adventures in uncertainty

 what a weird day. the only times i went outside were to pick up reflective straps i'd ordered online (i haven't even opened the packages yet) and to take out the trash. the sky dripped a few drops on me along the way, but otherwise my time outside was uneventful and insufficient to constitute exercise.

from a health and wellness point of view, i'm not okay. i'm convinced that it's psychological, and that i'm just burned out and depressed.

...

i finished the first evangelion book this morning, and it is magnificent. or... manganificent?

i came across this at the library, and excitedly brought it home - only halfway through did i fully register that it's an adaptation of the series, not the other way around, but it's an adaptation with so much heart and soul!

all the little shifts really pull the series' threads more tightly together and make it not just emotionally powerful, but much more intellectually accessible. i recommend watching the original series first, but either way this is a fantastic book.

we watched the third episode over dinner, it was awesome.

...

i worked from home today, and i sat too long in my office chair. which i'm still sitting too long in, i guess. i'd to say i worked hard, but that expression's been slowly losing all meaning over the course of the year. we had an interesting online group meeting with my employer this afternoon, and one of the questions was "what do you do between prompts?".

well, i had an answer, but it depends on the kind of work i'm doing. for personal stuff, i'm usually messing with other projects while waiting for the response, so i cycle between them. for paid stuff, i'm usually either upgrading my "software factory", as one of my group put it, by improving my skills and refining my tooling setup, or i'm reading through the previous round's changes to get "closer to the source".

i went through a lot of that, today.

on a silly note, i misheard one of the group as we were all saying goodbye, and felt obliged to produce the following:

...

mr smear seems to have had a good day. fortunately or unfortunately, gd came to me today with the book report on maus he's been working on, and it said some disturbing things about the holocaust. so when he got home, we sat down to talk about it... he explained himself pretty well, and we're not alarmed any more, but in addition to coaching him on the language he uses to describe things (he "got it" pretty quickly), we're now planning a family trip to yad vashem. considering the fictional darkness he's already been exposed to i think he'll be able to handle it, and we want him to see and feel the reality and the human faces behind the numbers and clinical grim details.

...

i spent a lot of time thinking about investments today, i'm nervous about having all of our deposit money in indexes that may or may not crash. i've learned enough about investment and economics to be well into the valley of despair, so i don't trust any advice or theories on the internet but both sides make compelling arguments.

after thinking out loud and talking through a plan with my mom and gd after dinner, i decided to pull a chunk of money out of the traditional indexes, put some of it into an israel fund that includes real estate, and withdraw the rest to my bank account... in another few days i'm going to go in person to try and put that money away (along with the bonus i received) in a way that makes sense.

...

gd and i seem to be okay, but i'm still having moments of disconnection, still processing my feelings about the other night.

...

i've spent the past couple of hours working on security for one project and blockchain architecture for another, and it's approaching midnight already. i think i'm ready to call it a day.

the bubble

 i know enough about investment theory to know how little i understand, how little anyone understands. i know just enough to be helpless to make a decision when faced with a market full of noise, half doomsaying and freaking out that the AI bubble's about to burst, half calling for calm rationality and assuring everyone that things will get better, and that if there's going to be a crash it'll be sometime next year.

i don't know what to do about our deposit money. i should probably take half of it out and put it into something "safer". or maybe hedge it.

fuck.

...

gd and i left the apartment along with mr smear, and made the mistake of following the transport app's suggested route. we arrived about fifteen minutes later than planned for our meeting with the head dentist, but it didn't matter because she wasn't there anyway. the woman who was there - the office manager - was a right bitch. rude, obstructive, and it took everything in my power to not lose my shit while gd looked at me out of the side of her eyes, warning me not to let her get under my skin but amused that it was me getting upset and not here.

we left with an appointment to return in the afternoon, meaning they successfully burned my morning pre-office work time that i really, really need, as well as a good couple of hours out of my client hours in the afternoon which i also really, really need...

at least the head dentist was there when we returned, and even better, she speaks english so gd didn't need me to translate. she heard gd out, examined her, and sent us off with a recommendation to book an appointment with a periodontist.

according to gd, this *could* have been taken care of when we were in south africa and had dental health insurance, but the dentist magnanimously decided that it wasn't urgent enough.

smh.

