bluelander | Entries tagged with outside

Had a doctor appointment yesterday. It's not related to my recent mouth issues, it's just time for my checkup. I hate going to the doctor when I'm not sick. What always happens is, the doctor shows me a bunch of numbers that say oh, I actually am sick, very sick indeed. And then he tells me to do a bunch of stuff that makes me feel worse.

Now, I'm not some kind of medical science denier. I know that these numbers do in fact have some relationship to my health. What I don't know is how to make myself take the steps necessary to change them when my lived experience tells me that I feel worse when I do it.

Imagine there's a hot stove in my home. I touch it, I get burned, I learn not to touch it. But a man in a white coat is telling me that I need to touch a special medical stove 3 times a day. It'll feel just like it does when I touch the other stove, but this one actually imparts a special healing burn that will make my chance of contracting Frozen Bone Syndrome drop by 50%. Which sounds like a lot, but actually that just means it drops from 3% to 1.5%. How do I square this with my lived experience? My brain is screaming at me to stop touching the stove. From my body's perspective I'm torturing myself every day for no reason. Even if the doctor is right—and doctors are wrong all the time—is it really worth the drop in quality of life? I don't think it is. If you take this mindset to its logical conclusion, you turn into that creepy rich guy who's ruining his life trying to optimize his "health markers" in pursuit of eternal life (Lily Alexandre recently published an excellent video essay about him).

But of course if I take it to the opposite logical conclusion, I never go to the doctor at all and risk missing some actually important medical information. Health feels like a no-win situation and I don't know how to feel better about it. Just going to the doctor causes me stress, which in my experience is one of the leading causes of my despair. The thing that would actually be best for my physical and mental well-being is a permanent sabbatical from work, and I can't have that. My medical insurance won't pay for me to have shelter, and healthy food, and the time it takes to acquire and prepare it, and adequate rest time. But it'll pay for the drugs that numb me to the fact that I don't have these things. It'll pay for the drugs that make bad health numbers go down so I can be a part of the machine that makes economy numbers go up. Take a drink every time it's capitalism (and you'll be too shit-faced to care.¹)

At least my blood pressure was good. It was 126/86, which isn't perfect, but it's in a healthy range, and considering I've been in pain and have anxiety at the doctor, I think that's pretty damn good. As we all know, blood pressure is the metascore of health. Sure, all the critics are pointing out that I have too many bugs and don't run at an acceptable framerate, but as long as that metascore is above an 80 I still get my year-end bonus.

Oh actually that would be a great way to incentivize me to get my bad health numbers down: give me money for doing it. Then I won't have to believe it's real, I'll see a tangible benefit. I think my "pay people to be healthy" program could be the revolutionary public health initiative the world needs. Mr. Ghebreyesus,² give me a call 🤙

1: Rhetorical advice only, do not take

2: Tedros Ghebreyesus is the Director-General of the World Health Organization

Run For The Border

My spouse came with me to my appointment, because she needed some labs there anyway, but also just to help me remember stuff. Ironically, the closest place to the clinic we could eat is Taco Bell. The only other place in walking distance is a McDonald's. What a country! We picked Taco Bell, the lesser (?) of two evils.

In lieu of hours of operation, there was a sign on the door which says: "Open 'til 4 AM or later! Check online for local hours."

Huh??? Like, I realize Taco Bell is a franchise, different locations are going to have different policies, but like, I'm at this location! There are people physically here who can put a sign up! If corporate doesn't give you a fancy custom decal, write it on a sheet of A4 and tape it up. It's not pretty, but it's information. We shouldn't need to google opening hours for a business we're standing in front of. Anyway, I knew they'd be open cuz we went at like 18h00, but it's the principle of the thing.

They were playing country music on the radio, which sucks, but that's the expectation for the part of the country where I live. But they played one song I kinda liked. Most modern country is bad, but some pop-country is so poppy that it's barely recognizable as country, which probably isn't popular among the core fan base but to me, it's an improvement.

