redirect

i took horseman's recommendation to heart last night, and as a result i went to bed particularly late and invested a significant amount of my energy (and tokens) on three different projects, in parallel with burning my client's tokens on the project they're actually paying me for.

then i discovered that the "reset" wasn't going to happen automatically, that we've been given an additional one to use when we like. oooooooooooooh.

but i got a hell of a lot of stuff done today, including massive improvements to the game (mr smear was overjoyed) and reviving the stalled social media experiment i've barely touched since december. i used a lot of AI back then, too, but i've leveled up considerably in the past few months and the experience is now completely different. also, the new models are completely different as well.

...

i did manage to sleep last night, but instead of being kept up by the usual pain or discomfort, or just restlessness, it was a nightmare that i awoke from with adrenaline pumping through my veins, and it must have taken about half an hour to calm down enough to get back to sleep.

the nightmare: extremely vivid, with lots of grim parts, ending in a chase scene (i was in the back of a flatbed truck being shot at, and some of the bullets struck centimeters from my legs), followed by a narrow escape after being discovered (and abandoned by one of my "friends"), which involved a favor (some random guy deciding to look the other way) and then sneaking into a secret passage i was sure he didn't know about.

the morning dream: i woke up from another epic dream that ended in me cleaning an oven (and scratching it accidentally by using the wrong tool) then finding out i was covering for some kind of crime. the last person i encountered as my alarm went off was a cartoon daffy duck (à la who framed roger rabbit) but man-size, which was pretty intimidating.

aside from work - one of my biggest achievements being getting my client's environment playing nicely with my personal skills and sandboxed playground - and all of the token burning, i feel like a large part of my day was spent snacking, and trying to help gd get through all the food she's made (we both decided, spontaneously and simultaneously, that she should have frozen half of it), and in the evening she accompanied me to my haircut.

she's *not* happy with my haircut. neither am i...

dinner and the wonder years and me and mr smear working on the puzzle together until late, followed by this post and a cup of tea, and now i'm trying to decide whether it's bed time or more work time. my brain's feeling a bit fuzzy...

catching 'em all

 it's after noon on a saturday, and i'm writing this because i feel compelled to press ctrl+s on my life (just like when editing a doc that isn't autosaved). i'm currently taking a break from doing a lot of busywork that got triggered by me wanting to begin working on a game with mr smear, and then finding myself studying how to shave the yak of terrain map import.

[stopped here to write down the trophies design details from my conversation with horseman earlier]

yesterday:

i eventually gave up with helium and migrated back to brave. hello, brave. you're annoying, but you're alright. that took a lot of energy, both effort and psychological, and it was pretty draining.

after mr smear went off to school, gd and i went to the pharmacy, me with my little notebook and an intention to spent gd's waiting-in-line time writing down some stuff, more-than-loosely inspired by inside moebius. i'm pretty satisfied with the results, it was a good idea.

so gd took care of her meds for the long weekend, and we did a quick grocery shopping, and then we returned home.

oh, i should mention that gd and i were both struggling with post-nasal drip and coughs, but it was relatively manageable.

i spent way too much time trying to make a comic about something that happened at the mall, eventually giving up because notebook / gemini just kept failing and failing and failing to capture anything remotely like what i'd scripted. at some point it decided to DEI the comic and make gd black, which was super weird.

in the afternoon, our upstairs neighbors paid us a visit, and i flooded big data with my opinions and ideas on gaming, and introduced him to the israeli version of jones in the fast lane, which he played through completely :)

while we both enjoyed gd's marzipan and choc-chickpea fudge. that stuffs growing on me 🙄

i helped (as usual, now) with the challahpeño, then mr smear and i went upstairs to join them and their kids for a couple of games of fluxx - marvel and star. mr smear won both rounds! then we took our leave and went to the store to pick up wine for gd, with me become enraged along the way by a cycling who (apparently deliberately) almost ran into me even after we left him enough room, and then lost trying to find the wine gd was looking for...

gd almost ruined the rice by following the recipe... i made a suggestion that actually rescued it and we were both surprised ^_^

we went upstairs for dinner, and we all had a good time (mr smear doing a minimal amount of trolling, and encouraging their kids to fight over the piano by sitting down and playing quite nicely). after dinner, big data handed me a folder full of really interesting pokémon cards! somebody appears to have left it on our neighborhood's giving bench, and according to what he saw online it's probably worth a fair amount of money, but i'm taking it as a sign that i should sit mr smear down and get into it again :P

everyone was tired by the time we left, and i went to bed soon after helping gd put everything away (impressing her with my packing skills, we didn't have to toss anything) and clean up the kitchen, and aside from waking up in the middle of the night for an hour or so of very uncomfortable indigestion, i slept really well.

i began my day cleaning and then sitting on the balcony, with my notebook, working on an idea inspired by a conversation with big data's wife (who's not convinced that one can use games to teach social skills), and then moving inside when the sun streamed onto me directly (we get direct sunlight in the winter months, and we're protected during the worst of the summer, that's pretty cool) to do some research into writing mysteries.

i thought about swordschool, who i haven't heard from in a long time, and i sent him an email because i suspect he's changed numbers again. also, i discovered his actual surname, i believe for the very first time.

i had a long chat with horseman about trophies, then invested an hour into burning the last of my week's token allowance before the refresh on the app i've been working on all week, unfortunately hitting the reset with an annoying issue unresolved after everything else worked out beautifully.

