gameis 2026

 the gameis conference was nothing short of inspirational. up until a couple of weeks ago i was convinced that the israeli gaming industry was all about gambling; i arrived a little before the crowds, and i was really impressed by the local games set up to play; extremely high quality, both the studio and the indie games.

a guy i served with sat down next to me during the opening talks, and we were both - like most of the people in the room - made very uncomfortable by the fifteen minutes of "saying the quiet part out loud" explaining how to take advantage of "whales". judging by the audience reactions to that and the marketing talk that followed, and the antithesis in the more sentimental talks that poked fun at the first ones, we weren't alone. the only other uncomfortable talk was by a hardcore liberal american jew, whose thesis regarding making games meaningful was excellent, but who couldn't stop himself from putting his TDS and anti-musk sentiments on display.

lunch was surprisingly good, really decent vegan options.

the rest of the talks i sat in on were interesting, enlightening, and motivated me to want to Make Stuff. i've captured a whole bunch more game ideas, and as soon as i'm done with integrating my auto-doc into my client's systems i'm going to focus on some of them.

there were some awkward moments during the day, but i had an interesting phone call with sailor and a couple of positive interactions (one with an old university buddy who used to be a part of ze germans). in general, i feel much better about the lay of the land. and, considering my current situation - and my anxiety over tomorrow's attempt to renegotiate my salary possibly going awry - i'm wondering if i shouldn't try to move in that direction.

during the day i learned - fortunately from mr smear first - that mr smear and his "friend" had had an incident this morning. i told his friend's mother about the on/off bullying that mr smear's been experiencing the past couple of months, and i think as parents we're all aligned and hoping for the best... but either way he really doesn't want to go back, he's been really disappointed by the summer day camp in spite of a bunch of positive experiences.

i spoke to an organizer a bit earlier, and it looks like they'll refund us if he stops now (which is in spite of their terms and conditions), so we'll ask him in the morning and take it from there. it'll certainly put us under less financial pressure for this month, even if it doesn't really affect the next ones so much...

mr smear and i did a quick grocery shop and then sat down for dinner. gd made home-made hamburgers that were delicious, but none of us was hungry. i ate all my food anyway, because it was delicious and i felt uncomfortable leaving it on the plate, and i kind of regret doing that.

we finished watching chocolat, and we all loved it, which is awesome.

at mr smear's bedtime gd and i had a fight that was triggered by an argument over whether she could be a receptionist in tel aviv if her hebrew isn't great, and it took a lot to get to a point where we both heard each other...

now it's late, and i really don't have energy to work on the auto-doc, so i'm going to chill and go to bed soon and try to get as much done in the morning to be ready for the demonstration 🤞

preoccupation

 the rest of my afternoon: my sister called, and we had quite a long chat about her plans for her visit, along with some distressing news that during the course of their divorce, her most recent ex-husband made a point of separating her from a bunch of old videos from her childhood.

i managed to get mr smear to play another session of math fluxx, and he was a lot more compliant and we had a lot more fun.

over lots-of-sushi dinner we watched infinity train, and between dinner and bedtime i was a *little* bit constructive vis-à-vis my autodoc side project.

i read some more alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear, and then put myself to bed soon after.

...

now it's about two hours later, and i've gotten up after lying awake for a while developing indigestion.

good grief.

not broken, well-fed

 i feel like i'm just about to fall apart.

this morning began with me getting out of bed a bit late, reading more of watchmen, making a bit of progress in a new side project before heading off to work.

work was mostly about migrating to claude - i'm still experiencing a lot of weirdness - and then we stopped for a small lunch (a tiny, oddly nice onion and raisin bagel) in preparation for the group outing, and then before i had a chance to grab a coffee and do something productive i received a phone call from the school: mr smear, in tears, believing that his arm might be broken.

i rushed out to make my way there - i tried to catch a cab, but the guy who accepted my fare was still busy with another one - and the fastest way to go was to walk quite a ways and jump on a bus. in retrospect, there was a better light rail option, but i was rushed 🤷‍♂️

in a nutshell: my son has decided that he's a claustrophile, so during a free class he decided to stand behind the classroom door. one of the kids in the class - one who's been quite aggressive and mildly violent with him all year - saw him and smashed the door into him. apparently the kid didn't expect to cause as much harm as he did, according to mr smear he seemed sincerely remorseful and apologized profusely.

i arrived to find him seemingly alright, although when we did get a chance to stop moving at the light rail, his arm did look a bit bent. off we went to the clinic to show his doctor, which was a walk, and she was very impressed with his newfound ability to communicate what happened in hebrew (although i had to reign him in a little). she gave us urgent referrals for imaging, so we went to the next clinic, which was another walk, for an up-and-down set of x-rays, bandaging and receiving a referral for the hospital because all the doctors had left already, and then picking up the x-ray disc. then it was another walk to the hospital (all this because the clinics and hospital are relatively close to each other, but the bus routes between them are complicated) where gd met us and took over.

the group had left for the outing more than an hour before, so i rushed to catch a couple of buses to get the office, pick up my bag, then catch the light rail and walk (another significant walk) to meet up with them.

i missed the food tour part of it, and i was starting late with the drinking part of it, but i made it just in time for the eating part, and omg it was amazing food, and there was a lot, and i ate and drank so much (i guess that's relative, two light drinks and three shots, but i usually don't drink at all), and the atmosphere was excellent and we all had a lot of fun. like, really, a lot of fun.

i was interrupted twice by phone calls: the first, the mother of the kid who hurt mr smear; i wasn't quite cold, but not exactly warm either (i don't really like her, she's interesting to talk to but immensely disrespectful), and learned that her son wanted to contact mr smear but hadn't told her why. so i told her why, and then sent her mr smear's number, and she's assured me (sure) that it won't happen again.

the second call was from gd to say that his arm looks fine. which is an enormous relief for a whole bunch of reasons.

