It's a gorgeous late summer October, the high for today is 83 but the humidity is low, the breeze is blowing, and the trees are just beginning to turn. It is a glorious time to take advantage of the fact that my current apartment complex is not wildly particular about how we use our balconies and do a little woodworking.

In my previous apartment, I had a huge balcony that was fully screened-in on all sides--closer to a three-season room than a balcony. I love fresh air, so as often as I could, I left the patio doors open and let the cat wander in and out as she liked. The new place, alas, has a more normal-sized balcony that is not screened in at all, and she was not thrilled to have her outdoor space removed.

My first thought was just to DIY some screening-in; a lot of places I've lived won't let you do that, but lots of balconies on this building have chicken wire or privacy screens or child netting hung on the railing, so that clearly wasn't an issue. Alas, I couldnt get it to work in a way I'd be comfortable with: there's just no place to attach anything to the wall without drilling into the brick, which I suspect would be a little too far. (Also, I don't have the tools for it and I don't wanna.)

Attempt two worked for a while: I got one of those pop-up doggy playpens that zips up on all sides and put it up against the screen door. Sofiya can wander outside as long as the door's open, and while she doesn't have a ton of space, she can get fresh air and watch the birds in the trees and the people (and cats! One of my neighbors takes hers for a walk on a leash) on the ground.

This was great--I even built a frame I could stick in the sliding door that I could put a cat flap in without cutting into the actual screen door--until yesterday, when somehow an extremely ambitious bird got into the playpen. Sofiya took it down in one pounce before I could coax it out again; fortunately she had her teeth removed before I adopted her so she didn't kill it, but unfortunately she did bring it inside. The bird was pretty smart and managed to get outside again fairly quickly, but she's still looking at the ceiling hoping that maybe she's just missed it. And I do not want to be doing that again, thank you.

So I've resorted to the proper solution: a DIY catio. Yesterday I went down to Home Depot and bought an armload of 1x2s and some screws, and today I'm building frames. The plan is to construct it out of square panels screwed together--it takes a little more wood than it might otherwise, but it should be more stable this way, and it'll be easier to disassemble and store for the winter or if I move. Plus, I could tuck it further over in the corner so I can actually get out onto the balcony without squeezing my way out through a 10" gap.

I am pathetically out of practice with hand tools, but there's something very satisfying about spending the morning with my grandpa's tape measure and my dad's ripsaw and a carpenter's pencil I got out of a stationery advent box, building something useful. I have no doubt that my grandpa would have thrown himself wholeheartedly into having cats for great-grandchildren, and my dad will be very pleased that I'm using the tools he gave me (and impressed I finally got around to the project; I definitely get the ADHD from him).

There has of course already been one bump in the road: I forgot how many inches are in eight feet and didn't have as much wood as I'd planned. (And of course I cut one piece to the wrong length, because you have to, as a sacrifice to Haephestus.) It'll be a little smaller than originally intended, but since it's a modular design, I should be able to add more height later on, and Sofiya isn't as interested in climbing on things as she is in being outside. Besides,I don't really want the landlord to think I'm building a structure, since that might need permits or something, so I want to keep it under the height of the balcony railing anyway.)

I took a break after cutting five of the ten boards I bought--like I said, I'm doing this with a hand saw I'm not very good at using--and I think it's probably a good idea to eat lunch before I go back to playing with sharp objects, but I think I'll be able to get at least a couple of panels done today, and hopefully the rest tomorrow. It would be really nice to finish a weekend project in a weekend for once.

It's been a hell of a few months for my little website. First I moved, which required (naturallyl) shutting down and moving the home server--we were down for probably three days altogether, because it took that long to find a place I could reach an outlet to plug in the power strip behind all the boxes. It took about three weeks to be thoroughly unpacked, and about two months to reach a state I could comfortably call "moved in," and the server didn't get much attention during that time.

Then it was ArchiveCon, which was a delight as usual but even though I didn't go to the conrunner's get-together this year it still takes a lot of energy. Not to mention the panel I wound up writing at the last minute (I have no defense for this, I'd been planning for it for a full year).

And then my hard drive decided to fail. The boot drive. On my server.

This is also indefensible on my part; I'd known it was an old drive, I'd known I was getting a ton of I/O errors, I should have been more prepared and I should have replaced it long ago. But I waited until it was actually dying, and I let it sit on my desk for three tense days while I waited for the replacement to arrive, hoping I'd be able to copy everything off it before it completely gave up. And then the new drive arrived, and I set up the copy, and I...copied the new, blank drive onto the old, dying one.

Yeah.

