Irish families
Irish families like mine have two responsibilities:
- Pretend everything is fine when everything is terrible.
- Pretend everything is terrible when everything is fine.
Thoughts from John Karahalis
Irish families like mine have two responsibilities:
Earlier this year, a colleague asked me what “my genre” is. I responded that it must be progressive rock. It's just weird enough to be interesting, just unexpected enough to keep your mind engaged, and just absurd enough to remind you that rules really are sometimes made to be broken.
I've listened to the Pink Floyd catalogue many times over, I've been listening to more King Crimson this year, and I've really been enjoying “Firth of Fifth” recently. I only really listened to Rush a couple of weeks ago, but they tick a lot of my boxes. I love synthesizers!
I have so much more to discover. Something to look forward to!
WordPress is much more complicated than it was when I last used it. I'm afraid that's not a compliment. There are many, many of preferences, which is a pet peeve of mine, especially when sensible defaults would have sufficed. It really seems like WordPress is trying to be everything for everyone. That's unsurprising given how many people use it as a general-purpose content management system, but I wouldn't recommend using it that way. Drupal is a better CMS, with more power and greater flexibility.
Even still, some features that WordPress provides are nice, like search, the “Related posts” that can appear below blog posts, and the ability to rename tags globally. Search is something I would really like, mainly because it would help me find my own posts. (Using Kagi or Google with my blog's domain as a site: filter also works, but the results aren't as helpful and they lag by a bit.) Related posts and global tag renaming are nice features, but they're not essential. I would probably use them, but their absence is not a deal breaker.
Playing around with WordPress just now has made me even more appreciative of WriteFreely, the platform that powers this blog. WriteFreely is elegant. Yes, it's missing some features I would find useful, like the things mentioned above. It's also true that the internal menu navigation often confuses me, and I wish development were more active. Nevertheless, compared to the behemoth of WordPress, with its endless options, overwhelming editing UI, and slow page loads, WriteFreely is a breath of fresh air. I always admire when a product focuses on the few things that really matter, and WriteFreely does: a simple editing experience, sensible defaults, and a beautiful design, including beautiful typography. I hope WriteFreely continues to be successful.
A quick disclaimer: Carl Jung has become popular with some right-wing commentators. Please don't take this blog post as evidence that I have any affinity whatsoever for those commentators. It's sad that so much has become political these days, but I don't believe in guilt by association, and Jung was doing his thing long before anyone had heard of Jordan Peterson.
With that out of the way, I recently stumbled across Jung's five factors of happiness, and I find it to be very interesting. This isn't the first set of guidelines I've come across in my life, the first list of ten rules or eight practices one should follow to find salvation, but I find it to be a bit more modern and understandable than some of those.
His five factors of happiness are:
I would point out that this list may not be complete. A murderer or spoiled child might check all of these boxes, but would they be happy? I don't think so. Perhaps that's why we need multiple perspectives, after all.
I'm interested in using Debian on my next laptop. The releases are slow, of course, but not much slower than Ubuntu long-term support (LTS) releases. For a few years now, I've been using Ubuntu LTS, anyway. I've found that many non-LTS releases introduce problems on my machine. Besides, these days, it's not hard to install newer desktop applications using Flatpak and newer CLI programs using… I don't know, Homebrew and language-specific package managers?
Debian's commitment to free software would have appealed to me more as a younger person, but these days, I want a laptop that just works, and I do see the value of proprietary software. Apple creates great software, for example, and it very often has higher usability and user experience standards than open-source software does. (Liquid Glass and the iPhone setup process are notable exceptions over at Apple. Signal, WordPress, and GNOME, among others, are notable exceptions in the open-source community. Also, I really hate the way Apple behaves as a company, but I think that's largely a separate issue.) Thankfully, with Debian, it's easy to work around the free software guardrails and install proprietary software. So easy, in fact, that the FSF faults Debian for it.
What's wrong with Ubuntu LTS? Not much. I like it, and my gripes are pretty minor. Ubuntu does have a habit of force-feeding their users unpopular software that was built in-house, however, like Unity, Snap, and lots of other stuff. I would prefer a pure GNOME experience. Plus, I think it would be fun to learn Debian. That's probably the main reason I'm interested in switching.
Maybe some additional thinking will change my mind, but at the moment, I'm interested in giving Debian a shot. I probably don't have enough energy or interest to do it now, though. I'll wait until I buy a new laptop. (I remember installing Arch Linux mid-way through courses at RIT and being unable to use my laptop for one week while I figured out how to properly configure full-disk encryption with LUKS and dm-crypt. Yeah, those days are gone.)
