i feel sick

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

almost boring

 it was a bit of a weird weekend. i guess i slept okay, i got the balcony pretty clean yesterday morning, mr smear had a very long and screen time-filled hang out with his friend on his last day in israel, and i managed to make a little progress on my tarot game, though a lot of my time spent on that was understanding that my initial ideas didn't really make as much sense i thought they would, and subsequently thinking very hard about what could and would work.

i've nailed the experience of getting into and out of a "level", and i've understood that i need to figure out the relationships between tarot, astrology and alchemy in order to put something coherent together... and i really didn't have bandwidth for that...

in the evening i took mr smear out for a walk, which was great right up until the last five minutes or so. at that point, he got into fight mode and started pissing me off (the trigger was him being too precious to drink from a water fountain, and asking me to stop and buy something instead), and when we got home he went into a downward spiral from which gd lost her shit.

it got so bad that we agreed he wasn't welcome to eat with us, and the situation wasn't improved by him coming out of the kitchen to tell us he actually quite enjoyed eating alone in there and could he please do it every night 🤦‍♂️

anyway, we had a family meeting after dinner that went late, but very positively.

i've spent this morning uncovering things that need to get done, but not actually doing anything (aside from a little tarot game polishing), and now i'm off to by mr smear a lock for his toolbox (he appears to have thrown away the lock i bought him last year, jesus fuck) and then go to work.

stuffed brain

 fortunately, i didn't regret that last coffee, but not because i was able to go rollerblading... i wasn't. i was so tired even after the coffee that i just showered, and then minesweepered myself to sleep. i somehow ended up sleeping alright.

this morning went alright, although gd was very angry with mr smear for not leaving his books and equipment in his locker yesterday, which meant that he left this morning with the same heavy bag on his back plus another heavy bag for today 🙄

...

i wrote the above, then got distracted - mr smear called me when he got to school, he was unable to get his combination lock open and i almost lost my voice; initially, yelling at him to go somewhere quieter so that he could hear me. then, because he couldn't follow basic english instructions and spent more time complaining about how bad the design of the locks is instead of applying himself to understanding what the term "full turn" means.

by the end, i got him through it, but while gd was laughing hysterically as his reflection of her behavior, i was thinking that i'm pretty sure i'm not going to be drowned in college fees after he's old enough to leave the nest...

i started the day at my employer's offices, where my mentor ran a workshop in responding to CFPs. it was pretty interesting, and i guess my homework is to record the auto-doc presentation i promised to re-record a few weeks ago so that i can put it online and use as an application sample.

i went straight to my client's offices, arriving just in time to meet some more of my team and enjoy a catered lunch. not as good as yesterday's, but still pretty good.

over the course of the afternoon i made progress with my onboarding, almost fell asleep during a particularly droning talk during an employer group tech circle while sitting in the heat of a balcony because none of the booths were available on any of the four floors i checked, tried hard to be helpful when a not-so-bright guy i used to work with at my previous client contacted me for assistance doing something i've specifically warned them isn't necessary and isn't a good idea, sat in on a meeting where someone explained prompt caching in a way that actually made sense, and then left the office feeling tired.

like, am i sick? or just tired? i don't even know. i might be sick.

on a related note, gd's having lots of asthma attacks and she's convinced we have mold in the air conditioner. this is now the third week in a row i've asked the landlord to do something about it, i guess if he doesn't soon we're going to have issues :/

i dropped off my bag when i got home and took mr smear for a walk through the park, stopping to draw money twice (the ATM didn't give me any money, i really hope there was a proper error and that i didn't just get taken), and then we returned home for a delicious chili dinner and a great episode of the wonder years.

i've got a ton of stuff to do, but my brain is fried.

just the good stuff

 it's been an hour or two and i have no idea why i'm not sleeping, so... here i am 🤷‍♂️

...

on friday night, we watched the first wallace & gromit, which was great, but gd and i were both falling asleep by the end of it. we all went to bed, and i slept well.

after starting my morning on the balcony - having cleaned a whole lot of bird droppings and re-sprayed the bird repellent, and then being harassed by a bumblebee - i then moved to my office and finished writing up my article about my new spec repo.

that felt good.