I shazam'd it and learned that the song is What You Want Me To Do by Phillip Andrew Buckle. This surprised me, because the vocalist doesn't sound like someone who would have that name. They sound more like a Phillipa or Philomena. I searched around a little more, and other sources give the name of the artist as Vitamin A. The album art doesn't give an artist name, just the title of the album, Hits and Pieces. It also has the word "vocals" on it, which leads me to believe this is a fictional group who only makes music to play in restaurants, and they provide both vocal and instrumental mixes depending on the ambiance you're looking for. Phillip Buckle might be the songwriter, or maybe it's another pseudonym. It's a little on the nose for country music, isn't it? Buckle? Like a big cowboy belt buckle? I dunno, maybe I'm just being paranoid.

What is true is that there's zero information about either Phillip Buckle or "Vitamin A", just a million places you can buy or download tracks. A little more digging and I found the source: Universal Production Music, a source for royalty-free music you can license for film, TV, and apparently, Taco Bell radio. The youtube audio library of real life. It's kinda sad that the only song I found tolerable was the most bland and crassly commercial music that can be made, but I suppose that's country music these days.

I don't want to be a hater, so I'll share a good country song, a Johnny Cash song I was unaware of until recently called One Piece At A Time. It's a "talking country" song about a guy who worked at a General Motors plant smuggling car parts out in his oversized lunchbox. Over 25 years, he brings home everything he needs to build himself a Cadillac. It's a lot of fun. I'm a big fan of stories about salami slicing and other outside-the-box ways to steal back a bit of agency and dignity from the systems that control us. Also, this song is apparently the origin of the term "psychobilly". Neat!

So How Was The Food

Mostly unmemorable and not worth the price. Taco Bell used to be the most dirt-cheap fast food, a bare minimum viable product for the least money you can spend. Now you can't even get a meal at Taco Bell for under 10 bucks. But you know what? For $1, they'll sell you a giant cheez-it. My spouse got one because she had to experience it. It is, in fact, a single cheez-it the size of an MRE cracker. They made it happen. I'm miffed that they gave the Nobel to one of the guys partly responsible for AI slop when we have giant cheez-its now. It's all politics.

Have A Good Weekend

Thanks for reading, everyone. If you enjoyed my Taco Bell radio report and want to help fund more investigative journalism like it, reminder that I've got a ko-fi and a Patreon. Help me do more things I can write about, and I'll write about more things! It's all part of the symbiotic relationship we call "spending".

Question Of The Week

What's one of your favorite or least favorite portmanteaus, and why? Speak up in the comments below or email bluelander@tutanota.com if you want to make your voice heard. I'll see you Monday

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Johnny Cash - One Piece At A Time

Doing quite a bit better today. Spent some quality time with my spouse last night, which I needed. Had to sacrifice some sleep to get some rest, but it was worth it.

It's been raining for like the last two weeks, and mushrooms are popping up everywhere. They're mostly the plain white puffball variety, but it's still neat. I almost never see mushrooms at all, and never in this quantity.

( mushroom pics )

I like how they appear in neat lines, like groups of little extraterrestrial tourists seeing the sights. I can see why they have a much bigger cultural footprint cultural in damp climates like England and Japan, because they're quite a sight when they pop up in large formations. They're a really interesting form of life. I keep meaning to read that mushroom book everyone recommends. In fact, I'm going to check and see if the library has the audiobook

several seconds later

There's one copy available on the Libby app but it's in use, so I placed a hold. Nice! It's rare that I go looking for a specific book and they actually have it. It says there's a two week wait, but it's okay. If the mushrooms can wait for a period of sufficient wetness, I can wait for this.

I saw a discussion recently about all the lawsuits being filed against the internet archive. There was the Hachette suit they lost, and now apparently every major music label is suing them for their collection of digitized 78RPM records. Their collection preserves a lot of stuff that's gone out of copyright that one wouldn't be able to hear anywhere else, but it also has a lot of artists whose back catalogs are being exploited by the labels and "intellectual property" holders. I don't see how any of these cases have merit, but it's very disheartening.

