As of 2016-02-26, there will be no more posts for this blog. s/blog/pba/
Showing posts with label Blogarbage (old blog). Show all posts

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2791/4168295697_93f2b8e946.jpg

Every pack has two special cardsOne for love, the other to love; both with luck.

The odd is pretty high to love, 1/52, almost 2 per cent. Even if your life is two wild, you still 1.85 per cent of chance.

So, good 7uck if you are a love chaser1! If you are in love, wish you that would be a 42-year love to !

Got inspired by the photo in background, when I was wasting my time on recent photos. I have no idea what kind of the game they were playing.

[1]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56x6HS8PsKw is gone.

Awesome! Another great musical, I Love Lunch, from Improv Everywhere. Though it's quite similar to Food Court Musical in many aspects except the starting, it's still good. If I had a friend who do that on me in public, I would wish I could dig a hole and bury my head in. Paul: Jeff, don't sing a song, man! LOL!



Is that a real cop? The article didn't say if he is, just mentioned some guy was shocked when found out the cop was in it.

Relay IE's message: There aint no shame in <3ing lunch.

A twitter I followed tweeted1 (got to favor it) the clip below exactly two months ago, and a month ago, a blog I read posted it. It is like recurring reminders around me, they kept pondering me. After, I had been waiting to post about it, but I didnt because its kind of way too negative. Hell, who am I to care about that?

After I watched the clip, I checked out the film (Synecdoche, New York). Its kind of abstract to me, I knew I didnt catch the concept of this film well. Basically, the plot is good but it has nothing to do with this post. All I want to bring up is the last line of dialog in the clip.

Minister: Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you wont know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: its what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesnt really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is Ive felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long Ive been pretending Im OK, just to get along, just for, I dont know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.

I didnt mean to shout that out to everyone nor to particular someone, its just a feeling of yelling that. Though, I only tweeted, yelling that is really not my way at the moment. Nope, it didnt make me better but it seemed to be a necessary step to relieve. Some things or nothing caused all of the sudden irrational feelings, no clue of what just happened, or what the hell I am writing.

Well, fuck everybody. Amen.

[1]http://twitter.com/kyriabeingbanal/status/3717235435 is gone.

Imaginatively Fly To The Infinite Possibilities

Just a photo if it is without an actual action when taken

Within our brain, we can imagine, create a fictional memory,

or revenge what someone did to you long time ago

In the end, nothing of them would be real

They would never come to this bloody world

Only remain inside, ridiculous dreams





Why so negative?

Because you forget to open the window (Ouch!), and

you also forget you can not really fly (Belief is not enough)

Unless... you were a superman!



:-)

I was listening to my music library, one song caught my ears, Falling from Broken Lullabies by Calling Wendy. The whole album is free for download on Last.fm, but I had only that song. I must have listened to that sometime ago on Last.fm and I downloaded. Sometimes, you dug out good stuff from things you already have.

They are from Canada and indie, I like their music style and the following tracks from the album:

  • Tennessee
  • Just For A While
  • You Make Me Whole
  • William
  • Take A Look Around
  • Falling

By the way, this album has six tracks. :-)

Just got a entry in Google Reader, hooray! Improve Everywhere just released another musical, Grocery Store Musical. This one is well produced and planned, better sound (the previous one is good still).



And is that girl really pregnant? I didn't read the behind-the-scene post but just searched for that for an answer and I wasn't the only one believed she was, some shoppers even asked about the due date. She could do another IE mission on those shoppers.

But the my favorite one is their first (they only have two so far, please make more Improv Everywhere!), Food Court Musical. Because it's more dramatic and it has a twisted and funny ending.



I wish I can be seeing this kind of thing someday, it's better than winning a billion lottery, okay, maybe not. But it's an experience you could remember for whole life.

Now I am looping these two musicals on my screen.

Yes, We Can Give Them A Napkin!

I am a six-month-old Gentoo user now! Six month ago, I posted about being a newbie of Gentoo. Now I could say I am happy with my decision of switching from Fedora. Please note that Fedora is a great distribution, I personally think Fedora is better than most of distributionsUbuntu included.