then i took a nap, and then fell into the busywork, and now that i've got everything written down i need to decided whether it's pokémon time or game dev time with mr smear.

gaming in the new year

friday evening was lovely. the kids were all fine, although they didn't eat anything and between gd and big data's wife there was waaaaaaay too much food. i... i ate too much. so much that i was very uncomfortable and needed to keep myself upright for a couple of hours after we got home to ensure i wouldn't have indigestion :/

both yesterday and today were essentially spent either making games, or playing games. cascadia was a great success. the mini-games i've been experimenting with have been a great success. i spent a good hour or so with horseman discussing game dev and vibe coding, and then blockchain dev, which was cool.

mr smear and i played settlers of catan with our upstairs neighbors this afternoon, which was mostly good except for a) big data getting upset with his youngest - as usual, but his youngest just continued doing the things that he kept asking him to stop doing and it got so bad mr smear joined in, and i had to stop him - and b) mr smear "jokingly" calling big data "asshole" because he did something that stopped his plans. at the end of the game we managed to make it worse when i told him to apologize and he repeated the word while apologizing 🙄

we watched more spider-noir, we watched more the wonder years, we watched the first half of the new masters of the universe which is a tragically funny parody of the original series, but with too much violence and swearing to be appropriate for kids. the casting for evil-lyn was spot on 😂

what else? i don't know. i guess i should record that my throat's been scratchy for the last couple of hours, which i definitely don't need, and mr smear's cough hasn't fully let up yet. oh, and gd made pretty good chickpea fudge today. and my main thing these past two days has been the games i've been working on. it turns out making nostalgia-flavored edutainment mini-games can actually be fun, to make and to play!

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.

myths and fables

 my bum still hurts - gd dug her elbow in and i've used bengay, but the tightness isn't going away and i'm nervous about going to bed...

it's probably not helped by my spending the last hour or so sitting down at my computer.

i began the day trying to figure out why my external monitor was flickering, and it resolved without me getting an answer. apparently it's a known macbook thing. nice.

i then spent the next three hours putting fable through its paces. i sent the following to horseman:

bro, i’ve been using fable for the past couple of hours. it’s… 

it’s…

it’s an AI model 😂

it does seem like a significant improvement so far, but god damn the hype is so detached from the reality - as usual. also, holy shit it’s expensive.

we walked to our favorite vegan coffee spot to meet up with my aunt and her family - we haven't seen my cousins in years! i spent most of our time talking shop with the younger brother, and then tgtbt stayed with us when everyone else left and we talked and talked until mr smear had long had enough :P

the afternoon / evening was going great, mr smear and i agreed to a compromise between video games and fluxx, and i think that's the first time i've held my own in spiderheck. a lot of our math fluxx experience was good - meaning both of us were enjoying it - but then he got in a mode after deciding that the game should have been over (when it wasn't) and made a whole thing... which i kinda the whole thing gd and i have been charged with getting him to learn how to handle. so we entered shabbat with a bit of a shit vibe.

kiddush and dinner were nice once we got over that initial hurdle, and then it was shower and bedtime for mr smear, and then i passed out for a while, and woke up with my hip flexors doing their thing, and for the last while i've been playing slay the spire 2 while occasionally checking in on fable because i forgot to set --dangerously-skip-permissions which are far more nuisance than any real safety they provide.

so far i've apparently used $45 worth of fable tokens, and i've yet to see evidence that the effort is any better than sonnet. perhaps i'm wrong? i guess i'll find out in the morning, but i'm beginning to believe the rumors that LLMs have peaked and the next evolutionary jump is going to have to come from some other idea. and that the magic really is in the harness, and that off-the-shelf harnesses are just not where it's at.

detour

 there was a lot of kitchen stress last night, and some very serious (positive) conversations with mr smear about life in general in its wake. gd had ridiculous trouble with the gluten-free dumpling recipe, but the ultimate result was much better than the store-bought frozen ones...

i did nothing of value between late dinner and climbing into bed a bit after midnight. then i woke up, restless and sore, and for about two hours lay in bed, distressed but too tired to give up on trying to fall back to sleep. eventually i got up for a couple of hours of mindlessness, then finally returned to sleep for a couple more hours.

i didn't feel great this morning. i read some watchmen, i napped a little, and then i was going to start getting into the things i'd been intending to do today* when my alarm reminded me that i was going to one of ze germans' daughter's bat mitzvah...

* i'd intended - like most people - to put down money for claude in order to have access to the fable model to do some experimentation. i woke up to the news that that wasn't on the cards any more.

i had a long chat with horseman about AI and middle east politics before and on my walk there, broken only to get dressed and make coffee, and when running into our old neighbors and learning that there're a lot of kids in the building now and they've managed to force the building management to renovate the bomb shelter. too late for us, but i'm very relieved for them!

the bat mitzvah was really simple and tastefully done, all i consumed was liquids (only one alcoholic drink, though) and a little bit of the fruit salad, and i had a good time chatting with ze other germans (irish/swedish + austrian).  i got a ride home, realizing only at that point just how late in the day it was.

i'm now having a late coffee, mr smear's just completed a second hour of "productive" screen time (making animations) and is now having a bite to eat, and then we're going to head out for a bit more rollerblading.

