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The alphabet sucks! I have created a replacement

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Yes! It really does!

You though don't have to worry, as I have a solution for you. Read till the end to learn more!

it doesn't succ! I think it's very good

No, it's not! Think again, you loser. How dare you contradict me?
Look at how many useless letters there are - for instance, can't we just use KS instead of X? SMH.

get a life and go touch grass, you nerd!

No

which alphabet are you talking about?

Before we begin, I want to clarify that the alphabet I'm talking about is the (unfortunately) internationally standardized ISO basic Latin alphabet/English alphabet.

There are plenties of other (bad) alphabets out there. We have Cyrillic script; Esperanto's got its own set of characters, and so does Greek. And then you got whatever those Japanese thingies are.
Each and every one of these's got its own flaws. But today, I'm going to focus on the basic (extended) Latin alphabet mentioned above.

reasons the alphabet sucks

  1. Redundant letters: X is just KS, Y is just half a (regularly pronounced) I; it's basically another J. And English's pronunciation of letter J is just that of a soft G, BTW.
  2. Ambiguous letters: why in the world is C sometimes pronounced K (like in cat), sometimes CH (soft sound; like in chair), and sometimes S? We have loads of letters, so why not use them properly, as God intended us to?
  3. Missing letters: we have so many commons sounds that don't have a letter. These include: CH, SH, TH, whatever that second "g" sound in garage represents, and more. An ideal version of our alphabet would include characters for all of these.
  4. More than one character for the same sound: Q, K and C.
  5. Unfair enforcement: not all western languages need a "Y", or an "H", or a "W". And yet, everybody seems to accept those letters, regardless of whether the language uses them or not. Following the same principles strictly, everybody should be using Spanish character "ñ". Not so surprisingly, though, not everybody is using that letter. But having English letters in your language's alphabet, that you don't need, is perfectly fine, it seems.

looking for a solution

So, as I've already pointed out, the Latin one isn't the the only script out there.

IMO, Esperanto's very own character set does a pretty good job when it comes to assigning each sound a letter. Excluding its symbols representing sounds composed of two sub-sounds [such as C (TS sound)] (which we want to avoid: we're trying to avoid redundancy here), almost all of Esperanto's characters are a pretty good starting point for creating a new alphabet. It'll be my main reference. Yes, ladies and gents. Today, I'm going to craft a brand new alphabet for you and you only.

Oh, also, I'm going to introduce a new way of creating consonant clusters and the like. X, for example, is not just KS. It's K+S, basically KS pronounced really quickly. So getting rid of X means having to look for a way of telling readers that there's some sort of letter combination going on.

say hello to Alfabet 2.0 (Engliŝ ediŝon)

Creative Commons License
Alfabet 2.0 by mirk0dex is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .
Based on a work at www.mirkodi.eu.

Here it is:
Normal characters : A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Replasements : A B K (as in cat); T-Ŝ (for CH, as in chair); S (for the S sound) D E F G (as in guts) H I D-J (normal sound); J (French sound, as in garage) K L M N O P K W (or R) S T U V W K-S Y Z

The whole thing looks a little bit like this:

Aa Bb Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nm Oo Pp (Rr) Ss Ŝŝ Tt Ðð Uu Vv Ww Yy Zz

Red: characters representing a new sound; Bold: new characters.

NOTE: S can never be Z. So, instead of saying memorise, you're going to have to use memorize - sorry, Bri'ish mates.

Az you kan see, ðere's no more C, X.

I know it might sound kwinge, but let's be honest hewe: R and W awe pwetty mutŝ ðe same in Engliŝ, uwu. So you kan uze R if you want to, but I don't pewsonally wekommend doing so (because redundancy).

By now you pwobably have alweady notised ðat ðere is no lettew fow CH ow fow ðe old J (soft G) sound. Ðat is bekause you kan now wepwezent ðese uzing my "read quickly" marker: -.

Instead of june, you now kan uze d-june. Boð lettews on hyfens/dashes' ends awe to be wead mowe kuikly ðan oðers - OK I'll stop. Sorry for wasting your time.

Thanks for reading today's journal entry of me going nuts. If you enjoyed, please consider so I can pay my rent. I think I have sucessfully fixed the alphabet BTW. You're welcome.

I challenge you guys to use this alphabet for 24 hours - I bet you'll lose it before you even start. Good luck!

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 23:08:35 +0200

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Hello everybody, I'm Mirko, I once used to make videos about stuff like this, but I just can't be bothered anymore, so in this blog entry, I'm going to explan my plan to make the Fediverse mainstream, getting YouTube and Twitter to go bankrupt (as suggested by @niclas@angrytoday.com).

WTF?

Alright, alright, let's start off by giving you guys a bit of context.

I asked my Mastodon frens what they think I should do to get famous on the Fediverse

The replies I got were:

make cool things
- @arik@social.linux.pizza
Toot random things.
- @StampedingLonghorn@social.linux.pizza
Make Fediverse go mainstream and bankrupt Twitter, YouTube et al. Sure it will make you very famous. How? No F! clue.
- @niclas@angrytoday.com

I already shudpost loads of random things, and as a shidposter, I'm not able to make cool things, as @arik@social.linux.pizza suggested.