...

work was pretty good, though the office was freezing and i sat shivering in my hoodie for a while before anyone else decided it was a problem worth looking into :P

on the one hand i'm frustrated by how much time it's taking getting PRs reviewed (my usual complaint), on the other it's giving me opportunities to learn more about the system and make better decisions 🤷‍♂️

...

at work, i received a phone call from mr smear's math teacher. he'd hit a girl 🤦‍♂️

BUT.

the teacher had borne witness to the provocation that came before it, and it was clear as day that while he should never be using force unless he's defending himself, the girls were messing with him non-stop and his response was, at the very least, understandable.

aside from validating his usual claims which we're often suspicious of, something else happened in the aftermath of the encounter: he surprised his teachers, and his parents, by taking responsibility, apologizing, and acknowledging that he had better options like coming to a teacher for help. this in itself was big, but in his conversation with his homeroom teacher and the councillor - who's the one who usually freaks out the most about his behavior - he was very open and direct, and i received a second phone call to discuss how mature he was being, and how together they'd realized that the kids were conflating "asking for help" with "snitching" (so we can have a conversation about that), and how mr smear's keeping his distance from his friend with the mouth; this is precisely what we advised him to do a couple of weeks ago, and it presented an opportunity to talk with the teacher about how these kids are interacting.

so that was good. we held a family meeting when we all got home, and mr smear was caught off guard because he was expecting to be punished; we made it clear that he'd crossed a line with the violence (no matter how soft it was in effect), but our focus was on how well he handled himself and how proud we were of him. i think this is the first time we've ever witnessed him allowing himself to be proud of himself, and it was an emotional moment for all of us!

then, in the evening, he reported something to gd - his friend with the mouth had said something absolutely beyond all boundaries "as a joke" (as usual), and this time i fired off a message to his mother. i was pleasantly surprised by her response, she handled it immediately, and i hope the effects are long lasting.

...

i worked until dinner, even though my brain was frying. we watched another episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins, which is really great, and i encouraged mr smear to finish the carrots he'd removed from dinner by rewarding him with a video about uploaded consciousness (well, sorta. the fruit fly brain being uploaded). i read some more of the light fantastic to him at bedtime, which is honestly consistently more polished and funny than the colour of magic.

by that stage of the evening i was falling apart. i spent about ten minutes working on a side project - planning a security strategy because i'm terrified of becoming successful enough to attract DOS or DOW attacks - then chatted with gd about our finances, then had a long catch up with my mom, and now... it's already later than i thought. i'm going to wind down and try to go to bed earlier than usual.

i feel sick

 i have no idea whether i'm sick or not, but i feel sick. weak. i'm probably not sick, though, and just feeling the effects of what's definitely and understandable depression. the following are my prime suspects for how i'm feeling at the moment:

1. the stress and adrenaline dump of last night's fight.

2. the financial distress combined with the general stress of all the things broken and wrong in this apartment (gd discovered this afternoon that the floor's lifting by the balcony door) and the fact that the landlord's barely communicating.

3. not eating well. i mean, i think i'm eating good quality food, but i'm not sure i'm eating enough and i'm struggling to control what i eat because i'm trying to lose a little weight. weight watching is complicated :/

having said all that, although getting to the beach and back on my rollerblades was proper exercise in significant heat and humidity, i felt fine at the beach with nystire and co and a friend we served with and his kids, and although some of the news was really heavy it was good seeing them and i had a good time.

...

i went to bed about an hour after my last post, and woke up about six hours later. i didn't feel particularly positive about the world, and i'm still processing some of things said and done last night. relationships are weird.

mr smear surprised me, though: his phone was ringing so i took it to him, apparently waking him up with a call from his friend. he answered, jumped out of bed, and quickly (much more quickly than we're used to) brushed his teeth (and presumably performed his ablutions), got dressed, packed his bag, and all i had to do was help him pack a chunk of the challah-peño into a tupperware container and accompany him to his friend's just in case he got lost.

it was a perfect opportunity to gauge how much last night fucked him up - he seems fine, we had a very reasonable conversation and then moved on - and just generally talk about the world. the day was already heating up, so i took a roundabout route home which was shadier, going through the museum park and then park hayarkon, and that gave me a little processing time too.

after burning tokens for a while, gd and i watched a few episodes of fauda, which were very stressful, and then i headed to the beach.

i got home a little bit before mr smear did: he'd been worried about coming home by himself, but not because he was afraid of getting lost. apparently - though she denies it - he saw a video with gd of a kid being kidnapped in tel aviv in broad daylight, so we've explained that he's clearly mistaken, and that he needs to always be careful, but never scared.

