$25 to see the end of louis ck

 i watched louis ck | back to the garden last night.

a few months ago, we purchased his new special, sorry, along with all his other specials for $25. it was brilliant. it was louis ck doing what he does best, and doing so while acknowledging his behavior and (pretty much) apologizing for it.

let me very clear: what he did was awful, and i was (and am) disappointed in him as a human being.

at the same time, he didn't manage - in my entirely subjective opinion - to cross the boundary where i could no longer separate the art from the artist*. his whole schtick is that he's always been a bit of a piece of shit, and his comedy has always been absolutely brilliant. although, now that i think about it, his 2017 special didn't really strike my funny bone, so let's say that his comedy has mostly always been brilliant.

* only two artists have managed to cross that boundary in my eyes: ian watkins, the voice behind shinobi vs dragon ninja which i can no longer listen to without being filled with disgust, and marilyn manson, who turned from hero to zero and took all of his music with him a few years back when it turned out his personal corruption matches what he's been singing about all along.

anyway, aside from the 2017 special i was able to enjoy it even while he himself made me uncomfortable, and his older work is mostly fantastic.

back to louis ck | back to the garden.

the first disappointment: i could skip past the jazz, but not the two decidedly uncharismatic, unfunny comedians he wheeled out to open for him. this was just like bill burr presents: friends who kill: did bill burr actually perform? i couldn't make it through the opening acts. where did they find these people? why do these events smell like great artists selling out? wtf is going on?!

but this time, i pushed through, and i bore witness to each and every excruciating minute of louis ck's performance. it was... it was louis ck, and it was louis ck doing louis ck-style bits. but he just didn't have any funny. he didn't have that light shining out of his eyes. his jokes... his jokes weren't funny. they weren't even interesting. there were three minor chuckles in the entire set, and then an almost-clever bible reading bit, and then nothing less than a resounding disappointment.

breathing out before the week starts

 we went to neighbours for dinner last night, we generally had a really good time in spite of the fact that all the kids declined to eat dinner and that gd had an allergic reaction to their rabbits.

i let our host insist on giving me a second beer, that was a bit much for me at that point.

i got up this morning and dived in to migrating my server-hosted applications to serverless. there were quite a few sharp edges and it took a lot more time and effort than i'd anticipated, but by early afternoon i was ready to start the migration.

so i took a break, and the three of us walked down to the beach. gd enjoyed a drink while mr smear and i played in the sand, and then we did some serious bonding on the way home by eating hal's jalapeño chips in spite of them setting our faces on fire. 

those things are hardcore.

gd made a delicious dinner while we showered, and by the time mr smear went to bed he'd more than made up for the skipped meal the night before: he'd had a huge breakfast, too, and then three helpings of dinner with fruit. not even garbage-bin dad could eat that much.

i started reading charlie and the great glass elevator, then joined gd for half of the first episode of the new season of hunters while starting to run deployments. when she went the bed i finished watching the original gremlins movie. i'm pretty sure it was my first time - i've always loved gremlins 2, but i think my only contact with the first installment ever was via mad magazine when i was a kid.

holy shit, that is *not* an appropriate movie for mr smear. and now that the concept of gremlins is fresh in mind, neither is the sequel.

the deployments took forever (i needed to follow a very particular sequence), but i finally got it right and it looks like everything is 100%! i've now destroyed my droplet, and after years of configuring and maintaining and performing manual updates and deployments i'm now very pleased to report that everything i've got online is a) serverless and b) managed by cdk projects.

so... cheaper, and far less effort. and i get to check off a to-do list item that's been bugging me for at least a year or two.

good night!

three for three

 yesterday morning started off on a fantastic note - i disabled the linter and tested out my theory, and it worked beautifully! then i got some work done before taking a call from a recruiter for a company i'm not particularly thrilled about. i worked from home yesterday, and it was a long day but marginally successful.

mr smear and i got through most of his homework between last night and this morning, and we're currently trying to finish up the last two questions before shabbat begins. as frustrating as the experience can (and has) been, it's exceptionally rewarding to see him beginning to get comfortable and succeeding and taking pride in his successes.

last night i went out with sailor after putting mr smear to bed, and we ended up in château shuál, a really cool little place. by the time i got home, bathed, and had watched a bit of comedy before going to bed, it was 1am again...

this morning went pretty smoothly, and after i got home i took care of a few things while occasionally helping gd deal with the black mold (vinegar spray and elbow grease). then we did a huge grocery shopping (barely manageable, my back's better but still twitchy), started vetting the first gremlins movie, then i picked up mr smear and brought him home. we had a bit of a fight on the way home which resolved nicely - through the bad vibes i learned that he has grossly misunderstood my motivations as his dad, but once we aligned, we hugged and moved on.

i napped for about an hour, and woke up seriously groggy. now i'm just trying to breathe and relax into the weekend.

...

mr cat is making good progress on the next comic pages. they've taken forever, but i have a good feeling they'll be worth the wait.

...

we've been watching transcendent man in bits and pieces, and with that in mind some of the news i read today just blew me away:

• scientists build a working tractor beam
• a brain implant thinner than a human hair

two 1ams in a row

i'm falling asleep, but i want to get this down quickly.

mr smear's grounded until the weekend for being particularly uncooperative yesterday. he's absolutely loving charlie and the chocolate factory. 

gd's been struggling much more than i realized. 

we've just discovered that we have a very real problem with black mold. 

the work days have been long, but much more positive and successful. 

i'm a bit irritated by the people i might end up working with. 

i'm excited about a conversation that's scheduled for early next week. 

i'm relieved that one of my teammates who got laid off found a new gig. 

i began today with a threat of a back spasm and i'm still feeling it and feeling nervous. 

i just spent about two hours trying to test a really cool idea for an obscure cdk use case and i got so stuck on the damned linter configuration that i haven't tested it yet. 

the tell

 i'm a terrible liar. even when i'm not actively lying, but just trying not to disclose something. my boss trapped me this afternoon and expertly manipulated me to the point where i couldn't keep the embarrassed smile off my face.

either things are really good at the moment, or he's pacifying me until such time as i can be replaced. it's impossible to know which. but if i take him at face value, then all of my unhappiness boils down to a combination of on-call stress, mismatched expectations and miscommunications. apparently everyone views my work as critically important, and appreciates its expensive.

yesterday was a long day that wasn't terrible, today was also long but included some good achievements. and both days, i've been improving at taking things one task at a time. overall, i'm doing okay.

gd's been struggling (physically) more than usual lately, i hope her next treatment has a significant impact.

mr smear made me super proud this evening - after dinner we did some of his homework together, and he did remarkably well.

my head's all over the place but... it's okay. my body, on the other hand... aside from my neck and back acting up a bit lately, i've got a couple of skin concerns (i made light of it yesterday, but mr smear with a complete lack of irony woke up this morning and told me "dad, you've definitely got cancer"). we'll see what the doctors have to say, i guess.

weekend complete

and on the seventh day - and a fair amount of the sixth - i rested. sailor came over for gd's vegan sushi dinner last night, we had a good time and even spun gd having a particularly emotional moment into a positive (her spine injuries are far from trivial, she's still not used to feeling allowed to have emotions about it).

this morning mr smear and i got up together (erm - he got my up) and we worked together to solve a puzzle in dragon quest builders 2 that's been bothering him for a while. i then managed to convince him to walk with my to meet up with nystire and his family - i'm still feeling pleased and proud that i managed to manipulate him into coming out with a good attitude - and just as pleased that gd was able to meet us there.

nystire and i took longer than planned for our coffee mission and returned to a goodbye with some tensions, but overall it was a really nice way to spend the morning and the walk home was really cool as well. it was a beautiful day.

we spent the second half of it doing whatever, mr smear continuing his game ("it's WAY better than minecraft), me finally convincing cdk to publish a static website with both a domain and subdomain, watching the first half of back to the future while eating leftovers and oatmeal, reading to mr smear and both of us laughing hysterically (we're almost finished charlie and the chocolate factory, the book has some hilarious moments), and chatting with horseman.

...

that was the positive stuff.

gd and i then settled down to start watching j'accuse!, the documentary about the lithuanian holocaust. it's beyond horrifying. especially if you're of lithuanian descent (which i am).

the world needs to know that this happened to us, and the world needs to understand that the lithuanian government is *continuing* to cover this up.

not-so-functional

wednesday was a write-off, and i'm actually kinda proud of myself for taking off a sick day when i needed it. i did nothing of value all day (aside from getting mr smear to and from school), i just rested all day. and most of the night.

i finished watching the original back to the future, which i decided could be handled by mr smear. but then i thought of some of the things in the second movie, and now i figure we can wait a few years...

we all watched the fifth element together in the evening. there're a few uncomfortable minutes (the take-off scene) that didn't seem to interest mr smear, and everything else ("except the kissing") was enjoyed by all.

yesterday i worked from home, and i was feeling pretty relaxed. my boss had given me some uncharacteristic praise, a few of us had a good meeting about security disclosures and the implications of using copilot's offerings in our proprietary codebase, and i admitted to a coworker that i thoroughly hate everything to do with our ci/cd solution.

i spent most of the afternoon upgrading something that was long overdue an upgrade, in spite of the fact that one of the elements was left pointing to the old API because the provider hasn't made it available on their new one... even though they've been threatening to turn off the old version for over two years now :/

aside from a quick grocery run, and an hour or so of a founders' meeting, last night was quiet.

this morning saw me trying and failing to produce a satisfactory recording of the slam - i thought it was satisfactory until gd informed me otherwise - and i've just spent some time failing to communicate my thoughts to midjourney. otherwise, we've done our weekly grocery shopping and i've failed to do any of the things i *needed* to do because i've been very invested in self-care. which means doing nothing that feels like work.

so there.

this seems to be happening

i'm very busy processing, after a meeting in herzeliya earlier which made things seem both real and surreal simultaneously. there was a moment, as three of us rushed into the train station, where the captain of the ship pulled me aside to let me know his estimation of me has increased significantly. it was a good moment.

then i got home to a message from twilio informing me that they've finally resolved the messaging issues which have been plaguing and frustrating me for months. i restarted my phone and confirmed.

that's nice, too.

my day started with geoffrey asmus and will foskey. the former i've been following for a week or two now and i love everything about his comedy, the latter i just discovered this morning and he's really fun.

the work day was a bit of a bitch. whatevs.

the mondays

israeli politics are troubling (it's hard to ignore what's going on in spite of my best intentions to the contrary) and i woke up to a post about the awful societal failure they're calling 50 shades of black, which i watched for half an hour before realizing that i do not want to start my day with this (too late, i guess).

friday was functional - we got a lot done, including buying my and mr smear new shoes - but the weekend was by and large cozy and indoors while the winter weather did its thing. it was a tim burton weekend, we watched the nightmare before christmas, edward scissorhands and corpse bride.

i also published a video for advice, which i've been wanting to do for the longest time.

mr smear's been sick since the weekend, it started with a sniff and progressed into a horrible cough. i stayed home yesterday while gd went to ulpan, and for the most part we were good.

i spent a good chunk of yesterday morning reading through job listings and making contacts. i'm grateful to not be doing this under pressure.

i had a meeting with my boss yesterday, and it feels like all the words left unspoken were heard loud and clear.

is it really thursday night?

 i'm a bit stunned, and i should probably be getting into bed. i'll do that soon.

in the meanwhile, the past couple of days were a continuation of the week's intensity, although yesterday evening i managed to complete the main part of the effort and today i spent cleaning up the surprises. there's one broken thing left to deal with, but it was broken before.

that was the work week.

yesterday evening nystire and i participated in a mini "flight" reunion, which was really fun! it was my first time in the sarona market, which is a bit too expensive for regular visits but the sandwich i had was amazing.

both yesterday morning and this morning mr smear lost his mind arguing about whether his shoes are too big or too small. in both cases i eventually managed to explain to him how these concepts work and he admitted he was wrong, but my gods i wasn't expecting a second round. otherwise he seems fine, although gd had to intervene this evening when one of his friends straight-up attacked another by punching him in the head...

i'm sore. i'm tired.

this evening i joined a call with dod and co for a couple of hours, i have some concerns but it looks like these guys might actually be able to secure funding and if they do, i would be a real idiot not to dive in. at the same time, i need to start sending my resume around and there's already at least one possibility that might be exactly where i need to be.

we shall see.

meanwhile, mr cat's been making exciting progress on the next page of the comics, but i haven't had bandwidth to really sit down and evaluate the draft (or fill in the blanks), so hopefully tomorrow morning i'll be able to push things forward.

routine-ish

i started yesterday taking care of admin and watching a bit of transcendent man at horseman's recommendation. it's the perfect time to watch it, with all the AI madness going on (i've just received an NSFW warning from midjourney because i'm terrible at prompt engineering...).  i remembered to take leftovers to work. i spent most of the day laser-focused on the security stuff and i ended the day with a pretty big achievement.

it's weird getting praise from my boss because i don't trust him to actually mean it.

i don't remember much about what i did last night, but i got home relatively late. after wishing mr smear a good night i finally had a chat with vfmp, we've been just-missing each other for weeks... i ended up going to be unreasonably late, but i don't recall exactly what i was occupied with.

this morning i restarted transcendent man to watch with mr smear at breakfast time. then i managed to record advice (it took a lot of attempts, i'm satisfied enough with the final output but it's not perfect...)

work was more of the same. i left the office having almost completed the task, but with my eyes and brain crossed after so much concentration. it's really sensitive and convoluted stuff.

we had a good evening, the highlight was finishing the peanuts movie. we watched the peanuts movies from half a century ago and absolutely loved them, they've aged beautifully! then we watched the 2015  movie and it totally blew me away. i'm stunned by what is clearly a work of pure love, both for charles m schultz and for his characters.

it's literally wonderful. (except the music, but whatever)

mr smear was so excited reading charlie and the chocolate factory tonight that he had to sit up and sit next to me, occasionally getting up to pace animatedly while musing about how amazing getting a golden ticket would be ^_^

it's close to midnight

 i'm getting sleepy, but i also felt the need to make myself another cup of tea. i felt much better today. i fell asleep around 5 or 6am and was barely able to get out of bed, but half an hour lying on the couch and a short race to the corner with mr smear (his idea) woke me up a bit. then i had a cup and a half of coffee and got a bunch of admin done and by the time i left the apartment i was actually a bit wired.

and very much not giving a fuck.

the work day was long and very focused while i worked on something highly sensitive. i made good progress and kinda felt like everything was (relatively) okay / back to "normal".

i didn't eat very much today. i'm trying not to spend too much cash on food - also, i wasn't really in the mood for anything in particular - and with our company cutting back we haven't got too much to go on in the kitchen. i really need to remember to take leftovers...

going home was weird. there were a lot of kids around, a lot of hyper kids some of whom were play-fighting in a way that suggested that real violence was imminent. older people were behaving a little weird too. i felt relieved to get home without getting into a scrap.

we watched the rest of a boy named charlie brown, which was a movie that i loved as a kid and it was great seeing mr smear invested, entertained and sympathetic. the evening wasn't perfect but bedtime was cool, we've been reading charlie and the chocolate factory and really enjoying it.

after wishing my boy a good night, i received messages from his teacher - he's got a problem with boundaries and a problem with emotion regulation, and the two together can have some bizarre effects. we're going to have to have a talk tomorrow.

*sigh*

anyway, gd and i watched the end of the angriest man in brooklyn (which was beautiful) and started watching the recipe together, and then she turned in and i started watching jersey girl. i don't know what made me push through the utterly detestable beginning but i'm about halfway through and i am enjoying it.

okay, it's past midnight now.

can't sleep

 i'm still frazzled, even after most of a night sleeping well i've woken up a broken-record scratching imagined potential end sequences for my current employment.

yesterday had some good times, although some of them involved some mixed emotions. we went to play table tennis at a nearby park, we did have some good times but a big part of it ended up being trying to teach mr smear how the game works and it was less fun than it could have been...

i spent the rest of the day just trying to sort my head out and plan my next steps. a long chat with horseman and a shorter chat with sailor definitely helped a lot.

i also had a short but very important talk with gd about what she's up to after mr smear went to bed, we both needed that.

stress-sick

 i'm feeling somewhat better this morning, but the whole of yesterday i was literally ill with anxiety and depression. i didn't get through the things i needed to (aside from an efficient shopping with gd in the morning), and sheer disappointment with life occurred just as we were about to say kiddush when my pager went off and i had to spend the next half an hour to an hour figuring out what was wrong, fixing it, monitoring it all while doing everything in my power not to ask for help.

i was successful, at least.

i managed to join my family for the end of matilda: the musical, and i have to admit i really enjoyed the adaptation! they really did the book justice even if they went significantly off script.

which reminds me - we read james and the giant peach a little while ago, and i was thoroughly disappointed by the movie adaptation. they made some weird decisions, and some deeply upsetting ones, the two main ones being the decision to not kill the horrible aunts and the incomprehensible switch between live action and stop-motion. either one would have been fine.

after everyone went to bed i decided to try and get snow bros running on my windows machine. i haven't used that machine in so long i had lots of accumulated housekeeping to do, and then i went through a variety of emulator software (probably picked up some malware along the way, hopefully not) before realizing that mame is still the best of breed. so i downloaded the snow bros rom and configured it to work with our joypads.

this morning, in spite of minor trauma caused by mr smear thinking i was telling him how to draw when i was explaining what i'd need from him to convert his drawings into sprites, i managed to draw him into a game and we a) had a great time together and b) finished the game for the first time in my entire life!

having infinite credits helped, certainly, but that doesn't take away from the satisfaction of finally having seen the closing credits of a game i've been loving (and still love) since i was a kid.

mr smear's now back into gravity rush, which we discovered yesterday evening once his playdate was over. it's fun, and clever, and beautiful.

...

i've been a huge fan of steve hofstetter for ages, and yesterday i listened to the recipe. i've heard a lot of the elements of these stories in various bits, but he's put his special together in such a wonderful, powerful way that aside from its sheer hilarity it's also a provocative emotional rollercoaster.

pushed and depressed

 this has been an absolutely awful week. i've been on-call again, which is going to happen more and more frequently now that our team's been cut down to size, and it's made me realize that i am passionate about my job.

i'm hating my job with a passion.

it suddenly struck me this morning, while i was feeling horrible after our "retrospective" yesterday in which my boss informed me of how disappointed he is in my on-call prowess, that in our tiny team of eight there're two developers who aren't included in the "ninja" roster: our frontend devs. but for six months i've been the infrastructure guy, the dev-ops guy, not just as disconnected, but even more disconnected from the everyday workings of our product as those guys are.

i'm raising an eyebrow very, very hard right now.

this week was a fantastic time to be listening to this crazy one podcast, i found it quite inspiring. i really need to focus on finding where i need to be, instead of coasting from compromise to compromise. it's time to start looking around and being very intentional about what i pay attention to.

...

it wasn't just an awful week from a work perspective, but the emotional stuff got better.

we decided it was a good time to introduced mr smear to who framed roger rabbit. i don't recall whether or not i've seen it since its big-screen debut, but we all thoroughly enjoyed it and it's aged amazingly well!

we've been very lucky to have received some government assistance, we're still a long way from clear but it's easier to breathe knowing that we can keep the roof over our head without having to borrow more, and as much as it sucks seeing all our money disappear it is a bit of a relief to be able to pay bits of our loans off. if it wasn't for all the debt incurred in getting here we'd actually be able to save money - possibly occasionally travel, even - so hopefully financially things keep moving in a positive direction.

we had a parent-teacher meeting yesterday, and i couldn't stop giggling. half of it because mr smear can be legitimately hilarious, half of it because i knew exactly what his teacher was talking about and was both amused and embarrassed. in general he's doing fine, but he really isn't the most cooperative kid...

yesterday afternoon gd tried to get medical assistance and was sent to the refugee clinic, where they refused to help her because they're not allowed. the clinic is in the old bus station, and i was dealing with work shit, and she was in tears trying to navigate that godforsaken place alone. when she got back and told me everything she'd been through i called up our healthcare provider, and we were informed that of course she can get treatment if she walks in to the clinic with an urgent issue.

which is what they'd previously made clear to us was not an option.

anyway, the woman i spoke to was helpful and we now know what our options are for emergency medical assistance. which is a relief.

...

i forgot to mention that gd and i finished re-watching dredd on new year's eve, and holy shit it's still as phenomenally brilliant as we remembered.

that movie is criminally underrated.

less than happy

 today was a really good day. productive, constructive, good feelings all around. yesterday was a bit weird, including both gd and myself missing our dental hygienist appointments by over an hour, but ended on a positive note even though i was so tired by the time we got mr smear into bed that i just crashed completely.

this evening was not good, and i'm exhausted and feeling sick from the emotional turmoil.

happy 2023!

another time round the sun!

2022 was WILD for us. it started off theatrically scary and confusing, became super crazy for a few months, became a whole different kind of crazy for another few, and has finally ended with us miraculously - gratefully - feeling pretty stable, positive, and surrounded by friends, family, neighbors, and nation.

...

thursday: a productive, constructive, positive day. my only mistake was eating two pitot with the hummus. the "happy hour" whiskey made the last hour a little more difficult than it needed to be. on thursday night, i finally succeeded in deploying something i've been struggling with for a week now.

yesterday: massive progress in the morning after my 1.20am victory. then the big weekly shopping with gd, then we split up so that gd could pick up mr smear and take him to a birthday party while i picked up a couple of bottles from the liquor store. i joined them afterwards for a very pleasant afternoon drinking beer and eating vegan pizza and conversing with the adults while the kids entertained themselves on a couple of massive bouncy castles and wired themselves up with candy floss.

i think that was mr smear's very first candy floss experience.

sailor came over for a sushi dinner, i was pretty down - more exhausted than anything else, i feel, but it did make me a bit withdrawn which sailor picked up on.

today started off positively, but went sour when one of our support team contacted me for assistance about something i know nothing about and i felt bad asking him to wait until tomorrow because, i suddenly realized, i didn't actually have a clear idea of what's expected of the on-call victim ninja at night / on weekends. i sent a message to my boss for clarification, and he quickly jumped in and made it abundantly clear that on-call isn't to be bothered outside of work hours unless there's a real emergency.

i feel better now.

in the afternoon we picked up australian cousins and drove through to our lapid cousins, we had a lovely evening ushering in the new year with family, ate well, heard good news and generally ended the year on a very positive note.

...

here's to a magnificent, surprising, peaceful and wonderful 2023!