I think Weezer is nice.

 first written 1425est 2025.08.26

    Weezer used to be a big part of my life and made up approximately 100% of my musical diet. Not unlike taste acquired as a teen it slowly trickled out of my life and by 2019ish it vanished almost entirely. My nosy room, still buzzes reminding me every moment. Each glance to my left reveals my dedicated shelf of Weezer a subtle reminder of how fickle a dedication can be. Featured prominently is my "the lion and the witch" 538 of 3000 print run Vinyl which I still treasure very much.

    My dedication to Weezer evaporated after the release of the much awaited black album. Released 2019, I had waited so long, coveting the few singles released before its release. Each of those tracks was fantastic, and I watch the music video for  High As A Kite fairly routinely. The album had leaked early from a European music streaming service, but I refused to listen to it as I had pre ordered the smoky vinyl and was intent on listening to it upon it's arrival via the USPS. I actually did not wait until I could hold the Vinyl. I remember the day I first heard it. I had a shitty day at school, and it was raining. By the time I located and entered my mom's car I was drenched. So I reached out my hand and listened to the black album. I was feeling lifted up by the songs I had become familiar with, but after the fifth track Piece of Cake my heart sank. I labor with a track by track review, but it was clear that Weezer lead with their best tracks not just by track list but with the singles they released. It was so bad and by the time I  got home I don't think I had even finished the last track but I just pulled out my earbuds and layed face down in my bed. 

    One time only a year before, someone I loved so much and I miss even more had burned a CD containing the contents of the infamous to my in group Weezer christmas album. Infamous for its tackiness and frankly frivolous existence. They gave it to me before our shared English class.

    I ripped it out of their hand and put it in my mouth and destroyed it with my teeth. In the aftermath they tried to assemble it again using the bits that had scattered on the floor. After jigsawing them together they couldn't finish it as a small slanted trapezoid shaped piece was missing. It was assumed that I had ingested it. I don't really remember if I did. But I ruminate on this experience with high frequency. I can't quite explain the shame, besides that fact that it's just the behavior of lunatic. I think I just didn't know how to say thank you.

    My disposition hasn't really evolved on Weezer either, unlike some ex Rick and Morty fans I haven't regressed to being like it was never good. And I also refuse to stoop to the level of ex Simpsons fans and claim that Weezer mysterious stopped being good after I stopped  listening to it. In fact OK Human a record that released to little context and well after I had tuned out is I what I believe sincerely to be Weezer at their best.

    I had first been introduced to Weezer by then TF2 youtuber FUNKe who'd prominently used some weezer songs in his videos, borrowed symbols from Pinkerton, and made TF2 styled parody of a Weezer song.

    In my car I keep my CD acquired sometime in 2017 of The Return of the Rentals. A CD I had exclusively because the relation to Matt Sharpe and his carrying on of the same sound in early Weezer. I liked some of the later The Rentals, but none of them got farther than on my Spotify playlist.

    It's strange to me that something I made my prominent concern could suddenly just stop being cared about. I haven't weared my Weezer clothes since the turn of the decade.

    I don't really know what else to say at the moment so I'll end on a my personal ranking the Weezer albums.

I couldn't bring myself to listen to SZNS, so I have omitted ranking it. Also you may think some of my rankings are based in being a contrarian, but I would urge you to return to some of these albums disregarding some of the narratives you've heard about them.

tiny sounds re:why I use the hourly chime.

first written: 17:03

As I was cleaning out my closet, my hourly chime beeped turning to 1700est. But as I have become familiar, the beep; the turn of the hour on my Casio Baby-G is just a few seconds short of the correct time. I continued on filling a bag of my unfitting clothes, without thinking I started counting the seconds. I don't know exactly how off my watch is, I usually find myself satisfied with counting an addition 17 seconds.

The delay kind of tilts the purpose of the chime. By the nature of it err, it is telling me that it is the turn of the hour. But rather is warning that it is soon to come. This relationship I have enjoyed with all my watches.

I did not manufacuture this short delay. It's a bit hard to sync a watch perfectly without devoting a conscious effort to it. But I like this skewing of form. It makes me think of cracks in a rock. The minute changes in salt or other mineral that make the noisy, bumpy, and sharp changes in face of a rock. It's texture.

waterfox testimonial

first written: 19:29est <2025-07-29 Tue>

     Browsers are a weird deal. As pieces of software, they're very vague. In time the scope of browsers has crept and crept until they have become their own little operating systems. In the sameway that Emacs isn't a text editor but a lisp interpreter, browsers have really become Javascript interpreters. A lot people use Javascript as a pejorative, and while I feel like there is a lot of valid derision cast its' way,  it simply is the reality we live in. Because web browsers have become just that, in my opinion there really hasn't been a big distinction in which web browser you use. Whether its Chrome, OperaGX if you like the taste of crayons, Firefox, or Brave if you think the age of consent is too high.

    I have been a life long Mozilla Firefox user. Not because I super love Mozilla (which I do) or really even a dedication to open source software. Like a lot of things in life I just use it because my dad told me to use it. Starting way back when he built me my first computer in 2005.

