do something, it has been done for a reason.
rather than fight against yourself
and treat yourself like an enemy,
befriend yourself.
try to understand yourself.
listen to what your parts within you have to say.
soothe them, care for them.
thank them for what they do.
lovingly tell them it could be done better.
if they falter, help them get back up.
treat them with love and respect.

maybe some of you might be thinking:
what is this sissy horses***?

well, if me from 2022 reads this, i’m pretty sure he’d call this “gay”.

but trust me, i have been there.

the egolifting, the abuse,
the rage-driven squats & bench presses,
(often with poor form, i admit)
burying emotions to “strengthen” yourself,
(that causes more problems)
reading “Can’t Hurt Me” by David Goggins,
(nice book though, minus the advice)
listening to everything from the manosphere,
(no hatred towards them though)
and thinking therapy is a sad excuse.
(even though people have used their trauma as an excuse and not use that knowledge for healing themselves but demand good treatment and no responsibilities from others, and thus make a mockery out of it.)

but i’m no saint, i’m no preacher.
i have my faults.
i am working through it, yet i keep my hope in the Lord.

what my mentor told me about relationships... and then i derail.

Mon, 28 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

a relationship truly begins when both the man and the woman are completely unburdened and healed and then choose each other with all their heart.

what we like, what we don’t, what we’re scared of - all can be affected by what our parts in us think.

perhaps what we find beautiful and attractive right now, in our burdened states, is not what we’d really like if we were guided by the Self.

a relationship has its struggles, and issues that arise from our inner burdens and our hurt parts. but merely telling each other we’re worth it and the like will not solve the problem. merely fighting over it or blaming each other too won’t cut it.

being kind and compassionate to ourselves and each other, and slowly healing ourselves is the way. and then when we are completely healed, we understand what we really want, and we choose each other - or not.

and this requires a lot of patience as well.
as you get to know a person more and more,
as the novelty fades away,
the scars become evident.

sure, all this sounds simple. but it’s not easy.
i too have run away from myself, buried my anguishes, hurt myself, filled myself with rage, told myself it’s normal, it is what it is, lashed out at myself, blamed others - but it takes a lot to confront yourselves and admit to yourselves about what you’ve done.

but don’t blame yourself.
the destructive things you might have done, it’s not because you’re evil. your parts who have a limited worldview and vision thought it’s best for you. they’re trying to help you out. acknowledge them, thank them for what they do to us. and ask them why they do so. listen to them open up. and lovingly tell them it’s not the way to do things, and let them heal.

again, easier said than done.
it takes a lot of courage.
and a whole lot of compassion.

well, i don’t expect anyone to understand all this in one go.
it took me two years just to unlearn what i had learnt and learn the fundamentals. i used to think strength was all about muscles and possessions and money and being cocky and rude. i used to watch “reject modernity, embrace masculinity” videos all the time - again, no hate to anyone, but hating on others and worshipping superficial versions of “masculinity” like fictional superheroes and steroid junkies is not strength.

i am no saint.
i have done things i’m not proud of.
i could tell myself i would have done things differently
if i were given a second chance,
but, i don’t know.
but i do have hope.
and i do feel His mercy, even though at times i seem to forget about it.

my wayland situation.

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

pros of wayland (for me) #

pinch-to-zoom works in chromium based browsers.
waydroid.
- tried doing it in xorg with cage and weston, won’t recommend
touchpad gestures work.
- i don’t have any use for it though
things are smoother and brighter? or am i imagining?

wayland “showstoppers” for me, personally #

~~gtk4 applications freeze the whole KDE Plasma desktop for some reason?~~ (solved now ig)
~~can’t paste images in clipboard into chat applications.~~ (works now ig)
~~panels appear stacked on top of each other instead of left, right, center.~~ (fixed)
gramps crashes.
maim doesn’t work. (i need a screenshot tool that returns something other than 0 if it’s cancelled, and everything else - flameshot, spectacle returns 0 even if cancelled).
grim doesn’t work in kwin-wayland, because some wlr unstable protocol lacking. (not wlroots’ fault, but a hundred implementations exist).
- and who names these tools? i mean, grim, slurp, scrot… oh my God.
issues with anydesk and rustdesk.
no simplescreenrecorder :(
- well, not a wayland issue, but SSR is just too good
i can’t use blobdrop normally.
- i might have to switch to a wayland-supported tool, if it exists.
obs-zoom-to-mouse.lua doesn’t work in the intended way.
- ideally it should follow the mouse cursor and zoom into the portion where the cursor is currently situated. but in wayland, it just zooms into the center of the screen. maybe there’s a script written with wayland in mind, idk.

silence.

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i was at my brother’s place.
we were having food, chatting, joking about random things and stuff.
and then, all of a sudden, we all fell silent.

and that’s when my brother’s filipina wife said,
in the philippines, when a group of people
who were talking suddenly fall silent,
they say it’s because an angel just passed by.

i think it’s interesting.

my 2-min hyprland adventure.

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

well, i have used hyprland and sway in the past for a few weeks, i guess.

but well, with DHH’s omarchy and pewdiepie’s hyprland setup,
among with many other rices,
let’s say it got me intrigued.

to be honest, i do not care much about the rest,
but I remember seeing a hyprland rice with custom window decorations,
and that was actually wonderful.
i have tried to create a window decoration for KDE plasma,
but it turned out to be quite inflexible.

and quickshell seems pretty interesting,
even though i could use it with KDE plasma, if i wanted to.

but yeah.
i thought about giving it a try.

by the way, the title is a based on a lie -
i messed around with hyprland for like 20 minutes or so.

at first, it was okay.
the config file is pretty straightforward.
alt + enter opens konsole, (konsole is pretty good)
alt + w opens dolphin,
alt + q closes the active window.
yeah, pretty easy.

i swap my control and capslock keys,
and being able to configure it within the hyprland config was pretty nice.
if it were a typical xorg window manager, i’d have to do something else.
well, one less config file to store.

i didn’t immediately dive into the bling parts.
i thought it can wait for later.
plus, i don’t feel like spending too much time customizing everything, so.

but then i noticed that my laptop monitor was on.
(i have an external monitor plugged in.)
so i disabled the laptop screen in the config, and yeah, good.
i never expected it to work, but i thought,
well, maybe the hyprland guys programmed it so that
if i disconnect the HDMI, the laptop would be back on.
or there would be some config that would enable it.
and, i was wrong, to nobody’s surprise.

well, i thought some simple configuration would exist,
and i looked it up.
i saw a bunch of hacks:
bash scripts, hyprctl, IPC stuff, systemd services,
and there was something called kanshi or something.
and i was like, nah, man…

enter flashbacks.
bspwm/herbstluftwm config,
endless editing of rofi configs,
polybar breaking the whole Xorg session everytime it updates,
writing runit services by hand.
ah no.
i really, really don’t wanna go there.

hyprland’s ram usage was like 1.2 gigs or something.
at least in my pc.
but if i were to add a panel, notification system,
scripts and all that,
i would end up with ram usage of KDE plasma,
which is like 1.6 gigs at idle.
and KDE plasma does so much more.
so it’s not worth an effort anyway.

one could say KDE plasma made me lazy?
but i’d say KDE is as comfy as home.

TIL hardwrap.

Sun, 20 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

i have this writing style of
breaking stuff into lines.
i don’t do paragraphs.
i like it this way.

but that means i have to run this after i complete writing something:

:%s:$: :g

that’s two spaces.
basically what it does is, add two spaces to the end of every line.

i think markdown requires either two spaces,
or a backslash,
or a <br>.

but today i came across this thing called hardwraps.

in your hugo.toml file, add this:

[markup]
 [markup.goldmark]
 [markup.goldmark.renderer]
 hardWraps = true

and no need of hacks anymore.
i could just write in obsidian and hit :w.

"batman begins" - thoughts.

Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

revisited “batman begins” after a years.
was a kid when i watched it.

even since the death of his parents,
young bruce puts the blame on himself.
the thought germinated in his mind as a kid,
and he clung onto it as he grew.
he still bears the guilt.

and what he did was bury the guilt with anger.
“my anger outweighs my guilt”, he says.
but ra’s al ghul tells him he’ll teach bruce to
overcome his guilt by confronting it.

well, the rest of what happens isn’t that noteworthy in my opinion,
cause ra’s just shifts the blame onto thomas wayne,
because he didn’t act.

why i noticed this is because,
whenever we go through tough situations,
what we tend to do is we bury it.
we are told to “shrug it off”, “deal with it”, “quit being a sock”.
it’s something normal.
and we pretend like it’s nothing.

we know the scars haven’t healed,
and they still are there.
but we gotta keep moving.
everyone knows we should deal with it,
but we don’t know how.

so we distract ourselves with stuff.
numb ourselves with media.
adopt questionable coping methods
that seem like it’s working,
but introduce more hurt in the long term.
we resort to anger and hatred.

on the surface,
it seems like everything’s okay.
no problems at sight.
so we go on living our life.
until one day, a slight reminder in the form of a remark,
a bruising memory, an image -
and then it all comes crashing down.

in this fast-paced world,
no one can be left behind.
so we keep on running.
running to new goals.
and running away from ourselves.

but is running away and distracting yourself
the answer?
or is being compassionate to yourself,
owning up to your doings,
yet treating yourself kindly, without bashing yourself,
and befriending yourself
the way?

i’m no expert.
i too have problems following my own advice.
but i have renounced the old ways of being hard on myself.
compassion must start from ourselves.

"gender politics."

Wed, 16 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

NOTE:
my intention is not to blindly criticize anyone.
we are all humans, the children of God,
and we are all made in the image and likeness of God.
we all deserve good in our lives,
yet we are tormented by our internal and external burdens.
but we should seek to heal ourselves,
and treat each other with compassion.
i believe it’s possible.

my analysis might be wrong,
but as i engaged in online discourse,
i could see two types of people.
and as far as online discussions go,
the most vocal, heated and extreme viewpoints are shared.

on the extreme left of the spectrum lies the
misandrists who call themselves ‘feminists’.
they’re a minority within the feminist community, but a loud one.
it seems as if they have had horrible experiences from men,
and so they express their hatred in different ways.
saying things like they don’t need men to have babies
cause of bone marrow something something.
and similar opinions.
(i don’t claim to be an expert in this field.)

and on the other end lies the manosphere.
incels, MGTOW, the self-proclaimed “sigma males” and “alpha males”.
they too seem to have had bad experiences from some women.
and they too share extreme views.

but something i found weird yet interesting is,
as the both of them go to the most extremes,
their stances seem to converge.
“why marry? marriage is a trap.”
“be promiscuous.”
“the other sex is evil, they don’t deserve respect.”
“don’t marry and don’t have children.”

but this sort of narrowed and poisonous thinking
has crept into mainstream discourse, too,
mainly fueled by social media and channels like Jubilee.

but let me tell you:
anyone who tries to turn men and women against each other
has ulterior motives.
when men and women can be turned against each other,
it’s easier to assort us into two factions,
and fill our minds with ideologies that suit their agenda.

i don’t mean to bash on any groups.
both the feminists and the manosphere state facts.
we live in a society where women are stuck in homes,
and are not allowed access to education.
but at the same time,
men have been framed as bad actors and disregarded.

there is no single truth.
all these exist in the same world.

men and women shouldn’t compete with each other.
men and women are made to complement each other.
from the unity of a man and woman comes something beautiful.

let us not allow our burdens and the hurt we endured
to dictate our life and relationships.
let us heal, and rise above it.
let us all be friends.
let’s work together.

the psalm of gratitude.

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

everyday feels like a gift from the Lord.
my only qualm is, i do not make much use of it.
yet, every single day feels different.

i thought they were joking when they said that
the love of the Lord is different every day.
now i experience it.

He saves me from every trouble,
He feeds me,
He protects me.

i used to clamor for help,
i used to ask God,
“God help me, fix this issue of mine.”
but i think i downgraded God to a mere miracle-worker,
who would press some buttons and
(trying not to say “bada bing bada boom”)
hey, issue resolved.

but, what He actually did was
teach me the tools to fix the issue.

i cannot believe
how God can forgive and love me
despite me faltering multiple times.

that is not to say
i have this very perfect life.
i have my burdens,
and i have hurt others,
and i don’t mean to justify my actions.