4/29/25

Landlord coming by tonight. I'm so tired today for some reason even though I thought I got enough sleep... but I've been tired since the landlord's visit I guess. Lost my motivation to do anything even play games. And I'm still upset about the idol thing because I keep arguing to myself about it.

4/28/25

Landlord still hasn't replied. Sent another email, it's at least 6 gallons a day at the current rate. Will send a text later if no response. Ok, got a response, he'll talk to a handyman. Good. I was stressing out about the no response yesterday and looking into options. Found out WA law changed and at least we have a 90 day notice requirement for landlord to end a lease, that's such a relief. Chaj. Watched some videos, including one on a japanese joinery table.

4/27/25

Walked around outside and noticed the backyard faucet was leaking, probably from yesterday. Sent landlord an email. Stress ate some easter candy and got jack in the box.

4/26/25

Finished rearranging and cleaning. Roof guy arrived around 8:30am and was at it all day until like 6pm. Landlord did his inspection, no problems. Took photos of the furnace and AC to consider replacement. Apparently that runs like $20k, I had no idea. He also sprung a rent increase on us, which was kind of shitty and feels almost retaliatory. Even if it was initially only $150 extra per month and we talked him down to $100, the timing of the notice is just annoying. We drafted up an email covering stuff. Roommate was a lot more upset than me.

4/25/25

Landlord coming tomorrow, doing some cleaning. Mowed the lawn. Zapped a fly. Coyo stream. Going to move my PC to my other room instead of staying in my bedroom, maybe that'll make me more of an adult... Chaj.

4/24/25

Mostly just played Oblivion.

4/23/25

Slept about 3 hours. Woke up for Coyo's stream, half paid attention to it, went back to lying down while listening for much of it. Pretty amazing how easy the game is when you have a smaller team that is also relatively more good at games... Hope the punishment doesn't backfire lol. Continued DS1 SL1 run... beat Manus. Just Kalameet and Gwyn left. Played Oblivion Remake. Chaj.

4/22/25

Refreshing my data backups that are off my main 5 disk bay. Coyo stream. Chaj. She ended with some important communication that I at least really appreciate. I started writing about it but then went to sleep. Now I'm up again. AC and furnace got serviced, were recommended to replace, we'll see if landlord does anything. Anyway, about her communication... I'm probably not the only one who thinks some of it applies to me (though I do think a lot of it probably applies to me even if I can identify others it can apply to in parts), so in one sense good job for not singling out a specific person for everyone to dogpile on, but on the other hand not so good job making multiple people, perhaps some of them entirely innocent, feel a bit crappy and anxious. She did a good job trying to encourage those of us feeling called out to not take it too much to heart, which was kind of her. Like not walk on eggshells.. but also be more careful. At least for me that's how I'll try to proceed. And I've been feeling the eggshell way for quite a while, except until she really clarified what sorts of comments she doesn't like, there was an eggshell I didn't really see so much as a shell and so had repeatedly trampled on it. Oops. Don't know if I'll ever get a chance to talk to her more about it, I have my own broad perspectives on the matter that I'd like to say, not so much as an attempt to defend myself (though if I reflected on it for another month perhaps there is some underlying motive there if I'm honest) but just to share other interrelated perspectives. I guess I'll try and write about them here so I can look back on it and remember if I need to. For the first perspective, she mentioned herself that she might just be a bit sensitive sometimes too, which is nice reflection on her part. I don't think she's too sensitive, but at the same time, it reminds me of something that in the modern age we're told to not remember or notice, that she is in fact a woman. It's hard for that to not come off as condescending here, it's not, just an observation, and reminder that in most cases you really can't fully treat women as "one of the guys" because we are different. It goes the other way, her friend groups can't really treat men as "one of the gals". Perhaps a lot of society's problems would improve if we could remember or recognize these things that used to be common sense... being raised in a modern culture that tries to deny them, like everyone else, I also forget. But the point here is just that guys tend to rib each other in what can be seen as quite rude and harsh ways, the closer the guy group the harsher the ribbing can be even (which acts as a sort of signal of the closeness), but this doesn't really apply to women as much. Even the tomboys get bruised more from it. Anyway, my second perspective is that streamers occupy a unique value proposition space. Chatters aren't just interacting with the streamer, but with other chatters, too. As most chats are overwhelmingly male, this does create a problem where communication starts to drift towards "one of the guys" styles as before. But besides that, even if (entirely sensible) rules tend to prohibit direct conversations among chat (focus on the streamer), the nature of chat members having persistent identities mean that they're talking to each other indirectly anyway. Like, there are three people who you can always count on for a good pun, and that makes the stream experience more enjoyable for everyone, it's not solely the streamer creating entertainment. (And when rules are fuzzily enforced, that creates opportunities for other problems. The tekken streams have always been too lax on these sorts of things.) Also, while a remark might not go over well with the streamer, it might go over well with the rest of the audience (again, maybe as guy talk, but also could just be unrelated to that, like the streamer might not like puns), so if the streamer doesn't say anything, but the rest of the chat is positive or laughs, that's reinforcement to make that kind of comment again. That's part of why so many braindead jokes persist in vtuber chats in general, like the cutting board meme, or even more braindead things like "Here it comes...!" as an ironic way to say a spoiler without saying a spoiler. (Irony is a big problem as my fourth perspective will get to.) There's also the problem that everything encourages a reaction, and sharing that reaction. I'm going to try thinking about the "not everything needs a reaction or response" meme more. (A less obvious example: streamer talks about hurting themselves again, reaction of "that reminds me of this other time you hurt yourself" or were otherwise kind of a girlfailure isn't really needed, even if it's fun to know for other chat members that might not have heard about it before.) A third perspective is that, as sort of a fact of observation, streamer brain seems to be very common. By that I mean it doesn't matter how smart someone is in general, once they start streaming they kinda take a hit to their intelligence. It's just the nature of multi-tasking, trying to play a game while entertaining. Some streamers lean into this and, as a bit, pretend to be even dumber sometimes, which can be fun for them and chat. But there's a potential for miscommunication and poorly timed jokes or ribbing when something is interpreted as being around the level of a bit, but it's actually not, and so the streamer just ends up feeling stupid and insulted, with the chat against them, which is usually not the intention. As an example, it's like, from the chat perspective: there is text on the screen right there that they're not reading that explains everything. Being blind to it is usually a symptom of streamer brain, but it could also be part of a bit. In any case, if one is going to point it out at all, one can do it in less rude ways... And again, fuzzily enforced rules about backseating don't help here. Like, people dropping combos in chat is totally backseating, but it's generally positively received, until it becomes excessive like an insistence on doing this combo. Or asking for tips on where to go in an open world, or how to get back to some location. Once you allow that once, you set the expectation for when it's ok to do so in the future, even without asking, and so people tend to volunteer that sort of thing unprompted -- and if it's further well-received as being helpful (as it usually is being intended to be helpful), then that creates even more of a disconnect later when it's not appreciated. And again the phrasing matters, which brings me to the fourth perspective, which is trying to define what sort of communication she has problems with, which she herself struggled to do. I think the main thing is that excessively ironic (and sometimes sarcastic, as a subset of irony) remarks are a problem. Now irony itself can be hard to define, but the key trait here is that messages have more than one intended reading depending on what level they're seen at. So for example, to riff on one of her examples that was pretty close to something I said, it was something like "You do know they added the ability for you to select the review match option directly after the match, right? It's right there on screen now." I didn't word it like that, but that's basically the meaning. The irony involved is that on one level it's just a simple question, even if rude, asking if she is suffering from streamer brain and being blind or not. On another level, one can assume that of course she knows, she just doesn't want to do it right now, and the comment is then at best a weirdly phrased reminder (can just make a reminder if that's all you want to communicate), and seems more of a backseating type suggestion or even a demand to take the stream in a particular direction, and in this case even a bit of "because I know better" -- e.g. there's a hint of what could be interpreted as "you're sucking and the only way to get better is to do this thing", which isn't true. (And here we get into intentional vs unintentional irony -- just because a message can be read on another level, doesn't necessarily mean it was intended to be, or that all levels are equally valid/reasonable/charitable interpretations.) She also mentioned how a followup of "at last you did it, see I was right" type of comment can also annoy her if she does eventually do the thing. Anyway, as another commenter mentioned, let's just all try to do better. I'm just glad she spent time on this because it helps me recognize that it's these ironic type of comments that to be honest I've made a lot of that she doesn't generally appreciate. I said that if one doesn't make it clear what one doesn't like, no one will know. She pushed back on that a bit, that people should know better, and while to some extent yes they should, remember you're dealing with internet text communication, chat brain, streamer brain (I know she once entirely misread one of my comments, inserting a word and verb negation that weren't originally there, making it come out as quite the opposite of what I wrote), a mass of guys in a girl's chatbox, and various levels of internet-autism and the entailed pros and cons as icing on the cake. Clear and frequent communication is the key.

4/21/25

Stayed in bed for a while. Kept making up sad scenarios in my head. Eventually got up. Got some day after easter candy sale. Told myself I wouldn't eat any of it until I lost more weight. Decided screw it, and ate too much. (Not as much as I could years ago, but enough I feel a bit sick.) Got a new controller (or was that yesterday?), an 8bitdo. The dpad isn't great, but not getting it for the dpad. The hall effect sensors for the joysticks and triggers are the good parts. It feels a bit smaller than I'd like but overall it's not bad.

4/19/25 - 4/20/25

Still dead. Two Coyo streams and a tiger stream didn't cheer me up. Idol is definitely still mad at me. It sucks because I'm upset she thinks so poorly of me; some of it might be justified, but some of it's not, you know. And there's no communication so I'm just left to read the tea leaves and assume. Oh well. Hoppy easter. I got some on sale egg dye last year. But I'm in no fucking mood to dye eggs after all this year. I might watch sound of music as a semi-traditional thing, it's something I remember doing growing up as it often aired on public broadcasting around easter I think. But whether or not that's an accurate memory, I've watched it myself some easters since living on my own. It will make me cry though. Decided to watch a different movie instead. Chaj. Played some games.

4/18/25

Recentered my feelings somewhat. It's a bit after midnight, going to lie down and maybe read my original old version of tao te ching; I had before been making a comparison with reading another translation at the same time, but I'll just go back to the first and favorite (if perhaps not the most accurate..). Made it to ch 22 before falling asleep. Got up, ate a quesadilla. Played some more DS1, beat the 4 kings finally. Decided to try bed of chaos first for the remaining lord souls... tilted after only 3 tries, one of its tree swipes ends me even with havel's armor... beat her, then beat nito first try which was nice. Decided to go into dlc, had perhaps easiest sanctuary guardian fight ever. chaj. Zapped a fly. Just have a few bosses left now, last two dlc, waifu, and gwyn. Went to the store to get some sugar-free sugar water.

4/17/25

Feeling meh. Kind of mad at myself as well as a possible conflation. Spent a bit of time reviewing the design of the fangame I want to make still, but I really don't have any motivation for it... Rare communication is worse than zero communication, I'm discovering. Ate steak. Played a bit more DS1... I'm trying to do a SL1 challenge, tilted on 4 kings. Ate sandwiches. Took a nap. Ate quesadilla. Ate pistachios.

4/16/25

Woke up, feeling worse again. Also feel weaker for some reason. Whatever. Upset at myself again. Chaj. Took a long nap. Watched some tiger, that was kind of cheering up in a way. Chilled more with some dark souls...

4/15/25

Feeling a bit better. Still pretty down. Playing T7 with everyone cheered me up some. And finally someone made a discord for all of us, I'm glad we'll be able to chat occasionally even after she's gone. (And I'm glad it didn't have to be me, I really don't want to organize or lead things.) Idol posted some videos from the event publicly after all (not complete ones but just clips). I can't bring myself to watch them... Still going to just delete my accounts without any ceremony sometime next month. I don't know if I can make my obsessions fade any faster than they naturally do but I have to try. I just wish we could clear the air. I don't think it's the case but I really am torn by the thought that all the time she previously accepted spending with me (for a fee of course) wasn't either for the money, or because it's fun, but because she was afraid of what might happen if she said no. Like I'm ever going to do anything, sheesh. I don't think that was a reason but if it was and things are as deteriorated as I worry, I do have to verify such things, 'cause damn. It'd be upsetting that I'd been thought of so poorly -- surely not right? So why is my brain generating the feelings as if it were? Stupid brain. ... hashed things out with myself some more, while some signs are worrying, I'm just going to let things stew. Uninstalled insta app even and blocked it in hosts file. Coming to the realization again that when I'm feeling this depressed, every action I make is wrong, even those I make trying to think about this problem. I wrote before that I need to re-read the tao te ching, I still do, I didn't do it. But it can help me with practicing not-doing I think.. I hope... Watching Tiger before I go to bed. Played a bit of Dirt Rally myself, it's kinda fun, mostly just the environments.

