Blog
2025-11-28: Whoops, one thing led to another and I didn't touch my site in like a week and a half! I just got back from visiting family for Thanksgiving. I am exhausted from the trip, but thankful that I got that time!
Also, it has been a waking nightmare to get the registration done for the car I bought from my parents. It took two trips to find out what I was actually missing. Turns out, we needed a notarized bill of sale to establish the sale price. Got that done before coming back home. Hopefully everything will be fine when I try again next week!
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2025-11-18: My hobby/habit/compulsion to buy cheap laptops and put Linux on them finally paid off today. One of my interns was panicking because their computer was on the fritz right in the middle of papers being due. They have everything backed up to a Google Drive, so their work isn't stranded on a hard drive thankfully.
I let them know I can get a spare laptop set up for them. Stuck Linux Mint onto a flash drive to do a fresh install. For whatever reason, my jailbroken chromebook was not happy about it! From what I could tell, I was having issues with some proprietary driver. I managed to cause my first kernel panic trying to fix the issue, so I gave up on that and set up a budget ASUS laptop instead.
Linux Mint is pretty user friendly. It feels like Windows 7 and lets you manage basically everything using a GUI. I figured that would be the path of least resistance for something they need for finishing the last couple weeks of the semester.
They seemed pretty quick to adapt to the new setup too. Turns out, they went ahead and changed up the theming to their tastes, got everything set up how they want, and seem to be chugging right along with it! Who knows, this might win someone over to use linux as a daily driver
(Also, the chromebook is fine now that it's set up with Debian + KDE Plasma. Glad it's not borked.
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2025-11-15: Howdy! I am finally back to normalish life. A work project 2 years in the making is no longer sucking the life out of me, so hopefully I'll be back on here more. I'm also on a discord call with some folks from that DnD group that I met a couple weeks ago! If any of you end up here, hi gang!
[spoke too soon. DM spilled coffee on her keyboard and won't be able to do her thing without one. We're postponing for a couple weeks.]
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2025-11-09: Feeling better. Also ended up distro-hopping to Fedora KDE on all my systems since discovering how to get mulimedia codecs working properly. Idk why i go ham on stuff like that when I'm not feeling well, but I do!
I also learned how RSS works last night and I have started following some indie web RSS feeds. Very handy stuff.
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2025-11-07: Maybe some of the moodiness and malaise I've felt this week has been a sign that I was veering into illness. Woke up today with some flulike stuff going on.
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2026-11-06: Yeah so today hasn't been great either. At this point, I'm just ready for this week to be over and done with. [edit: visiting with onio at onio.cafe was a highlight of my day. Thanks for being around to chat 🥺]
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2025-11-05: I let myself get very, very dehydrated at work yesterday and have been miserable. And kept busy enough today that I have not properly hydrated to recover. Gonna pour myself some ice water to redress that after I write this up
I've also been very moody. I'm sure being dehydrated, having a headache, and not having lunch until late in the afternoon and not having breakfast didn't help. Hopefully I get along better tomorrow.
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2025-11-03: After a couple days of being (perhaps unduly) anxious about accepting the invite, I finally opened the Discord invite link for that DnD group.
I am coming to terms with a lifetime of struggling with rejection-sensitive dysphoria. Basically, after getting that link, I spent a couple days feeling like the image above. Zero reason to assume folks would have an issue with me; much the opposite, I am a longtime friend of the DM who has tried to get me involved for years, and I got along great with the other players who attended. Yet, something about tabletop games just make me feel like I am going to make some intractable mistake that will make people hate me. I panic when I need to improvise, I am not terribly confident in my ability to roleplay a character, and I am atrocious at math.
I know this pang of rejection is coming from an irrational place, one which reflects trauma from ~15 to ~20 years ago. One that nobody in this party was responsible for. I'd bet some of them have been through similar things too, just from the little tidbits I got from Saturday. They seem like decent folks. When I expressed my anxieties about joining, they met that with a great deal of encouragement as folks excited to introduce someone new to their favorite hobby. If I were bringing someone onto something like, say, flight simming, I'd feel the same way.
Intimidating as it may be, I think this is something I need to try and do. Even if it turns out that I am not the biggest fan of the game and bow out after a one-shot, I need to face this fear. It's part of a larger pattern of behavior that has held me back for entirely too long, one I am taking deliberate steps to try and correct.
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2025-11-02: So, I was one of the only people to wear a costume to that wedding reception. "Costumes not required, but encouraged" did not entice very many of the attendees. I committed to the bit though and made a fun first impression with my friend's friends. I may be joining their DnD group. If any of you are here to check out my webpage, hai hai hello!