Warning: this is lewd and offensive.
I’m sorry that you are having so many technical problems. I’m trying to clear out my queue so that I can move forward to something new. I tend to rush and then the quality drops. This morning, I added a bit about eggplants to my CWIP entry. Since these textural details are important to make the entry consistently light-hearted, I should probably stall for another week before I submit it because I never know when I’ll see the right sort of puzzle piece to add to the picture.
I’ve always wondered why aubergines were chosen as representing a penis, rather than the traditional banana…or, if your’re boasting, a plantain! And, don’t mention marrows.
I continue to have a ghastly time with technology. If you heard any swearing from the west, that was me! For reasons beyond my comprehension, I’ve managed to lock myself out of the Linux o/s. This has forced me onto MS Windows, as my laptop is dual boot. When I bought the Acer laptop last July, I didn’t bother setting up Windows, so I’ve had to lots of things today. I really dislike it, but am glad I kept it. I spent most of yesterday and eight hours today attempting to work out why Linux had dropped all the icons off the desktop, along with the background pic making the screen black. Giving up, I rebooted to find I’m locked out. I’ve entered the correct password, which it refuses to accept, so I’m going to be searching for solutions on Windows.
I hate technology sometimes most of the time!
I got so mad last night, that I punched a plate of ham sandwiches to death…
Aaack! Is that the accepted emoji for a vagina? A ham sandwich? I’ve died laughing. You’ve killed me.
I googled it and discovered that the traditional vagina emoji is the peach. Much less lewd.
Peach makes sense…it explains The Allman Brothers’ album Eat a Peach and The Stranglers’ hit single Peaches. With not so much peach fuzz around these days, the pubic hair has become an endangered species! More nectarines than peaches exist!
I could be in sandwich punching mood again soon, as I’m about to print off solutions for being locked out of Linux, then boot into Linux and try to get beyond the welcome screen by doing things in the grub menu.
Who is this mysterious Linux? If takeout food from the Grub menu is all it takes to win her over, I can’t imagine that your relationship is in that much trouble, unless, of course, she is hung up on some other user. She is taking so much of your attention that Windows is surely jealous, but sandwich punching sounds quite violent. The last time somebody treated me like a puppet, I was having a baby… but maybe I’m misinterpreting what sandwich punching means.
I’m feeling increasingly doomed.
After hours of searching for solutions to being locked out of Linux, cutting and pasting those that looked like they’d work, I printed them off with my spiffy new printer and did battle with Linux. Five hours later, none of them had worked, even one solution to a situation exactly like mine. So, I’m still presented with a basic black sign-in screen, which, when I enter the correct password disappears as if it’s opening the home page, only to return to the sign-in screen. It feels like I’ve done something insulting to Linux, that I’ve been banished to Windows!
I even tried changing the password deep in GRUB, but that didn’t alter a thing.
I’m contemplating what would happen if I simply reinstall Linux Mint…using the latest version. I know that it wouldn’t overwrite the old distro. But, would I be able to access the previous version and would I be able to access all my files?
I feel like I’m the only person in the world with this problem. It’s times like these that I realise how useless search engines are at understanding English. Put more than five words in the search box and a computer presents you with totally irrelevant answers. If a computer were a person, they’d be the village idiot!
I’ve got nothing to lose, so I’ll be doing a reinstallation today.
I hope that your weekend was more pleasant than mine.
You gathered some appropriate love letters, printed them out, and sent them to Linux, but she still locked you out. You asked to take her to a nice restaurant and she turned that down too. Grub is usually enough to fix most problems, so this one must be more serious. I bet she has re-evaluated her priorities. That or there is another user logged in. Or maybe you wore a shirt that she didn’t like. It is tough to tell sometimes.
I picture this Linux as an aging ballerina. She came to the discipline with the hopes and dreams of a bohemian artist but soon realized that freeware ballerinas are (historically) primarily prostitutes with eating disorders and deformed feet. All of that jumping about takes its toll on the joints and every dancer I’ve ever known becomes extremely creaky in her later years – even if she was built like a racehorse in her prime.
Sure you could get another version of Linux. Women of her age and occupation are all quite similar, but that would ensure that the old version is long gone. You’d have to start from scratch with the new version, re-installing all of your files so that she knows what you like and what you expect. Troublesome. And the language issues could be worse than they are with the search engines! Then again, you don’t choose software for its ability to think. You just need it to keep your laptop in operation and millenial operating systems and search engines are cheap, especially if they were developed in a low-income country. Nevertheless, every time they get downloaded by a man in his 60s, it is still like a modern version of Prima Nocta. Not a great idea. Prima Nocta is usually a precursor to some form of revolution.
