~localarmsdealer@TTBP

15 april 2026

Haven't written here in a while. Guess I should write here again so people know I'm not dead.

Started working on redesigning my website. Made the page layout, but I still need to fill out the pages, and making the text-to-image and image-to-text systems will have to wait for a bit. I suppose I should work on the 'about me' page after I finish writing this.

Might be developing anxiety, which is annoying. Can't say with certainty for now, but I definitely worry about a lot more things now than I did before, sometimes to a probably unhealthy degree. Turns out, what I thought in October would be temporary was not entirely temporary. Oh well, not much I can do about that other than fight it, which I've already been doing and intend to do.

I'm also working on setting up and maintaining a self-hosted Minecraft server, which might be a bad idea while also working on schoolwork, but I'm not exactly known for my good ideas. I won't post the access information for it here because this is publicly-accessible, but if you message me on Discord (same username as on here) or through the intranet email system, I'll send you the information for it once it's up.

Okay, I'm going to keep working on my website now. We'll see when I next remember to write here.

mi tawa

5 january 2026

my brain isn't working, i'm tired, maybe staying up until midnight was a bad idea. the benadryl is not helping.

mrow mrrp mreaw :3

okay bye i'll probably write more stuff here when i'm actually awake, also sorry i'm writing this differently than usual i'm too tired to do formal writing

12 november 2025

Well, I did get work done. I also got overwhelmed and had to stop halfway through, but progress is progress.

Not much else I can say here, and I need to sleep in a few minutes anyways. Goodnight.

11 november 2025

Things were going well, then I made a collosal blunder and procrastinated on multiple projects due in 3 days. My poor understanding of time has yet again come to bite me in the ass, and this certainly won't be the last time. The rest of the weekend was good at least, good enough to outweigh the pain that must ensue this week to make up for lost time. I have 2, maybe 3 assignments to do in 3 days, this week will not be fun. Procrastinating to have fun during the weekend was a calculated decision, but clearly not an excellent one.

I'll be back, probably once I finish some of my work. If things get particularly stressful, I might even end up crying for the first time in a while. We'll see. mi tawa.

2 november 2025

My partition table broke, that was fun. Thought my SSD gave out, but nope, it's still fine. Definitely didn't spend 3 hours getting my partitions back up and running, then the rest of the day playing Vintage Story instead of doing homework. I'll regret that tomorrow, but whatever.

I feel like I should be writing more here, but there's not much for me to say. Oh well.

29 october 2025

Got my computer to be stable. Had to reinstall everything, but now I have Debian with KDE Plasma and I have Tiny11. Oddly enough, Sober doesn't work on Debian (it works on Lubuntu, so I'm sure I can find a way to make it work on Debian if I cared enough to), but at least my computer properly connects to internet now. Was it worth spending multiple hours and having to replace every partition? Kind of.

Not much else to say though. Can't say anything's going particularly well, but nothing's going horribly either. The main issue is my inability to focus on things I need to work on, but I could probably fix that too if I tried hard enough. Ranting on here certainly doesn't help.

mi tawa.

27 october 2025

Today was eventful, but certainly not bad. Switching to Debian was maybe not my smartest choice, especially not during class, but I got everything working now (after 6 hours...) and very nearly lost my private SSH keys but didn't. I'll have to get mosh set up again, but I have to get all my packages set up again, that's nothing major.

In terms of mental health, everything's going surprisingly well, both for me and for the people I'm helping. The stress of due dates nearing does cause minor issues, but as shown by the fact that I just changed my operating system for fun, it clearly isn't catastrophic.

This is a pretty small post compared to usual, but I don't have as much time as usual. I still need to get everything installed, and my Windows partition is still acting up. See you all tomorrow, assuming I don't lose my SSH key for real tomorrow.

26 october 2025

It gets worse before it gets better. That's been true as far back as I can remember, but it would be nice if the 'it gets worse' part was shorter and the 'it gets better' part was longer. You'd think I'd have more ways of dealing with this after 8 years of handling my mental problems, but seeing as I only found a way to handle the worst parts of depression a year ago, I guess progress is just slow. Trial and error, with a lot more error than I'd like.

