diff --git a/blog/windows-pain-2021-03-03.markdown b/blog/windows-pain-2021-03-03.markdown
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..f15f306
--- /dev/null
+++ b/blog/windows-pain-2021-03-03.markdown
@@ -0,0 +1,291 @@
+---
+title: "Development on Windows is Painful"
+date: 2021-03-03
+tags:
+ - windows
+ - vscode
+ - nix
+ - emacs
+ - rant
+---
+
+# Development on Windows is Painful
+
+<big>SUBJECTIVITY WARNING</big>
+
+This post contains opinions. They may differ from the opinions you hold, and
+that's great. This post is not targeted at any individual person or
+organization. This is a record of my frustration at trying to get Windows to do
+what I consider "basic development tasks". Your experiences can and probably
+will differ. As a reminder, I am speaking for myself, not any employer (past,
+present and future). I am not trying to shit on anyone here or disregard the
+contributions that people have made. This is coming from a place of passion for
+the craft of computering.
+
+With me using VR more and more [with my Quest 2 set up with
+SteamVR](/blog/convoluted-vrchat-gchat-setup-2021-02-24), I've had to use
+windows more on a regular basis. It seems that in order to use [Virtual
+Desktop](https://www.vrdesktop.net), I **MUST** have Windows as the main OS on
+my machine for this to work. Here is a record of my pain and suffering trying to
+do what I consider "basic" development tasks.
+
+## Text Editor
+
+I am a tortured soul that literally thinks in terms of Vim motions. This allows
+me to be mostly keyboard-only when I am deep into hacking at things, which
+really helps maintain flow state because I do not need to move my hands or look
+at anything but the input line right in front of me. Additionally, I have gotten
+_very_ used to my Emacs setup, and specifically the subtle minutae of how it
+handles its Vim emulation mode and all of the quirks involved.
+
+I have tried to use my Emacs config on Windows (and barring the things that are
+obviously impossible such as getting Nix to work with Windows) and have
+concluded that it is a fantastic waste of my time to do this. There are just too
+many things that have to be changed from my Linux/macOS config. That's okay, I
+can just use [VSCode](https://code.visualstudio.com) like a bunch of apologists
+have been egging me into right? It's worked pretty great for doing work stuff on
+NixOS, so it should probably be fine on Windows, right?
+
+### Vim Emulation
+
+So let's try opening VSCode and activating the Vim plugin
+[vscodevim](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=vscodevim.vim).
+I get that installed (and the gruvbox theme because I absolutely love the
+Gruvbox aesthetics) and then open VSCode in a new folder. I can `:open` a new
+file and then type something in it. Then I want to open another file split to 
+the left with `:vsplit`, so I press escape and type in `:vsplit bar.txt`.
+Then I get a vsplit of the current buffer, not the new file that I actually
+wanted. Now, this is probably a very niche thing that I am used to (even though 
+it works fine on vanilla vim and with evil-mode), and other people I have asked 
+about this apparently do not open new files like that (and one was surprised to 
+find out that worked at all); but this is a pretty heavily ingrained into my 
+muscle memory thing and it is frustrating. I have to retrain my decade old 
+buffer management muscle memory.
+
+#### Whichwrap
+
+Vim has a feature called whichwrap that lets you use the arrow keys at the
+end/beginning of lines to go to the beginning/end of the next/previous line. I
+had set this in my vim config [in November
+2013](https://github.com/Xe/dotfiles/commit/d8301453c2b61846eea8305b9ed4b80f498f3838)
+and promptly forgotten about it. This lead me to believe that this was Vim's
+default behavior.
+
+It apparently is not.
+
+In order to fix this, I had to open the VSCode settings.json file and add the
+following to it:
+
+```json
+{
+  "vim.whichwrap": "h,l,<,>,[,]"
+}
+```
+
+Annoying, but setting this made it work like I expected.
+
+#### Kill Register != Clipboard
+
+Vim has the concept of registers, which are basically named/unnamed places that
+can be used like the clipboard in most desktop environments. In my Emacs config,
+the clipboard and the kill register* are identical. If I yank a region of text
+into the kill register, it's put into the clipboard. If I copy something into
+the clipboard, it's automagically put into the kill register. It's really
+convenient this way.
+
+[*It's called the "kill register" here because the vim motions for manipulating
+it are `y` to yank something into the kill register and `p` to put it into a
+different part of the document. `d` and other motions like it also put the
+things they remove into the kill register.](conversation://Mara/hacker)
+
+vscodevim doesn't do this by default, however there is another setting that you
+can use to do this:
+
+```json
+{
+    "vim.useSystemClipboard": true
+}
+```
+
+And then you can get the kill register to work like you'd expect.
