Status
Well, I have to fix all the old statuses again, but that looks pretty good.
Hm, actually I should wrap each post in a div so I can style the entire post. I bet I can get them looking nice
The only downside of this vs. matabash is that I now have to do all my formatting in HTML instead of markdown. But I can add an option to run the input through pandoc before posting. No probalo 👌
Posting another status update!
It works!!
Already barely tolerable phone calls 100x worse now that hold music has been replaced with computer voices chattering ad nauseam
Made it to stage 4 of Jewel Master! I think there's only one more stage after it. This game's cool
Made it to the second boss of Jewel Master, which is farther than I ever thought I'd get tbh. It's all about learning to master the jewels
Good song: Generate Utopia by Death's Dynamic Shroud and Galen Tipton
I've decided to remove my responses from the Guestbook. I decided there's no non-awkward way to present them, and people generally don't expect guestbooks to be a medium for dialogue. If you want/need a response, please use the Contact page.
I don't understand why there aren't way more HTML tags. Like why not have <red> and it can be a shortcut for <span style="color:red;">? And one for all the common colors? It's considered gauche to use old-fashioned tags like <center>, as if typing out <span style="text-align:center;"> is somehow more pure? There should be a ton of shortcut tags for common formatting needs. This is why HTML is so annoying
Good song: Bella Moon by H.E.X.
Good song: Always Looking by Young Mister. "We were born into it, we never had a choice. What kind of monster would create a being for the purpose of wandering to fill a void?"
I actually don't care whether AI makes corporations money, any more than I care whether Lockheed Martin or Raytheon are lucrative enterprises. "It makes money" isn't an argument for something being good
I'm about as anti-GenAI as it gets but I've never been a big Ed Zitron fan, and Dan Luu astutely broke down many of the reasons why. I obviously don't agree with Luu's genAI neutrality, but he's on the money for why Zitron isn't a good spokesperson for my side. You shouldn't make predictions based on what you wish would happen, what would happen in a just and rational world, because ours isn't. It's why I stay out of the prediction business.
One nice thing about pre-paid phone plans is that sometimes it takes them awhile to notice that you need to give them more money. I just got nearly a full extra week out of my plan before they finally cut me off. Suck it, people who pay bills on time
I'm no expert in trademark law, but IMHO I don't think Zip-Pak is legally distinct from Zip-Loc. If I were whichever one was first, I'd take the other one to the cleaners.
Buy a boat?? But I don't even like gravy
Iowa was really going places in 1999. Gateway computers, Slipknot... true harbingers of the millennium
Good song: All Day (remix) by Kanye, ft. Kendrick Lamar and Meanz of Operation
Just sat an hour waiting for a bus to ride a distance I probably could've walked in 40 minutes, if there were sidewalks.
No way... first Dolly Parton, then Tim Curry, now King Harald V of Norway?! They really do go in threes 😭 #rip #celeb
Just used Musescore to edit a midi with a really harsh synth part in the soundfont I have to use and replace it with a lovely flute and violin instead. Matches the tone of the piece much better. (surely the intended use of this software, lol.) Check it out. Starts on the second bar of the third measure.
I should have the ability to upload/use a better soundfont, neocities says .sf2 is one of the allowed filetypes, but I get an error every time I try saying I need a supporter account. E-mailed them about it but haven't heard back yet. At least I have the ability to tweak them a little bit and make them sound better. Some of them might be too complex for me to fix though.
Guestbook is back online!
Just got a phishing test at work that looked like a normal spam email. Devious. I had to look at the headers to verify that yes, I should report it as phishing instead of spam. As if anyone on earth would get an unsolicited email from Marriott and say "why yes, I would like to download their mobile app, let me click that there link to find out how"
Heavily based on SilverHawk's Rad Music Player with my thanks. I simplified the interface, fixed some bugs, and set it up so it doesn't autoplay.
Neocities page now has a midi player, like a proper website. If you're using a desktop browser with javascript enabled, check it out in the footer. Many more tracks will soon be available.
Not abandoning the status page, just haven't felt like saying much recently. Same with the fediverse. I go through phases. Anyway, it's 09h00 and salary etc etc.
Okay, I had disabled secure boot but apparently I also needed to disable TPM. I didn't think that should have fuck all to do with linux but apparently it made the computer not like it.
