hello world

[Pogckets]

Dear Diary,

Another warm day, cloudier, some rain.

Slept well, cooked well.

Made tea with fresh ginger for the first time in a long time.

Wanting for equilibrium and more love, more bliss

Always learning, unlearning

Attention is a kind of prayer

[meri]

i long for something that can't be touched. time destroys the enjoyment in everything. every year a repeat of the last. i don't want to do the same thing. i've done it alll. stuck in myself. stuck in mild smiles. just comfortable enough. look over the horizon. it's the same one as always. is this really all there is? i want to see you again. but even if i do ill come back home eventually.

i want to pour myself into something and forget. destroy me.

[meri]

morning is kind. everything has a softness to it. the light is warm, and newly sprouted leaves and flowers dance from my window. the complex simulation outside seems effortless. there's so much happening at once. i want to lie down and soak it in.

m slept in today, which is exceptionally rare. i was the one to wake her up for once, and i gave her a kiss on the forehead. i have a gift for her, later. i like throwing money at her.

i take a sip of coffee, glad i made the journey yesterday to get some more. the day is starting. 9 am is pulling me away. i'll be busy. i wish things could be this way forever.

[Pogckets]

Long day, winding down with kimchi, beer & chess.

Whoever is reading this, hope you feel a little better in this moment.

And if anyone has a book recommendation, would love one.

Just read Moby Dick for the first time and everything since has paled in comparison.

[sinku]

jmtb02's games

Ball Revamped my beloved... I downloaded the flash archive late last year and replayed 2-4, it was such a trip down memory lane. (Turns out I am way worse at III.1 and III.2 when playing them on non-laggy computers!)

i find myself thinking about balloon in a wasteland sometimes. but looking back at his publishing history, i forgot how good the next floor, and dark cut 1-3 were. what a prolific guy

[JennyDog]

My favorite kind of mornings were the mornings where I'd wake an hour or so before anyone else did, and I could read books quietly as things starting shifting. I don't live with my family anymore but that's one thing I miss, it was a sort of beautiful experience.

[sinku]

I got covid at some point and it really started hitting me last tuesday. I was laying awake all that night with a horrible fever and I was too delerious to get up and take some paracetemol so I thought I was gonna die and I was praying a lot. So for a lot of the past week I have been running on fairly low sleep/weird scheduling, but it is blowing over now. I feel fairly normal again besides this general bodily lethargy and sore throat and mild congestion. I think the fever was the worst ive felt in forever.

[hepatica]

i came down to [7e] for the first time in a while in order to see my dad again. 7e is, in many ways, the platonic ideal of a corpse. in the winter months that hang long and dreary, which are particularly pronounced on my part of the west-atlantic, it feels less than dead. in the spring and summer, though, its endlessly pretty. the long stretches of asphalt become mirrors for the sunlight. the overgrowth stretches its arms through the fallen roofs and decaying foundations to new homes. i can't bring myself to be disgusted by america. i'm still as fascinated as ever by rotting.

i've found a person that really makes me content. it's an almost surreal feeling, i don't know how colored by delusion my own feelings are, i can only hope they weren't delusional in the first place or that my delusion lasts a long while. sorority as a metaphor just never stops giving. its oh so simple. its oh so wonderful. the world is meant to be shared!

[maru]

I guess I've been home for a while now. I was in New York for another week in the middle and now a few weeks have passed since then.

It's been a hectic work week; I've been taking advantage of being the lone coder at work to clean up a lot of items. I've been getting really into Proton services? And strangely obsessed with "how do I synchronise a spreadsheet"?

That is, there's not a lot of nice alternatives to Google Sheets. There's Collabora or whatever; it seems more like small business deployment. Cryptpad has an OnlyOffice integration, but it definitely does not work well on mobile devices. Proton Drive does not sync any folders locally on mobile devices, and trying to open straight into an application gets you hit with errors. So how can I remedy my spreadsheet addiction?

My guess has been — well, using Syncthing on a machine that has Proton Drive to then synchronise the spreadsheets onto the phones that need them, and then using desktops native interfaces. But I'm realising there's no way around that either because you need to open these files with a format that works on all of them. Do I move everything to ODF and LibreOffice on all machines? I just need a webapp spreadsheet. I don't need it to be crazy. Proton bought Standard Notes and it theoretically has spreadsheets, on the paid plan, and they might well incorporate that into Unlimited, making it tenable later. I know Obsidian has plugins for spreadsheets that might work but I don't need notes to be that crazy.

It's the kind of thing Microsoft 365 and iCloud Drive are amazing at. Doing cross-compatible document stuff is just an enormous pain.

Otherwise I finally finished a game. I feel freed up to go do something else ... but there's simply too much to do... I'm feeling paralysed.

[watermoon]

it's strange… despite however many years i've been paying for proton mail, i've never really explored any of the other services. like, i already have a vpn, i already have a password manager, i don't have a use for a dropbox-like currently… so i'm not sure how to make the value-add work for me personally.
de-googling is a long-term goal of mine though, but maybe that also means i'm a touch wary of moving wholesale into another company's infrastructure.

and i've found obsidian's table support to be useful enough if you want to want to display and edit a little bit of info in a grid, and likely very challenging if you want to treat it like a spreadsheet and run formulas and do anything that requires inspecting its own contents. dataview is pretty hella as plugins go, but that's more about treating a corpus of notes as a database that you can run reports on, so it's not quite the same thing, and using it requires thinking about how you want to structure your notes so you can pull data from them later.

[maru]

Wait. You don't have any shared storage at all? What about photos? What about — like — keeping recovery keys somewhere safe and accessible? Everything you do is by hand?