...

i then spent the next few hours working on my tarot game, which involved website scraping, establishing the rules for the basic game, and implementing a deck being shuffled and dropped in to the game, which worked out *really* well! i mean, like, so well that i got high fives from both gd and mr smear, and not just myself :D

in addition to that, mr smear joined me and we worked on his game for a while, figuring out the design needed to do the first real experiment of "is it fun?" while he regaled me with descriptions of the enemies he's invented. which, by the way, are genuinely disturbing and make me continue to question whether i should be assisting him with this or not...

by the time we got the design worked out, and my initial experience implemented, we were down to 1% of the five-hour window's tokens remaining!

...

we strapped on our blades, a little worried about the weather app warning that it apparently felt like 36℃ degrees outside, and went out for a while. as we headed out i warned mr smear not to whine about how far we were going to go or about going home, and to his credit he didn't - we went all the way to the park lake, and he was great! he did excellently, we had a good time there and back, i managed to get him to drink from a water fountain without too much drama, and when some kids kicked a soccer ball right into his path and he fell, he landed really well. score!

...

after getting home and showering, we re-watched the first episode of fullmetal alchemist: brotherhood over dinner, then received a package from our upstairs friends who had just returned home: cthulhu fluxx and star fluxx! i'm very much looking forward to playing them ^_^

...

i got into judge dredd comics when i was a kid - my first tattoo was inspired by the world of megacity one, and chopper in particular - and when i saw the stallone movie i was at the same time overjoyed to see so much of the world brought to life, and upset that dredd removed his helmet and rico wasn't rico. i've been carrying that with me for over three decades now (say what?!), but this week i decided that it's time to put my big-boy pants on and introduce my son to the franchise via the movie and then let him discover the magic of the comics if he wants to.

we watched the first half of the movie tonight. mr smear is definitely enjoying it, and i let go of the minor grievances and enjoyed it far more than i did in the theatre :)

...

i really hope i can get back to sleep soon, today's a big day!

finishing strong

 now i'm not so sure that walking to acupuncture and back was much better than taking a bus, because by the time i got home my hip was hurting... but the acupuncture itself was another good experience.

i stretched hard when i got home, and ate breakfast, and then all of a sudden i was running late for my last day with my current client.

the work day went as follows: i managed to figure out the final issue from yesterday's testing, and it turned out to have nothing to do with the data or the code. there was much rejoicing! i then proceeded to spend the rest of the day preparing the handover documentation, discovering an issue that required a backfill that sharpened the procedure documentation significantly. i had lunch with my client team, which turned out to be a really good idea because happy hour ended up being cancelled. and i managed to say a proper goodbye to pretty much all the people i have relationships with.

and then... and then i was done. i left my computer and my keycard on the IT guy's desk, and i packed my bag (with the headphones they gave me, i asked my manager the kit-bag question and he assured me i could take them), and i sent a farewell and thank you message to the boss and my managers, and then i left.

it's been eight months, some of it rough, all of it educational, and to finish on a good note with a delivered project on my unexpectedly last day feels amazing.

i came home, picked up mr smear and took him for a walk, which was going great until we had an argument about drinking water in the park, followed by a much heavier fight about him being an asshole about other people's music, which pissed me right off and made me want to throttle him.

we managed to get past the bad vibe about halfway home from there, and arrived in time for dinner and the simpsons.

now we're getting ready to go out, and gd's just informed me that she's going in spite of the fact that her stomach's doing a thing again today 🙄

hopefully it'll be a fun evening.

shifts

 i've just got out of a cold shower after cooling down enough to get into it in the first place, having just said good night to mr smear having come in from the rollerblading group around midnight to find gd fast asleep and him still awake reading...

i feel like i barely survived the route tonight; it was *not* a "social" route, and more than the first hour was predominantly uphills. the wet bulb temperature is around 24°, and i don't know if that's why but when we stopped for a short break i was sweating so much that i felt like my eyes had flooded with seawater and i couldn't open them for a few minutes.

...

i had a somewhat productive morning this morning, planning out my repository, and i continued earlier before i left and i think it's looking good. the implementation has caused me to hit my 5-hour token limit for the first time since i signed up for codex, usually i'm only really focused on my weekly limit.

...

work was alright, though i am in scrambling mode while also trying to say goodbye without bumming anyone out. one good thing that's come out of this week so far is that one of their engineers needed to make a fix in the golang project i worked with a while back, and because i modernized it he was able to get the work done pretty painlessly and we were able to determine that the work was good pretty quickly.

