Red Star OS (or, the answer to the question “How can I make my computer more communist?”)

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Yes, I'm talking the Red Star Operating System. From the KPDR. Where Kim Jong Un gets to be the nuke-happy, egomaniac ruler of a country that almost started World War III over a damn tree. Why? Well, if you've ever seen LGR on YouTube, you know he does a series called Oddware, and this is definitely one of the things that he might end up looking at one day. On a side note, with few exception, I ended up leaving the system in Korean (save for Sogwang Office) and opened the thing to the internet, but that's neither here nor there. What I'd like to get at today is that this (both this and v2) is one of the operating systems I'd used on my main computer a few years ago. It wasn't a good computer (it was a laptop from 1997 that I fitted to be a desktop because I'm quirky), but it could run Red Star OS 2 decently and could boot OS 3, but that was just a pain, so I left it with OS 2. I could make it into a "Communist, North Korean Windows XP knockoff" and enjoy the path of insanity that I sometimes let myself go down, though the "distraction-free" aspect didn't end up working for me. I just had another fun toy to play with. Still, it was funny that I was able to use what was ostensibly, a piece of complete and utter crap to do assignments for school on and use, to some degree, the internet. For reference about just how much of a rip this OS is of western software, Sogwang Office and Uri Office were just different versions of OpenOffice.org; Naenara Browser 2 is the same version of Mozilla Firefox that made me fall in love with the Gecko engine (North Korea's version is just in Korean and rebranded as the propagandistic "My Country"); the OS uses KDE 3 (picture the Linux equivalent of Windows XP); and the whole thing is based on code from (I believe) Fedora 11. I never had wireless networking on the system.

Now that my anecdote is out of the way, the reason I'm writing about RSOS today is partially because I don’t see things as a linear path the way that most people do. I can get my writing done on one of several versions of Microsoft Windows, a choice of Linux distros, or (assuming it still works) I could break out my iMac G4 and try to break into it because God knows I don't remember the password after umpteen years. My point here is that there's not just one way of doing something and there's not just one set of tools that you have to use. You can, ultimately, use whatever combination that you want and can get your hands on. When I sit down to my computer with my Windows for Workgroups machine running, I tend to be more self-conscious of my mistakes (whether or not I'm aware of what they are, I have no idea), but when I sit down to write in Microsoft Word (not in any emulation, just running Word straight on my computer), it's easy for me to get distracted by the "features" available. When I would sit down to type on Red Star, however, I wouldn't be distracted by the array of choices (they didn't exist, beyond whether to use Konqueror or Naenara to get online and to use Sogwang Office or Uri Office), but the sheer lack of any available options in the system had me baffled and intrigued as to what was really going on under the hood. Short story, (crappy) spying on the end user and not much else. I was actually held back after class one day when I said that I had typed my homework on North Korean software, but the teacher and I didn't get along, so I didn't worry about anything in the long-run.

Using a different set of tools to achieve a certain task doesn't mean that said task won't get completed or completed badly, it just means that the end result is going to be somewhat different than if you'd used "regular" tools. Sometimes the end result can be more about you learning different ways to go about something, sometimes, you'll end up with a bigger and better goal than you started out with, the possibilities are truly endless. As with everything, though, I do caution you to use some discretion when trying things in the manner that I do (not that it's bad, I'm just a skeptic on so many levels) because, while most of the time, the differences are in no way harmful, there is the off-chance, and that doesn't stop at working with computers; it goes to every aspect of life and doing things. Truly, you'll be shocked when you really step back and look at all of the ways that something can be done.

Whelp, with that being said, I'm going to leave you with another challenge: Find something that you do and do it, but use a different toolkit than what you're used to. If you're in a funk of some kind, this is guaranteed to help you along.

