hello! it's been another quiet month for me as i continue to be more offline than not (i've updated my "now" post at the top of the blog to reflect this (⌒_⌒;)) i've just been focusing on health and well-being. because things are rough enough out there without the internet piping hot garbage into my brain every time i look at a computer. since i haven't touched my computers very much, i almost forgot how to navigate niri and vim on my framework when i came back to it to write this blog. as far as computing goes, i've mainly just been using my iphone and my pi homeserver. it's actually been really nice to have such a minimalist setup. i did finally upgrade my apple operating systems now that 27/golden gate is out. i was able to mostly avoid 26/tahoe and the liquid glass disaster. the ui now seems to be less buggy and less of a headache to look at so i'm glad i sat out last year's apple experience. unfortunately, there are still annoying things like all the ai stuff they're cramming in everywhere like in the writing and photo tools. no, i don't want ai notification summaries. no, i don't want "genmoji" suggestions. why can't there just be a single kill switch to turn it all off? i have no use for any of it. i've never used "agentic ai" and i don't want it living my life for me. i like doing things myself. and if it's something i truly see no value in doing myself and experiencing the good and bad of it, i'll just find a way to remove it from my daily equation rather than let a data center somewhere destroy the planet to book a reservation or something for me. at least apple still let me delete the standalone siri ai app. i wish there was a viable linux phone/pocket computer that could replace my iphone so i could set it up exactly how i want to use it now that i've lost all interest in engaging with my computers. but i haven't found anything yet. for me, apple is still the peak for the overly-convenient, low friction, almost brainless software/hardware combo. while there are lots of options for setting up linux to be simple like apple software, i've yet to see anything on the hardware side. unfortunately, this has made me consider getting the iphone duo when it comes out (╥_╥) then i can pretty much get rid of my current iphone and my ipad. does it still count as de-appleing if i buy a new apple device in order to get rid of two apple devices (⌒_⌒;) maybe i'll try to go the whole next year running just a duo/pi setup. i don't think it would be that hard if i continue to be as unplugged as i've been. --- i've made no major additions to the homepage here this time. i just haven't felt like working on it. i barely could get this blog post out. and, even then, it feels forced and uninspired. knowing that it's just going to end up scraped by some ai crawler really kills my desire to put anything online (╥_╥) i hope someday this changes for the better. i've written before about how the web was a place for my younger self to escape to from the horrors of world. but now that so much of the world has come online and brought the old horrors as well as new horrors with it, especially in the past five years, maybe it's time to go somewhere else.

it's almost the end of august and i haven't blogged all month! honestly, i haven't really felt much desire to, which i already kind of mentioned in my post last month. between heatwaves, my dad's dementia, and the general state of the world online and offline, i've been staying as disconnected from everything as much as possible and trying to find enjoyment in a more local and quiet existence. in my spare time, i've mostly been watching jdramas, listening to music, and sketching instead of doing things that require me to plug in and be connected to the larger world. i did spend some time making my selections for the tiny awards. it was hard because there were so many good sites! in the end, i selected sites that required multiple visits to truly appreciate and to absorb so my picks leaned more towards denser ones rather than the kind that are more like single use/single purpose (but still interesting and amusing) web app type sites. i don't know if any of my picks made it onto the shortlist yet but it was a fun experience. the public voting phase opened today! go vote for your faves! a few of my picks made it into the shortlist so that made me happy ^-^ i haven't done much work on my homepage here in the past month. i've barely touched my computer at all (￢_￢;) i did add a few more friends to the links sections but that's about it. as i mentioned above, i'm kind of going through an existential time, especially with my online life. part of me thinks about retiring from the internet as it continues to deteriorate into more of a mess. unfortunately, looking at all the tiny award submissions didn't help much to restore good feelings about the current web. it was only a brief escape. in some ways it made me feel worse. because how are there are so many amazing things being done that hardly anyone sees or cares to see and that the primary use of the web is actually whatever torture device it has become? for every good site i visited last month, i probably saw five articles or videos about pervert glasses, flock cameras, the right-wing hate ecosystem, "ai" everything, gambling markets, data centers, etc, etc. i'm too tired of all this to link to specific examples but i'm sure if you've spent a few seconds online lately, you know what i'm talking about. i don't even seek out that stuff, it's just inescapably always in the periphery of being online. and it sucks to feel like this after i've spent pretty much my whole life telling people how amazing the internet is (could be.) it's polyester now, as the kids say these days. given that this is the reality of the situation, i've just been questioning whether i need to write or publish anything online. i'm not looking for work or collabs or sponsorships or anything like that so do i really need to contribute to the overall internet content churn so diligently? i find myself just talking about how bad things are (this post is no exception) and fear becoming a broken record that doesn't really help make anything better. it is nice to meet new and interesting people through this page. but i still get emails regularly even if i haven't blogged in over a month. maybe i'll just stay on this "whenever i feel like it" homepage building and blogging schedule for now and write when i feel like i have something important to say (though this might mean i'll never write again if nothing feels important anymore (๑>ᴗ<๑)) but when things are too forced, it stops being fun.