    I had a brief rebellious phase where I used Vivaldi, it was fine. But it felt a little too cutesy and when I came across a problem with an extension I just came back home to Firefox.

    Sane minds for tech news probably use [hacker new] for finding technology discussion and while its a great site, I spend more time on 4channel's /g/ board. Partially because of self loathing, but also because of an early habit who's comfort is too strongly ingrained to change. A frequent topic on /g/ are browsers and usually how much Mozilla sucks because woke or something. Because of this contrarianism there has bred a brood of canonical web browsers. They come in many flavors:

• Completely built from the ground up: cool but unusuable
• see Nyxt or QuteBrowser
• Chrome reskin.
• Webkit based browsers.
• I have never been able to compile one of these.
• Firefox but with some about:config flags changed.
• Palemoon users stay winning, I love you all.
  

    This last category I despise more than any other. Because it lays bare what these complainers actually care about: which is to say basically nothing. [LibreWolf] is a project that has become modestly popular among software contrarians and is frequently the subject of virtue signalling on sites where you find those software contrarians home. LibreWolf is a fork of firefox with some minor tweaks that include but are not exclusive to:

• Removing google as a one of the built in search engines.
• Including the popular ad block add-on uBlock origin.
• Using Firefox's "strict" privacy mode.

    It also claims to always be fast to update because it builds off of the latest Firefox stable. Which is earnestly a good policy, but I think shows some of the inherent laziness. There's not anything novel about compiling with some flags and shipping it as a brand new flavor of Firefox. I will say I do appreciate that on LibreWolf's website that they do call it "A custom version of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom.". Because it isn't even really hiding that its just a few settings switched.

Also as anyone who's used the strict privacy mode can tell you it's not a great browsing experiance.

    I just think distros of Firefox are a little silly. If you like the defaults it makes sense, but everyone should know that there isn't anything special about the ingredients of Librewolf. Its just arranged in a different way, which I think isn't conveyed in the way that it is discussed as Firefox but good. All the minute changes can be made in "about:config" or just the settings page. And I get it, if you don't want to set it up yourself thats fine, but I feel like it's natural that as people have used browsers all their lives that you will have already configured your browser incrementally through the years to have achieved your desired outcomes.

# So... Waterfox.

    Waterfox has existed on my radar for a long time. It first grew a user base as a fork of Firefox for x64 architecture when that was cutting edge. To me it was just a clone of firefox, before there were like 90 of those. One of my close friends Maddie actually has used Waterfox for quite a while which was the main portal from which I heard about it beyond the little I knew from way back. I never was particularly interested in using it, all of the changes seemed minor...

    But one day, I was really bored. I shouldn't have been, because I had a lot of stuff to do. But I was. So while scrolling /g/ I saw it mentioned in a thread. The post was as tedious as any post about browser is. Something about how it wasn't made by multiple minorities that this poster didn't care for. Which as I write this makes me feel guilty that this post reminding me of its' existence is what got me to try it. Prejudices existing or not aside I decided to give it a try.

## Getting

    Installing on Debian was a bit of a hassle. I was a little shocked to find Waterfox absent from Debian's repositories, because I felt like it was up Debian's maintainers' alley. But it's understandable they don't want to maintain 20 frivolous flavors of the same package. Yet they still carry gnu-icecat which is a little bit silly I think (<--- gnu hater). But I am no stranger to compiling usually slightly older versions of software for Debian, so I went out to find the source. Reading the build instructions I found that it would be tedious as I would need to delete files to make space for the whole 40gbs specified in the requirements in the build instructions. I also got the hint by the system specs that my laptop was probably going to need a long while to actually build this thing. Man, browsers are big :O (who knew?)

    So eventually I sought out a precompiled binary. A privilege that is almost always afforded to me by my APT package manager privilige. I have lived the DNF life and I know that sometimes its impossible to find .RPMs for some stuff, and I'm sure its worse for people who live in even nicher ecosystems. I found one in a site affiliated/hosted by OpenSuse. I've actually had a hard time using packages from this site, but this time it was no problem. Though I couldn't add it as a source because the host seemingly hasn't renewed their certs in the last year. But theres also an 70% chance that I just fucked up the GPG keys, as I always do.

    Regardless to say that while it wasn't hard. But if you value using only software from the Debian repos for convenience and guarantee of reliable security updates, perhaps this venture isn't for you. Which is fair, to be honest if I hadn't already written up a lot for this experiment I wouldn't of bothered setting this up.

## So this isn't maintained by Mozilla?

    Something to consider about Waterfox meta-contextually is that it is a firmly community driven project. Firefox is project closely maintained by a massive enterprise, that is questionably not profit driven. Which means Mozilla's reputation is heavily tied to Firefox, and without a standing reputation Mozilla's developers will be out of a job. Which is to say that Mozilla has a very closely tied incentive to making sure Firefox is on the up and up. This notion may sound offensive to anyone familiar with Mozilla's history of big ugly mistakes, but I think if you can not be such a hater this should intuitively feel true.