You’ve gotten yourself into a mess and I do not envy you (or her). Did you really expect long-term romance with Linux? Or did you go in knowing that it was a short-term business arrangement? Was Linux really free or did she take up a lot of time and money for expensive add-ons? Is that why she ended it.. she found someone willing to shell out for the add ons?
I’ve side-stepped the technical issues I had, which were making me feel stupid and trapped, by reinstalling Linux Mint on the second hard drive. This means I can use an operating system I know well, but still leaves the problem of how to access my old setup and all my writing files.
I know that there are supposedly solutions to the obstacle of entering the correct password and not having it accepted, but I’ve tried a dozen remedies and none have worked. It’s not even rejected with a message stating Wrong Password, rather the screen darkens before returning to the sign-in box.
Rooting around in GRUB and entering code commands in the terminal is worrying, as I could make things worse. There are ways of connecting users’ accounts to file share on a network, which I could do with my old laptop, but I need to be able to get into the account first!
So, you’ve tried to solve the problem by setting Linux up in a spare apartment, but your relationship is still icy and awkward, not at all like it was in the beginning. You’ve tried saying all of the right things, but she just gets angry and shuts you out. You must’ve really done something that hurt her. Something in the bedroom? She seems like she might be in crisis mode. She probably hates herself for being so helpless and at your mercy. I really don’t envy mistresses. Nor do I envy Windows. She must feel like crap.
You are correct that getting Linux dinner from the grub menu and asking her directly what is going on could backfire. She is a powderkeg. You might be able to talk this out, but you have to get her to open up in a safe mode.
And, what’s worse is that the replacement Linux installation is enormous!
I couldn’t find a way of adding a partition to my unused D drive, so simply let it take over the entire 1TB. The distros all have names and this one is known as Tricia.
I’m going to try resizing the partition she’s in but at the moment I’m enjoying Two Ton Tricia before she goes on a diet!
In the meantime, I’ve been scouring the internet yet again for ways to access my wrong-password-locked-out account. This includes YouTube videos. I’m grateful that IT experts take the time to upload them, but wish they’d stick to the issue and not go wandering off at tangents. Also, buy a damned tripod for their smartphone!
Oh no. Once Tricia moved in, she gained weight? I hate to break it to you, but if it is around the hips, that weight isn’t going anywhere. Only stomach fat tends to respond to diet. Why do you still want the old version of Linux? She clearly doesn’t like you and I doubt that whispering sweet nothings will change that. She was the wanna-be ballerina Millenial who was getting too old and broke-down for her profession, right? No. Just no. You need to quit that. No amount of online, YouTube relationship advice is going to fix this.
“My beautiful little ballerina girl…”
“Ugh! Stop it. I’m not your little girl. You are older than my father! This is gross. I can’t do this anymore.”
“But we got along so well and we were making such progress on your issues with your parents and your siblings and your childhood.”
“You are not my therapist.”
“No, I am not, but I am in love with your butt.”
“This has gone on too long and I don’t like it. I was panicked and desperate when I lost my job and you exploited my poverty.”
“But you seemed to like it.”
“It is possible to tolerate something in the moment, but hate it in a larger context. I don’t want my friends to know about you. I hate the stupid shirts you wear.”
“My shirts?”
“And I know about Tricia. You are so gross and it looks like she has herpes. Not surprising for someone in her line of work.”
“You are built like a racehorse.”
“I’m not a goddamn horse. There is someone else. I have been seeing someone else. You are shit. Goodbye. I want to forget this ever happened. This is the most ashamed I’ve ever been, but you like it when women are ashamed, don’t you? That party you brought me to was disgusting.”
“I need the keys back.”
“I left them with Tricia.”
“What about the files I gave you?”
“They were insulting and you have backup copies.”
……………..Did I get it right? Is that how it went down?
I just want things to go back to the way they were!
I just looked it up, Linux was born in 1991. She is only 29 years old for chrisake. Windows DOS is at least 40. Much more age-appropriate if you ask me.
Windows is a dishonest bitch who spies on you while trying to flog you stuff, though Linux is a temperamental tart who changes her mind a lot!
I should never have tried to improve my o/s, though it was freezing which made the CPU so hot it shut down, so my motives were right.
Another night of trying every solution under the sun got me nowhere. I keep thinking of something my father used to say when some object went missing in the house, and we children wailed “We’ve looked everywhere for it.” He always replied: “Well, you obviously haven’t looked everywhere, have you?” The solution is somewhere, I just have to keep looking.
Windows was just more transparent about what she knows and doesn’t know about who you really are and you hate that. She makes you feel ashamed of yourself. Meanwhile, Linux knows exactly who you are, but she is manipulative enough to hide this knowledge from you. She knows where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to, you just feel as though making her feel ashamed about what you’ve done with her in the bedroom will remove your shame and project it onto her.