Fortunately, for the first time in human history or at least in my life, I had backups of everything--except, of course, my Home Assistant installation, which was undeniably the VM with the most pseronal/customized data on it.

Well, I'd been thinking about redoing it for a while anyway.

And then, of course, I had to spend all that time putting it back together, and then I had to get over it emotionally enough to write a blog post about it, and then I had to finish writing the blog post, and now it's October. On the plus side, my Home Assistant installation is looking better than ever. And I have a better backup system.

It has been one fucking hell of a month, and I am trying to remind myself of that so I stop collapsing in despair over how useless I am.

First, the weather: all through March it did the thing March in Wisconsin is known to do, going from nearly 70 degrees and gorgeous to fucking blizzards with no regard for things like "astronomical spring." I am, in fact, a houseplant with more complicated emotions, and my apartment gets very little natural light, and I am well known for finding the outdoors inconvenient at the best of times, so I have unsurprisingly been wilting.

Speaking of which, I finally turned down my lease renewal to move to a new place. I don't hate this place, and the increase is a lot but not technically more than I can afford, but it is on the opposite side of town from my friend (...I keep saying friends but I do only have one person I see regularly) and everywhere I want to go, and more importantly, it gets no natural light. Like, at all. It's incredibly depressing.

I did find a place that sounded too good to be true - $400 cheaper rent, the second floor of an old house (I love living in old houses, okay), within two blocks of the queer bookstore and no pet rent. And then I ran into the clause in the lease where the landlord can give you ten days to get rid of any pet they deem to be disruptive and I decided I'd better ask what "disruptive" meant. Turns out "likes to meow to let me know where she is" is too disruptive and also I'm an inconsiderate asshole for even looking at the apartment with a cat like that, so okay, too good to be true after all. I've settled on a place that's more expensive and a little further away (although still less than two miles and an easy bike away from the queer bookstore) but that I used to long to live in the last time I lived in Madison, more than a decade ago, when this complex was owned by a shitty landlord. So I'm feeling optimistic there, at least.

The more I think about it, the more I think I'd like to stop using the second bedroom as an "office" and start using it as a dedicated craft room. I don't have the kind of job or the kind of personality where sitting in one room for eight hours a day is productive, so the office winds up being both "the place I have to drag myself to first thing in the morning" and "the place where my computer and most of my toys are," which is not a fun combination. At the same time I'm feeling more and more overwhelmed sometimes by how much I'm relying on screens to occupy enough brain space to keep me from going insane; I'd love to go back to having one day a week where I just don't look at screens, although that sounds terrifying, and having a room with no computers in it would help. (I mean yes, my bedroom doesn't have any computers in it, unless you count the Chromecast, but I've gotten pretty good at the whole "the bedroom is for sleeping" sleep hygiene thing, and I don't want to break that down entirely.) So I'm doing my floorplan fiddling with that in mind: Craft room, maybe study, but not office.

(I'd also kind of like to replace my computer desk with a sit-stand desk and I'm really liking the idea of using something like that in the living room for a variety of purposes, but I haven't convinced myself enough yet to pull the trigger on the $800 purchase, so.)

At least I was doing that until yesterday when my boss sprang on us that we've all been reclassified as non-exempt, which technically is fine (we're support, but we're not the kind of support who can do anything useful when enough of the system goes down to qualify as an emergency) except this is the latest in a long series of decisions that seem determined to turn us into call center support, which is 1) not what I was hired to do, 2) not a job I would apply for today, and 3) not a job I would accept if offered. So job-hunting again, only this time the tech industry is in an even worse place than it was the last time a job drove me to madness, so no quitting without something else lined up.

In between all of this my parents moved out of my childhood home, FINALLY, and the week after I went down to visit them my cat got sick. Like, call the emergency vet at 11:30pm sick. (The emergency vet did not think she needed to go to an ER, and they were right, so that's a relief, but god.) Around $1,000 and a week later, it appears that she had an attack of IBD brought on by a change of food followed by the stress of me leaving her alone for ONE NIGHT. This is throwing a serious wrench into my plans to travel for ArCon in June, although at least by then I'll be close enough to have someone she knows who can look in on her a couple of times. And we will be sticking with the food that does not cause her intestinal distress, even if she doesn't seem to like it all that much. Sorry, hon, we all have to make sacrifices.

Anyway as I said on twitter, I really think there ought to be some kind of cosmic law where at least one of the trio of job, home, and health of your household should have to be stable at once, this is Too Much.

I've been binge-watching horror movies again as a way to distract my brain from being horrible, so it's time for a recap of some of the more memorable ones I've seen in the past couple of weeks.

