#ReHashed

What possesses a woman to do a clean install after midnight?

Something’s wrong with me.

The last 24 hours I’d spent at the scene of the crime, trying to figure out what to do with the corpse of what was once a vibrant breathing operating system; it had been working just fine everything was as it should be, even a little boring. There was no reason to tinker with something that wasn’t broke…

But that didn’t stop me.

I made the mistake of opening up my sound settings, and saw an unbidden program listening in on my microphone. It was probably an innocent byproduct of a website long gone, easily remedied with a flick of a toggle and a reboot - but for some reason, it just rubbed me the wrong way. I don’t like people listening in just to hear me breathe, and I don’t want to cuss in front of strangers, so I decided I’d had enough -

I uninstalled the browser.

Now, this should have been enough. It WAS enough, but I went back through my settings and found a dummy server where I hadn’t specifically asked for one; this irritated me no end and I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I executed a command line purge.

CAVEAT: this is usually no big deal, especially when performed by People Who Are Technologically Skilled (PWATS). But I am not a PWATS: I am a PWONC (Persons Who Oughtta Never Code). This is not due to a lack of MAN files; all the info is there - it is due to the lack of reading said files on my part, and as a result, the command line purge did something unexpected, and I totally bricked my computer - I could no longer connect to the Network.

Supposedly this was because I somehow nuked the resolvconf program, which causes much pain in certain networking protocols. There is a simple explanation of how this happened, involving 1D10T codes and lack of general knowledge; but I have never been one to let this stop me from playing with computers. I mashed all the F Keys, toying with BIOS utilities and fscking around with files...

For some unfathomable reason, this did not work.

At this point, I realise I should have called someone, anyone, who has even an inkling of what they are doing. This is logical, but it not fun. To be fair, I did stop briefly to consider what I would do if I wiped it down badly that I could not break back into my system to reboot, and I knew that it would involve some sort of mea cupla and payments to PWATS. But as I dabbled in the dark inner systems of my computer, a perverse joy was taking hold of me, from the top to my head to the bottom of my toes:

I wanted to watch my digital world burn.

Inserting the thumb drive, I uploaded my most precious works - my manuscripts, my illustrations, all I ethereally own; I umounted my universe, then popped in the ISO image and pulled the trigger.

Farewell, vestigial Windows partition, with your vampiric updater and insistence on logging into Outlook every single time for everything;

Farewell, unreachable DiscWorld DOS game I never could get to load, even in WINE -

Farewell, unused IRC chat program I never really used but wanted just because it made me feel like a l33t h4x0r.

my rebel spirit was rising with every line of code that scrolled, the formatting of the ghost in my shell transforming into a Cybernetic Goddess of Destruction. I revelled in the absolute power of doing it all myself, even if it meant destroying everything so I could start over again…

Linux Mint booted up without a hitch, like it does every time. It took a while to get my wallpapers just the way I like them, and I made sure to load my desktop preferences to make the fonts extra big so I can see the clock even without my glasses. But even after it was all over, I couldn’t sleep. I felt a giddy glee at my own status as She Who Shall Be Obeyed, the Destroyer of Digital Worlds -

I’ll probably do it again next week.