If you know of Gentoo a little more, you should know that its a source-based management, you install packages (applications) by compiling source code with Gentoo package management program, Portage. It sounds scary whether if you have experience to tar xf program-x.y.z.tar.gz && cd program* && ./configure && make && make install or not. Of course, you wouldnt have to run the command but just run emerge <package> to compile and to install it. The Gentoo developers have taken care of that for you.

However, at beginning, the effort of using Portage is not as easy as other binary package management distributions. You need to understand your system more and to configure how you want the package being compiled as you do manually. You need to set up /etc/make.conf, which has C(XX)FLAGS, etc. This leads a common discussion: Does -O3 helps in program execution speed? Go google it.

You would also need to edit /etc/portage/packages.*, because sometimes you need unstable packages or you need to specify per package USE flags.

Like other binary package management, you would encounter problems sometimes. Most of them are failure to compile, I had few times. Google gentoo bugs package_name version to see if its already been reported and also check Gentoo Forums. Sometimes, you resync after, it will be resolved.

How about GCC upgrade? I had done twice and met no problems, one right after I installed Gentoo 4.1.X to 4.3.X, few days ago, 4.3.X to 4.3.4. You only need to follow the manual. If you want to do something, just google. The only drawback of Gentoo that I could think of is compiling time. The last GCC upgrade took me 21 hours to rebuild system + world. Well, its a trade-off. If every six month to do whole system rebuild, I could accept that.

For some really big package like OO.o or Chromium browser, you could emerge the binary package. Yes, Gentoo provides some binary package, try to append -bin after package name. When I first time to compile Firefox on Fedora, I thought its a big app. Once you tried OO.o or Chromium, well, you will see whats really called Big app.

About my environment, XDM > Fluxbox. I dont use GNOME or KDE months before I switched to Gentoo. The only few major GUI apps are Firefox, GIMP, GnuCash, VNCViewer, and OO.o. Firefox runs most of time on my system.

I use Midnight Command to manage files, MPD + ncmpcpp to play music, conky to monitor my system, VIM to edit files, BashPad to launch programs, xrandr to manage dual-monitor, and some self-made scripts to help myself.

I think one of major point of using Gentoo is USE flag, if you have compile a program, you would have known that ./configure --help tells about what kind of features that you can enable or disable. The binary management distributions would probably enable all because they have to meet all of users needs, therefore, the compiled result would have lots of things you would never need to use or you have no idea there is a such feature. For example, the mplayer,

> emerge -pv mplayer

These are the packages that would be merged, in order:

Calculating dependencies... done!
[ebuild   R   ] media-video/mplayer-1.0_rc4_p20090919-r2  USE="X a52 aac alsa ass cddb cdio dirac dts dv dvd dvdnav enca encode faac faad gif gmplayer iconv jpeg live lzo mmx mp2 mp3 network opengl osdmenu png quicktime rar real rtc schroedinger sdl shm speex sse sse2 ssse3 theora tremor truetype unicode v4l v4l2 vorbis x264 xinerama xscreensaver xv xvid -3dnow -3dnowext -aalib (-altivec) -bidi -bindist -bl -cdparanoia -cpudetection -custom-cpuopts -debug -dga -directfb -doc -dvb -dxr3 -esd -fbcon -ftp -ggi -ipv6 -jack -joystick -ladspa -libcaca -lirc -mad -md5sum -mmxext -mng -nas -nut -openal -opencore-amr -oss -pnm -pulseaudio -pvr -radio -samba (-svga) -teletext -tga -vdpau (-vidix) (-win32codecs) -xanim -xvmc -zoran" VIDEO_CARDS="-mga -nvidia -s3virge -tdfx" 0 kB

(If you want to know what the USE flags for, just run equery u mplayer.)

With Gentoo, you could turn off those that you dont need and have a cleaner version of programs and environment. This does reduce the flexibility, but you only take time to re-emerge with new USE flags and this kind of change rather happening. It is worth if you do have time.