+
+### Load Order of Extensions
+
+Emacs lets you control the load order of extensions. This can be useful to have
+the project-local config extension load before the language support extension,
+meaning that the right environment variables can be set before the language
+server runs.
+
+As far as I can tell you just can't configure this. For a work thing I've had to
+resort to disabling the Go extension, reloading VSCode, waiting for the direnv
+settings to kick in and re-enabling the Go extension. This would be _so much
+easier_ if I could just say "hey you go after this is done", but apparently this
+is not something VSCode lets you control. Please correct me if I am wrong.
+
+## Development Tools
+
+This is probably where I'm going to get a lot more pedantic than I was
+previously. I'm used to [st](https://st.suckless.org) as my terminal emulator
+and [fish](https://fishshell.com) as my shell. This is actually a _really nice_
+combo in practice because st loads instantly and fish has some great features
+like autocomplete based on shell history. Not to mention st allowing you to
+directly select-to-copy and right-click to paste, which makes it even more
+convenient to move text around quickly.
+
+### Git
+
+Git is not a part of the default development tooling setup. This was surprising.
+When I installed Git manually from its website, I let it run and do its thing,
+but then I realized it installed its own copy of bash, perl and coreutils. This
+shouldn't have surprised me (a lot of Git's command line interface is written in
+perl and shell scripts), but it was the 3rd copy of bash that I had installed on
+the system.
+
+As a NixOS user, this probably shouldn't have bothered me. On NixOS I currently
+have at least 8 copies of bash correlating to various versions of my tower's
+configuration. However, those copies are mostly there so that I can revert
+changes and then be able to go back to an older system setup. This is 3 copies
+of bash that are all in active use, but they don't really know about eachother
+(and the programs that are using them are arguably correct in doing this really
+defensively with their own versions of things so that there's less of a
+compatibility tesseract).
+
+Once I got it set up though, I was able to do git operations as normal. I was
+also pleasantly surprised to find that ssh and more importantly ssh-keygen were
+installed by default on Windows. That was really convenient and probably avoided
+me having to install another copy of bash.
+
+### Windows Terminal
+
+Windows Terminal gets a lot of things very right and also gets a lot of things
+very wrong. I was so happy to see that it had claimed it was mostly compatible 
+with xterm. My usual test for these things is to open a curses app that uses
+the mouse (such as Weechat or terminal Emacs) and click on things. This usually
+separates the wheat from the chaff when it comes to compatible terminal
+emulators. I used the SSH key from before to log into my server, connected to my
+long-standing tmux session and then clicked on a channel name in Weechat.
+
+Nothing happened.
+
+I clicked again to be sure, nothing happened.
+
+I was really confused, then I started doing some digging and found [this GitHub
+comment on the Windows Terminal
+repo](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/376#issuecomment-759285574).
+
+Okay, so the version of ssh that came with Windows is apparently too old. I can
+understand that. When you bring something into the core system for things like
+Windows you generally need to lock it at an older version so that you can be
+sure that it says feature-compatible for years. This is not always the best life
+decision, but it's one of the tradeoffs you have to make when you have long-term
+support for things. It suggested I download a newer version of OpenSSH and tried
+using that.
+
+I downloaded the zipfile and I was greeted with a bunch of binaries in a folder
+with no obvious instructions on how to install them. Okay, makes sense, it's a
+core part of the system and this is probably how they get the binaries around to
+slipstream them into other parts of the Windows image build. An earlier comment
+in the thread suggested this was fixed with Windows Subsystem for Linux, so
+let's give that a try.
+
+### Windows Subsystem for Linux
+
+Windows Subsystem for Linux is a technical marvel. It makes dealing with Windows
+a lot easier. If only it didn't railroad you into Ubuntu in the process. Now
+don't get me wrong, Ubuntu works. It's boring. If you need to do something on a
+Linux system, nobody would get fired for suggesting Ubuntu. It just happens to
+not be the distro I want.
+
+However, I can ssh into my server with the Ubuntu VM and then I can click around
+in Weechat to my heart's content. I can also do weird builds with Nix and it
+just works. Neat.
+
+I should probably figure out how hard it would be to get a NixOS-like
+environment in WSL, but WSL can't run systemd so I've been kinda avoiding it.
+Excising systemd from NixOS really defeats most of the point in my book. I may
+end up installing Nix on Alpine or something. IDK.
