11 june 2026
wtf is a drawing tablet
a long time ago, about six or seven years, the keilar was gifted a gaomon pd1161 drawing tablet from its mom. we have gotten a lot of mileage out of this item, and its presence in our life is a direct attestation to everything that we hold dear to us. it's only just realized this, however, but the metaphor is there and it's now one of our favorite possessions; weird feeling.
it has dumped way too much time into osu! with it so it's a gaming device. it has used it as a high-tech whiteboard to visually teach others so it's an educational device. it has used it to draw things so it's a creative device. but, something it never envisioned before it used one for the first time, was that it's also a second monitor. when we use this tablet we never bother to look at our main display anymore and this is a bit of an issue for the neck situation as we have never really had the glory of desk space, and using it like a giant window into our computer is fun when you can't even reach your keyboard comfortably. in any case, it has come to the conclusion a while ago that digitizers, touchscreens, and pretty much any interactive display is fundamentally multipurpose, but aren't all screens in general?
wtf is a "drawing tablet" for. it oft sees small pen tablets described as drawing tablets, but they are so much more than that. they're simple devices. they work for their purpose, and they're everywhere.
at least our Graphics Tablet, per the wikipedia page, is still alive and kicking. it does have a slight purple tint however, but we enjoy that kind of stuff
... if only we could find the squid of cables
permalink
3 june 2026
fixing stuff (and also testing)
earlier today (about two hours ago) we were asked to help run an ethernet cable through a small hole in the ceiling. what should have been a maybe 30-minute task at most ended up becoming one that took over an hour, and only because a 3/4in drill bit somehow wasn't a large enough diameter for the jacketed RJ-45 to make it all the way through. granted, the job was completed at some point and we were able to get packets spewing through this jacketed cable at nigh light speed, but there's a... certain desire to do this everywhere now.
the keilar's desktop is about five feet and a dream away from a breaker box. our body may not be a walking receiver in its entirety yet, but it has the awareness to know that the em leakage from this particular cabinet is enough to interfere with the wifi reaching its computers NIC. oftentimes it'll struggle loading simple static webpages, and even more often it's not able to sustain youtube videos at an acceptable quality (when it actually opens the site). in any case, this is a common theme in its basement bedroom, and for the large part it's ok with this because it has certain spots it can put a device where it can talk to the router without being screamed at by a temperamental and somewhat angry box of levers with no door. the cabinet would have one but it brought the damn thing to school in 7th grade and got it taken away, alongside a train horn, a hand-crank claxon, and three samsung galaxy phones. funny how this is somehow still affecting us to this day.
in any case, there are things it can do to fix this but it's come to the realization that it might just be a better idea to drape an ethernet cable throughout the entire house wired directly into a small switch. originally it was going to buy aluminum tape and turn the entire cabinet into a makeshift microwave oven, but it's decided against this for both aesthetic reasons and fire risk. moreover, its family may be picky about how we use computers, but they can't say no to an impassioned girl with a radio and a job in info tech wanting to make the place a little more livable for everyone else when they decide to browse facebook or whatever. also it'll be able to play minecraft with greater stability and that's always welcome
permalink
29 may 2026
attempting to find a theme in identifying bacteria with differential tests
it hasn't written a blog-like thing in genuinely 6 or 7 years (really, can't remember); the last one was about hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes. today, it is highly motivated. we're locked the fuck in.
there comes a point when one must act upon a (something) and end up being left with the wrong tools at their disposal. of course,this begets troubleshooting, and often ends with feelings of dread where one must rationalize "wait! what! holy fuck how do i do this!" in light of not having, say, a screwdriver of the right size needed because one wanted to take apart their walkman on a sudden passing whim or the hex key needed to fix the front disc brake of an expensive mountain bike. it happens, shit happens.
in fact, chemistry is a lot of the same, we have noticed. one has a chemical toolkit that they can use to accumulate an expected product. often, especially in the realm of chemical engineering, one will have a large amount of two reagents needed to satisfy the goals of an industrial process. when something you need runs out, shit falls apart, things blow up, profits are lost, and people are upset, or worse. now what if this has to do with identifying a potentially pathogenic species? public health is arguably a very important facet of a daily life, and it often goes forgotten about despite recent events, but this isn't the point.
about fifteen weeks ago, we were informed with the future task of hopefully identifying a species of bacteria dispensed to us by the lab instructor. using an array of over twenty differential tests, we had to identify three potential candidate species based on the results of these tests, as well as observations of morphology with a compound microscope. all pretty simple stuff for us really--- the instructions were given, demonstrations were provided, and many, many questions were asked and subsequently answered. all was well. the keilar was provided with a petri dish filled halfway with nutrient agar, on which a slightly translucent off-white smear of blobular slime was deposited. it was smooth around the edges, largely flat, and when wafted smelt of, surprisingly, nothing. all good. doesn't really say much tho, does it? after all, about half of all biomass on planet earth is bacteria. there's a lot of them, a lot can't be cultured in a lab, so this could quite literally be anything.