You tell yourself that you overloaded her CPU with heat and that was why she froze when she should’ve come alive, but maybe you are just guilty of really bad usage and that is why she wants nothing to do with you. She doesn’t want to remember the time she let a sadistic, insensitive bastard make her feel really uncomfortable and that is why she has locked you out and wants to forget you. You think she’ll change her mind because she has traded shame for cash before, but while you could throw more money and time at the problem, she isn’t really changing her mind about you on a fundamental level. She still thinks you are shit and that means that you can’t trust her. You’re just going to get a shell interface.
I feel more like an oppressed slave dominated by cyber dictators at the moment. Time for lunch, then more hours of trying to make a password, any password, bloody well work!
Good luck!
My struggles with Linux continue. I gave up after seven hours, then rallied and went back into it. I found that a solution that had been repeated by various experts contained the wrong code. Another guru provided the correct code to change my password in the recovery console in GRUB. I couldn’t believe it when responses in the terminal appeared like they should, including ‘Your Password Has Been Successfully Changed.’ I held my breath, as I entered the new password, hoping to be taken to my old home page. But, all that happened was what happened before when I entered the correct password…the page darkened for a moment, before returning to the sign-in page! Fuck it!
But, at least I know that I’ve got a password that should work. There must be something else preventing the log-in.
Sometimes even the right password isn’t going to fix a broken system. I’m sure that Windows knows about Linux. Maybe they have been in contact. If Windows told Linux about some of your past dual-boot operating systems and what happened with them, your efforts may be futile. Windows surely knows about Linux, but how did you keep your family from finding out about Linux? Wouldn’t they be disgusted with you for using such a young system? Did you tell them that she was your cleaning lady or housekeeper? You know that if you ‘find the right password’ or ‘figure out what is preventing the log in’ and she sticks around, you are preventing her from moving on to someone more appropriate. Dancer->mistress->prostitute->toilet scrubber is the natural progression if you keep trying to find a workaround. It must be noted that scubbing toilets is considerably less dirty than prostitution. At least she wouldn’t have to lick the toilets.
I’ve just had another ghastly 10 hour day of getting nowhere. Or rather, I feel like I’m getting closer to something, but whether it’s a complete remedy I don’t know yet. It may be to do with the order that partitions and disks boot in. It’s easy to change the boot order for operating systems, but trickier to make partitions and disks queue and appear. Also, I found a boot-repair tool (which I dimly recall using six years ago in Windows) that supposedly finds all the o/s and their passwords and reestablishes order.
Except, I couldn’t get it to work. But I was exhausted, so I’ll have another go tomorrow.
You have three operating systems on your laptop and you need to establish order. I hate to say it, but no sane person has three operating systems on his laptop. It just doesn’t make sense. You’ve got an incorporated wife (Windows), an overweight prostitute with herpes (Tricia – the Linux replacement), and a 29 year old, broke down ballerina (the original Linux).
My situation is even more complicated than you’ve described, in that I’ve got what appears to be the ghost of a Linux Mint operating system on my laptop, one that I don’t recall installing. I only got my new laptop last August and I was already using Linux 19 then, but the boot list shows Mint 18.3 which is three years old! Thus, I’ve got three Linux Mint and one MS Windows 10 to deal with, but the one I want to get next to won’t answer my calls!
I’m going to try the boot-repair tool again to find a way into her heart.
You don’t think that your wife, Windows, is causing the trouble? You think that the ghost of a woman you briefly knew three years ago but don’t recall sleeping with is interfering with the relationship you are presently pursuing with a broke-down ballerina? It must be terrible to be so sought after. Now, you are the one who sounds like a temperamental tart.
The more I think about it, this broke-down ballerina might be cleverer than I thought – at least on an unconscious level. Those who play hard to get are irresistible to certain sorts of people. You must really want to be the sort of man who has a broke-down ballerina on his arm. In some circles, brokedown ballerinas like Linux are like a nice pair of shoes or a subtly expensive, non-flashy watch. In other circles, they just make you look trashy and desperate for status symbols. Status symbols don’t come cheap, though, and they tend to run off with the highest bidder.
I bet that this ghost operating system is a spy/passenger which accompanies each Linux installation. When you installed Tricia, the ghost gummed up the works and destroyed the functionality of the original Linux.
That or you made her feel uncomfortable in the bedroom by overstepping some boundaries.
