04 october 2022
i have a pile of junk on the ground next to me because i'll be going on a trip this weekend.
i feel like i have lost a lot of muscle memor for using vim.
i have a pile of junk on the ground next to me because i'll be going on a trip this weekend.
i feel like i have lost a lot of muscle memor for using vim.
lol i'm trying to do some updates to the feels engine and i cannot remember how to python at all
mushy brain, maybe we will try this again later
one of those phases of having to write down extremely trivial things both so i don't forget them and so i can have the near-instant fake dopamine rush of crossing it off when i do it
feels good, but also feels bad
i'm feeling overwhelmed, but this will pass
oops there's a big feels bug, i will fix it soon, hopefully this week!
hi feels i'm coming back down a little from a complicated and euphoric handful of weeks/months and some things are scary and make me nervous but also i'm just sort of bouncing my fingers up and down waiting for some limbo periods to be over.
i feel good, though. i feel like i'm slowly clawing my way back into myself. i feel more myself than i dared to be.
i feel like a long-time buried part of me has finally felt safe enough to resurface
a part of me that went into hiding to avoid being hurt by a terrifyingly harsh world
a seed, gently nurtured until it finally decided to sprout
i'm glad i've been patient
i'm glad it's still here
i don't know what this means
but i'm happy and calm.
+-+,
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. , . ||| | ., . ^ ' ` '
i started training myself on a screen reader again because sometimes staring at the screen is awful and i'd rather be able to close my eyes or stare off into space and have all the things in my computer conjured into my head in a non-visual way. i want this space to open up so it is bigger than it looks when it is contained on a screen, deeper than these panels that slide around, a space with dimensions that cannot be explained because they are not flat or linear or stacked.
but inputting that via text to speech is clumsy, and i'm not dedicated enough to practice all the time, and so many things do not play well with screen readers.
however, after trying to use ttbp with a screen reader, i think i should make a more accessible option, because dear god having it read through the banner image is torturous, confusing, and useless.
(edit to add: haha, i experienced this exact thought nearly a year ago to the date: https://tilde.town/~endorphant/blog/20171128.html)
i'm so exhausted i started filling the water chamber of my moka pot with coffee grounds and didn't realize what was wrong until i was like 'gee this thing is taking a lot more grounds than usual today what's up with that'
i gotta remember: just because i want to stop sleeping or cleaning or doing anything besides a mad dash to complete things on my todo lists doesn't mean that's the most effective way to get things done
everyone's gotta rest
everyone's gotta take care of themselves
i'm not immune to that. i do better work when i take care of myself.
today is the second anniversary of the launching of the feels engine <3
here's the first post ever: http://tilde.town/~endorphant/blog/20160501.html
thank you everyone for feeding your feels to the feels engine!!!
i hope this machine continues to churn for as long as y'all want to use it
i have loved experiencing feels together
STATS:
THIS FRESH FEELS ENGINE FEELING
i'm trying hard, hard, to have patience and be forgiving and generous and kind. some days, i'm exhausted. i'm scared for this world and everyone in it, but i'm also trying to refuse to lose hope in it.
this world is too beautiful to give up on.
be bold, start cold
an adage from a friend, about going outside
the worst part is the first moment of stepping into winter, feeling it pressing through your clothes. of course it will reach your skin soon.
but you are a creature of fire, and you can stoke that furnace with your own flesh and blood.
by the end of the first mile, i'm warm. i always have to remember that.
current feel: blasting nirvana's in utero album while crafting the perfect text to support the upcoming feature of purging all your feels here.
sometimes it feels like my brain is stretched so tight, and these little bits keep poking through the membrane. i sometimes remember things i thought i forgot. i guess you never really forget, you just don't know that you remember.
been stuck in my head a lot lately, but it comes from getting sick of letting things creep up on me
MAJOR NULL BURN IS MY OFFICIAL HACKER NAME
that great feel of collapsing onto the mat with starry vision and noodly legs, slugging water and pretzel sticks while your body remembers how to reconstitute itself
always gotta work hard, always gotta let my body know i love it
i want to be better at:
this is a particular kind of empathy and quelling of an egocentric experience that i know is historically very hard for me, but i think it will go a long way in both keeping me calmer/healthier, and calming down my environment a little.
today, this came from me pushing back at someone (who is a contact at work that's an external vendor and swings through once in a while for business) for laughing at me and making comments about my wet clothes when i was getting into work after biking through heavy rain. i'm always a little on edge when i see this person coming down, because i've started anticipating negative exchanges and it doesn't set us up to be nice to each other; this meant that as soon as i saw them i was already bristling a little, and took those comments extremely poorly.
i don't think my response was particularly out of line, given the situation (i very firmly told them not to laugh at me, and then made them wait for me to finish getting myself settled before i would speak to them again and complete our business), and i do feel good about being able to quickly establish a boundary and enforce it; that's a response i've been cultivating for a really long time, and i'm very glad it just activated without a lot of work from my end.
so the next step i want to work on is to not retreat into my head afterwards and fume quietly about it. with this particular person, i'm aware of a general disatisfaction with their situation, and that the frequent rude commentary often comes from a sense of confusion or frustration; just because they don't have a more productive way to communicate those feelings doesn't mean i need to absorb all of that angst. if i can work to let this slide off me, i won't be derailed as much when it happens, and i can spend more energy focusing on doing things that improve my environment.
