So, uh. I spent something like twelve hours one day in July working on my website, sitting down right after breakfast and basically staying there for the rest of the day, and due to the fact that I can't sit in a chair like a normal human being (and also I'm not 25 anymore) I fucked up my hip pretty good. And that fucked up my knee even more--yes I have a fucked up knee from an old high school marching band injury--and next thing I knew I couldn't sit at my desk without being in agonizing pain. Honestly it's a good thing that I work from home because this would have been a goddamn nightmare if I'd had to be in an office; at least this way I could get up and move around from time to time.

I tried, briefly, a standing desk converter, but I've gotten so used to having a full-sized L-shaped desk that perching on a 30-inch-wide platform was a nightmare (never mind how godawful a mechanical keyboard sounds when elevated on a platform with no acoustics at all). I also tried a saddle-seat stool, which was a better idea; I can't sit with one leg folded under me that way, and I can't twist my ankles around in a way that fucks up my knee. I can't sit in that chair for more than four hours either, but going from that one in the morning to the regular one in the afternoon does seem to make a big difference.

But while I was trying all that out, I was still determined to work like a grown up from my desk and uh. My knee was not getting better. (I went to the doctor and got some x-rays taken, but that didn't prove anything.) And then, finally, I gave in and moved my ass to the couch.

I've been resisting just moving my laptop elsewhere because it's a 13" macbook and my desk is set up with two 24" monitors and that's a lot of screen real estate lost (and also the only way I stay in contact with my coworkers is by Slack and there's no universe in which I let Slack ding a notification at me every time there's a post so I do need to have it at least semi-visible). Fortunately I live in a town with a state university and they have a surplus auction house that's only about a twenty minute drive away, and a couple of weeks ago they finally had a stock of monitors for twenty-five bucks apiece. So I grabbed one of those, and a cheap monitor mount from Monoprice (easily my favorite cheap consumer electronics source right now), and with a spare USB hub and the lap desk I haven't really used in years I now have an extremely comfortable and surprisingly functional reclining desk setup on the couch.

It's not perfect--I'd prefer the desk be a little lower and it would be nice to get the laptop in a better position than just "perched on the edge of the coffee table"--but it's shockingly good. And after a week of working exclusively from the couch I was able to go back to my desk last week for the majority of the time.

It probably wasn't the best idea, to be honest; my knee is feeling twisted up again and I could even tell it was happening (which is helpful, at least, in confirming what I'm doing and maybe what might help me stop doing it in the future). And yeah, I'm pretty pissed that I probably really ought to buy a standing desk and all the related accessories. I like my giant desk, but I'm not paying $1,000 for an L-shaped standing desk. But I'm not going to be in pain half the time if I can avoid it, either.

Sorry for the relative radio silence; in my great hubris I decided to make a fully static website, the old-fashioned way we used to do things, and it turns out there's a reason we stopped doing that, and it's because it's annoying as hell to update. What do you mean I have to update every single page every time I want to add a new one? Never mind trying to write blog posts like someone who lives in the 21st century. So I'm working on feeding it into a static site generator, which is invisible on the frontend but is taking a long damn time on the back end while I learn modern templating schemes. (I mean. I'm very glad they exist, it's past time. It's just a lot.)

Not to mention the fact that one of those days where I hyperfocused and spent sixteen hours working on my webbed site fucked up my hip real good and now I can't actually sit at a desk for more than a couple of hours in one position without winding up in screaming pain. This seems, uh, not normal (along with the full-body aches I've been getting when the weather changes) so I've been trying to follow up with the doctor, but that is of course taking an eternity. So here I am, floating along in general frustration, hoping to make some progress on something soon.

(I am planning to work on translating my tweetfic into an archive here, at least. I haven't figured out exactly how I want to add it to ao3 yet, but I definitely want to play with it here.)

I've been rewatching Invisible Man and Darien vs Arnaud gets funnier the more bilingual people I know.

Darien: Then maybe you could teach me some Swiss douche.
Arnaud: ...excuse me?
Darien: That's your language, right?
Arnaud: That's Swiss *Deutsch*, Swiss German. I am Swiss French.
Darien: So you don't douche?
Arnaud: [giving him an injection] Little prick

(Also it turns out that Arnaud's brother was my original mental image for Peter Lukas, I just didn't remember it was him. Which works because Arnaud is absolutely a bargain-bin Elias who really wants to be some kind of evil mastermind but he just. can't. pull it off.

I have chosen to believe it's because Arnaud is trying to do this with science alone, not having noticed that evil supernatural fear entities are a) real and b) the way everyone else is managing to be evil masterminds.

The Agency is to the Web as the Magnus Institute is to the Eye (although Eberts is an avatar of the End) (death and taxes, you know).)

(The truly tragic thing about Invisible Man is just how many people there are in this show who would appreciate Elias's sense of humor.)