<p>I started out intending to jot down a daily weed every morning, but have already long since not been able to accomplish that. That’s okay. I’ll start again today. Every time you start something anew, that is the beginning of a new streak that is so far unbroken! So with this entry, I have a perfect, unbroken streak of daily weed updates, consisting of one entire day!</p>
<p>I don’t take streaks too seriously. This week I lost my 414 day duolingo streak. This is the second time I’ve surpassed 365 days, gotten to about 400, and then lost focus long enough to let the streak lapse. No biggie. I could restore it by paying $14 dollar for another pro subscription, but honestly I don’t care that much, and I’ll tell you why. It’s the same reason I said above: streaks don’t matter much to me. Guess what? I started over again and now I have a a brand new three day streak. It is small and cute and I am proud of it!</p>
<p>Easy come, easy go.</p>
<p>I think the big picture thing for me is that the streak is not the accomplishment. It’s kind of an indicator, or a sort of map, or a symbol. But it’s the <em>work</em> that is the real thing. So what what I’m starting my language streak again at zero? I know that I still have ~800 days of studying.</p>
<p>You’re not entitled to the outcome, but only to the work there is to do.</p>
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<title>00017: easy open press and seal fucker</title>
<p>sometimes you get foodstuff and other stuff that comes in convenient plastic little pouches, and it has an easy-tear open with a little slit pre-started for you so you can just rip it open real easy, and it also has a nifty little self-closing press-and-seal kind of thing so that you can seal it up all nice and tight after you open it, but sometimes if you’re not careful, and even sometimes when you are careful, when you rip that fucker open it’s possible to accidentally rip out half of the press-and-seal mechanism, or even the whole damn thing.</p>
<p>this actually happens far too often if you ask me.</p>
<p>things have been pretty okay. i’ve been struggling with a lot of pain all week, which is draining and depressing. but, what else is new. been trying to do a lot of stretching and resting.</p>
<p>in other news, i joined a new rpg group a couple weeks ago. a former coworker invited me to play some Pathfinder, which is new to me.</p>
<p>anyway, last night our DM fell asleep and his phone died and nobody could reach him. everybody was about to bail out and do nothing, but i suggested that we play a quick game of Honey Heist instead, and so we did, and it was really fun and chaotic.</p>
<p>you can read all about it on dozensanddragons.neocities.org!</p>
<p>i’m glad we got to hang out, mess around, and geek out instead of just canceling.</p>
<p>we get our first vaccines on saturday. that’s big news. I don’t believe i’m going to be able to feel normal afterwards. it still feels kind of surreal and weird and scary.</p>
<p>went for a walk in the park mid-week and saw a big fucking bald eagle. Never seen one before.</p>
<p>and then, a speckled hawk flew over head and and the eagle took off and flew toward the hawk, and the hawk started dive bombing it and fucking its shit up, and the two of them were twirling and swooping and diving and the eagle was so big and the hawk was so small. The eagle eventually was like, shiiiit, and it flew away back to its branch, but i think the hawk was also like, fuuuuc, because it flew away too. who was the winner? looked like the hawk, but I don’t know!</p>
<p>That’s all I got.</p>
<p>Hope you are all doing well, my dear little gardners.</p>
<p>One night shortly after we moved into the new place, we discovered a large horrible blotch on the new granite countertop. Aghast, I poked and prodded at it with my finger. It didn’t have any substance or feel to it: it wasn’t sticky or raised or damp or warped.</p>
<p>I wiped at it with a damp towl. I scrubbed at it with a sponge. I got out some cleaners and tried scouring it with chemicals.</p>
<p>Had I put down a hot pan and scorched the stone? Had I somehow steam damaged it with a hot lid or something? I searched online for how to care for and clean granite. I had just moved in to this house not even a month ago, and already I’m destroying it. Some steward I am!</p>
<p>The blotch was an odd shape: almost perfectly round, covering an entire corner of the kitchen island. So it had sort of a wedge shape, like a large slice of pie, or the inverse of pac-man.</p>
<p>Defeated, I decided to leave it alone and revisit it in the morning.</p>
<p>In the morning, I went downstairs and in the sunlight streaming through the windows, the blotch was faint. It had faded, was less dark.</p>
<p>I looked around and noticed other faint dark spots around the kitchen. Shadows. I looked back at the blotch, and then up at the three round overhead lights suspended above the island.</p>
<p>I reached up and gave the one nearest to me a small push, setting it to wobbling slightly back and forth.</p>
<p>I looked down at the less horrible blotch, and saw it too wobbling back and forth. Because, after all, the offensive stain that I had scrubbed so furiously at last night was nothing but the shadow of the hanging lamp, strongly cast by the recessed lighting at night, and only faintly present in the natural light of the morning.</p>
<p>I ran my finger over it again, but of course you can’t feel a shadow, so I went and made myself some coffee.</p>
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<title>00006: weeds abound</title>
<author>dozens sin leche</author>
<guidisPermaLink="false">Fri, 26 Mar 2021 13:58:32 +0000</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 26 Mar 2021 13:58:32 +0000</pubDate>
<description>
<![CDATA[
<p>Yesterday was a big day in the weediverse! It went from being a beautiful garden with ostensibly a single weed (this one), to being a garden with several others!</p>
<p>So, a warm welcome to ~acdw and ~lucidiot, two of my very favorite tildizens. Both tildepals veterans, casamaniacs and basement flyers, bikeshedders and absurd podcasters, javapool explorers, ircsplorers, champions of tildes and the smol internet, and all around good humans.</p>
<p>Welcome to the weediverse. Enjoy the sunshine and the rich, loamy earth.</p>
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<title>00023: run report</title>
<author>dozens sin leche</author>
<guidisPermaLink="false">Sun, 23 Jan 2022 18:55:57 -0700</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 23 Jan 2022 18:55:57 -0700</pubDate>
<description>
<![CDATA[
<p>Today I went for a run!</p>
<p>It was a lot of fun. I pulled up a 60 minute class, and then hit the road.</p>
<p>At first I thought I was just going to run laps around the 5k loop at the park, but then decided to go on an adventure instead!</p>
<p>I quickly bailed out and ditched the park, the big one by my house, and ran down past the high school toward the other park.</p>
<p>On the way, I found a drivers license lying on the ground by the botanic gardens. I pocketed it and will mail it tomorrow. Hope they still live at that address. I considered just running it over to their house, but I was already 20 minutes into my run, and their house was 60 minutes in the opposite direction, and I didn’t feel that confident.</p>
<p>So I kept going until I got to the other, smaller park, which is still quite a big park in its own right. It was beautiful, lots of people out on the lawn by the pavilion.</p>
<p>I ran through that park and out the south side, and turned west toward downtown.</p>
<p>I saw a little park off to the left that I didn’t recognize, so I detoured to go look at it. Small but cute. The playground was fenced off. And next to the park is one of the biggest houses I’ve ever seen. But then I realized that this is Governor’s Park, and that was probably the governor’s mansion.</p>
<p>Continuing on, turned north and ran toward the capital, which is a nice thing to run towards because you can see its big golden dome from far away.</p>
<p>When I got there, I noticed some kind of protest was happening on the capital steps. I saw a couple people wearing US flags and thought to myself, ew, probably a bunch of right-wing fundies. But then I saw somebody holding a “My Body My Choice” sign and thought oh, it must be some pro-choicers, and decided to run closer to see. I got close enough to see that it was a trick anti-vax sign, because other people were waving “No Jab! No Vacine!” signs. I said ew again and turned around and ran away from the right-wing fundies.</p>