this entry is being published a few days later than usual. i wanted to hold off and post it on the day that the tiny awards nominations opened. because i'm one of the judges this year! so if you made a new website in the past year, you should think about submitting it. there are no real stakes, just fun. and if you really think about it, isn't still being able to have a tiny bit of fun on the internet these days the most valuable prize of all? --- a tiny change: i think i'm going to switch from my bi-weekly blogging schedule to a monthly schedule. at least for the rest of the summer. or maybe a monthly + "whenever i feel like it" schedule. one of the reasons is that my dad's dementia symptoms of hallucinations and anxiety always worsen during the summer months and he becomes more of a handful to deal with. i'm not sure if it's because of the heat or the longer daylight hours but it really messes him up and it's more work to manage him. and after back to back to back health issues of my own so far this year, i feel like i should try to relax my days a tiny bit more where i can afford to. besides, i'll also be spending july looking at websites for the tiny awards so i want to make some space to do that. i'm hoping to see so many amazing websites that it restores my faith in the internet as that has been plummeting for a while now, if you haven't noticed from my writings. so, no pressure to the submissions/nominees, i'll just be looking for a tiny sign that the internet is a worthwhile place still (⌒_⌒;) jk, as long as i'm not subjected to endless slop vibesites through this process, it should be okay. anyways, you can subscribe to my rss feed if you don't want to miss my more sporatic blog posts ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ --- even if i blog less frequently, i'll keep refining and adding little things to my page over the summer. here's what i've been working on lately: a tiny update: so on my homepage here, i like to inline my images as base64 encoded strings rather than manage a bunch of loose externally linked files. when you do this, you end up with each image asset being ~50% more data. but my pixel drawings are so tiny anyways, it's only a kb or two extra. after working on my maid outfit in the previous update, i realized i could trim the base64 string length on all my outfit sprites by almost 40%. previously, my character spritesheets had frames for all eight directions. but the right-moving directions were just duplicated and mirrored from the left-moving ones. so i could just take out all the rightward frames and write the flipping into the movement logic instead. it would take only a few more extra lines of code to replace huge chunks of the base64 strings for multiple outfits. i had already considered doing this last year but i was too lazy to change the code or i had other stuff i wanted to work on. but seeing how much space the (now) 3 outfits were taking up in the html doc, i decided that it had to be done ^-^ i also took the opportunity to rewrite the movement and remove the trig calculations for the angles so that it just uses simple vector arithmetic. i had the trigonometry in there because that's just how i learned to do this kind of movement from seeing other people do it. but i always hated trigonometry in school. so gtfo my page (๑>ᴗ<๑) the walking angles now are less precisely calculated but it was overkill for the type of animation i'm doing anyways and not noticeable in any meaningful way. and, technically, without the trig, it's using less compute. but with what i'm doing, it's such a small difference that it's unmeasurable anyways. it's just nice to think about and maybe (not really) a tiny courtesy to visitors using potato computers ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ i also made the outfits persist across refreshes/restarts by storing the selection in your browser's localstorage. made sense now that there's more than 2 outfits to choose from. --- okay, that's all for now. see you here again in a month or so!

