DevKitsune

The Christmas I went insane. 

A short piece I wrote Thursday night:


I was home. Somewhat lonely, I talked to my boyfriend on the phone a few times a week but otherwise for a lot of break not a lot was going on. Most of my high school friends had moved on. I saw some, once, later that break, and it was good, but also empty in a way that’s hard to describe, nothing tangible.

 I suggested we go to the same sushi restaurant we had gone to celebrate the end of high school, two celebrations almost four years apart, but we ended up down the road because the wait was too long. Maybe it just felt empty because more people were missing then there were there.

Maybe I just couldn’t appreciate that it was really great, that we had a nice dinner, we had a blast watching Sonic 3, that it was nice to catch up. Maybe it is insane for me to feel unfulfilled by it when I have nothing tangible to blame that feeling on. 

The few actual holidays were extremely busy. My family is married to tradition when it comes to the holidays.  I think it gives us something to ground us, a blueprint for how to succeed so that one year is much like any other, a frozen interchangeable mess of what is supposed to be the happiest time of the year, to the point where my 15 year old sister still insists we play along with Santa long after she has been matter of factly told the truth. The artifice of it all drives me a bit insane. 

This year the world feels like it’s getting meaner. I don’t remember past Christmas homilies particularly well but I remember them being kind and gentle, focusing on Jesus as someone who was poor, his parents forced out of their home land by the whims of an empire. Reminding us to care for those in need. This year the homily was just cruel. It celebrated the conquest of the godless Romans by the righteous Christians, it compared those who don’t believe out of fear of the mysterious and all knowing power of God to birds slowly freezing to death in the snow. Maybe that’s a fitting homily for this world, or maybe I missed the point because I’m insane, everyone else in my family seemed impressed by the shallow and mean spirited metaphor between the dead birds and the non-believer. 

At dinner my uncle talked loudly and callowly about AI. All he does is chase stupid trends, from natural gas, to environmentalism, to huge data centers killing the planet, he will go wherever there is money. I found him loud, and irritating. No talk of the ethics of training sets, or safety rails, or any reflection on the nuances and limitations of these new tools. 

But my dad was very impressed by it all, maybe I’m just insane. 

Now a month out from this Christmas the world has only gotten more mean. Friends talk of buying guns to fight off future militia in the streets like it’s a normal thing to do. On some level I know it’s just them struggling to feel like they have some means of recourse and sense of control but it doesn’t make me feel any less insane listening to it all. 

Meanwhile I sit here and I hope things get better some day because that’s all I can do, but everyday that hope feels more and more insane. 





Context:
I have always been interested in the relationship between intent, perception, and reality and have tried to capture the complex relationship between those in semi fictional writing before in a creative writing class to limited success;
I think this does a better job of capturing the feeling of the gulf between those things and how distressing it is. This is the level of distress I felt Thursday night as a wrote this, trying to articulate what has been increasingly bothering me for months. I didn’t include all the examples here because some are hard to articulate or too much to share, but the level of distress is not constant, and I have a support network in my friends, boyfriend, and family.

Linux on ARM Chromebooks

Recently I came into possession of a mostly functional Samsung Chromebook Plus (kevin) which uses a Rockchip RK3399 ARM CPU.

I have messed around with Linux on Chromebooks before. In early high school I used Crouton on a cheap x86 Acer Chromebook and more recently I have used MrChromebox.tech’s Firmware script to install Coreboot UEFI on a cheap x86 Lenovo Chromebook which enables the installation of most normal desktop Linux distros on Chromebooks (I ended up installing Xubuntu) none of these shenanigans have felt particularly worth documenting. They are fairly widely know and are covered by comprehensive guides and documentation from the people who actually created these tools

But Linux on ARM Chromebooks is a little bit stranger. Of course I am still standing on the shoulders of people much smarter then myself who actually did the work of creating these distributions and writing documentation for them, but the documentation is a bit more scattershot and the options for Linux on an ARM Chromebook are less straight forward then simply using a UEFI bootloader and installing your favorite distro.

Arch Linux ARM

https://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv8/rockchip/samsung-chromebook-plus

Arch Linux ARM got off to a good start. It was the first distro I found and it had a page dedicated to my Chromebook model with fairly comprehensive documentation on how to install, however things got rocky quickly. The first issue I ran into was that attempting to run “wifi-menu” as described in the installation instructions yielded an error. After some googling I discovered this could be resolved by downloading the Marvell wifi package and manually extracting it the second partition under /lib/firmware/mrvl on the SD Card that the OS was installed on. It’s possible that if you used the specific ARMv8 Rockchip Chromebook image available in their download page this issue would be resolved, however the instructions specific to my Chromebook did not specify to use this image, and instead use the generic aarch64 image so that was the image I used.