Anyway, the cultural assault on physical libraries came up, and I'm seeing a lot of people say that you should never use apps like Libby and Overdrive because the contracts are so punitively expensive compared to physical media, but I don't know if this is true? I'm pretty sure every actual librarian I've seen express an opinion on the subject says any use of services offered by libraries helps them, because demonstrating use is how they get funding. I do understand the argument that Libby/Overdrive is owned by a for-profit investment firm and is subject to the same cancerous deterioration as every capitalist scheme (I'm familiar with the Cory Doctorow-coined term) but it seems to me that if they turn the screws, the libraries will stop using it. They're not getting rid of physical media, they're using the tools that are available to make media accessible to more people. It would suck if that goes away, but I don't see it being an existential threat to libraries. I'm inclined to trust the librarians on this one.

In my case, work and the state of our public transit system are too burdensome for me to get to the library during opening hours, so learning about these apps has been a godsend. I'm a patron of the library for the first time in years, and I expect there are a lot of people in a similar boat. Surely getting more people to use the library can only be good? They (used to?) have bookmobiles to help people in remote areas get access to books, that's an expense that wasn't strictly necessary but helped make books accessible to more people. I think the apps are a modern extension of that. Yeah there needs to be a version of this that's not controlled by a corporation, but I think telling people not to use them is unhelpful at best.

I do think it's beneficial to encourage people to check out physical items in addition to using the apps if it's at all feasible. In fact, I just looked up my local library hours, and while they do close at 5 or 6 most days, they're open until 8:30 on Mondays. I might start making an effort to make a weekly library trip. I'd be interested in checking out their physical audiobook selection.

I do actually have a CD/Cassette player next to my desk at work. I assume it belonged to a previous employee and just became property of the office. On rare days that I work alone, holidays and the occasional Saturday or Sunday, I like to plug my phone into the line input and listen to podcasts over the speakers. It's nice to be able to not wear headphones for awhile.

I haven't actually tested the CD and cassette player, but if they work, that'd be a novel way to get more audiobooks into my media diet, although the way my desk is set up there's no elegant way to plug my headphones into it. Maybe I can get one of those little bluetooth transmitters.

Also, the library may have some of those little dedicated audiobook players. They're neat. I mean, they're incredibly wasteful, all of this is, if we didn't live in such a capitalist hellscape the supercomputers we carry in our pockets could have seamless 24/7 access to all the information in the world, but in the context of finding more ways to support libraries, they're interesting. Techmoan did a video about them, which prompted me to pick one up at a library book sale a couple years back and see if they can be hacked. If they can, it would have to be by someone with more skill than me, because it's pretty much just an SOC under a black blob. It didn't occur to me that the library might have books in this format I'd be interested in listening to, or that there would be a reason to go this route instead of checking it out from Libby or pirating it.

Torrenting audiobooks is an exhausting process. Audible's pissed in the pool with their 32kpbs, 22khz 8-bit mp3s that sound like a talkboy being played over shortwave radio, to the extent that it can be difficult to find audobooks in decent quality, especially older ones. Even some of the ones I've got from Libby have been compressed to the point of unlistenabilty. The playaways seem to have pretty decent quality files on them, which makes sense, because bulk 4GB eMMCs cost about a penny, and that's enough to hold just about anything short of the encyclopedia in perfectly acceptable quality.

I focus on audiobooks because practically, the 40 hours a week I need to fill at work is the time I'm most likely to get a lot of reading done. Historically I've listened to more podcasts than audiobooks, but that trend is starting to inverse. A lot of the podcasts I used to love have ended or I've grown tired of them, and a lot of the ones I've started to enjoy more recently have an insufferable number of ads. Even skipping them is starting to take its toll because having to skip ahead and backwards until I find the right spot every few minutes is hell for my focus.