the pain in my shoulder finally cleared up and i'm back to normal now, yay ^-^ hopefully i can go more than a few months now before another major health disruption (╥_╥) i'll try to be better at staying on top of things like stress management going forward but old bad habits are hard to break. --- my isp was having issues last week but i didn't really mind the downtime. i've been seeing an increasing amount people i follow talk about tech burn out lately. see ky's piece about the loss of an ideal and brit's post about stuckness. although they're talking more about the current state of working in tech, many of the points about feeling like a hollowing out of humanity is happening (largely due to llms) is something i feel applies to many things these days, especially the internet. i suppose some horrible people like epstein pal, richard dawkins, are content that the breakthroughs in ai psychosis have given them a simulacrum girlfriend/boyfriend but that black mirror life is just not for me. though, it makes a lot of sense that the guy who had his humanist award revoked can't tell the difference between a human and an llm ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ so, as the internet grows more hollow, i feel less need to check it. i didn't miss it while it was down. i just went back to working on my homeserver some more. i still haven't migrated all my data into it yet. it's a slow process of sifting through everything but made even slower with all the distractions (a lot of the times, not even good distractions) that the internet has to offer (⌒_⌒;) i did some more reorganizing of my system structure. i'm constantly learning new things about linux and the hardware so i'm figuring out better ways to do things as i go. i decided to move the os from the micro sd card to an msata ssd for better durability since i'm always reading about how raspberry pi micro sd cards keep dying on people and i got paranoid about it. it was a nice exercise to restore my os onto a new drive with my backup os image. it was pretty easy and now i'm more comfortable about putting all my stuff on my homeserver. i wrote a little script to make a new backup image of the os every once in a while ദ്ദി( ˶^ᗜ^˶ ) --- i didn't do much on my homepage since last time. just a little housekeeping and i added some more links to the various link sections. i've been trying to link back to people who are linking to me but since i don't use analytics tracking on my page, i just mostly find people by chance and wandering through webrings (⌒_⌒;) if you're linking to me and you don't see a link to you on my page, you can let me know. i prefer linking to personal homepages (real humans) rather than linktree pages and newsletter platforms which can kind of be internet dead ends. --- things in general are pretty much unchanged here. even though my shoulder has healed, i'm still feeling exhausted by home life and the state of the world. those aches and pains are persistent.

this week, i'm nursing a neck/shoulder injury (╥_╥) i don't know what happened or how i got it. it just started hurting over the weekend. maybe it's from the exercising i've been doing or sleeping in a weird position due to tossing and turning all night from the daily stress dealing with my parents. maybe it's from sustained bad computer posture. whatever it is, it's made it kind of hard to sit to write and code or do much of anything for the past few days. i didn't get much done over the past two weeks. i found some weird ios rendering bug with my homepage blog's xerox filter so i spent a few days figuring it out and fixing it. from what i can tell, ios webkit changed something and stopped rendering the page if the filter is applied over a large area. so i had to apply the filter more selectively. that fixed it for ios browsers but then chrome on m3+i chips macos started to be a bit more buggy (￢_￢;) sorry chrome users. firefox-based browsers never had any problems before or after though! so i decided to switch the default look to the un-xeroxed text and you can turn on xerox if you browser isn't picky and you're adventurous. it's more important that the content loads reliably everywhere and the fancy stuff can be extra. i really hope we're not heading back to the internet era of having to make different versions of the same webpage for different browsers in order to do fun things ( ⸝⸝•̀ - •́⸝⸝) my blog page was also getting quite long after blogging regularly for the past couple years so that probably exacerbated the xerox filter issue by making the page super long. so i split each year of entries into their own pages. this means all my previously shared permalinks on social media are broken. oh well, i feel like social platforms/posts are ephemeral by nature anyways so no big deal ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ those links will still take you to the front page of the blog, just not the actual entry. since i split it into years, i also had to redesign the dropdown menu and add some pagination links at the bottom of each page. at least now you don't have to load the whole archive onto a single page when you go to the blog (and, honestly, makes it much easier for me to edit and maintain ^-^) this had me rewriting a lot of the css on the flat pages so i also used it as an opportunity to organize and simplify things a bit more. i even caught some typos that have been in there for months oops. luckily html and css is pretty forgiving and things kept working anyways. --- i'll have to end this update here. so many other things are breaking around me, besides my body and my homepage. like things and people in my house and the world and society in general. but it's too exhausting to write about when i just want to go lie down to stop my shoulder from screaming at me.