destabilized

 i did go to bed, but i barely got much sleep. certainly nothing restful. mr smear stayed in our bed until morning, and then we all got up early ("in solidarity" according to gd), although i ended up lying down for an additional hour afterwards.

the day started off alright, though. i sat down with mr smear and my coffee and introduced him to mad magazine - issue #295, back to the future part ii - and it was really cool. i had to explain a whole lot of stuff to him, which led to some interesting moments. i think i blew his mind describing the difference by how we all dealt with the CFC / ozone hole crisis as a species, but allowed the oil and animal agriculture industries to divide us all on global warming.

i don't know how much "work" i got done today, certainly nothing significant. in addition to my brain feeling wrecked, gd was on a cleaning spree and discovered (what then became unavoidable) a sewer smell coming from the office bathroom next to my desk which we have no explanation for.

between meetings, mr smear and i walked to the hardware store to pick up draino, and did some tea shopping on the way back home. we sat down for a "salad pita" lunch while out, which was nice, and explored a local toy store's lego selection realizing that we never got mr smear a birthday present.

it's been a year. or two, or three.

i just got off a long call with horseman, most of it discussion the terrifying state of AI-fueled propaganda and the last fifty years building up to the west collapsing in on itself because its people have all been brainwashed to love their enemies more than themselves.

now to drag mr smear away from spore and get some exercise.

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.

spicy

i type this post with burning fingers. i used gloves on the carolina reaper, so i'm pretty confident that it's the jalapeño i prepared before...

yesterday:

i woke up from a disturbing dream yesterday morning: my mom and i on a pier in a massive storm, me in the car and her standing about 20ft away. i yell "look at the horses!" and then realize we have a massive tsunami incoming, i yell at her to get in the car and she makes it just as the wave hits. and then the car is pushed right over the edge of the pier and i wake up as we're falling, trying to recall how to not get trapped in an underwater vehicle

i began the day publishing the article on git worktrees and devcontainers, then mr smear and i accompanied gd to the neurosurgeon to look at her shoulder. we had about an hour and a half to wait, which i used to finally start preparing for my client meeting.

the doctor was pleasant, and he tried to be helpful, but gd left very discouraged and feeling like he didn't hear her (although, in my opinion, he did). i hope we get to the bottom of whatever's giving her trouble sooner rather than later, but it's already becoming a process...

after that we came home, and i spent the hour i had until my meeting preparing some more.

the meeting itself seems to have gone well, and i was glad to get good feedback from my lead. having said that, i was a little surprised to learn that i'm going to have to go through a proper technical interview with them on monday - i'm a little bummed out, too, because i didn't realize i'd need to spend another couple of my "unemployment" days doing work.

at least my employer's agreed to pay me for my preparation hours, but i was kinda hoping to have a few weeks off :/

after the meeting, i ate some food in preparation for the next big item on my agenda: the eating of my first carolina reaper.

OMFG. i just asked mr smear to record a reaction video to me eating a carolina reaper, i thought it would be a fun father/son activity. i survived - i only took a couple of nibbles, that was enough pain to convince me that eating the whole thing may have incapacitated me - and now that my system's calmed down (and i can breathe not-fire again) i just learned that he somehow lost the more than five minutes recording of me struggling 🤦😭

so... that happened.

it took an hour or so for my mouth and stomach to calm down after that, and between the meeting (and its prep) and the previous days' not sleeping enough and the reaper, i was completely exhausted. all i remember from the rest of the day was passing out watching an episode of jujutsu kaisen with mr smear, and gd deciding she doesn't like dinosaurs after we watched episode 7 ("family challenge"), and going to bed right after reading some more of the ocean at the end of the lane to mr smear.

today:

lots of weird dreams. it feels like it's been a while.

after a long chat with horseman - we talked about AI and game dev, but more about internet psychosis - we all went to the mall to pick up some groceries, and then the corner market, and then mr smear played among us online with his friend while i watched educational content (ha ha - most of the stuff i watched today was trash), and then i did the dishes so that gd and i could make the challot together; we have our first challah-lina reaper incoming :D

i was reading a bit more of the department of truth when i got the sudden urge to write this, so here we are.

i'm tiiiired. and we're going out to our friends tonight. i should nap a bit.

the cut

goddamn.

yesterday.

i got some shit done on my way to the office yesterday, not least of which being sorting out a pain clinic appointment for gd in the hopes to start getting the ball rolling with her cannabis license renewal.

i arrived at work in good spirits, but hadn't even managed to grab a coffee before being called in to a meeting with my boss and our HR woman. i didn't take it well - they listed their claims, and i told them that the claims are clearly nonsense - and i had some very awkward non-conversations (being "discrete") on my way out.

i feel the betrayal keenly. i would have felt a lot more like this was an understandable play on their part if it wasn't for two things: first, that a week ago they told me they weren't happy with me, but instead of firing me they moved me to a different team - a team that wanted me, and that i had a good chance of success in. second, they surprise-fired me along with five other people, about half of whom the decision makes zero sense.

i've received some concerned phone calls, not just concern for me and the others, but concern for all those who're left behind. you don't fire obviously competent people who lots of people have worked with and leaned on without sparking a panic. nothing about this play makes sense.