4/14/25

Fell asleep around 1, up again around 5, it's enough. It didn't help. I'm beginning to understand why people get into heroin. Coyo announced there's a tekken 7 stream tomorrow, finally some good ass tekken, but should I even show up? Fuck I just want to crawl in a hole and die. Had a dream about a prince rupert's drop coyopotato put into a hydraulic press and coming out as a new type (not cleanly shattered, cracked and bounced out). also had a dream where a bunch of vtubers were strawberry picking (goal was to find 10 unique breeds of strawberry or something) but it was the actual humans and they had their 3d models transparently overlayed on them some of the time like ghosts... my favorite won and spoke directly at the camera... weird. Tried and failed to fix a gstreamer issue. Ate a couple sandwiches and some cashews, took a nap for a few hours. Feel a bit better... going to delete my instagram account entirely next month. Every time I get curious and open it nothing good happens. Shion was right.

4/13/25

Man I've been on an emotional rollercoaster. It's led to further mistakes in my own behavior, too, which has led to further self-hatred and despair. Yet I'm also over it at the same time. Schizoid like I guess huh. It sucks. I shouldn't even be writing here because it's technically 'public', but I'm sure no one reads these things. I don't mind someone stumbling upon this and concluding I'm nuts. I kinda am. Chaj. Anyway, as I was going through my chekis, I had the "brilliant" idea to maybe do a last minute request to idol's manager, if she could take a few chekis and hold them for me until next time I'm in Japan, whenever that will be... I was kind of expecting to be ignored because my last emails were ignored. But surprisingly it was an enthusiastic of course, and the manager even went a step beyond and asked if I'd be interested in a video archive. I didn't know such a thing could be possible, so of course - but it wasn't a certainty, she would still have to check. It turned out not to be possible, and that's fine with me, but she confirmed she took the chekis. Overall, I was feeling quite a bit better after this interaction... maybe my inner critic can be silenced for a bit? But then a few hours ago I happened to randomly check instagram, since idol tends to only post there around lives, and maybe she'd post something cool... and lo and behold when I loaded it, a post had been made like 5 minutes prior. (I thought I had notifications turned on, but didn't get one, but whatever.) And... fuck, it's another semi-vague downer post about her boundaries. While it's possible this isn't my fault / about me (in the past apparently I've misjudged similar vague posts that were about someone else), I think it probably is my fault. I made a follow request to her two locked twitter accounts... I guess that really overstepped her comfort zone. I feel bad about it. Wrote her a reply to the story post, she probably won't read it... I don't know man. It's like the Golden Path but made of shit -- I saw the nexus quite a while ago but I've wanted to avoid it. I just keep stepping on rakes. I think the only solution to stop unintentionally raising her anxiety is to just fully withdraw and say goodbye forever. I don't want to, I still want to support her, without getting anything in return even, but I keep doing this shit, something is clearly wrong with me. In other news, my X server crashed, no idea why. Started talking with another fan about preserving Coyo's videos. I also spent some hours doing some design work on a possible last minute fan game for her but man, my motivation for literally everything has been vacuumed away and replaced with feeling terrible. At least I'm not coping by eating. I hope I feel a bit more stable after a sleep, but midnight approaches and I'm not tired.

4/12/25

Huh, feels like it's already been a few days since the announcement... I ended up not sleeping much between yesterday and today. But I'm ok. Woke up just in time for Coyo's stream with Usako, which was cute. Biked for an hour. Finished shaving my head entirely. Tomorrow (today now in japan) is idol's live event... she's doing her solo and a collab. I wish I could just teleport for it. Started going through my chekis again and reminiscing. Isolating the scans I did into individual images, I want to make my dumb house-of-cards simulation with them.

4/11/25

Woke up a bit past midnight, surprise announcement that Coyo is almost certainly graduating (confirmation in a few hours). Well I guess the end is coming sooner than I thought. Not that I didn't see this coming, but. Chaj.

4/10/25

Beat Pikmin 2 until the debt was repaid and first credit roll. I think that's enough Pikmin for now... I think 2 is still my favorite but I definitely appreciate some of the things from 4, even if they make things easier. The caverns are a lot better in 2 as well and demand more skill/patience/stress I think, plus have some great variety of background music. They do go a bit long but that's ok. I re-adjusted to the old mechanics pretty quickly. Still lost quite a few pikmin to drowning and one electric spider... also no easy 'rewind' button (I guess I could reset) so except for really terrible mistakes I'm just inclined to take them on the nose. A lot of caverns I lost half my overall force by the end... Still really fun. Started playing Metroid Prime Remastered.

4/9/25

Got Jack in the Box, ok, now back to diet. Finished 100% Pikmin 4. Overall, pretty good game. It leans into the difficulty of time management (dandori/planning) and some of the challenges were pretty tough. I didn't bother going back to get perfect on everything but got quite a few. The white sage challenges were fun, only had to retry some but a lot I finished down to the wire. I enjoyed the higher stress pikmin 1 retelling within the game. The controls are both more refined and less refined than pikmin 3. Auto-lock on for things, and the r-stick movement does reappear though not until Olimar's story and the end-game and the whole game isn't designed around it so it doesn't matter so much unlike Pikmin 1 and 2. The unique strengths of the pikmin weren't done well enough I thought. I did appreciate having enemies not respawn. The night missions were kinda cool. The final boss was a lot better than Pikmin 3's. P4 was quite a bit longer than all of them too.... But it fixed most of my gripes with P3: caves are back (though not much incentive to revisit them unlike P2 where if you didn't have whites you'll miss some stuff), more Olimar (though P3 had his side story too), directing whistle, some enemies I missed... The dog was fun too. Well, I had fun. I think P2 is still my favorite but I'm going to go back and replay it at least until the normal ending (not 100%) just to verify. (Ok, going back, I do like the camera improvements and lock on is really baby mode... P2 is so much harder mechanically, you have to be smarter with your division of forces and pikmin die easier, not as many nectars, fewer chances for mistakes. Still I like it.)

4/8/25

More Pikmin 4. Watched some Coyo. Went to the dentist. Had a consolidation Arby's for getting my teeth beat up (it's a semi tradition); they weren't in very bad shape though... just gotta floss more and watch my lower corners for gums. No new cavities at least. Hygenist was jealous of my animal experiences in Japan.

4/7/25

Been playing Pikmin 4 yesterday and today.

4/6/25

Finished Pikmin 3 (Deluxe). Felt like it took longer than it did... almost 10 hours. (Assuming emu crashes didn't distort time anyway.) I beat the main story on Hard, did the side missions too getting plat on most of them. I don't like how they made this one simpler and removed the ability to control the pikmin herd; the cursor movement is a bit floaty but probably a holdover from its original wii u version. It'd probably be a bit more fun with a second player to do co-op, or perhaps more frustrating heh. Can add the unlocked extra hard mode to my wishlist of games to play with a GF if that ever happens.

4/5/25

Played some Pikmin 2. Not sure if I'll beat the whole thing again, but decided to try Pikmin 3 after I got the 5 p2 colors.

4/4/25

Played some games. Chaj. Finished playing Pikmin, haven't played it in a long time. Biked a bit.

4/3/25

Watched Song of the Sea, biked while watching it, made it an hour.

4/2/25

Nothing of note.

4/1/25

Thought about staying up all night for Coyo but fell asleep. Somehow only slept for 3 hours, feel alright though. Coyo stream was nice. Unexpected ending of some chatting. She's obviously been under a lot of stress... Well, I feel good about my decision to not spontaneously visit Japan next week. I don't want to add any stress to the idol. I should probably withdraw from interacting with Coyo too but I still like her too much -- I was pretty much done with vtubers when I found her, and I've been pretty much done again, but she is and will be my last vtuber I care a lot about, and gosh darn it I'm going to see it through until the end even if I hate myself for it. Slept. Woke up still kinda sour. She's got body image issues sometimes too, I wish she could sometimes see herself the way I see her, as the most beautiful... Watched some tiger. Chaj.

3/31/25

Biked 4.6 miles. Convincing myself back and forth on going to see idol. I convinced myself the financing wouldn't be a problem. But now I've convinced myself that she really wants nothing to do with me and it's best I just stay home to avoid bothering her. I don't know. Slept. I think I'll stay home... Watched tiger, played a bit of new T8 patch.

3/30/25

Played Hoa, only took 2 hours. Listened to vtuber songs. Slept. Got up, didn't do much of anything.

3/29/25

Messed with AI art. Chaj. Watched vids. Watched an ep of Mushishi, I think I might watch the whole first season again... so many animes to watch, not feeling like watching them. So many books to read, not feeling like reading them. So many games to play, not feeling like playing them. Depression I guess. Slept. Had an interesting dream where I was getting some baked goods (they had some sort of sweet pie/tart/cobbler thing whose name I forget) and the lady running the stall (it was sort of like a food court cafeteria but with business stalls not just big businesses at the walls) added in a couple small meat pies because apparently I was a regular. Then she gave me some business card thing with some extra stuff written on it (a phone number?) and started talking about maybe getting together and dating -- I glanced at the card briefly and that made her stop briefly to chastise me, but I forgot what exactly she said, but all I said was something like "I'm paying attention I was just seeing if you wrote down some of what you're saying here too" and she went on. Anyway, I said I'd think about it while I ate. I had mostly woken up by this point so the dream was over and I forgot what she said really. I thought for a bit to decide what her name would have been, something vaguely germanic maybe, starts with E, but she's old.. 50s? No... probably not, at least, but 40s... Anyway, I decieded on Evelin, and now that I'm awake I wrote a stupid fake letter to this imaginary dream person whose image I can't even remember.
Dear Evelin,

I'm not sure how serious you were the other day about maybe hooking up. Perhaps you weren't serious at all and it was just a bit of show in front of the other customers who didn't realize I was a regular. I said I'd give it some consideration while eating. This letter is that consideration. I hope I haven't midjudged a joke, but hey, if I look silly or foolish for treating the idea seriously, like a kid who gets too many ideas just from a mandatory valentine's day card from some classmate, it's not that big of a deal, I'm already a loser so whatever.

Because you raised the idea first, I've been put somewhat off balance. You see, I've not known what it's like to be desired in any sense. Of the two times in my life I wanted to be with someone, there was no reciprocity, and I don't blame them, as I don't particularly desire or like myself either. So the idea of someone actually desiring me in any sense is rather alien and strange. I think perhaps this letter is also serving as a way to argue that you shouldn't be interested in me; I'm weird and I'm nothing. I think there's a lot about me that, while I'm fine with, is pretty repelling to others, especially in the context of what it would mean to have a long term relationship with me.

You are quite a bit older than me -- if I had to guess, 40s? But, I guess I'm no longer a spring chicken either, I'll be 35 this year. I still feel mentally like I'm 25, my thought patterns are quite similar, my preferences are quite similar. For a long time I've believed that age mostly doesn't matter except when it does -- for example, I've gone back and forth on the idea of ever having children. There are biological limits to consider for the near-term foreseeable future. Ideally humanity cracks the aging problem and/or has a positive Singularity event, and that way age truly does become just a number, and our bodies can be shaped much more into whatever we please. I wonder what you think about this. I guess one thing I'm trying to say here is that I've not been attracted to you -- not that I think you're unattractive, thinking about it now I do think you're pretty, just I never had the thought that we might date each other or more though. Thus far I've only had love for your baked goods.

My inclination is to politely decline and keep things as baker and customer between us. However, you've expressed interest in me, something that's new. I'm willing to be open to the experience and see what happens. You might even say I'm giving you a chance, but I think of it more as the chance for a change of heart, not in the sense that I'm something special that anyone would be lucky to have even a chance at. I predict you'll come to your senses and rapidly lose your interest, but perhaps I'll gain interest instead, and there would be something amazing.