for the last couple weeks, i've been tied up with parents stuff (╥_╥) just random health and general issues kept popping up for them non-stop. things have settled down now but i haven't had much time to mess around on my computers. i'm not really even sure what to write about this week but i feel like i should write something just so i don't break the habit ^-^ maybe it's partially my lack of sleep lately due to my parents, but i've been feeling extra exhausted that another war has broken out in the time since my last post. i hate it. it feels like a hopelessly endless cycle of more suffering, more destruction. it's made even more intolerable by the assholes in charge of it. it just makes me feel like there's no point in doing anything in this world if we're all just trapped in this neverending loop where nothing gets better. but the stubborn part of me feels the need to keep going no matter what. even if it's just to irritate the powers that want everyone to become apathetic and complacent. it's just so fucked up that the world is still fighting wars in the year 2026 when we probably have more knowledge and technology than ever to figure out peaceful solutions. but some people just won't allow for it to ever happen. whether it's driven by greed or ego or hate or sheer stupidity, so much human ingenuity and energy is wasted building anti-human machines and deadlier weapons instead. all so warmongers can generate their cringe slopaganda and cosplay as tough guys committing real war crimes with their vibe warring. --- since last time, on my homeserver, i've added: * nginx proxy manager to give my lan services easy to remember urls * netviel for a nice web ui to search my notmuch email index when i don't have a cli * notediscovery for a web ui to write and manage my notes (organizes my folder of of markdown notes and replaces apple's notes app) * i also swapped out freshrss for miniflux instead as the latter works much better for me and my more minimalist style now i think i've got everything i want installed. i still need to move the majority of my data in. but before i do that, i've been doing some administrative tasks like consolidating all my working notes that i've written down from scouring forums and website tutorials. i'm working on writing out documentation for my whole system. just in case i need to remember various commands and how to restore every piece of it if something breaks or i want to upgrade to new hardware at some point if hardware is ever reasonably affordable again (￢_￢;) not very exciting work but good for keeping my mind from crashing out over all the simultaneous global horrors. --- over here on my homepage, i made some small layout adjustments and fixes on the flat pages. i also updated my uses page since my homeserver has altered my setup a lot! i also added some new people the blogroll and button links section. like i said, i didn't have much computer time this week. so that's all i managed to accomplish. --- sorry if the title of this entry made you think it was going to be review of the pt anderson film rather than a literal description of my life right now (๑>ᴗ<๑) i did see the movie a while ago and thought it was good and pretty relevant to the current times we're living through. but i don't have much to say about it that i haven't said in other ways on other topics ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ another film i watched just the other day was good luck, have fun, don't die. it was quite entertaining and full of dark comedy even if it's maybe a bit heavyhanded in delivering its message. though i suspect that the lack of subtlety is somewhat intentional since it's about societal and reality collapse due to social media, ai, brainrot, etc. maybe it's probably trying to reach people who have already offloaded a lot of their reasoning ability and media literacy to the machines so it's attempting to speak in their language. i think that's also probably why it's lit and shot to look like the artificial high-contrast style that ai imagery (particularly sci fi stuff) is known for (that it ripped from movie cinematography to being with.) and then the costume and prop design mimics the inconsistent/illogical generic garbage style that has become recognizable as ai slop aesthetic. it even has the piss filter tinged color-grading (╥_╥) i didn't know much about the movie when i went into it so i don't know if that was all intentional but i thought the visuals made a lot of sense with the story. afterwards, i had to go look up if parts of the film were actually ai generated. but the director, gore verbinski, is pretty clear about his feelings on ai (if it wasn't already clear enough in the story of the film): "Why is AI helping me write a song or tell a story? I don't want it to breathe or fuck for me; I want it to solve cancer." worth watching if you want to cry-laugh about the current state of the world. maybe even more worth watching if you're stuck bed-rotting in the doomscroll or if you feel yourself slipping into ai psychosis.