so obviously i'm not in a good place right now, the anxiety from the past week or so has now shifted to a new, differently-terrifying one. they're doing something ugly, dirty and counter-productive, and i'm walking away with a black mark on my resume in the form of an eight-month stint.

one for which i've made enormous sacrifices of my physical and mental well-being.

i don't regret doing what i believed in, and i'm proud to be walking away with my integrity. i'm also kinda glad that it's happened exactly as it has, in a way that anyone in the organization with half a brain can see through, can see that it isn't right and it isn't deserved.

now to find a new job. i'm praying that the guys who made me the competing offer are ready to make it again... i have a meeting with them next week 🤞

...

mr smear went to a friend's place yesterday (obviously just a pretense for extensive and inappropriate screen-time), and i went to pick him up (and pace and ponder while waiting) and take him to the mall to look for a belated birthday gift for his friend. i told him basically what was happening, and a bit later he needed some consoling because he literally interpreted it as "we're going to have to start eating worms" 🤦

we didn't find anything amazing, and then he very wisely said that he didn't want to get his friend anything that he might politely accept but be disappointed with, so we caught a bus home and he said he'd ask his friend what kinds of things he might want.

last night was dinner (half a dinner for me, the anxiety diet*) and a lot of phone calls. and eventually a chat with my mom, who made a very good suggestion that i write down what i'm going to say in the hearing. i now have a pretty solid statement prepared, and i think i'm just going to tidy it up, and then send it to my boss and the HR woman right before reading it to their faces.

* i was down to 77 kilograms this morning!

last night, gd and i started rewatching thursday. and passed out about a third of the way through. [i checked: good guess]

today:

the highlights of this morning were an hour long conversation with horseman, and taking gd to an ultrasound appointment.

horseman told me something very surprising about why he won't work with kids under fourteen, and it seems wrong but it also explains a lot of the frustration we experience with mr smear: at his age (and all ages before this age), he's very good at continuing the flow of a conversation and sounding like he's understanding. but he's not understanding. so we get all frustrated and angry with him but he's just playing along and not fully comprehending what he's doing wrong...

gd and i bussed through to south tel aviv, eventually finding the place and arriving with half an hour to spare. which was fortunate, because it took just over half an hour waiting on hold for the clinic staff to get authorization...

having had a successful adventure, we came home to do the dishes, and then gd made us really good toasted sandwiches and we completed watching thursday. still good.

the rest of the afternoon / evening (shit, it's getting dark really early already) has been mostly syncing with mr smear over his day and helping him with his math homework (algebra!). somewhat successfully :)

morals and dilemmas

 i'm quite upset right now, and the current upset is triggering an earlier upset and everything's getting mixed up in my head.

[takes about half an hour to trawl the interwebs to see if he's referred to aethersmith by "name" before or determine which to use]

so a couple of days ago i heard about the studio ghibli filter, and i ran our family photo through it. the result was gorgeous, and i'm really pleased with it. today, aethersmith post the following comment on my photo: "this is gross. and shits all over artists." and then tahoma reposted something about how miyazaki is deeply upset by the use of the filter, so we shouldn't use it. 

aethersmith and i have been arguing about generative ai since it became a thing, he's very upset that training models on artists' works without consent or compensation is unethical. he's not wrong.

having said that, though, the use of generative ai is - to my mind - not quite so cut-and-dried. art has been cannibalizing art since its invention, and the only real difference between what ai models are doing and what human artists have been doing is that they're commoditizing it and doing it at a scale that's making us a lot more sensitive to it. imagine banning the sale of painting equipment, or preventing people from reproducing others' artworks... that could never make sense.

i'm sad that miyazaki hates it, but whether he appreciates it or not i see this whole ghibli filter trend as a beautiful tribute to his works. i believe a lot of other people do too.

pandora's box is open, and it's not going to close any time soon. i hope that this is simply a growing pain and that we evolve to a place where we have amazing tools that work for everyone, not just consumers. i believe that we can get there, and i believe that we must get there.

...

and that triggered upset over the brief conversation horseman and i had earlier regarding the zombie apocalypse that's been rapidly emerging around the globe. the hysterical destruction of tesla vehicles and infrastructure by people who believe that climate change is an emergency is mind-boggling. the complete rejection of facts or any level of rationality and fair-mindedness with regards the war in israel is mind-boggling. everyone has finally lost their minds after decades of "active measures" and disinformation campaigns and enemies of the west infiltrating its media and its universities.

gd and i were discussing this morning how a hidden aspect of the trans agenda is self-sterilization, and that there's a sibling component to that in how the west is leaning more and more towards tolerating and encouraging people who don't have children, and in doing so opening the doors to enemies performing a "land and expand" conquest, while convincing themselves that tolerating their enemies' intolerance makes them morally superior and anything else is racist bigotry.

i hope we all wake up from this dystopian nightmare before it's too late.

...

i didn't sleep much last night, and i didn't sleep well. we had some unpleasantness getting up in the morning, but it passed quickly, and after mr smear left for school i took care of a couple of things and then accompanied gd to her dental imaging appointment.

we arrived on time, at the right place, but there was no appointment. i tried getting hold of our dental clinic but there was no answer, and we were in the middle of resigning ourselves to having to go there in person to make a new appointment when the technician (or dentist?) picked up the phone and intervened, taking no prisoners and making it clear to whoever was on the other end of the line that it's not fair that patients are blamed for receoptionists not doing their jobs.

he handed me his phone and my jaw dropped as the woman on the other end informed me that we had an appointment booked, but hadn't paid. when i translated for gd, her jaw dropped too. this is all very literal jaw-dropping, by the way, we stared at each other, mouths agape, because we both remember very clearly paying for the appointment.

regardless, we instructed her to deduct the payment and she released our booking, and five minutes later we were out of there, having thanked the man profusely for going to bat for us.

