2019-10-15 - The black screen 
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Here i am again, in my room, in front of my computer. A cup of tea 
on the left of me, along with a couple of pieces of chocolate. It 
is already dark outside. You can notice the end of the year is 
coming close, as it gets dark earlier and earlier in the evening.

I am enjoying this view on my computer. Living in textmode. Quitely 
typing these little white characters on a black screen. No 
distractions. Nothing shouting for attention. Just the humble 
monospace characters that appear on my screen after a gentle key 
press. I wonder if all those GUI users know what they are missing?

While i am quite a visual oriented person, i do appreciate the 
simplicity of textmode very much. During the day i am already 
bombarded with all kinds of visual messages. Bombarded beyond the 
point of saturation to be precise...

When i am sitting here in front of my computer at the end of the 
day, i don't need more visuals. I don't need more of these stupid 
billboards, advertisements, pop-ups, corporate branding and slogans 
pushed in my face. I just want peace and quiet. A black screen with 
some characters on them. That's all i want.

From when i was younger, i remember these CRT monitors, with either 
green or amber text on a black background. Or if you were really 
cool, you would have a single monitor that could switch between 
these two colours. I remember messing about in BASIC, trying to 
make silly animations of little men, running across the screen.

Perhaps, this is where the love for textmode started. However, i do 
not think my current appreciation stems solely from melancholy. It 
is also caused by finding a dissatisfaction with the current way of 
computering. Everything is happening on the internet. Everything is 
graphical. Everything is animated. Everything is portrayed as 
fabulous and sleek and fancy. And it seems it is mostly done by 
visuals. Fancy pictures of beautiful happy people eating a 
sandwich.

It is not difficult to imagine the love for textmode started to 
grow while the internet slowly grew to this insane commercial 
narcissistic shitshow of (personal) branding happening inside 
walled gardens owned by three or four big coorporations. 

"Have a look at this bowl of soup i ate today".

Oops... I flew off at a tangent for a moment there. Apparently 
there is some deep surpressed anger with the state of the internet 
residing still inside me. And i started off so well... What was i 
talking about again... Oh yeah... i was talking about how text mode 
gives me a much better focus...


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                    co/op   __
                    |uuu|   \'\l
                     \ /     \{3
                     >o<    / /
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"I am Mike, and today we are going to unbox this great new phone 
nobody needs. The great thing about this phone is that it has an 
awesome app which allows you to connect to somebody far away and 
when connected you can hear live audio streams of eachother. In 
real time! And all thanks to cloud computing, blockchain and 
artificial intelligence!"