Let me know what you think.
-Kevin
Anyway I finally finished Dordogne. I had very little left, I thought I had more. I savored it because it's pretty. Unfortunately not too fun. But so very pretty. Watched a big Coyo collab, it was better than I thought, Coyo got her favorite role. I'm talking myself into and out of taking a short trip to Japan in April to see my favorite idol's first performance of the year... Google is enticing me with a sub-$900 flight. I'm trying so hard to get over her but I'm just so depressed. I'm thinking: if I don't go, I'll just sit around at home, being depresed, and save myself around $1k. If I do go, then I'll be out $1k, my diet will have to be broken (whatever), I'll have some stress because I don't know Japanese, but I'll get to see her again and take some photos for 20 minutes, and maybe more. So I'd have 20 minutes of some sort of happiness before the dread reasserts itself. I don't know.

3/28/25

Listened to some interviews, watched some vids. Played Pop. Took out the trash. Did a bit of biking. Slept. Ran an errand for someone. Watched some vids. Finished Pop. I'm now free-free.

3/27/25

Awake for Coyo's stream. Then slept. Made a couple sandwiches.

3/26/25

Slept through Coyo's stream, meh. Went shopping. Watched Tiger. Played Pop -- I beat it but I'm redoing the first few hundred worlds so that they are video archived and I have an accurate time estimate for the whole thing.

3/25/25

Woke up late for Coyo, meh. Watched some vids. Played Pop and beat it! The last world was actually pretty easy, and I had armageddon available but didn't use it. It granted me the title of Greater Eternal Immortal God.

3/24/25

Did some exercise biking. Coyo had her celebration stream, it was comfy. Slept a bit. Ate a gouda wheel. Randomly decided to watch First Contact again. Watched Tiger. Cooked some scrambled eggs with a hot dog. Played Pop, reached world 901, now am Eternal God (text King). 901 looks like a crappy world... Did laundry.

3/23/25

Slept for a bit over 6 hours but didn't get up, stayed in bed for another 4 or so. Played Mega Man, played Pop.

3/22/25

Played Pop. Reached the 700 tier, now the game calls me a 'mortal god' despite the text being 'mortal king'... the game's not really getting any harder, but it sucks running into worlds with no armageddon. But even when I have armageddon, I need to be patient, because if I have enough mana to activate it multiple times I get an even bigger score bonus and skip more worlds. Not that I'm going for any sort of optimal route, I'm just playing until I reach the last world, but still. It took me over 4 hours for the last set, so maybe I can guess around 4 hours per 50 worlds? In that case I still have several sessions left. It's a depression game apparently since I can mostly zone out... Slept. Cooked last of frozen broc. Played more Pop, now I'm a greater god (text still shows king...). didn't take as long to get through the 100 as I thought.

3/21/25

Woke up in time for Coyo's team's matches, she won, yay. It's the first day of spring, but still kinda chilly. Cooked a steak. Watched some vids. Level of feeling depressed about what it usually is, on the lower side. Guess I'm feeling a bit sad I can't talk to idol anytime. Even if I'll never be more than an annoying fan, I still get some benefit just talking to her... oh well. Took a nap. Stupidly ate can of cashews... Decided I should make a month-by-month summary of this happenings page as we're coming up on a year somehow. Listened to Laika OST again. Moda.

3/20/25

Woke up towards the end of Coyo's practice. Felt pretty rested for a while but squandered it, didn't do anything, well I guess I did some biking and watched an interview, and then I got tired again despite caffeine and went back to bed. Had a cool dream. Up again in the early evening. Watched tiger, did another 2 miles.

3/19/25

Woke up to some sudden stomach acid coming up, but I kept it down... weird. Ate a few cheese sticks, took a bit of apple cider vinegar. Figured Coyo would be training so stayed up. Yup, caught her stream. Fixed leaky bathroom sink faucets. Ate whole summer sausage. Feel pretty melancholic. Tried having a bunch of caffeine to stay up and do something (maybe 600mg?) but ended up lying down again and dozing. I think I'm going to setup my hammock again either in the other room or rearrange bedroom to fit it and futon setup... my sleep might be negatively impacted after all, not sure. Shower diverter replacement part came, and huzzah, it works, so I could take a shower again, and there's now no more missed pressure from the former one that was leaky. Went shopping. Played more Pop.

3/18/25

Slept a little bit. Woke up in time for Coyo, but half-dozed while listening in. Decided to show up at the end for a quick match. Superglued diverter prong back together, replacement washer should be arriving today, then I can take a shower again... Did some stationary bike riding. Fell asleep. Failed with shower faucet repair, had to take a bath. Watched Coyo and Tiger. Played a bit of Pop, reached Greater Deity (600s).

3/17/25

Played Pop. Slept. Tried calling but can't pay such a large amount over phone, so mailed out check. Chaj. Watched some vids. Watched some tiger.

3/16/25

Up around 6 or so. Scrambled some eggs. Did a couple more miles on my stationary bike; I have no endurance... I've been kind of scared of it because it seemed to cause my tendon to flare up last time I used it, and that and/or gout potential is kinda scary, but I think if I just build up endurance and do my stretches it'll be fine. I want to do something crazy like 30 miles in a session. Watched the rest of part of a DS2 playthrough vid, guy is having a blast. Tuned in to Milky for her upcoming Malenia fight. She cleared it so fast, wow... Read some tabs. Slept. Cooked some hot dogs. Messed with sink and tub faucets, realized I don't have the right washers for them. (Sink needs cartridges.) Played a bit of Super R-Type -- a large component of its difficulty is the inconsistent frame rate.

3/15/25

Finished up my ecs post and code experiments. Slept. Finished pie. Now back to dieting~

3/14/25

Woke up in time for Coyo's tournament thing. She got cooked, as expected. (She's been destroying herself all week.) Her coach dominated though, that was fun to watch. Organized and cleaned some stuff. Chaj. Watched some vids. She'll be back for a stream at 3pm, will she oversleep it? I'm honestly impressed with how little sleep she seems to be getting and not having royally messed up yet. My brain has been able to betray me since I was 16 or so into thinking I could stay up indefinitely and then thinking I could just close my eyes for a bit and even if I fell asleep still wake up -- only to wake up hours later and miss whatever. It carried on betraying me into college and I even missed work a couple times... that was enough to make me never trust my brain again on waking up without sufficient sleep. I went to the store and got a pie for pi day, and some chicken and potato wedges and chocolate milk too. Watched Coyo's later collab, it went better than I thought. I food coma'd after.

3/13/25

Woke up a bit after midnight. Chaj. Watched Coyo. Did a bit of exercise bike riding. Finished reading some papers. Slept again. Got up around noon. Agreed to pay off brother's car. Got distracted designing lisp projects. Used AI to help a bit, it's suddenly a lot better at lisp... Repaired garage. Ordered Sichuanese. Played Pop, reached world 500 (now called Deity). Slept.

3/12/25

Slept. Played Pop, though it's giving my screen even more burn-in. Watched Coyo in the bg to Pop. Chaj. Got jack in the box. Maybe if I make some cornbread and cookies I'll resume keto after that... Reached world 302 in Populous, it now calls me Deva, whatever that is. (Pronounced like Diva.) Continued to the 400s, now it's Greater Being. Setup OBS to archive it on youtube...

3/11/25

All my cells feel weak, it's the food abuse. Another stupid dream of raising kids with her.. it's never going to happen, why is my brain still so obsessed? Maybe it's going to take me a decade to get over after all. Again marveling at what a difference ~0.0000001% makes. Played Pop while Coyo streamed. Reached level 200 now, so it says "Eternal" instead of "Immortal". Watched some old YuGiOh episodes... laid down, didn't sleep. Garage part came in the mail.. don't want to deal with it.. Played more Pop, why...

3/10/25

Took a break, tried again. Hardest level so far... The only power I could do was make knights. The CPU's power was making volcanoes and knights. So much volcano spam.. I was eventually able to win the war of attrition by keeping my cool and just rapidly expanding as best I could with the volcanoes. When he made knights, I tried to kill them by drowning them, that worked out fairly well to cut his forces. Still took over an hour. Had jungle cat's farewell in the bg. It's pretty sad, but I only have tears for one more. Slept. Woke back up... can't help myself playing Populous. Got Immortal percent clear. (Reaching a world over 100.) Except the world I was greeted with, 103, is a no-build world! What a terrible world. All I can do is earthquake and swamp and have my followers settle in different ways (all of them dumb). Tricky victory, had to use earthquakes to give my followers better flat lands to build on, and the early game is crucial in making the leader spread out to slightly better terrain to get that initial population advantage. Some followers made it to another part of the map that had a tiny diagonal connection, wasn't sure if it was possible, but they could be left alone over there and got really strong. Attrition wins -- 59 battles won, 42 battles lost, ended with 77 structures. Ate my second pizza. Laid down for a while. Back to a bit of Pop, watched some tiger stream, sent my useless money, fell asleep.

3/9/25

Ate some ice cream and cookies. Chaj. Watched some Milky. Slept. Almost threw up, caught the small amount of bile before it came out, so you know I've been eating trash. After a while drank some apple cider vinegar to help. Messed with N64 again. All my games are working still. GameShark 2.1 works too, though I had totally forgotten that it needs to be put into different "modes" via keycodes to handle different games, and unfortunately it doesn't seem to be able to dump the internal data from every game to the controller pack. Perhaps a newer gameshark would work? Still, nostalgic. Ah, I guess if the cart only uses sram or eeram then the gameshark can back it up? List of types here: https://micro-64.com/database/gamesave.shtml Notably my Paper Mario and Pokemon Snap didn't show up to save anything to the pak and they're using flash. Though the big sram and bigger eepram didn't work either, so maybe that's a GS limitation... or not, I see the video on this shows Smash Bros as not being able to be dumped and it's an sram format. Oh well. Played a bit of SNES Populous. World 51 kicked my butt, so I stopped. Cooked a pizza. Retried world and beat it pretty easily. Stopped again at level 71.

3/8/25

Watched more repeat stuff, some new youtube vids. Chaj. Had a bowl of chili. Truly RIP keto... I'm just depressed again, screw it. Another bowl of chili. Can of peaches. Sleep. Went shopping and bought a bunch of high carb crap for me. Played Rez: Infinite, it was a'ight. Too easy, too much form over substance. Lightly slept again.

3/7/25

Did some programming. Finished eggnog. Ate a can of chili. Coyo event. Unboxed some stuff from my jp trip. Chaj. Went and got Wendy's, they had a nice girl scout cookies thin mint shake. Slept. Woke up in time for tiger.

3/6/25

Ate the rest of the pizza. Jammed out to some rap to get my mood back up a bit. Finally watched the second ep of fox in space. Watched various other vids and tech talks. Chaj. Watched random Frieren episodes. Thought about doing anki cards for the first time in a while but didn't... Procrastinating everything. Ate a bunch of peanut butter out of the jar with a spoon. Slept. Weird dreams! Drool. One dream was an extended play or something, with idol being one of the cast. It was so unhinged. Dagoth Ur like star. Seemed like he went off script at the end and blew himself up in the main train engine after it detached from the rest of the train. (This is all indoors.) In the dream I was just an audience member. I tried reciting something like the horse and the rider poem. Anyway "then the nerds went and built it the way they wanted to" was the conclusion.. and as I initially started following the two biggest engineering nerds towards the lab, I changed my mind, and said I'm going to bed instead. Useless in dream as in real life, it's no wonder idol doesn't care for me. (I just wish she and manager didn't just straight up ignore me... it's more annoying than rejection.) Took a thing of eggnog from the freezer to thaw and drink later. I'm done for.

3/5/25

Feeling a bit less crabby. Did some laundry. Cooked some bacon. Decided it's not time to disappear but maybe I'll just withdraw more anyway. Coyo stream. Slept. Succumbed and bought an XL pizza, RIP keto. Ate half of it.

3/4/25

Did a bit more vid watching. Anime watching too. Walked a bit but gave myself a blister somehow. Coyo time. It was a'ight. She's obviously worn out and refuses to give herself the rest she needs. She's also more sensitive to more edgy comments (probably some of mine, I've expressed a few things in a crankier way than need be as well as ways that were probably misread because she doesn't always read things properly, though I've noticed a few other viewers might have helped make her extra testy too, and one from the other day about her friends was brought up again that probably upset her most -- it was pretty bad even as a joke, and I feel stupid for kinda white-knighting over it, but whatever). Went to sleep. Up again around 7pm. Slept again.