[ a general note on my pronoun usage; lately, i'm trying out omitting references to a person's gender when it's not relevant to the current context, especially when i effectively want to anonymize someone. i will do this regardless of their presented gender or declared pronoun if that person is never expected to be visible to people that might hear me. i'm not sure if this is the right thing to do yet, but i'm trying it out for myself; if you have strong feelings about this practice, i'd love to hear from you. ]
feelin' cold; hiked 11 miles of winter trails at around 10F today. back home safe, fed and bathed, tired and still a little shivery. can't wait to keep working on getting better at this.
i caught a bird with my hands today
(there's a bug with how the global feed handles posts that have been edited after the original post date; the way i designed the global feed doesn't deal well with post editing. this is something i'm intending to fix at some point! i made a note for myself here: https://github.com/modgethanc/ttbp/issues/27 )
yo pals:
there's a bug in the current settings menu since the last feels update that means that publishing options aren't being saved correctly; if you're running into problems, you can possibly fix them by manually editing your config file. it's located at ~/.ttbp/config/ttbprc and you can look at /home/endorphant/.ttbp/config/ttbprc for a reference to see what a correctly publishing config file looks like.
sorry about this! my life is a bit hectic for a little while so i might not get to fixing this for a week or two, but please feel free to send me tildemail or ask in irc if you need help!
threw a house party today and it was good. my partner and i do this once a year before we take off on holiday travel and it's always a little hectic, but a nice way to get our otherwise disjoint fiebd sets together.
i have to leave for an airport in a fww hours; i always get anxioys i'm gonna sleep through on the night before, but i actually love and thrive off the weird limbo state of transit.
some of my first tildetown experiences were thumbtyping in airports during holiday travel. i still cherish that.
hey friends!
the current version of the feels engine now supports crossposting your posts automatically to gopher! if you wanna learn more about gopher, drop by irc and ask around <3
if anything breaks or acts strangely with this update, gimme a shout!
i started playing animal crossing: pocket camp; it's cute as hell, but i'm kind of frustrated with How Long everything takes, and how network-heavy every single action is. it just feels super clunky and slow, and never really satisfying enough for me to get anything done. this is kind of a weird feeling for me because i like super tedious grinds that are almost all flavor, but it doesn't really tick it for me? maybe i'm just not into the endless fetch quests i guess. also the fact that each action has like, more time spent watching little repetitive animations go by than actually performing actions.
(if anyone wants to add me, feel free; my code is 8873 9274 637 and my player name is 'plinth')
i tried a thing where i symlinked my .ttbp/entries directory to my ~/public_gopher directory, as a preliminary test for what it's like to have feels in my gopherhole. you can check it out at gopher://tilde.town/1/~endorphant/feels but i'm not 100% satisfied with it at the moment; i kind of wish it displayed feels in reverse chronological order, for starters.
i'm still trying to get a feel for what gopherspace is; for me, it seems to promote generating a lot of text-based content, in a way i've never felt before. i kind of want to just dump a bunch of things from my brain into it, but it also feels strangely exhibitionist? maybe it's just that i'm not used to it, so i don't know how to think about it yet, so everything i do feels really awkward and exposed.
my mornings are slow; my stomach has a hard time settling down these days.
recently, i bought myself a yubikey and attached it to every service i use that has u2f support. it's surprisingly satisfying to me, and appeals to a particular cyberpunk part of my brain.
i'm reading lots of documentation on how to be a better programmer and how to make better projects and how to work well with others and how to be a good person and how to take care of yourself and i'm working on my brain and my body and it feels okay. i've got a long ways to go, with everything. i'm cautiously optimistic, always.
there's a lot of stuff that gets me down, and i'm learning how to let it energize me instead.
my eyes are sore and i'm learning to use a screenreader and learning to let go of what things look like, in favor of finding different ideas about what things are.
nothing is permanent.
hahaha okay i just tried to use the feels engine vanilla with a screenreader and it's super illegible :/ i wonder what i would have to do to make it more accessible.
[mild feeling-down vibes here]
v srry n fbsg-onq, yvxr n fyhttvfu qernq bs gur jbeyq
yvxr na raqyrff pnainf bs bss-terl naq v fnl vg'f orpnhfr v srry gur jvagre fxl naq v fnl vg'f orpnhfr v srry gur qnlf fyvc ol naq v fnl vg'f orpnhfr
gurer'f ab orpnhfr
i made this so it would be easier for me to capture my feels and pin them into a little box for display.
i'm not sure if it works all the time.
but it does make me feel better when ttbp thanks me for sharing my feels.
hey tilders <3
i'm so glad to be back here after a long absence; i'm taking some time to get caught up on all the new projects, expansions, users, etc. that have made their way onto this little universe. i'm glad this place is here. i'm glad it's still here and growing and feels good!
since i was last around, i guess:
basically, i feel good, i've taken a lot of my nervous spinning in circles energy and pointed it towards concrete things and now i have a lot of excellent feelings about working hard and doing more things in the future. a lot of the world feels a little bit bad lately, and i think this is what i need to work on in order to be my best person and be in a better position to be a force for good and beauty and love <3
gosh i'm seriously off the deep end in peace love and dirty hippie right now, and i don't even feel bad about it <3
thanks for reading <3 <3 <3
i wonder what kind of person i'm supposed to be i wonder that i wonder what i always believe i'll never be lost for long
i always know how good air feels against my lungs i always know a good sky when i see it i know the dirt grinding into my heels i feel that
i wonder what sort of person i once was i wonder how i'll change i wonder what i'll take with me when i move on
i know what i love to smell i taste notes, sometimes when the tone clicks into place it's sharp on my tongue i feel that
i wonder that i wonder that
hi! i'm so glad people are using ttbp. i haven't had a lot of time to keep up with posts or working on new code, but here i am, i guess. a few months back, i started writing up a longer post about ttbp, and never really finished it (*), but i still wanted to say hi, so here's a few quick notes that i'm thinking about:
if you are interested in trying out a privacy feature, you can edit a file at ~/.ttbp/config/nopub to list files that will be ignored for writing to html (check out mine at ~endorphant/.ttbp/config/nopub for reference); i intend to actually write this into the interface someday, i just haven't had much time to work on ttbp code lately.