half the group continued on to a bar, a few of us walked together to the light rail, and then i switched to the bus home, and arrived just in time to take the last few bits of mr smear's dinner laffa, and start winding down for the night. after putting him to bed, i put an hour into the side project, and now i've written this, and i think i just might go to bed.

not according to plan

 so! i have an explanation for yesterday evening, last night, and this morning. also, today, and still now to a degree.

i didn't mention that when i took mr smear out yesterday, my belly was doing a bit of aching. i didn't really think much on it, but in retrospect that was the warning sign. then last night's feeling horrible, and this morning still feeling horrible, primarily with a low-intensity headache and an unusual dizziness.

i was still in post-rollerblade "recovery" mode, and i grabbed a petit beurre from the jar on my way to my desk. i'd had a few yesterday; they don't always have them, but every now and again i help myself to a couple when they do. but yesterday, and today, it tasted a bit different... richer... and while i managed to put that aside yesterday, the way i was feeling today made me suddenly paranoid. enough to go back and look again, more carefully, and realize that unlike the standard petit beurre in israel (osem), this was a different brand. so i looked up the brand's ingredients.

dairy.

in the "vegan"-labelled cookie jar, looking almost identical to the osem one which is legitimately vegan.

so i had my answer - the tale of last night, in its entirety, was me eating a handful of dairy biscuits yesterday afternoon, and then feeling extremely heavy effects all through the night and most of the morning. then there was an hour or so's reprieve, before this morning's biscuit kicked in and set off a pounding headache.

a coworker gave me a couple of headache tablets, which eventually took the edge off but never quite managed to lift the fog.

...

with that all happening, i had some important project work to do today. it took me a while to get into it properly - i had to deal with a few bureaucratic distractions, and i wasn't exactly operating at peak performance - and by the time i got started i was fortunate to realize that some else had overwritten my work yesterday before i triggered a mistake i might not have been able to take back.

i got in touch, and coached him through merge my changes into his (it's quite frustrating to have to guide experienced, intelligent developers through basic git manipulations because they refuse to use graph visualizations), and eventually we managed to get everything in sync.

but by that stage, i'd already been dragged into an investigation for an incident that had begun the night before and hadn't rung any alarm bells. suddenly, me the contractor who's working on a high-pressured over-deadline damage control project, had to take charge of the situation and lead the team through hours of resolution and troubleshooting.

so much for wednesday.

it looks like we did it in the end, and relatively well (i argued for combining mitigation with some elementary protections for the next set of surprises), and while monitoring the fixes not only fixed up the dashboards, but exported them to a versioned repo and demonstrated the advantage (apparently convincingly) to the others.

...

i left the office really late, stopped at the shops to pick up a couple of things, including soy milk for gd. you see, we found out months ago that she's probably celiac, and had some amazing success with her going gluten-free, but recently some of the symptoms have been creeping back. turns out, she's been drinking oat milk this whole time, thinking that it was gluten-free 🙄

...

dinner was excellent - gd made another large round of sushi and we ate the lot - and we watched some more of cool runnings. the evening was feeling like it was going great, so it was a rather undigestible surprise when the mother of one of mr smear's "friends" called to discuss him getting violent with her boy.

gd had suspected something had happened when he'd come home this afternoon, and he'd brushed her off, and it took a lot for us to extract even a little bit of the story from him. when i called the mother back to talk about it, it turned out that there was more to the story, but mr smear swears blind that that was everything. gd and i are extremely concerned, and we're both having trouble dealing with this.

...

oh, yeah - and this morning's AI usage, which was really basic, blew through more than half of my monthly budget. well, i've been complaining about the AI providers putting on the squeeze for a while now...

so all-in-all it's been a bit of a shit day, with only the slightest sprinkling of glitter over the incident resolution and the few minutes where i got to enjoy dinner with my family before everything fell apart for real.

i'm - fucking - tired.

purim ii

thousands of years later, in the same week of the hebrew calendar as the original purim, we turned the tables on a modern-day haman: khamenei is dead. and with him, his family, and his generals. the antisemitic anti-west coalition has begun to unravel.

so this purim we tell the story, and we live the story, and we will celebrate in the streets and drink too much, and possibly come up with a new baked good like "ayatollah's beard" (or "ayatollah's glasses"), and possibly add an appendix to the original megillah.

but, hive mind, i have to ask you: in this retelling, who is mordechai, and who is esther? trump is achashverosh, clearly, but is bibi our esther?

...

 holy shit. last night's sleep was heavily interrupted by missile attacks, and mr smear had to stay with us, so it was even more interrupted in between the interruptions. and then it was morning, and between attacks we tried to be functional, and i somehow managed to get some work done, and everything was really just a mess.

all my coworkers, israeli and non-israeli, are being very sweet.

i educated horseman and his girlfriend on middle east politics and anti-west propaganda today; it's one heck of a way to introduce oneself to new people :P

the most exercise mr smear and i got was a walk around the block to take down recycling. he was bored today. but also antisocial. and i could barely keep it together, and went down a savings / investment rabbit hole...

gd, in addition to everything else, is really struggling. if her situation worsens, we're going to have to head to the nurses tomorrow.

at least the groceries got through.

the latest attacks have been particularly intense, and it looks like they're using cluster bombs. as i just told my brother: we need to be grateful, as we need to be for every single war since 1948, that our enemies are so ideologically blinded that they’re incapable of discipline. imagine how much harder this war would be if iran hadn’t attacked ALL its neighbors!

really tough fighters get in the ring. pathetic fighters bully non-fighters.

the brain slimes out the headcase

i woke up from a strange dream where i reconnected with my first branch commander and his family out in the middle of nowhere. when i got up i couldn't remember his name, but firefighter came to the rescue and i could return to a reality in which it really doesn't matter :P

 today began with an argument over the couch, which *i* had thought we were keeping, and which i'm now scrambling to sell before the move. and i tried to put our mattress on facebook marketplace, but because i used the word "orthopaedic" it was identified as medical equipment.

i could only ask for a review on the grounds of "it's not offensive in my country" and "it was a joke",  and the review was obviously just as automated as the original misclassification. and then, to make things worse, i couldn't edit or delete it because it had been flagged, and i couldn't re-create it either because it was detected as a duplicate 🤦

a sweet couple came to look at the apartment this morning, right after i returned from the hardware store with putty and shpachtel and a replacement showerhead for our last week because ours sprung a leak last night, and they absolutely loved it and we all really clicked over our rick & morty and adventure time pictures on the walls.

i arrived at work a bit later than usual, fielded a call from a scary-looking woman who asked incisive questions, and then dived into work.

