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.

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?

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.)

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.

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.

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.