IRC users: i made #ttbp; i'm not sure what it will be for yet, but there's been interest in a channel for announcing new posts (which i would want to make opt-in per user), general discussion about feels engining, dev chatter/feedback, etc. i dunno, it's there now, come hang out :)
i'm logging issues/wip/thoughts on github, in case you want to check in on what i've been thinking about, or contribute. you are, of course, always welcome to send me mail on ~town or through the ttbp feedback menu.
(*): if you're curious about it, the draft is at ~endorphant/projects/ttbp/ttbp-manifesto.txt
writing more on paper. want to have more feelings. feeling unproductive. gotta stay focused.
--
!! CONTENT NOTE this entry talks a lot about tattoos, and describes some potentially graphic imagery (body or otherwise) relating to tattoos
i'm writing a paper on tattooing practices and indigenous identities and this just makes my skin itch for more tattoo. i want images pounded into my skin, shapes and lines that remind me of truths i have learned and growth i've accomplished.
the more i read and think, the harder it is for me to see tattoo aversion as much more than just another face of racism. not for people who don't want tattoos of their own, i mean. i mean, people who take all tattoos as representing something bad, something crude, something undesirable.
once, i was talking about my tattoos with a non-tattooed person, and after listening for a while, his friend decided i was someone he shouldn't mess with. 'nah, nah,' the one i was talking with said. 'that's just someone who's learned something about themselves. that's good. you don't have to know what it means.'
i have to think about what i've learned recently that needs to be on my skin. that needs to be between my body and what is not my body.
--
some tattoos i've wanted recently:
--
i miss the feeling of fresh ink spilling out of my skin while my body heals. i can feel it, the slow rejection of extra material mixed with plasma. i bled during my last tattoo; i felt it when the machine kicked too hard, and saw the blood pooling around my tattooist's gloved fingers. during a previous session, i'd asked him if it ever bothered him that he caused people pain when tattooing. 'no,' he replied gently. 'i'm more worried i'll do a bad job and mess up the tattoo.'
some pain is brief. some consequences last a long time. the part where i bled is still visible to me; the lines there lose sharpness, spreading deeper into my skin without the fine control of the patterns near them.
i wish i could stop sleeping and stop slacking off and get lots of work done
anthropology class today ended with a student asking how to be a good person.
that's a hard question to answer, but i'm glad people ask.
there was an upgrade and ttbp still works! praise the tildes.
i am reaping the consequences of my past self's sloth, because with nearly 600 entries on ttbp, it now takes around 10-11 seconds to load the global feed. so, here are some solutions i'm considering:
set a rolling cutoff date for how far back it checks for entries (since entry date is encoded in filename, this should be fairly fast). DOWNSIDE: what if no one posts for a long period of time? should the global feed display only posts within the last, say, week?
whenever someone posts, queue that post onto a file that lists the 10 most recent posts; the global feed reads this list instead of trying to generate one from scratch. DOWNSIDE: this excludes people who might edit/post from outside of the ttbp interface
make a cron job that cruises through all the entry directories and generate a list of the most recent posts; combine this with the above option. this could be a way to catch posts that fall through the cracks.
thoughts/ideas appreciated!
i've also opened this as a github issue, which might be a better venue to discuss this.
today is pretty bad feels. i'm letting things get to me, and angry that they're getting to me, and frustrated that i have to work this hard to keep things from getting to me, and sad that i do not think there is a forseeable change.
i'm crawling up the front end of a cold and feeling tired and unproductive.
i'm scared and confused.
i'm reminding myself of how to keep calm and level.
i'm writing a lot more, by hand, on paper, with ink. i enjoy the feeling of physically flipping through the pages and reading the words a recent-past version of myself wrote down. the quality of my handwriting hints to my state of mind; the ink tells me which pen i used, which sometimes corresponds to a time and place.
i alternate between drifting away from myself, and snapping back into a sharp and present reality.
i am water, flowing ever towards the center of the earth, spreading to fill the edges of my container.
constantly swinging up and down, between feeling crushed and drained to the core and feeling full of strength and love and energy. i'm riding out the lows and using the highs to set myself up to keep momentum going. it takes time to adjust. it takes time to adjust. it takes time to adjust.
my dogsittee is a devoted, attentive animal, and it's so wonderful to have her at my feet.
i'm evaluating my priorities, constantly.
i'm in a lot of pretty raw pain. it's bitter and quiet in here, where i'm reminding myself to be patient and calm and to not lash out or assume ill will of people who might not realize they're hurting me or others.
i'm always working on being the best person i can be. nothing has changed. but now i can think more clearly about what's important to me, and what problems there are for me to work on.
i still trust and believe that people can be good. i'm surrounded by love and affirming compassion, and this gives me hope.