3/3/25

Decided to play Mega Man Zero again via the legacy collection. Getting cooked, it's hard. Switched to ZX, which I own on DS and beat long long ago but I don't really remember the plot at all, and there's a sequel I never knew about until I bought the collection. HLTB says it shouldn't take too long to beat it... Paused to watch a guerilla Coyo stream. Continued. So I'm playing BG, Mega Men, Tomb Raider.. before my trip I was playing unreal gold and wolfenstein new order, need to get back to them. Majora's Mask too... why am I as bad at finishing games now as finishing books? Bro is getting knee replacement surgery today, have been waiting for a call. Thought dad was taking him to hospital but he's on vacation in arizona I found out. I'm stressing out over it, hopefully for no good reason. It's just after noon and I'd like to go to bed but I should wait... Thinking later this month I'm going to withdraw from watching Coyo for a while, after the 3 year anniversary (for myself). She'll probably be better off without me figuratively darkening her doorstep (aka chatting nonsense in her streams). I'm just so crestfallen. Got call, bro is good. Slept. Chatted with dad later. Watched a bit of tiger. Chaj. Watched some tech talk videos.

3/2/25

Stayed up all night again, not doing much. Watched some old anime in bits and pieces. Watched a bit of Milky. Fixed some automation issues. Ate more calories than I should have. (Keto goes well and no gout yet, though some odd 'twinges' sometimes that make me nervous, but weight loss is also slow and I have no energy for exercise.) Slept. More dreams. Cooked bacon.

3/1/25

Early morning vtuber. Slept after. Woke up, did some cleaning. Did some programming. Played a bit of LOTRO, paid my upkeep (in-game currency) -- wish they'd let you do more than 6 months at a time, I was actually close to the expiration. It's just not that compelling of a game once the novelty of exploring around middle earth wears off, a couple hundred hours in. Listened to the baus. Chaj. Finished organizing some pics to send off.

2/28/25

Watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbFEQv259yw -- cool Lisp company history with over a million lines of code and decades of existence. Slept around 7am. Finally made phone call around 2pm, but have to wait for callback. Got callback, email issue resolved.

2/27/25

Played BG until 2 or 3am. Started playing some other random games. KoF 2002 was kinda fun to mash with. Chaj. Went to sleep because I'm terrible. Why can't I just make the stupid phone call? Argh. Finished cleaning air purifiers. Chaj. Took out the trash.

2/26/25

Stayed up all night for Coyo again. Went to sleep. I think I woke up in time to make the stupid call but I didn't, avoidance... Watched some dark souls 2 stuff. Started watching a funny presidents play dark souls vid. Started watching tiger. Played some BG at the same time.

2/25/25

Stayed up all night waiting for Coyo. Barely made it through.. slept. Missed time to call, whatever. Went shopping. Filled kerosene heater I got last time the power went out for a few days so I can have it ready to use if the power goes out again. Played a bit of tekken. I got the fight pass thing to force myself to play a bit more, at least enough to win back the coins for the fight pass.

2/24/25

More BG. More Coyo. Sleep. No email from garage... will call tomorrow. Finished godot project part 2. Watched tiger. Cooked some bacon.

2/23/25

Played BG all night again. Starting to get bored of it and its mechanics; I just don't like it when games have a party system and force me to choose party members but make it seem like it's going to be a slog to swap out different ones. So I've got a party setup I like, and find someone new, but they don't look like they'll be better than who I have and am getting to know... so I let them 'join' but then remove them immediately. Also I want a bottomless bag for everything now, some insect heads weigh too much and I know they'll be valuable for something sooner or later... Hoping that dropping them off on the ground at a town will leave them there indefinitely. Anyway went to sleep, woke up for a big important Coyo collab.. Cooked an artichoke. Watched collab. It was fantastic, better than I was hoping. Coyo prepared well, feel a bit proud of her... Played more BG.

2/22/25

Watched dumb tekken team tournament. Transferred some files from laptop from last trip I hadn't gotten around to. Showered, went back to sleep. Chaj. Called garage opener company, they had me do some disassembly and reassembly which didn't fix the problem. And I haven't received an email from them to proceed with warranty information. (Maybe they typed it wrong?) Watched a bit of tekken 1v1, but I just don't care man. Cooked up some chicken and a bit of broc. Watched some tiger.

2/21/25

So I did play at the same time and continued playing through most of the night, went to bed around 7am I think. Or maybe it was closer to 11am. Or maybe I fell asleep but briefly woke up again around 11 and dozed? Anyway I got up more fully around 1pm. I was already feeling pretty crabby (repetitive thoughts like "I'm not even mad at her specifically, I'm just mad about being ignored") and suddenly get an email update from landlord about garage issue, he wants me to call them now. Frustrated me because it's probably because his english isn't so good. Whatever. On a whim decided to see if my N64 is still operational, seems like not, or it's the capture adapter's problem, need to test with another device. Anyway went back to sleep around 3pm I think until getting up again at 10:30pm. This time I'm much less angry/frustrated at nothing, the feeling has mostly dissipated, hooray for sleep resets. On a separate note, I've been dreaming a lot more since the switch to the futon... Mostly strange dreams, and I don't remember them all that well, but I remember the act of dreaming a lot more than I was in the hammock. This is hopefully a good thing.

2/20/25

Had a dream about tiger girl... Got kind of sad. There's a hard to articulate difference here though that I'll maybe try to articulate. Like, she's nice to everyone and in simple ways that let those people know and feel that she's being nice. But she'll be incredibly / hilariously and played-up-for-show toxic towards some things, as part of a bit. The coyote meanwhile is less nice on the individual scale, but more kind on the world scale. Global kindness and attitude, she doesn't go on big rants, and plays up the frustration/toxicity at individuals taunting her in tekken as the 'meanest' thing she does. Well, I like both of those streamers, they're pretty much the only two I watch with any regularity. Tried a little bit of the new Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves beta, don't really like it as it's just another 2D fighter.. Decided to get back into trying Baldur's Gate 1. Last time I died in the tutorial fight. Now I understand it's really turn based combat, truly, so pause everything. Now it's actually not bad. Played for around 4 hours, break. Nothing productive really for another three hours -- reviewing some github issues I had created to see if a proposed solution works or not took up most of that. Shishou stream starting sometime after 7, might as well watch that. Might try playing my game at the same time.

2/19/25

Woke up super early AM. I haven't been feeling any more tired since switching to the new bed setup, but maybe my sleep hasn't been as consistent.. except one day where I spent more than 8 hours in bed for the first time in a while. Started playing Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness on a whim. Not so great controls... chajchaj. Tiny bit of coding. Watched a couple Star Trek episodes... (BOBW part 2, and the followup, Family.) Got a big dose of brain rot from watching Tiger for four hours.

2/18/25

Nothing important. Did some cooking, a tiny bit of programming. Played some old SNES games. Started a repair on an old xbone controller, but I messed up. I don't think it's unfixable but I don't want to deal with it now for a while...

2/17/25

Strange dreams. Woke up to surprise ongoing stream.. joined for a fight. Lost twice now, I guess she has gotten better. Decided to play a bit of Touhou 11.

2/16/25

Watched vids. Snacked too much. Chaj. Kept eating too much.

2/15/25

Blanking on what I did today. Ate a quiche, which probably had more carbs than I thought. Watched some youtube vids and did some laundry. Not much else.

2/14/25

Didn't fully sleep as I needed to get up early to take the trash out and then watch Coyo's valentine's stream... I was planning on not installing tekken after all and not participating.. but I changed my mind as the stream was ongoing. I had some fun despite myself. Later I'll play Star Fox: Assault, because it's the 20th anniversary and I'm still alone. Chajchaj. Over-eating a bit, hope I don't get kicked out of ketosis... Decided to try Sidebery over treeStyleTabs, the latter I've been using for almost as long as SF:A has been out..

2/13/25

Maybe last sleep in hammock for a while... futon arrived yesterday, but not frame yet, should be today. I don't want to sleep on the floor because of dust and spiders. Anyway I predict it'll be kind of awful and I'll succumb and get a normal mattress, but I wanted to experiment anyway. Scrambled a couple eggs, nothing sticks, yay. Doing more reading. Took down hammock, vacuumed room. Setup new bed. Went shopping.

2/12/25

Zoning out listening to music. Knocking off some old tabs by forcing myself to read them with PhraseReader at a decent speed. Surprise Coyo stream derailed me. Did some review of game physics stuff. Re-seasoned my old cast iron. Lesson: the fake liquid coconut oil sucks, just use canola oil (but need to go even thinner amount than I thought was thin enough before putting it in the oven). Whole kitchen area stinks of smoke now, and called it after two or three coconut and two canola oil runs, could probably use a third canola oil run but we'll see how it goes.

2/11/25

Decided to buy a bed... well, not really. A bed frame that's only twin XL sized, and going to try a japanese futon on it instead of a normal mattress. But I'm ready to maybe say goodbye to hammock sleeping which I've been doing for many years.

2/10/25

Watching vtuber's dumbest stream from 3 years ago... They were so stupid, have to do it in chunks... Organizing photos.

2/9/25

Chaj. Had landlord come by to look at garage issue, no resolution yet. So tired...

2/8/25

Watched some more math. Messed with firefox settings. Chaj. Went to a robot battle competition. (Spectator.) Went to sleep after getting back home.

2/7/25

Did some more bookwork. Chaj. Watched some math videos. Went back to sleep.

2/6/25

Did a small godot tutorial project from a book.

2/3/25 - 2/5/25

Haven't forced myself back to doing math yet.. no games either. Instead I started watching The Young Pope. Chaj. I guess I'm still in pain. Unsubbed from so many more youtube channels... Even the very oldest/longest, vtuber and non-vtuber. Only 46 survive right now, probably fewer at some other point. I'm sorry... Doing some more twitter purging too, but.. leaving some... Finished TYP. I was thinking, something's off, for an HBO show it has the gratuitous nudity, but where's the gratuitous violence, and how are they going to flop the ending? But they came through and at least delivered on an ending that rather sucked. Apparently there's a second season made years later, but from the synopsis our Pope is in a coma... not gonna watch it. Anyway, it was funny, worth a watch. Made me think about getting a cat again...

2/2/25

Finished Baki. Now only the old original series is left. Such a ridiculous show... Chaj. For record-keeping, chaj counts in December: 13. January: 13. Got Star Fox PC port working natively on Linux, it's pretty cool. Spent most the day hanging out with friend.

2/1/25

Spent some hours working through the first bit of Shankar's Principles of Quantum Mechanics. Bra-ket notation is ugly.

1/25/25 - 1/31/25

Again not much. Haven't even rebooted machine, but good, no instability again... Been playing Horizon Zero Dawn. Emotionally feeling pretty stable again, if a little numb. Not productive at all for anything, still.

1/19/25 - 1/24/25

Not much to say, forgetting to keep a day log. Diet is going well so far. Haven't left the house in a while.. Finished a game, started another one. Just being an unproductive worthless slime, nothing new. I guess I can say that I spent a bunch of time fighting my computer. Its instabilities started happening again. Turns out I wasn't logging various errors, so once I turned that on, I started noticing ECC errors. I was then able to reliably get a few that were corrected, then one or something that would lead to a system freeze. Updated BIOS (2 years of 'improvements') but that if anything made the crashes easier to trigger. But at least I got a watchdog working so the system reboots now instead of just being frozen forever. I tried one ram stick in each slot, and couldn't get errors. Tried another stick in its one slot, no errors. Tried it and the other one in their slots... no errors initially, then a correctable error at random, but no more. Put 4 back in.. crash while playing a game. I lowered the RAM clock speed from 3200 to 2800 (will try increasing it to 2933 later since that's what the product page explicitly mentions) and that seems to have removed the instability, even with overclocking the CPU... still not sure if that means it's the RAM, the CPU, the mobo, or the power supply that's truly at fault, though.

1/18/25

Got up around 6am. Listened to some music.

1/17/25

Just chilled. Watched some streams. Funny I'm still watching vtubers despite my recent thinking I need to just disengage from them all. Ah well. Updating old PC before I turn it off until the next trip.

1/16/25

Had some chicken with butter and cheese sticks. Officially on low-carb diet now. Hope I don't get gout again...