i don't have much to write about this time in terms of homepage updates ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ ive only made some small edits here and there like new links to other people, etc. most of my time for the past couple weeks has been spent on working on my homeserver. i've really been enjoying the process of finding all the pieces and trying not to make catastrophic mistakes that require me to start all over again. so far so good. as of right now, i have: jellyfin for my movies, tv, and music library; browsersync for website testing over lan; komga for my ebooks and manga library; immich for my photo library; notmuch for my email archive; and borg for backups to my second ssd. i still need to add an rss reader (i'm thinking probably freshrss but i'm looking to see if there are other options.) and maybe find another thing to read my email archive with. notmuch is good for quick searching but not so great for reading (⌒_⌒;) so my setup is pi os on the sd card and then all my data and files on one of the ssds with borg backing that drive up to a second ssd a couple times a week. i was able to write a simple script so i can run a single command on boot up to decrypt both the ssds and then start all my services ^-^ my goal is to centralize all my computer stuff on this lan-only homeserver machine and not have things spread out over my various computers/tablet/phone. i made some samba shared folders so i will be able get to everything i need over the lan ^-^ now i can treat my computers as interchangeable client machines. that's the basic skeleton. i have a lot of files and data to migrate and organize. i think this will probably be the most time-consuming part of this project. it also doesn't help that i keep getting distracted by things in my archives that i haven't looked at in a long time. like reading and getting sentimental about old emails from friends from 15 years ago (╥ ᴗ ╥) the feeling of time passing can be quite intense. --- i've been pretty checked out of the world while working on the server and haven't scrolled social media at all. i kind of have the worst personality type for a "user" or a "consumer." it's easy for me to get obsessed with things and be really into them for a while but after i feel like they've run their course, i can just as easily step away from them. i don't really have the addictive personality that everything seems to be trying to prey on these days with the gamifying and gamblifying of every product. maybe my dopamine receptors are broken ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe that's why i'm not really into gaming that much. so with things like social media, it's hard for me to start using it again if i've decided i've had enough of the experience. i had a pretty offline january and now it's half way through february and i still have no desire to log on. maybe this will be a whole offline year. i've noticed that i'm less irritated during the day without all the constant slop and regurgitated noise from the screens. it's made it a bit easier to manage my parents' frustrating reality without my mood being dragged down all the time. it's freed up time and mental space to focus on more local things (and not just my computer local area network (⌒_⌒;)) and i'm starting to feel motivated to do healthier things for myself instead of being depressed about things that i have no power over. i just ordered a new yoga mat to replace my old one that's falling apart because i want to start working out again. i probably do need to get a bit more fit to survive the dystopia this world is quickly transforming into (╥_╥)

2025 is finally gone. yay. but it still had to slap me in the face one last time on its way out. i got vertigo for christmas and i don't mean a copy of the 1958 hitchcock film (╥_╥) i mean benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (bppv) and it was/is a nightmare. i self-diagnosed myself so don't take anything i write here as medical advice, it could be totally wrong. because it's christmastime and hospitals are backed up with the h3n2 mutant superflu and with my dad's condition being what it is, i wasn't left with many good options than to do what i could on my own. so, again, this is not medical advice, i don't have any medical training beyond the things i've learned from being a caregiver for many years. if you have a serious injury, you should seek real medical help. i'm just some random person writing about this in my diary here. --- i woke up monday morning and the whole room was spinning. i initially just thought it was a bit of sleepy disorientation. but then i tried to stand up and the whole room went upside-down and i fell back onto my bed. i wanted to throw up. closing my eyes didn't help. even though i was laying on my bed, i still felt like i was falling. after a couple minutes of being frozen in place, things stabilized. i picked up my phone and called my mom upstairs. i told her i couldn't move and that she would have to make breakfast for dad and get him through his usual routine (toileting, etc.) i felt so bad (physically and emotionally.) it was the realization of my fear of being totally incapacitated and not being able to do anything for them. she kept asking if i needed to go to the hospital or an ambulance but i said to wait and maybe i could sleep it off if she could do what she could with dad. at that point i started getting intense chills so i crawled back under my covers but then i started overheating and sweating like crazy. i was shaking and my teeth were rattling. that little movement of curling up into bed made everything spin again. i was getting overloaded with conflicting signals and my brain hurt and my stomach was churning and i just kind of semi-passed out for a little while. i stayed like that for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. my mom kept checking on me and i kept saying i just wanted to stay still. when i regained full consciousness, the room wasn't spinning so i thought it had passed and i tried to get up. but as soon as i sat up, everything went crazy again. i got back into the sleeping position i woke up in and waited for everything to settle. i called my mom and told her i had to rest for the whole day. i realized that as long as i didn't move my