I will make certain my next laptop has an AMD graphics card. NVIDIA graphics cards have caused me so much pain and frustration on Linux. I should have known better than to go with NVIDIA for this laptop, honestly. I don't know what I was thinking. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, had it right years ago.
I've heard that NVIDIA drivers for Linux are improving with the growth of AI, but it's too little too late. Besides, I have no doubt NVIDIA will stop working with the Linux community as soon as the benefits to their company become less obvious.
I want something stable that just works, and that's AMD.
Over the last few weeks, I've been migrating my short posts (kind of like Tweets without Twitter) from thoughts to this blog. At the same time, I've been migrating my article-length posts from Medium to this blog. This blog is powered by WriteFreely and hosted by Write.as.
I love thoughts so much, and I’ve praised it constantly. I’m so grateful that it’s gotten me back into writing short little blog posts, something I loved doing as a younger person but somehow lost interest in, maybe because simplicity and fun have taken a back seat in the world of blogging. At the same time, I’m now looking for features that thoughts doesn’t provide, like pagination, dedicated pages for individual posts, email signup, RSS, tags, and more. I still think thoughts is amazing, a beautifully simple blogging platform with an “old internet” feel in the very best way, and for that reason, I still wholeheartedly recommend it. I don’t recommend everyone switch to WriteFreely. It just seems like the better fit for me right now.
Medium, on the other hand, I could do without. They sometimes display giant banners above free blog posts to encourage readers to sign up for Medium, which is really annoying. I'm a paying subscriber to Medium as a reader, actually. I think that should exempt my blog from their advertising, but it doesn't. Also, their recommendation engine is horrific, and it encourages endless clickbait nonsense. I don’t want to support a company that does that, and I don’t want that perverse incentive to change my writing.
WriteFreely isn't perfect. Its Markdown parser can behave strangely, although it's not as unusual as the one used on thoughts. WriteFreely also doesn't provide search functionality, the navigational menus presented to authors are pretty confusing, and development seems very slow at this point, among other things of varying importance. But it's a much better fit for me right now. Even just having a separate page for each post is great. I'm sure that's what readers and search engines expect. By contrast, thoughts shows all posts on one page and uses URL fragments to link to particular posts (e.g., https://thoughts.johnkarahalis.com/#1762540598).
WordPress was another option, of course. I have mixed feelings about it, and part of me thinks it might have been a better choice given the issues mentioned above, most importantly the slow pace of WriteFreely development. WordPress can do everything WriteFreely can do, I think, the usability is a bit better, and it's a very active project. However, it's also big, bulky, and it has a bit of a “serious” feel to it, which I fear would take some of the joy out of writing. For whatever WriteFreely lacks, it's elegant and fun. Perhaps I'll migrate to WordPress some day when the tradeoffs become worthwhile (another migration, hooray!), but for now, I like WriteFreely, and I hope it continues to grow. edit (2025-12-18): Shortly after this blog post was published, I wrote about an experiment with Wordpress and how it made me appreciate WriteFreely even more.
Over the next little while, you'll see posts disappear from those places and re-appear on this blog. I expect I'll be done somewhere around the middle of January, 2026, but time will tell.
I'm a perfectionist, and not in a good way. It harms me much more than it helps me.
I was trying to come up with a phrase that I might be able to repeat to myself as a reminder that progress beats perfection and that small steps in the right direction really do matter. I came up with this:
Hope for perfect. Aim for great. Celebrate good.
Consider saying this to yourself any time perfectionism gets in the way of your happiness, whether the source of your frustration is your diet or your wedding. Nothing is ever perfect, and I've come to appreciate that any goal taken to the extreme becomes truly neurotic and harmful. Hope for perfect. Aim for great. Celebrate good.
The other day, I was watching an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where Raymond buys a special, expensive, rare, fad collectible card for his daughter. You may know the episode, Hackidu. It's a good one. Paul Reubens, best known for his character Pee-wee Herman, steals the show.
The point is, it made me very emotional, thinking of all the nice toys my parents bought me as a kid, including many that were fads, expensive, difficult to obtain, or simply extremely thoughtful. I grew up in the 90s, and so this list includes things like Beanie Babies, Tamagotchis, baseball cards, video games, educational games, books, scooters, backpacks featuring TV shows I liked, and much more than I can honestly remember.
I'm very grateful for that. I hate to say, “it's the thought that counts,” as though I didn't enjoy the toys themselves, but truthfully, the thought and love they put into those choices is very meaningful to me.
I feel a bit strange being so emotional over physical things, especially when I dislike consumerism, but it was the thoughts that matter most. They show their love through gifts, to a large extent, and I am very touched.