1/15/25

Early morning, another non-tekken stream, wow. But it's not a good game, just flavor of the month trash that makes her motion sick.. ah well. Almost fell asleep during part of it. Got a new shower head for my shower, this one has a hose too, the last Japan trip broke me as far as wanting a hose shower again and having more pressure. Can't go back... I think I need to replace the diverter though to get proper pressure, too much water is still coming out the bathtub faucet. Did take out the flow regulator at least.

1/14/25

A few vtuber streams. I uninstalled tekken 8, I don't want to play anymore. But I'll kinda pay attention. Watched at least one more ep of baki while the stream was going on. Another stream later, went to bed first, ended up waking up about 30 mins late for it but that's ok because it kind of started late. I hope the two collab more.

1/13/25

Watching the next Baki season... so goofy and stupid but it's fun. Subconsciously encouraging me to get stronger, maybe. Finally called dad. Looks like I might be going on a cruise next year... Went out for brazillian bbq lunch with friend, it's gonna be my last hurrah for eating out for a while I think.

1/10/25 - 1/12/25

Just being back home. Slowly readjusting my sleep schedule. Weight was the same as when I left. Trying to consume my sugary stuff so I can get back on keto. Finished writing a PC setup guide and sorting through some photos. Watched the china tournament arc for Baki, almost done through the prison arc. Finally going to call dad and brother today (12). Called bro. Finished prison arc. Took a nap that turned into a sleep, so didn't call dad, missed a call from him.

1/9/25

Didn't get much sleep, but it doesn't matter. Packed up everything. Still taking a full suitcase back with me, jeeze. Left bags at the hotel until around 1pm or so, flight isn't until 4:50pm. Went for one last dandan noodle run. Also got a couple last minute souvenirs, window shopping around akiba, and got some jack in the donuts before the noodles. Glad I only got 4-4 this time instead of usual 5-5; maybe it's because I'm sick/coughing a lot, or maybe because my mouth is coated in anti-cough drops / lozenges, but it was way spicier than normal. It was kind of a struggle. But I was happy with it. Left and took a slow trip back to the hotel for my stuff. Grabbed it, headed to the airport. Security before dropping off my bag hassled me more than ever before, actually wondering what I was doing in more detail, and didn't really understand about chika idols. Whatever, it didn't take too long. Security itself was easy. Pretty civilized, leave shoes on, don't take crap out of bags. Minor pat on the back or something 'cause it was sweaty? Whatever. At the gate, got called up briefly, but nothing was wrong. Later after boarding and getting situated, a guy comes up and says I'm in his seat. We had the same seat assignment -- except he got a new assignment from the ticket receipt that he didn't pay attention to. I was correct. I booked way in advance. I did get a notification from the airline app that my seat got reassigned -- to the same seat -- so I do think something happened that they reverted but in a dumb way that also led to them calling me up briefly. Whatever. Flight was uneventful. Only took 8 hours somehow, landed like an hour early. Uber was hella expensive. But got home, showered, went to sleep.

1/8/25

Last full day. Somehow she agreed to see me again (for a fee of course). It was a good day. At the last moment I did ask my question to her about possibly maybe in the future dating and trying to make a relationship work... I expected a 'no' and have been assuming a 'no', and I heard a 'no'. Even if technically she said something like "I think I'll stay in the entertainment industry", which isn't even a tradeoff, it's not one or the other, but I get it, it means "no". I appreciate her honesty. I hate me too, I think I'm an ugly creature, of course there's no way I could be with the most beautiful one.

1/7/25

Thought I might try and make a trip to the snow monkeys, last day of JR pass, but ended up doing nothing. Didn't sleep well, coughed a lot when lying down. Took some nyquil to try and sleep it off. Got some sleep at least. Towards the evening went to get some pizza at a new york style place in Shibuya, it was kind of disappointing unfortunately. Met up with other idol fan for one last dinner. My anger has subsided, I'll just be careful not to mention anything to him at all that I'd rather the world not know. Can still be friendly. Saw another idol briefly outside her new gig, told her next time we should play games. I wanted to sample some craft cola I heard about that was supposedly the best cola ever, it was very meh, trying too hard. I'd rather have a coke. Rather have a pepsi. Rather have a store brand cola actually.. We went to a bbq place for a dinner afterwards. Checked out his crib nearby before we said bye for now.

1/6/25

Really rainy day, the only one for the trip. Coughing a bit more... don't want to go out. Had to go out for a promised idol live though, but I kinda ducked out quickly right after.

1/5/25

Back to the fox shrine / big temple area, more to take more photos and check out some food recommendations than anything. Went to an out of the way capybara cafe, finally. It was surprisingly expensive, but I guess one of the adults recently died, so not too sad about helping to support it. My dental hygienist will be happy I made it, I thought I wouldn't be able to do it this trip because the popular one in Tokyo has online reservations that are instantly taken.

1/4/25

Went to fox village again. Got to hold the white fox Hanako-chan this time, so now I've held all the colors~ Was with someone who rented a car this time as well, it's actually not very expensive (at least compared to the prospect of paying for a taxi to and from the village all by myself). I want to try and prepare for a future trip so I can maybe rent myself and explore some areas outside Tokyo more without limitations from train/buses.. Shinkansen back to Tokyo was full, I ended up standing the whole time and just repeating "kill yourself" or minor variations in my head over and over :/ Not productive. After that though went out for dinner and that cheered me up immensely.

1/3/25

Took a shinkansen out to Kyoto and finally checked out Nara. I think it would have been better with fewer people. Lots of deer though. Trip cut short by having to do some last minute big plan changes. It worked out though.

1/2/25

I forgot what I did today...

1/1/25

Hotel transfer day. Dropped off bags at new hotel (old one), visited usual fox shrine next to the big temple. Tried overpriced kobe beef from one of the stalls. Delicious, but way overpriced. JR pass activated today, so made a random trip a bit up north, had some disappointing chinese food, came back. Yay new year. New PC parts for her arrived -- except the motherboard, due on Saturday, when I'm seeing her again. I should be seeing her on sunday too though...

12/31/24

Spent most of the day in bed. Had a weird italian fusion place -- I can't complain about anything for the price.

12/30/24

Found a random taoist temple while scrolling google maps, went to that. It was neat. Got a lucky charm and some other stuff. Apparently it's a taiwanese version. I need to read the tao te ching again.

12/29/24

Actually had a bit of trouble sleeping because I was kind of happy. But had to get up early to go to idol concert. One member I liked was missing from her group's morning performance... and a guy I was going to get a late lunch/dinner with later wasn't able to show, wasn't feeling well. Everyone's getting sick but me. (I'm invincible!) It started to hit me before she came on, but realized two things about my favorite... I hadn't seen her do a solo live in almost two years, and this might be the last time I ever see her do a performance. It was good though. She had to lip-sync because her voice hasn't fully recovered, oh well. I got a ton of good photos. Good memories... anyway I did briefly see the one I liked from the other group run by, so I think she was there for the next two perfs, but after my favorite I just felt kind of sad, and no planned meal either, so I just went back to the hotel. Tried some more dishes at a place nearby. There was another group that performed later that I'd been meaning to see, but I didn't.

12/28/24

Did full day event, that was nice. Really nice. Got to eat more sichuanese. Did a bunch more shopping too (I shouldn't be surprised there's almost always some shopping -- but I do like to spoil her...). Went to an animal cafe with flying squirrels and otters, the otters were super cute and soft. Went to a neat aquarium. Had sushi. Somehow managed to have enough time to play an hour of games or so. (I wouldn't have minded playing for several hours, but ah well.) Overall felt pretty good after. Also could walk normally.

12/19/24 - 12/27/24

Still here. Idol bday event went off successfully, so that's good. Did an xmas eve dinner too. Xmas I visited a cat cafe briefly and ate my favorite dandan noodles. But overall I feel nothing about all this. It's all so pointless, a waste... And a slight relief, I guess -- I could have a heart attack and die and nothing would be counting on me. Well, I forced myself a few more days to give a certain gift, and I guess I should force myself to not have a heart attack over the remainder of my trip here so I can buy her some new PC parts. But my potentiometer between compassion and fuck everything is so far to the latter. I'm sick of it all. It's not helped by this guy betraying my trust -- thankfully in a relatively minor way, I'm glad I didn't extend my trust too much until he proved he earned it with the smaller things. But still, he couldn't even do that. Fucker. You all get but one chance with me. Break my trust and I'm done with you. I'm also extra crabby because my dumb peroneal tendon is still acting up, basically since my hotel transfer on the 13th. Transferred hotels again today. Had to wait until 4pm to check in to this place, so walked a ways down to a park and back. Had sichuan boiled beef. Felt kind of decent finally after that, could almost walk normally back to the hotel. We'll see how it is in the morning. Tomorrow have a plan, but it went from 12 hours planned down to 8. Fuck it. (And I assume no one reads these, hence I'm opening up a bit more than I normally would and probably writing more than I should. But if you who betrayed my trust are reading, fuck you.)

12/7/24 - 12/18/24

I'm bad at updating this when I'm away from home, huh. Well partly it was from my home PC having problems and not having 100% uptime. Here's what I've been doing so far in Japan: went to a tekken event briefly, pointless but got a fun selfie, preparing for idol's birthday celebrations, went to a performance she did before her birthday one coming up, did some shopping and some arcade playing. Dealing with hating myself. Dinners I had with someone were nice, first was a yakiniku place after buying some fabrics, second was a ninja themed place. Got one scheduled for xmas eve... if she doesn't hate me too much for them anyway. It makes me a bit sick how much money I'm blowing on all this, but if I keep telling myself that this is the only way to support her, and she's worth more to me than multiple bitcoins and I haven't even burned through the value of one, I can sort of justify it... Still kind of funny/pathetic to think of it as high escort prices without even as much as hand holding or hugs or any touch whatsoever though. I'm such a loser. I think I'd have a bit more dignity maybe if it could just be a pure donation. I do appreciate her and her manager spending time with me though, I just don't like the framing of paying for time. Anyway, also went to a weird restaurant after the live with another fan, they have insects and exotic meats... Stayed pretty safe with a 3-type sampler of deer, duck, and kangaroo, the first two I've had before. Kangaroo wasn't bad, deer was my favorite. Also they gave us a whole fried tiny bird (maybe a sparrow?) to eat whole... tasted like chicken, just crunch through the bones or whatever.. Gout seems to have been kept at bay but tendonitis or something is flaring up instead, making it hard to walk normally for the past few days. Might have hurt it switching hotels as I was very over-encumbered with my luggage.. Too many dumb gifts for her...

12/4/24 - 12/7/24

Gone to Japan again~ Trip 6.

12/3/24

Biboo dark souls, aoc 3, slept, watched dumb skyrim/dagoth ur vids. Starting to pack up snacks, might need to take friend's bigger suitcase... Stressing out about art stuff, can't make up my mind.

12/2/24

Watched some moldbug interviews. Got a few more references to never follow up on, but it was entertainment. Working on art stuff. Did advent of code day 2. Did some treadmill -- finally felt for the first time like I was able to walk normally again since the gout thing. So maybe 100% after two months? Sheesh. Napped. Watched some rant vids. Watched some Biboo dark souls.

12/1/24

Watched a Morrowind vid... Watched some N64 vids. Rewatched story of the remote agent. Chajchaj. Did a bunch of communication. Did some blender work. Slept. Watched andreessen interview.

11/30/24

Didn't get up until late. But art was done, it looks good. Did some communications. Finished a few last dishes.

11/29/24

Woke up, ate a bit more cornbread, went back to sleep. Got up, went to get rest of yen currency, started doing some dishes. Watched a video on carbon-14 dating, cleared up some misconceptions I had. Half-life is around 5k years, which puts a useful max age limit around 60k years, but not a hard limit on the resolution within range. C-14 comes from cosmic rays (neutrons) colliding with N-14 in the atmosphere, then getting bonded with some oxygen to form a CO2 variant, then absorbed by plants through photosynthesis and then spread to all organic matter basically. Finished off cornbread and mashed potatoes, slept again.

11/28/24

Played tekken with Coyo. Baked a pie. Slept. Baked corn bread. Watched some Mori. Baked mashed potatoes, had thanksgiving dinner.

11/27/24

Played some old GC games. Chaj. Played some N64 games too. Watched some vids. Finished sword tutorial for blender.