<3<3<3
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
---"The New Colossus", Emma Lazarus, 1883
i voted today. it made me feel good and confident and grateful; i texted my parents afterwards to thank them for working hard to make it here and have a life here so that i could grow up and participate in a system that lets me have a more meaningful say in my government than they ever had.
i hope everyone can be strong and brave and do what they think is right.
have been having a hard time writing paragraphs or sentences and i'm saving all that mana for a paper due this weekend.
i'm getting better at bullet pointing out things i want to write. it's a bit lie doing a pencil undersketch before laying down ink. some days i'm good at sketch and some days i'm good at ink, so i'm trying to recognize those modes to better take advantage of them.
the hard drive on my 2008 era eeepc is probably actually toast. i'm doing my paper on an external flash card so i'm less likely to lose progress. guess i should really rehab my spare adopted machine soon!
i'm being really gentle with myself today.
tomorrow morning, my friend is dropping off her dog at my house. i'm dog sitting for about two and a half weeks, and i'm really looking forward to it. the dog is a nervous old hound, and i've been their go-to sitter for the past six or seven years.
i've spent a lot of time working with dogs, especially ones that are more difficult to handle. i've never had my own dog.
i always feel honored when a dog that doesn't easily accept others allows me to greet it on its own terms, and will come with me on a stroll.
i'm aware that i experience an inappropriately high amount of empathy, and this makes some days hard for me. sometimes, i feel better if i can just step out of my feedback loop a little, and sit with some dogs, who also experience excessive empathy. standing next to a dog forces me to turn down the volume on the more intrusive parts of my internal monologue, in a way that i cannot do if i'm around humans.
i have a hard time communicating this to people.
had a pretty bad head crash today. i've been feeling a slow spiral all week, and i've been digging my claws in trying to slow it down.
maybe if i know i hit the bottom again, i can start brushing myself off and climbing back up.
on my list:
i've stubbed out all the points i want to cover with my ttbp essay, it's mostly a matter of filling in the gaps and actually punching it into a readable format. i've been feeling really good about my writing lately!
repeat to yourself that everything works out fine at some point
repeat to yourself
breathing slowly and carefully.
my calves ache and my eyes are dry and my shoulders creak and i know it's because i love myself and work hard to become the best version of myself that i can.
i'm slowly following through on promises.
slowly.
i don't always move very quickly.
--
one of those days when i compulsively open and close tabs. my helmet and jacket are already on but i cannot peel myself away from the keyboard. i'm tapping my feet, anxious to get home. i open my email again. i refresh a tab. i close this tab. i power off the monitor, and open the laptop next to me.
everything will be okay.
i'm coming out of a haze and life is feeling okay again. i'm reminding myself to note when this happens so that in the future, i can believe myself when i try to convince myself that this is possible.
i have 13 post-its on the wall over my desk; each one has the name of a fellowship or residency that i think i can apply for, plus a couple of details, and the application deadline. they're lined up in chronological order. i have a deadline coming up next week. it feels good to stare at this wall, even though i know i will have days when it seems crushingly stressful.
i've gotten back to being able to bear crossing things off to-do lists again; for a while, i was only capable of slowly enqueuing things, but felt a paralyzing and inexplicable feeling at the thought of both completing individual tasks, and completing entire lists. i am afraid of running out of things to do. i'm afraid i'll be bored and idle. when i'm not taking good care of my head game, i cope with this fear by forcing myself to do nothing, as if having a sense of control over the state of boredom could cure me of the fear of boredom.
i can tell i'm doing better with my head because i'm able to articulate these things.
i spent all day in my pjs, which happens about once a month for me. i did laundry and i wrote a paper and drew a tapir and cooked some food and ate it and put the rest of it away. i thought my 8 year old eeepc was finally going to fall over because of persistent i/o errors, but the drive recovered on a reboot. i put away some clutter in my pocket studio and listened to a lot of music. i closed my chotchkies window because it was chilly. i can feel winter creeping in, and it feels good.
i'm having trouble getting feels into words and i keep hitting 'dd'.
i wrote this so that i would never feel like there was something between my thoughts and putting them into text somewhere.
guess there are other barriers i haven't figured out how to get past.
trying to get pagination working for reading entries; i didn't put this in from the beginning because i was lazy and just wanted to get everything else going first. now that there are lots more entries to read, and people writing entries, it's getting hard to scroll through.
the user end is still a little rough, but at least it kind of works. try it out on beta if you're interested:
~endorphant/bin/ttbp-beta
and let me know what you think!
--
i had a couple moments of angst trying to get this working. a long time ago, i wrote a giant, awkward perl script that does blog publishing, including tag filters/listing and pagination, and i did it in basically one shot. i still get this wall of frustration whenever i try to write anything recursive, because i remember when i was first learning recursion, and how much it just wouldn't stick. i had a lot of other shit going on around me that kept me from figuring it out.
at this point in my life, i don't really ever need to write any code at all, but i get a lot of pleasure from figuring out little things here and there. i enjoy many parts of programming, and i'm pleased with my recent past self for leaving enough breadcrumbs through my codebase so i can actually get back in and add new things.
i briefly glanced at my old perl script for a good pagination reference, and it's pretty much unreadable (then again, it's perl, which, as far as i can tell, is never meant to be read again after the initial writing.)
take a long, deep breath. feel it slide into your chest, pushing against its bounds. inhale until it hurts. hold it there, a fluttering bird inside your ribs, until you see stars. hold it tight. let the panic rise inside of you, swelling until it competes for the space that breath is desperately trying to escape.
let it go. if you love something, you have to let it go. you cannot keep it inside you forever.
you can take another breath. you can let that one out. you can take another one in. and then release that.
take a long, deep breath. let it fill your body. let your blood extract what it needs. release what you cannot absorb.
take a long, deep breath. give yourself permission to let it go.
take a long, deep breath. release it before you are ready.
take a long, deep breath. let it go.
there's a kind of depression i only feel when the weather is this beautiful
im thumbtyping this over my slow friday morning coffee. i mostly listen to the water pump running my neighbors koi pond, and the rough garble of an old workvan trying to start up.
when its this overcast out, i lose track of the time passing. i want to start ticking off tasks, but i cant quite bear to break the silence of having the house to myself.
planes keep passing overhead while my stomach gurgles. i dont know where to go from today, but tomorrow will roll in whether i want it to or not.
