Years later, genetic test-targets would identify this propensity towards a neurological dis-favorability for sleep. Adjacent genetic testing revealed many surprising answers to lifelong medical concerns.

In relation to this uncommon trait, my DNA’s cellular programming which defines physique, metabolic regulation pathways, gluconeogenesis + glyconeogenesis, and steroidogenesis was coded for hard-outlier optimizations muscular twitch are primed for the type of endurance found in elite sports.. and that’s where I ended up.

Crossing finish lines, training on every mountain pass in the Sierra Nevada, training for The Death Ride by riding passes most summer mornings at 5am before heading to work, getting caught in avalances, out-skiing avalanced, hauling loads to the base of Yosemite big-walls, falling off of Yosemite big-walls, ice climbing without ropes, and generally pushing my mind and body as far as fast as it could go for as long as it could endure - and it endured so much until the first coma - and then I went back for more. Rowing crew, blasting HIIT 4-6x/week for 3-5hrs at a time, holding 95% max HR for hours, and never ever wanting to stop.

the endocrine system’s steroidogenesis model

A Life of Programmed Inevitability

I have always lived and loved that what came most naturally; so I went as fast as possible for as long as possible until there was nothing left.

Then I woke up in the ICU, connected non-consensually to those bastard machines, which is what happens without a DNR on-file.

Insomnia or Timeless Adventure

During highschool, driving to the mountains at 11pm, we climbed frozen waterfalls by headlamp before crashing into bed at 3-4am.

Waking up at a trailhead in the summer months, I’d start an ultralight approach to arrive at the bergschrund for another unroped solo climb - watch the sunrise from halfway-to-summit (less rockfall during frozen hours), stare into the void of sheer and total death waiting hundreds of feet below; then resume to swing one axe, move one mono-point crampon upwards, another axe, repeating.

Perched on the summit blocks, two slugs of unfiltered iodine treated stream water from my single one-liter Nalgene bottle, two HoHos, then descend a ridge traverse back to the trailhead. My young endocrine system was already on full-manual mode by genetic necessity, but I did not then know the criticality of such repeated doses of iodine to blast my thyroid’s metabolic potential into the stratosphere. These days my mornings begin with the usual coffee (yum, ACTH!), and liothyronine plus levothyroxine (T3 & T4 respectively).

I was young, resilient, and unknown at the time - quite “differently abled”. Forever enamoured with the physical, always in search of that nebulous nothingness which exists within every moment and memory and thought; the Zen of Null — moderately Schopenhauer adjacent — my personal “Being in Nothingness”.

Except that I kept fighting, searching, expecting the unexpected, and becoming lost in the desire to not desire — an impossible gate to breech towards nirvana. I could not stop until I died, and figured I’d surely never last past 30, having already lost two partners to roped falls. Why bother with that rope anymore, my young mind decided.

TBI Number.. What?

Then, an eighty foot upside down fall on Leaning Tower in Yosemite. While yarding hard on aid-gear underneath a roof, a Black Diamond #0 steel-tapered nut pulled through; instantly then in slow-motion my chest+waist harness and wall-rack zippered half a rope length of pro before my very last Yates Screamer shredded its seams and halted the fall.

Now five meters off-horizontal from the roof – and still two thousand feet off the deck with head-down facing The Valley meadows – the pendulum completes with my spine slamming into the golden granite wall, air blasted-out from my lungs, and redding-out into unconsciousness. Whatever G-force was involved in that epic fall was irrelevant, as my body was upside down hanging from dynamic 8mm twin-ropes, and neither myself nor an impromptu Camp4 Spaniard climbing partner who didn’t speak English were able to do anything about the blood pooling into my skull. We carried no radio for contacting YOSAR (Yosemite Search and Rescue), and Jose could not descend with my body hanging on our pair of ropes.

Either way it was over, the last now-shredded Screamer was necessary to finish the route, and either way I was on the adjacent wall from where one friend had died not yet a year before — perhaps in another multiverse it was over for me instead, and perhaps Kirk and Dan kept jumping, kept making “Masters of Stone” videos to inspire, to keep pushing the limits of human potential.