Link to the WiFi package.

https://archlinuxarm.org/packages/any/linux-firmware-marvell

Once the WiFi was working I was easily able to get the Arch install online. I then ran “pacman -Syu” and installed XFCE4, and LightDM. After all this was done I rebooted…. and the Arch install would no longer boot, instead hanging at a black screen. My best guess as to what happened was the system upgrades preformed by pacman broke something but at this point I was thoroughly fed up with Arch and decided I would much prefer something Debian based with all the familiarity and stability that comes with that.

PrawnOS (Debian Based – Very FOSS)

I don’t want to be too mean to the guy who created PrawnOS. Clearly he cares deeply about what he does and has put a lot of work into building a well documented and easy to install Debian distro for ARM Chromeooks but he is also kind of a GNU simp and FOSS bro. His whole goal with this project is not to worry about trivial things like having the WiFi function, and is instead to create a fully FOSS Debian and he will not be distracted from that mission by people asking him if they could please have functional WiFi, or at least a way to easily enable it.

If you actually want an OS that doesn’t recommend difficult hardware modifications as the best way to get WiFi working on your ultra portable ARM laptop this is not the OS for you.

I tried to make it work. I tried to swap the kernel for one that was the same version but with WiFi support using the built in tool to flash the kernel partition and this resulted in the same black screen hang up that Arch ran into after the upgrades.

Cadmium (Debian Based – IMO the best, but no longer actively supported)

As cliche as it is third try’s the charm I guess.

Cadmium was the third ARM Chromebook distro I tried, and the first one to just work properly despite being no longer actively supported.

Its still an extremely up to date Debian base, using Debian 13 (trixie) and kernel 5.1.3.0 and the installation process was super easy just like PrawnOS. Unlike PrawnOS (and Arch) however WiFi worked out of the box on Cadmium. Also unique to Cadmium is support for the stylus pen that the Chromebook Plus includes, which once again worked flawlessly out of the box.

I installed Cadmium with the Sway DE – its worth noting that because Chromebooks lack a super key Cadmium’s Sway has been configured to use the alt key in place of the super key…. this should not have been hard to figure out but it isn’t noted anywhere and took me just a little bit too long to figure out. Regardless I ended up replacing Sway with XFCE which is my preferred DE. I run into some weird visual artifacts with Firefox in both Sway (which uses Wayland) and XFCE (which uses Xorg) however these visual artifacts don’t occur in Chromium nor any other program I have tried, and overall Cadmium seems much more stable and mature then the other options for Linux on ARM Chromebooks. I was even able to do some light 3D gaming in Minecraft without issue. I was able to use the stylus to take notes in Xournal++ and overall think that if my Chromebook Plus had a properly functioning keyboard that it would have made quite the nice little Linux PC. Still it was fun to play with regardless and if you have an old ARM Chromebook sitting around I highly recommend installing CadmiumOS.

Asexual Dating:

Last weekend I told my parents Peake and I were dating.
I have very liberal parents – who while not perfect always seemed like they would be accepting, so I brought it up like it wasn’t a huge deal.
My dad took it well, my mom did not.
In fact the day after I told her, several hours after we already had an extremely awkward and inappropriate conversation where she aggressively asked invasive questions about my sex life she called me back to explain what friendship was to me and tell me she thinks I am mistaking friendship for dating.

I get that I can be socially awkward and slow to pick up on social ques, particularly in new settings, and I did have a very hard time making friends for a lot of my childhood, but I have a solid friend group at my college, I had a solid friend group in high school, she knows that, she has met a decent number of my friends. So I assured her that after 21 years on this earth I do in fact know what friendship is. I also told her that I am figuring things out and that I get to decide what dating is to me.

We haven’t spoken about this since then (though she did half apologize and we have talked about trivial nonsense)

This is my second romantic relationship, both of which have occurred after I was already identifying as asexual, which I started to identify with freshman year of college. The first was with a girl, J, and I knew in the lead up to it that we were likely going to end up dating, we bonded over a class we had together and in our shared confusion and apathy towards dating.

As an aside a little bit of context worth mentioning, DevKitsune is genderless and uses them/they pronouns (but doesn’t really care that much) IRL I am a cis guy and use he/they pronouns (but also don’t care that much)

Anyways J and I did date, for a couple months. She asked me to just as fall was rolling in last year and when she asked I told her I was willing to try it but was probably ace, so she needed to be okay with that, and she told me she also identified as ace. The relationship was fine, fun at times but honestly the lead up to it was more fun then anything we did when we were actually dating, and by the time the semester ended I felt like she was actively trying to find excuses to avoid hanging out with me (and I suspect she felt the same about me) so over winter break we mutually broke it off over text.

We still sometimes make small talk, I don’t think we hold any ill will towards each other, I don’t think we can and frankly I don’t understand why so many couples do.

