Some template changes

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I’ve changed my site templates a bit more, to make CWs work a bit better. In particular, now entries which have a CW will also hide the text behind a <details> on the page (for example), and similarly I’ve hidden CWed images on individual comic pages (for example). Comic images will also (finally!) be blurred in the OpenGraph tags, as well, after one too many “oops"es when posting links to Slack demonstrating how my CWs work.

I’ve also improved compatibility with Bridgy Fed and with the way that webmention microformats are supposed to work in the first place, per a conversation in which I learned that I wasn’t actually using reply types correctly. (You may have noticed a bunch more micro-posts on the chatter section as a result of me fixing this as well. I also need to finally implement a thing so I can properly filter that stuff out of the little "latest posts” box on the main page!)

The sample templates repository has been updated, accordingly.

As always, thanks to the various IndieWeb folks, especially Ryan and Kevin for setting me straight on this issue.

Edit: It didn’t take me very long to implement the Publ feature change. I went ahead and cleaned up a bunch of query generator code while I was at it. Also I think I found a bug in PonyORM. Nope, I think I was just being hopelessly optimistic about a thing.

Things I accomplished today

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Oops I haven’t been posting to my blog as much lately. I’ve been kinda busy I guess?

So let’s see:

  1. Had a technical interview with Mozilla which went pretty well. I remember more about the fiddly low-level bits of C++ than I thought, even after not really doing anything in C++ for a few years (and purposefully avoiding the minefield-type stuff I was asked about)
  2. Received a bunch of custom enamel pins that I’ll be selling at GeekGirlCon and turned out fantastic (more on this closer to the show!)
  3. Also received my vendor packet omg this is really happening isn’t it
  4. Put down a deposit on a new kitchen (not that I’m that eager to go through a remodel process again but my kitchen has been literally falling apart due to the cheap stuff the previous owners put in, and this time around I’m just getting everything gutted and replaced which is turning out to be… easier?)
  5. Finally got my gabapentin dose up to the target of 3x a day, which had me pretty hecked up this evening and I left drawing group earlier than usual but folks were understanding at least, and also this is probably still placebo but I kinda feel like I’m in less pain finally?
  6. Hugged so many cats (well, okay, mostly just one cat, but I hugged her a lot of times)
  7. did a bloggy thing

Oh also happy 9/19/19, which is apparently the last palindrome date (for a particularly reductive definition of “date”) we’re gonna have for a long time.

Unless you count 2/22/22 which is technically a palindrome and actually will work the same way in most truncated date formats (including 22/22/2 and 22/2/22).

Things I need to accomplish at some point in the near future:

  • Pushl has gotten overcomplicated and also isn’t actually working quite right anymore and I need to open an issue to track how I think I’m going to fix one of the breakages
  • Make prints for GeekGirlCon
  • Get rid of a bunch of cardboard boxes and other trash-like substance
  • order new refrigerator, settle on final appliances and sink fixtures, do some short-term plumbing to make a transitional bit of that a bit easier
  • learn rust
  • fix the o key on my MP1 model01
  • maybe set up a new VPN now that I don’t have access to the university one anymore? for now I’m just using hide.me’s free tier

Read more…

Drawing apps, still meh

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Once again it’s getting time to renew my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, and once again I really don’t want to spend a few hundred dollars for another year of access to Photoshop. So as usual I’ve looked at other drawing programs to see what the state of affairs is for my uses, and boy howdy is it still pretty dismal.

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More iTunes/iPhone sync woes

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So, I’m still having the iPhone sync issue, only now it’s gotten so bad that I can’t even sync my music after doing a full factory restore of my phone. Ridiculous.

As an attempt at just getting my dang music on my phone I decided to sign up for another Apple Music trial period, figuring I’d use the iCloud Music Library sync stuff instead.

Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t really work.

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Gabapentin adventures continue

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I guess I haven’t posted a public update on my gabapentin experiment in a while. Yesterday I started taking it twice a day, 100mg each time. I also created a simple blood serum estimator more to satisfy curiosity than anything else; I don’t expect it to be all that useful for anyone although I’m thinking that at some point I’ll add the ability to plot graphs and maybe specify the times of days for the doses or something?

Anyway, taking it in the morning as well as the evening means that I get a nice surge of dizziness, which will supposedly pass eventually (and will get better when I get up to 3x a day). So far I’m not noticing any difference in my pain levels, and I kinda feel like my emotions might be a bit more intense? Last night I certainly had a bout of frustration with technology and drawing apps (I really want to work on comics again and I feel like my tools are actively getting in the way!) but I’m feeling much more even-keeled today at least. Drowsy a lot though.

This is certainly an interesting time for me to be experimenting with my neurochemistry, as I only have a few days left at my current job and am also trying to ramp up on some projects at the AR startup while also juggling an interview process with a well-known and generally-beloved non-profit corporation that I’d love to work at – and so far that’s been going really well! I just hope my brain has stabilized again by the next interview, which is yet to be scheduled. Anyway I’m waiting for that to happen before I go up to 3x100mg of gabapentin.

Oh also I’m finally making progress on redoing my kitchen, which is way overdue. The previous owners had done a really cheap, low-quality job of refurbishing it about 10 years ago, and it’s all been falling apart. I’m taking the opportunity to finally fix some long-standing issues with it, like a lack of storage (caused by a ripple effect from a way-too-large sink) and also switching to a smaller refrigerator and dishwasher (freeing up more storage space). Also going to finally get a new range, with such perfect timing since the oven in the existing one has finally given up the ghost for good. Unfortunately there’s only one range available that actually fits in the space (due to the odd venting configuration) and going with a different solution would require a lot of compromises and be way more expensive (due to the aforementioned odd venting situation), but still, I think everything will be better in the long run.

In any case, given that I’ll soon be working from home most of the time again, it’ll be good to have a space where I can enjoy cooking for myself again.

(I’m also looking forward to getting back in the habit of buying bulk produce and unbutchered meat at my favorite restaurant supplier. And probably doing more sous vide again!)

My review of the new Amazon Go store

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There’s a new Amazon Go store on the way home from my therapist, and I was feeling too tired to think about dinner so I decided to just check it out.

There’s a little seating area in front and a greeter who watches you to help people out (and probably make sure they aren’t up to Shenanigans). I suspect that there’s actual human intelligence going on and it isn’t purely AI like the marketing leads everyone to believe. Still, I have some ideas for things to test.

Food selection is pretty okay. The prices are fairly reasonable for Seattle. It’s mostly sandwiches and salads and snacks, and I think they’re all made elsewhere (probably at the flagship store downtown).

I ended up getting a “Tex-Mex Salad with Beef” and a caramel latte. The salad was $8.50. The coffee was $1.85, on sale, although the regular price is $2.35 which is still really cheap for Seattle. The cup and lid were Starbucks-branded, but the cardboard cozy thing said Amazon Go on it.

The salad was pretty okay. It had too much quinoa and not enough lettuce for my taste, but it was tasty and more or less filling. It did have an expiration date of today. I wonder when it was actually made.

The coffee was a bit too sweet and also wasn’t very hot by the time I got home and I suspect it wasn’t actually freshly-brewed hot. They did have regular and decaf options, but no non-dairy milks. It tasted okay. They let you bring your own cup, which is nice.

Not a fan of how it’s yet another case of tech displacing workers from jobs and automating everything away while driving even more of a wage gap and an overall wealth divide.

Also the salad selection could be better.

All in all I think it’s a place I’ll go to get cheap, quick coffee but I don’t expect to make a habit out of it.

They’re also opening a gigantic flagship store a block from my home. I look forward to seeing what the anarchists do to it.

Alec, isolation, solidarity

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Scott Benson wrote a more detailed, public article about what had been going on with him and Alec Holowka. Please read the whole thing, but I want to especially highlight this paragraph:

I’d asked people who knew not to tell anyone. This is pretty common. I had reasons- during development we couldn’t deal with publicly hashing this out, I was too exhausted to handle some big public thing with Alec, etc. And I was too far removed from Alec’s social circles to really know what was happening there. And lots of other people who had similar experiences with Alec never told me, or anyone. It’s common. I wasn’t keeping Alec’s secret. I was keeping mine. That’s how this happens.

That feels a lot like the shit I’d been holding on to privately for the past 8 years. Nobody wanted to tarnish the reputation of a widely-beloved person, and I’m still afraid of actually directly naming him in these posts. I don’t want to relive the community abuse I experienced, especially if it means being seen as being a “collaborator” or “protector” of a serial abuser, and on the other hand being seen as someone who’s looking for attention or some perceived “clout.”

In the aftermath of my writeup, on Sunday I had a very good conversation with the mutual friend who’d taken on the burden of the wellness check and the estate management. I won’t repeat anything of what he said (that’s his story to tell, of course) but the conversation helped me quite a lot, and I hope it helped him too.

For what it’s worth, the past two days have been the lowest-pain I’ve had in a while.

Seeing the reactions to Scott’s articles, including on the now-quite-toxic backers-only thread on the NITW kickstarter, all I can hope for is that everyone eventually finds their peace with this, and that we as a society start having better, more open conversations about this stuff before it turns tragic.

An almost miscellaneous side note

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This almost feels petty compared to what I wrote about last night but it’s a thing that’s been gnawing at me for quite some time, and looking at the little traces around the web of what others were saying about my partner’s death reminded me of it again. I’d mentioned it as a side note a month ago but while I’m feeling frustrated I’d might as well go into more depth.

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There are no happy endings

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The recent unfortunate and tragic news about Alec Holowka has hit me very hard. On the one hand, I was a fan of his music and games, and saddened that he could be responsible for such things. But also the reaction at large to every stage of this whole horrible affair has been dredging up some very bad, stressful feelings that have been affecting me for the past eight years, and I feel it’s finally time to talk about it publicly.

I am not going to name names, even though the names are easy enough to figure out. I don’t want this to be about me, either, but I am necessarily talking about a thing that happened to and around me, and affected many people in a profound, terrible way.

In particular, I have at least something of an understanding of what Scott Benson is going through right now.

This is probably going to be a difficult read.

Read more… (CW: suicide, abuse of minors)

Gabapentin, day 1

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So, yesterday I finally got my prescription for gabapentin/Neurontin, as another attempt at managing my fibro symptoms. Took my first dose at 9 PM, and felt very tired and dizzy by 11 PM. Then still managed to not fall asleep until around 3 AM (I was definitely wide awake at 2, and my smart bed thing says I didn’t fall asleep until 3 so that seems believable).

I slept pretty okay although I had vivid dreams about unpleasant stuff, as always seems to be the case when my neurochemistry is being tampered with.

Woke up at 8 AM, couldn’t actually peel myself out of bed until half past 9, and I felt wobbly/dizzy/tired all day.

Pain was okay in the morning, but at 2:40 PM or so I had a flareup. It cleared up with a snack, though, and I kinda-sorta managed to get some actual work done, ish.

Went home at 6, had dinner, not sure where the past two hours went but I’m really tired and sleepy right now and also flaring like a matroncopulator, and it’s time for my next dose. Maybe I’ll sleep better/longer tonight and feel better tomorrow.