Nope, the installer got a lot further along but that one crashed too. Fuck!
I gave spouse a few things we could try since the Mint installer keeps crashing. She asked which I thought was most likely to work. I shrugged and said probably Debian. Looks like we're gonna be a Debian household ꩜
Added some more articles to the project page.
Anyway, hopefully things should be back to relative normal at work this week.
Fell asleep around 1. Woke up at 7. Was 8 minutes late for work, so I was essentially one minute late for work. Annoying. Spent the morning downloading some other .isos my spouse can try today and instructions for using etcher on my computer. I suggested she try installing Mint in safe mode first, I think that might work, but if not she has some other options.
I hate not being able to tell her with certainty that we can get get her computer working again. I love Linux when it works, but when it doesn't, and you're poor, it can make be soul-crushing. We can't afford to get her another computer, even a used decade-old thinkpad like mine. My kidneys aren't healthy enough to sell and I'm not pretty enough to start camming. Praying that the Linux gods will decide to favor us.
What a terrible night to be cursed with Linux. Goodnight
Been out all day with spouse and too busy to update status. I saw one of those pink Mary Kay cars. That sucks. But I saw a bunch of great anti-"Flock" stickers pasted around town. I saw a cute fish embossed on a storm drain marker admonishing people not to dump waste water. We ate at a chain restaurant. It was kind of bad. I hate that spending way too much money on medicore food is the only real way to eat if you're going to be in the city and riding buses. But the server was clearly having a really rough day so my spouse wrote her a thank you card and left it on the table with her tip. Hope it made her night better. I'm worn the fuck out from laundry and running around. It was good to get out. But I need to rest.
Cat outside the laundry room! 😻
Also make sure you do for i in *.html; do sed 's/<old title>/<new title>/g' $i; done | less first to make sure it looks the way you intend. Especially if you're using regex. Gets tricky.
Got the syntax wrong in this status because of course I did 🙄 Fixed it.
Was so exhausted last night I forgot to status. But went to bed at 01h00 and slept 8h. Still very drowsy. Have a day off today but probably have too much I need to do to enjoy it.
Actually okay tonight. Didn't think I would be. Spent most of the evening with spouse. She wants to start using Linux (on purpose!) I set her up with a Mint live USB and we spent about an hour exploring. If it doesn't mysteriously and repeatedly corrupt her filesystem like on her last computer then it should be pretty good. I suspect that won't be an issue on her current computer, so I'm optimistic.
It's funny, another long Stereolab song (Long Life Love) from the same collection (Oscillons From the Anti-Sun) came on and I was actively annoyed for most of its 7 minutes. Pretty uneven catalog for my tastes. Banger of an album title though.
Good song: Golden Ball by Stereolab
Big big anxiety spike. I'll be okay, but don't know if it'll be today. Will check in when I can.
It's 09h00 and my salary is there for the earning! Computer on! (Gonna be a weird one today. Probably won't have time to write in detail about it til tomorrow. Thoughts and prayers please 🧘♀️)
Got up at 07h00. Not quite 6h sleep. Feel like shit.
gn 😴
Not nearly as bothered by plain HTML now that I'm familiar with unix tools. Used to be that if I wasn't using some kind of CMS I'd be terrified to commit to anything, because if I ever need to change it I'd have to go in and manually edit every single page. Now if I ever want to change my site's title, it's just
for i in *.html; do sed -i 's/<old title>/<new title>/g' $i; done
Kills me that I could've been doing this the whole time
Had dinner and watched Pooh with spouse. Trying to relax a little before bed. It's going to be a weird day/week.
Giving some of my best blog posts the archival treatment.
Weekend breakfast is the best meal(s) of the week because I have time to actually make a proper breakfast. That was a couple hours ago. Got distracted from whatever else I had intended to do by website stuff, for some reason 🙄
Good song: Fresh Tattoo by the Mountain Goats
There was also a separate Korean version but I can't find a ROM anywhere. Guessing it's the same game just in a different SKU. I wonder if the box has any indication that the text is all in English. I know some games in Asian countries were released with all English text, but what a bizarre choice for an RPG. It's barely possible to figure out what to do in that game even if you are fluent.