About Musique

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Music (as well as any “complex audio”) is an interesting subject to me. Take the recording of Jerusalem (And Did Those Feet, in Ancient Time) by Lesley Garrett, for instance. If you listen to the standard recording of it, you’ll hear her start to sing the first verse of the song at 1:43 (on an unrelated note, she has an absolutely beautiful voice here, I challenge any contradicting opinion). If you listen to it with the pitch a little lower (I usually have Musicolet set to p=0.85), you can hear a five-note pattern at 1:44 that is nowhere in the song, apart from that one moment. It doesn't sound bad, it sounds like an orchestra. Ms. Garrett's voice (obviously) becomes a lower pitch, somewhere around the tenor/alto range, I believe, and the five notes can be heard as if they were played in the “melody octave” (it’s what I call the range of notes that falls within singing range for me, it just helps to have that label) and they're somewhat-more pronounced. At p=0.70, the notes are pronounced, and at p=0.50, most things below that part of the staff, as well as the voice, is distorted.

Anyway, rant over.

The thing I'm bringing up here isn’t to download an app and screw with the settings to see what you can and can’t hear in your music; rather, it’s about how sound is an amazing thing when well and complex, I find music to be the best examples to use. Sound, like so many other things, is often overlooked when you’re talking about complex and delicate things. Sure, it’s just a form of non-electromagnetic waves, but at the same time, there's more to it that just that. Sound is closer to an art than most people realize (so long as it’s not irritating clatter) and, like art, can be deconstructed and analyzed from multiple viewpoints. Look up a picture of the Zaisan Memorial in Ulaanbaatar online, you’ll understand what I’m getting at. Sound, like art, can convey worlds of different meanings and messages, sometimes without even changing the most-minuscule of details.

At some point, I’d like you to take a song and run it through any full-featured audio program (Musicolet for Android & Audacity are both good options) and experiment with it by tweaking some aspects like speed and pitch in small increments. Musicolet is a music player, so it won’t mess up the original song file, but I’d recommend you use a copy of the song of your choosing if you use Audacity, that way, you won’t have to worry about anything getting overwritten that you care about. Do this and listen to how the song changes, listen to what parts become audible or more noticeable and vice-versa. It’s an amazing experience, believe me.

The Golden Record Preview №5

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Preview №5

As I finished with breakfast and had everything sat on the island, Azathoth came through the great room, smelling the air before looking at me as he stood, completely naked, covered only with his tattoos and his hair that now was only pushed back from his face as I froze and my eyes scanned his entire body.

“I… uh…” I said, finally able to blink again.

“Yes?” he said, crossing his arms and looking expectantly at me, “I walked here to find that smell.”

“You’re… naked.”

“So?”

“It’s just… whoa,” I said, closing my eyes and shaking my head as I finished taking up the food, “It- it’s breakfast, I made it for us,” I said, fixating my gaze on the stove to respect his privacy, “Go put on some clothes, Azathoth, and I’ll have it ready when you come back.”

“Of course, right,” he said.

“I made it a point to not turn around until I was certain he was out of my view.

“My God,” I muttered, setting the rest of the food on the island and grabbing the cups and orange juice.

“Right, of course, I’m back,” he said, “I’m wearing clothes.”

“Thank God,” I said, “Azathoth, this is breakfast. I… don’t know if you’re hungry right now, but it’s something we do on Earth. Go ahead, make a plate and dig in. It’s my favorite breakfast ever, actually.”

“If you say so,” he said, filling up his plate and stopping halfw2ay to the table as he tried it, “Khlahng-yeng! This is good!”

“Azathoth, it’s like I always say, don’t half-ass two things; whole-ass one thing and be damn-good at it.”

“This is… I thought food last night was good, but…”

“Fast food is just a quick meal. As actual food, it’s not much past taste,” I explained, “Compared to this, fast food is just garbage food.”

“Tdrakh-vih-nay-yuh,” Azathoth muttered as he savored the bagel and tomatoes in particular, “The food on Tanh Khlokh – Khu'aiy, it’s nothing like this. It’s mostly aintervened on.”

“Here, we call that undomesticated.”

“Interesting,” he said, “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“Nah,” I said, “I’m an only-child. What about you?”

“I have one sister and she is more into body modification than I am,” he said, showing me a picture of him and a girl.