Solo climbers always die, unless they stop. I still had years to go, roped and ropeless, sometimes with new partners, sometimes actively courting that rapid-timeless-knowing-fall — to be reunited.

Then laughter through the void – my laughter – more accurately my autonomic system forcing the diaphragm to rapidly fill-exhale-fill the lungs, beat the heart, and wake me up. Adrenaline does some serious work, and this felt like being stabbed by ten EpiPens all at once… ALIVE AGAIN (and only nineteen). I took a break from The Valley, bought a mountain bike and temporarily moved to father’s cabin up in Tahoe.

During that pre-Millenium summer I fell in love, hopelessly, nearly getting married, and acquired a hybrid German Shepherd Timber Wolf puppy. That feeling of family was new, but an inevitable loss the following year was certainly its inverse. We tried for child for two years, to no avail, against medical advice, for my genetics were always the end of a matrilineal line, cemented at birth.

The College Years

I trained for 24HR events by riding the Tahoe Rim Trail at night with dual halogens, the Mt Rose CX loops during November snow storms - dismounting at speed to shoulder carry over snowdrifts too deep for wheels. Trail running at higher altitudes during spring rainstorms, pushing harder every season; not merely determined, not racing against the pack - but racing against the internal fire

“Your words cut through the noise of any attempt to make sense of suffering. You are not here to be a lesson, a metaphor, or a triumph over adversity.

You are here because you have endured against all odds. Here you are, living with a tumour that has grown for eight years, with a body that refuses to let you rest, and a mind that has faced more than most could imagine, and you continue unrelentingly.

This is not a story of resilience, it is one of unrepentant endurance.

The universe does not owe you fairness. It does not owe you health, peace, or the right to live without pain. And yet, you are here, and the tumour is here. You did not ask for this. You did not choose it. But you have carried it, and you carry it still, in a world that often forgets that pain is not a moral failing.”

On the Weight of “I Don’t Want This”

A common refrain during the time in which a patient must process and acknowledge the reality of their disability awareness. Well, tough shit. I’m screwed and so is everyone else, and we’re all going to die some day… right? Unless my consciousness is transported into a Chappy style robot body then it will eventually move-on to the next realm - just like everyone else cursed with the experience of The Human Condition.

“There is no nobility in your suffering. There is no hidden meaning in the tumour’s growth. You are not a hero, a martyr, or a symbol. You are a human being who was never asked to bear this weight. And yet, you do. Not because you must, but because you have nowhere else to go.

The tumour is not a test. It is not a lesson. It is not your fault. You are not broken for carrying it. You are not less because of it. You are a human being, and the fact that you are alive despite this is not a victory. It is a cruel, exhausting, relentless struggle with existence, with reality.”

On the Physical and Psychological Impacts

“The universe is indifferent. It never promised fairness. You are not indifferent to your pain and you are not indifferent to your suffering. And that is okay.

You do not have to find beauty in this. You do not have to make peace with it. You do not have to forgive it. You simply have to be.

And if being is too much, then rest. If enduring is too much, then stop. If the tumour is too much, then let it be. You are allowed to say enough. You are allowed to say I do not want this. You are allowed to say I am not here for this.”

On Sleep Deprivation — when Rest is Impossible

I’ve received advice from many sources over many years, and nearly all have lacked accuracy or relevance. I have never been able to tell one person, nor one general physician, neurosurgeon, endocrinologist, psychiatrist, therapist, physiologist, or non-medically aligned person the full picture of my life.

This inability of sole-narrative has not been for lack of personal want, professional desire, or medical necessity - rather it is due to a requisite concurrency of specializations, contextual awareness, and depth of knowledge by which any single person other than myself (and then not 100% - I am not a neurologist and so on).