Actually never mind, the "Asian" version of Shadowrun was "for sale in Asia except Japan and Korea". I downloaded the ROM for this version and in-game it's labeled (J) but that seems to be a mistake, all of the text is in English and AFAICT the game was never sold there. What a weird version. Sega Retro has scans of English and Chinese Mega Drive manuals#Physical_scans) (covers only, unfortunately.) So just Hong Kong and Taiwan, I'm guessing? The game seems identical to the US version. Very weird.
Man the infiltration music is so good. I really wonder if FF7's "underneath the rotting pizza" took influence from this track, whether the Square staff had played it at all. Bladerunner is the obvious cyberpunky influence but I always saw parallels between FF7 and this specific Shadowrun game too. I wonder if the Squaresoft staff was familiar with it at all. It DID get a Japanese release, I wonder what if any splash it made there. There's barely any information out there about this version, and judging by auction prices it wasn't a huge seller there. I wish I could learn more about this version.
Good song: Going Home by Aloa Input
I don't know what I expected the Magnetic Fields to sound like, but every time one of their songs comes on the radio, it's one of the worst songs I've ever heard. Like I can see how they released an album with 69 songs: they're all extremely low-quality. I don't know how a novelty band became such critical darlings.
Lyrics in the song Bury It by Chvrches: "Bury it and rise above".
What I hear: "Bury it and ride the bone"
Listening to music instead of the klaxons.
No alarms set, woke up on my own after 6h44m. "Will going back to bed make me feel better or worse" is always an interesting question. I believe this time I'm going to chance staying up.
gn 😴
My meta challenge this time is, I'll buy one stack (of 6) grenades before every corp run. I've put zero points into electronics, so that's the only way I can open doors. If I keep finding grenades, I can keep exploring. My primary goal is to finish the run, secondary is to grab as much loot as I can before my grenades run out. With three party members, the amount of loot I can escape with is considerable. It makes the corp runs much more worth your while, and success not being guaranteed makes them more exciting. It's cool that I'm still finding satisfying new ways to play. (I just wish I didn't have to listen to the damn klaxon the whole time... 😒)
Oops, I was having too much fun playing video games and now it's almost 01h00. Well, I guess there are more debauched ways I could be spending my Saturday night.
It's pretty fun going into the corporate dungeons guns blazing, blowing doors open with grenades, mowing down any guard foolish enough to get in our way. I almost always go for the stealth and subterfuge option. Good to mix it up.
Time for some runs in the shadows.
Hanging out with the spouse. Showed her something cute I added to ArkMast. She showed me some crafts she's been working on. Good nerd bonding.
Ran to the bodega for some emergency snacks. Now dinner and youtube.
Aw, there's already a program that does basically what mine does. Womp womp.
I'm still going to finish mine, but you should probably use this one since it's been in development for years. But if you share my unhinged minimalism fixation, maybe ArkMast will be for you too
Home and my brain is cooked. I really gotta learn how to pace myself.
YDD 🤜💥🕟
It's almost 15h00. Wtf happened
Okay, text dump and update functions are done and hopefully free of major bugs. Just need to do menu UI and HTML mode. No probalo.
Good song: Cut Glass Hammers by Memorials. This song sounds a lot like Stereolab, in a good way.
Y'all. My Mastodon archiver is SO coming along. I got really frustrated yesterday but we're back baby!
Oh uh, it's 09h00 sharp and the computer is on! Let's do our salaried best as fish pillow cheers us on. [gif]
Neocities also makes it easy to get an API key, so I won't have to ask for the user's login credentials every time! Sweet. I wish I knew a long time ago how fun and relatively easy it is to do web stuff with APIs. The only reason I had the confidence to do it with Mataroa is because I needed to learn it for the Bearblog import. It doesn't look like I'll be able to pay for web hosting any time soon, so I'm glad Neocities should be a lot more useful to me now.
Okay, I thought the neocities CLI not working meant my neostatus idea was dead in the water, but it looks like they support uploading via curl too. That'll probably be the next thing I do after I get Arkmast working.
6h28m of sleep. Not the kind of number I like to see. I'm typically looking for a bigger number than that.