So, instead, I figured I should try and literally bankrupt big tech as a whole in favour of Fedi.

The PLAN

IMO, ads are the best tool we have to promote the Fediverse. They might be the best tool to promote literally anything, actually. They can be very annoying.

We can even let normies know about our based Fediverse that way.

Now I want you guys to think about it: can't we just use YouTube to defeat YouTube? Can't we just get Fediverse ads onto YouTube?

A clip Avengers: Thanos says 'I used the YouTube to defeat the YouTube'

Yes, we probably can! But we need money to do that. So here comes the fun part: you donate money to me, so I can start the ad campaign as soon as I can. I'm broke, so I can't afford to do all of that by myself.

If you really consider joining the project, thank you! That'd mean a lot to me. Please do use LiberaPay if you're particularly interested in this and this only, because I can't really convert crypto to money for the time being.

Expect updates soon.

Also, everybody knows an advertising campaign is nothing without actual ads. So I'm soon going to start working on these. If you make some yourself, please send them over!. Either way, contact me. I need help, and I know nothing about advertising.

OK, so that's the plan! I know it's bad, I really do. But hey, if you have any ideas don't be afraid to let me know about them.

Bye guys. Please, stay safe out there, and enjoy your life!

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 18:46:19 +0200

Richard Stallman reccommends playing Minetest and you should too!

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Hello there, my beautiful peoples. What's popping? You alright? Feel free to leave a comment in the comment section down below (and by "comment section down below" I mean my inbox).

As you probably have already noticed, I'm trying my best to use this blog section more. And oh boi, I have beautiful plans. Please do suggest topics you'd like to see. You can do this by @tagging me on Mastodon or via some other contact medium. E-mails are preferred.

Alright, so, today's topic is: Minetest!

What's Minetest? Is it some Chinese Minecraft clone?

Minetest is:

An open source voxel game engine. Play one of our many games, mod a game to your liking, make your own game, or play on a multiplayer server. Available for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, and Android.
From Minetest's official website.

I'd just like to interject for a moment: what you're referring to as "Minetest", is in fact "Minetest Game/Minetest", or as I've recently taken to call it, "Minetest Game + Minetest". Minetest is not a game unto itself, but rather, another free component of a fully functioning Minetest Game.

That is right. Minetest is not a game, but an engine. That means anybody can create per own game and compete with giants like Minecraft!

And speaking of Minecraft: there are modpacks called "Mineclone 2" and "Mineclone 5" allowing gamers to experience Minecraft without sacrificing freedom. Heck, even Richard (at 0:59:41) reccommends it!

(I asked that question, BTW).

Now, as I've already pointed out in the past I don't really like the term "open-source", but still, if you don't consider the different philosophies behind open-source and free software, in the end, results are pretty much the same.

Minetest is guaranteed to respect user freedom as it's completely free, and it being open-source means code quality is must in the project.

Alright guys, that was it for today. Stay tuned, I'm gonna post more from now on. Also, check out AntVenom's video on Minetest. Cya!

Tue, 13 Sep 2022 15:14:24 +0200

We need more libre plugins (and I'm working to fix that)

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If you're reading this blog post on my website, there's a chance you already know that I make music. EDM, more precisely.

Something I really care about is software freedom: it doesn't matter whether I'm writing a program in C, browsing meme websites or producing some happy hardcore track - my freedom must be respected no matter what.

I thus have decided that my music production software must follow the same freedom principles (or "open-source", but I don't really like/use that term).

Even if I'm a hardcore free software enthusiast and user, though, the temptation to use non-free software is growing inside me, every day more. I see popular musicians and producers use proprietary garbage like Ozown, Abelton and other programs, and I have to admit that I sometimes feel like, because of my choices, I'll never be as good as they are.

But then I realize that software is not a replacement for talent. If an artist is good, the software per uses shouldn't matter much. If a programmer is talented, per will be able to use any programming language to fulfill his needs, getting to the desired results (JS is an exception here, though. No matter how talented you are, if you write your software using JavaScript, it'll always suck and there's no way to change that).

What I'm trying to say is: help please there's no free maximiser i need libre maximiser pleez help.

I've been looking for one for about a month now. I've searched everywhere. I've posted on forums. Nada: had no luck so far. And I probably know why: there might be absolutely no libre maximiser out there. Oof.

Of course I know Barry's Satan Maximiser is a thing but I don't think Barry and I have the same definition of "maximiser plugin" in mind. That kind of plugin is not really what I'm looking for.

So I decided to roll up my sleeves and get to work. If there's really no libre maximiser out there, I'll make one myself. But since I don't know anything about VST or LV2 programming, that's probably going to take a while.

In the meanwhile, I've asked the creator of LoudMax to free per amazing (but unfortunately proprietary) plugin. We'll see how far we can get on this.

Please stay tuned for news on the project. You can find my plugin's source code at https://codeberg.org/mirk0dex/LibreMiser, but do keep in mind that the project is young. It's still VERY work-in-progress stuff.