<p>Leaving the capital I was close to my neighborhood again, and saw a new sculpture in the parking lot of the old mexican restaurant. It was like a large dodecahedron (shout out, dozens!), but with each face split into three sections. And the parking lot was drawn on and divided up into similar shapes. I stopped to take a picture.</p>
<p>Then I turned and ran along the edge of the park with the fountain, and then I was in my neighborhood, and then was home!</p>
<p>Yesterday the cop who killed George Floyd was convicted on one count of murder and two counts of manslaughter.</p>
<p>May he rot in prison forever and then burn in the hell I don’t believe in for a second forever.</p>
<p>I felt a small sigh of relief, but no joy or gratitude. I felt like I was simply seeing the justice system do its job. You don’t get points or accolades for doing your job.</p>
<p>Yes, the justice system has been broken, seemingly irrevocably at at times, especially when it comes to holding police thugs accountable for their violence and racism.</p>
<p>But again, no balloons and no celebrations for getting back to the baseline: if a cop murders someone for no reason, that cop gets fired and goes to prison. Square one.</p>
<p>So we’ve managed to get ourselves back to the starting line.</p>
<p>A friend of mine had this to say about it, a sentiment with which I agree:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>i may feel differently about this another day, and i understand why people want to celebrate it, but if he was not convicted, it would be a complete mockery of the entire concept of justice. stopping one tiptoe away from a complete mockery of the entire concept of justice doesn’t give black people their lives back</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I think that actually captures my feelings really well: yes we got a conviction, yet we are still one tiptoe away from a complete mockery of the entire concept of justice. Assuming we haven’t already crossed that line. How cynical and jaded am I!</p>
<p>Hope: I expected the deliberation to take days. It took 10 hours. That is fast.</p>
<p>Realism: There’s not much to deliberate when there is almost 10 minutes of uninterrupted footage of a cop murdering a man, being told he is murdering a man. What did they realistically have to debate?</p>
<p>Despair: During the trial, Daunte Wright is killed by an incompetent police officer who can’t tell a gun from a taser. Hours before the verdict is read, police kill Ma’khia Bryant because they don’t know how to deescalate a situation without murdering black people. (This was a situation where Bryant was wielding a knife and aggressively defending herself from her attackers. So there was nuance here. But it probably could have been handled with a little less murder.)</p>
<p>So no, I don’t feel super happy about things, nor about the verdict. It is, once again, the <em>very least</em> that is to be expected of a just system.</p>
<p>I’m going on a small vacation this weekend, first one in ~20 months, and my brain is doing strange things about it. I keep over planning for it: i have 2 novels I want to read and 2 - 3 side projects I’d like to make progress on, and maybe also make some headway on some reasearch I’m doing.</p>
<p>But it’s a two night trip. Like. I might not even bring a computer.</p>
<p>I think what this says to me is that I need an actual sabatical. Take two weeks off to stay home and just work on my bullshit.</p>
<p>My employer offers unlimited PTO which I know is a shit sandwich wrapped up in pretty paper for employees. I have no reservations with taking their offering at face value and saying, Why thank you very much I will extremely take you up on that, thank you very much for the unlimited paid time off, assholes.</p>
<p>I’m actually one hundred percent planning on taking 2 - 3 weeks off after this current project wraps up at the end of the month to mentally and physically recover. This project has been very demanding and I’m starting to crack a little.</p>
<p>Anyway, kind of nervous / kind of excited about this weekend. I plan to enjoy the hottub and enjoy my friends and maybe do a little reading and a little writing? I’ll bring a laptop, who am I kidding. I don’t remember if there’s actually internet at the cabin though..</p>
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<title>today is sunday</title>
<author>dozens sin leche</author>
<guidisPermaLink="false">Sun, 13 Feb 2022 10:38:05 -0700</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 13 Feb 2022 10:38:05 -0700</pubDate>
<description>
<![CDATA[
<p>Had some friends over for dinner last night. Made some dope ass chili and some pretty okay cornbread. It’s so easy to accidentally get cornbread mix that is too cakelike. I like it a lot more “corn” and a lot less “bread”.</p>
<p>Fussed around with my gamelog recfiles this week, and I’m about fed up with the thing. I continue to value the convenience of a plain text database: easy to edit, revise, and check into version control. But this week I had difficulty with querying (it’s not possible to reverse sort) and with templating (the docs say it’s possible to use queries and conditionals in slots, but in my experience you cannot). So basically my workflow right is convert to JSON (which requires csvkit as an intermediary step because recutils don’t support JSON directly, which is another oversight in my opinion) and then sorting, transforming, and then applying to a mustache template. So at this point, I’m using very little of the actual recfile utils beyond some basic recsel querying on a recfile. I’d just switch it all over to a sqlite database if it wasn’t for the fact that I really do enjoy just being able to edit a textfile to update the database.</p>
<p>Ran a cute session of <em>Brindlewood Bay</em> this week for a group of friends. I kind of struggled with it but everybody said they had a good time which, if true, is nice. I’ve been inviting D to play with me for years now because ttrpg is pretty much my main hobby and I want to share it with them, but they’ve always declined saying that it doesn’t sound very fun to them. Not their thing. Well this time the accepted my invite for some reason, and right from the beginning I could tell that they were right: it wasn’t very fun for them. Not their thing. Oh well.</p>
<p>Might travel to a destination wedding this spring. That feels weird. “Feeling safe outside my home” is a muscle I have allowed to atrophy over the last two years. We’ll see.</p>
<p>Okay, there’s a little gremlin outside whose ass needs kicking. Off I go!</p>
<p>It was a pretty positive experience overall. Efficient. Clean, plenty of room. Not too crowded.</p>
<p>I expected to feel more of a relief than I do, but I still feel kind of numb about it, and honestly a little stressed out by it, because I don’t feel in myself any relief, or the permission to start doing more “before times” things. I’m not going to start going to grocery stores again, for example. And I’m not going to go out in public without a mask on. Even if there’s a 90% chance that I can’t get it myself, I’m pretty sure there’s still a chance that I could carry it and give it to somebody else. Sooo</p>
<p>We have a brunch appoitment at a favorite restaurant of ours in a couple weeks. About a month. That’ll be the test I guess. I’m kind of dreading it, because I’m afraid I’m going to feel too conspicuous and weird to enjoy it. We’re going with another couple, who I guess are our “vaccine pod”. They’re getting their 1st jabs this week too.</p>
<p>I’m still scared of carrying and exposing other people. I’m still scared of the 10% chance I have of getting it anyway. I’m still scared of varients that may be resistant to the antibodies in the vaccine. I’m still scared of being out and around people in a cavalier that…</p>
<p>I don’t know, I have a fear of starting to act like everything is okay when everything is definitely not okay yet. And I don’t want to role model or demonstate feeling like things are okay. I’ve seen too many people not giving a fuck this whole time. And I’m afraid that if they see vaxxers starting to cavort around carefree, they may feel encouraged and validated in their not giving a fuck. “See? Things are back to normal. Hoax. I’m not getting a 5G chip.” It’s still not normal, and I don’t want to act like it is.</p>
<p>I don’t feel more comforted by getting a vaccine than I do by staying indoors and away from people. It just feels to me like another layer of protection: I stay away from people, I wear a mask, and I have a vaccine now. I’m probably okay until everyone’s had it, or everyone’s been vaccinated, and we get herd immunity.</p>