head, things seemed fine, almost normal. i slowly reached for my phone and started looking up all my symptoms like you're not supposed to do. i ruled out viral infections like the flu and covid since i didn't have any other symptoms of those and also i haven't been in any public gatherings for weeks. i've had those and this felt very different. i've never had vertigo before but i know people who have and it was feeling like how it's been described to me. so i spent a couple hours laying there learning about the crystals in your inner ear that can get dislodged and end up in your semicircular canals to totally fuck up your life. i learned about the posterior canal being the most commonly affected area for bppv and the dix-hallpike test. i did the test on myself. it was scary to do the first time since it intentionally triggers the vertigo and i didn't know how bad it would be. i didn't want to vomit (a lot these videos suggest having a bucket nearby.) but i got through it and it seemed to indicate positive. then i learned about the epley maneuver which is a sequence of positions that moves the crystals out of the canals. this also triggers the symptoms when performed so i just focused up and got through it as well. surprisingly, i immediately felt slightly better afterwards. i treated the right side since that was what was testing the most strongly but then the right side pretty much cleared up after a couple days but the left side was still causing symptoms. so i've been repeating the maneuver for the left. things are getting better. currently, i still have some residual dizziness but it's manageable. i also have to walk super slow to not trigger any vertigo. if i'm staying perfectly still and keeping my head level, things mostly feel normal. that's how i'm writing this entry. i haven't been able to eat much for days, mostly just trying to stay hydrated. i was finally able to shower and wash my hair on the third day after two days of feeling gross. i don't know what exactly triggered the bppv. the day before it started, i banged my head on a cabinet door that my mom left open so maybe i got a mild concussion ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ or maybe my dependence on wearing active noise canceling headphones overnight to sleep through my dad's nighttime wandering has finally caught up with me (there is anecdotal evidence that sustained overexposure to anc vibrations can cause bppv.) i don't know, those are just my theories. i'll see how things go over the next week and if there's no more improvement, i'll consult a physical therapist to make sure i've not misdiagnosed myself and i don't have a brain tumor or something. i'm just going to try to get as much rest as possible but it's proving to be a challenge if i can no longer use my headphones to get through my dad's dementia at night. that's on top of having to sleep in the most uncomfortable semi-upright position to keep the crystals from falling back. thankfully my dad was pretty subdued on day one and two so my mom was able to handle him by herself. but on day three, his hallucinations flared up (probably because he sensed a change in the environment with me not being very present for a couple days) and he started acting out and i had to step in which caused a few super dizzy episodes for me. --- i was hoping to start off 2026 on a good note with some fun new additions i've been working on for my homepage but i guess everything is on hold for now while i tend to my new hobby of moving around ear crystals. hopefully this doesn't foreshadow another bad year to come (╥_╥) then again, all the time i've spent the past week sitting in silence and stillness hasn't been all that terrible of an experience. it was quite peaceful once the room stopped spinning. if the foreshadowing means i'll be doing more of that peacefulness instead of falling into the toxic internet attention sucking traps, then it might be something to look forward to.

a couple weeks ago, a post from the cyberdeck subreddit popped up in my rss reader showing off a retro-computer terminal themed social website called cyberspace.online. it touted a web 1.0 vibes social media with no ai, no video, no algorithm, no ads, no crypto, etc etc. which sounded good to my ears since i complain about all those things regularly on here. of course, i've heard that story before and have been disappointed many times when it turns out to be just empty marketing tactics. but it caught me while i was procrastinating from life so i made an account (there weren't many users yet, i was user #27.) i had to waive my rule of not joining any feed-based sites that don't provide bare minimum profile rss feeds. if you've been reading this blog for a while, you know i'm very tired of walled gardens and closed ecosystems. see my recent linux and hardware posts. even this very homepage was born out of the desire to exist on the open web instead of closed systems (and it's why i try to stick to using open standards like basic html, css, js, rss, openpgp, etc to make everything here.) i don't enjoy feeling like all the time and energy i'm expending online is trapped in and limited to one specific closed place that i have no real control over. one recent egregious example for me was another platform i was on for many years that semi-abruptly turned from a nice place for talking to internet-building people to now a full-on crypto casino. it's like if a local nightclub that brought in good bands and a cool clientele slowly kept adding slot machines by the bathroom area until the machines spilled out into the main space and the noise of slot machines drowned out all the music/conversation and only the only people left in the place were gambling addicts, grifters, and in-denial nostalgists (╥_╥) sigh, another profile with years of posts and connections in the trash heap. in hindsight, i should seen the red flags since that platform never offered native rss support (⌒_⌒;) anyways, back to cyberspace. cyberspace is made by someone that goes by the name _genghis_khan_ and, as the faq explains, is more of an art project than a commercial project at this point. i've been enjoying it. i love that it's terminal themed and text-focused. other things in this genre include itter.sh, a real terminal based social