...

the workday began with a rocket attack, so i took my coffee down into the basement for the first time (previously i'd just hung out in the stairwell, but i was curious).

...

highlight of my day: i helped our security consultants secure authorization for a contract for an important tool. afterwards, i overheard one of them discussing password policies, and i
(respectfully) got into it with him. i was getting some support from his coworkers, but then their Big Boss arrived (he looked vaguely familiar) and he asked him to step in.

he didn't hesitate to agree with my assessment - that password policies should enforce complexity and be easy to remember, not check arbitrary industry-standard compliance boxes that only cause people to behave in counter-productive ways. and any developer will happily accept occasionally using a second-factor authentication method (like fingerprints) over having to regularly reset their password.

after another round or two, they were enthusiastically on the same page and i really hope they manage to figure out how to implement a policy accordingly. as i told them: if they can get this right, every player in the industry will have their backs and be excited to work with them.

...

a couple of us interviewed an applicant in the afternoon. i'd prepared pretty well - though i've learned a bunch of things through the experience - but the actual interview was a bit awkward and it was only when pressed (afterwards) that i was able to put my finger on what was bothering me.

...

i didn't accomplish what i'd set out to, but i did learn a lot. i came home and had barely enough time to get mr smear through a page of his math homework, but he did such a good job and with such a good attitude that i was happy to put on an episode of the simpsons (homer the vigilante) in spite of it being too late for screentime.

after mr smear went to sleep, gd and i resumed watching slow horses. this is because i mentioned to my coworker how disappointed we were with its politics, and he threw me a spoiler that made us want to give it another chance. so i guess we'll see.

...

i've been playing inscryption again (tonight's the first night i've been feeling alright about taking things easy in days). i ended up doing a ridiculous run, with an unkillable geck (x2 thanks to goobert) and a reptile totem with an ant spawner sigil, and then an ouroboros that i was forced to sacrifice that was offered back to me, and then i put a morsel sigil on it, for completely OP combinations.

chores and childhood

saturday:

i went to bed, got up a bit later to pee and caught mr smear on the computer... i warned him that that had lost him screen time, got him to go to bed, and then returned to bed myself.

i was in the middle of a dream when he woke me up to ask if his punishment time was over yet 🤦‍♂️

by the way, i have to note that he's been reading the wave and is really enjoying it.

when i eventually got up (i didn't get too much more sleep, unfortunately) we sat down to play some space quest v together, which was fun and got a lot of laughs until he decided he was getting bored 🤷‍♂️

i moved over to the playstation, and began playing nier automata. i managed to get through the first sequence, it was a lot of fun and the game world is gorgeous, but by the time i got to the save point i was feeling worn out...

mr smear's german friend came over for a few hours, while i played some more final fantasy vi.

in any event, the day was mostly spent quietly indoors. we were all exhausted.

yesterday:

after dropping mr smear off at school, gd and i took the bus to dizengoff center, then walked to the shuk. we enjoyed a cup of coffee on rambam street with no pressure, we picked her up a couple of bags (custom prints, she's happy with them) and a couple of nice t-shirts for me, i picked up some wired speakers for my windows machine, and then we checked out the book store looking for a gift for the mongoose's daughter (whose birthday we've missed, twice) and hit the jackpot - a large piglet plushy and a hebrew translation of winnie-the-pooh.

after we got home, gd went back out to meet up with urchin, so i had to pick mr smear up from school. i arrived there just as he was leaving the gate with a friend of his we've never heard of before, informing me that they were going to take the bus to his place and asking me to pick him up by 4pm.

so... that was a moment. i made sure i had the address, and that his friend knew that mr smear is vegan, and off they went, leaving me feeling a little bit anxious but very proud at the same time.

gd, however, didn't take mr smear's independence so well... to be fair, though, if we were in canada or south africa i definitely wouldn't have felt so safe about it.

i spent the next while setting up my new work accounts, and discovering that the cheap speakers i'd bought were terrible, and then gd and urchin arrived and we chatted for a while, and then gd and i left together to pick mr smear up from his friend.

he was fine, they'd had a nice afternoon. we took the bus home, picked up the gifts, then took the bus to the mongoose's. and discovered that his daughter already had the matching winnie-the-pooh plushy, but their copy of the book they had wasn't as nice so she'd been bored... on our way out i overheard them reading to her and they later sent an adorable picture of her hugging her new friend.

all good ^_^

from there we went to market vegan for dinner. i had the hand-made couscous, which i really didn't enjoy the texture of, and they shared kebabs which were delicious, but there was an embarrassing incident with mr smear trying to spit out a mouthful of food because he didn't like the peanut butter sauce 🤦‍♂️

we got home pretty late, had a struggle to get him to do some of his homework, and then just before bedtime he decided he was hungry again.

ay carumba.

