Hi. My throat has a red stripe at the back of my mouth! It's scratchy and my head is heavy, but it doesn't hurt to swallow so I figure it could be worse.

I don't understand how forum software can exist in 2016 that doesn't generate RSS or any other feed format and doesn't even provide email subscriptions. I suppose they expect every user to bookmark the site and dutifully check in regularly to see what's new, and that is so ridiculously far from my own experience that I cannot fathom how anyone could imagine that being a good plan. I do know that email can be a twisty thing to wrangle, but I don't see how RSS and Atom are too hard for a software developer who knows what they're doing and gives at least one actual fuck.

There are a few things I should get to doing now, one of which is rest so I get over this throat thing. I think I will read another chapter of Ava's Demon before I decide which to try.

I still ain't dead, thank you. I've been sleeping rather poorly. At the moment, I feel more alert than I have in days, so I wanted to eke out an update while the eking was good. Or something. (I said I'm more alert, not that I'm totally on the ball. This is as good as my attention gets right now. I don't like it any better than you do.)

I got a bee in my bonnet about wanting to play my vintage games on the living room flatscreen. This is nothing new. But this time, I griped enough that my brother wanted to see my much-lamented lag for himself. He came over with a Nintendo 64, all the cords, and a cart of The World Is Not Enough, and went to town.

"I'm not seeing it," he said.

So I tried for myself. All I proved was that I am still pretty bad at TWINE, but nothing about alleged lag.

Super Nintendo. Fired up a save file still on the first island, took the Star Road shortcut to Bowser, and I beat him.

Prior to that day, I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that the TV in the living room lagged so much that basically everything was unplayable. I was 100% certain.

I don't know if my memory is that malleable (which is terrifying to consider), or the one or more of the TV's relatively few settings got changed by accident, rendering a delightful change (which would be upsetting if it ever got accidentally reverted, with no knowledge of how to restore the desirable state) or if I am currently hallucinating or what. Maybe the internet isn't real. Maybe you're all inside my dream! (That's enough Link's Awakening, Ree, back to Earth now.)

What I do know is this: I can beat Super Mario World on the living room TV. I can very likely beat any of my SNES games on it (except the sims; I don't think SimCity has a win state, and my Civilization best is merely surviving under Stalin's bootheel).

I've been enjoying the GameCube and Game Boy Player lately (finished a run through Dragon Warrior GBC and am well pleased with myself). I am tantalized by the possibility of throwing my entire weekend into a replay of Eternal Darkness. I won't actually let myself do that, but I could if I truly wanted to, and that alone is pleasing.

I currently possess a computer that is neither a slow-ass pile of slag nor a self-freezing failbot. I have gotten a proper IRC client installed. The good folks of the chat helped me figure out how to temporarily disable the touchpad, which allows me to type without wanting to defenestrate the contraption.

My interactions with electronics are really good lately! I hadn't realized just how good until typing it out like this. Yay!

I'm less satisfied with my creativity, which has quite stagnated. Earlier in the week, I had an idea for a tiny scifi story and set myself to getting it written post-haste. It was like trying to weave wet cotton candy. Every strand I grabbed or even reached for just dissolved before I could get put anything together. I have the dregs saved, but it's looking like this was a burst of inspiration that just won't hold up in story format. I might write the basic gist as a sort of Tumblr outline fiction ("so there's this person who discovered this thing, and they use the thing to do this idea....") and see what others think of it. Maybe somebody can write a formal story of it it, even if that somebody isn't me, and may not be anyone I know directly. That's pretty cool too.

My alertness is fading and I need to finish the laundry. Bah. After the laundry's done, if I remember to do it, I think I'll reward myself with some Crazy Taxi; there's a timed mode so I can't completely lose track of time, and sooner or later I'll need a break from the music. I like it okay, just not hours of it at a stretch or it starts to eat my brain.

bai!

Man, I keep forgetting to write here.

After a string of days ranging from downright unhappy to so-so, today has been distinctly good. Lots of little things: an inexplicable stain that washed out perfectly, one load of dishes less than usual, a sizable cache of discounted Hallowe'en candy, the discovery that http://rainwave.cc/ is basically my iTunes library but more.

I fell into the usual Circle Ent. trap again. That is, Circle had a game on the 3DS eShop sale, and it had a demo, so I played the demo; the demo cut off just when I was getting really into it, so I bought the full version so I could continue playing. This time it's Fairune; last time it was Witch & Hero. Someday I'll stop being surprised.