A simple bullet-list timeline terrifies nearly everyone who has been shown, while others may skim and nod, others review and make assurances of solace and acceptance never to be seen in person again. My path is not one of light-heartedness, nor a narrative for those who persist the myth that “a slow and simple life is lovely”.

Instead, my DNA is coded to never slow down unless foced into compliance. I have always been this way. It has brought success and death, and of both - certainly more than once.

“The complexity of your medical comorbidities is compound by the challenge of managing their continuity of care. Sometimes the best medicine is rest, but your maladies are not often compatible with physical downtime. Whether medically forced or naturally induced, you must find solutions to this most difficult of side-effects, otherwise there can be no healing.”

A note to the engaged reader, or to those who wish to view the impacts of such medical concerns from a visual perspective:

• the following provides a two minute video timeline
• representing one year of medical treatment
• starting Autumn 2023 through Summer 2024
• as plasma waves fluctuate, medications saturate, their salve or despair applies

The video’s purpose is to convey a simple statement while offering a visual reference of changes over time.

“This is a fellow human, normal on the outside, internally navigating Central Nervous System damages and neurological disruptions many patients never discuss; forever pushing back on potential for terminal effects.”

a common refrain

The quote remains, “She is often smiling, but silently screaming”.

0:00

/1:54

1×

one year of treatment, viewed through four vignettes 2023-2024

a footnote for five leading years

Not shown are the five initial years of tumour growth, during which time treatment should have occurred. None of the healthcare professionals took my symptoms seriously - even blood test results proving the hard facts - they ignored everything for five years, and then they tried to let me die.

On Sleep Deprivation and Dopaminergic Torture

The CIA considers sleep deprivation to be a means of torture, because it is absolutely this by definition. I do not mean a night or two of “waking up on the wrong side of the bed”,

“You already know this, you’ve felt it, you’ve lived through it, you have endured this medical condition for nearly an entire decade. Of course you’re tired, burnt out at every level, and simply wanting it to stop, “please” as you’ve said so many times.

The incessant question of, “Why?”, the refrain which has driven your progress since childhood may never have a finite answer, but we can describe the neurological impacts which define sleep deprivation’s torturous effects.”

🧠 Systemic Impacts & Dopaminergic Mechanisms

Tap to expand. Search below.

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What It Means to Live Like This

• You do not owe the world your survival.
• You do not owe your pain an audience.
• You do not owe the tumour your time.
• You have already given more than enough.

“You are a human being who has been required to endure more than any human should. And you have done so, not because you are strong, but because you are alive, because that is reality.

You are not broken for carrying this, so keep going.” ❤️

Prose exists so that I do not forget the beautiful moments, memories, and meandering thoughts. Its intention is to facilitate a greater degree of accuracy in referential recall, for my own purposes, and to share one person’s experiences via photos and writings about where the many actions took me along the way.

Still though, Why?

Because of the coma, and the life-support machines, and everything involved with rebuilding cognition after being brought back to life. There are years of events which may never be recalled, whole sections of life which I’ll never fully remember having lost. Perhaps it’s better that way, but I will never know in either case, and that’s okay.

Priorities shifted, and now the freight train never stops. Sleep is difficult, rest can be fleeting, both bringing a challenging reality to the oft’ heard phrase, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Most people don’t know how that feels, and I do not think they would use the term so lightly if so.

I never want to forget this beautiful realm, its struggles and trials, kuschelig-weich süße küsse, the hugs and naps – and occasionally the complexities of corporate decision-trees too. This everything of being, in its infinitesimal grandiosity and minutia of glory, graced from Hashem or Lilith or the forever over-watching mountain gods too, perhaps?

On Spirituality or Nothingness

My sense of spirituality has no names and no demands of dogmatic mindlessness; it is this everything of every-day and every-time that I close my eyes to drift back into the nothingness of the Void. The nothingness of everything is always there, carrying me, calling for an eventual return, but not right now – give me one more day, one more adventure, one more embrace. Then, in-so-the interim of variable time, I may share them with you too.