...

work today - aside from forcing myself to take a lunch break - was completely ridiculous. as a hired "expert", i probably shouldn't be reveling out loud in the fact that this is my first mlops experience, but my gods, this is a discipline of complete masochists and/or trolls.

my first success was navigating the docker resources required to actually run a model in an ml instance, and the next was figuring out how to request predictions. but then i had to deal with logits and understand that the model i was using didn't include the labels it was trained with. so the data scientist who helped me yesterday jumped in enthusiastically to help, and the two of us were like kids trying to find buried pirate treasure with a riddle of instructions and no idea which map they referred to. or whether or not that map was accurate.

by the end of the day, we'd managed to synthesize a massive dataset of sample sentences (in 235 different languages) manually using google sheets and gemini, and we'd coerced a cursor agent to run a script against the deployed model that took our dataset plus a guessed label mapping and try to figure out what the mapping *should* look like, and we were surprised and amazed when the first iteration showed a fair amount of success and gave us a great starting point.

just before i called it a day - it was already much later than i'd intended to stay in the office, and my brain felt like it was oozing out my ears and nostrils - my boss/client appeared. we enthusiastically caught him up, but he didn't like my original plan, which was to give the project until the end of today and then make a call to use a temporary fallback to avoid blocking an end-of-next-week delivery.

"you should be more optimistic", he told me.

now i'm at a point where i know i'm not going to work over the weekend, but it's going to be bugging me that i might need to work over the weekend in order to make this deadline.

...

i walked home, had a very serious discussion with mr smear (he made a bad call today, and may have initiated some real bullying by some kids in his class), but then moved on to more positive things and dinner and showertime and bedtime were great.

i'm sure i'm forgetting something, but it's late and i need to chill a little.

...

it’s (hopefully) mr smear's second-last day of his no-reading punishment. yesterday i told him that if he reads hebrew it counts as homework, not reading time, and he’s embraced that loophole and is thoroughly engrossed in a hebrew graphic novel i bought a while back :P

liminality

 mr smear told us earlier that today was the first day he remembers enjoying school.

...

a mostly sane wake-up, dishes, ping pong (i'm just more than halfway through), and after mr smear left for school it was dealing with pension / insurance stuff, and beginning a response to my boss/client who finally replied to my first update with a whole list of questions.

i arrived at work a minute late for my first meeting (this is becoming a thing, i have to be more careful in the mornings), and it was another long, very busy day. some of it productive, but not visibly so, by me having conversations with the stakeholders that triggered some very serious "debates" between them. i'm going to have to be very attentive and careful to not step on anyone's toes... which is literally a part of the job description.

i joined a few people on a lunch mission, which ended up being to a shuwarma place - fortunately, they had a plate full of side-dishes on the menu which was vegan and delicious. on the way out everyone was shocked to discover i'm vegan, which triggered some very serious discussions. the woman who came with us - a mother of two - literally cried when i told her what mr smear had had to contend with in his previous school regarding his dairy allergies and bullying.

we had to stop talking about nutrition and food safety over lunch because the guy in the team i'm embedded in started losing his appetite :P

...

i left a bit early to meet gd and mr smear at our friends' neighbor's apartment to take a look. we were there for a while, the disabled landlord seems genuinely decent and the apartment looks great, but he's putting us under enormous pressure to take it from february 1st, ostensibly because he has another potential tenant and he's giving us a chance as a favor to our friends.

it's a little further away from where we want to be than we are already, but it's on a corner with bus stops that work for us. and it's closer to another street we're happy shopping on, and the park. it's potentially a lot noisier than where we are, but the windows seem built for it. and winter. it's a big space with one more room than we're used to, but there's a poorly-conceived wall that divides what would otherwise be a wonderful open-plan kitchen and living area. there are multiple bathrooms, though each one has minor problems. not serious ones. it has an in-apartment bomb shelter. it's a little more expensive than our current apartment, but it's still very reasonable.

mr smear's very enthusiastic about it, and i made gd try and find faults but she's generally feeling positive about it. i walked out feeling very pressured, which i really don't like.

on the one hand, i don't want to make a decision under pressure - real or artificial - and this is a big decision. aside from the risks you take with any move to a new apartment, this is potentially burning two months' rent if we don't find someone to replace us. but at the same time, there's no guarantee we'll get a better deal than this if we don't take it. in fact, based on the past couple of days of looking, i'd be very surprised if we find something else even close to this good for us.

but there's no oracle we can consult, no human being on the planet who can guess whether we should take it or pass. there's no right or wrong answer.

i rushed through some of the dishes when we got home, then headed out to meet tahoma, and we went to rainbow for their sensational burgers. afterwards we took a long stroll looking for a dessert, and then i took my leave to get home in time to handle mr smear's toenails and put him to bed.

between discussing things with tahoma, and discussing them with my mother, i got most of the way home still very much undecided about what to do.

but then, just before i arrived home, i realized something important: if we don't take this apartment, there's a very good chance we'll have to use a real estate agent. and real estate agents - even though it's illegal - take an additional month's rent from the tenant as fees. which means that us taking this apartment is effectively only a loss of a single month (more than we would have lost anyway), and there's still a chance to reclaim some of that loss if we can find a replacement tenant quickly.

so now we have a plan. a scary plan, but a plan.

...

i read a bit of the beginning of sophocles i to mr smear at bedtime. he's into bits of it, but i don't think he's really ready.

game theory

yup, it's a definite nose & throat thing, i'm not feeling *sick* sick (yet?), but i am feeling a bit rough...

after posting yesterday morning, we went to the 24/7 to do a little shopping and then our friends came over for the afternoon.

the good: a fantastic game of goodcritters, with us two dads teaching the three kids game theory experientally, and we opened both the math fluxx and mystery fluxx decks which are a lot of fun.

the bad: mr smear and the little brother griefing the sister, resulting in tears, and a no-good lousy shit-attitude afternoon and evening for mr smear. which then led to a pretty shit morning experience as well.

so this morning gd and i had a long discussion about what our options are, and we're now waiting for mr smear to come home so we can sit down for a "family meeting"... probably the first of many more on the topic of our familial relationships and roles...

gd and i finally sat down to watch 10 things i hate about you, which is one of my favorite shakespeare adaptations and has aged phenomenally well. i then pulled out my copy of the illstrated stratford shakespeare and read/paraphrased the induction scene to the taming of the shrew, which i *wish* had been included somehow in the movie.

and then i (finally) purchased balatro, and sunk about three hours into it. i don't understand if this is the whole game or not, but it's addictive already...

intensity

> there were some minor incidents, but according to him he handled them well.

he did not handle them well. i woke up this morning to a message from the girl's mother and learned that mr smear had handled the incident particularly poorly. horribly, in fact. so most of the morning was invested in dealing with that.

the irony: he prepared himself to apologize to her, but he didn't recall what she looked like so his super-shy self awkwardly approached every single girl in his class to ask "are you <insert name here>?"

at least, from my brief talk with her, the girl's mother seems cool.

...

shit start to the day aside...

i didn't sleep well, but i definitely slept better.

it was a long work day. with some very intense feelings during meetings. with some badly-handled interruptions. with some success, but not enough success.

i lost my temper with gd last night because she's injured and insists on doing things that interfere with her recovering, on pretext of not wanting to make my life difficult.

i've spent a good chunk of the last couple of hours of restlessness worrying about mr smear's expectations regarding the survivalist activity this afternoon.

the tension

 my morning... did not go well. on the way to the office i talked to my mother about krybabie's wife whose been coerced into paying for and arranging an english police clearance for a child who was four months old when they left london, which makes my blood boil.

on the back of that, a couple of us spoke to lipgirl about the marketing lecture we'd been invited to on wednesday afternoon.

and then one of my coworkers dropped a bombshell - our tech ops manager is hiring someone to do a job that's essentially devops, in addition to "owning" the entire data pipel... nevermind the details. i tried to talk to her about it - this is after giving bigtalk a lecture about how we approach her - but she's a bit weird, and refused to talk face to face, and when i put everything in writing i tried to carefully step around the eggshells (and copied my text to my boss so he'd know what i said and how i said it), but i still managed to step on a landmine.

fuck.

so that happened. our boss has set up a meeting for the three of us on sunday, hopefully we'll resolve this.

it was a very busy day, with a few big meetings, but the end of it saw us quite successfully merging in the work from wednesday night and i got everyone excited about me interviewing the founders and first employees to start putting together our company origin story.

i happy-hour'ed a little too hard (from a sweets point of view), and i shouldn't have brought the knaffeh back home - i ended up being the only one to eat any.

about halfway through dinner one of my coworkers called me, and it took almost an hour to get him sorted out, by which time i was completely exhausted and had almost missed wishing mr smear a good night :(

the last thing that i recall from last night was a back-and-forth with a coworker who inexplicably refused to understand that the thing he did to solve a problem we didn't actually have breaks our deployments.

today so far:

i slept late, and relatively well. i've just finished my first coffee, helped mr smear enjoy his glow-in-the-dark lego that he just pulled out of somewhere forgotten, informed him that his bully's leaving the country before the new school year, and we're getting ready to roll our way to the swimming pool.

near misses

 i arrived just in time for my appointment, which started on time, and i felt attended to by the neurologist and validated (especially regarding the mild narcolepsy concern). the tests she did before referring me to a proper sleep doctor were fine, although i was a bit uncomfortable with the fact that she warned me that her foot nerve test would be ticklish and it wasn't.

she then handed me a referral and a prescription, i went downstairs to the pharmacy and barely had to wait before picking up the meds and walking out to hop on a bus.

...

the meds were pregabalin. what followed was gd freaking out (for hours) that i would take it regardless of her warnings (we've been having a long-running fight about trust issues that have nothing to do with me), and she sent me the following:

1. lucy thought her prescribed pain drug was safe

2. lyrica is another brand name for pregabalin

3. pregabalin side effects

hard pass.

...

the work day was alright, but a highlight was having the conversation with my boss and coming up with a couple of satisfying strategies. i'm still not sure what bigtalk is up to, i really hope he delivers something soon.

i left the office early to go to the dentist. on the way, the bus driver slammed on the brakes to narrowly avoid running over a child that had run across the street. i'd been facing the back with my headphones in so it took me a little while to figure out what had been going on, and a part of the drama was that one woman was yelling at the bus driver while he was still freaking out that he'd almost killed someone. before getting off i took the time to thank him for his quick response and to assure him that he didn't need to pay attention to people who don't know much about life.

the dentist experience was better than last week (same dentist), and i feel like he's done a good job. he's also reassured me that as things stand i don't really need to worry about root canals and crowns, which is an enormous relief.

on the bus ride home i had an awkward conversation with an american woman who were scarfing down a pizza; i asked them to please be careful because dairy allergies are a real thing and she responded sympathetically, but with an unexpected interrogation when i just wanted to move on to the back of the bus...

when i got home read a bit more of the neverending story with mr smear before dinner. dinner turned into a massive fight over my inability to not eat the food on my plate (which was too tough and chewy for my new filling) and then over my family bullying me about my mr. burns-level sensitivity to nail filing.

so that happened. by mr smear's (late) bedtime we were okay, at least. then i hopped into a meeting to coach a coworker on a deployment, which went on until almost midnight.

...

right, it's been a pretty relaxed morning (minus the trust thing over the meds again) and i'm off to pick up a mystery package (probably a book).

bully for berlin!

 omg i forgot that on friday night we heard some excellent news - mr smear's main bully isn't going to be in his class any more! we haven't told him, and it's not the only bullying situation, but it's a relief nonetheless. in just-as-good news, his teacher from the last half a year is staying in spite of the pay cut, for which we're all very grateful.

and mr smear's on the waiting list for the art school. so... 🤞🙏

not broken!

 everything is broken, and ai isn't helping. i'm now spending an enormous amount of time fiddling with eslint and typescript configurations that are all designed to be as non-interoperable as possible, and this is what i'm doing on *my* time.

...

i struggled to get out of bed this morning (again).

we had a parental guidance session this morning that went well.

i managed to register mr smear for summer camp. it's ridiculously expensive, but it seems amazing and they even have a shuttle to our area, which may be expensive but not as expensive as me or gd having to pick him up here and there. and the timing is fantastic, because he starts going the day after my mother returns to SA. and, also, we're out of debt and we can (kind of) afford it.

i think i may have done something useful at work today, although i'm not confident.

i mean, aside from bringing home the black salt (kala namak) which has been offending some of my coworkers every time i use it. meanwhile, i'm not complaining about them microwaving fish in the communal kitchen. i did, however, complain about breakfast being all dairy except for lots of delicious bread, i'm not losing any weight...

and getting a recommendation for an interesting-sounding book (tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow), and convinced myself that a replay of the (three primary) daniel mullins games is in order.

there was a bullying incident at school today, it's still not clear what happened but it sounds like the english teacher just shrugged her shoulders and gave up on taking any action.

i had a long chat with mr smear's art therapy teacher, who scared the shit of me (as she does every year) by calling mid-morning out of the blue and making me worry that there'd been an incident.

i don't know if i've just got really dry skin or if i'm being attacked by something, so i had a vinegar bath and i'm using moisturizer and hoping for the best.

i asked gd to prepare a "go bag" in case of iranian attack, it looks like things may be heating up. i'm praying we get on with it and attack them for real and shut the IRGC shit down. also, making greta thunberg watch hamas atrocities is a stroke of genius.

[OMFG i finally figured out the configurations and things are working 🥳]

the real puppetmasters

mr smear woke me up this morning with a surprisingly long talk about dealing with life, and school, and bullying. amazingly, he seemed genuinely open to what i was saying and appeared to appreciate how i tied it into how video games work*, even if he was a little confused at first :P

* that our emotions dictating our behavior make us like an NPC, and that he's been taking more and more control of his character's actions and learning how to navigate the world

mr smear woke up coughing again today, but we medicated him heavily and sent him off to school. i got a bunch of small things done, then arrived at the office with my biggest goal being to wait before tucking in to the breakfast. fasting is harder when the FOMO kicks in.

the day was an interesting, exciting, and sometimes confusing mix of tasks, but there was a common thread between a bunch of them and over the course of a few conversations we may have hit on a viable solution to something that's been gnawing at me for a while.

there was a little drama when i got pulled out of call by a notification that i couldn't make sense of, then pulled into a reference call for a candidate that i had nothing to contribute to, and then the next meeting ended with me trying to be calm and rational and end the call quickly because i suddenly and violently needed to pee.

i arrived at a plan of action in time to rush home and take mr smear out for a "walk"; literally just to the electronic recycling across the road as an excuse to talk about his day, but he derailed that plan with his favorite new game of trying to come up with dumb ideas. he liked my idea of "cold sauce", but i liked the idea of a digital broken telephone even more :P

we watched some more asterix & obelix - the big fight (it's really good!), and while mr smear got ready for bed i ordered the next two illustrated harry potter books (did they only publish up to book no. 5?), and once mr smear was in bed and i'd watched random shit and showered i sat down to do some work.

i was displeased to have to explain to a coworker how to extricate himself from a mess of his own device - well, a bunch of devs, but all of them doing stuff i've explicitly informed them is undesirable and dangerous - so it seems like we're going to have "a talk" tomorrow. but i was pleased to stumble (pretty quickly) on a solution to the most immediate issue that was much simpler than what i had in mind.

score!

the rest of the evening would have been very quiet had my mother not sent me and gd something politically triggering, and after the argument gd and i had yesterday i immediately called her to explain the situation... we're living in what feels like the end times, where being jewish is unsafe no matter where you are in the world, the jihadis have taken control of the media, and even patriotic israelis who should know better have become mouthpieces for jihadi propaganda.

plus, the south african situation is spinning faster out of control than ever.

i think i need to go to bed soon.

sleep deficit

i certainly could have used some more sleep. i say that, but it's approaching midnight again... one of my bosses asked this afternoon if not sleeping could be making him stupid. i suggested that not getting sufficient REM sleep prevents our brains from processing information.

"so... you're saying i am stupid?"

aside from getting mr smear up and to school in good spirits (and reading my kindle instead of looking at screens), i managed to get some work done and have a meeting with my (direct) boss before gd and i headed out for our meeting.

the meeting went pretty well. gd had a couple of emotional moments, one positive (the new principal gave her a hug) and one negative (the old principal got a lambasting in absentia, with gd comparing her to a "hair on a soup"). we learned that mr smear's chief bully is on the spectrum and mr smear takes it personally when he makes faces and noises that - allegedly - are him self-regulating 🤦

we've agreed that mr smear's current shit class is probably the best place for him, primarily because they made the other classes sound even worse. i'm not sure how i feel about that.