<p>So I got my first vaccine yesterday. Came home and ate a whole pint of chocolate truffle ice cream in celebration/out of frustration.</p>
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<title>00014: Reply to acdw (Re: my dumb ass)</title>
<p>As a former public library employee myself, I gotta assume that you’re totally fine. Most library people I know are both outrageously passionate about the work that they do, and also incredibly burnt out.</p>
<p>I think that there is a very small number of diehard “I will library until the day that I day. Preferably at the library” people, but that the majority of library people put in a few years of hard work and then move on to something else. In my experience at least, most people expect that.</p>
<p>In fact, of my original cohort of library people, I think exactly 3 of us are still doing library work now five years later.</p>
<p>They/we are now doing:</p>
<oltype="1">
<li><p>Programming</p></li>
<li><p>Programming</p></li>
<li><p>Programming</p></li>
<li><p>Programming</p></li>
<li><p>Social work</p></li>
<li><p>Skiing?</p></li>
<li><p>Library</p></li>
<li><p>Library</p></li>
<li><p>Library</p></li>
</ol>
<p>(I quit the library to become a web developer, and several of us followed suit. I am the Pied Piper of PHP. jk, I don’t write PHP lol. I am the Jaunty Juggler of JavaScript.)</p>
<p>Anyway. I don’t mean to diminish your feelings. I just mean to say tha if your boss is rational, and if turnover in your library is like it is in my library, then you’re probably Just Fine. They may be thinking, aw shuks, that sucks, I really like acdw and I’ll be sad to see them go. (Because who wouldn’t think that?) But I doubt they’re feeling any ill will toward you whatsoever.</p>
<p>BUT WHAT DO I KNOW I’M JUST A DOZENS WHO LIVES IN THE INTERNET</p>
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<title>00018: thanks for the park rich lady</title>
<author>dozens sin leche</author>
<guidisPermaLink="false">Sun, 02 May 2021 15:28:18 +0000</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 02 May 2021 15:28:18 +0000</pubDate>
<description>
<![CDATA[
<p>Got my 2nd pfizer shot yesterday afternoon. So now I’m full vax, fat stacks of vax.</p>
<p>We accidentally scheduled out vaccines at opposite ends of town at the same time. So they dropped me off at my spot which is in a little clinic inside the grocery store in the middle of a huge commercial hellzone, and they tootled off to their site which is in a little clinic inside a grocery store in a cute planned walkable hip neighborhood.</p>
<p>By all accounts, my hellzone site was much, much nicer.</p>
<p>Far less crowded, no bozos with no masks or dick noses. In and out. And–surprise of surprises!–turns out I was a two minute walk from a big open space park hidden away behind a huge municipal complex.</p>
<p>I walked over there after my shot and walked around the lake. Saw a pair of woodpeckers and a bunch of red-winged blackbirds, which I really like, and also a bunny rabbit. It was beautiful.</p>
<p>I found one of those informational placards on the other side of the lake which informed me that this whole area used to be part of a massive estate belonging to one half of a pair of rich as fuck newspaper heiress sisters from the early 1900s whose names are still plastered over tons of things here because of their philanthropy.</p>
<p>I don’t know much about what they got up to during their lives other than live lives of luxury and give money away and not have any children so that their entire fortune went to the city. So thank for that, ladies.</p>
<p>Also, what a funny notion that you used to be able to be rich as fuck for generations by owning a newspaper. Is that still the case? Surely not.</p>
<p>Anyway, this park was part of the estate of the older, more crazy sister. She build an exact replica of a French palace on it. And she protected the property with huge hedges, chain link fences, armed guards, and german shepherds. And this wasn’t that long ago. She lived there till the died in the 60s, hanging out by the lake with the boathouse and the docks.</p>
<p>She also got crazy religion, converting to Catholicism late in life. And there’s nothing weirder than late life converts. She erected at least two huge stone piles with giant crosses on them. And when she died, she willed the estate to the church. The church didn’t know what to do with it, so they tore down the mansion, the one that was an exact replica of a French palace.</p>
<p>I don’t know what happened to it after that, but I guess it must have passed hands to the city at some point and gotten turned into an open space preserve. Because I sure enjoyed walking around it yesterday.</p>
<p>I have to wonder what that snooty old moneybags lady would think if the public was tromping around her precious estate now. And that her French mansion, if it was still here now, would be walking distance from an Olive Garden.</p>
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<title>00002: they</title>
<author>dozens sin leche</author>
<guidisPermaLink="false">Wed, 17 Mar 2021 14:04:31 +0000</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Mar 2021 14:04:31 +0000</pubDate>
<description>
<![CDATA[
<p>so right on the heels of my previous post about gender, I was reminded that I’m speaking to a cohort of young coders at a bootcamp this Friday. (A Learn To Code bootcamp, obviously. Not like, a military bootcamp.) This is something I’ve done before thanks to a friendly acquaintanceship that I have with a local developer/educator/evangelist. Anyway, the guy scheduling the thing reached out to me and gave the run down and the agenda, and asked me for my pronouns and my website.</p>
<p>So I gave my github link and told him “he/they”. (Which I still continue to mistype initially as “hey” everytime. Which I guess is also an approapriate way to get my attention: “HEY! YOU!”)</p>
<p>This marks the first time that I have strayed from exclusively masculine pronouns in a somewhat professional setting. Feels significant.</p>
<p>I have zero expectations of being asked about it, but the possibility, no matter how small, has had me thinking about how I would discuss my pronouns if asked. (I seriously don’t think anybody would ask: it would be off topic for a tech talk, and also really personal.)</p>
<p>The best I can think of so far is something like this:</p>
<p>“I really love ‘they’ as a pronoun. In fact I think it’s the second best gender neutral pronoun in the English language. [Speaker notes: If they ask, the #1 best gender neutral pronoun is ”y’all”.] I like using it to refer to people when that’s appropriate, and I like having it used to refer to me. It works so well in so many situations. And I think that promoting and normalizing its use among my peer group of cis hetero men is an important step in breaking down gender binarism.”</p>
<p>I think that’s okay. I think that gets the point across of what I’m trying to do and how I feel, without getting into personal details about my own identity. Which is still some flavor of “cis hetero man, but softer.. also, fuck the patriarchy!”</p>
<p>So that talk happens on Friday. Like I said, I won’t get asked about it. I’ll get asked about my background and my job seeking experience and what life as a developer is like. But I’ll report back and share how it went.</p>
<p>In other news, my standing desk should arrive today. I’ve done without for almost a year now and I can feel the effects in my body of not being able to move around into different configurations during the day. Looking forward to having the ability to switch back and forth again. I share this about my desk both because I’m genuinely looking forward to it getting here, and also to let you know that this weed won’t be all about gender politics all the time.</p>
<p>That’s all. Be good, do well.</p>
<p>~dozens</p>
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<title>00019: freenode</title>
<author>dozens sin leche</author>
<guidisPermaLink="false">Thu, 20 May 2021 15:12:09 +0000</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 20 May 2021 15:12:09 +0000</pubDate>
<description>
<![CDATA[
<p>So Freenode imploded this week?</p>
<p>Here’s what happened to the best of my knowledge, off the top of my head.</p>
<oltype="1">
<li><p>Back in 2013-ish christel sold freenode outright to a private group with the majority of the ownership going to Andrew Lee. Nobody at freenode knew this.</p></li>
<li><p>Around 2017, suddenly everybody knew this. Lee said he wasn’t going to change freenode at all<ahref="#fn1"class="footnote-ref"id="fnref1"role="doc-noteref"><sup>1</sup></a>, but then started putting corporate logos on the site advertising his businesses.</p></li>