I wish I had an easier time getting into audiobooks. There's a lot of, I dunno what to call it, onboarding anxiety? Like even a short audiobook is 8 hours, and that's a big commitment for an unknown quantity. Fiction is the hardest, I don't know if I'll like the world, the characters, the quality of the writing, the story, or the narrator. If it's sci Fi or fantasy, there will probably be a lot of new words and concepts I need to learn about. If I'm lucky, the book will start off with a strong character moment and get me through the door. If I'm unlucky, it's hours of turgid world building and scene setting and I nope out before I can even meet a character I care about.[^1][^2]

Nonfiction is easier for me, because it's already set in a world I kinda understand, and I can appreciate a deep dive on just about any subject if the writing is good and the author is passionate enough. Like mushrooms! Hey look at that, I brought it back around.

I want to write about the podcast I've been re-listening to instead of trying new books, because it's kind of interesting and kind of embarrassing; and I also wanted to talk about the untimely demise of cohost; but I'm already at 1500 words, so I'll save it. My god, a callback and a tease, it's like I'm some sort of blogger

[^1]: If I'm really unlucky, it's Neal Stephenson's Reamde, a book I spent an audible credit on back in 2011 when I could afford it and listened to for 30 hours before I realized I was bored out of my mind and stopped like 80% of the way through the book, my god someone get that man an editor (please don't use this statement to own me re: the quality of my own writing)

[^2]: now that I think about it, I don't know if the version of markdown used by dreamwidth supports footnotes, I think it's a non-standard feature that happened to be included in bearblog's MD flavor. I hope it is, because those are really fiddly and annoying to do in HTML. I guess I'll see

Current Mood: awake

Saturday is laundry day around these parts. My apartment complex's laundry room is only open from 8-4, so weekends are the only days I can do it. Laundry day used to be Sunday, but I've learned that Saturday has two advantages: one, if I don't get moving fast enough on Saturday, I at least have a backup option instead of having to wait another week; and two, the odds are much lower that there will be other people doing laundry that day. I guess other folks around here have stuff to do on a Friday night and they like to sleep in on Saturdays. This works for me, because there are only three working washing machines for a couple dozen-odd units (technically four, but one of them only accepts quarters, and there's no change machine [the other three let me pay with an app]) and competing with the neighbors for access is a frustrating, socially exhausting experience.

Laundry yesterday went about as smoothly as it could go. All the snow's gone, so walking down and back carrying a lot of weight wasn't dangerous. I didn't see another person, and although it rained on and off that day, I didn't get rained on. Also, I remembered to bring my 3DS with me for the one activity where it makes the most sense. I have a couple/three hours to kill for washing and drying, and having games is a great way to pass that time.

The potentially confounding factor is that laundry day is when I sometimes get to hang out with Laundry Cat, a cat who comes to visit me in the laundry room. For new readers, or anyone who needs a refresher, here are some of Laundry Cat's greatest hits:

( Cat photos )

If Laundry Cat shows up, obviously she'd take priority over games, but she doesn't come around quite as often in the winter, and I didn't see her yesterday. I hope she found somewhere warmer to be.

So once laundry was going, I pulled out my 3DS, which luckily I had remembered to turn off last time I used it so it still had some battery left. It's technically not a 3DS, it's a 2DSXL, which is fine because I wouldn't use the stereoscopic 3D function anyway. It's a lovely device with the exception of the power button, a rubbery little nub on the bottom of the machine that feels like an afterthought. You have to hold the button in to power it off, and every time I do I have to press so hard that I'm sure it's going to break. There's no way to shut it down in software, even though there's a software step in the shutdown process! Once I hold the button in long enough, a thing pops up on the screen that I have to tap to properly turn it off. It's like they don't want me to turn the thing off. So as a result, I usually just close it and hope I remember to plug it in when I get home, which I usually don't, so the battery's usually dead when I think to use it again, so now you're probably getting an idea why I don't play many 3DS games.