+
+### PowerShell
+
+They say you can learn a lot about the design of a command line interface by
+what commands are used to do things like change directory, list files in a
+directory and download files from the internet. In PowerShell these are
+`Get-ChildItem`, `Set-Location` and `Invoke-WebRequest`. However there are
+aliases for `ls`, `dir`, `cd` and `wget` (these aliases aren't always 
+flag-compatible, so you may want to actually get used to doing things in the
+PowerShell way if you end up doing anything overly fancy). 
+
+Another annoying thing was that pressing Control-D on an empty prompt didn't end up closing the session. In order to do this you need to edit your shell profile file:
+
+```
+PS C:\Users\xena> code $profile
+```
+
+Then you add this to the .ps1 file:
+
+```
+Set-PSReadlineOption -EditMode Emacs
+```
+
+Save this file then close and re-open PowerShell. 
+
+If this was your first time editing your PowerShell config (like it was for me)
+you are going to have to mess with your 
+[execution policy](https://www.mssqltips.com/sqlservertip/2702/setting-the-powershell-execution-policy/)
+to allow you to execute scrips on your local machine. I get the reason why they
+did this, PowerShell has a lot of...well...power over the system. Doing this 
+must outright eliminate a lot of attack vectors without doing much on the 
+admin's side. But this applies to your shell profile too. So you are going to 
+need to make a choice as to what security level you want to have with PowerShell
+scripts. I personally went with `RemoteSigned`.
+
+### Themes
+
+I use stuff cribbed from [oh my fish](https://github.com/oh-my-fish/oh-my-fish)
+for my fish prompt. I googled "oh my powershell" and hoped I would get lucky 
+with finding some nice batteries-included tools. 
+[I got lucky](https://ohmyposh.dev/docs/installation/).
+
+After looking through the options I saw a theme named `sorin` that looks like
+this:
+
+![the sorin theme in action](https://cdn.christine.website/file/christine-static/blog/Screenshot+2021-03-03+231114.png)
+
+### Project-local Dependencies
+
+To get this I'd need to do everything in WSL and use Nix. VSCode even has some
+nice integration that makes this easy. I wish there was a more native option 
+though.
+
+## Things Windows Gets Really Right
+
+The big thing that Windows gets really right as a developer is backwards 
+compatibility. For better or worse I can install just about any program from 
+the last 30 years of released software targeting windows and it will Just Work.
+
+All of the games that I play natively target windows, and I don't have to hack 
+at Steam's linux setup to get things like Sonic Adventure 2 working. All of the
+VR stuff I want to do will Just Work. All of the games I download will Just 
+Work. I don't have to do the Proton rain dance. I don't have to play with GPU
+driver paths. I don't have to disable my compositor to get Factorio to launch.
+And most of all when I report a problem it's likely to actually be taken 
+seriously instead of moaned at because I run a distribution without `/usr/lib`.
+
+---
+
+Overall, I think I can at least tolerate this development experience. It's not 
+really the most ideal setup, but it does work and I can get things done with it.
+It makes me miss NixOS though. NixOS really does ruin your expectations of what 
+a desktop operating system should be. It leaves you with kind of impossible
+standards, and it can be a bit hard to unlearn them.
+
+A lot of the software I use is closed source proprietary software. I've tried to
+fight that battle before. I've given up. When it works, Linux on the desktop is 
+a fantastic experience. Everything works together there. The system is a lot 
+more cohesive compared to the "download random programs and hope for the best"
+strategy that you end up taking with Windows systems. It's hard to do the 
+"download random programs and hope for the best" strategy with Linux on the 
+desktop because there really isn't one Linux platform to target. There's 20 or
+something. This is an advantage sometimes, but is a huge pain other times.
+
+The conclusion here is that there is no conclusion.
\ No newline at end of file
diff --git a/src/build.rs b/src/build.rs
index 7c3f12d..d2fb8e2 100644
--- a/src/build.rs
+++ b/src/build.rs
@@ -9,15 +9,14 @@ fn main() -> Result<()> {
         .output()
         .unwrap();
 
-    if std::env::var("out").is_err() {
-        println!("cargo:rustc-env=out=/yolo");
-    }
+    let out = std::env::var("out").unwrap_or("/fake".into());
+    println!("cargo:rustc-env=out={}", out);
 
     let git_hash = String::from_utf8(output.stdout).unwrap();
     println!(
         "cargo:rustc-env=GITHUB_SHA={}",
         if git_hash.as_str() == "" {
-            env!("out").into()
+            out.into()
         } else {
             git_hash
         }