<li><p>Today-ish, <em>something</em> happened to break the camel’s back. Lee started lawyering up, nearly all the existing freenode staff quit, encouraged people to delete their freenode accounts, and migrate to libera.chat</p></li>
</ol>
<p>So I don’t know what to do about that. I don’t know if this is a real thing or whether this is just noisy internet drama. Or, whether this is yawning at the apocalypse, a boring dystopia: the ever spreading, creeping corporate take over of all things. Lee owns freenode. Microsoft owns github and npm. Etc, etc. It sucks, but most people still use github and most people will probably still use Freenode TM.</p>
<p>Me personally, I made a libera.chat account, mostly to protect my account name, and joined the tildeverse channel.</p>
<p>I don’t have any plans to leave freenode at this time. I lurk in a very small number of very small communities, and don’t rely on it for the success of my software project. So I’m obviously not part of the community that has a personal stake in how this unfolds.</p>
<p>To be honest, the vast and overwhelming majority of my irc usage is on two or three tiny non-freenode servers. What’s that you say? Yes, I suppose you’re right. I’m using irc as a decentralized protocol, the way it was intended.</p>
<p>The analogy of irc is to freenode as git is to github stands up pretty well. And if that’s the case, I think that the best thing that can happen is for people to abandon those platforms and embrace the decentralized nature of their tools. Run your own server. Be your own boss.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’m mostly writing this all now to merely document a point in time. It might be funny to come back here in a year and read this after freenode has adopted sponsored channels, paid subscriptions, featured content, advertising, etc.</p>
<p>That one admin posted a chat log where Lee’s associate tried to bribe them with donations to the Alpine project, so I have no problem imagining that will happen.</p>
<p>Welcome to the corporate hellscape that is the internet. I shall retreat further and further into my tildespaces, friend holes, gemini capsules, gopher holes, and rss weeds.</p>
<liid="fn1"role="doc-endnote"><p>This is always a lie. I have been at two companies so far that have been bought by larger companies, and both times they promised to “not make any changes.” (Even it was caveated by “…at least for the first year”.) This was followed in one instance by the parent company later completely dissolving the brand and merging the company with another. Which I would say is a pretty big change! I am not a business person. But in my experience and in my imagination, it is exceedingly rare for somebody to spend enough money to purchase a company, product, or other IP and then actually take no operational control over it. You buy the thing to generate revenue from it.<ahref="#fnref1"class="footnote-back"role="doc-backlink">↩︎</a></p></li>
</ol>
</section>
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<title>00003: Bikesheds, conspiracy theories, and systemic racism</title>
<author>dozens sin leche</author>
<guidisPermaLink="false">Wed, 17 Mar 2021 18:36:33 +0000</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Mar 2021 18:36:33 +0000</pubDate>
<description>
<![CDATA[
<h1id="bikesheds-conspiracy-theories-and-systemic-racism">Bikesheds, conspiracy theories, and systemic racism</h1>
<p>A comment on “GitHub, f*ck your name change” by MooseyAnon</p>
<p>First of all, I condemn racism and slavery and violence in the strongest, most absolute terms.</p>
<p>Now, I was on this anti-master-branch bandwagon. I continue to think that renaming git’s default branch from master is a simple, easy, and worthwhile change to make. It doesn’t <em>accomplish</em> anything, not anything significant or meaningful, but it’s a gesture and an acknowledgment and a promise.</p>
<p>Yes it would be more better if we as developers could get GitHub to stop supporting ICE. Or if we could stop selling facial recognition software to racist law enforcement agencies.</p>
<p>But we as individuals, and even as small or not so small groups of individuals, can do little to cause swift, meaningful change because capitalism and corporations, and the government that protects capitalism and corporations, will always protect their own interests over those of humans, and over making true reparations for those who are struggling to recover from government sanctioned slavery and genocide.</p>
<p>That is, changing a git branch name is <em>easy</em>. Correcting systemic, government sanctioned racism and violence is <em>hard</em>.</p>
<p>Racism in America is hopelessly pervasive and complex. It’s overwhelming to think about actually rooting it out of our institutions and society. But it’s easy to point to git’s master branch and say, this! I can fix this!</p>
<p>Yes, it’s probably performative. No, it probably doesn’t actually accomplish much. Beside maybe expose those who would defend racist vocabulary a little too loudly. No, most black americans probably didn’t ask for it, nor do they care.</p>
<p>It’s somewhat adjacent to the phenomenon of bikeshedding. Given an immense, complex project like ending racism, or designing a building complex, the scope and breadth of the problem is so vast that most people can’t have an opinion on the best way to accomplish the end goal taken at a whole. But give them something small and easy to reason about, say a small bike shed, and they’ll argue all day long about what color it should be, or if vertical racks are more efficient than horizontal ones.</p>
<p>No one person can ever cancel racism. But one person can change their default git branch and feel like they’re participating in something.</p>
<p>Bikeshedding is counterproductive because it wastes time arguing and decision making. Renaming your git branch is counterproductive because it similarly distracts from the <em>actual</em> problem. And it offers a false sense of accomplishment. You didn’t <em>accomplish</em> anything by renaming that git branch. But it forces the conversation: for a while though, the tech community was buzzing with this topic. But was that conversation helpful? I wonder anybody from the apologist camp or the devil’s advocate camp, those defending the use of the word ‘master’, I wonder if any of them were at any point convinced that use of that word actually is problematic. I find it easier to believe that they all grumbled and complained about it, and now that it’s over, they just shrug and go back to work and if they think about it at all, they think, “Well that was weird and unnecessary,” and remain unchanged in any way.</p>
<p>What did we win here?</p>
<p>I think it’s also in the neighborhood of conspiracy theory. People look at the world and see that shit’s fucked up and getting worse. It is a sign of weakness, but very comforting, to choose to believe that one single party or group is responsible for all the bad stuff in the world. To say nothing of the feeling of superiority if you believe you’re in the know and others don’t get it. Comfort and superiority are great feelings, so I see why people fall into those traps. But it’s wrong to think that one group of people is in charge of the world government and that they are responsible for all your woes.</p>
<p>It all stems, remember, from looking at a hopelessly complex system, and assuming that there is a single, simple solution. The git branch saga falls somewhere on this continuum: I can’t understand complexity so I will form unreasonably strong opinions about bike sheds. I can’t understand complexity, so I will concoct a false belief/scapegoat for my troubles. I can’t understand complexity, so I will rename my git branch.</p>
<p>They are all various amounts of avoidance.</p>
<p>But at least git branch renaming is to some degree productive avoidance. No it didn’t stop racism. But it has caused us to take a look at how deeply rooted racism is in our language and culture.</p>
<p>One million points to the first university who stops giving out Masters degrees and starts giving out Scholars degrees. More lip service, sure. But that’d be cool as hell.</p>
<p>I write this rant mostly to myself. To remind myself that I renamed my git branch, and that is barely even a beginning. I didn’t accomplish anything, I barely even started anything. There is much work to be done.</p>
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<title>00011: little old lady beating up bullies</title>