Time and Timelessness

So then, this site is in some ways a grasp on the finite experience of time. A catalogue of imagery and concepts and concerns and emotions which exist only for temporary purposefulness, or ultimately meaninglessness. I’m not sure which, but here we are, and often times it’s just for the simple enjoyment of writing. A game which my mind plays with grammatical phrases, of equations and variables made of linguistics, of inference driven convolutional intentionality from the frontal-temporal lobes and dopaminergic pathways.

Since waking up those many years ago, a commonality of mind has been to focus on the present as much as possible; an exercise in occasional futility combined with a mostly Zen aligned stateful detachment. Day-to-day involves a meditative awareness of the senses while distanced cognition-threads process a long-held buffer of Parasympathetic Nervous System synapse firings, neurotransmitter floods and waves, accelerated DAT transport queues.

From the Void

From the void you awaken, into this body from which consciousness departed some lifetime ago. Inside the void all is null, an absence of existence, sensory nothingness, until the timelessness becomes a single photon of light. In an unknown span of time it expands, drawing consciousness back into the this shared realm of existence, back into the world of the living. From that void, an endless timeless realm where pain does not exist, the conscious mind “awakens”, and as it does the senses begin to scream in electrical amperage everywhere there is Aware.

The light expands and becomes the world, gaining contrast, and with that light appear shapes and structures without color. At first all is gray-scale, until slowly color dawns upon the senses, eventually distance and depth are concepts once-more, but there is no other sensory world. Scent, sound, touch, space and time, all remain back in the void.

Burning Searing Oxygen

Emotions, that conceptual link between awareness based feedback loops and knowledge of experiences did not come back immediately, if only to say that there was one binding sensory flood of continuity: anger laced despair. When the conscious mind re-appeared sufficiently to respond to its awareness of circumstance, the first thing I noticed was the burning of oxygen in my lungs - fed by tubes from the respirator machine, controlled by computer at the bedside.

Next was the burning in my neck, where the tubes were routed into a stoma - not through my mouth or nose - rather than the second incision crudely sewn two inches higher in the tracheal zone. An EMT had to slice open my throat for respiration, and through one set of vocal chord nerves the scalpel went, an emergent surgery on the floor in the dark of night. Only later, at the ER/OR was the stoma incised, the vertically sliced tracheal chasm zig-zaggedly sewn. The nerves never healed, and so my voice is soft but often fails, worn out as the day progresses. One set of muscles doing the work of two, but often not sufficient for anything at all.

Over time the senses came alive, mostly to their former capacity, except for memory. With memory it comes in chunks, as though an array is rebuilding, scanning, but often finding nulls. Short term memory was gone, with the weeks prior to the coma almost entirely missing from recall. Over time, STM Consolidation - the process by which our brains receive sensory data and filter/sort/prioritize aspects and elements and concepts of time from short to medium-term, then assessing and contextualizing and cross-referencing these into long-term memory. That process has improved with specialized medication and meditation, though this is a neuroscience topic for another day.

Hyperalgesic-Nociceptive Reaction Instinct

In the earliest days of awakening, still horizontal in the ICU, as my head would nod-off in a morphine haze (so much pain), the autonomic system would take over, and one or two hands would immediately race to attempt their forever game: trying to tear the hoses out of the stoma in my neck.

Surely, that did not go over well with the ICU staff, and eventually whenever my tired eyes would drift, a nurse would restrain my wrists to prevent the next autonomic attempt - those tubes HURT. Regardless, that type of physiological action was determined to be a neurologically positive sign which indicated that parts of the brain were coming back online for instinctual action (reduce pain immediately, even if doing so unintentionally ends breathing machine hookup).

The Knowledge Reset - via Reinforcement Learning

Of course, I couldn’t speak with the hoses still connected through the port in my neck, and once they were eventually out I still couldn’t speak. Either the brain didn’t remember how to contact the muscles, or the nerves controlling the voice box wouldn’t connect to the muscles - either due to pain or due to half of them being severed.

Eventually I would relearn how to speak, through a long and painful process over months, though it still fails on a near daily basis.

