Blog
2025-06-27: birthday honks
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2025-06-26: Yay, birthday plans are finally settled. Friends are coming over for pizza and a special surprise of a movie. I'll tell y'all about the movie sometime later :p
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2025-06-25: "So far, I've figured out that I don't have anything figured out."
Weather is supposed to suck this weekend, which blew my birthday weekend plans out of the water. I also realized that I was making plans that revolved around doing stuff by myself, rather than trying to make plans with friends or family. I'm trying to be more intentional about being social and making room in my life for people I care about, so spending a milestone year alone is not only bad for myself, but also unfair to folks who would probably want to celebrate with me.
We probably won't do anything extravagent. Good local pizza and a so-bad-it's-good movie, or a board game, or something like that.
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2025-06-24: Today's championship parade was something special.
We had over half a million people attending the parade, and the players finally had a chance to fully let loose after a really disciplined season. It has been a joy to root for this group.
Part of me wanted to go to the parade, but I got too much sun this last weekend, and the whole event looked like a logistical nightmare. I was glad to watch from work though!
Now to get birthday plans figured out this coming weekend. Probably doing something easy-going and low-key.
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2025-06-23: OKC! OKC! OKC!
The Oklahoma City Thunder won the 2025 NBA Championship. I got to watch the game with a friend at the Chickasaw Bricktown Ballpark, down the road from the Thunder stadium. The Comets, our local minor league baseball team, hosted a watch party. Anyone who attended the Sunday afternoon baseball game got to stick around and watch Game 7 of the Finals.
The game was spectacular. Getting home? Not so much. We had a hell of a trek through Bricktown and Old Town to get back to the car. Security was tightened up a ton after a shooting at a restaurant near the basketball stadium. We ended up having to find some funky alternative routes, and had to keep our heads on a swivel. Unfortunately, some folks come out of the woodworks to cause trouble at sporting event celebrations. Eventually got home safe and stayed out of the chaos.
I was absolutely exhausted today though. Took a half-day and came in to work this afternoon, but was still dragging. I came home, had dinner, and conked out for like 3 or 4 hours. I'm not sure when I will go back to bed.
Still, on the whole, it was a fun weekend! I am glad I got to see our local team get their first championship, and I am glad I got to share that experience with a good friend.
2025-06-21: Game 7 of the NBA Finals is tomorrow, and I am trying to get some friends together. The baseball stadium in OKC's Bricktown is hosting a watch party after their Sunday afternoon baseball game. It's supposed to be pretty hot, but I think the hype should be a lot of fun.
I attended a watch party at a rooftop bar a couple days ago and it was honestly pretty awful. The place was packed, food and drink lines were outrageous, it was unbearably hot, and the team got blown out so the vibes were awful. Here's hoping tomorrow is better.
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2025-06-17: I'm somewhere between zonked and zooted tonight. I am resetting my Windows machine to use a local profile, now that everything is working. Also going to get Retroarch set up. Other than that, I am going to turn in early.
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2025-06-16 Part 2: WOOOOOOOOO!
My favorite basketball team just won. They're one win away from winning the NBA Finals! 40 points from Jalen Williams, one of the biggest dorks on the team. It's been absolutely thrilling to see this team grow and reach this pinnacle. Here's hoping they get the job done Thursday!
WOOOOO again)! I finally got Rocksmith working on one of my computers. It took an ungodly effort to get it factory reset. Lenovo's factory image downloaded at 200kb/s, taking over 24 hours to deliver. I may have not needed to go through all that either, since the real solution required a deep dive into the control panel. But it lives!
I've got some privacy and telemetry settings taken care of on Windows 11 on that machine. I will also get it set up for competitve steam games, the occasional Xbox Game Pass game, and Minecraft, since Bedrock Edition does not work on Linux.
The new laptop is running Debian, and I am writing this on it. It has a Ryzen 7 and 16 gb of ram, so it is absolutely blazing fast. Looks like I have my daily driver for the next decade and change, and a future-proofed Windows machine if and when that need arises.
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2025-06-16: Tonight, it suddenly struck me that my upcoming birthday will my first mainstream social media-free birthday since 2008. On one hand, it is a little bittersweet to know that a lot of people on the periphery of my life will likely not be reaching out. On the other, the vast majority of those people also have not spoken to me in years outside typing a birthday greeting on my Facebook wall.
When I mentioned it to a friend, their response was: "the lack of weird parasociality is, in and of itself, weird in a world where that level of it is the norm.
I still struggle to settle on how I really feel about this. I know that enough of my friends, colleagues and family have stepped away from those platforms, if not deleting their accounts, then limiting their presence on it in the very least. If I were to return, I would find a lot of dormant accounts and people who aren't really part of my life. The handful of family I would otherwise want to keep up with have fallen into conspiratorial rabbit holes and I had already disengaged from them on that front.
I remember being pretty bought into the idea of social media platforms as an extension of public life, and feeling that it had the potential to be a public good, even if it wasn't one yet. I also remember being able to make common-year arguments as an appeal to decency. "Oh come on, it's 2015," was a way to call something outdated, narrow-minded and barbaric. "It's 2025," just does not carry the same sense of forward progress. It feels like every area of life, online and offline, is either unraveling due to neglect, or being torn apart on purpose.
I know there is still good in the world. I know that community, as an idea, is not dead. I know that things can be better, that it will take a lot to get there, but that it can be done.
But hope has been somewhere between absent and fleeting.
I find a bit of hope in this old-web revival. I am certain that there are some real dirtbags in this space, but the vast, vast majority of people I have interacted with here this last week have been kind, earnest, and good-natured. I know, in the abstract, that this is true of people out there too, but getting regular demonstrations of it here has been relieving
So thank you to the people here who have been kind and helpful. In some small way, you're providing little rest stops for a weary heart. I cannot tell you how many hours of my life have been lost doom-scrolling. By contrast, this has been a space where I can step away and find a bit of relief and catharsis. Y'all rock.
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2025-06-15: Holy Moly, installing Windows has been a living nightmare after a few months of daily driving Linux.
I set up Rocksmith on my dad's computer, but something about his hardware is unwilling to play nice with the program. So I installed it on a circa-2018 HP laptop. Works like a charm! But I hoped his setup would work so I could make that old HP my designated Windows backup and Rocksmith machine
I grabbed a new laptop as a daily driver, and now I am trying to put Windows 11 onto one of my other machines. One laptop's wifi refused to work, and the other does not have touchpad drivers out of the box. The former took a ton of finagling to get up and running, but I got zero audio output in the game, and could not find a way to resolve that. My last resort is a chromebook-spec craptop. I have zero expectation that this will work.
On the plus side, I am getting Debian back onto the other lappytopper <3
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2025-06-12: Boy. Getting a website put together takes some work, even if you start with a template. Probably doesn't help that I'm coming in with next to no web development or experience. I am stoked to see this thing come together though!
One of my favorite things about browsing other people's webpages is all the different ways people frame the place the site fits into their lives. Some think of their neocities page as a garden or an archive, something to carefully curate and nurture. Others frame it as a living room or den, a place to hang out. Others (like me) frame it sarcastically or humorously, highlighting the silliness of the endeavor.
The effort and intentionality that goes into building a webpage demands the user reveal a bit of themselves in the process. Even shitposting nonsense pages leave the impression of the personality of whoever shitposted.
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