I can do a brief tally on this; I have

- an Android phone
- an iPad mini that serves as "a bigger phone when I am at home"
- a Mac mini I use as a NAS / general server and whatever
- a MacBook Pro I use for work
- a computer I treat as my "personal device" running Windows 11
- technically I can count the Steam Deck as a Computer if I really wanted

I keep a bunch of stuff I would like to edit from wherever place:

- I have a shared spreadsheet of my incoming revenue, expenses, capital gains, etc. each year for the past, like, decade
- I keep a spreadsheet of every book I've ever read
- and every book I've been recommended
- I monitor my basic net worth periodically
- I track my cost of living (a basic budget) and my actual expenditures maybe twice a year

I also keep my journal in plaintext so that I can add to it from jrnl.sh on any device. I keep literally any piece of personal data I need to verify my identity onhand so I can use it when I'm not at home. I keep my leases and whatever. I also, if I have a TON of space, like to start to collect Photoshop scraps or whatever in an easy place since I have Photoshop on two computers.

I also have photos going back to 2009 I like to search through by face, location, whatever, if I need to. A ton of avatars, wallpapers, memes, whatever...

[watermoon]

hmmm, i wouldn't say that's true, but my setup might be more cobbled-together than most… i guess i can break this down into a few different categories:

for computers i use frequently that i want to talk to each other:

• my home desktop
• my home nas
• my android phone
• my work laptop (to some degree)

and then for the specific use cases:

passwords: been using bitwarden and it works well enough. i can also access it through my phone, which comes in handy every so often.
backups: the most important stuff on both the desktop and the nas gets backed up automatically via restic to a backblaze b2 pool. the one downside of this approach is that backup pools are encrypted, so if you want to restore a certain snapshot you have to download the whole thing. i really should spend some time thinking through how to make this more durable…
notebook: currently using obsidian with obsidian sync, which honestly has been worth the money for me. the primary vault is then synced to my phone, though i also have a couple work-related vaults that are synced between my laptop and desktop. i think this is the single thing i'm most mortified about losing – since this is effectively my external mind – so these folders also get lumped in with the other backup jobs and a lot in my life would have to go wrong for me to lose access to them for good.
images: i use and adore hydrus for image management, though it's unfortunately desktop-only (unless i want to jump through some hoops?). i also backup phone photos to desktop every so often, and all of my images are part of the restic backup.
every month the android photos app asks if i want to back up all my photos to google and i start frothing at the mouth. when i select no, it asks if it can just back up some of my photos instead and it makes me want to scream.
media: since i keep all of that on the nas, i can watch videos through jellyfin and listen to music through navidrome. i put perhaps a bit too much effort into making those libraries look nice, and i even set up hairpin nat so i can just type in a domain and get routed to the homepage for all my services!… well, if i'm on my local network, and if i'm on my network i can just get at the files directly.
it wouldn't be hard to add a couple extra router rules so that these can be accessed from anywhere in the world, but it also seems like another security risk to worry about. plus, if i'm planning to go anywhere for an extended period of time, it's assumed that there are more interesting things for me to be doing there than watching anime.

[maru]

Fascinating. It's really cool how we all use stuff differently. I've been really basic — I wouldn't say my notes are my external brain at all. Like, I use OmniSync and stuff for task management, I have a calendar app, that's all good. But my notes are all quite basic. I basically never take notes. I tried shipping a Zettelkasken and my brain just doesn't work this way. I keep citations of books I like, but that's always been in super basic notepads.

Hydrus looks really cool. I wonder how it could be made to syndicate a little bit. Hmm.

I was basically only using Apple ecosystem for 2015-2024, and everything basically worked fine for my purposes. I didn't make associative graphs or cross-reference a lot (though Standard Notes actually lets you do a lot of that, which is theoretically cool).

[watermoon]

i've been thinking about this demoscene image (also attached) for a while now, perhaps because the idea of a creative self that has gone into hiding speaks to me. but i'm especially touched by how she represents that self (yx) as an independent being – someone who luna's more in dialogue with than as someone she possesses. and i can't help but use this to think about how i conceptualize my creative self…

some of my close friends are plural, yet despite their best efforts i still remain a boring singlet.¹ but being around them has encouraged me to think about whether i could put a name to the different facets of myself. and i guess i can, but none of these names feel especially natural; they feel like post-hoc classifications rather than active beings inside me. so there's no unique watermoon inside that's pushing the buttons: it's just me… i think.

i do make jokes about "the demons" being responsible for some of my most batshit creative decisions – which i usually have the sense to filter out before release, except when i don't – yet now that i'm thinking about it, i feel like that makes the most sense at all? like, when i'm on the cusp of sleep or in a place where i can let my subconscious wander, random voices and images flood my mind with little ability to control them, except to record them and process them later. and i feel like these scattered dreams and hypnagogia play an important part in my process, and apparently that has come through to others.²

so i guess that's the closest answer to what my creative self is: an amorphous chorus whose whims i am powerless to guide.

but how about you? i'm curious how other people think about stuff like this…

fragments_of_self.png (3.51 MiB) Viewed 3965 times

---

¹ that's unfair to them; they've never seriously pressured me to become plural.
² "honestly the mood of "this is such a raw product of so many psyches that it feels like a dream, but not one i could ever have" that's on a lot of internet projects and locations hangs on you like an aura. you're probably a cryptid?"

[maru]

but i'm especially touched by how she represents that self (yx) as an independent being – someone who luna's more in dialogue with than as someone she possesses

It's kind of unnerving, but I can't put my finger on it. I have definitely had other voices, but they either felt outside of me entirely or like within the superset of "me". They did not feel like a splinter of myself, nor something I could name or have take the lead. In this particular case it's like she knocked out and some other thing just wrote and left a note for her.