<p>Laid down on the couch and fell asleep so hard that I had a vivid dream about being a little old lady in an airport, and I’m pretty sure that if I hadn’t set an alarm, I would have slept the whole afternoon.</p>
<p>I usually only end up using 20 - 40 minutes of my 60 minute nap alarm, but today I sure used the whole thing.</p>
<p>Here’s a fun game I’ve been playing since Saturday: second-guessing every feeling and wondering if it’s because of my vaccine.</p>
<p>Felt extra sleepy today and slept extra hard during my nap. Vaccine, or normal?</p>
<p>Dragging a little during my run yesterday. Vaccine, or normal? Besides, it was kind of cold, and I was still sore from my five miles the day before.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure none of those things are vaccine related. But it’s interesting watching my brain trying to form associations. Relax, brain. You’re fine.</p>
<p>Speaking of vaccines, though, I saw in the news today that J&J vaccines have been suspended after six women in the US had blood clotting issues in the two weeks after receiving their shot. One of them died. Which is terrible.</p>
<p>And it’s terrible that the first thing I thought of was, oh boy, the anti-vaxxers are going to have a field day with this.</p>
<p>How did we get to a place so polarized. In the park today, I saw a car that had not one, not two, but three huge Trump decals. Like, not slogans or bumper stickers. Decals of Donald Trump’s face and body, so that it looks like there is a Trump in the passenger seat, in the back seat, and also sitting in the trunk. The Trump Trunk.</p>
<p>And the bumper sticker said, “Proud to be everything liberals hate.”</p>
<p>And it made me sad. Because… I’m a lefty progressive. A “liberal”, if you will. And I don’t hate anybody, or anything. Except hate. And willful ignorance.</p>
<p>I’m sitting here at my keyboard, not sure what to say next.</p>
<p>I don’t know how we got to a place where we have people who don’t believe in medicine/vaccines, climate change, or science basically. Who value authority and law and order over individual lives. Who elect people who actively, open suppress voters, and who think that parents of trans children should be considered child abusers if they support their kids. Who support conspiracy theories and xenophobia and nationalism and white supremacy.</p>
<p>To me, being a “liberal” literally means trying to protect and lift up the most vulnerable of us. And if you stand against that then you stand against humanity and common decency.</p>
<p>So when that guy says he’s “proud to be everything liberals hate”, I pray to the god that I don’t believe in that he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about.</p>
<p>A small part of me wonders whether this division is real, or if it is fabricated by social media and the news. (Realistically, it probably <em>started</em> as a fabrication of the news and social media, until people bought into it.) Like, we can’t really be this far gone right? But then I see the proof. We have elected officials who believe that California wildfires are caused by “Jewish space lasers” and others who actively participate in child sex trafficking.</p>
<p>Anyway. That was some doom spiraling. All I meant to say was, I had a good nap on the couch, and dreamt I was a little old lady beating up bullies at the airport.</p>
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<title>00001: pronouns</title>
<author>dozens sin leche</author>
<guidisPermaLink="false">Tue, 16 Mar 2021 16:09:20 +0000</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 16 Mar 2021 16:09:20 +0000</pubDate>
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<p>Hello and welcome to my secret rss-only blog.</p>
<p>Wait no, we need a better name than blog because that means “web log”</p>
<p>And this is a “web feed”</p>
<p>Welcome to my WEED. It’s a lovely little thing. I will water it and nourish it and watch it grow just like a pachypodium or a venus flytrap.</p>
<p>A bunch of my tildepals and I were talking today about having a place where we could write freely, which is honestly kind of cute and precious because we’re all from this art/hacker collective that hangs out on irc and sometimes on the fediverse. I mean we are already really cloistered away in a very small, supportive, hidden community. But anyway, the feelings are still there anyway to justify it, so whatever, here we go.</p>
<p>That place is this, if you didn’t follow me. This is weed is about rsspect and self-expression.</p>
<p>The context in which this weed sprouted (this time, that is. because we’ve talked about starting weeds before) was about gender and pronouns and identity.</p>
<p>My pronouns are he/they, with a slight preference for they. Not because I identify as non-binary or anything like that, but mostly because I want to distance myself from masculinity and male dominated culture.</p>
<p>I am a very masculine looking dude. Very tall, big bushy beard, stern face, big deep voice. One thing I have to work on all the time is “make your face friendly!” Something my partner yells and/or whispers at me constantly. If I don’t think about my face, it looks like a big scary dude is scowling at you. And that sucks.</p>
<p>One time I saw a small woman fall off her bike half way down the block by my house. I bike a lot and I know painful and scary it is to fall off a bike, especially in the road amid traffic. So I immediately started running to help her with what I’m sure was a look of great concern and worry on my face. Pardner yells after me, “OMG make your face friendly,” and I realized what I must have looked like: a huge bear of a guy running at a small vulnerable woman. So I broke out into a huge grin to greet her, but then thought, “No, that’s wrong. That’s inappropriate too. It looks like I’m happy she fell.” So I stopped doing that and settled on a kind of raised eyebrow, lips parted kind of face like I was about to say something that I hoped read as concern.</p>
<p>I’m not actually autistic. But I sympathize with people who have to work at social interactions.</p>
<p>I helped her out, got my first aid kit and my bike tools. Fixed up her and her bike too.</p>
<p>Anyway. That’s a little bit about how I sometimes struggle with my “masc af” appearance.</p>
<p>I both want to disance myself from masculinity, and also I enjoy feminine aspects of myself. I like my long pretty hair and my long pretty nails. I get upset when people refer to my “man bun.” It’s just a bun. It doesn’t have to be gendered.</p>
<p>I don’t really know where I’m going with this. My pronouns are he/they. I’m a manly looking cis male who doesn’t feel especially masculine. And this is my rss-only web feed!</p>
<p>This post is about table top roleplaying. It is probably better suited for my dozens-and-dragons blog, and I might crosspost it there later. But for now, it is a weed that goes in my garden.</p>
<p>I recently joined a game of Pathfinder with some of my friends. It’s been a couple weeks now. I find the level of fun to be adequate. I don’t love the system because it is the polar opposite of what I tend to gravitate towards lately, which is fewer rules, less crunching number, more simple rolls, more rulings and collaboration, etc. Pathfinder is none of those things: the rules are complicated, combat is complicated, character creation and advancement is complicated. Encounters feel as though you have a couple of situational, limited options that you can feed into the chain of functions that the rulebook provides you, and just a lot of things are handled <em>for</em> you by the rules. As opposed to a rules light game where you can do whatever the fuck you want and then the DM rules on whether that happens or not.</p>
<p>The DM is good. His descriptions are vivid, he knows his shit. There are a lot of rules and a lot of lore to know, and he seems to know most of it.</p>
<p>And I obviously like my friends.</p>
<p>I think it’s just the game itself that I don’t like that much. I guess what I’m doing right now in my head as I write this is justifying continuing to play, which means I must be thinking of quitting the game.</p>
<p>You ever start writing something then realize a truth about your thinking/feeling through the process of writing? Writing <em>is</em> thinking for me a lot of the time. There is a tremendously great passage in the tremendously great <em>Sputnik Sweetheart</em> by the tremendously great Haruki Murakami about this.</p>
<p>I wrote it down somewhere, hang on I’ll find it for you.</p>
<p>Anyway, yeah I guess I’m not enjoying that game as much as I wish I was. I’m going to stick with it a while. Maybe it’s just going to take me a minute to gel with the group.</p>