Anyway, I fired up New Super Mario Bros. 2, which if you don't remember was the one with a big coin-collecting gimmick. There's a 7-digit counter showing the total number of coins you've collected across all levels, which shows at all times on the level select screen and whenever you pause the game. I still haven't gotten far enough to learn what the point of it is. All of the level progress so far has been gated by how many of the big coins you collect, three in each level, just like traditional NSMB. There are some fun new coin toys, like a brick helmet Mario can wear that continuously spits out coins as you move around until you get hit or a certain amount of time passes. But, it just feels terrible to play. The D-pad on the 3DS is smaller than I'd like, and it just doesn't feel precise enough for the types of movement NSMB2 requires, and I'm certainly not playing a side-scrolling platformer with an analog pad. I think they want me to use the circle pad, because it was one of the big new 3DS features, and no, I'm not going to, you can't make me.

So after a couple frustrating levels, I started a game of Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon. You may remember a few years ago Koji Igarashi, the Castlevania guy, did a kickstarter to fund the development of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which was Symphony of the Night with the serial numbers filed off. It's actually quite a good game, I liked it a lot more than I remember liking Symphony of the Night when I tried playing that many years ago. I did at one point get hopelessly stuck, just like I did in SOTN, but this time I liked the game enough to swallow my pride and look up what I was missing. It ended up being one of the better exploration platformers (or "metroidvanias", if you must) I've played in recent memory.

Curse of the Moon is a companion game that I think started as a kickstarter stretch goal. It's a more straightforward level-based action platformer done in a retro "NES plus" style; the resolution and color palette resemble the NES Castlevania graphics, but it's widescreen and features animation and effects that wouldn't have been possible on the original hardware. This is my favorite way to do an "8-bit"-style game in the present day, and Inti Creates (a developer most known for their work on handheld Megaman games, I think) nailed it.

I had started a game before, but despite enjoying parts of it, I had bounced off. You're given the option when you start a new game of playing on "veteran" or "casual" mode. "Veteran" is described: "A style for those looking for a retro style challenge." "Casual" says "An easy-going style. Lives are unlimited, and taking damage does not knock back the player. There is no penalty for selecting this style."

The first time I played, I chose veteran, and I'm not really sure why. I don't need games to be super hard to enjoy them, but I had played Castlevania 3 as a kid, so I figured I should choose the mode that most closely resembles it. I figured the developers designed the game with that mode in mind, so that would probably be the most fun way to play. Well, since I've tried a few games featured on ranking the NES, I've learned something about myself: the main thing that makes me not want to play those games is the fact that taking damage knocks you back, often into a bottomless pit. That's the #1 reason I stop playing those games. There are games that I like everything about except for the fact that taking damage knocks you back. The limited lives aren't a big deal to me; I don't mind a little bit of trial and error, or repeating difficult parts until I master them. But the main features I want in a platformer are jumping and exploration. I don't mind action elements like shooting and sword-stabbing, they can add a lot to a platformer, but if the action fucks with the platforming, that's when I start getting annoyed.

Well, Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is much better on casual mode. I'm now having a great time, not just a good one. There's no reason to play on veteran unless you like pointless frustration. I made it to level 4 and when I got home I left it in sleep mode and plugged it into the charger somewhere out of the way, and it'll be ready for me to pick right back up the next time I do laundry. Unless a certain cat requires my attention, of course.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Earthside - Watching the Earth Sink

11,100 gecs

A few years ago I decided I didn't like the band 100 gecs based on the first song of theirs I looked up, "Money Machine". Well, recently I had seen a couple tracks recommended on youtube while I was looking up some other music, and I heard two that I really liked: "Ringtone" from their first album, 1000 gecs (1Kg) and "Hollywood Baby" from their second album, 10,000 gecs (10Kg). So I decided to give them another shot, and I'm glad I did.

1Kg is my less favorite of the two, but there are still a few tracks I enjoy. I can tolerate or even enjoy heavy vocal modulation/distortion up to a point, but 1Kg crosses that line more than I'd like. "745 sticky", "800db Cloud", "Ringtone" and "gec 2 U" are the 1Kg tracks I enjoyed.

I liked 10Kg quite a bit more. The standout track for me is "The Most Wanted Person in the United States", which I've listened to dozens of times. I also really liked "I Got My Tooth Removed". I found it incredibly relatable, and I liked how earnest and vulnerable the song was compared to their other ones.

