regression

yesterday:

while posting, gd came in to talk, and while we talked a wasp arrived at our window and hovered about for a bit. after looking around a bit, i think we see it - right above the same window of our downstairs neighbor. i hope we're right so we can get it cleared...

the fighting with mr smear didn't end with the board game. after i posted and did a bit of side project work, and then tried to get him to come out with me, which triggered a regression behavior and we got into the same, tired old battle of getting him to come outside on a saturday. here's the thing: we could choose violence and punishment, or choose rationalization and negotiation. the former would be much, much easier. *much* easier. because our child is not a rational being, and he's so set in his belief that him needing to go out and get exercise and be in (relatively) natural surroundings is wrong and is not how the world should be...

... it was a rough hour of our lives performing the dance, but he came out with me with a positive attitude and we took a proper walk* about the city, the park and then the port, even stopping by the games arcade to experience a painful loss on their giant pacman game.

* i'd wanted to go rollerblading, but i compromised on that part.

overall, we talked about a bunch of different things and we had a good time, and i even got to do another couple of tests on the social media app i've been working on, and it's getting there!

dinner was nice, accompanied by the barmitzvah episode of the wonder years, after which mr smear disappointed us by decided he didn't want to watch total recall with his crazy awesome parents who think he's old enough for that level of excitement, so we let him have half an hour of minecraft while we watched game night instead, at the end of which he declared that he might have made a bad call :P

gd and i went to bed at a relatively reasonable hour, and i woke up this morning quite relieved that i managed to sleep alright in spite of everything.

...

oh! and i figured out why i was so confused about shmini atzeret and simchat torah this year. not only is it always confusing that in israel the two are merged together, but the school holidays including an extra day (today) really threw me off. so it's a relatively normal work day for me today, and gd's off to the dentist, and mr smear's got one last day of holidays.

the game of life

 thursday evening's rollerblading was nice, and my back didn't do anything interesting, for which i'm grateful.

my anxiety shot up during dinner time, though, and even though we watched the first half of the suicide squad, i ended up going to bed feel positively ill.

yesterday:

a lot of thinking. i've got a lot more thinking left to go. additional stress because the amount we borrowed to make rent wasn't enough to pick up gd's meds, and it's a long weekend for simchat torah so i was worried the transfer wouldn't be done in time (it was).

mr smear and i played a few invasion levels of rayman: origins yesterday afternoon, which was great fun.

i spent some time writing, and built a sudoku game, and worked on my social media platform. and worried a lot all the while.

oh! and i tried my hand at an adventure game, which came out a bit crap but does have some potential.

mr smear didn't want to go rollerblading in the evening, so we took a walk to the beach instead, where i got to try out my app on the sunset. it was a good, long walk, with only one short argument towards the end. the evening was nice: we finished watching spider-noir, which is beautifully made, and we watched the second half of the suicide squad, which was thoroughly enjoyable even though i did pass out for a chunk of it.

today so far:

i continued reading about garden of earthly delights this morning, hans belting has opened my eyes just in the first few pages and it is mind-blowing.

our upstairs friends came down for a pancake breakfast, with gd making a whole lot more than we needed, and then we sat down to play settlers of catan. unfortunately, about halfway through the game mr smear decided he wanted out, which after some interrogation turned out to be because - due to his frustrating habit of not paying attention to what everyone else is doing when it's not his turn - he had misunderstood some of the game mechanics (and taken certain actions personally), and once we'd explained things to him the situation improved. he still needed a talking-to after the game about being a good sport and not spoiling games for others, but he seemed receptive?

now late afternoon is approaching, and in addition to everything else i'm now freaking out because the air-conditioner smells like mold again after we just had it cleaned, and our landlord hasn't been responding to us for a while and i'm not sure if he's authorized the window and door repairs for the upcoming metro station work...

it's shabbat, and erev chag, and here i am trying to relax, and figure out my next steps career-wise, at the same time.