everything is narssicism. i dress to be seen, speak to be heard. there is always the inevitable human desire to matter and feel valued. no one wants to live in vain.
i'm thinking about applying to mountaineering school this year. it's weekend outings and weekday evening classroom sessions, plus a structured training regimen, for four months. the graduation trip is on my birthday.
i've been feeling increasingly frustrated with my physical condition, because i'm not getting closer to my goals. i spent a weekend climbing with a bunch of new people, and it reminded me that there's always more work to be done, and that it's up to me to find ways to squeeze it in with the rest of my life.
i'm taking an anthropology class with a professor that's new to me, and it's kind of exciting.
i'm sketching out a few ideas for new photo projects. i'm considering giving myself permission to officially shelve some old photo projects that have obviously stalled, so i can move on.
life is complicated. planning is hard. i always feel like i'm running out of time.
hey! you know what i just remembered exists? the tilde town collaborative twine that a bunch of us worked on a while back! according to my records, i started writing for it in january 2015.
i've been thinking about collaboration a lot lately, and sketching out a few ideas for things i want to try out.
here's my old blog entry from 5 january 2015:
friends, i am really excited about collaboration. i am even more excited about disorganized, incidental, and mysterious collaboration. this is the main draw of tildeverse for me.
i like when things have just enough structure to create the idea of a context, but not enough structure to dictate exact terms of interaction. i like examining patterns of what people do and i like thinking about what sort of things can be built from those patterns that are greater than what anyone things is possible.
i like when indirect actions are more meaningful than direct actions. nethack empire is only the beginning of scratching this itch; i am slowly learning more about what this could become.
i learned about the tilde town twine today, thanks to ~krowbar in irc earlier, and it is making my brain pace restlessly. i want to build a metaverse. of what verse it will be meta-ing, i am not yet sure.
thanks for being here, everyone. thanks for being here and doing things and thinking about them.
i'm all about constant personal growth. i can feel good about what i've learned in the past year and a half since then.
the days are growing shorter; i always feel a desire for the long, lonely path. winter will pass, but i do not want to waste another season.
TTBP DEV NOTES
stuff i'm thinking about, now that we're seeing more bugs/glitches:
i'm starting to feel a little over my head with working on this; if anyone else has feedback or thoughts, especially for code stuff (but just general comments are great, too), please drop me a line! tildemail or pm on irc is probably the best way to get a hold of me right now, since i'm a little more ephemeral here than usual.
as always, thanks for sharing your feels.
oh, for new folks: ~endorphant/bin/ttbp-beta exists :)
i'm still not around here much; life's been a whirlwind of things. some of it is strange, some of it is good, some of it is draining. the days turn. people move on.
i'm still so excited and pleased that the feels engine keeps churning. i feel a little bad that i've lost a bunch of momentum on development, but it seems to still be mostly functional. i'm honored that y'all are using it!! also, big love to ~sanqui for catching a bug and sending in a PR; i'm not sure i would have picked that up myself so quickly.
please continue to keep bashing on this machine for as long as it's working for you <3
i've been all over the place for the past few weeks. i have a brief pause here before i hit the road again, i think. sometimes, i'm bad at keeping up with things. the escapist desire runs high; there is hardly enough time for me to fully become the person i want to be.
i'll do my best.
--
i visited my parents at their new home for the first time; they seem happy. a little stressed and confused, but for the greater good. they'll always be kind of batty, and they'll always treat me like a child, and we're learning to live with that.
--
everything feels very different right now.
traveling a lot. traveling, doodling, thinking.
--
i'm always happy to see new posts on ttbp, and i'm always happy that people are dumping words here, and i'm always happy that people are reading them.
i've been stalled on working on the program because it kind of hit most of my goals for being stable and usable, and i haven't felt very motivated to pick at the new features i've been thinking about. it's nice to step back and just use it, flicking words, marinating in feels. maybe i'll pick it up later, when i feel like nosing through again.
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the days tick by. the sun warms and scorches, but i already feel the daylight starting to slip away. more and more, i'm becoming aware of the endless swell and fade of the seasons; i think about time as seasons more than months, now. i've seen enough to start thinking about decades rather than years. it hasn't been that many for me. i'm hoping for many more.
i don't know what kind of person i am, or what kind i will become. i think i'm still excited to work on that. yeah. i think i am.
--
i'm pretty sleepy.
the open road is addicting. every curve that pulls away ahead of me promises something new.
i can feel when i drop into the coastal plane because the air feels thick and warm, smothering me inside of my helmet. i can feel when i'm pushing into the mountains when a line of cold creeps in over my wrists near the foothills.
sometimes i worry that i'll never want to go home; sometimes, when i've been gone for long, i ache to rond the corner and see the skyline open up into that familiar river valley i've seen for the last decade.
I'm A: Chaotic Neutral Human Wizard/Sorcerer (3rd/2nd Level)
Ability Scores:
Strength-14
Dexterity-11
Constitution-13
Intelligence-17
Wisdom-14
Charisma-14
Alignment:
Chaotic Neutral A chaotic neutral character
follows his whims. He is an individualist first and last. He values his own
liberty but doesn't strive to protect others' freedom. He avoids authority,
resents restrictions, and challenges traditions. A chaotic neutral character
does not intentionally disrupt organizations as part of a campaign of anarchy.
To do so, he would have to be motivated either by good (and a desire to
liberate others) or evil (and a desire to make those different from himself
suffer). A chaotic neutral character may be unpredictable, but his behavior is
not totally random. He is not as likely to jump off a bridge as to cross it.
Chaotic neutral is the best alignment you can be because it represents true
freedom from both society's restrictions and a do-gooder's zeal. However,
chaotic neutral can be a dangerous alignment when it seeks to eliminate all
authority, harmony, and order in society.
Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races.
Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them
physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress,
sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.
Primary Class:
Wizards are arcane spellcasters who
depend on intensive study to create their magic. To wizards, magic is not a
talent but a difficult, rewarding art. When they are prepared for battle,
wizards can use their spells to devastating effect. When caught by surprise,
they are vulnerable. The wizard's strength is her spells, everything else is
secondary. She learns new spells as she experiments and grows in experience,
and she can also learn them from other wizards. In addition, over time a wizard
learns to manipulate her spells so they go farther, work better, or are
improved in some other way. A wizard can call a familiar- a small, magical,
animal companion that serves her. With a high Intelligence, wizards are capable
of casting very high levels of spells.
Secondary Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who
manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious
discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that
they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire
them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no
need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards,
sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their
powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through,
they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple
weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in
this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.
Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)
Detailed Results:
Alignment:
Lawful Good ----- XXXXXXXXXXXX (12)
Neutral Good ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (20)
Chaotic Good ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (21)
Lawful Neutral -- XXXXXXXXXXXX (12)
True Neutral ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (20)
Chaotic Neutral - XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX (21)
Lawful Evil ----- XXXX (4)
Neutral Evil ---- XXXXXXXXXXXX (12)
Chaotic Evil ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXX (13)
Law & Chaos:
Law ----- XX (2)
Neutral - XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Chaos --- XXXXXXXXXXX (11)
Good & Evil:
Good ---- XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Neutral - XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Evil ---- XX (2)
Race:
Human ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXX (13)
Dwarf ---- XXXXXXXXXXXX (12)
Elf ------ XXXXXXXXXXXX (12)
Gnome ---- XXXXXX (6)
Halfling - XXXXXXXX (8)
Half-Elf - XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Half-Orc - XX (2)
Class:
Barbarian - XXXXXXXX (8)
Bard ------ XXXX (4)
Cleric ---- XXXXXXXX (8)
Druid ----- XXXXXXXX (8)
Fighter --- XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Monk ------ XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Paladin --- XXXXXXXXXX (10)
Ranger ---- XXXXXXXXXXXX (12)
Rogue ----- XXXXXXXXXXXX (12)
Sorcerer -- XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (14)
Wizard ---- XXXXXXXXXXXXXX (14)
this summer feels scary and bad all of a sudden, and i'm not really sure what to do with it.
i'm trying to do well at lining up things to do, leaving myself low hanging fruit, giving myself permission to be a useless layabout once in a while, but whenever i turn the corner i find myself standing in a mist of unrelenting dread.
the air is thick and warm. i think i'm doing the best i can whenever i'm doing it. i have ups and downs. i crash and i soar and i am a thinking, feeling human.
you will not always feel like this.
i spent most of my day in a mental health first aid course. it was a free class, run by the health and counseling services at the university where i work, and i opted to take it because i was curious about what the course would cover and i think the topic material is really important. also, i like collecting certifications.
one of the things i appreciate most about first aid courses is that they focus on what you can do as just another person; you don't havae to be a medical professional to recognize signs of distress, and you don't have to be a trained care provider to express empathy and kindness. these are things i think about a lot, but from watching other people in these courses, they're lessons that are important for a lot of people to hear.
some of the details were kind of hand-wavy, mostly due to scope limitations, but because of the sort of people in the class today, a lot of really specific questions came up that were hard to address. health is hard. mental health is hard. humans are tricky.
if there's a class in your area that you have access to, i highly recommend it! the one i took included a lot of information about local resources for getting help, including advice and reassurance on who to call if you're worried about someone else but don't know what appropriate action might be, which i hope is a part of every local training.
i only got about four hours of sleep because the class started way earlier than i've been getting out lately, so i'm kind of a total zombie.
i feel okay. i hope you all are okay, and have ways to take care of yourseves.
a limerick oughn't be hard
for any accomplished bard
just make up a rhyme
and ask for a dime
and then buy yourself a reward
--
we're riding the feels machine
it's complex and simple to mean
whatever you want
with feelings to haunt
and memories come in between
--
a ghost isn't always a scare
at most it's a little bit there
some whispering words
might only be birds
as opposed to a voice in thin air
there's a space between all of us. there's a point at which one human physically ends, and another begins. that space is occupied by thoughts, connections, dreams, emotions. we love things and we hate things and we desire things and we cannot help but compare ourselves to things we perceive as different because, inevitably, all things that are not us are different.
where do you end and where does someone else begin? there's only the sense that that separation exists, but i do not know where i would draw that line.
we're cresting another heat wave here. every day, i go out and stare at my seedlings and think about how they're doing. i only water them after the sun has passed the garden wall
commentary and discussion are welcome! hit me up on mail or irc.
i keep repeating this, but i'm learning so much in the process of putting ttbp together. i just wanted to take a second and step back and look at it.
user-end version checking/patching---since there are people running this program who aren't me, if i make drastic changes to the infrastructure of the program, i have to find ways to communicate this to users, and step them through updates if needed. the way i'm doing this now is that everyone has a version marker that the program looks at, compares it to what it's expecting, and then performs relevant updates. so far, it seems to be working okay; i've gotten fewer bug reports since i started doing this, at least. it also forces me to slow down and be more deliberate with my changes, making sure everything makes sense and that i can communicate new features or small tweaks.