Night Swim

This movie has such Stephen King vibes, between the haunted swimming pool, the middle-class family with working-class roots, the fact that the main character is a baseball player fercrissakes. The side character who's a racist stereotype, albeit not the most offensive racist stereotype she could be; the way it alllllmost has something to say about learning to live with a disability but chickens out at the end. All of which is to say that how you feel about this movie will depend entirely on how you feel about early 90s Stephen King adaptations: if you have enjoyed not just Misery and Children of the Corn but Christine and The Running Man, you'll probably have as much fun with this as I did. It's not great but it made me feel like I was a thirteen year old renting the scariest movies the clerk would let me get away with for a summer weekend.

Noroi: The Curse

This was one of those movies I knew was going to be so much my jam that I put off watching it for a long time and fortunately I was right and it was terrific. I love a good mockumentary and this one was great, just the right degree of cheesy shock editing, lots of creepiness, and nothing that ever felt out of bounds for found footage (which, I have realized, is much easier to do with mockumentary than with Blair Witch-style found footage, which is probably why I prefer the former to the latter). (I've been on a found footage kick lately, by which I mean for the past year somehow.)

Wilderness

One of my other favorite subgenres of horror is "people lost in the wilderness," so naturally this one cropped up several times, but I'd put off watching it because it didn't seem to be exactly what I prefer (more on the accidental/animal attack side of disaster than the Most Dangerous Game side). I was right, but it was enjoyable anyway - kind of a spinoff of the concept of Lord of the Flies, a group of boys from a youth detention centre in England are taken out for a weekend of camping after they've bullied one boy into killing himself (it's implied they're all city kids so this is a punishment); shit goes haywire. One of those British movies filmed on tape so it looks much, much older than 2006, and featuring Sean Pertwee as the detention officer! (I love a surprise Pertwee.)

Infinity Pool

I remember seeing trailers for this on YouTube and being mildly offended that they were running a three-minute trailer as a YouTube ad, so even though it looked interesting I was trying not to be interested. This was pretty solid: not groundbreaking, but a good use of the doppelganger trope, a good use of obnoxious entitled rich people, and plenty of identity horror that edges into body horror with how graphic some of the violence gets. Good call on the totally fictional southeast Asian island nation (although it would have to be, given the mechanism the movie hinges on). (I'd go into more detail but actually having the mechanism be a total surprise did a lot for the pacing of the first half, and this is a long movie, so I'd hate to deprive you of that.)

The Bay

Another high-quality mockumentary, this one about an environmental disaster that manifests as a truly disgusting plague and also features what has turned out to be the most accurate depiction of how the government handles a plague that I've seen in a movie. It's essentially Jaws with parasites, complete with a mayor you can't wait to see get eaten. There's the full range of horror in this one: the creepy abandoned hospital with the one doctor's increasingly frantic calls to the CDC; the chaos of mass panic in the middle of a public event; body horror from the parasites; psychological horror from the subplot with the cops (which...damn, that is going to live with me for a while). Strong recommendation, I'm really not sure why this one is so obscure.

Would You Rather

Yeah, yeah, look I was browsing Tubi and I wanted something mindless. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this, actually; 90% of that is probably down to Jeffrey Combs having the time of his life as Discount Jigsaw. The acting overall is surprisingly good for this genre of early 2010s horror, actually; I also enjoyed all the main characters and was genuinely disappointed to lose everyone who died after the first forty minutes. The ending is pointlessly mean and not even in a way that's designed to maximize guilt, which is kind of a letdown after an entire movie that is 100% about making people do horrible things to themselves and other people.

....I've made the mistake of working backwards again, and now I've gotten to a good stretch, so I'll leave off there. This feels like a pretty poor return on investment for how many movies I've watched in the past two weeks, but to be fair most of those were whatever Tubi decided to autoplay, which is...certainly a selection.

Look. I'm not going to blame it all on Google shutting down Google Play Music, a lot of other things happened in 2020, but rounding out the year by losing that easy, streamlined access to my music collection (a messy, massive thing built over decades, starting with my very first CD ripper and Napster) did not help my mental health. And I've been struggling to find a replacement ever since.

Play Music was so simple: my entire music collection, with recently played or newly added items at the top, easy playlist creation, and a convenient "I dunno, just shuffle everything" button. And once that went away, it was weirdly difficult to find a drop-in replacement. WinAmp hasn't been good software in a decade or more, and just when I started to get MusicBee doing 90% of what I wanted it to (still couldn't play from my phone, but I was managing with streaming from my computer to my speakers) I switched to Linux and had to start all over again.

