I know how you feel. I often find myself typing :w into notepad/word at work to save something. Or when I log into a machine that doesn’t have the vim extension in vscode I constantly type /something to search, only to realize that I actually wrote that in the file. Then using ‘u’ to undo just adds more characters and people look at me like I’m on some drugs. Just embrace it!

:wq

I actually did this once. My USB was on /dev/sda instead of sdb and I didn’t bother to check. It took me like 2 days to fix it because you can’t just delete partitions and start over normally, it changes some flags on your drive that you need to manually reset for them to be usable again. Fun times.

I mean, sure, but that absolutely devalues the meaning of the word. Absolutely every single thing you do is preceeded by a choice to do that, and choices are reflective of ones inner self, and if making a choice is power, and politics is all about power, then every single thing you do is political. Waking up before sunrise is political, waking up later is political, saying hello to your neighbour is political. Recording a guitar riff that just sounds cool is political. I created croissants yesterday, that was political.

Words are created to be used, and “political” cannot be used in any meaningful way if it refers to everything. While you probably could soundly argue that a child drawing random lines with crayons is political, it’s really pointless since it’s just pedantry that doesn’t add value, but rather devalues the word.

Well, art is political by its very nature

Is it though? I once made a little tree out of wires as a birthday present because trees grow. How was that political? A friend of mine did a digital portrait of one of her friends for fun, how was that political? A whole genre of art is: “I saw a beautiful sight in nature and wanted to paint it”. Nothing political about that. I mean, “Art for art’s sake” was a whole movement. If it’s political by nature, removing the politics would mean that it’s not art anymore. And some musicians refuse to tell people what their music is about because they believe that everyone should give it their own personal meaning. But, as I said, a lot of art has no “meaning” besides: this looks/sounds nice/calming/cool/energizing.

Yes, it stems from the beliefs and feelings of the artists, but if we extend the meaning of politics so far that someone painting a mountainside transfers a political message, the term becomes pretty unusable.

And yet our professors at university translated “free software” using our word meaning “free of charge”, my ears bled. It should have been libre software from the beginning.