😴
I thought the old tagline/jingle for Little Caesar's was "we make it pizza-riffic!" so I was going to post on Mastodon "Little Sleeper's Pizza: We Make it Soporific!" but I looked it up and that was actually Gino's Pizza, a local chain. I could still make the joke and call it Nemo's Pizza, as in "Little Nemo in Slumberland", but I don't think anyone who sees it would recognize the tagline. I wanted you to know all this because you're reading the Status Page, which means you're entitled to special information. Thanks for being part of the club.
Taking my soporific. I'm working tomorrow for reasons too complicated to explain. Maybe I'll write a blog post about it. But I'm taking Tuesday off to compensate, so that should be exciting.
I'd like to be well-known for my deeds and accomplishments, but I'd definitely want the kind of aloof, eccentric fame experienced by figures like Bill Watterson or Prince. No interviews, no autobiographies, just a quiet, dignified celebrity people barely notice, so it's always an event when they do something new. Yeah, I'm a Prince-like figure for sure.
I don't know why they made children's cartoons based on adult comedy personalities like Louie Anderson and Howie Mandel. I didn't know who those men were. The studios could've made cartoons about nonspecific weird man-child characters and I wouldn't have known the difference. Then they wouldn't have had to pay celebs and they'd have more budget to make the cartoons good. They should've done that.
Neocities CLI app installed fine in termux on my phone. Won't install on my computer. I hate linux
I liked Tony Hawk 2 on the PC, but I wish it didn't have the time limit. It'd be a lot more fun if I didn't have to keep starting over for no reason.
Time to eat burritos and watch some N64 games get ranked 🌯🎮️
The Toyota Tacoma is the ultimate culmination of history's two greatest Bells, Taco and Ma.
Good song: Expressway To Yr. Skull by Sonic Youth
Anyway, yabba dabba doo 🤜🕟
Maybe I'm an outlier, but I always found the desktop metaphor a lot more pleasant and easy to work with than real files and folders. If all my creative materials were physical objects I had to keep organized and physically manage, that would make me considerably less capable. Maybe the project just isn't for me.
I found some videos of someone editing the Dynamicland website, and I'm closer to understanding what it would actually mean to "make a website in Realtalk" (but I mean, not really), but I still can't help thinking "man, this seems like a tedious and frustrating way to get stuff into the computer. I feel like just using the computer in the first place would be a lot faster and easier." I know the website isn't the point, the point is to do other things that would only tangentially involve computers, but as appealing as that sounds in the abstract, I can't conceptualize what it would actually mean. I wish I could get a hands-on demo.
Good song: Spite by Vandaveer. "Life is such a wretched affair / I'm going to hold my breath to spite the air."
Realized that AI doomers might be able to twist my "this could hurt other people" clause to support their eschatology. Annoying. Need a good argument for why doomsday prepping is different than fire safety precautions other than "the probability is much smaller", because that's not convincing. I know it's a different kind of thing but I'm having trouble articulating how.
New blog post: Almost fell into a Well, Actually 📒 Got to use my image beautifier. It worked great!
And like, we're in the age of USB-C, so what if they put a few ports on there for peripherals? What if I could connect a keyboard and mouse to it? Or even a monitor? A touchphone could be a computer you use at home and then just grab it out of the dock when you're ready to take it with you. Wouldn't that be incredible?
Well, Apple dictates reality about what a touchphone is, and they really don't want people doing this. They would like you to also buy their computers please. The economy really wants you to buy two computers every few years. So this will never happen.
Frankly it's a crime against ergonomics that touchphones don't come with a charging dock. Like what are the two things everyone with a desk job wants to do with their phone? Charge it, and have the screen visible so they can see if they get a notification while they're working. A dock would fix both issues. Instead I have to supply my own stand, use an app that rotates the screen 180° when it's plugged in, and have the big honking charging cable awkwardly sticking out of the top. A dock would be so cheap. Some plastic, a strategically placed USB connector and a passthrough. But companies can't even give you an AC adapter anymore. What a sorry state for electronics.
Nearly 9H of sleep. I'm not cured, but it's a noticeable improvement.
😴
Long mutual crying sesh with the spouse about poverty, illness and our gestapo healthcare system. Now I'm gonna stuff my face with post-dinner snacks and watch comfort youtube (Cathode Ray Dude). Aiming to go to bed around 22h00.