...

around lunchtime, i jumped on a call with the teacher and her friend that we scheduled a week or so ago, and it was *not* the kind of call i expected. it looks like there's serious potential for something big here, and i've been left with a fair amount of homework to do.

also, i had to (metaphorically) sit my wife down and have a real-talk moment with her about what the implications are. she's got serious trust issues that i'm going to have to work around, but she assures me that she'll have my back and put her big-girl panties on for this.

i don't know what the chances of any of this becoming real are, but if they do it's going to be one hell of a ride.

...

we watched a particularly cringy episode of the wonder years ("steady as she goes"), which upset mr smear so much that he stormed off halfway through 😂

before i left, we watched a video on nuts and i learned that my regular handfuls of brazil nuts at the office might well have been messing with me! those things oughta have warning signs...

shorter notice

 t'was a weird day. first and foremost, because i received a kickoff email from my employer informing me that i'll be starting work at my new client in a week, when on thursday my current client assured me that we still have a month together. i inquired, but i haven't yet got a response.

i reached out to my new client, who quickly responded positively and said that i have an advantage if i like shuwarma. i asked if vegan shuwarma counts, and i got silence... for just over an hour... before he responded with a "lol" followed by a "no" 😅

i struggled today with tiredness, motivation, and caffeine efficacy. and snacks. i've been putting on weight again. in spite of all that, i managed to put together two strategies for one of the projects i've been working on, and ran an investigation to confirm my troubling findings from thursday, and took the next step in the big project i've been working on for months and now need to bring to a close even faster than i thought.

once i was done with work, mr smear packed his borrowed books into his bag and we walked to the library, along the way stopping to marvel at all the glass skyscrapers that are effectively being built on sand. my favorite part of our walk was having to assure him that although his hormones will make him think and do stupid things when he hits puberty, all he has to do is be aware of them and try not to make things worse than they need to be :P

i did a little more work on the map generation for mr smear's project, then we had a good couple of math fluxx games before dinner, and then we watched a couple of episodes of the simpsons, and then - post shower and toothbrush time - i invested more time in the map generation.

i'm just now discovering just how much of a waste of time a generic map generator might prove to be, as i'm struggling to make it make sense for both mr smear's horror game and my tarot game. this might just be one of those expensive lessons i've heard so much about...

circles

having barely slept the night before, and with my hip flexors threatening, i took a puff. i'm still tired from the sleep deficit, but i slept really well. it's weird to sleep well and not remember dreaming.

i got up, had a coffee, looked for an didn't find my last MRI, then i walked to the bus stop and went to the clinic for an acupuncture session. my body was profoundly calm for most of the duration of the treatment, though i did develop a random itch that made my leg twitch, and i've just gotten home (trying hard to stay in the "comfort" bubble in spite of the world around me, i think next time i'll walk instead of taking a bus) and am having a quick breakfast before heading to the office.

...

i made some progress on the map generator problem before going to the office, and the work day was mostly completing the backfill (it still required some fixing). i came home for lunch, then returned for a talk by a south african "CTO" that turned out to be a thorough waste of 45 minutes of my life that i'll never get back. the title of the talk had been misleading: i thought it was going to be around organizing a company's structures around AI, and instead it was about how a junior dev became a senior dev with a fancy title and how the south african tech industry is years behind us in terms of working with AI.

a little later i walked past my client team and inquired after the weirdness that was going on - my client / the boss was standing there with tears streaming down his face, and i was offered a piece of a little yellow pepper to try.

it turned out to be a reaper that the boss had home grown. the first little piece i took hit me hard in the throat, but i barely noticed it in my mouth. the second piece was substantially thicker and full of seeds, and i made a point of chewing it thoroughly. it had a delayed action, and i ended up regretting it. it must have taken about an hour to completely stop burning...

i had a good sync with my manager, and on my way out made a suggestion to dx for the problem he was stuck with, which i hope helped.

i came home early, and walked with mr smear to the library to switch out a couple of his books. while there, i had a fun conversation with the librarian, who lit up when i talked about how we'd just finished the eighth season of the simpsons and the importance of monoculture especially with regards bridging the communication gap between parents and their children.

the walk there and back was full of interesting conversation, and by the time we got home i'd put in 17K steps in addition to the hour and a half of rollerblading the night before. i stretched a bit before dinner, after which i had a little too much dessert and some arak for good measure. i was ready to go to bed, but i still had to wait about an hour for mr smear to shower and brush his teeth 🤦‍♂️

