I Don't Want To Blow Up

by Mike Levin

I don’t want to blow up
But baby if I did
I could set a good example
For kid!

—Mike Levin, 2022

The cure for anxiety and depression in our modern age is already fairly well documented:

• Gratitude
• Mindfulness (meditation)
• Exercise

…but perhaps it is not believed or beloved… or even known? Yeah, a little from column A, a little from column B and a lot from column C.

Helping the world get over their anxiety and depression in the same ways I found that I was able to, while making a career out of it to boot… that could be my ikigai… my calling… the stuff I have to teach on YouTube and the reason I blow up.

Also stories. Always stories. The stories of what led me to where I am today, this vimming vimmer who vimity vims while I think.

I think people like that.

I think people want that.

I think it’s the cure to a lot of things people don’t even know it would be a cure for. Acquire skill A. Win battle B. Connection not 100% clear, but it is certainly there.

Wax on. Wax off.

Martial arts.

Marshaling resources.

Breathing exercises… first step! Always first step.

Chest out, shoulders back, breath deep.

Mental state follows physical projection.

What now? Why will you blow up on YouTube? Why will you have additional revenue streams in life, merely for who you are and what you do anyway?

Start by telling your story.

Start with a question.

Why, despite your earlier-in-life aspirations to be a Mars colonist or other sort of scientist, your ass ended up in marketing by way of Commodore Computers. And then Commodore went away, and all that was left was marketing. Commodore marketing? Isn’t that an oxymoron? No, it wasn’t purely marketing that killed Commodore. Engineering has to take just as much blame for not moving the product forward during those critical years of the PC’s rise to dominance from around 1988 through 1992. By 1992 nothing Commodore could do product-wise could catch up with PCs. It almost killed the Mac too. But that’s a story for another time. Let’s talk about me, and why y’all gonna follow me.

• Teach the precise incantation to get started with the Linux Subsystem on Windows
  • Call it LSW and refuse to relent (have “a thing”)
  • Show another way to kick Linux’s tires with Levinux
    • Chase the rabbit and solve the sha-1 login problem
    • Demonstrate Charlie Brown / Roomba resiliency
  • Show how all roads lead to text-based Unix/Linux
    • And how it’s either now with me or get left behind
    • And how this is a love-worthy endeavor, good for so many reasons
• Flesh it out / show the integrated lifestyle I propose and live by
  • Explain the poetry
    • Show where some of it resides
    • Show where the new stuff is accumulating
    • Consider organizing it
  • Explain the one journal for life
    • The nearly complete resistance to additional journals
    • The acceptance that there must be additional journals
    • The falling in love with vim buffers
• Talk about a bit of your history and the “complexes” you’re fixing
  • The “good son” complex
    • Taking over my dad’s check cashing business when he died
      • Having to shoot a guy
      • Having my sister move in on me with a friend from CA
      • Having my mother start showing signs of craziness
    • My mother going crazy and disappearing
      • Me putting my life on hold to “rescue” her
      • My mother disappearing again and me not putting my life on hold again.
      • The pain of… well, so many things at this point.
  • The Commodore complex
    • The future was now and nobody cared… what’s with people?
    • Being beamed up by the mothership just as it was crashing
    • Scala, and subsequent betrayal
    • Windows WebDev and subsequent betrayal
    • Moving to NYC, getting married and subsequent betrayal
• Talk about the realizations
  • I’m very angry and full of excuses
  • I am very sensitive, easily “entangled” and easily upset
    • There are those who intuitively prey on that
    • There are plenty of others like me out there who are
      • Utterly ruined and turned into “hollow people” by this fact
      • Rise above it and are somehow doing something different
  • There is no betrayal / only my inability to adapt
  • The definition of stupidity is repeating past mistakes without learning
  • So there must be something wrong with me!
  • However, the “giant reset button” of tech is very real
  • This giant reset button of tech somehow hurts me more than others in tech
  • Many people who are not in tech couldn’t even get over the hump the first time… at least I can
    • initial inertial resistance in indoctrination
    • The next big “humps” I get over in tech must be my last
    • The loss of secret weapons hurts
    • But how can that be, because tech’s always changing… right?

Oh wait, what was that old stuff from AmigaDOS that still really applies today in that unixy stuff I’ve been noticing? Shells and scripts and piping and output redirection? That couldn’t really be big enough to specialize and make a love-worthy career out of… could it?

• wsl –install
  • At your fingertips Linux
  • Raspberry Pi
  • Levinux
• Windows Terminal
  • putty
  • ssh through Powershell
  • Terminal
  • TTY-like enviornment
• vimtutor

What next? That’s the initiation. Help everyone through the initiation. Have alternatives. Criss-cross verifications.

Yes, blend that with your life stories.

• Bullet-point out the stories
• Work your way through the stories
• Emphasis on indoctrination to the world of text-based Unix/Linux
  • wsl –install
  • Get Windows Terminal
  • run vimtutor
• Make the bandwagon excessively clear… BOOM
• The vim show / you can too! vimtutor
• Relate them to your work at-hand and aspirations
• Remain flexible on it all… JupyterLab… JavaScript
  • Browser
  • NodeJS
  • Because of Unix/Linux… the great umbrella, glue API
• Help people with their first one-file-for-life journal… vim & git
• How much to pander?
  • Reading the tea-leaves in the data