The other good thing about Gentoo is its tools, for example, eselect, very powerful to customize some settings. Here is a sample of what it can do for you:

> eselect
Usage: eselect

Global options:
--no-color,--no-colour    Disable coloured output

Built-in modules:
help                      Display a help message
usage                     Display a usage message
version                   Display version information

Extra modules:
bashcomp                  Manage contributed bash-completion scripts
binutils                  Manage installed versions of sys-devel/binutils
blas                      Manage installed BLAS implementations
cblas                     Manage installed CBLAS implementations
ctags                     Manage /usr/bin/ctags implementations
editor                    Manage the EDITOR environment variable
env                       Manage environment variables set in /etc/env.d/
fontconfig                Manage fontconfig /etc/fonts/conf.d/ symlinks
java-nsplugin             Manage the Java plugin for Netscape-like Browsers
java-vm                   Manage the Java system and user VM
kernel                    Manage the /usr/src/linux symlink
lapack                    Manage installed LAPACK implementations
modules                   A module for querying modules. By default, it lists all available modules
news                      Read Gentoo ("GLEP 42") news items
oodict                    Manage the configuration of dictionaries for OpenOffice.Org.
opengl                    Manage the OpenGL implementation used by your system
pager                     Manage the PAGER environment variable
profile                   Manage the /etc/make.profile symlink
python                    Manage the /usr/bin/python and python.1 man symlinks.
rc                        Manage /etc/init.d scripts in runlevels
vi                        Manage /usr/bin/vi implementations
visual                    Manage the VISUAL environment variable

Gentoo is easy to maintain if you are willing to pay time first to learn. I dont know if its still easy if you use GNOME or KDE, but I am sure it is if you use other DE or just window manager because you would know your system and each configuration better. I can do everything and even more and know better. For example, I didnt know gmplayer had ceased development when I was using Fedora, but I knew it after I emerged mplayer with gmplayer USE flag. When you emerge something, you will get some good information, it might recommend you something else or some post-emerge actions. If you use Gentoo, you will learn to read messages.

I am not a very careful user I believe, maybe just above average? I know Gentoo is perfect for me, Fedora is great for me, Arch Linux is awesome for me. But I just could stop loving using Gentoo. Its simply fantastic because I have it and control it more. Its meant to be used by you, not like some are using you.

Hail Gentoo!

Starting showering twice a day is the only thing I am happy with myself this summer. I used to shower at evening, but this summer something have inspired me, I should have done this before. Now I shower after and before sleep. After the before-sleeping shower, I also drink a small cup of warm tea to prepare my night. Those help me relax.

It makes me feel really good after the morning shower, my body would be completely awaken, fresh, and clean. A cup of coffee follows up, wow! it can't be better than that. I wish I could have done this when I was a student, I might have better performance at morning classes.

I also thought a shower/bathing was a minimum for personal hygiene, but some pages I read from googling they didn't say so. However, they didn't have references. Some else said it's okay if you feel necessary, and I did feel that way. I am not that kind of guy stays in bathroom longer ten minutes nor a neat freak.

There is one thing for sure, I use more water than before. At least, I didn't cause global warming anymore. I started to shower in cold water, I used to use hot water no matter how hot the day is. Showing with cold water feels really good, I had heard some people claimed it's better for your health, I didn't dare to try. Thanks to the water heater, I got my chance.

I don't think I can shower twice in winter, every time I turned off the hot water at shower in winter, it begins a bloody battle between me and time. I have to dress as quick as I can, or I would shake like a nuts.

If you only do once day, then try one more a day, you will like it!

This posting was written for myself, though I don't think I would ever read it again. Whatever, just for a record of the terrible me. I didn't like to reveal my personal lifeeven if I ever had one, so to this posting, this would read very abstract. I might be the only one who would understand. I don't think you will be interested in reading this.

In a few months, it will have been five years. I couldnt recall the exact date, I probably could find out if I really wanted. Almost five years ago, I made a decision before midterm exams, I didnt regret that after all. I didnt achieve the original goal, in fact, I doubt I had started to go on that way. I failed myself in just a half year, I realized that long after. For the last three years, I hadnt done anything. I knew the problems, I saw the problems. I am just not willing to correct myself.

I rather talked about my family, I didnt know if I still have. I was the only one still stand at same place like five years ago, maybe more than five years. I couldnt be sure, I must stop for quite long time. They might have been moving on, I didnt. They might have let go, I couldnt. Its my fault, I just need to admit to them, I couldnt.

