I have determined that an hour or so of self-indulgence in mid-afternoon goes a long way toward keeping me happy, calm, and unscreaming. Mostly I've been playing some old computer games. So far I've gone through Myst (courtesy of ScummVM reading my old CD-ROM!), Monkey Island 1, a smattering of interactive fiction, and some Baba Is You (which gets very hard much faster than I was expecting; how brainbending is the back half of this game if I'm flummoxed already?! But I make slow progress and feel quite pleased with myself when I do). ScummVM even supports and detected The Making of Myst feature on my disc, which I hadn't expected. Still need to get back to that one day but it will have to keep until after Christmas break is over and everybody gets back onto a regular schedule again.

Something else that will have to keep is Get Lamp, a landmark documentary about interactive fiction. I don't monopolize the TV when my family is home, but I got far enough into it to learn some things about IF and how I feel about it. IF sometimes was (is?) held up as a story you can participate in, which is catnip to a books-and-games nerd like me, but the reality is somewhat different. IF has story but the gameplay is not the story itself; the gameplay is puzzles, mazes, mapping, playing Guess The Verb. And those are things that I dislike, am notoriously bad at, or both. This was useful to discover, because I had felt stupid for being bad at stories, but it's not the text that stymied me.

(I think I am overusing commas again. Gotta watch that or I spin up strings of text so long and tangled that even I who write them cannot parse them out.)

I keep not checking Dreamwidth in timely fashion. I may have gotten a setup that works for me, if I remember to use it. (I used to have an icon on my phone that would open Dw in my browser, but frequently my browser would have a bunch of tabs already open and it would get overwhelming and I'd mass close them or forget about it for days. Now I have more browsers installed on my phone, so I have one that is pretty much just for running Dw, and I have a Dw icon that opens into that. As it happens, this means the Dw icon that is displayed is less jaggy than before as well, which is not terribly important but does help in some small way.)

I wish Dw had a night mode site skin that was small screen and touchscreen friendly, but I suspect this is one of those things where you ask support or a dev about making that happen and they say "Sounds like a great project! When do you want to start?" Which makes some sense, but I have little free time and the focus of a hypercaffeinated, phobic squirrel.

And on that note, I suppose the laundry isn't going to fold itself. Have a great day, folks!

(Edited the 30th to add: Whoops, I was mistaken, Calibre is full of itself and didn't fix a damn thing.)

I'm starting to see some utility in Calibre. I still think it's a big Swiss army knife that tries to do all the things and I still hate the structure it uses to organize its books, but the blighter does come in handy.

I usually sideload my ebooks. Occasionally this results in two copies of the same book on the same Kindle, and then they get entangled with each other such that neither can be truly deleted, unless I just factory reset the thing. If I leave them be, then new books don't get indexed for search. (I use search a lot.)

But. Calibre does something differently when it add or removes books. Calibre can see two copies of the same book, tell me there are two, and remove the one of my choice. No reset, no reinstall. This pleases me.

I still hate having to put every! single! book! into Calibre or else when I put it on my Kindle, it will have the correct cover thumbnail, except that shortly thereafter whoops no it won't. I understand some of why it works out that way but it remains icky regardless. With this morning's situation, though, Calibre was a real help. Yay!

("So how many times have you managed to put a duplicate book—" Enough. Enough times. Not enough to learn to doublecheck, every single time; enough times to hate it.)

Hello I am barreling through here while I have a moment to spare and some happinesses to record!

Rural internet was patchy yesterday but much better today. My lifeline, restored! (I am like 30% kidding. At most.) I was able to get back into my Facebook account (first time since last year) and snag some in-game item gift codes for the pin-pulling game my kid likes. I even, heh, took a guess at what the next gift code would be and I got that sucker on my first freaking try, w00t! ...I should try Wordle later, see if today's my day. Dreamwidth first though.

I have given up on Twitter and moved shop to Vivaldi Social, a Mastodon instance, at @pokitty@vivaldi.net . I don't love my username there but I do love Vivaldi. They've hosted a forum and user blogs since Vivaldi started, and their predecessor Opera did, too, so I trust their experience with moderation. They also speak a number of languages besides English, so I trust their moderation of non-English posts more than I do a random American (sorry, 'Mericans, but we tend to monolinguistically suck).

I still have some misgivings about Mastodon, moderation, and non-monetization; I more than half expect 2023 to see instances asking for (or requiring) money, and users leaving rather than pay. But the vibe there is solid and sound. I like logging into the Vivaldi Social much more than Twitter. People keep linking to Mastodon accounts for people freshly banned from Twitter, and they make a pretty dandy reading list!