(reader can skip this if it's just gibberish, it's not too important)
and so, logically (but also as instructed), it started running through the differential tests. many were performed: sugar metabolism (dextrose, sucrose, lactose, mannitol) and acid/gas production, oxidase, catalase, citrate, stains (gram w/ safranin/crystal violet counterstain and negative w/ nigrosin), nitrate, casein, SIM, TTC, FTM, urease, gelatinase, and MR-VP.
the corresponding results were: sugar met. (-/- [color, gas], -/+, -/+, -/-), oxidase +, catalase -, citrate +, gram -, negative rod-shaped with some paired cocci (!, numerous, with good separation though), nitrate + or NO3- reduction, casein -, SIM - with no iron (ii) sulfide, TTC +, FTM indicated facultative anaerobic metabolism (!), ureause +, gelatinase +, MR-VP 1 acid, - for pH < 6.2 (weak acid prod. +), MR-VP 2 alcohol production -.
inhales. nerd shit over. pretty cool stuff but out of the scope of what it's trying to say here.
we threw all of this into four volumes of bergey's manual of systematic bacteriology and it acquired the candidate genuses aeromonas, enhydrobacter, photobacterium, vibrio, proteus, and pseudomonas. however, the instructor had given us a load-bearing piece of information that, at the time about five weeks ago, had neglected to remember:
don't overthink things, go with your gut, list off your candidate binomials, and full send an explanation without considering pathogenic agents. after all, this is a bsl-1 lab. pathogens are a no-no. unfortunately, autism be damned.........
what counts as a pathogen?
pathogen, as the professor intended but never described, meant anything that can cause human ailment upon exposure. the keilar never asked about what "pathogen" entailed. it assumed that a pathogen in this case was any agent that could cause illness, including opportunistic infections, plant diseases, or marine life contaminants. this is one thing it didn't ask for clarification on. pathogen == illness causing. "don't search for pathogens" ahahahahahaha -> brdNervous -> and so two hours of process of elimination begins, in lab, at nineteen o clock on a monday.
yay!
that evening, we were destined to spew forth our candidates but we were also granted a two-week long grace period for further research should our (unidealistic) bacterial specimen be a tricky case to crack. the kicker?
vibrio, pseudomonas, aeromonas, and enhydrobacter are all pathogenic by our perceived definition. most species within these genuses are illness-causing agents to another organism on planet earth. these were immediately axed, questioning to the professor dashed. he said it's not vibrio, that's it. that's it. this is technically like 30% of the lab grade. he couldn't offer much guidance.
the day came two weeks later, twenty o'clock on a monday night, two weeks later, where the keilar had to blab about its candidates. it chose Proteus mirabalis, Proteus penneri, and Pseudomonas putida--- one of the only non-pathogenic species of pseudomonas it could find in the taxonomic keys. the latter was a perfect fit! the colonies looked similar and it is commonly used in the biotechnology sector.
after listing these and showing its lab notebook for proof, as well as where in those massive blue books it found this information, it was unexpectedly cut off.
"you're wrong", he said, pointing down at the flow charts that the keilar was pointing at. we frowned, looked up at him, and it shuffled its feet apprehensively.
"what was your dish number?" he said after a moment of flipping through its lab notebook.
"8", it responded. he gave no response and flipped a paper in his clipboard.
"your unknown was Pseudomonas fluorescens, a rod-shaped gram negative obligate aerobe that metabolizes lactose and sucrose, which you pointed out in your metabolic tests. it produces weak acid. you were really close" he emitted. the keilar must have frowned because it doesn't remember what else had happened, but those words have stuck, and it never gets upset at itself for being too wrong about something it's confident about after spending weeks looking into it.
pseudomonas fluorescens WAS a candidate species that the keilar had picked out because the colonies it saw online were identical in morphology, and besides oxygen requirement and cell morphology, hit almost every single mark. decisively, oxidase was the test that made it suspect that as a finalist. why didn't we commit to this? overthinking is an enemy of the mind--- not only does it erupt self-doubt into our mindspace, it puts forth a feeling of "this isn't enough" or "you're wrong" and, sure, it was, but it wouldn't have been if it had clarified what "pathogen" actually meant.
it's not sure why this is of importance to us; we passed the class, got a damn fine grade on that weeks-long assignment, and walked away with knowledge that not a lot of people on this planet may be interested in. it's festered a bubbly, frothy, tasty, and oh-so-colorful bout of thought-provoking love for the world around it in its mind, spilling over the edges of the boundaries of our consciousness and into our words, actions, and thoughts, however rapid they may turn out to be... because we were wrong?
there is much that everyone on this planet does not know. it's good to ask questions, it's even more important to be curious, and it's best to ask for clarification when there are things that one may not know. variety may be the spice of life, but such knowledge about the very workings of what makes this planet unique among all others around it is one that cannot be found as mistaken, wrong, or misleading because to do so might be to fundamentally push aside what breathed life into the world that we must live in.
ask questions, always, and don't you dare ever stop. make sure that your toolkit has the things you need, when you need it, because there may be that one apparatus that needs to be so desperately fixed to be useful but it just won't work until it is given the attention it deserves. much like a bacteria is a tiny complicated machine that alters the world around it, every living individual, animal, human, or otherwise, must take it upon themselves to use that intellect, tool, protein, or tidbit of knowledge to Be Certain that things are as they seem to be.
hi, hello, greetings, good evening, afternoon, morning, or dark hour. we have lots to say and not many routes in which we can say them. yapping at this at work has been good. it hopes it may be able to teach someone something from this, because knowing things, learning things, and perceiving things is so peak actually.
permalink