2025.05.15
Back in 2017 I started writing what would eventually become a short story about how and why I ended up using the command line almost exclusively. The idea was to build a whole website for such content, and for six years it was only a few short chapters with nowhere to put it. In the excitement of launching my own Gemini capsule in 2023, the story was promptly “finished” and then posted for all to see…
…but it was shit.
I’d disappeared on a bike tour that summer and felt like a failure because I’d gotten stuck in a strange city for a couple of months and needed to be rescued. When I got back it seemed like a good idea to start writing again, and at that time the story hadn’t been published yet. I was in the middle of trying to sort out some issues with the Pi Zero W running NetBSD and somehow managed to dump a few thousand needless words into a bunch of files, talking about the Pi and the Udoo Bolt v8, and an entire “chapter” about Plan 9 which wasted most of the words talking about a failed project from three years prior and concluding with having tested Plan 9 for all of a few minutes before deciding it wasn’t right for me… Somehow it failed to sink in just how bad this story actually was, and how incoherent the entire second half turned out. A year and a half later, even I was struggling to figure out the timeline of it all!
There was no deadline by which to publish the story, there were no expectations from anyone, and yet I rushed to the end and threw the result into Gemini space without a second thought. I think on some level I was trying to compensate for the failed bike tour by taking an old project and actually finishing it, because I have a long history of coming up with ideas and in many cases taking steps to turn them into reality, only to abandon them or otherwise run into brick walls that cannot be passed by any means that I can think of. Rushing to the end is never a good idea, no matter what the project is. I have several pieces of handmade “furniture” which serve as constant reminders…
Since launching the new site I’ve been working on that story again, removing all of the superfluous content that served no other purpose than to inflate the word count to make it seem like I was achieving something. I’ve removed two whole “chapters”, reorganized and even cleaned up the remaining content to make it more coherent. It’s still not that great, but then I’m something of a perfectionist and could easily spend the rest of my life trying to refine the damn thing… At least now it might make more sense and even leads to an actual conclusion without going on a pointless tangent, so I think it’s time to just move on to other things.
It’s in the File Cabinet now, and while I’m still going to refine it a bit every now and again, you can read the current version here: