I have a job now. I think. I've done my orientation but I'm yet to receive a schedule. I'm working in retail, specifically in the meat department. I won't disclose the name of the store, but they were very keen that I know the company started as a small meat delivery business before expanding into the multi-billion dollar national retail conglomerate they are today.
More importantly, I've finally switched domain registrars. I was using Domain.com, and I have a lot of gripes with them:
Gripes
The UI is bloated, slow, and overly javascript-y, like it's trying and failing to be an app
My ability to access their website via anything but Chromium with no VPN is spotty at best
I had to go through support to get AAAA records
added to my domains. There's just not an option in the UI for it.
I've still got upcoming bills for my domains AFTER transferring them away with no obvious way to cancel them or remove payment information
No clear way to delete my account either
Also, they charge extra for WHOIS privacy
All in all, very dubious. Steer clear. I now recommend Porkbun. It's the registrar I switched to and it fixes every complaint I had with Domain.com. Plus, it's much cheaper.
I'm tightening up my security practices, bit by bit. Just this week I've set up KeePassXC, created a catch-all custom email domain in protonmail, and purchased a Yubikey.
I also upgraded my Protonmail subscription to Proton Unlimited recently, and started using Proton VPN on account of I'm allowed more than one connection now and Unlimited is actually cheaper than paying for Protonmail Plus and Mozilla VPN separately. Funny thing, Proton VPN is also just better. Mozilla VPN is alright, but it's lacking features and you don't get very granular control over which server you're connecitng to, just which city it's in. Proton VPN gives you hundreds of different servers to choose from, sometimes dozens per city, with handy little indicators of which ones are good for streaming/torrenting/being routed through Tor. It's also got DNS leak protection, an automatic killswitch, and a built-in adblocker(!), none of which Mozilla VPN offers. My favorite feature, though I have no use for it currently, is the ability to hook your router up to it and pipe your entire network through it. They literally advertise that you can do this.
Good talk. It is now 3 AM and I need to sleep. Goodnight.
i think i said before that this blog is about tea, but it also isn't - it's
really about this attempt i'm making to improve as a person, to deepen my
understanding of how i relate to the people around me and the world i'm in. my
priest said two things to me a couple weeks ago that really stuck - 'to lose the
ego, you must first have an ego, so... get on that' and also 'most people
stumble around the world half-blind to what's around them'. or something like
that, anyway. the goal of zen is to actually see the world as it is, see
yourself and everyone else as they are, as you are, and realize (i think) on a
deep fundamental level that there is no separating you from the world, or the
world from you. we are all in this big blue boat together, and we are also the
boat, and the things that give us suffering have their roots in delusions about
that fact. it takes a long time to stop looking at the finger and start
considering the moon that it's pointing to, and i have a long way to go, but one
of the routes to that is very mindfully making tea.
i've mentioned before that i have some mental health challenges, and they have
been... really, really bad recently. i guess it's not so much 'recently' as 'the
last several months', and i am still in the thick of it - but, today is a good
day with a high roll on the happiness table, and so i'm posting. i need to find
an outlet to write about some of the other stuff i'm feeling, but that's for
another venue i think.
i am starting to drink my way through some of the things that i bought at the
end of last year - with black friday and christmas sales, i ended up with a
healthy amount of tea, and so i am trying to finish some things before i start
others. i've decided that i don't especially care for Buddhaās Hand (ä½ę) Wuyi
tea, but other than that, everything is tasty. that Buddha's Hand tastes a
little like sucking on a rock, which is cool, but also a rock that has been
sitting in a fire, which is not so good. it's not even like lapsang souchong,
which i like, it's just clear that it's been pretty heavily roasted and i'm not
a huge fan. today i will probably drink something lighter.
Happy new year! Iāve decided this year to use my short journal as a more detailed monthly record. This month was largely focused on my college application. Iām attempting to return to college in September, switching institutions as I do so to be closer to home. This requires a whole new application, portfolio etc which I spent most of this month handling. In my off time I put a decent amount of work into my website, solidifying parts of the website that have been disjointed up until now. I also started a Linux Wiki of various cheatsheets Iāve written over the past year. These were received quite well, and I hope this knowledge will help others learn too. Lastly, this month I was shortlisted and exhibited in The Photographerās Galleryās Small File Photo Festival. Iām very proud of this exhibition, combining two of my interests: Photography and Image Compression. Iām hoping this year Iāll be able to move about more and take photos again.
Starting today, i will try to change and take a break online for now. I'll try updating this more frequently but I'm a bit busy. So what happened? Well, I moved into my nw house and I love it already. The only thing I don't like is how it's really messy and stuff. Also, there is a new cat trying to go into our house. It would be fine, but the cat looks like it has mange on its ears and my mom doesn't want my other cats to get infected. So there's that. Oh and also, i tried to plant in our garden, and I betted that if at least one of them would sprout, I would have to reanimate one of my animation memes. And guess what? Two sunflowers sprouted. Haha, you know what happens with that now. So yeah, aside from that nothing much. I couldn't go to school because my school is afraid of my well-being and stuff, so I'm stuck here at home. Which sucks because I just thought of a cool idea to write down notes. That's all for now.
Starting today, i will try to change and take a break online for now. I'll try updating this more frequently but I'm a bit busy. So what happened? Well, I moved into my nw house and I love it already. The only thing I don't like is how it's really messy and stuff. Also, there is a new cat trying to go into our house. It would be fine, but the cat looks like it has mange on its ears and my mom doesn't want my other cats to get infected. So there's that. Oh and also, i tried to plant in our garden, and I betted that if at least one of them would sprout, I would have to reanimate one of my animation memes. And guess what? Two sunflowers sprouted. Haha, you know what happens with that now. So yeah, aside from that nothing much. I couldn't go to school because my school is afraid of my well-being and stuff, so I'm stuck here at home. Which sucks because I just thought of a cool idea to write down notes. That's all for now.
Letās just say thereās a lot of work I have to do on
myself to get out of my questionable mindset. A straight month of
Bullet Journaling
on a real, paper notebook is helping me remember the good things
that happen, so that I donāt focus on the bad ones too much. Even if
some days I just feel like doing nothing, the pleasant situations
outweight the blue hours, for now.
This weekend my daughter and I made a second issue of Underworld Championship Wrestling, the zine devoted to our imaginary crazy crossover pro-wrestling promotion.
I also need to share this absolutely ridiculous graphic I kludged together for the interior. I'm very proud of how silly it is.
Although it occurred to me that maybe it would be nice to add a tiny update to an earlier post here: the little ivy plant is thriving, and now I have fairy lights over my bed, too. They look super pretty.
I don't know what the fuck to say here, honestly. I started writing it because I love reading other people's blogs and about the details of their lives, but I forgot to account for the fact that my life is really fucking boring to people who aren't me. (And occasionally to people who are me.)
Or, I don't know, is it, I guess? On paper "disabled queer trans family trying to survive and not lose their shit in 2023" could be at least a little interesting, right? In practice it's mostly just a lot of "can we afford to put the heating on today" and "please don't show me any more transphobic news articles, I can't deal with it right now". Maybe it's just not knowing how to write about it. Ugh. Well, the point of this blog is that it's nonsocial media and probably nobody reads it, so I guess I'll just try to get back into writing whatever I've been doing with the kid or whatever. I mean, I had breakfast in a cafe this morning! It was nice! Except that I forgot I'd just had a wisdom tooth removed, so actually eating the toast I'd ordered was almost impossible. I cut it up into tiny pieces and awkwardly chewed it only on the right side of my mouth.
Which, yeah: I got a fucking wisdom tooth removed! I have never had a tooth extracted before in my 43.5 years of life, and I really wish I hadn't had to start with a dramatically broken wisdom tooth. (Most people in the UK do not get their wisdom teeth removed as standard - and we don't get knocked out for it, just a local anaesthetic. I *wish* I had been knocked out for it, but no.) I won't go into detail because seriously who wants to read that, right, but, ugh. I feel like I've been run over by a truck, but only in one very specific area of my face.
First off, I'm thinking of adding subtitles to my journal entries, just to give you all an idea of what to expect. I think that this idea will really take off.
Secondly... Well. Yesterday, I went to the doctor to get my Ritalin refilled. I even asked for an increase in dosage, since I don't feel like my current dosage is helping enough. He refilled it, of course, and I went over to the pharmacy to get that picked up.
Yeah, apparently Ritalin is on backorder. For a long time, at that!
I've had... Some troubles relating to medication in general, lately. I had to postpone my psychiatrist appointment by a week because it interfered with school, and that appointment was to refill my Zoloft. I... Didn't know that there would be any repercussions to not getting a refill right away, and I kinda sorta spent an entire week quitting cold turkey. That week was filled with dizziness, headaches the likes of which you could never imagine, tiredness, and other fun things.
I'm back on Zoloft now, but man... Now, the other medication that I require to function like a normal human being is on backorder, and who knows when I'll be able to get back on it again??? This doesn't have withdrawal symptoms, so I'm lucky in that regard, but I still want to be able to focus on stuff! I've heard that caffeine can be a good self-medicating tool, as can exercise. I'll definitely try both just so that I can function. I want to be able to do things. I never asked to have ADHD. It's a curse, I tell you...!
Though I've been hoping to give an update on new fiction, I've been a bit more focused on transcription and preservation over the past few weeks.
There's a new section dedicated to the vintage Westwood game Circuit's Edge, itself an interactive novel based on the North African cyberpunk universe of When Gravity Fails that just happens to take place in a dungeon RPG engine. Though that old DOS game has shown up in a few places, I haven't seen any references to the original manual or the author's setting background materials. To fill that void, I've made a point of reprinting all of that here, starting with an introduction to the game.
Alongside that is a section dedicated to D2 Megaten, which wife and I spent much of our COVID times playing before I got a game console more recent than a PlayStation Vita. The main push behind that has been to catalog as much of the (easily missed) story behind the main Wizardry-like mode, also known as Hollow World or Aura Gate 2. With ten floors left and a story mode epilogue, I'm pretty close to wrapping that up.
The last ten floors of Aura Gate 2 that I've recorded dialog for (31F to 40F) happen to be pretty closely associated with office humor of a sort. This past week has made that feel somewhat timely.
Left drifting out in space is You Learn Noise, from an impromptu monologue by ARavingLoon where he espoused one way to square the past with the present.
Finally, thanks to m15o for welcoming the website this journal is hosted on to Nightfall City proper. It's a warm, fuzzy place that I hope our writings are helping to add to. Go check out everybody else's websites!
New issue of Kā¢Rā¢Yā¢Pā¢Tā¢A! The print quality of the cover was a little janky for the first few copies, but the interior is nice and crisp. The red sphinx is a rubber stamp I got for Christmas.
I've been trying to get more exercise recently. To that end, I've been going on walks. Crazy idea, I know. There's a forest near my house with a network of trails I've been using, it's nice.
My home network has been giving me endless troubles of late. Last week I suddenly lost internet access, then I got that back but the overengineered piece of shit Linksys mesh wifi network thing my parents installed in the house was busted, so that needed to be reset, which borked the static IPs I had set up for my computer and my home server, and now I'm having what appears to be trouble connecting to the internet via IPv4 at all. On my PC this is fine, because my VPN seems to be circumventing the problem(?) but not so much for my server. Minecraft, the one thing that I'm using that machine for, doesn't support IPv6, which means until that comes back it's completely useless, so that's fuckin' fun. Maybe I can work around it somehow by fiddling with WireGuard configs, but that server sees so little use I honestly don't care enough right now.
In brighter news, I applied for some government tax credit a while back and my application was accepted! I got paid back for the past ten years worth of taxes the credit would have saved and it came out to a frankly hilarious amount of money. Now how to spend it... I'm considering getting a nicer keyboard.
Did I mention I have tinnitus? Well that's a thing now. It developed suddenly a few months ago - so suddenly that there's a post on my fedi instance from the day it happened to the effect of "I think I just developed tinnitus". I went to get my ears looked at by my doctor and they said my ears looked fine from what they could tell. Supposedly I'm on a waiting list to get my ears looked at in more detail - an audiogram, my doctor called it. That hasn't happened yet.
In the meantime, I honestly can't tell for sure if it's getting worse or not, and that's kind of worrying. Honestly, the tinnitus isn't the problem for me. If it stays at this level forever, I can deal. It's not debilitating or even that distracting unless I'm in a quiet space. My worry is that it'll get more intense with time and become debilitating, or worse, that it's a symptom of some kind of hearing damage I unknowingly inflicted on myself and this is the beginning of total hearing loss. I'm supposed to be a musician, dammit!
I bummed myself out writing that. For my sake and yours, have these isopods:
I guess this journal will be weekly from now on, at least until
March. Iām not having enough things to report in a meaningful way to
write an entry every single day (or couple of days).
Yesterday I went to university for an interesting seminar about
the foundation of logic and mathematics. It was one of the most
inspiring lectures I had in a while. The only bad thing is that itās
over now.
I stumbled upon this video
by Tantacrul. I didnāt know such evil people exist.
The newest issue of my personal memoir zine DILLHONKER is complete. You can't tell by looking at the cover, but this issue is actually about Dungeons & Dragons.
I can't shake the wanting to play with reversible computing. I've put together a simple project that allows me to experiment with the ideas of psi-lisp, while limited it allows me to explore this space which I find fascinating. Somehow, this makes me feel like I'm visiting an old friend.
Meanwhile, I've been trying to bring potato to a usable state, which means that for it to entirely replace the current launcher, it should be able to assemble and run assembled rom, to which I am inching closer.
I was on the edge of a breakdown. Luckily, I didnāt alienate my
friends in the process, so they listened and offered a solid different
perspective. I canāt thank them enough; Iām so happy they exist.
it has been a long time since i last wrote here. the christmas period was extremely busy, and i went straight from that period to a couple frenzied days of work followed by a trip to Canada's northern coast for my birthday. some might question the wisdom or purpose of traveling to the arctic in January - in fact, several people did - but getting to Tuktoyaktuk, seeing the frozen ocean, standing on the ice and looking ahead to the north pole, several thousand kilometers away, and seeing no horizon to interrupt the white of the sky and the white of the ice, was one of the most peaceful moments i think i have ever experienced. i made tea for my wife and myself in front of the 'ARCTIC OCEAN' sign - a 2022 sheng puerh - and we had a great time.
i spend the end of the year, and the beginning of this new one, reflecting. i first came to zen through tea, and then back to zen via tea, and so on back and forth. i have started reading again about chanoyu (č¶ć®ę¹Æ), the Japanese tea tradition, and i had reached out to a chanoyu teacher here. she is not taking students, or indeed running classes right now, but she kindly agreed to meet with me to talk. she made tea for me, i stumbled through being a guest, and we talked a lot about tea and the way of tea. i felt like we are aligned philosophically and i have a lot to learn from her, though my personal circumstances are such that i don't know to what extent i will be able to study with her when she does resume classes.
one of the difficulties i have with zen, and the way of tea, and art, is that really - if my goal is enlightenment, or to be a better person, or heal some of my psyche, and generally connect again with the world and people around me, it isn't necessary to go to a lot of trouble to go to a certain place and do things in a special way. i don't need to go to the zendo to meditate, i don't need to chant sutras to progress in the way, i don't need to wear a kimono and kneel on tatami to find peace in the making of tea. i don't need anything except a kettle and a vessel and tea - i should be able to get everything i need and want from a kettle and a teabag, or sitting on a cushion at home. the thing is, i don't want to be isolated like that. the three treasures of zen is the dharma, the sangha, and the Buddha; i can't have sangha, the community, by myself. making tea for myself is fine as an opportunity for introspection, but i don't think i want to cobble together a practice that is disconnected from everything else, because my whole goal is connection - both connection back with myself, and with everyone else.
i feel very stuck, but i'm going to go sit on a cushion for several hours, in a special building meant for that practice, with a (my?) priest officiating.
I believe that there may be... Quite a bit to be talked about today! There's a lot of stuff that's on my plate now, and I've been meaning to try to put it all into words.
So! First off! I have a bit of a new project! While I don't really talk about it much here (I really need to actually make the shrines about my interets someday...), I'm a pretty big fan of Metal Gear Solid. Unfortunately, the best wiki for it is hosted on Fandom, which is a horrible website for too many reasons to list. I'm currently in the process of making an independent Metal Gear Wiki, though getting a community is proving to be pretty difficult. I don't really use Twitter, so I've been using Tumblr and Cohost as my main methods of trying to reach people. I also found an independent gaming wiki network, and some people there are interested in helping! Honestly, I'm just kind of worried that this will be a really big undertaking, and I'll get overwhelmed and just abandon it. Abandoning projects does seem to be a recurring habit of mine, and I really want to break it.
The only other Internet related things that I've been up to are things like submitting an entry in the Yesterweb zine, and trying (and failing...) to learn JavaScript. It's pretty difficult for me to actually sit down and learn things, mostly due to what I'm going to get into next...
Real life.
Pretty horrifying stuff already, I know. It's not as bad as it could be -- I have mentioned that my dad has cancer before, but he's recovering pretty well! He's more fatigued and has to go to the hospital sometimes, but that's to be expected. I'm certainly a lot less worried than I was when I first heard the news! Even though my dad is doing well, that doesn't mean that my real life is necessarily as good as I would like it to be. I started school recently, and while my course load is pretty light, I'm still very worried that I might fail some classes. I also have to actually start learning to drive (I'm in my 20s! I swear! I'm just not good at being an adult!), try to get a job at some point, actually get out of bed before noon... My sleep schedule is screwed up beyond belief, keeping rooms clean is way harder than it needs to be, and I just feel... Overwhelmed? I guess? I don't know?