Before that time, my voice was always listened since my mid-teenage. I believe if I ever speak again, its still listened. But I havent for more than four years. They did value me a lot, I failed them.

Around two years ago, I shockingly realized how far I had be away the original plan. The life I had expected to have, its not there with me. All I had was the premature thoughts, I didnt grow up. I like looking at photos on Flickr or somewhere I could see or read peoples life. I began thinking if I possibly could get like those life? I answered myself: not in this life. Because there was some crucial change of myself, which was related to born feature, I wouldnt never possible to have what I wanted.

The last two months, I read a lot of stories. More I read, more I knew how wrong I was, but I still didnt try to apologize. Three persons. He supported me in silence, I couldnt remember if I had thanked him. She was subtly relying on me. The dog, the snuggling that night, the crying in book store. The last time I couldnt remember the time, a year ago I guessed, clamping my arm but I crudely pulled her hand away, she tried twice. We had been close but not anymore for ten or thirteen years. Last week, she was eating cookies or something alone as I saw her back. Its my fault I believed, she should have been with someone. Its my fault I knew, no one could ever hear from me. The last one, my buddy, the cat, sorry for not playing with you anymore. Our only conversation was like Meow..., then I gave him some food while saying nothing to him. Wait, that was even counted as a conversation.

Two weeks ago, hundreds buried because of the typhoon which was happened where only a hundred mile from here. I felt nothing! I couldnt feel grief or sadness, just nothing. I didnt care. How awful I became. Doing nothing is worser than those who hold knifes in hands. Thats what I did for the last five years.

Stupid, selfish me.

At middle of night, I woke up.
I knew what time it possibly be because that's what I used to.
I staggered to check up the time using my cell phone, or say a clock.
It's 2 o'clock.
Then I went to clean up a bit.

I opened the door, but the cat wasn't by the door.
He sometimes does.
I still walked to fill his bowl with food, even he didn't ask for.
It's just a routine, which I keep doing from time to time.
I felt nothing.

I went to make some food to eat.
Poured water in pan and put it on the stove.
Minutes later, I realized that I forgot to turn on.

While boiling the water, I gave myself a glass of water, a cold one.
Then, I took the food to living room, where I can watch tv while eating.
What I was eating, that isn't important.
Because I only eat for my stomach.
No taste, no smell, no pleasure, or whatsoever I care about the food.
It's only the animal's natural need.

I have to mute the volume, because there are other people sleeping.
News channels are the ones I don't like watching.
Because some news are very disturbing and I refuse to make myself suffer from them.
After few rounds of scanning all channels, I finished my food.

Feast of Love on a movie channel, I stopped by that one.
I remembered I have seen it few times.
Never watched it all, only pieces, so is this time.

In the scene of Oscar's funeral, when the coffin slowly moving down, at the very moment, I cried.
For no reasons or some, I don't know.

This is not my first time when watching a movie.
But this one is different, I knew it, I just knew it.

Maybe that was another story that I read earlier.
A boy suffered a disease then died tragically like by his intention.
The girl, who suddenly fell in love with him for about a month or so, could not forgive him for leaving her at first.
But she finally understood, remembered him, kept the love in her heart, and moved on.

I cried a few more times when some lines came up.
I started to think, to recall, maybe it's me, then few more as I writing.

What is this all about? I don't really care anymore, but I know I must write it down.
There is one thing for sure, I am looking for more tragedies.
Sadly, that's the only way I want to fell.

And It's 4:59 now,
It's Not My Time
That is a question, badly want the answer.

the rain

It has been raining for more than two decades. It never stops, and won't ever.

I can feel each raindrop. They rained on my head, face, shoulder, hands, palms, legs... everywhere. The touches are unforgettable.

The raindrops form many unpredictable streams, they flow over my skin towards ground, the dirty mud ground. Sooner, the feeling becomes numb.

I can smell them like dirt, grass and freshness. They don't taste much, simply water if you really want to know.

I walk along the dirty road. The road splits sometimes, I never chose the paths other than the straight ones.