Not looking at any code tonight.
Reward system hacking is scary. A guy in our neighborhood is a chain-smoker, and there's no smoking allowed inside these apartments, so rather than quitting he's arranged his life such that the thing he spends most of his time doing is standing in front of his apartment smoking. He's literally a "smoker", as in that's the activity that defines him. We have horror stories about fungus taking over people's brains and turning them into zombies, but we have a real plant that does that, and it's the plant where cigarettes are made. The tobacco industry owes this man a life.
Yabba dabba doo 🤜🕟
Thank god the job I get paid to do isn't nearly as hard as the jobs I make myself do for free. When I get overwhelmed I can start slacking off and it gets me in the opposite of trouble.
Okay just sat here doing pointless troubleshooting for like an hour because I forgot that text files you make on windows can't be used on linux. Time for a break ⚰️
Woke up and immediately started working on my archive script. Doesn't bode well for my sleep tonight, but I'm excited, I really think this could help. People desperately want a commonsense way to archive their posts, and this could be it.
Bed.
Well my "no thinking" plan was a complete bust. I'm learning that I can channel anger into useful programs and that's a dangerous thing. I didn't want to get sucked into a programming hole again. Since I got home so late after errands, it feels like my day just vanished. Going to try to get to bed in about an hour. Don't feel good about it.
It works!! I have a text dump! Take that, industry standard enterprise search engines. Elastisearch? Pssht, my Ctrl and F keys work just fine, thank you.
Downloading a text dump of my mastodon account... twenty posts at a time...
Good song: Shed by Geggy Tah
Paradoxically, everything seems to be cheaper when you get it at the hospital vs. retail, even the OTC stuff. Like the US health system is famous for hospitals charging $10 for a single tylenol when you're a patient, but if you could go downstairs to the pharmacy, they'd happily sell you a thousand for the same price. Very sane and normal.
To be fair, it might've been because I'm cu—because the hypothetical person in this fictional scenario is cute.
Apparently you can just walk into a hospital and buy food from the cafeteria. You don't have to be a patient there or anything. Also, if you happen to be wearing your lanyard and badge from a different hospital you happen to work at, someone might not pay that close attention and give you the employee discount. I'm just stating information.
Got way into the weeds about Mastodon's god-awful post management. Now I need to make another bash script. Very mad. But that's for later. Clocking out and walking to the pharmacy. Wish me luck.
A footbath is the opposite of gloves.
Ended up having some actual work I needed to think about at work today. So much for plans.
Actually yeah, this is way too ambitious a project to try to start on my phone. Back to not thinking. Hopefully I'll have some time to work on it this weekend.
I suppose I could just make it look for "begin status" and "end status" comments in the HTML... 🤔
Trying to figure out if it's feasible to make a version of the status client that would work with a free neocities account. The neocities CLI will let you upload a single file, but the only download option is "sync the entire website". Annoying. I could probably fetch a "status.html" page with curl, then patch it and use the CLI to upload the patched file. The only way to embed on neocities without js would be an iframe, and I'm struggling to make it look right. Annoying that they don't just support SSI. Why don't more static sites use SSI? It's awesome. Anyway, so much for not thinking today.
Gonna try not thinking today as much as possible and see if my brain shuts up at a reasonable hour. We'll see how it goes. It's times like these I wish I liked any of those "you just have to turn your brain off"-type shows.
6h17m of sleep. Gonna need a real night's sleep pretty soon. It's catching up with me.
Going to bed now for real.
Just made 3000 nuyen from a simple Matrix run so I'm gonna recruit Walking Bear. Ugly Squad assemble.
Really really off-kilter today.
I have eaten
the hot dogs
that were in
the fridge
and which
I was probably saving
for hot dogs
Forgive me
they were hot dogs
so beef
and so mustard
Making some hot dogs.
Trying not to be too disheartened by this. All things are fleeting
Important bug fix in Matabash 1.🐬 😢
Oh my god, I just remembered, there was an internet hiccup when I posted "Yabba Dabba Doo". I need to make sure if it's not able to retrieve the body text, it doesn't do the append. I can't believe that happened. Thank god I caught it this early.
Oh my god why did it erase all my old statuses??
Yabba dabba doo