11/26/24

Calculated how much I played dragon quest 2 about two years ago, had to query sqlite db. Played a bit of Cruisin' USA while I waited for melatonin to kick in. Slept. Reviewed draft of art commissioned for idol, I'm relieved it's looking so good. It's probably going to be a bit hard to incorporate into a banner but I'll do my best... Got JR pass in the mail. Finished watching Coyo's stream.

11/25/24

Chose sleep over a coyo stream, yeah I'm cooked. She grinded for 7 hours, I'll watch it later. Still mad about yesterday, heh. I'd rather burn all my wealth down than give a single red dime to someone who's got a sense of entitlement. Fortunately, I can just not give. For family matters, there can be exceptions, but I'll still be mad about them. Watched a bit of Mori playing DS2. Did a bit of shopping, ate a frozen pizza and some pork sticks, feeling better. Watched a bit of Shishou, it's always nice when she greets me, and has the permanent association of me with coyodachi lol. I want them to collab again...

11/24/24

Watched mission impossible / star soldier recaps. Finished rpg vid. Had a somewhat upsetting but good sort of airing of grievances call with bro. I'unno, I'm just depressed again. Showered. Played solitaire. Played some chess. Wetrix vid was neat. Got depression burger king again. Watched some tech nerd vids. Interview with tailscale guy is good, I've been using tailscale for quite a while https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyczOQTx5Gg

11/23/24

How bout this. If I can't even remember what videos I watched, I should go look at my history and report some. Slept a bit after midnight. Watched another n64 vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCqSvM0K4JU Listened to much of a piano cover of megaman x songs. Watched a bit of tiger vtuber. Decided to succumb to thoughts of hating myself and getting burger king. Garage door was a pain in the butt to reconnect, never dealt with one so poorly designed before. Continued watching history of jrpgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhQamvbfDxc Installed / extracted some games I might never get around to playing. Moping and spending more time on downer thoughts about not building things than trying to build things. Spent so much of this year depressed...

11/22/24

Watched videos. Some silly speedrun videos. Some silly n64 game reviews. Played a bit of N64 games. Reset up with the latest emulators. Maybe will get to show some to idol... She announced all the stuff for her live, bought ticket. Learned a bit about using nakutemo. Ate too much -- chili, grilled cheeses... Thought about how I've started getting pretty vague here, as a 'daylog' it's not as informative as it could be. But don't feel like putting the links of every youtube video I'm watching. If someone wants to know, I'll fish it out of the logs.

11/21/24

Power finally back on around 5am, so about 36 hours without power. Ordered some more stuff, ordered JR pass... chajchaj. Assembled kerosene heater. Put in request for dead UPS batteries...

11/20/24

Cold night of sleep. Went shopping for some stuff, businesses had power... Bought some stuff to be delivered later that will make me a bit better prepared next time.

11/19/24

Moda. Threw out some of the remaining mini potatoes in a bag. Made some scrambled eggs, threw out some half-and-half. Looked up prices for JR pass. Power went out around 5:30pm. UPS didn't do its job...

11/18/24

Studied some Japanese. Fixed a phone issue. Watched some interviews. Got my old oculus quest 1 setup again, played some beat saber.

11/17/24

Read some of my old real time graphics book. Studied some japanese. Chaj. Watched another interview vid. Figured out some system noise issues.

11/16/24

I think I've gone over 24 hrs without any anti-inflammatory, willing to call foot healed finally. I've gotten old... Wrote a blog post.

11/15/24

Chaj. Watched Tyson fight.

11/14/24

Watched a couple more interviews (gwern, casey). Realized my Blender install hasn't been using Optix, which apparently is way faster than normal Cuda for Cycles rendering... Followed most of sword tutorial. Finally shelled out for paid claude to see if he can help me carry some side projects forward.

11/13/24

Finished AI talk, wrote short post about it. Chaj. Foot feeling better, upping magnesium seemed to have helped especially as before it almost felt like it was crawling up my leg. Finished Wizard of Oz. Finished reading God Emperor of Dune.

11/8/24 - 11/12/24

Read. Some tekken. Some videos/interviews/movies watched. Took stuff to the dump.

11/7/24

Did some Blender tutorials. Submitted an artist commission request. Gout pain has come back to the lateral malleolus with a vengeance. Able to ice it and get some sleep at least.

11/6/24

Up at 5:30am. Side ankle joint acting up. Started studying a bit of japanese, ended up cleaning instead. Read. Chaj. Finally slept a bit. Watched a bit of Mint and Doki.

11/5/24

Tekken with Coyo. Ate another pizza. Watched a movie. Watched a bit of election coverage: lol. Read a bit.

11/2/24 - 11/4/24

Yup, so far no more discipline than normal. Finished travel booking. Found a replacement artist potential for event, need to contact them... Foot finally feeling somewhat normal. Slightly tender still, don't want to jump on it, but I probably could and be ok. I'm wondering if overloading on fresh tart cherry extract was the push I needed or if it really just took a month to get over. Did a silly photo meme for idol, she liked and then unliked it, I guess one of the photos offended her. FML. Ordered a giant pizza, watched another movie, and food coma'd. Feeling depressed. Wrote a few lines of a poem I might give to her.

11/1/24

Finished children of dune. Slept. Ruminated over wanting this to be a month of discipline before my Tokyo trip, we'll see. Foot still suffering. Watched a movie. Did a bit of arm exercise.

10/31/24

Carved a Pumpkin. Tekken. Slept. Chaj. Read.

10/30/24

Finished lesson 4 of readspeeder, I didn't like having to read everything twice. Started a new game. Foot pain is back to big toe joint... did it just migrate around this whole month? Apparently 2018 was the first time, there were a couple flareups I remember since but this is the worst it's been since then... Next readspeeder lesson is better, and only have to read once. Still suspicious of the 'concentration' metric. I also think I just don't particularly like the book (Wizard of Oz). I should watch the movie again; I remember it enough that it's very different from the book, in many ways better, in some ways not as interesting. The book has so much random wanton slaughter, and so much illogical "and this problem happened, but fret not, immediately here is the solution". The wicked witch never does anything particularly wicked (even in the movie she's more of a generic menace than wicked). Finished lesson 5 already, wow that auto-read and read-twice thing of lesson 4 was ass. Slept. Went shopping. Read more book.

10/29/24

Tekken Tuesday. Read book. Slept. Finished Laika game.

10/26/24-10/28/24

Magic of ice, guess I shouldn't be so anti-RICE as I have been. Situationally useful. Felt good enough to go to the store and get a pumpkin as well. Started and finished a new railshooter game. Chaj. Continued playing other game. Finished booking most of my hotels.

10/25/24

Struggled to sleep. Finally slept a bit, painkillers wore off around 4 hours on the dot and woke me back up. Felt alright for the "morning" of 11am-4pm. Pain got bad again later, bad enough to make me use some ice which is just going to slow the healing. Baked a pie. Running out of non-keto food, need to go to the store...

10/24/24

Listened to Voyager 1's record https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELnn9V01EiI (Not the best recording, just one that youtube suggested. It repeats a lot.) Did some reading. Bought kemov streaming tickets. Donated to LEVF. Thought about mom, she'd be 71 today. Reviewed hotels. Tried to commission some art but it got blocked by the site, so will have to do an alternative. (I still have two months, don't panic.) Listened to new rap album that came out.

10/23/24

Laundry. Chaj. Started a new game, it's fun. Booked my flight.

10/22/24

TT. Spent a lot of time in bed yesterday/today, I think what happened is the gout gave way to tendonitis. But getting better again. Don't have to cut off my foot yet...

10/21/24

Did some anki.

10/20/24

Uh... what? I think I had a phone call and watched some videos.

10/19/24

Finished a book. Watched some math videos. Chaj. Got mad at myself because I feel like I've wasted the entire week. I can sort of pinpoint when, too, I was about to start a work project when I got a phone call and that derailed me for the whole week it feels like. I'm being unfair to myself, I did get some stuff done, just irritated and feeling useless.

10/18/24

Watched another Robin Hanson video. Disappointing again, for the person he was talking to (guy at Harvard). One thing I like about Hanson that isn't shared by most the people he talks with is that he doesn't just throw ideas out there, he throws ideas supported by some theory or model that predicts the ideas. And when evaluating ideas, he's happy to do the proper thing of shooting them down if they're not well-predicted by observations or theory. Took the trash out. Ruminated more about unrequited love. Chaj. Watched some PCT videos. Cooked pizza.

10/17/24

Listened to Dia singing. Chaj. Read. More programming. Went to the grocery store. Finished programming task.

10/16/24

Did some programming. Coyo tekken. Did some reading. Cooked and ate a family sized box of mac n cheese. Read some blog posts. Chaj.

10/15/24

Read some of my actual book. Reading a bit while on the walking pad too. Messed with some new AI image generation tools in Krita. Chaj. Did laundry.

10/14/24

Found some old poetry I wrote. Got mega distracted on starting to do some graphic design work and new blender stuff... Big chaj. Contemplated dumb thoughts on how maybe an assumption I've carried around for a bit over 2 years now could be false. (Assumption is that idol doesn't give a flying rat's behind about me. I assume that's the case, but still plan to give all my support she'll take. Assuming otherwise is unproductive fantasy that'll just make me sadder than keeping the current assumption does.) Had some mac n cheese. Chaj. Cleaned up a bunch of browser tabs.

10/13/24

Finished readspeeder's first book (alice in wonderland), started on second (wizard of oz).

10/12/24

Some reading. Got an inexpensive 'walking pad' to keep next to my desk. Chaj. Watched some book reviews. Got a new NVMe SSD. My old one was reporting only 51% "available spare", which is the primary health metric. (10% is the threshold.) It should normally be at 100%. So I got a 4 TB one on amazon's special day to replace the 2 TB one. (I'll still use the 2 TB one for extra storage until it dies, and I have a windows partition on there I don't care if I lose.) Problem: my motherboard has two m.2 slots, but the secondary one is limited to PCIe3 speeds. So I took the old one out and put it in the secondary slot, and put the new one in the main slot. Slightly to my surprise, everything booted up just fine. Well mostly, openRC bailed early to a login prompt because my fstab was trying to mount the wrong drives now for my /boot and /mnt/windows. (I didn't use ids for them intentionally, my fault.) So fixed those. Next I formatted the new drive to just have a boot partition and the rest for ZFS (again no windows this time). Created a new pool with most of the same settings as the original one. It took a few tries to get booting right, eventually putting the fstab /boot/ to the new drive too (what it originally was from a slot perspective), but eventually was verifiably booting from the new drive, not the old one. Next, I made a minor grub config edit to say use the new zpool name as the root filesystem, then did a recursive snapshot of my main ZFS root, and then did a simple zfs send/receive pair to the new drive. I chrooted for good measure to run the grub-mkconfig command but I could probably have just edited the grub config directly, the point was to have an entry saying to use the new zpool for the root fs instead of the old zpool name. Reboot and.. it works! I did need to logout and go back as root to change up a couple sub dataset mount points (weird result of the two pool's datasets claiming to be mounted at the same point, but it was really just the original). Overall, a pretty straightforward process.

10/11/24

Now at 4:30am foot's maybe good enough to go but the store is closed. Moda. Some more design iteration for idol banner, probably need to find a separate artist for some hydrangeas. (I don't want to use AI art flat-out even if it's nice, only for ideas or to partially complement and improve my own drawing.) Organized a bunch of files and removed some duplicates. Later went to store.

10/10/24

Had a very unproductive day, felt super low energy. A bit of JP study. Chaj. Finished eating cake. Kept getting up and going back to sleep. Did an experiment with bcrypt. Showered and wanted to go shopping, but foot felt too swollen, so kept it elevated and just stayed in bed longer...

10/9/24

A bit more JP studying. Chaj. Continued reading alice. Baked a cake.