I tried Tumblr as well, but crappy internet does not love their media-heavy (and completely non-ALT-texted!) communication. I unfollowed everybody I didn't pout to think of losing. Now I am only bothering to even try to check there on a good internet day. (I almost always just queue stuff up for the system to post later, so it might look like I'm there more regularly than I am, but I am not.)

I tried looking for a self-hosted to do list server, but found no consensus as to the best one. I'd love to have a lightweight local server that let me go to IP_ADDRESS:PORT and toggle ticky boxes next to tasks. Dunno if that exists. I suppose most people manage this on their phone and/or with Google Calendar, but my phone is frequently charging, in a kid's hands, or otherwise separate from me, and I'd rather not invest myself further into Google's "ecosystem" anyway. A thing that could be edited (or at least viewed) on a Kindle would be ideal. Sometimes that's the only screen available to me in the moment, but I very nearly always have *something*.

Lunchtime! Hope yours is tasty as mine.

I can't sentence structure, so list:

• I really should have backed up my PC ebook settings into a different folder before I uninstalled+reinstalled.
• Difficulty swallowing is a symptom of dementia.
• The Croods movies are surprisingly good.
• Funerals suck even harder when you're in the next-of-kin row.
• The old "I'm recovering from surgery" excuse only lasts until the next relevant person needs and gets surgery.
• I thought grief would feel like intrusive thoughts of sorrow, but it's mostly feeling like a thick, foggy static/panic that is hard to think through and also everything non-physically hurts.
• Dhalgren is confusing and long. No, like, way more confusing than you're imagining.
• Being a mom keeps getting harder. Always worth it, but ever harder.
• I do not like reading a book with death magic, finding death abruptly all to pertinent to my daily life, and finding that the next book on my to-be-read pile starts at a fucking deathbed. Do Not Want!
• I can't even fathom how much my mother must have done to help me throughout my entire life. So often, I didn't even see it. Now it's gone and I am at sea.

Stats:

• Percentage of household requiring emergency medical care in 2021: 100%
• Time since last crying jag: <1 hr

Found and reposted this and now I shall have a hard cry again before breakfast.

I don't have much to say these days. I'm quiet and tired and basically okay, just... quiet and tired.

Words are hard. Communication is hard. I try to read my friends' social media and tap "like" so they know that I am around and I am pulling for them, for their happiness, but just trying to string some words together is usually too frustrating and ends with me canceling my unposted comment. I hope likes can be enough.

I am trying to pare down my ebook library to save some filespace and make it easier to back up. This goes against my squirrelly nature; normally I grab and stow absolutely everything that I can. I'm only just starting to rummage through folders and honestly ask myself, "Am I ever going to read this? Yeah? So I may as well start reading it now? Ugh, I'm not interested in this at all..." Some things I'm keeping (sooner or later I do think I'll come back to that collection of vampire stories; I generally do return to vampires) and some things I am not (mostly Victorian fiction that is public domain throughout the world, easily re-obtainable for free if I ever change my mind; and some nonfiction that should appeal to me but somehow doesn't quite).

It may be worth noting that, with me, organizing is generally a coping mechanism: something bothers me that I cannot control, but I can control this small, specific thing, so I am going to control the shit out of it. Pandemic (one South Dakota county had over 51% positive tests and what the what, WHAT). Insomnia. Parenting. Older parents. Everything.

Everything is kind of hard and I am slogging onward, one determined footstep at a time.

I renewed my website's Let's Encrypt certificate. Apparently my host automatically notifies me when renewal is coming up; it wasn't actually due for a couple of weeks, but I'll be busy around when it would have expired, and this way it won't expire while I have eleventy zillion other things on my plate. Huzzah. (My web host doesn't support updating the cert automatically because they are backward and silly. Also cheap.)

There are not enough places to put all the things. There are not enough places to put things while seeking better places for them. The things are in all the places. Things are everywhere. There are no empty places in which to escape. This is a horror story without end.

I couldn't focus on more needful things, so I played on https://picrew.me/image_maker/315844 instead:



The figure in the image looks utterly exhausted. I think it's a fairly accurate likeness. The pic is missing the food stains in the shape of tiny fingers and the ponytail holder dangling somewhere off a rear strand of hair, so much of my mane having escaped that I forgot it had even been tied back. However, it'll do. (The paleness is 100% on point.)

A list of things that I hate today, partial:

• broken washing machine
• bra fitting
• bra not fitting
• whatever is making that ominous click somewhere by either the heater or the hard drive - oh, it's the clothes dripping dry onto the floor. Terrific
• broken light fixtures

Some things that I don't hate today:

• the less-than-a-dollar toys that my kid loves to death and refuses to be parted from
• desk chair. Sit good. Wheels good. Much sit, much good
• a giant canister of peanuts, so I'm not just gnashing my teeth, I'm also getting protein
• Dreamwidth!
• Whatever this is:
  Watch on YouTube

That repeated lyric is embossed across my brain now and I am not the least bit sorry.

