The bandits poisoned every cup and slit my party's throats
Now I am drinking in the dark wearing my armor coats
I pour a tankard on the wood to bait the angry dead
The shadows gather in the room demanding to be fed

I don't need water from the shrine to wash your curses out
I only need the tavern ale and a familiar shout
I speak the jokes we used to tell before the bloody night
And drag your screaming twisted souls into the holy light

The iron binds the dwarven bone
I will not let you walk alone

So raise your glasses to the sky!
I came to watch my brothers die!
I break the chains that hold you here
I wash your phantom in the beer
Go find the halls of shining stone
I'll finish up 
This keg alone

I take a sip and close my eyes to hear your roaring laugh
An axe swings right behind my neck to cut my spine in half
I duck the blade and kick the chair, I know your heavy swing
I punch the ghost of my best friend and hear his armor ring

You always dropped your shielding arm when charging for the kill
I strike your spirit in the chest to break your evil will
You curse my name with rotting jaws and bare your phantom teeth
But I will send you to the forge and let you rest beneath

The iron binds the dwarven bone
I will not let you walk alone

So raise your glasses to the sky!
I came to watch my brothers die!
I break the chains that hold you here
I wash your phantom in the beer
Go find the halls of shining stone
I'll finish up 
This keg alone

The magic fades, the tavern clears, the shadows start to crack
I feel the tears upon my beard, but I won't pull you back
The Maker calls your weary names to sit beside the fire
I did the duty of the priest, I built the tavern pyre
My hammer aches, my knuckles bleed, my spirit starts to bend
But you are walking in the light, my brother and my friend
The silence hurts more than the blade, the victory is cold
But you are free to drink the mead from mugs of solid gold!

The iron binds the dwarven bone
I will not let you walk alone!

So raise your glasses to the sky!
I came to watch my brothers die!
I break the chains that hold you here!
I wash your phantom in the beer!
Go find the halls of shining stone
I'll finish up 
This keg alone

Plus the entire damn thing is rather ear wormy. As a whole, the lyrics fit that “Wherever you go, there you are” quip I learned from Buckaroo Banzai. I think perhaps as a culture, we put too little thought into philosophy in the modern era, but self-understanding has always been a fundamental concept to me. Knowing yourself is a key that unlocks a lot of mysteries, it’s certainly allowed me to like myself as a person far more than I ever was capable of before then.

I spent my winters in the grey
Just watching seasons slip away
I had a gift I could not name
A spark without a proper flame
The world was loud and I was small
I felt like nothing much at all

But then the clock began to chime
I stopped wasting all my time

Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!
Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!

I used to walk the background lines
And read the fading, dusty signs
They wanted blades and iron shields
To fight the terrors in the fields
But now my spark has found a way
To turn the night to golden day
The sun is bright, the air is sweet!
The path is open at my feet!

The fog is gone, the air is clear
I’ve finally conquered every fear

Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!
Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!

I walk with purpose in my stride
With nothing left for me to hide
I spent too long in hollow space
Just trying to find a solid place
Now every morning is a prize
With open hands and looking wise

The world can keep its epic tales
I’m the wind within my sails

Whoooaaa!
Whoooaaa!
Whoooaaa!
Whoooaaa!
Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!
Whoooaaa!
I’ve found the lock, I’ve found the key!
The world is opening for me!
I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!

I’m exactly who I meant to be!
The missing piece is finally me!

LYRICS : 
[Verse]

Scout bursts in with blood on his face,
“Tiny-ass room! It’s a damn crawlspace!
There’s twenty cultists packed wall to wall—
If we fight in there, we’ll ALL fall!”

Barbarian said, “Bro, I can barely swing,”
Paladin said, “I can’t channel a thing!”
Druid sniffed, “Smells like bat guano and doom,”
And the rogue muttered, “This feels like a tomb…”

The ranger squinted, “Hey, where’s the floor?”
The mage tripped and kicked in the door.
Everyone turned to him with dread...
And he just smirked and raised his head:

[Chorus]

 “I don't give a shit about how large is the room,
I cast Fireball, make it go boom!
I don’t give a damn if we’re tight in a hall,
'Cause Fireball solves it all!”

[Verse 2]

It was eight by eight—barely space to stand,
The mage was grinning, fireball in hand.
Rogue screamed “NO!”, the paladin said a prayer,
But we all knew death was already there.

“There's no ventilation!” the warlock cried,
“I’m under a table!” the ranger lied.
Druid yelled, “TURN BACK!” mid-bear shift,
But too late… fireball began to lift.

