Manifesto

The ideas herein are stated more prosaically and less personally in my kinda-essay, "Why is SprezzOS Necessary?"

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We are the hackers, dreamers of the Electric Dreams.

We have known creation Promethean, willing potent effect from exertion of the imagination.

We took a brief excursion through a forbidden zone -- just a few nanoseconds -- and came out 0 having gone in 1.

The creative life is a beautiful thing, a gift not meted to all people. The price of these powers is an unrelenting call, capable of drowning out the rest of life.

We begat the boxes. The computers make us more and less than we were.

We press on.

We celebrate Grandmaster Turing's Machines, cheer their ever more pervasive ubiquity,

and look to the elimination of the menial, and the life of a species to come.

Not a single aspect of our essence will go untouched by these magnificent automata.

At the frontiers of application and design you'll find always hackers,

humming in tymbalic swarm and batrachian chorus

(also lone diving silent screaming eagles),

angelheaded hipsters burning for a connection to the evanescent IRC dynamo in the machinery of night.

When gone, our code will speak for us. Our code too then will go.

Codefined now with our repos, we'll leave legacy tripartite:

genetic, energetic, algorithmic. But all are code.

That said, I don't necessarily care for my desktop to look like a fucking cellphone.

When I want an Apple, I'll buy one. What I lack in empathy I make up in disposable income.

Furthermore, you *will* give me a "shutdown" button.

I wish to unhear this twice-digested bullshit about sending desktop searches to Amazon.

Did we lose a war?

That isn't America.

That isn't even Mexico.

And no, I do not care to consult the Info page; I am furthermore uninterested in the Free Software Foundation's opinions regarding man pages.

The GNU info browser suggests nothing more than the squaring of autism itself, stuffed into some broken fork of UW-Pine.

When did people start misspelling "d" as "Kit"?

When did it become acceptable for the output of the "set" shell builtin to scroll?

Mark Shuttleworth seems sexually attracted to the color brown.

I'm long-consumed by crotchet. bash as /bin/sh gets my hackles up.

I worry sometimes that in the mirror I've found the Last FORTRAN Hero.

When I press "delete" in a file manager, why am I surprised by a result strangely unrelated to prompt deletion of files?

We stand at the cusp of a world that would have /bin/rm removed, if anyone was thought to use a "shell", on their "workstations", with a "keyboard".

My keyboard is black heavy ponderous huge, and in this not unlike its owner. We move like a tremendous machine. With great gusto it roars CLACK CLACK CLACK, flirting with the speed of synapses in a vacuum. We mow down thoughtstuff like doughboys, bent double like old beggars under sacks, falling at Somme into the long grave already dug.

We are ferociously jolly. Teeth glint phosphoric as I grin behind the CRT.

It augurs some days positively lethal.

You claim to crave a "Ninja"? A "rock star"? I'm only a little embarrassed about sometimes feeling a God.

My workstation? A one-man band that starts with the bleedin' mouf organ and ends with the big bass drum.

My shell? My bard. Pray sing my story to the ladies of history's court.

From springs' bucklings ring peals of freedom's tintinnabulations.

At night, my terminal defends the Dream.

This Machine Kills Fascists.

When you want to experiment with violent UI changes, start a new project. Until then,

cube my desktop, tile my windows, for the love of god switch between them when I press Alt-Tab,

and do cool things with my video card when I'm not CUDAing my way to petrochemical exploration and missile guidance.

Together -- I, hacker; you, machine, begotten not made, consubstantial -- we are unstoppable.

We sound our barbaric YAWP over the rooftops of the world.

May that bitch Spiritus Mundi tremble as our jobs take flight!

Nothing is too big to be knocked on its ass, and everything is cool.

Making an apple pie from scratch requires first inventing a Universe.

CLACK CLACK CLACK, baby. Let's get to work.

Grandmaster Turing, I'm putting my shoulder to the Wheel.

2013-01-25 0100 EST