i walked gd home, then continued on to work, completely forgetting to help her prepare to cut mr smear's hair after school. which in retrospect must have been a good thing, because the washing machine technician arrived a day early to examine it and decide that gd had simply been using too much soap 🤣

most of the work day - the bits that i was in the office for - were straightforward and productive, though i am a bit unsure as to whether what i'm doing really qualifies as meeting my deadlines. and i received my first full payslip today, which was less than i was expecting. i had to go over it earlier this evening and i'm hoping my insurance broker will agree with my assessment...

between my morning chat with my boss and an afternoon chat with our (unofficial) head of communications, i feel like that was the most productive part of my day.

i left the office early to meet gd at the orthopaedist's offices. we arrived early enough to buy new pillows and get a few groceries, and eventually found the clinic itself. the examination was brief, and now we're on to the next specialist (the one we knew from the beginning she needed to see).

we got home just as the play therapist was leaving, and after unpacking the groceries that had been delivered i sat down with mr smear to continue The Homework. but that took longer than anticipated, mainly because we had a couple of in-depth talks about All The Things.

the simpsons over dinner - gd's experiment with making vegan chopped liver for passover was a complete success - and then a fairly relaxed bedtime / finishing john wick (it's a well-executed 80's-style action film) / run on kaycee's mod / and now this before going to bed.

blame it on someone else

so the past couple of days have been all about imposter syndrome. i've been working very superficially with our tech stack, and i'm now knee-deep in shit with no idea where the shit is coming from. i did some studying today and i'm currently running scripts in the background, over and over, tweaking what chatgpt and claude have been giving me and praying that they're not running me in circles.

because today has not been a great day for AI for me. i tried making a simple game in the morning using claude - "vibe coding" - and all i got was a thorough waste of my time. i'm now repeating that attempt on base44.com, hopefully that'll be better.

thursday:

i slept poorly.

i went to work early, while gd went to get her foot x-rayed. it was a weird day, it included some really good conversations but not a lot of success. and by not a lot of success, i mean if i look back at the chats with my lead, i feel completely useless.

at least i managed to get something done before shabbat, though, and i seem to be understanding a lot more tonight.

happy hour was... happy. the big announcement was excellent news, but it's weird to me that we skipped another announcement that was just as big to me - my previous CEO has signed on with us, and if i understand correctly he's going to be my new CEO as well. that's pretty good news :)

yesterday:

i slept poorly again.

yesterday was exhausting. not only did i get up with a significant to-do list looming over my head (and it still is), but we had a couple of real issues with mr smear.

i walked him to school, talking him through which buildings to run to if a siren goes off and what to do if their doors are closed. then i picked up some snacks at the grocery store and came home, dropped them off and caught a bus to ramat aviv because that's where our clothing order ended up. so that burned an hour of my friday morning, and all the while i was stressed about how long it was taking because i expected mr smear to call me about his juggling class.

he called me *just* as i hopped off the bus next to our apartment. i grabbed a banana (to prevent hanger) and walked to the school.

he was sitting with his best friend and his little sister, and it was extremely difficult to convince mr smear to try a different class when the sister was doing her best to convince me that mr smear really likes being at home and i should take him with me 🙄

i eventually - magically, almost - managed to get him to try photography. he claims that he enjoyed it, but now that i think about it there's a good chance he might not have actually gone.

i say this because at the end of school, he called me to report that the kid who'd bullied him a couple of weeks ago had attacked him again. this time getting physical.

just before mr smear arrived home, he explained to me what happened and i sent a message to the boy's mother. she responded that it sounded like there had been an incident, but that it wasn't his instigation. his friend's dad dropped him off, so i scrambled downstairs and asked him if he could describe what happened... and the story came out, well, different.

family meeting.

it didn't take long to get the full story out of mr smear, at which point i was thoroughly embarrassed both by his behavior and by his lying to me about it and by having written what i wrote to the boy's mother. so we called them up, and mr smear apologized.

it wasn't the most authentic-sounding apology, but it was good enough.

...

the rest of the afternoon was alright, i guess. i managed to get him through a couple of pages of homework, and he came to shul without any fuss. the experience was pretty good, and the walks there and back were good. and we had a very pleasant evening.

today:

i slept a bit better, but not well.

it was a slow day, and it was another day of stomach issues. but we did re-watch the original rocky, and although most of it was too slow or adult-themed for mr smear's sensibilities, he did join us for the iconic training montages and the fight, and he really enjoyed those.

i took mr smear out for quite a walk this afternoon, it was almost all good and he agreed that the lotus cream and salted oreo ice cream was worth it :)

after getting mr smear into bed, gd finally watched the second half of the first slow horses episode (i've now seen the first half three times), and it's political angle that i'd successfully ignored on my first watch really got under gd's skin, and now it's under mine, and sonofabitch i'm out.

goddamnit.

...

it's past 1am and i'm still seeing red on my deployment attempts. i'm calling it a night. thanks for nothing, AI. or... thanks for not enough, AI. i should be grateful for all the assistance, but it would probably be better for me to just have struggled with documentation and tutorials instead of leaning on a perpetual sense of false hope.

gurgle splat (and a review of our son)

 i did get a (literal) couple of hours' sleep before my alarm went off this morning. most of them, anyway.

mr smear was great this morning. he was rewarded accordingly, with multiple reminders that it's a special treat. gods help us.

the skin under my fingernail is splitting again. this is the third or fourth time since winter started and i'm so over it.

gd is very much over her damaged toe, but she insisted on not going to the clinic and instead going to her sewing lesson ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

the work day was a struggle and a half, it was very frustrating and a lot of what i had issues with made me feel rather dumb. otherwise, i had a couple of good syncs with coworkers, i finally got to sumsum for lunch (one of the syncs in question, fascinating talk), and my stomach gave me trouble pretty much the entire day. also, i'm regaining weight... i have definitely not been eating responsibly.

...

in the late afternoon gd and i met with the guy who did mr smear's psych evaluation for a feedback session. it was very comforting hearing that we've already got a good understanding of his abilities and his struggles, though it's heartbreaking that so much of his hardship is trauma response, primarily from immigrating and bullying (but also his fear of coming into contact with dairy).

we've been given some helpful recommendations and we'll continue doing what we can. and the school has absolutely no validation for medicating our child.

