I don't update my phlog/text blog enough. I really don't.
Right now, I'm stting back on my bed, laptop on my lap, listening to music in
Winamp. I almost feel like I'm back in the early 2000s on my ass-old eMachines
laptop, running Windows XP and writing up a blog post for LiveJournal, just
without the edgy 90s feeling or Semagic client. Or the 4 hour time limit on the
battery (85%, ~12 hours remaining). Or feeling a 5 lb laptop on my lap. This is
nice, though.
My 2009 MacBook's screen has gotten worse, but at least I have other machines
to take up where it can't help me right now. I'm still getting used to
Microsoft Word 2007 again, because as nice as LibreOffice is for some people,
it just annoys me a little too much with the newer UI. I'd actually take
OpenOffice over it, just for the (in my opinion) cleaner interface.
I'm also getting used to Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Illustrator CS3, mostly
because they better support my weird Monoprice art tablet, and that's important
to me. GIMP doesn't seem to work with it on any platform, and Inkscape barely
works with it on Linux (Krita is fine on Linux, though). Which is sad, since
it's effectively a Huion model that's been rebranded, but I can't afford a new
tablet so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My website got a bit of an downgrade, as I moved it to be completely HTML 4.
I don't like or trust where HTML5 has been going, and with Google getitng more
and more control over it, it just feels wrong to support something that should
be the W3C's thing, and not some "living standard" that only large companies
can really keep up with. It's virtually impossible for a small team to create a
fully spec-compatible parser with a Javascript engine in a new browser now, and
that *really* rubs me the wrong way. So, I just choose not to support it on my
own website, and leave it at that. Not much else I really /can/ do.
I've generally been staying offline as a whole lately as well. Going mostly
silent on IRC, staying offline on Discord (ugh) and XMPP, staying away from
social media as a whole... I even disabled seeing comments on YouTube, since
they're mostly just noise these days, with very little good coming from them.
Admittedly, it's been nice, and being able to keep my head clear of all the
negativity and doom-mongering helps with my own mental health. Just... Culture
has become so attention-demanding and emotionally draining that stepping away
is the only chance you can really get to recover from the trauma that it causes
for one's own mind.
Maybe once things fully clear up in the brainpan, I can start working on the
projects I /really/ want, like learning some basic programming, and the books I
want to write. Maybe I'll finally be able to focus myself with some reading as
well. My backlog of short stories is growing quite large, after all. The
podcast project will be nice to start on as well, but that's for later.
For now, I think I'm going to take it easy for the rest of the day. It's
10:38 local time, and relaxing sounds like a nice thing to do.