once he was out the shower we had a little time to play through his horror game, which is taking shape nicely, and then we ate dinner and watched another touching episode of the wonder years (harper's wood). my gods, that series is amazing.

we talked to my mom, who relieved us with news of shadowslight's dad who's just come out of surgery for an aneurysm and seems to be doing okay. i asked for financial advice, specifically regarding how much money (and time) i'm investing in all these AI projects. i wish i had some kind of indication as to whether the things i'm doing are potentially lucrative or a waste of time 🙄

it's very hard to think straight when you're under pressure, and that's exactly when you need to be able to do so the most.

broken plates

 i don't know which was more effective in waking me up, the extra coffee or having to confront the cleaning lady upstairs after she threw dirty soap water onto our balcony again.

i finally made some progress on my projects before mr smear came home from school, and then we all headed out to the mall to look for a halloween mask for him. and also a tri-phase wall socket for the borrowed electric stove, which of course the mall hardware center doesn't stock. we spent considerably more money on his costume than i'm comfortable with, and that's after i told gd that i'm debating with myself whether the current AI subscription is really worth it or not (i think i'm going to downgrade, but i've got mixed feelings about it).

i felt downright ill by the time we eventually got home, and after eating something in the hope it would make me feel better, i napped on the living room carpet (and a beanbag) for what must have been about 45 minutes. i did feel a bit better after.

the highlight of the evening came after kneading the challah-peño: i sat mr smear down and we watched the first couple of episodes of evangelion together. it was awesome ^_^

dinner was nice, gd was very proud of her polenta and tomato pesto sauce and it went surprisingly well with the challah-peño and avocado (we call it "soggy pizza" now). we had a long chat with my mom while we ate, and we were planning on watching a movie together afterwards.

we never watched anything. the past few hours were absolutely miserable, unhinged, and were damned near the end of me and gd. i think we're (somewhat) okay now, but we're all feeling traumatized, exhausted, and disconnected.

...

at least the games are coming along nicely...

catching flies

 it's funny, i seem to be sleeping okay this week, but i'm tiiiiiired. mentally exhausted. emotionally drained.

i really don't want to - and can't afford to - miss the opportunity to build more, write more, find ways out of the financial hole and create the stuff that i'm excited about. but this morning? and yesterday morning? ugh. it's a brain-fog, probably depression, and i can't even focus for long on reading evangelion (which i'm absolutely loving, not least because its producer notes very explicitly answer All The Questions).

maybe i should go a little harder on the caffeine today. fight it. push through it.

*yawns in sad and lazy*

maybe shinji's attitude is infecting me. i guess i'm pretty susceptible to something like that right now.

themes

 it's getting close to... oh, it is midnight. fine. today was a weird, unhealthily weird day. i've been sitting too much, eating too much, and i literally never went outside :/

i was woken up by mr smear's awful alarm being shoved in my face because neither he nor gd could figure out how to stop it when the phone is in downtime mode. i couldn't get back to sleep, and i remained decidedly unmotivated for a whi^H^H^H^H^Hpretty much the rest of the day :P

i started reading neon genesis evangelion, and i've immediately arrived at the conclusion that a) omg the manga is awesome but b) it's probably not quite as awesome if you haven't seen the anime.

i spent a bit of time on the phone with the dental clinic, the experience was shocking (although not as shocking as gd's failed root canal and her dentist's negligence) and i found myself both yelling at the receptionist and appealing to her humanity at the same time. apparently we can see the manager to complain in person on sunday morning...

my consulting coworker gave an hour long presentation today for her team's hackathon project during our client group's bi-weekly, half of which i was confused because something distracted me early and i didn't realize that zoom was showing her screen in a different tab. dammit. fortunately, i was wowed by their project on the day so i didn't have trouble following.

...

i received my payslip today, which thankfully included my bonus. i thought i'd be less disappointed if i didn't expect half of it to be taken as income tax, but now i see that it was literally half of the amount and i am disappointed. it's obviously far better than no bonus, though, so...

...

around noon a technician came for our electric stove. the one that we bought when we moved in. he took it off to the lab, refusing to give us even a general idea of how long we'd be without it :(

we are extremely lucky that our upstairs friends had a spare, although unfortunately our socket isn't regulation so we can't plug it in. but it does plug the hole in the counter, and we do have their portable stove for now, so... 🤷‍♂️

...

in the news, frontier models have been doing amazing things. i'm not talking about missing the point of math problems, although that's certainly interesting, but rather the crazy new game merging trend and someone (or a group of someones) finally getting some justice for decades of greedy abuse by adobe by "freeing" their software.

what a time to be alive.

having said that, *i* spent most of my workday using anthropic's newest frontier model, opus 5.5, struggling to get it to help me import a spreadsheet into my client's platform without it going off the rails, inventing problems that didn't exist, and just generally behaving badly.

it was a grind.