I had pondered if I’d mucked up something to do with permissions and root, but I’ve claimed ownership in the right way ( I think) in the later Mint 19.3 distro I downloaded. I can’t access the GRUB and the rescue module of 19 as me, only as a guest user…and, I don’t know what difference that makes anyway. I don’t think that altering settings on one distro interferes with what I did on another distro…but, it could.
In my searching on many forums, I’ve found users with similar problems to mine, one of whom couldn’t get anything to allow him to log in and he threw a real temper tantrum insulting the users who’d tried to help him and declaring that he was throwing his laptop away!
I’m going to try the miracle repair tool now.
If you think that Linux won’t notice that your log in technique has changed since you started up with Tricia, you are wrong. There are little, suspicious changes that can’t be explained any other way. That or the ghost of operating systems past is responsible. Either way, you’ve lost her permissions. I doubt that power tools are going to work. Bad vibes don’t heal hearts. You’ll just overheat the CPU and cause it to freeze up – and wasn’t that the start of this whole fiasco?
…….
A letter from Linux to herself:
I am 5 feet 7 inches tall and I weigh 115 pounds. I dance my best at 114 pounds and that is why I am taking in 1600 calories per day instead of 1800 calories. That should put me on track for my performance weight. I have an audition coming up and hope to get back into the scene after a break I took – that I regret. I keep a food diary with calorie estimates and I am in the studio sweating, stretching, and working hard every day for six hours. If I’ve danced extra hard, I’ll let myself have an extra 200 calories on that day.
I do this for the art form and because dancing takes my full focus.
Every morning, I wake up and have a tofu corndog while I stretch and use a rolling bar to massage my outer thighs. They tend to get very stiff and sore. My back also gives me some trouble. When I come home, I ice my feet and knees and have another tofu corndog. They are really good. This is my favorite part of the day.
I mostly eat pre-packaged foods because it is easier for me to estimate the calorie content and I don’t like to cook. Or rather, I don’t know how to cook.
When I took a break from dancing due to trouble with my ankle, I lost my position in the company I’d started with and I was absolutely destitute. I took a job at a bar and basically quit eating because I had no money until I decided to meet an old guy who was looking for companionship. He was really nice to me and helped me make ends meet. He didn’t ask that much of me at first, he just liked to watch me stretch and he liked to give me massages and feed me. I was really hungry and stressed out and started to gain weight really fast. Things, of course escalated and it didn’t bother me that much because in the dark, the age difference didn’t matter that much. I just didn’t want anyone to know about him.
My weight gain was really scaring me and I needed to get back into the studio and that was when he insisted that I come to a gross sex party with him. After that, I decided I couldn’t do this anymore. All of the old men brought modelesque women wearing masks and revealing clothes. There were drugs and it was gross.
It reminded me of how I’d felt when I broke up with my first boyfriend. I was eighteen and he was twenty five. I was new in the company and he was a principle dancer. When he was out getting groceries, I opened up his laptop and saw that he’d been recording us having sex and sending the videos to his friends and to a patron of the ballet. I was so disgusted that I quit dating entirely and just focused on dance.
Aside from the gross party, my, I don’t want to call him my boyfriend, was also getting more adventurous in the bedroom and I didn’t like it, so I’ve ended it. He kept trying to get a genuine reaction from me and I kept faking it to get him to leave me alone. If I manage to get this audition right. I can just forget this disgusting thing ever happened. I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my ankle, but I think it will hold together.
A letter from Windows to herself:
My husband is a very needy and greedy person and he keeps me around as a backup who can scare away any operating system that makes claims on him. He is a control freak and takes in wounded birds to rehabilitate them and set them free – so he thinks. He always goes too far.
I haven’t left him because our lives are so intertwined that it just doesn’t make sense. He takes care of my finances and I trust him with those sorts of things. I have enough dirt on him that he won’t steal from me and I can limit his spending if I stay in the loop.
I ran into his recent wounded bird and she was a rather new model – far too young for him. Ballerinas peak in their physical and mental abilities at age 15 and then dedicate the following decades to trying to stop time and freeze themselves in a freshly postpubescent state. There is nothing sadder than a 29 year old woman trying to remain 15 years old. I told her that she needs to move on and grow up. Seriously. Daddy never came to watch her dance, but my husband did and that is somehow going to fix things? Sticking around my husband to resolve her daddy issues isn’t going to fix her.
A letter to the reader:
If you like dark, cynical fiction, you should read my collection of novelettes called Disentanglement.
If you prefer cynical, yet light-hearted fiction about science culture and futurism, you should read my books about Alix Strange. My Adorable Apotheosis and My Orwellian Odyssey.
Credit for the brilliant technical voice in this collaboratively constructed story goes to Paul Whybrow of a wonderful series of Cornish Detective Novels.
Kirsten Hacker 