On my computer, in any web browser, the spacebar scrolls one screen down per keypress. Shift+Space similarly scrolls up.

On my phone with external keyboard, Space worked as expected but Shift+Space switched keyboard language (in my case, between English - US and... English - US. Whoever chose this effect was not wise).

Turns out the secret is to install another software keyboard and set it as the default (it's still possible to switch back and forth). So now I have Shift+Space back and also my newly default software keyboard is Graffiti Pro (also available as Graffiti on Amazon Fire devices), so from now on I'm either typing like a real computer or writing on my screen like it's 1999. This is awesome! Whee, nerdery!

o/' I love keys, I love typing things o/' <3

Fear the power of my fully operational wireless keyboard!

Sometimes technology is awesome.

I think I can call my previous post's experiment concluded, with pretty much the results I had expected: not many people reading, but those who do are important to me. I had been a little worried that I was totally filtered off of everybody's friends page. I'm not sure why I thought so. Habitual social anxiety? Something to ponder another day. I'm glad I'm not just mumbling to myself in here though.

Nobody guessed that I had gotten an MRI. That's a bit of a tale, one that I intend to tell, but it's longish and full of old stress; I haven't the energy today. It's not a big deal anymore - I have a minute benign growth and the problems it caused are fully manageable with medication. Aside from motherhood-related fatigue, I feel better today than I have in years.

Two of the other entries in the guess list were inspired by things I am considered, but have not done. I'm toying with installing Linux on my old Win XP laptop, or at least running bootable USB or disc Linux. I'm so pleased that the old thing keeps shambling along (its predecessor died at maybe 1/4 this thing's age), but it's no longer safe anywhere near the Internet and it's gotten slow enough to be genuinely enraging. The right Linux distro could get it safe and peppy again, I think. (Although I did recently dig out my old Palm m125 and sync it to that box; not sure I want to try installing Win98-era Palm Desktop on my cranky Windows 10 tablet unless it's my only remaining option.)

My Palm is out because I'm attempting to use it as an ersatz e-reader. I'd like a Kindle, but I'm trying to see how much I would even use it before I put money into it. Unfortunately, I'm having problems. Like, four out of five attempts to HotSync result in a BSoD. And you have to HotSync to install (I think? I haven't used this thing for over a decade!) or back up. And the error is an IRQ thing and all I really know about those is that they're a tremendous pain in the ass to diagnose and fix and ugggggh. I am pretty Dutch when it comes to money but it might be worth the cost of an older, used Kindle to have it Just Work. I'm putting that aside today; I have a few ideas to try tomorrow, but first some distance because this isn't worth getting worked up over.

I'd avoided Kindles for years because of money and because I felt I wasn't the bookworm I was in my childhood, that I wouldn't use a Kindle "enough" to justify the expense. I still rather think that I wouldn't use it enough to spend $80+ on, but older used ones seem to be in the $30-ish range. I don't read many novels these days, but I use the heck out of my Instapaper account, which can wirelessly deliver unread articles to a Kindle and can deliver over USB to basically any reader (they support MOBI and ePub; Kindles read MOBI and basically everything else supports ePub or both).

I did (at long last) get a smartphone when my old phone mercifully gave out, and I've had the Kindle app on there for about a year (and now Instapaper, love me that Instapaper). Problem is that I use it enough, and get few enough good opportunities to charge it out of the baby's unusually long reach, that I run its battery down and have to turn it off and of course that's when the kid deigns to nap and I have nothing to read on. (I do have a Windows tablet but it's prone to spontaneously powering itself off, so it's frustrating to use for much of anything, most especially something as immersive as reading a good novel. Also it's rather big, so if it manages to stay on, it becomes a chore to hold.)

Ah well. I have some ideas to try tomorrow (try a different USB port; make sure m125 isn't trying to sync software that isn't on the desktop, e.g. the late lamented AvantGo; try installing Palm Desktop in Win98 compatibility mode; give up on Desktop and just take advantage of the SD card and already-installed MobiPocket to see if it can read Instapaper exports without crashing to menu!).

Do you use an e-reader? What do you like or dislike about it? (Apparently there is at least one model of Kindle - the Kindle DX - that doesn't do WiFi, just 3G, so you get charged a few cents for every single wireless delivery. This sounds like a kind of punishment for Kindle bargain hunters. If I don't learn how to distinguish that model from other Kindles, I'll have to avoid them all to avoid stupid fees or sullenly content myself with only USB deliveries.)

Much love, folks.