You think the Windows music player ecosystem is unfortunate? Jesus christ you should see what it looks like on Linux. I cannot find a single player that can handle a large library, playlists, and shuffle-all, and also looks like it was developed sometime in this millennium. I was settling for Clementine for a while; although old, it's pretty full-featured and it worked. I couldn't stream to my Google Home speakers, but I could have music while I worked, and that covered me 90% of the time. Sure, I had to switch back to my personal computer from my work computer just to pause or change tracks, but I managed.

At least, I thought I was managing. See, I couldn't find anything that worked comfortably from my phone, which is one of the reasons I even got a goddamn smartphone in the first place. Playing music on your phone is so seamless; it's just there. But I refuse to pay for a music streaming service to listen to music I already paid for, and besides, sometimes I like to be able to do things without needing internet access. So I just...didn't listen to music as often. Always in the car, unless I was listening to a podcast, but hardly at all just hanging around at home. And since I started working from home, that's basically all the time.

Well, it turns out the magic solution has existed all this time, it's just weirdly opaque and hidden behind the fact that technically it's designed for hardware that isn't being manufactured any more. Yes, it's the Logictech Media Server, an open-source continuation of Logitech's verison of Google Play Music (that, let's face it, Google probably ripped off in the first place) for their now-defunct Squeezebox smart speakers.

Now, the problem with this is similar to the problem I had trying to figure out mpd, which is apparently what everyone uses on Linux: it's a multi-part system, and as such the core piece works incredibly well and is very well supported but any given client is probably a one-person project and is liable to be dropped at any moment. Fortunately the LMS has its own client built in, in the form of a web player, and with a mobile-friendly skin it's perfectly useable on my phone.

...actually "perfectly useable" is damning with faint praise; I can see my playlist, I can browse my whole library, I can save and edit playlists, I can pull up the song that's currently playing and add it to a playlist, I can hit "shuffle all and don't stop until I turn it off," I can do everything I used to do on Google Play Music. And I can do it all with my own music collection, on my own computer, and the only internet connection I require is a functional router to connect to the local network. Add in the Chromecast bridge plugin and I can play it all on my Google Home speakers. I'm currently listening to "Beauty Mark" from Rufus Wainwright's self-titled album, an artist I'd forgotten existed but am delighted to be reminded of.

Plus, it all integrates with Home Assistant. I could start playing music to wake myself up in the morning again! I used to do this every day until Google Play Music broke and I couldn't figure out a replacement. God. The possibilities.

Being open source, there are a zillion plugins available; I can't wait to start playing with dynamic playlists so I can generate mood-based playlists again (wake-up music doesn't do me a lot of good if shuffle-all decides it's an Enya day). And this makes the prospect of replacing those Google Home speakers much more plausible; there's a Raspberry Pi solution that already exists, and you just plug it into any working speaker.

I'm still pissed as hell it took me three full years to find a replacement for something that was such a fundamental part of the scaffolding of my daily life (and mental health) but I am overjoyed that at least it's working now. And yes, I have learned my lesson about allowing proprietary tech to become such a key piece of my life. (Now it's all open-source and self-hosted stuff, so I have no one to blame but myself if it goes down...)

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.)

Am I recreating a static site generator from scratch? Kind of, I just don't want it to mess up my theming when I'm having so much fun with it already. Also somehow the last time someone tried making html includes work was in 2017 and it's still dead? Baffling.

Anyway I've been meaning to learn Python again and this is as good an excuse as any. I'm sure other programming languages exist but when all I want to do is text manipulation why should I learn another one?

This is all very nostalgic, actually, this spending seven straight hours working on my website instead of, I dunno, eating dinner. Or doing homework, which I guess I don't have any more, so well done me. Anwyay it's also a very good use of the outrageous amount of money I've spent on mechanical keyboards in the past year. See, I'm typing! Lots of typing.

Sooner or later I'll add some more stuff here, like an actual index of my fics and some recs and maybe the slides for my ArCon panels and maybe I'll write up the jonelias ship manifesto instead of just yelling about it on zoom to anyone who'll listen. Today I am amusing myself by re-learning how sass works and by actually making a css framework work for me. (And being mildly annoyed at how much manual work it is to put in a new post. Does this mean I'll spend tomorrow turning this into a Hugo theme so I can go back to writing posts in markdown and not having to write HTML tags by hand?...probably, tbh.)

Oh, and adding HTML plugins to vim, because wow vim is disappointing at HTML.

I am so sorry for having become That Guy. In my defense, I was also That Guy when I was fifteen, and I am feeling hugely nostalgic about that right now.