Across the whole album, the speech distortion and modulation has been toned down to a level that I'm able to enjoy. I think the only track on 10Kg I actively dislike is "One Million Dollars", but I've always had an aversion to speech samples repeated ad nauseam without sufficient variety. I like how Hideki Naganuma uses them, chopping them up and mixing them in different ways throughout the song, but "the system is down"-style repetitive techno sample drops always grate on me.

Other than that, 10Kg is a great evolution of their style. 1Kg felt like they were trying to make a meme album, 10Kg feels like they're getting more confident in their songwriting without sacrificing the humor. They're still not taking themselves seriously but their new music has a lot more artistry and maturity than 1Kg, in my opinion. I look forward to seeing what they do next.

On Cinema

There's a new season of On Cinema On Demand (FKA On Cinema! and More in the Morning, FKA On Cinema At The Cinema) which is exciting. Other than the Oscar special in March, they took 2023 off in solidarity with the writer's strike, which worked out for me: I discovered the show in mid-2023 after watching The Trial of Tim Heidecker on a weird random whim, and spent a few months getting caught up on everything from the On Cinemaverse I could get my hands on (which is most of it: there's some bonus material I haven't seen because I don't have a HEI network subscription, but all the main content I've been able to watch either free on youtube or find on soulseek)

They've released 3 episodes so far, and I've enjoyed them. I'm a little surprised the Amato Group storyline is still going, I sort of expected there to be an off-screen universe reset at some point, but Tim's more dedicated to the Amatos then ever. Tim (sorry, T. Amato) now has a fictional mental illness with the sole symptom of being unable to tell movies from reality; now that he's medically unable to watch movies, he brought on a mysterious new cohost, Joey P., a really great Joe Rogan-style meathead podcaster character, who for reasons unexplained records all of his reviews in a separate segment which is spliced into the main show, much to the confusion and consternation of Gregg. Gregg consistently asking Joey what score he gave the movie and Tim getting more and more pissed off as he repeatedly has to explain that the audience saw the rating in the other segment is great. Also Gregg doing the math in real time to convert from Joey's 4-star scale to On Cinema's traditional 5 buckets of popcorn is a great bit. I'm a Gregghead, so getting to hear Gregg explain movie runtime trivia before giving them five buckets of popcorn in the present day is like a warm blanket, although it loses a lot when you don't have the graphics and the "pop" sound effect. Hopefully this is addressed later in the season.

The most interesting thing about this season so far is that it's also being released as a podcast. On Cinema started out as an audio podcast in 2011, but it's been exclusively a video series since 2013. It's especially strange that there would be a free podcast feed now that the videos are locked behind a paywall. I got even more curious when I saw how much longer the audio episodes are than the videos. I assumed it would just be the audio tracks from the episodes: did they record additional material for the podcast? It can't all be ads, right?

Friends, it's all ads. At first, I wasn't sure whether it was a bit. Every ad in episode 1 was for Carrabba's, an Italian restaurant I had never heard of, and they were maximally intrusive. Ads would be played randomly, interrupting people mid-word, and it was always two 15-30 second ads back-to-back. I thought it was a fictional restaurant and was a meta-commentary on the state of podcast ads, but I looked it up, and it's a real restaurant, there just aren't any around where I live. "Huh", I thought, "maybe the ads are real."

In episode 2 I started using a stopwatch to time how many minutes of the show were commercials. Of the 25m44s runtime, 11m30s were ads. There were still Carrabba's ads, but other ads started creeping in. Some were very typical podcast ads, stuff like Blue Apron and T-Mobile, but it was starting to get weirder. There was an ad for the Morongo Casino Resort and Spa, a real business located in Cabazon, CA. At the end of the ad the announcer assured me it's located less than 90 minutes from wherever I am. Which for 2100 miles would be a pretty impressive trip.