...

i left work pretty late, but got to enjoy some of my leftovers dinner (i avoided tonight's pizza) with gd and mr smear, and after we got mr smear into bed the two of us watched about half of john wick (neither of us have seen it before). and then i got back to working, after forty minutes deciding that i'd had enough.

i suspect that tomorrow's going to be a reckoning of sorts.

blowin' in the wind

thursday:

i was right about thursday morning being intense, but we didn't expect it to begin at 4am with another rocket attack.

i spent a good chunk of my morning trying to get midjourney to make me a picture like this one, but with the right number of toes so i could do this:

my favorite failure of the bunch:

i took mr smear to school, and then accompanied gd to misrad hapnim to apply for her new passport. at least the coffee was good... we arrived on time, waited a short while, and then discovered that i'd made a big mistake by not checking what we needed to bring. we didn't have gd's expired passport with us.

she had a doctor's appointment right after that, and we both understood from the clerk assisting us that i could just come back later with the passport itself, so i made sure she got on the right bus and i stopped off at home, picked up mr smear's meds, rushed to the school gate, administered the meds, rushed back home, scarfed down a bowl of muesli, and headed back to that counter with gd's passport.

i may not have had to make an appointment, but i did have to wait about half an hour for the clerk to finish with the previous couple, by which point i was way later for work than i thought i'd be. and then, to make things even better, the clerk looked at me in astonishment when he realized that gd wasn't with me.

...

so we have to go back again one of these mornings 🤦

...

the work day was crazy. it began with an all-hands with a lot of interesting news, not least of which being that i'm going to need to go through a polygraph experience again. on the one hand, i'm okay with that. on the other hand, i'm not okay with that. this is going to be... an experience. but i guess it's best to get into it and over it as quickly as possible.

...

i completed the thing i'd been working on, and moved on to other stuff, beginning to work "organized" for the first time in ages - not only getting into the new ticketing system (notion-based, it's kinda weird but not bad) but starting to track my hours like i did when i last worked as a contractor. really more for me to understand what i've been doing and how much time i've spent doing it,.

i don't know if it was wise to drink a beer at happy hour, but i definitely felt it and my lead's comment about reviewing code after a beer seemed less funny when i was actually doing that :/

[i don't recall much about the evening]

yesterday:

i spent a good chunk of yesterday updating an old encryption package i maintain, most of the effort being rewriting code "the right way" only to discover that that's still unsupported by modern browsers and needing to revert it :P

gd and i took mr smear to the doctor in the morning, which got weird because i couldn't make heads or tails of what the doctor was trying to tell us and she laughed at my confusion. gd seems to understand what was happening, at least. we did some shopping and came home, and we were all in the mood to not get up again for the rest of the day.

but then i learned that mr smear hadn't brought his homework books home, so we ended up having to walk to the school to pick them up. we ended up having a massive fight, which started because he didn't want to do any homework in the first place but ended up getting really ugly. i ended up walking out of the school without him, but i called gd and she talked me down and i returned to give him another chance.

it took a little while for us to get through things - we were both feeling hurt and angry - but we did, and the rest of the afternoon was quiet. and we even had a positive experience with the homework.

gd has been having trouble with her back lately (i mean she's always have trouble, it's just been worse than usual) and we ended up ordering dinner, which is very complicated on a friday night. it worked out alright, though.

afterwards, everybody crashed.

today:

the weather wasn't nice at all today, so we all stayed in. i got some stuff done in the morning, and the big event of the day was us watching the original karate kid movie. and boy, did i feel dumb: i haven't seen the movie itself in decades, and at some point after the bro mitzvah, i guess i started believing the troll about larusso being the movie's villain.

anyway, not only did mr smear really enjoy it, but there are strong parallels between larusso's experiences and his own, and i think that might prove helpful.

over dinner we began rewatching the fifth harry potter movie. the last few hours have mostly been me trying to build a set of scripts for work, stopping when i felt too tired to carry on, finishing a run of kaycee's mod that i began recently (water tribe, with a mighty ouroboros with double-strike), posting this, and now going to bed praying that we don't have to run for the shelter tonight.

dreams and nightmares

 i slept horribly last night. like, way worse than usual. i was wired and restless, physically uncomfortable, and the entire experience sucked. i even got up in the middle of the night and faffed around for an hour or two, but the remaining hours of the morning before getting up weren't much better for it.

i vaguely recall the morning going alright. [gets to the end of the post and remembers that the ceasefire ended this morning. i'm grateful we got some of the hostages back, but we always knew that this was just a ploy by hamas to stall and survive and mess with us some more]

i walked mr smear to school, returned home, and then all of a sudden it was later than i thought and i had to rush to get to the sleep lab to return the equipment.

fortunately, i was only a few minutes late. i dropped off the gear, then hopped on an unfamiliar bus to work. it worked out fine.

...

my work day was intense, but overall great. it started awkwardly with me trying to help the new guy get his computer sorted out and not understanding that he was calling a thumb drive "DOK", proceeded with me starting to execute a plan my lead and i had come up with together, and before lunch we were treated to a surprise visit and talk by one of our customers. it was eye-opening.

after lunch, i finally got hold of one of the guys whose name everyone knows and we sat down to chat. his story was riveting, as is his job. mind-blowingly cool.

i got good work done in the afternoon, and was getting ready to go home when one of my coworkers caught me for a five minute conversation that turned into an hour-long intense discussion. although i was very eager to get out of there (which was duly noted), i feel like it was a really good discussion and that i managed to bridge two decidedly different approaches and attitudes.

...

i raced home, way too late for dinner, and scarfed down some of the leftovers. mr smear told me about some bullying that happened - on top of the fact that his best friend refused to go to school today because he's being bullied too - so that was that first bit of a shit feeling to bring me down from my work-high. then mr smear was a bit rude to my mom during their good-night chat, and another bullying incident surfaced that he'd handled poorly, which brought me down a bit more.

and then we discovered that he's having another herpes outbreak - it's been a year and four days since the first proper one - and that just brought the house down.