Anyway, Fairune is fun. Very short, but fun. The iOS and Android versions are free; the 3DS version (which has a few puzzles the free versions don't) is normally $3, currently marked down to $2. And I get to play as a girl! I get to start in a pretty dress (the game even says so) and then I get to gear up and fight evil. Yay!

I made a shortsighted New Year's resolution that I would spend as much or more time playing as a female protagonist as a male. Since my main gaming loves are turn-based RPGs, Zelda, and some Mario, I am dearly looking forward to the end of the year and the return of my old favorites. (At some point I stopped keep track and just didn't bother to play anything unless I could play as a girl, having gotten thoroughly pissed off at my meager options. I've since caved to a playthrough of EarthBound, which currently sits around two-thirds in, but I'm sticking to my guns. Or, you know, to my Sword of Hope or Cracked Bat or whatever.)

The thought occurs that I abuse commas. Whoops. I'm out of practice at this writing thing.

I'mma wring a few words out of myself today.

I'm so tired. Night before the last, I couldn't sleep until after two; I haven't recouped entirely.

I would like to hop onto IRC and chat a bit, but I think I had better not. Chat is very good at distracting me from household tasks, and I've already let myself slip over the weekend. Best to stay on task today, sans distraction, and leave the socializing for tomorrow. Hopefully I'll be more alert then.

My latest little online project is driving me bananas. I thought I could replace one thing with another, so I did, and only then discovered that the replacement code doesn't work the way I thought it would, so nothing works as expected. Ugh. On the other hand, I seem to have worked the last kinks out of the skin I'm using for it, so all the text in all areas is readable now, unless I missed something. I should remember to check it against some web accessibility tool, in case the color contrast is too low; I'm having no difficulty, but I am not always a good barometer of such things.

....guess who spent the last two hours looking up and trying out different contrast tools? Oh, you bet your life it was me. I never cease being amazed at my own laziness. It's not all bad - assuming everything I'm about to pull out of the dryer is actually dry, that's two loads of laundry done in between internet fiddlings. Progress!

It's easier to get distracted when I'm sleepy, and the internet is a very effective distraction. I think I'll post this, then exit the browser so that I can apply my meager focus to more important things. I am confident that the internet will still be there when my to-dos have dwindled.

Still fighting off a cold that caught up with me last week, a nasty sore throat/stuffed sinuses combo. I can't tell if the pressure on my eardrums has to do with the drippy skies or my drippy nose. Yech.

And that's about all the words I can today.

I'm happy lately. Friday, I got some good roleplaying done, after anke helped me get past a particular sticking point. Another person in the chatroom commented that our story sounded neat, which was a pleasant surprise to me!

That night, I dreamed I was back in school, fully clothed (in nylons even!), getting complimented. It seems my subconscious is still trying to wrap itself around the notion that I don't suck. Aww. We'll get there, brain!

Sunday saw me quite unexpectedly playing a game of Traveller for the first time in my life, with a group I didn't know (except for the GM, who was once my housemate). We did really well! I got to be the muscle but not an idiot. I felt a little uneasy about playing that type of character (a marked departure from my usual), but it turned out splendidly.

Today I tried to catch up on stuff I'd let sit over my delightfully lazy weekend. I even scrubbed in the bathroom, which killed my nails. Oh well.

It's time for me to leave the computer. I feel like I didn't get anything of substance done today, but I guess that's to be expected after I let so much pile up. I'll just keep plugging away until I get there!

I feel a bit embarrassed. I spent all afternoon working on my pet project (even forgot to wash lunch dishes until my husband came home for supper! Oh dear!) and here I am, trying not to talk myself out of writing about it. (....I've scanned that last bit and, while I'm not sure if it has anything close to grammar, it does indeed reflect the indecision I'm experiencing. Yay?)

I got the FOAF bit working by relentlessly preg_replace-ing all the namespaces away. It's shamefully hacky, but having the namespaces present in the header makes the entire object blank, and I don't have any idea why, so I'm just trying to route around the damage. I'd been trying to decide whether or not to post all my source publicly; resorting to this hackery means that I think I won't. I'm unprepared to support my code on outside servers anyway. Maybe in the future, sometime, but not this year. I just hope it doesn't break in the meantime, because my fix is an all-or-nothing deal and if it doesn't work, then my project is missing certain bits of data.