    This point isn't meant to discredit Waterfox's developers either. Emilio, Rvandermulen, Glandium, and all of the other contributors have seemingly done great work. But the nature of being held together by a bunch of individuals with no finite incentive can be prone to malicious actors. Again nothing about this makes Firefox invincible or even great at this job. But it is something a major enterprise is a little better equipped to deal with. Not just because legally binding incentives/punative abilities but also they have the scale to more closely monitor commits. I mean they have so much staff apparently that they can waste time fingering the TOS so that morons like Bryan Lunduke can freak the fuck out for no reason and him and his ilk can spam 300 videos that are factually wrong.

    Getting back to the point. I just wanted to highlight the contrast in the two structures present in the projects. There are different virtues inherent to trust, and which ever you value should make your preference between the two pretty clear.

# About Waterfox.

    As this text grows longer I felt like it would be kind to write a briefer take away; TL;DR for the piece right here. So here is the:

## THE BOTTOM LINE:

 Waterfox is pretty sensible... and I will use it for the foreseeable future.

 I give it 3.8 Monjar's out of 5.

 

    Importing cookies, bookmarks, and history from Firefox to Waterfox seems a bit sketchy, I have forgone it. Partially because I didn't want to finagle with the process, but I thought that the act of setting this stuff up manually is a valuable experience to detail. It is a little humorous though, because I think the group most  likely to try Waterfox are people moving from Firefox. This blind spot is courtesy of borrowing the setup wizard of Firefox which naturally doesn't offer importing data from itself.

    If you want to do it yourself, you need to find your profile folder and move it to Waterfox. Make sure to make a back up of your first profile because from reading it seems like there some expected breakage.

     There are loads of tweaks freely available in the settings page, and I think that's probably the main appeal for curious users. Some maybe accessible in Firefox's "about:config" page, but I do know some of these tweaks would require the use of a custom CSS. Which if you don't end up wanting to try Waterfox but you do use Firefox, I suggest investing in your free time some of the CSS changes you can make, I quite like a lot of them.

 ## "Security"

    Security is such a nebulous thing, especially pertaining to browser. Mostly because most security is in the hands of the person holding this metaphorical hammer. But despite its hard to pin down nature I think to those concerned about their data Waterfox is a fine venue to place it. Waterfox doesn't have any telemetry to turn off. Waterfox also uses oblivious DNS, which is a means of obfuscating traffic from your ISP that isn't already covered by HTTPS. It's a strange feature because it does so little, but also if you use 1.1.1.1 as your DNS like some already have you should already have this feature naturally.

## Workflow

I make ample use of two firefox features: its snapshot feature and picture in picture, both work out of the box. Which is a relief because I had actually tried Waterfox once before and Picture in Picture was not yet brought into Waterfox's stable branch. Picture in Picture is killer for me as I only use one monitor. Which I should maybe write about later, because I think it is the way to go. As far as I can tell Waterfox is at feature parity with Firefox now.

### Add-ons

    I had no problems with the Add-ons; they all worked perfectly on this platform. Add-ons are seemingly the main way that people customize their browsers and comfortably none of my extensions fell into any compability issues. which makes sense because its largely the same codebase. But it should be said that there are some Add-ons that I saw while scrolling Mozilla's Add-ons page that were not compatible. You may wish to check that out first if you try Waterfox out.

    I usually don't like using Add-ons in general. So Itry to not use more than 3 for Firefox. At the point of doing this trial I actually did use 4.

1. uBlock Origin
2. Dark Reader
3. h264ify
4. Bitwarden

 

Also as a note I have been using Firefox Extended Support Release. So I may have missed some bleeding edge ff features that Waterfox isn't yet at parity. 

# Peter... the Cloudflare is here.

    Isn't there someone you're forgetting to ask?
 

    Perhaps if you've used a browser that isn't FF or Chrome you've come across this problem before. But Cloudflare doesn't like it when you use something that isn't those main two. Pretty early into this experiment I found a big roadblock when visiting some sites I regularly check: I landed on a page telling me I was blocked. 

I couldn't access:

• moxfield.com
• mobygames.com
• apnews.com
• bbc.com
  

    This wasn't a complete shock, I actually have been blocked by Cloudflare before. I thought it would be as simple as changing my user agent, but Waterfox doesn't actually have a unique user agent. I am not quite sure how I was flagged and as I write this I have actually been un-filtered and can use those sites. Frustratingly it seems like its something dependent on the fickle wim of Cloudflare as if you look up this issue you will find countless accounts of this happening through the years.

    While this isn't the fault of Waterfox or its' maintainers it is something you should know that you will have to face if you want to switch and there isn't a solution for it. It's just whenever Cloudflare arbitrarily decides to let you back in ):  .

# Conclusion

    I dont think there's a particular reason to swtich from Firefox. Waterfox boasts some performance increases, but there either illusory or so minor that I didn't notice. The main reason I am sticking with it is that it's made for me. While it will inherit some baby things from Firefox, I enjoy that the settings page is full of little tweaks about stuff I care about.

     This trial started because I was bored. If you're bored try it. 

    But Firefox is fine. No matter how many times people freak the fuck out  over a misinterpretation of some sort of Mozilla TOS, Firefox is fine and probably won't die.