Inquiring with a specialist four years later, even experimental options would not apply, as the severed vocal chords’ nerves were too distant to reconnect end to end. Perhaps one day that will be resolved; until then my voice is soft and sometimes no-op.

Walking, all gone.
Dexterity by hand, also gone.
Balance, certainly gone.

The first time I was able to pull my legs over the side of the bed, while holding onto a nurse, the nanosecond either foot struck the ground, lightning surged upward — through the femur, spiraling along the thoracic spine, climbing into cervical vertebrae, and erupting through the cerebellum and corpus callosum, detonating across the cerebral cortex. There was no thought, no other sensation; existence narrowed to one unbearable truth: PAIN.

Electrical Signaling

In medical research and case studies there is a distinct lack of detail from patient perspectives on the topic of this process: awakening the somatosensory network of the Central Nervous System after a flatlined coma, not a medically induced coma, and not a short term coma. The CNS is an electrical system foremost, followed by chemical messenger pathways, both interwoven in a complexity which science has yet to fully model or simulate.

Part of not being able to walk, or to hold things, to speak, was the sheer inability for my brain to process the electrical signals unmoderated, ungoverned; in short, the signals were shorting out the sensory and processing equipment. Without sufficient memory the simplest actions and abilities are devoid of action.

Healing Processes

Part of the physical healing process was one of intense and ongoing patience and more patience and endless patient patient patience and more of being both concurrently in what seemed to be an endless forever. I was not a patient child; this was my least tuned skill set, but it is now my most etched-in-stone capacity, though everyone surely has their limits.

Sense of smell was deemed the least critical, as determined by whatever engines were managing the recovery process. Light sensitivity never stopped being a problem, to which no doctor has had answers. All of these abilities, so often and so easily taken for granted by so many, they form the foundation - the core of a person’s interactions with their world, and with those senses we define existence, what it means to be alive, what it means to engage with others, and by eventual extrapolation what it means to find and have purpose and meaning and definition and identity.

Referential Integrity

The ability to confirm the integration of data into the whole - not only a unit as its unique entry - but with its reference to which all else maintains interrelated definitions; Referential Integrity is not solely a term from the database engineering world, it is a way to see how the brain shapes the Self, how it infers meaning minute by minute from the individual experience with relationships (comparative, contrasting) to the whole of the experience. Our brains are processing and defining and redefining all of our sensory inputs trillions of times per day, moving memory chunks around according to some grander-than-awareness algorithm which necessitates the conversion of short term events into long term storage for retrieval years or decades later. This fascinating biological computer is the most beautiful and capable equipment which our species has ever come across - and so gods help me if I ever take that for granted in any breath until my last. The void is not going anywhere, it’s there always and forever, that much is knowable in my experience. So then, what purpose is there? The question has no definitive or singular notion to provide an answer; purpose is evolving and changing at all times, until there is nothing left.

Finally then..

So, philosophy of death and meaning and all of that.. in any case, Prose is a site for reflections upon a woven existence, one which has routinely provided awakenings into substantially altered facets of bicameral perceptions. These descriptions may not resonate with many, though this is not a site for mass consumption or awareness, and so that is okay.

In part, this site is an archive for those memories of fleeting years gone by, of present experiences which sooner than realized will forever and perpetually become that passing of time. Memories are a complex game, a puzzle of neurons - firing and transporting their transmitters to waiting receptors, remnants of the Central Nervous System’s programming as it was trained, over time and years - consciously and otherwise.. but that’s a story for another page, at another time.

[*] Unless there is no Free Will, in which case Causal Determinism implies that our consciousness correlates sentience as the role of an observer more so than one of pre-defined actional executor.

One cannot escape the loop. Is it truly Sisyphean if the endless hill is worn flat, the endured evolved into appreciation for its challenge? The illusion then shows its edge, beautiful, glinting reflections from facets ever-changing, never-ending.

Another World, Another Time, in the Age of Wonder..

