Now I can honestly say I survived a car crash!

Without a single bruise, at that. Although seriously, what were the odds of one taxi ramming into another?

I cannot stand questions like “How are you?” and “What’s up?” Please do not approach me with them. If you have no concrete topic to talk about, starting with a generic conversation-starter won’t score you points. Especially since you’re usually not interested in the real answer—namely, in hearing me rant about my recent problems, or on the contrary, singing praises detailing all the good happenings. You just expect to hear a stock non-answer. Hint: you won’t.

So, please, don’t do that.

Especially when I’m at work.

Because inviting me to type a two-paragraph-long summary of the events in my life for the past few days when my brain is full of Java code and Eclipse RCP documentation is beyond rude.

echo “127.0.0.1 linux.org.ru” | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts
echo “127.0.0.1 www.linux.org.ru” | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

It has come the whole way through, it seems. First I thought love didn’t exist (except as chemical reactions). Then I thought I was “too rational” to feel it (har har). Then I thought I would never find it, at least in the foreseeable future. Then oops.

Hazuki once said how she and Rachel got lucky to basically fall into each other’s arms. I guess the same happened here.

When Alice is not online, I often feel uneasy and tired, like I have nothing meaningful to do. And when she is, it’s enough to slide my mood-meter into the “happy” or even “ecstatic” zone, no matter how low on the scale it could have been before.

Once again: safe environments prepare for unsafe ones. Roleplayed relationships have prepared me to embrace a real one, where my 21-year-old self would feel utterly clueless. So weird… but in a good way.

I’m a visual person. My listening problems aside, I have difficulty processing walls of text if I can’t quickly scan out the key relevant information (which is how I usually read)—but show me one picture and I’ll spin a whole story out of it.

I’m getting quite surprised by my constant mood swings between “cold and snarky” and “warm and cuddly”.

“Which one is the real me?” I question myself.

Few things are as refreshing as looking at a vitriol-overloaded discussion about what to me seems like essentially a non-issue, smile, relax, and say, “They’re really taking it too seriously.”

Maia is walking through her FOSS participation—confident, triumphant. I’ve switched completely in Ubuntu, got a patch for AUTHORS merged into Arora, changed the name in two of my three Debian packages (the third is pending a cosmetic lintian-cleanliness upload), and I’m considering updating gtkpod as well.

Perhaps this is part of a psychological campaign to distance from my past self, and to give the new identity a semblance of reality. The more people know me as Maia, the more natural and right it feels.

Still, in the domain of abstract thoughts, I found myself musing over this line from my latest Debian upload for smplayer. When a sponsor pointed out that I used three different name-email pairs in the old package, new package, and RFS email (I since configured Maia to be my default sender name in Thunderbird and the Gmail web interface), I inserted this line into debian/changelog:

- Changed maintainer name (still the same person and GPG key).

That got me thinking: what am I to the Debian and Ubuntu developers, at large? What identity matters the most? Maia, sikon@ubuntu.com, launchpad.net/~sikon, or FB21C80A?

One of the points I’m going to make in That Twoform Story™ is how Internet patterns bleed into the real world there, and people start referring to each other by online nicknames, even in person. Some fellow Polymex users actually call me LucidFox in real life. But what if we went even further, and displaced conventional names by some kind of “hard” identity, like the aforementioned GPG keys?

…I need sleep.

If you wish—
I’ll rage on raw meat like a vandal
Or change into hues that the sunrise arouses,
If you wish—
I can be irreproachably gentle,
Not a man—but a cloud in trousers.

Vladimir Mayakovsky has always been my favorite poet—shame that non-Russian-speakers cannot read him in his own language—but reading about his life is draining. Feeling his identity void, complete loss of everything human about him over the years—reflecting even in his appearance.

What does he have in common with Ostap Bender, the Doctor, and Lelouch vi Britannia—fictional characters who have always clicked in me? They are natural leaders, unconventional, defying, standing out in every crowd, clever and knowing it—in fact, they think they’re even better than they are.

I was wondering if I was egoistic and self-centered—after all, this blog is 99% introspection and 1% Ubuntu and popular culture. But no, after one of the Hazuki conversations, I say it’s not really so. I put others before myself, and I’ve never consciously acted in my own interest at the cost of others. Still, I did note that I evaluate people by their similarity to myself—trying to identify with them and noting how many of my traits I can see in them.

Hazuki thinks the answer is loneliness. I seek interaction, and thus I would rather not waste my time on people I cannot relate to. I immediately noted how well it fits fictional characters as well: not wanting to waste my time on something that’s obviously not catered to me, I seek works of fiction featuring characters I can identify with. They don’t have to be the main character, mind; I can relate to Natsuki Kruger just fine in what’s essentially Arika Yumemiya’s story.

Mibbit actually turned out to be more nifty than I thought, since it has registration and autojoin settings (alongside the much-required option to disable graphical emoticons).

I should probably change the coloration of “Your name mentioned” tabs, though. It’s one of those dark shades of red that I have trouble discerning from brown. I don’t know what kind of partial color-blindness I have—none of the standard descriptions from Wikipedia fit exactly, although I fail the protanopia and partially (depending on monitor brightness settings) deuteranopia test. What I know is that I have trouble distinguishing between dark brown and dark red, as well as between light green and yellow.

Damn you, Y chromosome!

It’s February 23 in this timezone now. I guess it means I’m now 22.

I find it ironic that I was born on the day colloquially known as “men’s day”. Doubly ironic given that I was found unfit for the army, much to my delight.