10/8/24

Tekken tuesday. Some shopping and dreaming. Foot almost healed, maybe, inflammation has spread up the top of foot though. (More away from original joint.) Watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7TONauJGfc -- interesting to contrast with what I was thinking about a couple years ago here on the idea of "making someone feel" a certain way. I wrote "The idea that you can induce feelings in others is deeply embedded in our language, and not just English, either." I like Marshall Rosenberg giving the idea its own language name, with many dialects, and the language is that of Jackal. I'm reviewing some judgmental thinking I've had, and some "you made me feel, probably unintentionally but still, this way.." thinking. Even if the judgment is accurate, it's not a productive way of thinking. Simply state the observation: "you did this, and afterwards, I felt this way." There's no blame here, necessarily... I felt hurt, because I had a need to be understood that wasn't met. It's interesting as well to think on how steeped in jackal language I was growing up, like basically everyone in the world, but I think there's some amount of resistance to the language I was granted, maybe through philosophy, maybe through admiration of Gandhi, maybe through a weird brain. And I can't help but notice the meta contradiction here -- that it's better to not use jackal language. You can twist that into something else, like: it's not helpful to your goals to use and respond to jackal language. But there's still a meta level of an implicit "and it's better for you to be effective, right?" judgment. I also liked his statement about being careful with expressing your own feelings as hiding a value judgment or diagnosis. e.g. "I'm feeling ignored" -- sometimes you feel bad about being ignored, but sometimes you feel relieved about being ignored; the true feeling isn't "ignored", "ignored" is a value judgment and assumption about someone else. He highlighted careful thought on whether something is a request or demand, and knowing which is which based on how people react if the action is not done.

10/7/24

Read some papers. Did a bit of JP studying. Baked and sauced some meatballs. Played a bit of tekken with new controller. Did some vacuuming.

10/6/24

Finally got to talk to idol. My heart aches. Was able to discuss a good number of things from my list, I still have like 90 items though. Sent some JP emails, it's such a hard language for me, I'd be helpless without chatgpt and claude... Content was about me offering to help as much as I can to make a birthday event happen this year. Chaj.

10/5/24

Troubled sleep. Got a new controller to mess with, but I'll have to use windows to fully configure it. Played fall guys with coyo.

10/4/24

Not a productive day. Ate some potatoes. Another contrast bath. Lit a bunch of incense. Got some new books with giftcard. Chajchaj. Finished laundry.

10/3/24

Microwaved potatoes for breakfast along with eating an apple. Trying to retrain my reading speed with ReadSpeeder, it's starting me with Alice and Wonderland which I've never actually read so that's fun. Chaj. Did some vacuuming. Went for periodic dental checkup. Ate a pizza and slept. Did a contrast bath for feet while finishing watching sqlite talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSKLA81tBis

10/2/24

Got some jack in the box. Foot's still pretty bad, struggle to get a shoe on and drive (stick shift), but made it, and I think it's getting better... Got my idle wish about not winning the tickets. Also right before that saw some sad news about two idol groups I liked disbanding. Got a gift card, cool. So far... not the worst bday I've had heh. Slept most of the day. Might be able to talk to idol on Sunday. Got myself to the store so I won't have to get fast food again any time soon, might make a cake tomorrow. Started reading a book. Went back to sleep.

10/1/24

Got some Wendy's. More reading ancient stuff that doesn't matter. Played the new tekken story content, went through Heihachi's moves. Eh, I just don't like stance characters... but he's cool, I'm glad he's back. If I liked tekken 8 I might try to actually learn him. I'm lol'ing at the decision to make the new stage paid even for deluxe/ultimate owners. I've gotten burned twice in the last year or so on that (elden ring dlc, tekken 8's everything). I rarely did those ultimate editions anyway precisely because of stuff like this, but I can more strongly say 'never again' now. (If it weren't for Coyo, I wouldn't have even bought T8 to begin with.) Anyway, did our tekken tuesday event.

9/30/24

Researched some cake frostings. Was thinking about baking a cake for myself, but have decided against it to try and keep my diet going. (Except I triggered a gout attack a few days ago and it's not exactly getting better at a rate I'm happy with, so I might need to break diet anyway.) Did a bit of programming. Got distracted with silly fork drama. Reflected a bit about this whole page -- I think it's been positive, overall. I'm still not where I want to be, but I'm not getting worse, and I thought September might have been a very bad month but it's been ok. In some sense I've been doing "manic" activities to distract myself from the handful of activities I've said I want to do for months now, but find resistance doing. Ultimately this is a good thing, because even if I'm not making progress on those things, I'm making progress (of sorts) on other things. Action is better than inaction, and I was doing a lot more inaction before I started this dumb activities tracker. Action is so helpful in distraction, too. Unhelpful ruminating thoughts are constantly on my mind. One thing I forgot to mention was I started doing some very early prep work a few days ago for idol's birthday event in December, but I don't even know if she's going to have one, or if my presence is at all desired. I sort of wish I don't win tickets to another thing in Japan in November, just so I don't have to plan that trip out. Anyway, getting off subject. Point is, I let myself go a bit crazy with those repetitive thoughts, and action helps me stop them. I'll keep trying to do better for now.

9/28/24 - 9/29/24

More manic reading of old things that don't matter. A bit of programming. Watched some vids. dhh's ruby 8 talk was fun. Wrote about Lisp refactoring.

9/27/24

Foolishly decided to start the learn opengl site with C++... Went down a rabbit hole of old lisp papers. Forgot to take weekly trash out... Read https://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/Name.html in pdf form. I'm reminded that I should read (and re-read some of) all of Pitman's writing, it's really clear and enjoyable. In just this one (which now I that I think about I probably have skimmed/seen before), he gives great examples of what is meant by object oriented. His battleship example is even one I almost want to write actual code for, because it especially plays into modern discussions on the hardware inefficiency of oop. He also encourages Lisp people to stand up for their terminology -- I don't know if he'd agree, but sadly, that battle has basically been lost on every front... Even the meaning of "Lisp" itself.

9/26/24

Finished book. Chaj. Read some papers. Watched some youtube talks and interviews.

9/24/24 - 9/25/24

Reading. A bit of anki. Coyo.

9/23/24

More reading. Tried a new game, refunded it.

9/22/24

I don't know if it's better or worse that I'm engaging more on twitter, but I'm doing it. A bit on HN too. Probably net-worse, but keeps me out of trouble in other ways I guess. Did a bit of anki. Continued to read book. Wrote a post.

9/18/24 - 9/21/24

Did nothing important. Lots of partial reading of things, partial programming of things, partial tweeting and commenting in threads. Sous-vide'd some steaks which I haven't done in years. (Conclusion: sous-vide can give a perfect medium rare interior every time, which is great, but it won't make a bad cut of meat better, in fact possibly worse as less fat is rendered, and searing just isn't the same as cooking it normally.) Played with some AI tools. Worked around limitations in the insane Japanese e-commerce experience to let me as a foreigner try to acquire tickets to an event in November.

9/16/24 - 9/17/24

System maintenance / tinkering. Bit of programming. Pointless arguing. Unhealthy rumination. Watched a cool math video on the FFT.

9/14/24 - 9/15/24

Some programming. Some stupid arguments online. Some new games.

9/13/24

More system maintenance. Finished Risen 3.

9/7/24 - 9/12/24

Again not much, finished Risen 2 and went into Risen 3. Spending more time gaming than a full time job would take. Feel a bit like an NPC. Still moda. I think I'm coping. At least not binge eating (yet -- maybe next year). For most of 9/12 took a break from gaming. Did some Lisp community stuff. Messed with my gentoo system. Read about some more low level programming and hardware stuff.

9/3/24 - 9/6/24

Not much, mostly playing Risen. Beat it today at 2am. Moda each day. Decided to go straight into Risen 2.

9/2/24

Slept around 7:30am, up around 2pm. Moda.

9/1/24

Stayed up through the night. Watched some episodes of a show. Chaj. Chatted with friend. Went to bed around 7:30am, up around 2pm. Moda. Did some wiki contributions. Wrote a blog post.

8/31/24

Played with a few versions of the AI written classifier scripts. One using a classic HOG (histogram of oriented gradients) technique, the other using a neural net/deep learning approach. Nearly summoned the ancient gods trying to get a tensorflow version to work, had it redo it with pytorch instead. It "works" but I think performs worse than the HOG method... All-in-all I wasted more time on this than it could have saved me with accurate classifications. Anyway, meant to go to bed around 3:30am, but didn't actually do it until 6:30am or so. Woke up at 1:30pm. Took moda. Continued to mess with AI scripts... Finally got some better results bumping up the image resize to 512x512. Watched an old Coyo stream.

8/30/24

Woke up in time to take out the trash. But thought maybe a bug crawled down my throat in the night... just really weird sensation after waking of a blocked throat that didn't fully go away for a while even after hydrating and such. That or perhaps a cold? Watched old Coyo video. Took moda, caffeine. Resisted almost overwhelming urge to go back to sleep. Found a fun retro (12 years ago) idol group's playlist to listen to, did that. Sorted some images. Decided to see if I could get one of the AIs to help write code to auto-classify them, experimented with that. Got distracted playing lord of the rings online all day and night. Updated old gentoo system, just keeping it stable.

8/29/24

Woke up to surprise Coyo stream. Took moda. Played stepmania. Chaj. Read a bit. Watched some youtube vids (one on the oof sound and turned into a bigger plagiarism/credit thing).

8/28/24

Imported the handful of trip photos. Did some online shopping. Chaj.

8/27/24

Read a bit. Tekken stream. Slept and woke up again. Went shopping. Watched some videos.

8/26/24

Doomscrolled, listened to some music. Ate more pistachios. Chaj. Went to olive garden with friend.

8/25/24

Caught up on free game giveaways. Chajchaj. Unpacked. Ate leftover burritos from last night's drive. Went back to sleep.

8/24/24

Drove home to WA. Listened to various talks and interviews. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc5NTeJbk-k was the best of them, helping me understand the key differences of diffusion models.

8/23/24

Drove north back to Utah, met bro for camping overnight.

8/22/24

Did fourth and final (skipping out tomorrow) day of startup week. Chajchaj. Maybe will summarize thoughts in a separate post later.

8/21/24

Did third day of startup week.

8/20/24

Did second day of startup week.

8/19/24

Did first day of startup week.

8/18/24

Chatted with Coyo. Chaj. Drove to Durango. Met up with old boss, his brother-in-law.

8/17/24

Hung out with friend again. Finished Demon's Souls. Chatted with Coyo.

8/16/24

Caught up on some vods. Chaj. Hung out with friend, played Demon's Souls.

8/15/24

Went to hike up to Timp Cave with bro and do that tour. Satisfied my curiosity about a cheesecake shop.

8/14/24

Gone fishing. Caught 2 (one got off the hook as I was getting the stringer, so he escaped), bro caught 2.

8/13/24

Family hangouts. Helped with some labor. In demonstrating how I've not been able to touch my toes (ever? at least not since I was little), I...touched my toes. Body what? Chajchaj.

8/12/24

Arrived in good time, 13.5ish hours. Reviewed some Japanese along the way. Spent time with family. Chaj.

8/11/24

Ended up watching Mars Express and playing some classic Doom with friend instead of sleeping. Made some calendar events. Took some mela for sleep. Took some moda for drive. Departed for long drive around 5:30pm.

8/10/24

Kept napping, waking up, going back to sleep... Mowed the lawn. Organized some photos. Listened to a sqlite history podcast. Listened to the Tolkien BBC in their own words video; most of the things others said were dumb. Chaj. Watched the bau baus while eating sichuanese. Started prepping for drive tomorrow.

8/9/24

Dozed/food coma'd, forced myself up to take out trash. Went back to sleep, had an interesting and weird series of dreams. Played a bit of tetris. Spent more time just lying down, still recovering from overindulgence. Did a bit of Lisp evangelism. Ate some pistachios. Watched a tekken tournament for a bit. Finished scanning the last several negatives in my box of physical photos. Chaj.

8/8/24

Woke up around 1am, nap turned into sleep. Watched Coyo tekken stream. Slept again. Played a bit of Another Crab's Treasure. Played a bit of Doom 5's DLC. Overindulged on food.

8/7/24

Finished Kunitsu. Well, not going to do the 'true' ending of going through it all in NG+, but good enough.

8/6/24

Slept a few hours, woke up for tekken tuesday. Figured out her performance issue! That's such a gigantic relief... Played some more of Kunitsu. Chaj. Booked airbnb for trip next week. Verified I can stay with an old boss for a bit during the week after. Played more Kunitsu, almost done.

8/5/24

More mela, pretty vivid dream. Mostly about safety of Tokyo, leaving things unattended for long periods and coming back to them just fine. Watched rock. Chaj. Watched tiger. Went to applebee's for their all you can eat deal with friend.

8/4/24

Took melatonin to sleep, had a rare nightmare, went back to sleep. Did a bit more Lisp optimizing. Tried out Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, not feeling it, so dropped it. Then tried Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess. Not what I expected, but I'm having fun with it, played about 6 hours. Chatted with friend until sunrise.