I'm very hopeful that things will pick up soon. I want to have a good year. I want to be good at things, I want to focus on stuff, I want all of that. It's just hard to give myself the push without external motivation, which isn't necessarily good by itself.
Let's hope that my next entry is more uplifting (and that I update the actual website beyond journals, as well!) :P
Iām trying to fix my sleeping schedule. Today I woke up at 6:30AM to
go to uni and study. The problem is I was sleepy for too much
time, so the time I actually studied was quite little. I hope
tomorrow will be better in this regard.
I write for a small themed blog. Iāve been bouncing ideas with the
blogās owner for a week. Today I shared some of them with the rest of the
team, but they werenāt exaclty enthusiast...
Made two mini-zines practically in parallel with each other. One is about how a material object is capable of its own sort of liveliness and agency, the other about the inevitable disappointment that follows in seeking meaning from consumer goods. What can I tell you? I am large, I contain multitudes.
Also, I got a comb binder for Christmas, so now I can make full size zines!
I set up a Forgejo instance today! I have never used Git before. I considered using it for my websites before, but after what happened to Github (bought by Microsoft) I was holding out until I managed to set up my own self-hosted service. I've created repositories for my websites, the plan is to eventually have them automatically update from their respective repositories whenever I push to them but for now I'm just mirroring them manually because I don't know how to set up git hooks properly with Forgejo.
My computer science course is going well, for the first time in a while. I had an assignment a while ago where I had to debug a basic C++ program, and that was the only thing for that whole week in the provided study plan and I completed it in a couple hours, so I took that as an excuse to do nothing for the rest of the week and the inertia from that caused me to fall three weeks behind. I finally managed to catch up because I hit a section in the study plan that had three weeks total allocated to four things that I could do in a couple hours each, putting me exactly back on schedule again. Here's hoping that doesn't happen again.
I've been trying to stop using Youtube's official frontends. I've already moved all my subscriptions to my RSS reader and I have Newpipe installed on my phone, but there's a couple pain points preventing me from switching, loathe though I may be to admit it. First and most importantly, there's no easy way to sync Youtube feeds between my RSS reader and Newpipe. Pain point the second is that Youtube's RSS feeds don't have the actual videos embedded in them for me to watch from the reader - I have to click to go to youtube.com.
I'm seriously considering solving the first of these problems by setting up an Invidious instance on my server, so I can just go there on both devices. While writing this I tested going to someone else's Invidious instance on mobile, and it singlehandedly restored my faith in mobile websites. Everyone else, do better. I wouldn't even need an app installed, period. I think if I did that, I could deal with the RSS feed jank, because it would at least be a uniform experience across devices.
It's wild how exercise really gets me into a much better emotional state. Like it really makes me feel like I have more discipline and willpower, as well as just more resilience when unexpected things happen. I feel like I go through this cycle every few years, but it's good to get the reminder.
Oh, dear, how much negativity in my entries! All it took was one
afternoon of good work and studying with no constant distraction by
Reddit and HN to feel better. Perhaps my brain categorises studying
at a higher level than mindlessly reading other peopleās comments on
things Iām mildly interested in. I need to take notes on this.
Since the turn of the year, we have spent every waking hour rewiring Pino, it has been a more challenging project than we had hoped but we will sleep soundly knowing that each connection was properly made.
I've read Koopman's Stack Machines: The New Wave and it inspired me to experiment with other virtual machine designs, namely that of the NOVIX NC4016. But after two weeks of experiments, I returned to writing Uxntal, partly because I do not feel limited in the realization of my ideas with my current stack, and partly because these sort of systems make for extremely obfuscated assembly languages. That being said, I can't seem to shake the craving to experiment with the Setun-70..
I still write ā2022ā on this thingās date. Thatās mildly annoying.
Almost nothing happened today. The highest point in the day was
this mix I listened to while
doing stuff on the computer. And by stuff I mean waste precious time. My
resolutions are not helping me ā and why should they? I should help
myself.
I watched the first LOTR
film for the first time in my life. I was quite missing something,
to be honest. It still isnāt my favourite film, but itās good
stuff nonetheless.
Iām probably going back to university on Monday, and since exams
are in two weeks I may update this little thing way less than I would
like to.