[Chorus]

 “I don't give a shit about how large is the room,
I cast Fireball, make it go boom!
I don’t give a damn if we’re tight in a hall,
'Cause Fireball solves it all!”

[Bridge]

The spell went off like a sun in a jar,
Our gear’s now soup, and our souls went far.
The rogue’s now ash, the tank’s just dust,
The druid’s bear form combusted—just.

Cleric’s bones are lightly toasted,
Dwarf’s beard is flame-roasted.
And the mage? Oh, he’s super dead—
But he laughed the whole time as his hat caught red.

[Chorus – Slower, Echoing Through the Flames]

 “I don't give a shit about how large is the room,
I cast Fireball, make it go boom!
I don’t give a damn if we’re tight in a hall,
'Cause Fireball solves it all…”

I’ve been trying to maintain a habit of taking about a 2 kilometer walk each day, and a morning exercise cycle. About a minute on / minute off working through a cycle of press ups, crunches, squats, and walking lunges. Relatively simple, and enough to be done during my intermittent fasting period without leaving me too ravenous by lunch.

In general, I found this rather tiring but not exhausting at the start. I’ve reached the point where my legs don’t feel quite so tired. So, that rather makes me feel a bit happier. Not entirely sure how well it will work out for my aim of getting a small calorie deficit going, but I figure it’s at least a healthy step in the right direction, lol.

The sentiment largely captures how I’ve always felt about the people I care about. It nails the concept, so perfectly. It doesn’t attach anything to it, it just expresses it, so beautifully for what it is.

There’s two quotes that I’ve kept filed away that I think summarize the emotion better than most. The line in Fool’s Rush In where Isabel tells Alex that “Love is a gift not an obligation,” and part of the Celestine Chronicles where Terrance Mack concludes, “Love is to want for the happiness of another.” At the most elemental level, both quotes capture what love is without giving some kind of a type or meaning to it, and that’s oh so rare in my experience.

Over the years, I just haven’t found better ways to describe the concept. I do suppose though, I should put the URL to that video in the quotes file somewhere, it’s easier to find than searching my journal, lol.

Mar 11 01:51:11 xavier kernel: i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] *ERROR* Atomic update failure on pipe A (start=115216 end=115217) time 161 us, min 1192, max 1199, scanline start 1188, end 1200

Actually, compared to what great fun Skylake’s Gen 9 graphics chips were to fuck with when they first came out, I probably should count myself lucky that this machine’s Xe / Gen 12 based stuff has been relatively stable under KDE/Wayland. Also in retrospect that nothing went worse than the audio getting cut off.

In their place, a new “old” ThinkPad X1 Carbon takes their place. It’s a Gen 9, making it not so terribly obsolete at running modern software as Stark’s 14 year old processor. Compared to my X61 and T61 it also avoids that “Oh god, it’s the world wide web!” impact of using a web browser on a 21? year old processor. Actually, I think its the only time I’ve had a ThinkPad that isn’t considered thrift store vintage.

For lack of better ideas, I’ve named the system Xavier after Professor X. Both because it’s a 5 year old machine and because it’s purpose is to be an experimental secondary machine. Given the relatively modern processor, its initial operating system is Fedora Kinoite–something not to ancient, and theoretically not too easily broken.

On the hardware front, I’m finding it quite nicely. It’s an i7-1185G7 model with mid-level 16G of RAM, meaning that it has the same limitations as a development machine that Stark had, but can at least handle the ungodly heavy load that web browsers have become since Ivy Bridge. More useful to me personally, is it’s equipped with Tigerlake-LP chipset offering Thunderbolt which makes it possible to use my CalDigit TS4 alongside Shion and Ranga. For bonus points, i don’t even need a special charger, haha! Personally, I’m not a fan of ThinkPads, but they’re great machines to buy used especially if you can get a good deal.

Software wise, I find things a wee bit more of a mixed bag. Being an rpm-ostree based distro, system updates are quite stable. The actual user experience is a bit more akin to any problem can be solved, if you’re willing to delete your user account and start from scratch, or spend a few hours debugging which file in your home directory fucks the whole thing. On the flipside, it does actually work quite well most of the time, and it really is meant to be a test bed machine. If I assigned my computers a registry number rather than a hostname, it would probably have a Y or X prefix to it. It remains to be seen if I’ll transition the machine over to FreeBSD/OpenBSD or good old Debian, but we’re see how it goes with the atomic respin.