Depression showed up today, hardest it has in multiple months. It thought it could kick me while I was down, make things worse like it could before I found a solution against it. It was wrong, but now I'm unable to enjoy things I usually do, so I suppose it got the last laugh there. I could fix that too if I really cared, I suppose, but currently I don't care enough to fix a problem that will go away with time anyways.

Going outside might help, but it's cold out there. Worth a shot, I suppose? Certainly wouldn't hurt to walk around for a bit, not like I have anything better to do. I'll write an update if it does help, unless I forget to.

Edit: Walking around for a bit did help. By a bit, I mean an hour. I definitely need to walk around more, seeing as walking for an hour exhausted me, but that's a problem for later. Depression's gone for now though, so it worked.

25 october 2025

I should have figured such a quick recovery would have been temporary, but oh well. Things are still going well, and while I'm not able to help nearly as much as I wish I could, I've been told I'm helping significantly, so I probably shouldn't feel too bad about how little I can help. Things will end up in our favor eventually, it's simply a matter of time.

The worse the situation, the faster it goes away. As far as I can tell, this is near-universal, although admittedly I have a rather small sample size. What I failed to consider is that the positive state after a crisis (whether it be happiness, determination, or simply peace) is unstable, and will disappear when challenged. A shame that time is the only reliable stabilizer I have, and time is not currently on our side. It is in the long-term, I suppose, but that doesn't erase the stress of impending due dates from those I aim to help, and it certainly doesn't fix the numerous limitations when helping them.

We will prevail in the end, we always do. Happiness must be fought for, and no matter how tired of it I get, I can fight forever. After all, if I were to stop fighting, things would get unacceptably worse.

24 october 2025

Things are going well now. Changing my own mental state from negative to neutral in 3 days is longer than usual, but changing someone else's from highly negative to neutral in 3 days is much better than I've ever done. I'm proud of that, it makes the stress along the way more than worth it.

Not really much to say other than that, I suppose. Nothing notable happening other than that, except maybe that my grades are decent, which is an improvement over previous years but could still be improved. Improvement stagnated around a year ago in that category, and now it's reversing, which is annoying. It won't get bad enough to cause me to fail any classes, but grades in multiple classes are easily 10-20% lower than they could be. Oh well, optimization is the death of sanity and I intend to stay sane.

It's going to be midnight in 8 minutes. I should maybe sleep. Goodnight ~town, I'm sure I'll have things to say in the next few days. This week has been more eventful than the whole season before it.

22 october 2025

Most of the stress is gone now, but I still feel uneasy. Too many things happening, not enough I can do. At least if I were overwhelmed with things to do, I could prioritize and go from there, but right now I just have to wait and try not to panic.

Around a year ago, I realized something: happiness has to be fought for, and depression won't disappear unless I fight it. Both still remain true, and I've gotten good at fighting, but I'm tired. I don't want to fight anymore, but I have to, so I will keep fighting until I stop needing to. Wonder when that will be.

The event at school went pretty well, by the way. I know I mentioned it yesterday, so I might as well put a follow-up here. It wasn't anything important, but it was fun, and took my mind off the stress. It also gave me time to set up mosh and try to get my personal server to work with it (which didn't work due to port forwarding issues), so that was fun.

Not much else to say, really. I suppose that's a good thing: the more things I think of to write here, the worse things are going usually. I'm also tired both physically and mentally, so I suppose that doesn't help. Just noticed how often the word "I" is used for this, not sure why it feels wrong to use it so much. Maybe I'll figure it out later.

I'll post here tomorrow. If I don't, then either things suddenly got better or I was too tired to post. mi tawa.

21 october 2025

So apparently people actually read my ramblings here. That's surprising, but I'm glad people care about what I have to say. A shame that I can hardly think of what to say most of the time, but oh well.