She was a much different shade of blue, almost mauve. Her eyes were red where Azathoth’s were blue, and she had a dark, long mane that rested on her shoulders and had been dyed in strips from red to yellow, like fire. Her teeth, like Azathoth’s were the color of human skin, but she had eight fangs, which she showed off by holding what looked like a cigarette with her teeth. Each arm was covered in the tattoo of a dark dragon, outlined in the color of wood with dark purple runes adorning her torso, each hand wearing four rings with a glowing, purple gemstone. She had three breasts, unlike humans, and was wearing nothing more than a dark bra, underwear, leg warmers, and metal shoes. From her back was a pair of massive wings that were purple at the bottom and faded to black at the top with the section in her back being a vivid crimson color. On the top of her head was a pair of metal horns and a row of fiery-colored spikes. A dark, spiked tail, however, wrapped around her leg, ending in a larger spike that looked like it was made of metal leather.

How Far We've Come

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I was playing around in 86Box yesterday, and something occurred to me about getting on the Information Superhighway: I don't need to try to install a DOS driver for the NE2000 Ethernet card, I don't need to install WinPKT, I don't need to remember to do it before I type in WIN.COM, I don't need to screw around with Trumpet Winsock 1.0a and hope I get it right, and I don't need to have any more browsers on my computer (save for the glorious Mozilla Firefox, even though it's nothing like what I fell in love with years ago anymore), and I don't need to know if I'm running in Real Mode, Protected (Standard) Mode, or Virtual (386 Enhanced) Mode for access. I just need to make sure the telephone lines at my house are doing their freaking job for once and that I'm connected to WiFi (or Ethernet, if I'm at my desk). The above screenshot was taken at my dock setup, the computer itself was running Microsoft Word with one of my "Writer's Block Shorts" (just my way of making myself write every day) and, in 86Box, PFS:WindowWorks Word Processor running on Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11 running on MS-DOS 6.22 running on an emulated Am486DX at 33MHz.

It occurred to me the other day that I might be getting old, even though I'm not thirty yet, but moving on!

The reason I'm writing this is because, in The Golden Record, the society Azathoth comes from is akin to what most science fiction would still call futuristic, even for today. Seth comes from a time when getting on the internet involved making sure nobody was on the telephone (in most cases, at least. We've all heard of dial-up, right?) while most of us live in a time where Covid-19 is either ending or about to end and the reasons to leave our homes are dwindling. The society that Azathoth comes from has already mastered faster-than-light travel, no further explanation is needed, even if it makes us look like cavemen who've just learned that getting bonked on the head with a club is painful (I know the Neanderthals were more intelligent than that, I'm not good at humor). The reason for the story being written in that way partially hails back to my younger self. I was always invested in anything 90s and the portrayals of the future that were around were fascinating beyond belief, even if I was born a month before the millennium. Remind me to post a story about SheepShaver, Mac OS 7, and a Hackintosh when I was in ninth grade.

Explaining myself a little bit further, I consider myself to be (somewhat) a student of history and a Cold War Enthusiast, which is a double-edged sword, living in the Southeast US- it causes headaches, to say the least, but it does give me context for the present in so many situations that arise, even if I'm not always right about things the first time. Most of what happens, I solely believe to be the fault of egotists wanting to be right (to put it nicely), though what I do know to be right is that, to a degree, everything is subjective, and nothing has a one-size-fits-all context, no matter what you want to say about it. I remember seeing a… very illuminating graphic on Facebook one day, as shown to the right. Of course, this is, at best, highly oversimplified, and of course, I found it while I was scrolling through Facebook waiting for something to finish downloading (it was a few years ago, so I couldn't tell you all of the details if I tried, beyond it was several gigabytes over a DSL connection), but I think it illustrates my point… fairly-well. I'm sure there are better ways that it could be articulated and better people to do it than me, but I'm typing this while waiting on someone and I do not claim to be a professor, doctor, or anything of that matter. I just know what I'm talking about most of the time.

To sum up what I'm trying to say, generally, the context behind the present is in the past, and while I know that, to most people, context doesn't seem important, in reality, it is very important.