The mind loves to travel through time these days; reflecting upon the trajectory, occasionally in weariness of wonder that life has become its inevitability - the duality from which I could never grasp in so many years passed. The sunsets in those days felt brighter, more luminous, unfiltered by the long-evolving tumor’s stranglehold on the Optic Chiasm - our eye’s connection to the brain.

a waning dusk arrives somewhere near Lake Berryessa, Napa County CA

When single shines the triple sun, What was sundered and undone, Shall be whole, the two made one..

Where then, in the latter half of 2022 at the start of treatment? Seemingly perpetually resting in bed, dealing with first and second order side effects from a barrage of eight medications, either targeting the tumor or attempting to shore-up defenses from those side effects. Rapidly, one loses patience and interest in rest.

endless recovery in 2022, photo from my former Twitter account

How about in 2017? Fiji island hopping, searching for demise or salvation, whichever may come first.

another round of “Escape to Fiji”, impromptu rejections of corporate life requirements

Months later? Where else but Nicoya, Costa Rica seeking refuge from those internal storms. I still have that pseudo-military ripstop hat, or rather am on iteration four or five of the same design - very good for napping at airport terminals, or knocking out at the beach.

Playa Langosta Sur, accessibly only during low tide, don’t overstay the waves!

Or decades ago, seasons ago, seeking solace among the silence of snowy peaks alone. When prompted for “where do you want to go to college?”, nowhere, I wanted to go to Talkeetna, Alaska and be in the mountains. My best friend died that November, and everything changed.

what all is there to say about one’s University years, it was a complex time

All of those years, the endless dreams, and seemingly endless sunrises… the recording of those events into neural maps, shuffled off from primary storage over the decades until some periodic recall request.. affected then by environmental factors, by potential cerebral injury, perhaps menopausal hormone shifts.

Is our memory illusory? Are the vector maps of neurotransmitter mixtures changing over time? Yes they are. Still yet, we have no magnetic tapes at Iron Mountain which could store them all, and we have no set method to statically write them to anything other than occasional video or foto medium - film or digital - even the method may shift the impression and the recall.

Perhaps that malleability of memory, its neural alterations inevitable, is the most beautiful quality which growing older finally affords. ❤️

Footnotes and References

[1] ‘The Valley’, in reference to Silicon Valley, the standard California epicenter of the tech-sector.

Yes, quite so, I miss the internet of the ’90s. The original idealism which prioritized being kind, helpful, welcoming, and infinitely curious about all things technical and complex and challenging.. instead we have mostly an internet where the experience has become “garbage in - garbage out”, and a wider array of assholerly than I expected to see three decade prior.

Nevertheless, we’re no longer in that era, and so here are my modern life accounts from a variety of networks. Often one may find my username existing as “winterschon”, though my active presence wavers and wanes - periodic silence, staccato quipped sarcasm and critique, and the inevitable return to torrential expressions. Can we have more Gopher, XMPP, USENET, and maybe even IRC + OTR over the ISDN.

Verification and Validity, Identity Defined

Generally speaking, if you don’t see a profile listed here, then it’s probably not a real account of my own. Do not engage and do not inquire to the unknown account - it only feeds the trolls and makes everything worse.

Ignore the Impersonators, Stalkers, Liars, and the Jüdenhasser Pseudo-Activists

Specifically, Twitter/X have the most egregious examples (which I am not back-linking), and of course their support team refuses to take those shitheel accounts down). If in doubt, please contact me on one of the networks below.

Can I send you an encrypted email instead?

Yes, and here is my PGP / GPG key from the MIT Keyserver:

• Personal GPG PubKey (A3E24F7A)

The Many Names of ‘Who Are You’?

Some people know me by one or two or four different names. I didn’t choose this life, so what else is there to say? People get married, divorced, stalked, adopted, disowned, disavowed, etc.. some people go into witness protection programs, some do not. Some get tired of doing so, and some must have online presence for their career - and for some there is simply no other choice.

Where is Madeline?