As an update on my last post: things aren't too stressful now, a lot of it was either me being overwhelmed in the moment or forgetting just how much time I have to work on things. A month feels short, but it's surprisingly long when I'm doing work for every day of it. The personal projects I add on top of it don't make it any easier, but I can't handle sitting idle, and it's honestly easier to learn to enjoy the stress than to learn to handle sitting still and not doing anything. Is that the healthiest option? Probably not, but it's worked so far.

I've also been learning Toki Pona during all of this. I've been trying to learn it for months, but I got the official book ('pu') yesterday, and it helps a lot. Maybe I'll start writing parts of these posts in Toki Pona now, we'll see. Can't think of anything else to say, we'll see what I think of later. There's going to be an event at school tomorrow, maybe I'll write about that.

mi tawa.

jan lokalamutealew (I think that's how you transliterate 'localarmsdealer' anyways, if it changes tomorrow, you'll know why)

20 october 2025

The stress has increased since the last time I wrote here, but it hasn't been anything I can't handle. Consider it live fire exercise for my mental defenses, I don't know.

I figured things would get easier as time went on, that assignments wouldn't be as hard once I knew how to do them. I was wrong. Things don't get easier, you just have to get better at handling stress or fall behind. Unlike a few years ago, I chose the former, and have so far managed to stay on top of everything thrown at me. It's stressful, but what fun is life without a little difficulty?

Things would probably be more manageable if I weren't in reserve to help multiple people with their mental health, but I signed up for this. Even if it were easier, life wouldn't be nearly as enjoyable without the knowledge that I'm keeping others at least somewhat sane, and I doubt I'd be able to handle seeing them get worse. Better to burn bright keeping others warm and burn out quickly than to stay quietly aflame, right? Not like I can't refuel myself.

Anyways, see you all whenever I have a thought I feel like venting. Doubt anyone will read this anyways, but if you are, come send me an email on the intranet email system. I'm curious who actually reads my rambling.

26 september 2025

It's been a while since I put anything here, but there hasn't been much to say. Hopefully I'll remember to write something here if anything important happens.

12 june 2025

I started playing SkyFactory 4, thinking it would be a fun thing to do alongside programming. I ended up spending entire days just playing it, and nearly forgot about this place. I had plans to program a few things here, but those are postponed for the forseeable future, because the factory must grow. The main downside is that I have to use Windows to play because Arch refuses to recognize my NVIDIA GPU as a thing and I don't feel like debugging it currently (if I had known this laptop used an NVIDIA GPU, I would have swapped the GPU out a while ago). I have been keeping my plant alive in botany though, so that's good.

9 june 2025

We have a week until the end of the school year, and I don't feel excited like I normally would be. Most years, I am looking forward to the end of the year a month before it happens, but not this year for some reason. I'll try to get more done over the summer (definitely won't be going outside, it's going to be way too warm), but really, I'm still out of ideas. Maybe I'll set up a lottery game? I'm working out the specifics, but it could work. Either that or I'll make a top-down building plan in writo.

6 june 2025

Finally got Xorg to stop throwing fatal errors whenever I run xstart, which is helpful. Still no idea what to make, but I'm learning all of the different parts of ~town, and maybe soon I'll find a fun way to make my mark. I've added a few things to various writing boards and lurk on the forums from time to time, and once I get IRC running in a TTY, I'll be able to actually see when someone talks. It's a bit weird being in a community where I'm not bombarded with pings on a daily basis, but it's also kind of nice.

5 june 2025

I had so many plans for programs to write and share when I requested access to ~town, and now that I've been accepted, I forgot all of them. That's how it happens, I suppose. I have Arch mostly stable with i3 and school is almost over, so I'm sure I'll think of something to write over summer and share with ~town. For now, I'm just trying to think of something to put on my website. Maybe a web game? A web game could be fun to write, if I ever get motivation for long enough to program one. I don't even know what I'd make for said game, but I guess we'll find out eventually.