...

after saying good night to him i complained about how the evening had turned out, which gd misinterpreted, and then we had a fight. it took a while to get out of the fight, a part of which was gd remembering how distraught she's been since the morning news about the war resuming. we had a good talk about where we are and how the world looks right now, which turned to spirituality and religion.

and then a conversation about how the day went. and now... it's past 11pm and i don't know if i'm going to be able to sleep or not, but i'm pretty confident i'm not feeling like doing anything constructive right now. i kinda wanted to go to the purim (post-purim) rollerblade, but between all the emotions and the slight chance of rain i just couldn't.

and, of course, my eyes are feeling itchy now.

the FO part

it's the middle of the night, i got up to transition from couch to bed and i just had to get this down first.

it's been a day.

...

i slept about half the night last night, which is half the night more than i expected to be able to sleep. around 6am i jumped out of bed in a combination of fear and rage, and the first thing i did as soon as i was able was to sit down with mr smear and review his report of what happened the previous day. i got him to demonstrate what he experienced, and i understood exactly what happened.

i sent an update to his teacher, and i wrote that i'm beginning to understand that they're listening more to the bullies than to the victims, and that mr smear isn't merely inventing things to be afraid of.

i was supposed to have a call with my doctor this morning about my sleep issues, but gd and i were in such a state that i missed it and had to reschedule. she had just raised a really good point - everything we're going through is precisely what everyone the world over is trying to call attention to: we all say "no bullying" and "no violence", but when it's right in front of us we want to believe that it's not happening right until it's too late and there's an injury or worse.

i called the anti-bullying org we spoke to a few weeks ago, and the councillor assured me that they would speak to the school, but also gave me advice about how to help mr smear directly. which was reassuring, because it's stuff that we're already doing as much as we can.

after trying to write (and arguing about) the right message in french to yesterday's bully's mother (because then gd and her could communicate in mother tongue) for a while, i took over and sent the following:

hi ___, i hope you're all well

we are aware that [your son] and [mr smear] are not getting along, but recently [your son] has been more focused on him and yesterday he threatened him with violence. we would really appreciate it if you could talk to him before things get out of hand 🙏

so... let me tell you that it was a very pleasant surprise when she responded in a way that made it clear that she would be dealing with this. 

i updated mr smear's therapist right before entering my office, and tried to focus on my work.

...

it was a really nice morning, weather-wise. i went to work without a sweater and i was comfortable. hello, march!

the new guy and i got a tour of the "warehouse" this morning. on exiting the warehouse, our guide let our a loud fart and i immediately responded with a "bless you", and i spent the next couple of minutes being amused that the other guys were being cool about it too 🤣

it was a productive morning, and i merged my first complete PR by lunchtime.

...

lunch began socially, but was immediately interrupted with full-scale drama. with everything else that's been going on, gd and i had forgotten that mr smear needed to leave school early today for a rescheduled appointment with his therapist, and so i needed to get the message to him even though he's not allowed to use his phone. at the same time, gd needed to drop her lunch and rush to the school because the security guard wouldn't let him out without a parent.

what happened next was a total clusterfuck.

mr smear got the message, but by the time gd arrived at the school he'd been let out without supervision and had disappeared. we use family link to keep track of him, and that was when we discovered that he'd left his phone at home this morning 🤦

gd was in pain (her legs are hurting a lot) and in a flat panic, and i sent her to check if he'd gone to his tutor by mistake while i packed up my lunch and got ready to rent a vehicle to go searching the streets for him.

i was putting on my shoes when she called to say she'd found him - he had indeed gone to his tutor's.

jesus fucking christ.

i was a shell of a man by the time i got back to the lunch table, trying to process what had just happened and follow the conversations and be sociable when demanded of me.

holy shit.

anyway.

...

follow-up drama: gd dropped him off at his therapist - on time - but then got lost trying to take a bus somewhere after i'd told her to take a taxi. at this point she was so upset that she didn't want to go to her therapist, but i convinced her that of all the times to skip a therapy appointment, this was NOT the time. i'm very glad she listened.

...

i picked mr smear up from his appointment and talked to him about what we'd all been through. i took him to my office, where one of my coworkers immediately jumped on the opportunity to show him some of our toys, which was really cool! right until he got into trouble for flying a drone in the office, but mr smear got a drone's eye view of our workstations before that happened and he definitely enjoyed it :)

overall, having him in the office was a positive experience even though we weren't prepared for it and he spent (in my opinion) way too much time on the phones (although i did get him to switch from games to reading by the end). and he even helped me a little with setting up one of the computers :)

the rest of my work day was setting up a computer that we'd thought was DOA, completing the first iteration of the scripts i've been working on and finally testing them out before handing over the remainder of the deployment to my lead. it was a real deployment that needs to be installed soon, and although it didn't go smoothly, i proved myself up to the challenge and i felt appreciated afterwards.

my lead and i drove each other crazy for a little bit, too, but it felt good-natured and we got everything working in the end.

i really do feel like i'm where i need to be.

...

mr smear and i had a pleasant time getting home, with him leading for the most part. we got home just in time for dinner and a delicious in dungeon episode, and a long chat with my mom while eating too much dessert* that i truly feel i deserved.

* not just salted oreos, but salted oreos with vegan marshmallows squished on top

...

between getting mr smear into bed and falling asleep watching another episode of monk, i had a long chat with mr smear's homeroom teacher and it was quite reassuring. when interrogated, the bully admitted to what he did and he received a very stern warning. additionally, it sounds like my message to the principal and contact from the org i spoke to have lit a fire under their asses, and it looks like the school's going to be taking additional measures to ensure the kids' safety.

we'll see, of course, but it's encouraging nonetheless.

...

it's been a day.