today:

another difficult day getting mr smear ready for school. while saying goodbye, some guy walked his kid past me and the child wet-coughed openly into my face. i was literally stunned, and i really wish i'd said something because i spent my entire walk back fighting with the shitty parent in my mind :/

i took the speakers back for a refund, then ended up meandering until i found myself at a nice coffee shop on ibn gvirol, where i stopped and took care of a bunch of chores.

it feels good crossing things off my list.

it didn't feel good learning that mr smear had absolutely refused to cooperate with his teacher until the third lesson of the day :(

then i walked home via the mall, where i picked up some urgent groceries and found a pretty decent bluetooth speaker that was on sale for even less money than the cheap ones i'd returned. they work well, although the windows machine itself is pretty shitty so they're not as good as they could be...

mr smear had left school with a friend of his who was performing in a piano recital at the conservatory. i was told that he would be ready to be picked up around 3.30pm, but on my way there i saw that his phone was on the other side of the city, and when i checked in with his friend's parents i was told that the recital was only scheduled to begin at 5pm, and that they'd have mr smear home by 6pm.

color me frustrated.

i'd been in the middle of a meeting with horseman, who was trying very hard to explain a complex crypto scheme of his, and i took the opportunity to make myself a coffee and reset my brain a little. in total we must have sat for about two hours on his presentation, arguing non-stop about how all the mechanisms work together, but by the end of it i think we had a good handle on the design and we'd also both learned a some things about crypto that we hadn't fully understood before.

mr smear eventually came home around 7pm, just while i was talking to our kibbutz cousin for the first time in ages, and we dived into dinner because he hadn't eaten anything all afternoon. he apparently had a really good time, though :)

we had a long good-night chat with my mom, some of which was stressful (regarding aliyah), and now that mr smear's in bed and i've knocked this post out, i think i'm going to start winding down for the evening.

wacky wednesday

yesterday:

the interview didn't go well. it didn't go badly, but it definitely didn't go well. when it came to the technical part i was really unfocused, and all over the place - "all over the place" has really become my standard mode.

...

i was just saying to gd this morning that i've been riding between the edge of burnout and being burned out for a very, very long time now. it doesn't just make things tougher when they're not going smoothly, but it also makes me really unmotivated and demoralized.

...

i walked home feeling uncomfortable about my performance. i worked through some of mr smear's math homework with him, we had dinner, and while he got ready for bed we discovered a massive mold bloom in his bedroom so we had to work to get rid of (most of) it before he went to sleep.

by that stage i was completely done, over it, and most assuredly not in the mood to go rollerblading.

i put some time into preparing my laptop to be formatted (backing things up, primarily), then joined gd in watching some more beetlejuice beetlejuice. i'm not not enjoying it, but i'm not exactly engaged, either, and we keep falling asleep. still infinitely better than venom: the last dance.

today:

another weird day.

i woke up feeling very anxious about everything, took mr smear to school, and as i returned home received a phone call from the manager of a recycling site. amusingly, it turns out that while my complaints about the sites i've looked for are valid, there's a large site literally across the road from our apartment. with a sign. the only reason i didn't find it is because its google map pin is about 500m south of the place itself 🤦

i continued preparing for the great format, while gd worked on dusting and sorting mr smear's shelves (that's a hell of a lot of work, it hasn't been done in forever - possibly literally), and i was very pleased and relieved to receive a message from the company i interviewed with yesterday informing me that they'd like to proceed.

gd finally cut her hair short(ish), it's a lot of money but she's much happier, so... 🤷
(i don't really care much about hair, but i do prefer hers shorter)

i eventually took a bus to the office, and sat down with the CEO for our exit interview. it went well. we had lots to talk about, and in addition to giving me very positive feedback he and the CTO are being very helpful when it comes to the next steps and finding another gig.

and i can use my desk and equipment until the end of the month, which is extremely useful.

i then demonstrated my laptop's formattedness to the CTO, had an informal chat with him, and began the agonizing process of reinstalling the machine for personal use.

OMFG.

the reinstallation has taken many hours, and it's still not complete. i have, however, just managed to get the exercise code back to where it was on monday evening.

two of my coworkers (now ex-coworkers, whatever) came in to the office as well, and we ended up talking for a very long time, until it was dark and we remembered that rain was expected and we rushed out to get home before the downpour.

fortunately i didn't get caught, just lightly drizzled on. i had a long conversation with horseman about the game idea, then found that swordschool had added notes to our shared doc, and i'm pleased that we're all seeing value in this, even if we're not necessarily seeing the same value ^_^

we watched curious archive's the evolution of absolutely everything over dinner, and it's stunning.

mr smear's bedtime was alright - not excellent, but alright - and gd and i watched some more beetlejuice beetlejuice, and now i'm writing this down while messing with configurations and thinking about going to bed.

the game

yesterday (thursday night's a blur):

i got up early and started configuring my company computer to be able to work on the job application (my ssh and git configurations were very specifically set up for work, and not compatible with personal stuff). that took a lot of effort.

once that was taken care of, i started following the instructions for getting set up with the exercise. of course i encountered hiccups along the way that took lots of time to resolve and had nothing to do with the exercise itself... and then i finally got everything looking like it was up and running, but it wasn't.

at that point i tried setting things up on my windows machine, but that was a complete wash. i think i'm going to try again in a docker container and see if that makes more sense.