<p>My main game, however, the D&D game that I’ve been running for over a year now, is going well. I hope. Now I have a secret fear that my players may not be enjoying it as much as they could/should. Now that I’ve experienced myself not enjoying a game as much as I want to.</p>
<p>We’re having a non-game session tonight. A “Session Zero”. Our third. We’ve had some player turnover, and nearly 100% <em>character</em> turnover since the last time we did this.</p>
<p>So we’re going to review player safety and agency, get into some character development and roleplay mechanics, and then do some world building.</p>
<p>I find this exercise is useful to help players feel more connected to their characters, to each other, and to the game world. I have a few players who are still “trying to figure out” who their character is, and hopefully this will help them feel more confidant about that.</p>
<p>I’ll definitely recap this session on my dozens-and-dragons blog, as well as post the framework that I like to use for these sessions.</p>
<p>Okay, I guess that is all for now.</p>
<p>This has been a tabletop role-playing weed sprout.</p>
<p>Thank you and good night.</p>
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<title>00005: desks and devs</title>
<author>dozens sin leche</author>
<guidisPermaLink="false">Thu, 25 Mar 2021 13:57:37 +0000</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 25 Mar 2021 13:57:37 +0000</pubDate>
<description>
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<p>when this weed began it was about gender politics and now it is about office furnature. This is the mercurial nature of this weed. I hope you are okay with that because that is what I’m dishing out.</p>
<p>I put that busted up desk out on the front porch and UPS came and picked it up the next day.</p>
<p>Then yesterday they dropped off the replacement!</p>
<p>I cracked it open and gave it a good looking-at to make sure it wasn’t all cracked up, and it was not! It was a solid, honest to goodness, intact and whole desk.</p>
<p>So I pulled all the pieces out, and it did that thing where it had all of the small pieces sorted into individual, labeled little baggies, which I love. So well organized.</p>
<p>Very simple assembly: put the legs and driving rod/motor assembly part on the underside of the desk. Put the feet on the legs. Plug it in! Blamo!!</p>
<p>Now I have a stand up/sit down desk in my office. It has a little wireless charging stand on the corner, which is nice. It charges my phone if I take it out of the case. I have a little bit more space now, so I can have my keyboard on my desk, and also have a notebook open, which is cool.</p>
<p>I’ve been standing up a lot, which already feels great in my body. Can’t believe I’ve just been sitting for a year. I’m settling into a groove where I put on some music to jam out to, and I can kind of shuffle and move at my desk while working.</p>
<p>Yes, I dance at my desk while working. It’s awesome and you should try it. Just put on some good drums & guitar. Yesterday I listened to Battles and Giraffes? Giraffes! and it was great.</p>
<h2id="talksgiving">talksgiving</h2>
<p>Okay also I gave that talk last Friday at the coding bootcamp standup. It was cute and quick and fun.</p>
<p>They apparently start every morning listening to some inspiring music together, and that day the instructor played Basketcase by Green Day, and as we all know Dookie Green Day is best Green Day and I got really amped up over it.</p>
<p>I told them a little bit about my background and my job search/interview experience after bootcamp, because I figured that’s the next thing they’re going to be going through themselves, and they will find those experiences of mine most relatable and most useful.</p>
<p>I think they did feel that way. I got a lot of questions about agency life since that’s been then entirety of my career. And like, what they should put on their resumes. What should they specialize in. (Nothing now, you are infants. Keep learning basics.) etc etc.</p>
<p>I preached about Grazer style Curiosity Conversations, and one kiddo reached out to me to schedule one immediately after. Good for him. We chatted this week, and I hooked him up with another meeting with a friend of mine who is starting up a internship at his company. Hope that goes well for them!</p>
<p>My feelings about this are: I should do more of that kind of thing both to meet people and also to help new developers get started in their career. People did it for me, and I want to pay it back, and also it just feels really good to me to connect people and help create relationships.</p>
<h2id="new-weeds-in-the-garden">new weeds in the garden</h2>
<p>hellos and welcomes all around to acdw and cooldude! Welcome to the weedisphere.</p>
<p>Is it a sphere? No need to blindly mindlessly borrow from the web community. This is the rss community after all. We are cut from our own cloth! Our community could be a rhombus. Or a dodecohedron. Though I always imagined the blogosphere was an atmospheric phenom, hovering in stasis somewhere between the stratosphere and the troposphere. Funny that, to imagine that the Land of Blogs is a physical space somewhere between the earth and cold black suck of space.</p>
<p>Not us, no. We are a garden. Firmly planted, our roots growing down, our fingers stretching up. Sad news: the layers of the earth don’t have nearly as handy a naming convention. Can’t rightly call it the weed… crust.</p>
<p>“The garden” shall suffice.</p>
<p>acdw, cooldude, welcome to the garden.</p>
<h2id="fantasy-for-our-times">fantasy for our times</h2>
<p>Readers of my pseudo-autobiographical ASCII webcomic <em>Pro Toad and Superb Owl</em> will already know this. But I started a new book this week.</p>
<p>I started a new book because I finished the book I had been reading, and book-reading is often a sequential sort of affair. Truth be told, at my readingest, I usually have 3 - 5 books I’m reading at a time, each of which fills a specific need: an audiobook for walks and other outdoor activities, a book for the nightstand for bedtime reading, a challenging technical book for studying, a graphic novel for leisure and visual stimulation, and then perhaps another novel for fun or whatever.</p>
<p>I haven’t been able to read like that for some time though. Not for over a year at least. These Modern Times started in early 2020 and destroyed much of my ability to focus, and nearly all of my ability to enjoy the thoughts of somebody else inside my own head. That is to say, I haven’t really been able to read that much. Not with the fervor and passion I have.</p>
<p>So nowadays I slowly, cautiously, painstakingly plod through one book at a time like a recovering stroke victim learning to walk again.</p>
<p>I finished a book this week called <em>The City We Became</em>. It was good. But don’t focus on that, little gardener. That’s that what I wish to tell you about. I want to tell you about the book I started.</p>
<p>So in my rehabilitation reading, I’m mostly reading fantasy novels. At the recommendation of a couple different sources I trust, I decided I should pick up a Michael Moorcock. He allegedly does really good, varietally correct, sword-and-sorcery high fantasy novels. Just the sort of thing I’m looking for right now.</p>
<p>So I grabbed <em>The Dreamthief’s Daughter</em> on a whim: I liked the title. I like dreams. And thiefs. And daughters! This is going to be great.</p>
<p>The book opens on a moody, tragic, lonely noble lord, last of his line, carrier of the family curse, slightly disfigured, expert swordsman, bla bla bla. Classic fantasy hero trope. I’m sure he’s destined to wield the Sword of Fate against the Nemesis or something. (He does in fact end up possessing <em>Ravenbrand</em>, a magic sword and family heirloom.)</p>
<p>But, get this! You quickly find out that he grew up in Germany in the early 1900s. Fought in World War I and is currently part of the resistance during the rise of the Nazis. He is interred in a concentration camp!</p>
<p>The writing is great. It’s dizzying and heartbreaking and terrifying to compare the stew pot from whence the Nazis emerged and rose to power to the political and social situation in the US today.</p>
<p>But. My dragons. My sorcery. What is even going on here!</p>
<p>I’m 30% through the book and the hero is has escaped and liberated a concentration camp and is fleeing his Nazi pursuers, who have cars and machine guns, while he and his companions have, yes, cars, but, only a sword and a longbow? And like I said, the writing is great. The story is captivating. But this feels like a big bait and switch. The hero has believed in some magical qualities of the sword from the beginning, but I think the reader is meant to question the hero’s sanity on this point. I don’t however!</p>
<p>Anyway, I had to stop and look up the book. Is this a proto urban fantasy book? A bait and switch? No, apparently at some point in this book there will be a classic fantasy storyline featuring the hero’s wizardish ancestor and dragons and stuff, and it will eventually intertwine and intermingle with this one.</p>
<p>Which can only mean one thing, dear reader. And I hope you’ve stuck with me this far, and I hope you agree that the payoff will be worth it.</p>
<p>That can only mean one thing: the hero is going to ride a motherfucking dragon into Hitler’s bunker and fireball him in the face. How awesome is that going to be! How cathartic! It resonates with a desire in me I didn’t know I had. I desperately want to see a dragon scorch some nazis. Can you imagine?</p>
<p>Can you particularly imagine one of the gold dragons from Dungeons & Dragons lore, one of those paragons of good and virtue who seek out destroy evil and injustice? Not a feral, animalistic thing, but an intelligent avatar of justice set loose in Nazi Germany? A thing strong enough and confident enough to decide to just erase the nazis.</p>
<p>If only. If only. If only.</p>
<p>Supposing I live today in a potentially pre-Nazi society. I couldn’t in my right mind set loose a dragon to destroy all the Trump supporters. They are not the evil that poisons the well. My dragon would have to destroy… no, not the media. Not even social media. No, not even the bots and trolls that corrupt it.</p>
<p>My dragon would have to be a hate seeking missile. What is it that divides us so? That sows hate and fear in our hearts? That pits brother against brother.</p>
<p>Perhaps it’s the inequity. The unfairness of having to fight to survive while the rich prosper.</p>
<p>Okay, we’ll test this hypothesis. Mister Dragon, build your hoard. Steal the wealth of the richest. No more billionaires.</p>
<p>Look what I’ve done, my little cabbages! I’ve been given a dragon and I created socialism.</p>
<p>How much more simple and satisfying a fantasy to just destroy nazis.</p>
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<title>00022: i do not have cancer (this time)</title>
<p>okay i’ve been meaning to write this one for a while.</p>
<p>i’ve spent the last two decades being told by medical professionals that I can basically develop cancer in my eyeball pretty much at any minute.</p>
<p>see I have a freckle or “nevus” (which is the medical term for “freckle”) in the back of each eye. Which is not on its own unusual. What is unusual about mine is that they are directly in the direct back of my eyes, wrapped around my optic nerves, where they get maximum sun exposure. So just like any other mole or freckle, you wanna “keep an eye” on them and see if they change shape or color or stuff. Because if they do, then that’s probably skin cancer.</p>
<p>And the one in my left eye is basically pre-cancer that just can’t wait to turn into melanoma.</p>
<p>so one thing i do now is, the same way people who are worried about skin cancer put on religiously put on sun screen, I wear sun glasses anytime I’ll be near sunlight, because I can’t put sun screen on my eyes. Sometimes I get comments when i’m sitting inside a cafe that happens to be getting lots of natural sunlight about wearing sunglasses indoors. I usually smile and make a joke instead of talking about cancer. people don’t like it when you talk about cancer.</p>
<p>anyway, so again for the last two decades, i’ve had a cancer (of the fucking eyeball) scare every 3 - 5 years. that usually looks like me going in for an eye exam and them saying, ‘hey your mole changed shape, you need to go get a bunch of tests.’ so I do, and then it’s nothing.</p>
<p>last month, I started going blind in my right eye and getting massive headaches and feeling fatigued all the time, and I thought to myself, this is it. I have eyeball cancer, like cancer inside my actual skull. and I’m either going to die, or it’s still early enough that they’ll be able to just remove my eyeball and i’ll get to wear an eyepatch and have one eye from now on.</p>
<p>the scary part is that by the time I noticed it, I had no idea how long it had been going on. I was reading my kindle one night and noticed that there was a huge blurry spot in the middle of my field of vision in my right eye. and when I closed my eyes I could see a huge floating grapefruit of a tracer. And I was like, fuck, has this been gradually happening for a while now and I only just now noticed it? How long have I been going blind in my cancer-susceptible eye?</p>
<p>so i looked up an eye doctor near me and booked the very next appointment they had. I told them about the loss of vision and the headaches and stuff and they were like, hey, it’s probably nothing, but….. and then immediately made me an appointment with a retina specialist.</p>
<p>They said it was probably nothing because apparently older guys who are under a lot of stress can just get these little blind spots sometimes. But I am neither old nor stressed out thank you very much. i do lots of therapy and yoga.</p>
<p>the doctor called herself. called a retina specialist friend of hers to see me as soon as possible. so yeah. totally “probably nothing” vibes.</p>
<p>I went to go see the specialist. They took lots of pictures and ran lots of tests, including the one where they inject you with a dye so your blood turns weird colors, so they can take pictures of blood leaks in your eyes. That’s called an angiogram and it’s usually pretty chill assuming the technician can give you the injection, which mine couldn’t. They tried five or six times in my right arm before I suggested switching arms. so then they tried two or three times in my left are and finally shot me full of dye.</p>
<p>that was annoying because i’m a huge blood donater, and the blood takers always ooh and aah over my veins. “You’re such a good bleeder!” they say. super easy to stick. so either they’re wrong (which they probably aren’t) or my technician really sucked.</p>
<p>but anyway they eventually shot me full of dye and told me my pee would look really weird for a few days. despite their warning, the next time i peed it looked so electric neon that I shouted out loud in alarm before remembering that my insides had been dyed.</p>
<p>so I had been photographed, poked, pricked, dyed, and dilated, and all kinds of things, and eventually the doctor came in and said, ‘you’re basically fine. and by fine i mean you don’t have eye cancer. instead you have this other thing that has a whole official sounding medical name and everything, but basically it means that you get these big blisters under your retina every now and then. I can tell because you have scarring here and there, so it has definitely happened in the past. This just appears to be the first time it’s happened directly in the middle of your field of vision. It’ll probably just go away on it’s own. Let’s monitor it.’</p>
<p>He repeated the previous doctor’s claim that sometimes it’s stress related (yeah i’m a little stressed out about work, but also it’s 2021. don’t you think that if I was sensitive to stress, I’d have developed this condition at any fucking point during the past year?) but he also said that it can just be really random, and there’s no telling when or why it can happen.</p>
<p>In the meantime, I’m still mostly blind in my right eye, I’m getting wicked headaches every day, and basically sleep most of the afternoon of every day because of aforementioned headaches. I wear a makeshift eyepatch at the computer to try to deal with the discomfort.</p>
<p>but over the next month, it does in fact to start to go away on its own.</p>
<p>the grapefruit shrinks down to an avocado, and then an almond. The headaches go away. My vision clears, mostly.</p>
<p>I had my follow up today, and the specialist was like, ‘wow, i expected you to improve, but i didn’t expect you to basically be all the way better by now.’</p>
<p>my vision is expected to continue to improve until it is what it was before, and this was all just a big nothing.</p>
<p>except you know, for the fact that now I have cancer prone eyes that also now apparently just blister and leak fluids all the time with no warning or provocation.</p>
<p>so yeah, fuck that. but also what can you do.</p>
<p>guess i’ll just keep wearing eyeglasses and doing yoga.</p>
<p>A little over a year ago, I did a little Covid-19 <em>urban flight</em> of my own.</p>