8/3/24

Chatted with dad, determined visit date. Benchmarked some Lisp code. Played a bit over an hour of Lies of P, just starting out. It's ok, at least better than the new Lords of the Fallen which I decided to drop. Reminisced over some chekis; made me depressed so took a nap. Watched a cute rock become 3D.

8/2/24

Continued my tab reducing. https://paulgraham.com/ace.html was good. Upgraded system to python 3.12 as default. Read some poetry by Hamilton (the mathematician) https://web.mit.edu/redingtn/www/netadv/SP20141215.html especially those on his futile love. Reviewed some kanji. Reviewed https://statisticsbyjim.com/basics/cohens-d/ related to a few days ago. Watched some of a tiger stream. Got some junk food and chocolate milk from the store and watched The Secret of Kells, it was beautiful... Looked at some scans of the real book.

8/1/24

Registered for the dec tekken tournament in japan after all. I might not be there but hey, if I am, it could be fun. Half fell asleep in chair, woke up for a dumb game vid, went back to fuller sleep, up at 1pm. Got around to watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW_CbIX3NSE I remember when it was a big deal when this cartoon was re-found by the internet. What a crazy cartoon. Worked through some old browser tabs of things to read / vids to watch / songs to listen to. Only about 1900 to go.

7/31/24

Did more system updates, watched videos, new music. Doomscrolling. Sorted some images. Chaj. Read a bit of a math book. Short workout. Chatted with friend.

7/30/24

Finally fell asleep, kept waking up and going back. Fully up a bit after 6, cranky, bit late for tekken tuesday. Moda. Tried to research some possible problems with her PC to explain performance issues. Upgraded my own mesa which should maybe let me use mangohud and/or gamescope on things? Read the last couple pages of chapter 9 from http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstfinal.htm Read the rest about a week ago after debating someone about patents and referring them to that chapter, I remembered most things from it and it still holds up. Decided to reread https://paulgraham.com/softwarepatents.html while at it, not sure it holds up so well, but I still find myself repeating the point that being against software patents is usually no different than being against patents. The point about objections often being around obvious-ness is a good one. Found a cool Japanese grammar reference https://my.wasabi-jpn.com/magazine/japanese-grammar/wasabis-online-japanese-grammar-reference/ Watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=RlwO6CJbJjQ Cool project he made at https://github.com/real-logic/aeron Chatted with bro.

7/29/24

Up around 5, about that much sleep. Watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fH6CuDj29xY calmed me down. Updated a spreadsheet. Tried to sleep, can't sleep. Doomscrolled, videos. Remembered using resistance bands years and years ago, ordered some, did a bit of exercise with them.

7/28/24

Can't sleep, been up over 24hr. Chaj. Watched a bit of twins sucking at SMW (but nice they're playing and having fun). Saw fset got a new release. Watched fv major top 8. Saw a nice idea for an idol bday live's messages: blank cards with decoration materials and people can glue-stick them into a book. Finally slept 6 hours. Ate sausages. Had an insight I used to feel special about something but no longer do. Popped a moda. Listened to myka. Watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4FNBMZsqrY Reminds me to finish Doom 5's DLC. Finally read https://medium.com/@mickgordon/my-full-statement-regarding-doom-eternal-5f98266b27ce after nearly two years too, I remember reading a bit when it came out and it's just disgusting how sociopaths take advantage of people.

7/27/24

Woke up around midnight, watched a bit of fv major fights, fell asleep again, back up at 4am. Saw my favorite on a twitter clip, silly feelings... There's a tekken tournament in japan in december, thought about signing up for the heck of it since I might be there at that time anyway, thinking about it again. We'll see. If I don't travel I can always withdraw. Popped a moda. Read https://shivansite.wordpress.com/2013/11/13/using-a-queue-for-user-input-events/ which is a simplistic but still somewhat illuminating article. In SDL-land, you're always using PollEvent, which is backed by a queue. However, as the article notes at the end, real fighting games don't quite stop after just this stage. Indeed, it makes sense to setup an additional buffer (ring or otherwise) to capture the set of events active per frame for the last n frames, which then you can process to handle combo states and so on without necessarily having to keep a bunch of ad-hoc state around for each entity. This reminded me to look into what the difference is between SDL3 and SDL2 because I keep seeing SDL3 as coming soon and they messed up their wiki docs site to scare about it before it's actually ready. Anyway, found https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/docs/README-migration.md and it's unfortunately more than I thought it'd be... And so much renaming! I'd rather the whole project be called something different. I think I'm going to stop using SDL2 for anything if I can help it (RIP lgame as-is). Sure, SDL1 is still around and works and SDL2 will live just as long probably, but if this is the direction the project is going, man... Ate some hotdogs. Made an issue to lgame project and added some screenshots, fixed a bug. chaj. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeZjwdx30ys was a refresher on PCT. Neat Skinner fact in there, the experiments don't work unless you starve the animal to like 80% of its weight first. Ate a block of cheese. Re-read this old thing on monads here (skimmed part 4). Watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAhjKTDGF4o and its preparation material. Near the end it brings up some evidence and highlights effect size d values. This is a good time to remind myself of something seen before (should anki deck it?), examples of effect sizes. This isn't the original place I saw it but I've had it bookmarked: https://figshare.com/articles/figure/Illustrative_effect_sizes_for_sex_differences/866802 The first one, d=1.72, is the effect size for height differences between males and females. (It can be represented as the amount you shift a standard normal distribution from its initial point.) So, 1.72 is huge, easily observable without having to do a formal study. (I believe I'm also correct in interpreting it as something like how many standard deviations away from the original distribution's mean that the mean of the new distribution of the 'effect' is? With height it's almost 2.) Some useful info from that link: "$$d = t / \sqrt{\frac{n1*n2}{n1+n2}}$$, or $$d = \frac{2t}{\sqrt{df}}$$, where df=945 here." "The optimal (equal error) classification accuracy can be estimated as normcdf(d/2, 0, 1), which for the interhemispheric effect is about 56% (which is statistically significantly -- but not really substantively -- above chance)." I'm not sure where these approximations come from (and wouldn't error usually be 1-normcdf?) but using the height value we get 81% (or 19%) which is quite better than chance. Watched more fv major.

7/26/24

Crashed for some hours, got up a bit after midnight. Got jack in the box. Seeing some stuff from FV Major, poking fun at myself for dumb feelings. Found a silly react channel mostly of rap songs https://www.youtube.com/@CliffBeatsOfficial I don't usually like react stuff but it's nice when I find people vibing with what I like and picking up on stuff, his non-rap reactions are kinda hilarious too. (Shakira lol.) Also funny that listening to a lot of NF had him make this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvHSgq9J7c4 NF can do that, yeah. I kinda broke in May; thought I was stronger than I am, but I'm still strong, just not invincible, and had to build up some calluses (and not become callous). Took out the trash. Somehow I missed this Babymetal song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDnIEWyVIlE When did Su's English get so good? Always impressed with her... chaj. Watched random recommendation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEIGDkQchMY on learning tekken characters... Waste of 13 minutes, oh well. I mean, it's not a terrible approach, and my very first steps are similar (not at all the same though), but you can summarize that in a couple sentences, no need for a video. Youtube must know I've been thinking about it being cool to reach chair ranks with every character, one guy finally "beat tekken" by reaching max rank with every character, but sadly I just don't like tekken 8 or how its characters play for the most part. I want Chloe back. Also I got curious and my man you're not high ranked enough to be giving advice to the void. Read https://www.betonit.ai/p/do-ten-times-as-much (maybe re-read?), it's a premise/simplistic piece of advice I can agree with, if not execute on. Watched https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXiPWa9RWgc live. Useful review, learned a couple new things. (Like just how big the branch predictor silicon is. A long way from the start of The Slow Winter days of 2-bit saturating counters per branch getting to 94% accuracy.) RDTSC gives wall-clock time but uncorrelated to clock cycles/instructions. Covered some instructions that utils like perf use behind the scenes like RDPMC. Can get back the count of actual processor cycles on a core. RDPRU on recent zen cores. wikichip.org is a great site. Got some useful insight that he doesn't do anything special to avoid other process/kernel context switching interference in his normal perf work, especially because most things aren't using all of his 16 cores (I only have 12 cores) so it doesn't really matter if one core is used by an OS thingy. He did however remind me of the existence of Agner Fog's work over at https://www.agner.org/optimize/ which I've visited before but had forgotten about, very useful especially if you want to just boot into your own custom code right from the BIOS. Updated blog Linkify button to not re-linkify existing links; used the ever-useful (more useful?) https://regexr.com to save some thinking. Tried to find opening song of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvoNHajaMlg for someone, failed. Watched some videos on elden ring fall damage. chaj. Watched an old drag vid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oR-ozwMDy8 Watched chunks of a vid on train drm hacking. Ate a block of cheese.

7/25/24

Got out of bed after midnight (currently coming up on 6am). Sleep didn't restore mood, so starting out full of negative thoughts. Had dumb idea to do this blog style thing and see if it'll help but it probably won't. Had some cheese sticks, water. Popped moda and caff. Took a shower. Decided not to succumb to getting jack in the box. Not going to write down rest of day plans, I want this to be things I'm doing/did, not things I plan/want to do... ... Played a bit of tetris. Made some pointless lisp comments. Went shopping (this time to walmart, mostly for their $2 cheese blocks). Refreshed myself on CAP theorem issues (my thoughts pre-refresh were it's sort of irrelevant) with https://codahale.com/you-cant-sacrifice-partition-tolerance/ and https://martin.kleppmann.com/2015/05/11/please-stop-calling-databases-cp-or-ap.html (that one especially good, especially its analysis of ZooKeeper). Skimmed https://groups.csail.mit.edu/tds/papers/Lynch/jacm85.pdf but didn't find it interesting. https://github.com/guicho271828/bit-ops is a cool Lisp lib with a nice related work section, basically optimized bit twiddling. https://github.com/thephoeron/bit-smasher has some nice conversion functions. Rewatching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aAWtFMeeIc and making a couple clips, it was privated for a bit for some reason but returned. (lol, forgot just how bad she was at this game...) At the store, saw sunbelt bakery oats and honey, my favorite, and I didn't think they sold it out here. So I got a box... and had one... and now I've had a lot more than one. Oops.

April 2025 Summary

TODO.

March 2025 Summary

Did some programming. Finished some games. Watched some movies. Did some exercies on stationary bike. Watched some interesting vids, some technical, some just entertainment. Had a cheat week on diet. Played through all of SENS Populous as a coping mechanism for depression. Wrote a blog post. Paid off brother's car (expensive). Fixed shower diverter, fixed leaking sink faucets, fixed garage door opener. Decided not to take a last minute week trip to Japan in April.

February 2025 Summary

Finished anime, games, TV show. Started reading some physics books. Did a bit of programming, learning godot. Went to watch a robot battle competition. Swapped to a futon instead of hammock after 12 years.

January 2025 Summary

First week still in Japan. Replaced shower head back home. Watched and finished some anime. Got depressed. Finished some games. Resolved a computer freeze problem by lowering RAM clock speeds.

December 2024 Summary

Went to Japan.

November 2024 Summary

Gout continued until mid-month but didn't feel 100% until the start of December. Big power outage for 36 hours. Got back into some N64 games after finding a guy's channel who is playing them all. Went through some blender tutorials. Read some books. Made progress on stage banner for idol's bday live. Traditional thanksgiving with friend.

October 2024 Summary

Gout attack continued throughout the month though in spurts of feeling ok and then bad again. Finished a book. Upgraded my computer. Carved a pumpkin. Played and finished some games. Committed to a trip to Japan.

September 2024 Summary

Did a bit of writing. Poor sleep, continuing lots of moda. Played and finished several games. Finished a book. Got a gout attack at the end of the month, which turned out to be as bad as the worst one before, such that I want to say I've only ever had it twice.

August 2024 Summary

Had poor sleep. Did a tiny bit of Lisp programming, mainly around testing optimization hypotheses and figuring out how to get SBCL to do certain things. Played several games, finished a couple. Visited family in Utah. Visited friend. Visited old boss in Colorado. Attended startup week event. Read and listened to some technical materials. Ate a lot of whatever.

July 2024 Summary

Started this stupid thing with only a few days left in the month. Read and watched some technical stuff, not just mind junk food. Ate junk food though and had poor sleep.