Or something like that. Who the hell is Ulrich Drepper, anyway? Precisely, my friend. This week I tried to submit a patch to GTK, only to realize that the fundament upon which our great big world of electrons, transistors, flip-flops, bits and bytes, the whole god damn virtual lot, is nothing more than some horrible series of machines in which each feeds into each, in grotesque, erotic lockstep. And not the good kind of grotesque, erotic lockstep. More like a mass of worms wriggling in heat craze and covered in reproductive goo. You can't pick out any one of 'em in particular but by god they all contribute to a gestalt.

Wait a minute -- insects? Unfathomable and yet grotesque systems? Struggling through a circular process of forms and submissions which can never be bypassed? By Christ, there's only one fellow I know who ever wrote about all of that with any clarity.

After being treated like the smarmy little ratfuck that I am by a series of vast and unblinking digital systems, I thought that a little screaming into the void was in order. You can find it here, titled Franz Kafka's Lost Treatise on Wayland, or perhaps Into the PRnal Colony. Sure, it's a quarter Ulrich Drepper, but if you're no software head then fear not, because the other three parts in four is all good old Franz K., baby.