i took a break to pick mr smear up from school with gd, then took a walk to the supermarket to pick up some healthy snacks for the weekend. then i did the dishes, and had a long chat with horseman that was mostly about ideology and narrative but concluded with a discussion about a game idea i've been brewing. by that point, i was pretty much all in on the weekend.

i took mr smear to the synagogue for the friday night service, which was a corrective experience for him - we both enjoyed the service itself, and none of the babies were screaming. the walks there and back were good, too.

the evening was pretty good in general, and after everyone else went to bed i settled in to try out the tribe must survive that nystire gifted me (thank you!!) - i played until my eyes refused to stay open, it feels very much like don't starve together, but i felt a lot less stressed playing it. i mean, it was a while ago that we tried the latter, so i now feel compelled to replay it so that i can make a fair comparison.

either way, the concept, artwork and atmosphere are great!

today:

i got up early (again) and put together a document for the game idea i spoke to horseman about that's been on the boil since thursday morning. it's a combination of a bunch of different ideas that have been simmering over the past couple of years, and i'm really excited to flesh it out!

channukah gelt

"when i'm older, i'm going to become a christian" - my boy, whose only reference is that christians get to celebrate christmas.

well. if you think we're above "channukah bushes" and channukah gelt bribery, think again.

...

today was generally okay, but long. and weird. after dropping mr smear off at school, and helping gd with the grocery shopping, i headed to the office, arriving just in time to find a phone "booth" and join gd and mr smear's therapist for a guidance session.

it went well, but we had a breakthrough moment about our influence on mr smear's fear of the dark that made us sad.

i heard back from the company i interviewed with last week: nope.

i yelled at a HOT sales representative for calling me, and someone on our floor who overheard tried to help... it was a funny moment.

i consulted with horseman about whether or not to trade thursday's bitcoin, then got involved with messages with mr smear's teacher and tutor, and by the time i was ready to get some work done, everyone was leaving to get lunch.

after lunch, i needed to sync with my boss, but he and my coworker were busy, so i tried to find a way to withdraw. i eventually ended up so suspicious that i gave up for now, and went to sit in my boss's office thinking that he'd get to me when he was done.

the two of them carried on talking until my boss put his backpack on, at which point i interrupted to ask if he was leaving, and they both expressed surprise to learn that i'd been waiting patiently for them to finish...

... in parting, my boss asked me to do one more investigation.

i spent the remainder of the afternoon doing two things: sending some of the crypto to my south african bank account, and performing the investigation. it was roughly 6pm when i realized, while checking my results, that there was a much easier way to show that the investigation was pointless...

i walked home, we had a pleasant evening / vegan pizza dinner / chat with my mom / virtual tour around krybabie's mom's new apartment, which ended with mr smear's assertion (above).

we had a talk, and it's not clear if i handled it well or not. then we informed him, in the most confusing ways possible, of our new channukah tradition. at least he seemed happy about some of it :P

i didn't sleep well at all last night - both physically and psychologically - i've no idea whether i should go to bed soon or deliberately tire myself out.

breathing (a little bit better)

 yesterday was much, much calmer. gd did have a coughing fit, while urchin was visiting, but for the most part seems to be doing better. we postponed our dinner plans because she wasn't feeling fit enough for it, and aside from a shopping mission in the morning, the day was pretty much urchin visiting followed by us watching iron man and captain america in preparation for the avengers, both of which had mr smear literally jumping up and down. 

even though it was *really* later by the time we finished the second movie :P

i also had a positive encounter with a headhunter, and a nice long chat with horseman.

...

i didn't sleep very well last night - my mattress topper isn't really helping and my hips are sore - but when i did i had some mad dreams, including one in which a small chunk of my left hand got ripped out. the weather yesterday and today so far is surprisingly and pleasantly warm.

nice

 it's the middle of the night, and i'm having trouble sleeping again. i've spent the last hour or so doom-scrolling, now i'm going to try writing this and maybe, possibly, going back to bed,

i went to bed early last night, again, and i mostly slept through the night. i started the day with the beginning of what i presume is the final shadowrun mission, saved (and double-checked my save) and got ready to go out with gd to pick up snacks for our guests.

it was at that point that we realized that mr smear's bag was missing, the one with his epipen and mobile phone 🤮

i was panicking that we'd left it in a park or something, but then i checked google family link and was (somewhat) relieved to see that it was at or near the ice-cream parlor we'd stopped at. so gd went to the store for snacks, and i rushed over to the ice-cream parlor. it was a huge relief to find the bag there, and find everything in the bag, but the experience had certainly elevated my heartrate.

the minecraft playdate was great, the kids really enjoyed themselves and the adults had a good chat too. overall, excellent.

at some point gd decided that we needed to go and find food, so we went our separate ways and took mr smear with us to cafe eva. the only seats available were the comfy sofas, and after we'd finished eating mr smear pulled out his kindle (he's voraciously reading dr block books) and i continued reading superman: escape from bizarro world which is far more interesting than i expected it to be.

but between the comfy chair, and the food, and the atmosphere, i spent most of the remaining time there passing in and out of consciousness :P

...

eventually, we returned home and settled in as a family to watch pantheon (horseman's recommendation). as far as age-appropriateness is concerned, it's mostly fine with a rare scene where we need to send mr smear out of the room for a minute and then explain what happened afterwards. as far as entertainment / intellectual stimulation / writing is concerned, it's phenomenal, and we're all in, all three of us!