...

oh! and the woman i called pioneer appears to have blocked me and gd on social media. weird.

sinking feeling

 mr smear got up early today without a fight, which was a relief and a great start to the day. i read a bit of my book on the garden of earthly delights, so my day began with some inspiration, and i took care of a little bugfixing before sitting down with gd to go through our budget again.

i don't know why, but last time we did it we missed a bunch of important things, and now it's clear: we're living beyond our means. but a couple of thousand shekels a month, which we weren't doing before we moved here. this was, in large part, hidden by the first half a year of moving expenses and refurnishing, and it's caused less by the costs in the new apartment and more by the drop in salary that i took after losing my job last year.

so this... this is a problem. the bonus my employer's giving me will ease things for a few months, but it's not a real solution. now i either have to find a new job, which i really, really don't want to do, or sort out some kind of supplemental income. or both. i'm freaked out by the fact that one of the guys i'm friendly with who works for the same employer is currently juggling three jobs because otherwise he can't make ends meet. this does not bode well.

my bonus, which is attached to the condition of me continuing to work for my employer for another year, is now looking more like a loan.

...

we walked to the pharmacy to pick up some stuff, and that's where mr smear began pushing both of our buttons. this would become progressively more serious until a couple of full-scale blowouts back home later, but the past couple of hours have been alright.

from the pharmacy we went to the mall, to pick up a couple of things and, unable to locate a water cooler in the mall itself, discover that you can easily walk across the bridge to the hospital and use the coolers there without getting wet when it rains.

oh, yes - it rained a bit today, and we got caught in it :P

this afternoon involved lots of thinking (employment), and building (my social media side project, as well as a traditional game that i'm hoping i can make a little money with), and cleaning the floors with mr smear.

now it's dark, almost dinner time, and i'm about to drag him out on our rollerblades while by back threatens to spasm before i'm even out my chair.

a series of unrelated events

 i guess i slept alright last night. i woke up to a pleasant morning, it's was cooler and cloudy today (the heavy summer appears to be over) and i finished reading the history of western art in comics, which was a bit dry, but nevertheless an excellent teaching tool and the illustrations are great. i was also struck by inspiration to do something with hieronymus bosch's garden of earthly delights.

i managed to take care of a bunch of admin today. i was disappointed to learn today that the voucher for a pizza hut pizza which i was gifted by an employer a couple of years ago had expired. gd and i got into a bit of a tiff about something - parenting related - and i was pleased to have been able to figure out (eventually) how to express my side of things in a way that landed. i might be rougher than i need to be, but it's important for me that my wife and child understand my motivation, and that my number one priority is and has always been keeping mr smear safe and making sure he can handle himself out in the world.

it's after half-past eleven and mr smear is reading in bed and giggling to himself... and that's after i finally finished reading the colour of magic to him a little earlier...

mr smear and i walked to the comics library, which we found closed until next week. that was sad. we continued walking to the icon festival, but as soon as we arrived mr smear decided he wasn't feeling well (i believe it was the crowds that put him off) so we walked right through it and caught a bus or two home.

i then chatted with sailor for an hour and a half (!), and i'm relieved and pleased that he's excited about the social media app i'm building, and while we talked i formed some ideas about how to turn it into a platform that supports others building "apps" on top of it ^_^

mr smear chose cthulhu fluxx, which is apparently his favorite, and it was a fun game.

we watched another episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins over kimchi rice dinner, during which i convinced mr smear to try a drop of the carolina reaper hot sauce 😈

after showering after dinner, we sat down to watch the second half of suicide squad. i must admit i dozed off a couple of times, and a lot of the writing and acting was iffy, but mr smear enjoyed it immensely so 🤷‍♂️

now, post bedtime (even if he's not asleep yet, and it's been about twenty minutes since i started writing - largely because i've been getting distracted poking the AI in the background), i've been making progress on the side project and also on my mini-games, but i think i might end up going to bed soon.

architecture adventure

random thing i made a little while ago

 what happened today? it started off simple, reading more of the history of western art in comics while sitting on a beanbag and using one of the new little tables for the comic and my coffee.

after gd and i did some online grocery shopping, i sat down to work on the database redesign for my social media project, which turned into a proper collaboration between me and the agents and i ended up with something that feels really solid and clean.

gd had to go to a physio appointment, so we accompanied her, and then i took mr smear for a walk down to migal hashalom, found the entrance on our second try and hung around the ground floor exhibit* for a while examining the designs for what could have been and musing over an "i can see my house from here" artist's rendition...