The forward road has alway been hard to see through, my eyes are covered... by my own two hands.

It's all understandable, clear, and obvious from the beginning. Absolutely needless to have any reasons, any excuses, anything.



Accept the rain.

Today I paid first monthly subscription fee to Last.fm. You may probably be aware that Last.fm is not free for all. People who live outside of US, UK, and German would need to subscribe for listening to streams. I noticed this change two weeks ago, at the moment, I had no intention and no idea that I would subscribe. Earlier, I read a forum thread, which mentions few things:

  • Music is not all free
  • $3 is just enough buy you a cup of coffee

Because of this coffee comparison, I decided to subscribe. And I totally agreed with the first one. Some music are free like on Jamendo. I was hoping Jamendo can be the alternative. Unfortunately, it doesnt have same concept. All I want is the radio-like playing. Jamendo has radio stations, too, but the songs in list are fixed. No random or based on your taste of music. I used to like Pandora, but it doesnt provide service outside of US since two years ago, both paid or free. So Last.fm is my only choice.

And this is me on Last.fm.

Yesterday, I wanted to find an editor for writing. At first, all I can see is about programming editors, and that absolutely was not what I intended to have.

After few more tries, some keywords started to show up from my search results. One of them is creative writing program, of which the word program is not meant the computer program but a course for learning or studying creative writing. So what exactly is creative writing? This question I couldnt answer, at least, because I am not a native and never have any advanced class of English. Needless to say, English writing wouldnt be one of my skill (I hope someday it will be). According to those web pages, it can be a creation of a novel, a film screenplay, a poemor anything can inspire your by your imagination, orthe keywordcreativity.

Back to my intention of seeking an editor, I was expecting a editor, a simple text editornot a word processor. By which, you can focus on writing whatever you are working on, it can providing necessary accessibilities, such as dictionary/thesaurus lookup, grammar/spell check, or sort of things can essentially be helpful to writing.

I did saw some applications but almost all of them are for Windows or mainly for Mac platform. Nevertheless, it seems that Linux users do not deserves having one, I still managed to find one. And even better its a free software (not as in freedom), JDarkRoom. Obviously, its a remake of another software, inherits the idea of the original and extends the concepts to better implementations. Full black background with green text color (with a nice music if you have one), then it does help. At least for me, I can concentrate now. This somehow solves the problem, and, be honestly, I was not aware of that problem before.

JDarkRoom is written in Java, so its capable to run on many operating systems, including Linux. Its only purpose is helping concentration, but I believe that we can count on it more. The current feature can be part of a bigger program, a editor for writing. I have some ideas, I might be starting to work on a new such editor, but I am not so sure.

You may already know I am a Taiwanese speaking Chinese, but I am kind of resisting using Chinese by any means. Ridiculously, my English is not fluent and I can barely speak with blah-wa-la-e-ya accents. I have no idea how or when this all happened. Back at school, Chinese writing is just my average skill, I was never good or showing interest at Chinese or literaturefor this, its still true today. As of English, its the same story.

Five years ago, I heard of blogging, and started to do it in English. The reason of using English is an unsolved puzzle to me, too. I discontinued for a year, then I on-and-off wrote some postings since. Many questions are unanswerable, even you have one, you will still doubt of it. So, quit questioning it. Just write it!

1   The stereotype

I remembered there was some of jokes or such like, which depicted major GNU/Linux distributions as in cartoon pictures. As for Gentoo, if I recall correctly, it is a broken old-school CRT monitor with some funny words like You broke, fix it. That was what I thought about Gentoo before I really trying it.

2   First glance

When I decided to download and burn the CD (I still couldnt remember what motivated me), I felt no fear about it. Honestly, some should have. In my opinion, Gentoo is not for a complete Linux newbie to try, even though its documents are well-written and truly full of knowledge. The installation process and maintenance are dumped a lot of terms and intermediate-skill-required stages. It is absolute not to saying Gentoo is for expert-only. Actually, there is a fact for one thing, by which can decide whether you are an expert or not: Are you willing to RTFM and google for answers?