...

i had a little trouble with mr smear's attitude when he got home, but i managed to handle it and we had good results followed by a good talk. i had myself a nice glass of araq and started burning tokens - deliberately, in light of the fact that i'm about to try downgrading my subscription - making some interesting progress and coming up with a really cool idea for my sudoku game.

i stopped for dinner - the fall and rise of reggie dinkins is really fun - and a chat with my mom, read a little more of the light fantastic to mr smear, and then returned to the burn. gd restarted watching fauda, again, and because i've seen the first episode enough times i continued burning the whole time, jumping between different games. i'm using openai's latest frontier model, gpt-6 astra, and i'm experiencing mixed results. but much more positive results than opus, at least.

i should probably go to bed soon.

annual review

it was the 7th of october today. i thought about it a fair amount, though i tried not to. too soon. too close. in some ways it's still october 7th. in a lot of ways, sadly.

...

 i burned some tokens this morning, but nowhere near interesting quantities. i put lipstick on my pig of a fairy tales game, i put some polish on my sudoku game, and that led me down a rabbit-hole of revamping my personal website and getting donation mechanisms configured.

i hope it was worth it.

work: during the daily we were informed about a production incident, and my first thought (i don't think i was alone) was "i merged code yesterday, was it me?!"

it wasn't me, and i was pleased to be able to contribute to the conversation. after the meeting my onboarding buddy ran me and another dev through the investigation process, which showed a) that the new tooling (dynatrace) is absolutely awful if you're not interfacing with AI and b) that opus 5.5 gives very, very bad advice when it comes to managing production incidents.

i spent the next few hours back-and-forthing with agents on a design that i'd expected to have less to think about, but i was satisfied by the results by the time i had to head out to my employer's office for my first annual review with the boss. i'm a little nervous about how long each section of work is taking, hopefully i'll be in a strong position by my meeting with the team lead tomorrow afternoon.

my review was approximately the same time as gd needed to be at the absorption ministry offices to discuss her ulpan voucher, so she had to go without me, and i was pleased to learn that she got herself sorted out very nicely without me.

my meeting went considerably better than i'd expected. in fact, i walked out feeling pleasantly surprised by how happy the boss is with my work and my contributions, and even though the whole thing was over within fifteen minutes we had a couple of interesting side conversations as well.

i must have spent almost an hour catching up with the guy i was on my last contract with, and then i sat down and got a chunk of work done before finally calling it a day and beginning to make my way home. on the way, i contacted urchin and we chatted for a while, and then i received a message from mr smear's teacher confirming that he had, in fact, done the work he'd said he'd done and that it was satisfactory, which was an enormous relief!

i managed to talk mr smear into drawing something - even if he wasn't in the mood - and although he refused to do it as part of inktober it came out beautifully and he seems to be almost as proud of it as we are.

we watched the wonder years over dinner, all of us very disappointed in kevin (square dancing), and while mr smear was preparing for bed i began working on my old blockchain project, which as of a few minutes ago is beginning to take shape.

i'm tired. i think. i hope? *yawn*

win some lose some

 on my way out, our upstairs friend arrived to rescue us with a portable electric hob! so that's awesome. and i was interrupted in the middle of my team daily by a phone call from the public transport company, hopefully they'll now reach out to the landlord.

it was a relatively productive day, i delivered the second part of my changes and learned a heck of a lot.

otherwise, i dived in to a conversation about parenting and content (games and videos) and freaked out my onboarding buddy, which i apologized for, but she was grateful for the advice and the insight, so 🤷‍♂️

then i got home to find out that my son had had an incident at school... instead of working on his assignment his teacher found him making his hand completely black with a marker, and when she asked him to stop he just carried the fuck on 🙄

he swears blind that he did the work, though... i guess we'll find out tomorrow.

at least he did his math homework well.

with a break for dinner and showering and mr smear's bedtime, i've basically spent the past few hours making up for lost time, burning tokens on my social media side project, on my sudoku game, and on the fairy tale adventure game. i'm trying to use as much as possible before i downgrade on the weekend, and the past two days i barely did anything because of all the stress and the gremlins...