* i tried to post a video to my app while there, but there was a bug. i just learned now that the "bug" was that the AI "forgot" to complete the work 🙄

from there we walked to bialik square, through nahalat binyamin, which triggered the only drama of the day - mr smear noped right on out the moment he recognized that we were near the market, and i needed to threaten him with punishment to get him to follow me on a speed run through the crowds.

we did okay.

we eventually met up with gd, then wandered around a bit looking for a place to have lunch, and the walk through the holiday crowds of mall people down king george and through the actual mall raised my stress levels step by step until i was almost as emotional as mr smear had been earlier... but we finally found some peace and quiet, pleasant reggae and good hummus and i pretty quickly regained control of my nervous system.

it was a great meal, and i don't think i ate too much.

the bus ride home was a bit rough - line 5's drivers are always really heavy on the pedals - and when we got home i was suddenly overcome by a deep, desperate exhaustion, the kind that made me wonder if i was sick, or narcoleptic after all. when the groceries arrived i got up to try and help and ended up sprawled on the living room floor for a forced nap for half an hour (i was feeling really faint, so i lay down on one of the beanbags). i woke up groggy and still really tired, and even with a 4th coffee i still felt like crap for a long while after.

the recording of gd fixing my hair had been processed by then, and between then and dinner i set about downloading the auto-generated captions, cleaning them up, and then running them through a local AI (ollama + gemma) to translate them to french and hebrew. that's been an experience, let me tell you. challenging, but interesting.

we had a very light dinner, watching youtube videos on the playlist i curate for mr smear (he'd been watching that while i was focused on the caption editing), and after dinner and showering we all sat down with a bowl of salt and vinegar kettle fried chips and watched the first half of the original suicide squad movie.

i think mr smear's enjoying it, and it sounds like leto's joker is his favorite 🙄

since putting him to bed, i've been watching lots of random videos, slowly turning my brain off, and i think i'm just about ready for bed.

moving forward

 dinner and spider-noir, deconstructing this year's jigsaw puzzle, and then me getting back to my projects while mr smear got ready for bed. i paused, around 11pm, to go and read him to sleep (we're sooooo close to finishing the first discworld novel!), then returned to long conversations with AI, involving lots more typing than usual, as i dived deep into why its database design was wrong, what it should look like, and how to climb out of the hole it had dug itself into. at the same time i finally, a few minutes ago and after a couple of hours of mind-bending fails, managed to get the AI to make a rubik's cube function just like a rubik's cube, and i'm elated!! ^_^

between prompts, i've been drinking tea and watching youtube. i think i should probably hit the hay soon.

a busy pause

 i don't know what switch off meant yesterday when i wrote it, but i was still messing about (on and off) with my side project and a new minigame [stops writing to prompt the AI to improve rotation behavior]. 

most of yesterday evening is a blur to me now, but we watched a great episode of spider-noir over dinner, and after mr smear went to bed* i spent some time driving myself crazy playing cook, serve, delicious!...

* a process that began at a relatively reasonable hour, ended around midnight, and at some point when i went in to turn off the lights again and tuck him in he was offended because i didn't do the bedtime ritual and he'd forgotten that i'd already done so much earlier :P

i went to bed late, but not too late, and i guess i slept alright. on my way to bed i had a revelation about the change that came over me since last week's game meetup talk - i got so excited about the potential for making money with games that i lost focus, and i need that focus and excitement for the raw components of the game before i can start making something that's lucrative. every single thing i'm building, or failing at building, is a lesson, a dot to connect when i'm ready.

i woke up to the stress of reading a post i shouldn't have looked at before coffee, another oleh really struggling economically. one of the things i did after coffee was creating a facebook group to help olim network and build things.

my morning started quietly, a little meditative outside time followed by getting back into history of western art in comics, and then finally settling down and taking care of a bunch of admin that i've been putting off for about a week now. after mr smear completed his chores, he asked if we could play something together, but neither of us could agree on what. eventually he sat down to play valheim, and honestly, it did me good. first, because he made a point of chewing gum** the whole time, and second because he was playing something outdoorsy and really getting into it. it's like that "the children yearn for the mines" meme 😂

** "training": both exercising his jaw, and practicing dealing with the fact that it doesn't keep the taste for more than a couple of minutes.

our big adventure today was going to find some kitchen items and something we could use as a low coffee table for when we're sitting on the beanbags. on the bus, we encountered the old man who took a dump next to the bus stop a while back, and as soon as we recognized him we all quickly and quietly agreed to slide over to the back of the bus.

the sales lady at the kitchen store was stunned by gd's hilariously disorientating description of how normal it is for her to cut herself in the kitchen (or while cutting hair), she helped us figure out what we need to buy (it's a chain-link glove) but we've had to order it in gd's size. then we caught a bus to the hardware store, almost getting run over a few times by wolt drivers, where we found what we were looking for but everything felt like far too little value for money.

we walked up to the square with all the restaurants, and sat down to two delicious bowls of hummus, one with vegan shuwarma, and then headed down to osher ad to be amazed both by the prices and quality of their products, and by the lengths of their queues during the holidays. we'll go back there another day.

we were planning on coming home but ended up in azrieli mall instead. i had a coffee and mr smear and i milled around waiting for gd, crowded by surges of mall people, but fortunately not being pushed beyond my usual limit. i mean, it was exhausting, but it didn't put me into fight-and-flight mode like it usually does.

we found *exactly* the coffee tables we were looking for at the dollar store, very cheap and absolutely perfect. we caught the bus home, and halfway there i jumped off to take a call from the dermatologist i'd been waiting to hear from for two days - she's not concerned, she agrees with my assessment - and after having a bit of a rest (taking out one of the tables, lying down for a bit, then hearing gd out as she described how she's selling some of her childhood toys she's been carrying around because she's come to understand that she's holding on to nostalgia for really dark times, and then sitting down to edit the haircut recording from yesterday.

i've done very little development / AI whispering today, and that's okay. i've just had it out with mr smear over his piano practice (i wanted him to practice a new thing he's just learned before stopping), but otherwise things are good.

unremarkably successful

i didn't sleep long, but i slept alright. i woke up with stomach issues that lasted until the early afternoon, and i'm pretty confident it has something to do with the sheer quantity of suboptimal snacks i've been consuming over the course of the past week... my weight's been bouncing up and down accordingly, and i really, really need to start behaving with a little bit of discipline.

i cleaned the balcony floor this morning, but it was already too hot and sunny to sit outside. i spent a good chunk of the day resuscitating my social media side project, and it's looking good, and i've put some effort into a new minigame as well.

i sat gd and mr smear down this morning (as soon as he was clear of his first two screen-free hours) to watch a fascinating video on jaw development, which unfortunately includes two incidents of animal cruelty so gd only made it through half. but mr smear appears to get the idea, which was the main intention.

he's busy playing the sims 4 right now, i can't tell if i'm an awesome dad or a terrible one :P

the big event of the day was gd fixing my haircut on camera, with mr smear serving as cameraman, and we're going to edit it and post it (and hope i don't get blacklisted from barber shops :P). i'm hoping this is the start of a hairdresser equivalent of kitchen nightmares, and that this builds gd's credibility towards becoming a consultant or mentor.

in the meanwhile, my hair's looking sooooo much better and gd's only a little bit injured from the effort... 🤷‍♂️

we all went for a short walk to the grocery store to pick up a few things, which was a corrective experience as gd was forced to admit, begrudgingly, that it's not the worst supermarket and that they do have stuff sometimes.

alright, i think i need to switch off for a bit.

all the epochs

 i'm using astra, and it's great, but it's still.. just another model, making just another model mistakes if you don't guide it. the playbooks we've been building these past months shouldn't be thrown out the window just yet, though i suspect jev will trigger a large part of them to be rewritten. but i will say that i've had the privilege of working as a software engineer for a quarter century, and during that time i had the privilege of working on systems based on 70's tech, and to be able to experience two different epochs of computing history and then be able to experience this new one as well?

what a time to be alive!

indecision

 well, here we are. past midnight on saturday night. between last night and tonight we have finished watching small prophets (brilliant, btw, completely unhinged and brilliant), and mr smear and i completed the jigsaw puzzle, and the day was generally quiet, indoorsy, and involved a lot of me working on, well, mostly on the bird game, with which i made plenty of progress in spite of the fact that most of it was dealing with the agents being slow and dumb.

that slowness also meant just watching a lot of stuff on youtube and doing minesweeper challenges and snacking heavily 🤷

in the evening i took mr smear out for a particularly long walk, it was a great evening for it and aside from strategizing about games, i also successfully conveyed to him what my social media side project should feel like and he was excited by the possibilities ^_^

and along the way, we sat in a sukkah and said the blessings and we got an amazing view of the enormous harvest moon.

after watching the first episode of season 2 of ludwig with gd, after mr smear had at least theoretically gone to bed, i played some aces of the luftwaffe and am now trying to decide whether to go to bed or not.

i'm having a little trouble decided what i actually want to do.