<p>We were living in a high rise one-bedroom apartment in the heart of downtown. There was hustle and bustle, and I loved it. Close to the restaurants, bars, museums, shows, and more.</p>
<p>When the pandemic first started, we found it impossible to navigate the narrow hallways, elevators, and other shared spaces of our apartment building in a way that felt safe.</p>
<p>If it weren’t for our dogs, we probably could have stayed put. But we <em>had</em> to leave the house a couple times a day to at least go to the dog run.</p>
<p>So, we bailed. Poor timing. We had just signed a new year long lease. The apartment building helped us break it though without <em>too</em> much hassle, and we moved into a small duplex just a couple miles from downtown.</p>
<p>It was a godsend. Enough space for us to both work comfortably from home. A dreamy little backyard with a garden and a patio and a water fountain. My blood pressure dropped immediately, and my anxiety got better right away. No more clinging to the walls trying to pass people in a cramped hallway with six feet of space; instead I could just walk out my front door and be outside! Life changer.</p>
<p>My bike got stolen from my backyard about a week after we moved in. It was mostly my fault. But also mostly the bike thief’s fault for stealing it. I just left it in the yard, not locked up or anything. I had tucked it away in front of the garage so you couldn’t see it from the alley or anything. Which means somebody came into the yard looking for stuff to take.</p>
<p>That was a dearly beloved bike. The only bike I had ever bought new from a shop. It was expensive. I had it for years and years. Third bike I’ve had stolen since living in this city.</p>
<p>And so most of the pandemic passed with me having no bike.</p>
<p>This is a rare and unusual state for me to be in. I’m a bike buy. I like riding, I like working on bikes, taking them apart and putting them back together, cleaning and tuning them up. I like looking for parts and accessories to build them out. I like looking at maps and planning long rides. I like everything there is about bikes. The oldest website I still have is a bike blog.</p>
<p>For a year, I didn’t have a bike. During the time I probably could have most benefited from having one. From having the ability to get outside and escape a little bit. My lost year. The same time during which I couldn’t read, another personality-defining hobby of mine.</p>
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<p>Polly’s pandemic pastime was going for long walks. She walked in the mornings, and in the evenings, and during the day, well she got herself a small flat treadmill to put under her desk so she could walk while she worked too.</p>
<p>She walked so much she injured herself and now has some swollen tendons in her foot, and can’t walk very far any more.</p>
<p>So she decided that one good way to get around that is to get a bike.</p>
<p>She spent a day or two thinking about it, and then came downstairs and told me she had ordered a bike and would be picking it up at the store in a couple hours. (This is the third time she’s bought the exact same bike from the same department store. First one got stolen. Second one got lost. She likes it, and keeps buying it.)</p>
<p>I’m definitely more than a little prone to analysis paralysis. Especially so with bikes. Should I get a road bike or some kind of commuter hybrid? I’d really like a dutch bike, but they don’t sell those anywhere here, so I’ll probably have to settle for a cruiser or something. Should I buy it online, or from an independently owned local bike shop? Or just go to a big box like REI. Should I scour craigslist for a deal on a used bike? Maybe look for a stripped down fixie? On and on and on. I agonized at length over the choice of what kind of new bike to get.</p>
<p>Now I don’t know if it was jealousy or just inspiration, but when she told me she was going to go pick up her bike, it kicked my butt in gear. I pulled up craigslist and searched by size (because I’m a bigun and need a big bike) and found a cute bike that is just my type for under $100.</p>
<p>It had been posted a couple days prior, so I didn’t think it would still be available, but the poster replied right away and said that it was!</p>
<p>So I told her I’d go with her to pick up her bike if we could swing by and meet some guy from the internet in the donut shop parking lot and get <em>my</em> bike.</p>
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<p>I expected the bike to need a lot of work considering the price tag. But it was surprisingly complete. Like, all the way complete. I don’t think I needed to do a single thing to it besides air up the tires. And adjust the saddle. It was set a little too far forward, and dipped down so it felt like I was going to slide off. Otherwise, completely ready to ride.</p>
<p>Beautiful old lugged steel. Retro downtube shifters. Swept back handlebars so I can sit more upright. It’s a total dream. You just get to experience and engage with your neighborhood a little differently–get to know it a little better–from atop a bike with the wind in your face. Nothing quite like it.</p>
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<p>We’ve moved again since then, from the duplex into a large house with a large yard. From south of the park, to west of the park. The park remains constant. I ride my bike down there and ride around. Or I’ll grab my skates and bike down for a skate.</p>
<p>I was pretty broken for most of 2020. But I can read again now. I can once more tolerate other people’s words and thoughts being inside my head. And I have a bike to ride and to work on. I’ve bought a rat trap rack to put on the back, which is always the first thing I do when I get a new bike. It’s my favorite kind of rack. The kind with the “trap” on a spring, but also with a little ledge that folds up in the front, so you can wedge a box or bag (or a six-pack of beer) against it, and then let the trap close over it, and it holds everything real secure and in place. Got some lights on order so I can ride in the mornings and evenings.</p>
<p>I’m starting to feel more whole again, and the neat thing about rebuilding again is the feeling of starting from scratch. There are some things about my old self that I have decided not to include in the new 2021 version of me. The things I have included have been evaluated and they only get to come to the party now if they bring me particular joy.</p>
<p>And so now I have a new bike!</p>
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<title>00004: desk update</title>
<author>dozens sin leche</author>
<guidisPermaLink="false">Thu, 18 Mar 2021 20:00:18 +0000</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Mar 2021 20:00:18 +0000</pubDate>
<description>
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<p>I promised an update on my new desk so here it is, get ready.</p>
<p>My desk arrived yesterday on my front porch in a big box. It took me and my partner both together to get it inside. But once it was inside I just dragged it into my office.</p>
<p>I was going to wait till the end of the day to set it up because I was busy with work. But then I had some downtime at work, and figured the hell with it I’ll go ahead and set it up now and then I can play D&D tonight on my new desk.</p>
<p>So I opened up the box and lifted up the top layer of styrofoam, and at first I didn’t understand what I was looking at. It looked like the glass tabletop had some kind of neat tiled, marbled pattern to it. And then I noticed the edges were kind of crumbly and thought that maybe the styrofoam had crumbled into pieces and was sticking to the edges of the table.</p>
<p>Nope! The entire glass tabletop was shattered into shards and pebbles! I found out when I went to brush the pieces of styrofoam away and they turned out to be glass instead, and they stuck in my hand and fingers.</p>
<p>I yelled out, more surprised than hurt, and shooed the dogs away because a few pieces had spilled out onto the floor.</p>
<p>Luckily I hadn’t taken a single thing out of the box yet, so I just closed that bad boy up and taped it shut. I tilted it on an edge and wedged my skateboard under it and wheeled it outside and put it back on the porch.</p>
<p>Got ahold of customer support. UPS will come pick it up today or tomorrow, and a new one is on the way.</p>
<p>I decided to be bold and ask if they would overnight the new one to me, but my boldness was not rewarded. Should be here in a couple days.</p>
<p>This has been an update on my new office desk.</p>