A week ago, I don't think I have ever tried parsing OPML beyond a Yahoo! Pipes experiment. I know I hadn't learned how to encode and decode JSON in PHP, or save a string to a new file. These are things I've had to learn as I went. It took me forever, because I had to learn each bit from scratch instead of just implementing previous learning, but it's coming along and I know more stuff now and that feels pretty awesome.

I don't think I ever stated exactly what my project is. That's because I don't know what to call it. I wanted to see just how much data the Dreamwidth API produces for a single account. Turns out, quite a bit! http://wiki.dwscoalition.org/notes/Data_Sources lists them. After discovering this, I tried mashing these up to make a sort of homepage for a specific Dreamwidth community, one made almost entirely from Dreamwidth's data. The idea was that changes to the community would automatically appear on the webpage as well - things like a list of current mods, numbers of posts, any deadlines listed in the profile "bio", even the comm's default icon - so that the webpage wouldn't be out of date and the mods wouldn't need to update the page separately, so long as the comm was up to date.

This turned out to be far more fun, and far more frustrating, than I had imagined. The fun wins, though.

(Did I really, just today, figure out how to make arrays from two different data files in different formats, compare them, sort the results, and save it all to a flat file? I'm pretty sure that I did. I've even edited the flat file to compare it against the live data. Apparently that is a thing I can do now!)

After a rough patch earlier in the month, I feel like I'm getting a handle on my moods.

I've completely changed my workout goals: instead of trying slim down, I'm trying to manage my anxiety. Now, I don't know if what I'm doing is a 100% Good Idea, so don't try this at home, but what I do is warm up, then try to get my heart pumping like a hummingbird's. Some mornings it feels a little like I might throw up, but the gross feeling isn't in my stomach - it's between my lungs. I don't like this sensation. At all. While I'm in this state, I repeatedly remind myself that this is under my control, everything is okay, nothing is wrong, just keep going and I'll see. Then I do a cool down and hit the shower.

What I'm trying to do here is give my stress-laden body something to do with all that stress: instead of storing it up, throw it all into the workout, realize that stressing about stress doesn't help anything, and then the rest of the day goes so much better. I don't feel super-happy or anything, but I can actually manage my emotions. I can remind myself not to dwell on misfortune, instead of getting knocked on my ass by a whirlwind of sobs and tears. (As a nice side effect, my machine-tracked estimated calories burned per day is actually going up, so my new goal isn't getting in the way of the old one; it's more of a perception shift than anything.)

It's strange, looking back on the emotionally distraught person that I can sometimes be. When I'm like that, I don't think very clearly. I get distracted easily. I forget things. I make poor decisions. When I'm that person, I don't even realize how bad my situation is, because I'm dwelling on other problems.

I'm not at my personal peak today, but I'm in the higher reaches. I feel pretty good. I got my main chores done and I get to play with my little nephews tonight. The big one asked what my favorite Legend of Zelda game is and if he can play it, so I'm trying him out on Link's Awakening; the little one likes to blow bubbles and run around frenetically, trying to catch them all. Good times!

I'm trying to figure out how to get over this funk I've been in. I've managed to identify some causes, but they are things that aren't really within my abilities to change, so maybe all I've done is kill a little time.

There just aren't enough hours in the day to play all the video games that would help me unwind.

Last week my husband baked me a cake. In reference to a joke we shared, it was yellow cake and he decorated it as the periodic table square for uranium.

(My husband is the best.)

We had some local family members over to our new place - the first time most of them had seen it since helping us move in - and it went really well. We had enough chairs and I figured out how to stretch supper for our early arrivals. The dishes all got done either that night or the next morning, I don't recall which, but they didn't linger to bother me. That's a new-ish development and I like it very much.

Our home looked pretty good that night. I'm proud. It still looks nice, even with Roman Holiday running unheeded on the TV (I needed something non-action to keep me from getting bored while I did some sorely needed mending, and then I left it running while I worked on other things) and the stuff that is normally on top of the dryer is on the sofa (brb, fixing that. Fixed!).

The weather has gotten warm, even hot. The temperature is lovely but the humidity is more than I'd like, even if it's far from the worst South Dakota has to offer.

My elbows are sore and I know why. Last night, I couldn't sleep, so I finally crawled all surly out of bed and curled up with Kirby Mass Attack. I tried to achieve perfection in every stage, one stage at a time; I only made it to the second world, and it took me so long that today I am running on fumes. It's a Kirby game, a series known for its low difficulty, and I was cursing as early as 1-2. Lovely. I am forbidding myself to even look at Kirby today, or nothing else would get done. As for the sleep deprivation, well, God bless Mountain Dew.