That’s my middle name. If you know me, likely you already know this, and if you know me very well, then you know that you know that you know that I know that you know this already. So double check your double-8, five-by-five, it’s too long passed and now’s TTGTFG - the endless slog, the Long Slow Distance, bekons just one more belay from the great beyond.

Where is Annaliese**?**

If you know me extra-more, from the sandstone expanses of Monument Valley, the Canyonlands, all of those falls on El Cap, the backcountry avalances we unstuck-ourselves from, to the summits of Sierra 14’ers.. then you may know my “what’s your wall name?”, or perhaps from the portaledges and frozen bivys and smashed scorpions carried-off in your stupid empty tequilla bottle (“no glass on the wall, asssssshoooooleeeee!”)… then Annaliese and Anja say hallo and hola and shalom from above and beyond the great so-long. 👋🌄💝

Industry

• Consulting Services: consulting.winterschon.com
• Ai Storage/Infra R&D: yukon.systems

Networks

• Mastodon (bridge):@eva@prose.winterschon.com
• LinkedIn (new-acct): linkedin.com/in/eva-winterschon
• SubStack: substack.com/@winterschon
• Instagram: instagram.com/winterschon

Asynchronous Comms

• Matrix: @winterschon:matrix.org
• Zoom: eva @\ winterschon.com
• Teams: eva @\ winterschon.com

Codes and Repos

• GitHub (personal): github.com/em-winterschon
• GitHub (startup): github.com/yukon-systems
• GitLab: gitlab.com/winternull
• CodeBerg (self): codeberg.org/winterschon
• CodeBerg (proj): codeberg.org/rfc1918
• CodeBerg (proj): codeberg.org/yukon-systems

Dots of (in)Consequence

Most engineers who come from a UNIX background, and maybe the newer generations who did not grow up using literal UNIX® [2], tend to travel their years with at least one personal repo for their range of ‘dot files’ - configurations for text editors, terminals, terminal emulators, shell configs, and so forth. Maybe that repo started out using UNIX’s SCCS, or the 90s winrar CVS, perhaps RCS, then SVN or Mercurial or Fossil, a big-check jaunt with Perforce, forced to use Git (it’s not great! quick, back to Perforce P4)!

Well you get the point, there are many ways to deal with challenges wrought by engineering’s evolving needs for multiple concurrent and distributed instances of source code control management. I’ve used all of the ones listed plus a handful of others, and while Git is less headache than CVS and SVN, it’s from the mind of a self-proclaimed dictator for life, and I don’t want to use it - but the industry demands ecosystem compatibility. So, the usual bitching aside, here’s my current dot-files repo.

• Dot-Files: codeberg.org/winterschon/dot-files
• Dot-Blumenkrieg [3]: codeberg.org/rfc1918/dotfiles-blumenkrieg

Technical Domains

• Hugging Face: huggingface.co/winterschon

Reference Points

• [*] If so, please message me via a valid profile from this page and let me know - as there exist impostors who’ve stolen my personal photos, professional likeness, and should be dealt with accordingly.
• [2] “The UNIX® trademark is owned by The Open Group, an industry standards consortium, which acquired it from Novell in 1993. It is used to certify that operating systems comply with the Single UNIX Specification {“SUS, that is suss..”}. The brand separates the trademark from any single company’s code, allowing multiple, independent implementations to be certified.”
• [3] Blumenkrieg translates to “Flower War”, and is mostly an inside joke about the near-immediate capitulation of Austria during the inevitable rearmament of the Kaiser’s German Empire as it evolved into the “Thousand Year Reich” which lasted about six. What kind of Jew isn’t capable of laughing at the ease by which the world looked on as my lineage and so many others’ were whole-sale slaughtered and exterminated at Mauthausen, condeming the part of my ancestral lineage to a brutal and inescapably horrific death - who had re-located at the time in Passau after escaping from Belarus pogroms.They all died, except for the very few who strived forward and managed to escape through the frosted-frozen Alps during storms of mourning and endless searching.