documentation/style---usually, when i document my code, i put little scratches here and there so i can pick things up again later. at one point, ttbp got too big for this to work, so i read up on documentation conventions for python. the biggest change was when i realized i could just docstring everything and have stuff show up in pydoc. i know what i like reading in other pydoc modules, and that's started to change how i think about writing my own documentation. i'm thinking about my code more in terms of how legible it is for other people. i've always been shy about letting other people read my code, mostly out of fear of judgement for how bad of a coder i perceive myself as being. but, that's changed quite a bit here, and i've appreciated having a few other people poke through my repo and make comments and suggestions here and there.
i've still got so much to learn, and a lot of polish all around, but i'm very proud of what i'm building here! i never knew i could feel this good about pounding out code, both from what i like of the internal state, and what it looks like when it's running. this is one of many side projects of mine right now, and it's probably the one i'm most fond of at the moment. it's stretching me as a person and letting me work on some really satisfying skills, putting me right at the exciting part of the learning curve where it seems like i'll never run out of things to work on.
i dropped out of my undergrad computer science program because many different things were causing me pain and stress that i didn't know how to resolve. slowly, i've been working back and undoing some of those.
i feel good, ttbp. thanks for asking!
i flipped through my calendar for the summer and suddenly realized it's going to be hard for me to continually stuff things into it. expand to fill all available space, i always tell myself. life's too short to spend so much time sleeping.
and that's why sometimes it's 5am and i'm hiding under the covers with my nose pressed against the steaming glass of my phone, trying desperately to fall asleep so i can have a good morning. eventually, sunlight creeps into the room and i notice that i'm awake, which means i must have fallen asleeep at some point. it's too early, so i roll over and put a pillow over my face.
next thing i know, it's almost noon, and i'm alone in the house.
--
in my annual performance review, my boss wrote that i got a tremendous amount of good stuff done despite us having a really bad and stressful thing to deal with. i corrected him, saying it was because of having a massive, identifiable stressor; my response to stress is to keep my head down and plow through project after project with a manic fixation, because that keeps me from dwelling too much on things i can't affect.
i don't know if it's a good response or a bad one; i don't know if it's a clear indicator of how things are going. i'm dangerous when i'm bored; i'm dangerous when the only thing i have to look at is the inside of my head. it terrifies me in here. i reach out to try and touch things beyond myself so i can have any sense whatsoever that the entirity of existence isn't just this, but i have no way of knowing for sure.
it doesn't matter either way, so it's better to try.
on april 16th, i filled an egg carton with good dirt and put four seeds into each pod. i labeled one side 'brocc' and the other side 'sprouts', for broccoli and brussel's sprouts, respectively; a dozen pods, 24 seeds of each type.
a week later, each pod had sprouted at least one curious leaf; several sprouted all four. one sprouted something unrecognizeable. i smiled.
over the next month, i prepared a space for them in the yard. i turned up sod, mixed in compost from the previous year's worth of yard and kitchen waste, marked off rows, put up chicken wire to deter ground-walking munchers.
yesterday, may 22nd, i had a bad scare after looking at my sprouts; all of them fell flat from dehydration. over the weekend, i had forgotten to give them attention, because i could hardly take care of myself. seedlings need a little bit of attention every day, and i had let them down.
i watered them apologetically and looked to the sky, hoping that the weather would break soon and let me introduce them to the earth.
today, i put my hands in the soil and smelled the richness of a month's worth of spring rain, microorganic work, and aspirations. it was time; i pulled the egg carton out and inspected it. a few of them had responded to my apology.
i only had enough plots prepared today for six plantings, so i took the three best candidates from each side. the pods with multiple viable seedlings will eventually be thinned to one; from 48 seeds, six plants will be coddled into maturity. i made little pits with a trowel, then carefully pressed each puck of dirt and seedling into the indentations.
dirt responds best to hands. i put my hands against the cool soil and felt the density of each mound, pressing drainage channels and slowly massaging bunkers around each seedling to shelter them. 'thank you,' i whispered to each one i chose. 'thank you for working hard. thank you for pressing upwards. here is the earth and there is the sky; you are now between them and a part of them. do your best. i love you.'
those cells have never touched the earth and have never seen the sun. they sit there now, poking out of the ground like periscopes. their roots will burrow further than i will ever see, and draw matter from the soil to create more of themselves to give to the sky.
if i am worthy, i will eat some of them in the future.
sometimes people ask me how i am, and i don't know how to answer because i'm often not in a good state for self-assessment.
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when i'm feeling good, i can't remember a time during which i didn't feel good, and it seems inconceivable that i could ever not be feeling good.
when i'm feeling bad, i can't remember a time during which i didn't feel bad, and it seems inconceivable that i could ever not be feeling bad.
there is the up state and the down state; without a transitional grey zone in between, i have no mechanism with which to bridge between them. i cannot touch either state from the other. sometimes, the switch just flips.
--
sometimes i have to remember that most people are not inside my head 24/7, therefore most people do not see, hear, or experience the chatter that is my general head state. sometimes i have to remember that all humans are individual, fully-formed humans with their own agency, and thus act autonomously and in their own self-interests. i act only in my own self-interest, because i am incapable of perceiving things beyond my own awareness; others do the same. somehow, we manage to cooperate.
my most recent commit message, mostly to myself:
more documentation updates
holy crap! here i am, about a decade and a half after my first Formal Instruction in programming, and i suddenly understand code documentation. part of this is that sometimes i stare at functions forgetting why they're there, or start writing a function with the distinct feeling that i'm typing code i've already typed before, and realize that maybe there's a better way.
so i skimmed code from other people that i've used in my own repos, and lifted the general gist of their commenting style while doing things that feel right to me. i still don't know exactly how i like things, but i'm learning. this is the best way i learn things.
then. then! i learned that i can just pydoc any of my modules and pydoc will generate literally the same thing that i read when i pydoc other module! what. WHAT. this is amazing. i feel like a real person. i understand where those docs come from now, and how to make them myself.
i'm learning so much.
why does this feel so amazing.
all of this is in a commit message that i'm going to fire off into the sun but i just need to put this out there because this feels important.
# Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting
# with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts the commit.
# On branch master
# Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
#
# Changes to be committed:
# modified: _ttbp.py
# modified: ttbp.py
# modified: util.py
# modified: ../changelog.txt
#
i just made a bunch of changes that might break my blog if i switch back and forth from beta so let's see what happens
...
oh! it worked!
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today i went on a little motorcycle ride for like five hours, threading through suburbs i have only seen on a map and had not yet visited in person. i had the curious sense that i was not fully inside my body, just looking over the shoulder of the operator, sliding across the surface of the road.
had sort of a weird day that felt like nothing really happened. i did some cleaning and reorganizing in the pocket studio; i took a long walk through campus; i talked to a few people. maybe i'm just feeling strange and dull because this was the first day in a few weeks that i gave myself to step back from work altogether and take a breather.
i'm really close to finishing up a bunch of stuff so i can get into having my summer leave. i don't ever want to stop moving.
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sometimes i'm tempted to dump a bunch of lines here about ttbp development, but then i just started trying to keep a better changelog and commit messages. i'm scribbling down little thoughts i have here and there while i'm working on this, because i want to remember what working on this feels like. ~jumblesale asked me about writing a piece for the zine, and i'd like to do that in the near future once i hit all my goals for v1.0 release.
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i started reading the cuckoo's egg by cliff stoll and it's pretty fantastic. if you've read it, i'd love to gush about it to you! (i mean, i'd love to do that anyway, but i don't like hyping/spoiling stuff for people, so just take this as my recommendation to read it and get back to me later, i guess). my partner recommended it to me as topical reading for all the thoughts i've had about the internet, computers, and tildeverse recently.
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sometimes it's suddenly 2am and i didn't notice because i've been blasting music through my headphones, sipping whiskey, pounding on a keyboard. i notice that my fingers are sluggish over the keys, and that sometimes a blink lasts for minutes at a time while little packets of data are pushed out of my machine.
go to bed, ~endo.
sometimes i have so many thoughts at once that i can't organize them.
i skimmed over old writing projects from a decade ago
i'm remembering to drink water regularly.
i
i'm frustrated about vagueness.
i can't wait to feel excited again.
no human is better or worse than any other human
i've sprinkled accounts across the internet since the mid-90s. i've played a lot of video games. i feel a brief pleasure when i see a number go up and know that i caused that integer to increment; a triumphant note cues every small victory. sometimes, i collect badges. eventually, i am left with the hollow feeling that the only reason i've achieved is to increase the number of achievements i have.
this is not what i want as a human. i live for the sake of living, not for the ability to demonstrate my worth to others by showing them an integer. i like incrementing integers for fun. i do not want to attach integers to my sense of being.
the more i can separate the act of racking up points from the process of being a human, the more enjoyment i get out of both.
ttbp was a whim when i started it, but it's growing fast into a beautiful little nest of thoughts and ideas and communication. here are a few thoughts about """blogging""" that i've tried to work out for the past two decades:
that said, i'm focusing on honing these ideas, and developing ttbp whlie i continue to think about what this all means.
some basic practical consequences:
i still feel unresolved about how to display global things in general. chronologically makes sense, but it neccessarily favors frequent posters. random shuffle seems appealing, but too arbitrary and chaotic. alphabetical reminds me about how often i got screwed in elementary school for queuing up to the snack table.
ordered data structures bias how we read and perceive things.
please feel free to sendmail me about your thoughts!
a dim awareness that, in recent history, i have stepped off into the great gulf.
automatic limbs propel a body forward
breaking into the air at regular intervals
in the distance, a rock rises
i do not know what sort of person i will become
i have all these bug reports building up! i'm excited people are using ttbp and i'm also looking forward to developing and growing this program with the help of the community. i've never done this before. i'm so grateful and surprised by this. thanks for being here, everyone!
my headspace has been up and down a lot recently. i'm busy, and nervous, and anxious, and i have a lot of things hanging vaguely in the future. it's taking a lot of effort to maintain an even keel, to remember what i'm doing and why i'm here.
i have three tattoos: a reminder to check for handedness, a suggestion to not get too attached to objects, and an assertion that things will not always be this way. i'm doing my best to maintain neutral ground. i'm doing my best to provide a blank space for things to grow.
nothing happens in a vacuum.
i want to believe that it's possible for the human race to be united without destroying individuality and freedom. i want to believe that it's possible for humans to care for and respect each other without losing sight of themselves. i want to believe that it's possible for humans to love themselves without being selfish.
and yet some days i am starkly aware that we cannot have love without hate.
but we also cannot have hate without love.
a new day of feelings. mostly, i'm excited that a lot of people are excited about this project of mine. i'm hella overwhelmed with work this week, but i deal with that by having a project on the side that i am highly unlikely to run out of things to worry over.
i'm happy there are people in the world, and i'm happy that people talk to each other and learn and grow and become better versions of themselves. i'm having a great day of feeling like there's no limit to my optimism and good vibes. this isn't always the case for me, so i try extra hard to acknowledge it when i notice it.
don't forget:
i'm having some serious deadjournal-era nostalgia. can we have copy-paste surveys and shit like that again? 'current mood', 'current music', etc. oh god.
i'm not yet fond of the name 'ttbp', which was mostly a placeholder (the placeholder prior to that was 'tlog', some of which is still leftover in the stylesheets), although i do like that it looks kind of like 'http'.
test one, two, three.
now this is coming through ttbp proper.
things i did today:
future work on ttbp:
things that are important for ttbp: