a painful end to the weekend

 i don't think i did anything particularly constructive this afternoon, and for my sins i had to deal with a classic mr smear regression: getting him to come rollerblading became very unpleasant, and he refused to stop escalating, and he didn't climb down off the hill until we'd already made it to the port, and he'd already lost a few hours of screen time and three days of access to the youtube music app.

this was me being conservative with the punishments, and it was really hard to keep him moving forward and coerce him to stop being so damned obstructive.

once we got to the port, or to the main stretch of it, at least, we stopped for a moment outside the outdoors club which was playing some pretty solid beats... music soothes even the savage beast. the rest of the route (which was essentially the way home from there) was smooth sailing, with positive vibes and for the most part good conversation.

...

we got home, showered, and sat down to gd's vegan sushi. it was a good dinner. then we spoke to my mom, who dropped a bombshell - one of our american cousins' kids committed suicide yesterday. i don't have words.

we (myself and gd) tried to explain how disastrous the current situation is for teenagers, with social media and online bullying and AI chatbots assisting kids in offing themselves and malicious anti-west propaganda confusing them and making them ashamed to be normal, decent people.

we're fucked in general, and as family, devastated.

...

after that, it's been a weird evening. i read some more of the light fantastic to mr smear, lost myself in youtube and sudoku for a while, then did some research into online multiplayer game development. now it's almost midnight, though in a couple of hours it'll only have been almost 11pm (i can't believe the democrats in the US are so dumb as to fight trump on cancelling daylight savings time), and i'm going to bed a bit nervous about how i'm not feeling like i'm handling my missed deadline very well.