...

the only unpleasantness of the evening was mr smear being upset that we weren't going to watch another episode when it was already getting late on a school night :P

in spite of that, and the subsequent 45 minutes of him not brushing his teeth and then complaining that he wasn't being given time to read, bedtime went smoothly. and then i passed out on the couch, eventually moving to the bedroom, and then eventually moving back to the couch again. now i don't know what i want to do, because i don't want to get into a game, but i don't want to doom-scroll either.

ooh! maybe i should try actually reading again. it worked this afternoon :P

...

this long weekend has been good for me. we're now entering a more-or-less regular work-week tomorrow, and then it'll be ten days off. i'm really looking forward to that.

reversal

 WELL. we went to our friends for dinner last night, and aside from enjoying a really nice evening with them - and eating too much delicious food - we were all completely taken by surprise when mr smear and their daughter forgot their rivalry and just had a really good time together!

today was mostly relaxed, we played rayman: legends (we've restarted from scratch, and we're generally playing pretty well together), and we watched the second installment of pirates of the caribbean. so that was a great start to a saturday.

in the afternoon we all went out to play table tennis, which would have been nice except for a) mr smear throwing a wobbly on the way that generated a lot of unhappiness and b) the apparently-biting flies (both gd and mr smear complained about them) and wasps around the table.

so after all the drama in getting there, and the minor success in mr smear deciding he wanted to play, we ended up getting out of there without much playtime.

i had a good chat with horseman, though it's tough hearing how much he's been struggling (he's been suffering from chronic pain, he's in montreal where the only effective care is private, and he's had to quit his counselling job and has limited benefits that are running out).

in the evening, i put on my blades, mr smear got on his bike, we picked up our friend's daughter on hers and we went to the climbing wall together, for the last time on the three-month membership we bought. the kids were cool, and the evening was largely successful (her father and brother joined us after a while).

after a few walls mr smear decided he was done, but not after doing something that i had to punish him for. minor, but still. towards the end, i struck a bargain with him that i instantly regretted the moment i heard it coming out of my mouth - two more "goes" to drop the punishment.

gosdsdammit, i'm the one who's being trying to reinforce the idea that punishments are not transactional. fuck, fuck, fuck. afterwards, i explained to him that i'd made a mistake and that that won't be happening again...

the ride home was alright, and the rest of the evening was alright. now it's our bedtime, we have a big day tomorrow - first day of school, and ari's pain clinic appointment, at the same hour. whoo!

a day after

 did nothing yesterday afternoon. played inscryption, played some lego harry potter with mr smear (finished year three), thought a lot about what i wrote in yesterday's post.

like, okay. so i'm depressed. now what?

i woke up this morning to the news of the drone attack in tel aviv - my mother was awake at the time, and heard it - along with a link to a video horseman sent me about curating the five people you're closest to into a network to achieve things because it's not possible to achieve big things alone in this world.

this morning is, so far, going alright. and although we only found out about it last night - and dramatically believed that the child whose mom i messaged was ignoring my text - mr smear has been invited to a laser tag birthday party and we're leaving to take him there in about fifteen minutes (well, my mom and i, gd just left for a catch-up sewing class).

slow

it's getting late, and i have to be up at 4am to go fetch my mother from the airport - we're so excited that she's visiting!

yesterday:

after a chat with horseman, i went up to our elderly neighbor's place because i suddenly remembered in the middle of the night that i promised to visit her days ago and clean forgot. turns out she needed help with her wifi and an ipad her family bought her, as the neighbors who recently left had been letting her use their network.

she can't connect to ours through all the concrete, so she asked me if i could help her get internet installed. we then discovered that already did have internet installed, and we could upgrade her connection for less money than she was already paying. eventually, we managed to get her password sorted out, and her devices connected, and she was really happy.

she then informed me that she was particularly grateful because her husband and son both passed away many years ago, and the rest of her family is too far away to help with this sort of thing... so that was heartbreaking. it was interesting to learn that her daughter's a published poet.

afterwards, she gave me a super-sharp knife for gd and i came back home, gd responded by going to visit her and i took mr smear out to run errands. i asked the mongoose for advice and he invited me to join him and his daughter at dizengoff, so mr smear and i made our way there. stopping for an emergency breakfast sandwich along the way.

our mission at the center was really fun. we all had a good time, between the robotics and the games and the comics and the figures and the toys, although we didn't end up buying anything. and mr smear got a taste of a proper synthesizer at the music store :)

we ended up having lunch with them as well, even though that wasn't the plan, and after they rushed off for toddler nap-time we made our way home for a quiet, lazy afternoon and evening.

i started playing disco elysium. i'm enjoying it, it's brilliant, but after quite a few hours i still don't really understand what the game actually is. i mean, i want to solve the mystery, of course, but i get the feeling that that's merely a superficial element...

today:

aside from a midday excursion to discover a nearby park that tahoma suggested and pick up ingredients so that gd could make tabouleh for my mother, and an evening excursion to the climbing wall, today was very much spent indoors resting and playing video games.

the climbing wall experience was excellent, and mr smear got to the top of the really high wall he's been working on for the last couple of sessions.

it's now 11pm and i've got to be up at 4am to fetch my mom from the airport, so i think i'm going to go to bed pretty soon.

probably.