Part II: I wish society talked more about sex:

I know this a weird thing for an asexual person to say, and maybe it would be better phrased as “I wish society did a better job talking about sex” because so few serious people talk about it because it is considered taboo, and then the void is filled with the performative hyper-sexuality of teenage boys, and of men who have all the maturity of teenage boys. Frankly I find these people repulsive, I find them immature, and insecure, and deeply unhappy and I hate being around them and how it makes me feel. I was around far too many of these people in middle school, who bragged about the porn they watched in between their deeply bigoted jokes. I was around far too many of these people at the start of college, when my freshman roommate would hang out with a group of shallow boys who tried to prove they were men by talking about how hot different women were and how many they had slept with.
Even men who I think generally try to do a good job providing healthy male role models tend to talk about sex in ways I can’t relate to – I remember listening to LinusTechTips talk about how he used to sneak Playboy magazines and how Luke got in trouble for printing porn. Before finding fury I had never sought out porn, because the little snippets I randomly came across seemed both boring and unsubtle. I tend to hold it in a similar regard to the “try not to laugh” videos all the edgy gamer boys in middle school found funny but I was simply confused by. Even then the “NSFW” furry stuff I tend to like tends to be men in latex suits with there fur heads on, and I don’t find it “arousing” I just like how it looks. I tend to find actual furry porn to be way less interesting. If you do enjoy porn of any sort, then I am happy for you (and I apologize for comparing it to those videos. I truly am not trying to be smug about not enjoying it, I honestly kind of wish I understood attitudes around it more)

Part III: Am I Just Denying Myself?:

I had a therapist at the start of college who I stopped seeing rather quickly (and moved on to someone better) who told me that he thought I was just denying myself. I think he just couldn’t comprehend ace people and likely thought I was an incel or a closeted gay guy who had deeply diluted himself. That therapist didn’t hide his surprise when I told him that my friend group in high school had included girls, and basically told me that he thought I was just denying myself pleasure for some reason. I generally do not like this therapist (for several other reasons as well) but I can never quite get that thought out of my mind – am I, in some sort of smug attempt to show that I am different, just denying myself. And the answer to that is I think no, I did have a time in middle school when I actively disliked all mainstream pop music, but by late high school I got over that, and actually quite like a (small) subsection of pop music now and I have always felt way more comfortable discussing my appreciation of media that is mainstream, or at least popular within the community I am currently in knowing that I won’t be judged for going against the vain and liking something I am not supposed to like (I have also gotten better about this, but I do still have a strong instinct to avoid conflict and that means not making a big deal about being different while also trying not to compromise your values)

Part IV: Society (and fear of loss)

I like to pretend I am not influenced by society. I tend to try to avoid conflict with it, but I am also unwilling to fully deny myself to fit in, which is why I never pretended to like all the things the other nerdy middle school boys (at the start of gamergate) liked, like shooter games, or edgy humor, or sex, but is also why I tended to nod along, put up with their immaturity, and at least try to understand their perspective. Because of that conflict aversion I am influenced by society more then I would like to admit. The way I still take that backwards therapist’s comment seriously for instance. And my mom’s condescending comment about “mistaking friendship for dating” has stuck with me more then I like to admit. That combined with a fear that the thing that collapsed my last relationship was the weight of calling it dating has lead me to worry about my relationship with Peake. Yet I think we have a much stronger foundation then I did with J, we have spent a lot more time together, we have the shared interest in the fandom and all the bonding that comes with that, and ultimately if we decide not to call it dating at some point I think we could still be close friends. But it felt important to me that we call it dating, at least among ourselves, because it felt more like dating then anything I ever done, and because I do truly love him. And I thought my parents were cool enough that I could tell them without it being a big deal, I just wish that the confusion and hostility from my mom hadn’t dampened my excitement quite so much.

A Brief Introduction

Hello!
I decided to start a blog I guess because I already went through the pain of setting up a VPS and installing Apache and PHP for LinkStack so I figured I might as well throw WordPress on there as well. No idea how or (or if) I will really use this but I figured it couldn’t hurt.

I am Dev Kitsune. On the internet I am a genderless fox boy. In real life I am a 3rd year EE/CS student living in Cleveland Ohio. I prefer they/them pronouns but am okay with anything really. I am asexual and bi/pan-romantic and am currently platonically dating Peake, a protogen who I met this summer. I have had an ADHD diagnosis since 2nd grade and suspect I might also have undiagnosed ASD (apparently I was screened for it when I got my ADHD diagnosis and the psychologist decided that I met more ADHD criteria so they only diagnosed with that as duel diagnosis wasn’t yet common practice) I have some thoughts on computers, gender, and the furry fandom. Maybe I will post some of them here.

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