Alright guys, I'll see you soon. God bless.

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 15:08:48 +0200

My first album

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Why hello everyone - it's me, Mirko, your favourite internet person. It's been quite some time already, very happy to be getting back to my blog. If you don't follow me on Mastodon yet, you should, because I'm way more active there.

Anyways, I've been working hard on an album I'm planning to release by the end of the summer. Its name will be "Free as in Hardcore", and you can check out my SoundCloud (warning: proprietary spyware) if you feel like listening to a couple songs I've already finished producing.

When it's done, it'll contain songs of many different kinds and genres (mainly happy hardcore, but there'll be some slav ||| hardbass, normal hardcore and maybe dubstep, too). So I guess it might be proper to call it a "hard dance album" ;).

Worth saying that this'll be my first album ever, so I'm not sure that I'll manage to do everything correctly. We'll see.

Of course, it'll be CC licensed and ethically made (using free software and VSTs [which I just started using] only). Also, if anybody's interested in a collab, please do contact me so we can work on something cool together.

TL;DR: I'm working on a hard dance album, it will be released by the end of summer 2K20.

Aight guys, peace, imma head out.

Thu, 09 Jun 2022 17:58:55 +0200

An update

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Hello everybody, in this brief post I'll update you on what I've been doing/working on recently.

The JSless Web Index

I recently started working on this project and looking for people interested in it. It's called "JSless Web Index", and, as the name suggests, it'll basically be an umbrella website for JavaScript-less, static, and why not, also PHP-less websites out there.

Why would waste your time on something like that?, you may ask. Good question. I don't know either, lol. Jokes aside, I just wanted a place where I could find other useful yet simple, "Suckless", non-bloated and static web pages. Because that's basically what the web was made for. It was created for sharing scientific documents, not bloated scripts embedded in text files. If you could, would you embed a program into a PDF file? Well, HTML makes no difference. It's just a markup language for creating text files.

Sorry for the rant: if you want to contribute your URLs to the project, see the project's README! Thanks in advance :D.

My DWM turned black 'n' white

Do you guys like rices? Here's my very simple DWM setup:

A sad, uncoloUrful Suckless dwm rice
DWM be lookin' sad

It's been quite a while since I'd created this hot garbage of a coloUrful palette, which features the following colours:

  1. Black
  2. White

Just yesterday, though, I found out I could even go further: Xorg can be turned B&W! To do so, I made use of some advanced picom's features, adding the following line to my .xinitrc:

picom -m 0.75 -c -r 13 -o 1.0 -b --backend glx --glx-fshader-win "uniform sampler2D tex; uniform float opacity; void main() { vec4 c = texture2D(tex, gl_TexCoord[0].xy); float y = dot(c.rgb, vec3(0.2126, 0.7152, 0.0722)); gl_FragColor = opacity*vec4(y, y, y, c.a); }" &

By doing so, I obtained this tremendously joyful DWM setup!

I joined the OpenBaSeD gang!

I'm finally in! See this Mastodon thread to learn how it all started. Shoutout to Root BSD for making a very good tutorial on GNU/Linux and OpenBSD. Nice job.

In the end, it was actually pretty easier than I expected it to be. As usual, (at least for me) the hardest part was partitioning, but once you do that, installing BaSeD is straightforward. Now I gotta figure out how to set up wi-fi: it shouldn't be tough. I just have to fw_update and set up my network using ifconfig. The problem is the following: to fw_update, I need network access. I could just use ethernet, right? Well yes, if only I had an ethernet cable at home. It's hard to believe, I know, but I think I either have no ethernet cables or I'm just too lazy to check properly. And don't feel like buying one: I'm poor.

Well, I could just do USB tethering using my phone, right? Well, that'd work, if only I had a working micro USB cable. Lol. I can't be helped breaking them all.


Anyways, that was it for this quick (which in this case is just a way of saying that it literally took 10 minutes for me to write) article about many (3) topics.

Hope you enjoyed, stay safe! (Will update you on the OpenBSD situation, stay tuned!)

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 20:22:26 +0100

Friendship ended with GitLab, now Gitea is my best friend

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A good old meme showing me and Gitea shaking hands
Aah yes, this meme never dies

A couple months ago I decided to stop hosting my website on GitLab pages and get a VPS instead.

And so I did, but of course, this VPS could be used for many other things, for instance, Nextcloud and Git. Also, since I had just found out that, contrarily to my beliefs, GitLab is proprietary, or "open core", how they like to call it, which just really is another expression for saying "non-free".

So there was no better way of getting rid of GitLab than self-hosting my own Git website like real chads do. I picked Gitea 'cause although I'd really have liked to use Cgit, I want people to be able to open up issues and stuff.

And so here it is! git.mirkodi.eu is ready for use, I moved all my projects there although most of them are mirrored on GitLab. Feel free to create an account and host yours too - freely (both as in free speech and as in free beer!).

Aight guys, that was all for this short article. Happy late New Year! Peace out.

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 19:32:48 +0100