Episode 3 was 12m30s of ads for 27m02s of runtime, and this is where it really starts to go off the rails. It's still the audio from the show, but now the ads are playing on top of each other, 2 or 3 at a time. You'll get a few seconds from the middle of an ad sporadically interrupting the show, then an unbearably long block of ads a few minutes later. There was an ad for a Philippines airline and Malaysian pizza hut (when I looked up the promotion, I found a 2016 upload of the ad on youtube.) Total chaos. I still have no idea how many, if any, of these ads are legit.

I'm kind of conflicted, because as much as I hate listening to real ads, the bit wouldn't work if they were obviously fake. It's an incredible parody of the state of podcast advertising in 2024, I just don't know where it can go from here. There's usually 10 episodes in a season and they've reached peak unlistenability by episode 3, so I'm really curious what happens next. I'm expecting bits of the show audio will start to be cut, and eventually it's just a wall-to-wall cacophony of random ads. How long I'm willing to endure this for the sake of art remains to be seen, but I'll definitely listen to the next one. Whatever it'll be, I'm intrigued. I hope they're making at least some money from the podcast. Whether I keep listening or not, I'll download each episode. Maybe this can be my requital for pirating the show.

Snow

Yesterday it got above freezing for the first time in a couple weeks. It got up to 40F, but there was still a fuck-ton of snow on the ground. What the hell. How did it stay frozen if it's above freezing? Messed up.

Snow didn't use to bother me so much, but I used to live somewhere people shoveled and salted sidewalks. I guess they don't do that anymore. I love snow in theory, I love the cold, I love how freshly fallen snow looks; I just don't like having to choose between walking in the snow and maybe slipping and dying, or walking in the road and maybe getting hit by a car and dying. I usually pick the road. Most people are usually slightly more careful in snowy conditions, and I figure I have better odds of making it if my feet and ankles aren't in pain from walking on hard uneven terrain. We didn't get a real snow this year until relatively late, well into January, and I was hoping I wouldn't see any this year, but alas. It's currently 51 and there's STILL snow on the sidewalk, it's soft and slushy and patchy enough that I can walk through it with a minimum of pain, but it still got pretty slick in spots. There's a lot more traffic when I'm leaving work than when I'm walking to work, so I'm more hesitant to walk in the road in the evenings. It's going to be 60 on Wednesday and 66 on Thursday, surely that'll be the last of it, if there's any justice in the world.

15 icons

To end on a happier note, one thing I didn't realize I was missing about a livejournal-like writing platform is the ability to upload multiple icons, and choose which one you want to set for each post. How sad that this 25-year-old feature still feels fresh and novel. I have a bad habit of being mercurial about avatars on social media. I'm sure I change mine enough to be annoying for fediverse posters who rely on visual cue to keep peoples' identities straight. It's not like I change to a different raccoon picture every time, I pick wildly different avatars based on how I'm feeling at the moment I decide to change it. I feel bad that some people are frustrated by it, and I understand if they want to unfollow me, but if I see the same picture next to my name on whatever I post for too long, I start to feel resentful at pigeonholing myself. Like there's more to me than just being a raccoon, y'know?

But on Dreamwidth, it's okay! I'm meant to be mercurial, it's how the platform was designed! Even the 15 icons I get as a free user is plenty to make me feel able to express myself. I've been slowly adding old and new avatars, and I'm up to 11. I'm sure I'll be fine once I hit 15, I'll probably delete old ones and add new ones periodically, as old interests fade and new ones appear. It's a cool way to express myself that I didn't know I wanted. Maybe that subconsciously influenced my decision to switch to Dreamwidth. Whatever, I think I'll be happy here

Current Mood: okay
Current Music: 100 gecs - Doritos & Fritos

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Page Summary

Doctor visit, health numbers, the Taco Bell music scene, Johnny Cash slices salami, big cheez
Mushrooms and libraries good, capitalism and big publishers bad. Library apps questionable?
Curse of the moon in the laundry room
11,100 gecs, on cinema, snow, 15 icons

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Steal Compass / Drive North / Disappear

Entries tagged with outside

Doctor visit, health numbers, the Taco Bell music scene, Johnny Cash slices salami, big cheez