...

well, the calm has been slowly seeping away and i'm feeling my "wry neck" again. oh, well.

the doing feeling

 today was tuesday. i honestly don't know where to begin, and i'm sure i'll miss something.

the second volume of my favorite thing is monsters is off to a good start.

gd and i had a very serious relationship talk this morning, which went very positively, but it was addressing something that's probably just a feature of our marriage and we'll have to manage it in a loop 🤷‍♂️

i spent most of my work day babysitting and troubleshooting the backfill, i'm still encountering small surprises. my manager informed my team that i'm in a notice period, but he did it in an uncomfortable way, and then he told me they were planning on making an announcement, but as far as i know the only person who's been told is dx, and he already knew. whatever they're doing, it's really weird.

my two teammates of the past eight months are now both members of my async game jam 🤘

my manager hasn't done anything about my auto-doc project, so i went over his head and sent a brief directly to the guy in charge of tech direction...

pioneer wanted me to sign an NDA before sharing an app design, i convinced her that she was being silly but once i saw what she wants to build i understand that it's way beyond "an app". i also posted this morning looking to see if there's interest in a hebrew language meetup, which it appears there is.

i left early, switched computers at home, and headed to a game dev meetup. i spent most of the non-talk time speaking to a coworker, i'm grateful for the advice and knowledge he shared but it did get a little awkward at some point, because he apparently isn't great with social cues. null sweat, though, because i learned a lot this evening, and all three talks were surprisingly entertaining!

- when to build infrastructure, when to hack

- how to identify and test good ideas

- tips on game dev collaboration / team building, and the basic idea behind building for steam

as i was leaving, my mom called to share how excited she was to be enjoying life of brian on her new television ^_^

i got home in time to eat some dinner, say good night to my mom with my family, and then decide to go rollerblading in spite of not feeling entirely up to it.

i don't know if my problem tonight was being out of shape, anaemic, or just lazy, but aside from some rather brutal uphills and leaving half an hour early and barely managed to get home without collapsing, i had a great time!

...

something's been happening these past few weeks, and i'm starting to feel like i'm getting back into a groove i haven't been in since before i left israel - i'm *doing* shit, and feeling progress, lots of different kinds of things but all somehow related and working together. i'm feeling *potential*. and it's nothing short of thrilling.

...

it took me a while to cool down enough to shower, i had a cold shower, and now i'm going to stretch a little bit more and go to bed.

a skip and a leg day

 did i... did i skip a day?

yesterday:

i spent a couple of hours on mr smear's game yesterday, but the biggest event of the day was watching die hard together, which was the only screen time mr smear was allowed until dinner because he'd been pretty rude to me in the morning.

my son discovered liquorice allsorts and i discovered my sunflower seeds had the words "unsalted" written in large print on the packet that i hadn't registered when i bought them :(

the rest of my day was doing not much, but lots of it :P

oh, and i had a good chat with vfmp for the first time in ages. i'd come up with a prank to play on his antisemitic brother, and we both laughed hysterically as he told me a story of their sibling rivalry and the results of him exploiting a cheat in a game they used to play together 😈

dinner was sushi again (^_^) and more of the wonder years. each episode generates interesting discussions, necessary discussions that mr smear doesn't necessarily want to have :P

he got to play more thief after dinner as compensation.

today:

i slept pretty well again last night. i got a variety of stuff done today, but my work day was mainly me jumping between tasks and struggling to make real progress on any one thing. lots of small disappointments.

one of them being that after generating enough data at the end of last week, my cost estimates turned out to be considerably lower than i anticipated...

around 4pm i decided to get up from my desk and walk mr smear to the comics library and back. we picked up my favorite thing is monsters vol 2 and doomsday clock, along with volumes 4-5-6 of attack on titan for mr smear, after discovering that the books on the shelves are doubled up and we hadn't noticed all this time!

i advised mr smear as he signed up for an account on a website that asks you to confirm you're over 18 (it's a monster wiki, i'm pretty sure i'm doing the wrong thing), while i played around with agent frameworks and specced out some more work on his game.

dinner was delicious, not-quite-sushi but similar, and we watched an episode of the wonder years that we essentially had to force mr smear through as he died inside from "14th hand embarrassment" - yes, 7x as worse as 2nd hand - but he survived the trauma in spite of his protests 😂

between then and now, i came across a post on facebook from a woman who seems to have the same idea i do about employing immigrants, it looks like we might have some common ground we can cooperate with so i'm quite excited!