feed that you ssh into. i'm also @elle on there but i don't use it. again, no rss. there is also tuitter which is currently in closed beta. but cyberspace being a regular browser based platform that is just styled to look like tui makes it easier for the average user to get into it (so maybe it's more like the text-based subreply but styled for cyberpunks.) it has markdown and the codeblock formatting is handy for drawing ascii art. if you couldn't tell by a lot of the parts of my homepage, i love ascii art and kaomojis (cyberspace has limited image posting but i prefer not to use it.) it doesn't have likes or up/downvotes, or really any of the annoying dopamine-inducing clout metrics of mainstream unhealthy social media. it does have follower counts, which i could do without. there are chat rooms called circ and direct messages called c-mail. you can also navigate it with just your keyboard ^-^ it doesn't have fancy things like federation/decentralization, portable social graph, or even encryption (i assume khan can read everything everyone writes in the feed, notes, circ, and c-mail.) some things are a bit buggy and there are some weird superficial quirks. for example, why does an anti-ai platform have a giant ai generated cyberdolphin as the hero image on the support page (๑>ᴗ<๑) i know many artists who would be immediately turned off by that and write the whole thing off. whenever i see pure ai slop imagery like that on something like a newsletter these days, it's an automatic skip because it's kind of become a universal signal for low effort. of course, there's no way to stop users from posting ai junk in the feed but i feel like the platform itself should avoid that stuff in order to set the example. besides, the site design is so beautiful with just the text, it's a shame to pollute it that way. the ui/ux of the site is very simple but in a nice way that's more about just talking to people. like on the old internet where you would wander into random chat rooms and see what was going on. it's a calm oasis in a very chaotic and overstimulating time on the web. because of the design and ethos behind it, it has attracted a particular type of person looking to escape the current social hellscape we live in. i've been meeting some interesting and fun people on there! is this sustainable as it grows? i don't know. i feel like i'm already seeing more of the familiar signs of the bad internet discourse creeping in now that it's reached 3000+ accounts. i've been an early user of a bunch of social platforms and communities that always ended up crashing out and dying from growth. maybe that's the natural progression of these things ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ given my experiences, i also expect that as the user count grows, khan will be receiving more and more inquiries from sleazy vcs and companies looking to capitalize. the centralized nature of the platform makes it vulnerable which is why modern platforms are trying all sorts of "can't be evil" decentralization mechanisms or just being fully open source. currently, cyberspace is supported by user donations but the cost of scaling could get so out of control that it's just less headache for khan to take on funding partners or even cash out and exit. remember the slow motion heartbreak of david karp selling tumblr? on the $1.1 billion sale to yahoo, he loudly proclaimed "we're not turning purple," suggesting that tumblr would not be changed by yahoo. well, a palette swap was the least of tumblr's worries as we're still watching it suffer indignity after indignity to this day in its zombie form. hopefully the delete account button will be built before this happens to cyberspace (⌒_⌒;) in the meantime, i'll try to enjoy the fun days while they last. i still maintain that the real web 1.0 experience is simply just having a personal homepage and an email address. --- my field trip to cyberspace took up a lot of time the past couple weeks! since i've been avoiding social in general a lot lately, diving back into it via cyberspace brought up a lot of bubbling thoughts about these kinds of social spaces, as evidenced by the wall of text above (*~*) so, for homepage updates, i didn't make any major changes this time around. mainly just some tidying and small additions: * cleaned up some messy html * updated the time machine with some more recent snapshots * added some more blogging friends to the blogroll feed

things have been pretty rough lately. my dad continues to get worse. every time i think it can't possibly get much worse than this, it gets much worse (╥_╥) things he could still sort of do a few months ago like dressing himself or using the bathroom are totally gone now. he's perpetually in a confused and frightened state because he doesn't know where he is or who anyone is or what he's doing. my mom also had another surgery last week because of her osteoperosis so it's been extra hectic at home while she recovers. negative thoughts and feelings are probably creeping into my mind more than usual as i haven't had much sleep for the past couple weeks. i am not doing very well on my 2025 goals! at least i've somewhat achieved the goal that those goals were supposed to help with, which is staying off social ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ that just happened naturally because i no longer have the time or energy to spend in those online spaces. so maybe having to constantly clean up messes and accidents around the house all day is actually a good thing? --- as a result of having very limited time, i've only been able to do low hanging fruit projects around this homepage. this week, i've been fleshing out my /uses page more. if you've been following along with this blog, you'll know i've become more of a linux person lately and this has changed my computing set up a lot! (see last several posts for reasoning and other details.) i can't decide how much detail i should include with each item. some uses pages explain why they use each thing and some are just lists. i'm not sure which i prefer. but even the lists without context still paint a portrait of the user through the connections being made with their specific selections (sometimes) and that's why i personally like looking at them. in this update, i mainly just