So, comments were broken

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So hey, I thought it was weird that nobody had been posting comments on my blog in a while. Turns out comments were just, like, broken, and nobody told me, for some reason.

The problem turned out to be that Isso currently doesn’t work on Python 3.8 (or at least, the current released version, which is ridiculously outdated, doesn’t), and it was easy to roll it back to Python 3.7, thanks to poetry’s pyenv integration. So, score another one for poetry.

But why don’t people actually tell me when they’re having problems with my site? Do people just assume that if something’s broken it’s broken on purpose? Because I mean… no?

Anyway, comments are fixed now.

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2021 goals

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Let’s not call them resolutions.

One year ago I set out some goals for the next decade. They’re all pretty good goals. But here’s some specific things I’d like to accomplish over the next year:

  • Get my voice to a spot where people don’t misgender me quite so much
  • Get my fibromyalgia and ADHD meds dialed in (so far so good)
  • Actually finish my next non-Novembeat album1
  • PlaidWeb things, such as:
    • An online post editor
    • A self-hosted notification engine (for webmention, activitypub, websub, etc.)
    • Maybe actually write some actual code for Subl?
    • Also maybe actually put a dang site together for PlaidWeb
  • Rebuild my broken social life
  • Get my home clean, and keep it clean
  • Start drawing comics regularly again
  • And the ever-present goal of losing, say, 15 pounds

Kind of ambitious, I know, but it’s better to aim for the stars and hit the moon than to never even leave the ground.

Oh, good

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Just when I was worried that reinstalling the OS on my iMac once again fixed its many stability problems, it’s started randomly killing Sublime Text and occasionally kernel panicking for no particular reason again. And now the kernel panic backtrace involves an entirely different subsystem, and is for things that shouldn’t have even been in use when the machine crashed! (Heck, I wasn’t even at my machine at the time!)

Fortunately the M1 mini is arriving on Wednesday and hopefully then things will actually work for a while. Who knows.

Oh also happy new year etc.etc., no comic this year I can’t be bothered1

3D printing wood

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A week ago I bought some wood-filled PLA, and I’ve been experimenting with it a bit to see how to make it actually look like wood.

The first thing I printed (a Pocket Operator case) just looked like it was printed with boring beige filament, even after being sanded:

IMG_2515D.jpeg

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Flood and Mac updates

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Flood update: Today I checked on my stuff in storage and was happy to find that there is apparently no damage inside any of my instrument cases; they just got a little bit of dirt on the outside. Yay!

Mac update: Even after having done all the stuff to make it stable, it continues to be unstable. Ugh. So I decided to just go ahead and buy an M1 Mac mini (512GB storage, 16GB RAM), monitor, external NVMe m.2 enclosure, and a 2TB drive for it. I won’t have the new computer until January 15. Normally I wouldn’t be so eager to do a first-gen new-architecture Mac but the reviews of it have been great and meanwhile this 2017 iMac has always given me a lot of trouble with stability and reliability and mysterious problems; Big Sur made it worse, but it was never a particularly great computer to begin with.1

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Current state of affairs

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I’ve been on Wellbutrin for a couple of weeks now and the effect has been interesting. I’m definitely finding it easier to focus on things like chores (and heck, my kitchen is the cleanest it’s been since the remodel got finished, and my dining room is well on its way to not being a disaster), but on the other hand it’s disrupting my sleep a lot and I end up feeling tired throughout the day. My dreams have also been way more intense.

Right now I’m feeling sick with my usual winter sinus crap, so I’m a bit wobbly and a lot nauseous.

Between the Wellbutrin and playing DDR my pain levels are a bit lower but still not amazing, and I’m still finding it easy to hit a fibro wall™. Tomorrow I have a followup with my pain doctor to try to finally get on low-dose naltrexone. I also have the next two weeks off from work and hopefully I won’t end up just working too hard on personal projects instead. (That said, I have a couple of creative output gift swaps with deadlines coming up that I really should start on at some point.)

Anwyay I guess I don’t have a lot else to say. Oh well.

More meat boxing

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The box o' meat progresses nicely.

Since the last update I’ve completed all of the meats that were underway, and have finished 1 of the pounds of ground beef (which made very good burgers) and the chili relleno pork sausage. So what remains:

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • venison hot dogs
  • 1.25 pounds of flank steak

So, this turned out to not be an entirely excessive amount of meat. And Crowd Cow does seem to be a pretty good deal in general.

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DDR/Stepmania fun times

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Yesterday I finally got ArrowVortex working; originally I was running it under WINE on my Intel NUC over xrdp to my Mac, which was kind of janky but functional, but after that stopped working (and was too obnoxious with latency) I just tried out Crossover WINE again and it worked like a charm.

Incidentally, Crossover’s gotten way better in the 10 years since I last used it and I might end up paying for it again!

Anyway, you can see the results of this: I have a very much work-in-progress song pack that you can check out if you’re so inclined. Beta feedback is appreciated as well. I’ll be adding artwork eventually but right now my effort is primarily on getting more songs and charts in.

If there’s any songs of mine you think would be a good DDR track, let me know!

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