...

i'm feeling my hip flexors getting irritated again, i had a couple of days' reprieve while my back hurt and now i'm uncomfortable :/

vicarious horror

 holy shit, inside is not something to play when you're getting ready for bed. absolutely, awfully beautiful limbo-like experience with a lot more holocaust trauma than i was expecting.

[passes out before completing the post]

our walk together to the store was as much exercising our game design legs as our physical ones. when we got home, mr smear played thief while i chatted with horseman, who's been building an interesting crypto protocol that i finally kind of understand. but then he spoke to me about a different one he's planning and everything got jumbled up in my head :P

we stuffed outselves on gd's vegan sushi for dinner, watching the wonder years and pausing to ensure that mr smear's familiar with the woodstock performance of with a little help from my friends, as well as the songs where have all the flowers gone and blowing in the wind, and closing with a conversation about the cringe that kevin arnold was so afraid of versus the intensity of the cringe that he generated in order to avoid it.

(i think it was during the first part of the dance scene that both gd and mr smear literally climbed under the table 😂)

and how teenage hormones make us behave like idiots.

...

by the time we got to dinner i'd managed to get mr smear's game starting with a randomly generated map, using a system i'm pretty pleased with and that's theoretically portable to my game as well ^_^

in spite of inside making my heart race, i managed to fall asleep pretty quickly and i slept surprisingly well. it's been a pleasant start to the day so far, i'm not sure what i or we are going to be doing but i suspect it'll be mostly indoors activities.

token cheat

 i slept alright last night, though i got up for bit and then tried to sleep in after, and was woken at 7.17am by an enthusiastic city worker to be informed that they'd cleared the dead rat from the sidewalk that i reported yesterday.

they honestly didn't need to call :/

my first hour or two were spent putting together a summary of my last six months for my recruiter, while simultaneously continuing the auto-doc work i'd begun yesterday afternoon (an endless back-and-forth gen-eval loop between opencode's bigpickle and codex luna) which literally took the entire day to complete.

[takes a moment to do that just-one-more-thing]

to be honest, i have only the vaguest notion of what was being done all day. there were a couple of points where i had to get involved and clarify some principles, but by and large it was a lot of uninteresting crap and a lot of breaking one thing while fixing another...

budget AI is, well, budget.

once i got the summary sent off, i took mr smear with me to the pharmacy to pick up gd's prescription. he read while keeping an eye on the queue numbers, i did a bit of shopping, completely forgetting the mug mission we'd been on on friday, until we were already home :P

we must have been there an hour or so, and i was feeling worryingly faint. not sure if sick, or just sleep deprived. i just had to look up the term sleep deprived.

once we returned home, i finally started looking at client work. i spent a few hours trying to establish a baseline cost estimate for the backfill i'm supposed to be starting this week, which took forever and ended with me encountering bad source data and having to make my jobs more tolerant. i feel like i cheated, because i used the databricks AI for the real work and my own tokens just to validate it.

the inexplicable cost jump from last week reared its ugly head, and led me to dive deep to try and figure out what was going on... which led me to the not-exactly-verifiable conclusion that mlflow tracing was the prime culprit. removing its artifacts seemed to make my later verification efforts vastly cheaper, but in any event i'm no longer even trying to use the company AI to get any actual work done.

during one of mr smear's downtimes, i set him to cleaning our standing fans. i had to guide him a bit at first, but the second one he did all by himself and he really did do a good job 🙌

another win was getting him to use another of his downtimes to practice drawing backgrounds, and he appears to be quite excited by the results, though i cannot verify what he's been up to because he's being unusually secretive.

yet another win was getting him to come with me for a walk once i was *done* with my work day, he was happy to join me and we had a good time discussing all sorts of interesting things ^_^

[exhales]

dinner time.

unfocused

i put a lot of work into the auto-doc today, i think it's kind of ready. almost. i guess. i dunno.

but it's after 1am and i need to go to bed soon. i did pass out a couple of times earlier while we all watched the addams family on the couch (gd agreed with me that we can do this during the summer holidays), but that doesn't really count, and my back and hip flexors were doing their thing :(

we watched some adventure time today for the first time in ages, and played a couple of games of guess who?, and my sister and i took mr smear for quite a long walk through to the port for ice cream, so we got *some* exercise even if mr smear is now obsessing over his belly again...