added links to many of the things i use and also made a simple indicator system for things that are on the way out or things that i'm uncertain about. i'm considering adding a sentence or two to explain why i use each thing. is anyone even interested in that? i have no idea. i think most uses pages are just for computer stuff but while i was looking around for ideas, i saw some people also include other things as well, like analog tools and furniture. i like how localghost included her skincare/makeup products ^-^ i was tempted to add that to mine too. but i don't want to fall into the trap of doing inventory of everything i have. i already went through that phase once in my life (๑>ᴗ<๑) i think i'll keep it limited to things related to my computer life for now. at least until i'm happy with how the technology section is presented. --- i've been continuing to de-apple my life and playing with my framework and linux. one big project i've been putting off is reformatting my external ssd so that it works with linux. currently it's formatted in apple's proprietary apfs format(encrypted) which i guess is another way to keep people locked in their ecosystem ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ before i do that i also have another big project which is to export and reorganize my photo library outside of apple's photos app. this is probably a much bigger project as i have hundreds of thousands of photos because i used to be obsessive about photography. it's a daunting task. but i think it'll feel so good to not have my photos chained to one platform! i'm also still learning neovim. i'm basically picking things up as i go. this week, i learned how to use iabbrev so i can set automatic text replacements for my most-used kaomojis. i also learned how to tab multiple lines of text using the triangle brackets (⌒_⌒;) it's very different from what i'm used to with text editors but also quite fun. it feels like i'm playing with an alien computer. --- since i've been hyping up framework a lot lately, i should mention the backlash it's been getting the past few days and my feelings of disappointment with them. i had just read my friend paul's blog post about companies trying to both-sides things to avoid moral responsiblity (his post was in response to a different backlash last week with the bluesky ceo.) i share paul's opinion that this doesn't work at all because it only gives cover and credibility to bad faith actors which allows their toxic narratives to spread and harm people. but the day after reading paul's post, framework caught a bad case of both-sideism (╥_╥) users called out the company on the framework forum for promoting and financially supporting omarchy and hyprland which are both led by controversial people, particularly omarchy's dhh who holds horrendous views about immigrants, minorities, trans people, and probably lots of other stuff i'm not even aware of. hyprland's creator/maintainer, vaxry, also has a trail of bad discord posts and questionable blog posts, though it seems like he's cooled down recently? unlike dhh, he's quite young so i hope his brain has had some time to develop more and he has not joined the permanently aggrieved tech narcissists club. framework's ceo, nirav, responded by saying he wanted framework to be a neutral big tent company focused on open source adoption. while this sounds nice on paper, it doesn't really work in reality. this whole thing seems to be pushing people out of the tent. people who turned to framework because they were tired of giving their money to spineless big tech companies who present bigoted facists with gold gifts, who take down community support apps like iceblock. look at all the people on the framework forum understandably saying they're canceling their orders and no longer recommending framework to friends. the whole thing is sad because i think framework's mission of repairable upgradeable computing is great and healthier than what we have now. but that mission is sabotaged if people start suspecting that your judgment is too poor to lead such a mission or, worse, you'll be sending gold gifts to facists too once your company has the profited enough from its users. am i going to smash my framework computer now? no, i still like it even if i agree all the criticisms are valid and i'm disappointed. nirav's response so far was a misstep but hopefully they can still course correct. he was smart to log off after his initial response rather than to continue to post through it and dig a deeper hole and then start banning people like the bluesky situation. to framework's credit, they've left all the complaint posts up while diligently removing the expected racist and transphobic posts that this topic attracted. i hope they don't disappoint me even more but given the world now, disappointment seems to be the default mode these days so i'm braced for it. look, i'm still using many of my apple products even after all my complaints about them (⌒_⌒;) i'm using hyprland for the time being though maybe i'll check out niri or something else soon. with open source software, i have somewhat less worry about my money going to bad causes because it's free. i went through a period of time when i was trying so hard to be ethical in all aspects of my life. it got to the point where i was sewing my own clothes and making my own skincare products. but then you start thinking about where the raw materials came from because i didn't grow the cotton or press the oils myself. it's like the saying goes: there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. this is the unfortunate imperfect reality we're forced to exist in. all you can really do is pick the option of least harm and i think framework is still doing better than other options out there. not me looking up youtube tutorials for how to make a cpu because the american government owns part of intel now (￢_￢;) --- i finished watching season 3 of alice in borderland and it was disappointing. season 1 and 2 were already a complete story anyways so this just felt like a netflix cash grab that added nothing. the worst part is probably how it ended like the ending of squid game where it seems to be the soft launch for an american remake so netflix can keep milking money out of the ip. i'm tired, boss.