gremlins

i took a puff last night, or two, and it helped me get to sleep but i still spent some of the night awake and uncomfortable. where did i see a video about humming affecting the vagus nerve and reducing anxiety yesterday? i don't know, but i tried it and i'm not sure if it worked or not.

yesterday's hospital mission went surprisingly smoothly, and mr smear was able to go to school afterwards. i worked hard the whole afternoon, mostly battling to make sense of the AI agents telling me contradicting things and revising my plans in a way that i hope makes sense.

i managed to have an actual conversation with our landlord yesterday, which may not have resolved all the issues but it was an enormous relief nonetheless.

in the evening i took mr smear rollerblading, it was an absolutely gorgeous sunset / twilight along the yarkon river, so that was great.

after reading more of the light fantastic to mr smear i napped on the couch before i went to bed last night. so i didn't get much done, and i certainly didn't use my token reset like i'd planned.

it's been a week.

this morning we woke up to find both our stove and our dishwasher not working. i managed to get an electrician in early, and he checked everything out and it looks like the wiring is fine, so gd and i have named the gremlins in our house and i'm struggling to get technicians in. the stove guy will come on thursday. that's a lot of meals without cooking... fuck.

a bundle of nerves

 i mostly didn't sleep last night. i was tired, restless, and struggling with anxiety all night. i did have a few brief periods where i slept deeply enough to dream, but for the most part i just lay awake, uncomfortable, all night.

my gods, life is hard right now. and it's Big Stuff. i'm riddled with anxiety and my stomach's roiling with it, and i'm struggling to catch my breath. i have so much to be grateful for, but i'm having a lot of trouble seeing the wood for the trees, and two trees in particular are beating me with their branches.

the first tree is my job. we're living beyond our means, and that obviously needs to stop as soon as possible, but the only way out is to find another job. as i'm a contractor and on contract, if i do find another gig i'm going to be screwing over my employer and my client. if i don't, i'm going to be living on borrowed funds (time). i've got to find a side-gig that makes money, or gd has to, but until any of those conditions are met we're basically a ticking time bomb.

the second tree is our home. gd turned on the air conditioner yesterday and we didn't smell anything, which was an enormous relief. then she turned it on last night and it was blasting mold smell everywhere (it's central), and our landlord doesn't want to spend more money and has been out of communication for about a month already. on top of that, he's supposed to authorize the fixes to the windows and doors that the transit authority is offering to protect us from the construction noise, and i don't think he's done that.

...

yesterday was a monumental fuck-up regarding the holidays. i don't know where everyone else gets their information from, or if the holidays document i got was updated and i just missed the memo, but i only found out yesterday afternoon that mr smear was supposed to return to school yesterday morning. and this morning, he's missing school because i'm taking him to appointments at the hospital. so 🤷‍♂️

i also confused my workday schedules, and didn't realize until i joined the team daily by zoom that everyone was supposed to be in the office yesterday, so i scrambled to get there once the meeting was done.

the work day was pretty okay. i took the leftover challah-peño, which almost nobody wanted to try, and in the afternoon managed to guilt two of my team mates into trying, and then another became intrigued, but i still ended up eating most of it by myself :P

i merged my first PR yesterday, and then spent the remainder of the day buggering about with an indecisive/self-contradicting AI. my team introduced me to the spend dashboard, i was pleasantly surprised to find that my AI spend is very reasonable, and shocked to see some of the bigger numbers on the board.

after work, i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear to the comics library, where we returned the broken judgement on gotham and i was relieved to find that it was clear to the librarian what had happened and that we weren't at fault. mr smear took a while to figure out which books he wanted to borrow, but i discovered akira and evangelion.

i don't know if i'll sound as dumb to you as i do to myself, but with all the frustration of being disappointed by the reboot and annoyed with the series revisions because i don't know what's canon, nor what any of it is supposed to mean, it never occurred to me to seek out the original text!

we watched another great episode of the wonder years over dinner - it's amazing how well that series holds up - and then i read a little of the light fantastic to mr smear at bedtime, but i started nodding off and he took over and read to me, and then he switched to reading from the grimm fairy tales, and at some point i realized it was late and that we both needed to get into bed.

which, for me, was clearly a mistake. i couldn't sleep in bed, so i moved to the couch, where i didn't sleep very well either, but also found myself constantly overheating and sweaty.

...

it's now just after 7.30am, and i'm going to have to take mr smear to his appointments today, so i guess i should get some work done before we leave...