nervous juggling

 i already forgot how i slept on wednesday night, but i can say that last night wasn't bad. the last hour and a half in bed trying and failing to sleep was a bit of a drag, but overall it was alright.

yesterday was a really, really long work day. and i was manic - i guess i've been manic for a couple of days now - and doing a lot of nervous juggling while being bombarded with interesting information by the guy next to me (dx).

i spent two hours in the morning on my autodoc project before going to the office. for our team daily, i spent a lot of it trying to nudge my new manager without being imposing. then i spent the day trying to understand the existing ai infrastructure, and pitching my agentic skills (in zip format) to the vp tech, and reviving and reconstructing old golang services (everyone's too scared to touch them), and finally (finally!) getting most of my data to land that i've been working on for so many weeks now...

... and pitching my vision to random strangers (and getting buy-in ^_^), and discovering that my blockchain hackathon idea from 2021 (which i've subsequently tried to pitch to a number of people) has dx so excited that he's decided it's his "fable project" for the weekend - it would be so cool if he managed to pull it off!

between getting home and dinner, i gave mr smear the choice of rollerblading or walking. i was disappointed that he didn't want to get on his wheels, but i was surprised that he decided he wanted to walk all the way to the comics library (without any intention of actually going into the library). so off we went, for a very pleasant walk, discussing some horror game ideas he's had which are actually pretty damned good.

we got home and sat down for dinner, and finished watching guardians of the galaxy. what a brilliant movie. drax definitely gets some of the greatest lines.

after getting mr smear into bed, and in spite of the creeping tiredness, i continued working on my autodoc project for another two hours, before finally crawling into bed just before midnight.

...

now to dive back in until we all go out for the friday morning shopping.

squaring up

 well, i managed to join the rollerblading group last night! my neck and shoulder were in trouble - still are - but i was able to keep it together.

it was officially "social", and a bunch of people brought there kids, which was really cool. i was taking it easy, and overall had a good time, but towards the end we skated very close to home so i bailed early.

it took me quite a while to cool down, and after showering i made myself a cup of tea and played slay the spire 2 until about 1am, then finally went to bed.

i slept pretty well.

...

regarding the thrilling adventures of lovelace and babbage: i haven't decided yet how i feel about the comics themselves - so far, fun - but the preface and the footnotes are fantastic.

my body's making it very clear that it understands that i exercised last night (everything's responding slower than i expect, and i have that good soreness). my neck and shoulder are threatening me, but i seem to be okay. i've paid the rent, and the water bill, and the building fees, and i'm now getting ready to go to work and have some very difficult conversations.

it pours

i'm so freaking tired.

it was another rough day, tweaking AI skills and configurations and my PRs, and going around in the inevitable circles.

i went out in the evening for a short walk (the excuse was to buy another double-adapter, but i really did need real movement and my hip flexors had been agitated all day), and went i got home i was surprised to find that mr smear hadn't arrived yet - he'd missed his stop, and gotten off when he was almost at the next city.

my son learned some navigation skills today, and hopefully a little common sense. i went to retrieve him, and he made me lose my temper while i was trying to locate him by not only not answering my questions, but by telling me what i *should* have asked him when those answers wouldn't have helped me in the slightest 🤦‍♂️

when we finally met up, his lip began to tremble and i thought he was going to laugh, which made me giggle, but then he burst into tears instead - he'd been legitimately afraid. it wasn't until we finally got home that i realized *just* how lucky we'd been: when we came inside, his phone battery was at 1%. without family link's location service and a whole lot of phone time, i might have been able to guess which general direction he'd gone in but i have no idea how we would even have begun searching for him 🤯

so that happened.

on our way into the building we bumped into big data, who subsequently came down and managed to clear the cement at the entrance to the drain. then he had a beer and we chatted, and then it was our dinner time. we watched some of the first episode of the highlander series, and then it was bedtime for mr smear...

... and then, after i read to him for a bit and had had a shower myself, i saw that big data and another upstairs neighbor had done another experiment, and i saw that there was some water pooling above the drain. also, it turns out our A/C drips and had been doing damage downstairs.

FFS.

i had stuff i wanted to do tonight, but i'm so damned over it. i'm going to try going to bed now and i'm praying for a reasonable night's sleep.