If you are, then there is no doubt that Gentoo is the one for you. The installation stage before the first boot, more or less, it reminds me of the installation of LFS (Linux From Scratch) which I had tried almost a year ago. At that time, I also used multilib, the outcome of the processes should be similar. However, Gentoo is much more easier. Its started from stage3 and few useful scripts, you dont need to build toolchain, not even for once. With LFS, you must build them, twice! In order to get a minimal system for installing base system. Gentoo has prepared everything for you.

3   USE here and there

Portage, emerge, ebuild, etc., I have heard of them before. And now I finally am aware of their powerwell, that might sound exaggerative, but I have already known how to maintain the system by using them. In the only experience of LFS, I had never upgraded the toolchainbinutil, gcc, and glibc, etc; just in my first day of being a Gentoo newbie, I upgraded gcc 4.1.2 to 4.3.2 without a single problem (If I had, I wouldnt have this chance to write this.).

The most exciting thing of Portagethe package management system of Gentoois the USE flags and CFLAGS. You can customize your own CFLAGS very easy and decide what features of a package that you want by specifying USE flagslocally or globally, its very flexible to set the configuration. For example, when you firstly build GIMP, you think you dont need tiff support, so you turn that feature off. Later, somehow, your friend sends you a tiff format file and ask you to edit that. All you need to do is run sudo USE='tiff' emerge gimp and wait for rebuilding with the local USE flag (say tiff isnt in profile or make.conf). If you want to this on LFS, its not too hard either, but you have to handle the dependency by yourself; if on distribution like Fedora, you have to modify the SPEC file and build, then hope it builds smoothly since that is unsupported feature (from the package manager). Also, you need to wish the dependency has already in repository. Otherwise, you have to take care of that dependency, too.

On Gentoo, all you need to pay is the building time. You might think the building from sources take some time even much time, indeed, it is. But beforehand, you dont have unwanted code occupying your memory or your disk space. And, true again, it is just a small pay, but how many packages you have? If that small pay multiply 100 times, would that be small again? And how many small pay in a package?

So far, the kernel I built is about 2 MB with 11 MB modules library, and there have not done optimization yet. Some drivers I dont need remain, those can be removed. Why I havent removed them, because there are also many things that I do not understand what they are. This brings up another benefit of using Gentoo, you can know your system betterboth softwares and hardwares. You have to know them, then you can control. You will gain control eventually, again, if you are willing to pay time for researches.

4   The world

Within 48 hours, I have a bootable Linux OS, an X with Fluxbox, an ATI proprietary driver with DRI, Conky for system monitor, mpd and ncmpcpp for music playing, mplayer for multimedia, GIMP and ufraw, vim, subversion, and Firefox and other small bits. Currently, I have 400+ built packages on system. Sound, Video, Adobe Flash Player, and Java all work happily.

Except the installations, some customizations have also been finished. The rules of iptables, sudo, net connection in boot-time?not by the annoying NetworkManager, ccache?a compilation cache, Fluxbox and Conky adjustments, fonts, and many in /etc/.

Faster and stable worldthe world has become faster because you can choose what services you want to run and the power of choosing is fully in your hands. Which might also bring up some stabilities. If you ask me which program impress me most after using Gentoo, I would say Firefox. Before, on Fedora 10, it consumes 50 percents more of 2 GiB memory, that seemed to happen often. Now, it stays in between 10 and 20 percents. The appearing differences are it is now built up on for Core 2 Duo, it currently only has Adobe Flash Player plugin. The profiles of Firefox were restored from the backup of previous system. The world is dancing around me.

5   Community

I havent checked out the Gentoo community because all problems I have encountered were resolved via Gentoo Handbooks, documents, wiki pages, or googling. As far as I know, Gentoo has many IRC chat rooms, many forums, many mailing lists. It definitely wont be hard to get in touch with them and ask for an answer.

6   So

Gentoo to me is easy and simple to use, just as the many distributions follow the holy philosophy, KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), but this is actual one. With Gentoo (after newbie phase), you control and know stuff well. The package management and system administrate management are also easy to use. Every distribution has own pros and cons, no one is perfect in all aspects. But there may be one is perfect for you, and I just found mine. I believe as long as you pay a little more efforts, you can transform Gentoo into an eagle and command it to fly.