inside

 everyone had a rough night last night, but in our case it was having mr smear in our bed for much too long and plenty of siren disruptions.

the day began well, i managed to get a lot of my ideas down and read through some of what i needed to read through, and mr smear and i came up with another game design.

big data and his daughter came down for a visit; mr smear was being antisocial, but big data and i ran through a whole bunch of possibilities for the network disruptions and he found the bug: a bad ethernet cable 🤯

so now we have great network all throughout the apartment. i guess i'm going to be asking for a refund of the new network device.

i spent most of the rest of the day working on side projects, and then did another deal with mr smear (kick boxing for screen time). it went well! again!

we decided to watch strip search with mr smear tonight. i hope we don't regret this :P

...

here's a pretty good playlist of funk AI covers by conhuir. we were disappointed by most of the slipknot covers, but the metallica ones are awesome!

backwards

 i *did* go to bed relatively early, i think. if i recall correctly. it's kinda hard, though, because around twenty minutes to 1am the sirens went off and we all had to scramble downstairs into the shelter.

that was pretty rough.

the morning was okay, though. mr smear led the way to school so that he could demonstrate that he's ready to do the walk alone ("stay back, dad! i need to focus!"), and gd and i spent a quiet morning doing mostly nothing (i lie, i spent a good chunk of today putting together a couple of articles) and watching an episode of strip search. because we've been together for more than a decade and we still haven't finished the season 😂

oh, and we had to go give him his meds at 10am, the asshat security guard's been uncharacteristically cool with us and let me in to go look for him. while i was on a call with a support agent, and the kids were in breaktime. it was intense, and it felt pretty miraculous that i actually managed to find my boy in all that madness.

the afternoon was pretty chilled. i wanted to take mr smear to the beach in the evening, but gd reminded me at the last minute that we needed to be back by 6 for his next dose, so we ended up taking a short walk to a nearby park instead. where we happened to bump into a woman that i served with - we recognized each other, but until she did the "wait, is your name..." thing i wasn't 100% sure if i was looking at the person i thought i was :P

they've just arrived from overseas, with two english-speaking kids who need to integrate into the local schools, and it was a pleasure for both of us to see our kids immediately click. even though the older one's two years younger than mr smear, they're about the same height and they both speak roblox/minecraft fluently :P

we came back home, showered, relaxed a bit (i'm loving shadowrun), made kiddush (although my mom's properly sick, so she left her camera off), and watched the first half of the 1989 batman film. then mr smear went to bed - almost without a fuss, but he's probably still awake reading - and now it's time for me to figure out whether i'm going to sleep or not.

...

we bombed the shit out of hezbollah this evening, and netanyahu gave a speech in front of the UN (which has done little more than consistently expose itself as a mouthpiece for the most oppressive and dangerous regimes on the planet), and everyone here is trying to understand what it all means, whether it matters or not. and all i can think of, all i've been able to think of, is whether blinken's on the quatari payroll or not. it's been a year of all this insanity, and the west is still telling us to stand down / not escalate when we're the ones who're under attack.

dog-eat-dog

yesterday:

i tried to take my broken headphones back to source to take advantage of my warranty; the first door was locked and barred but the second was open. i checked the times listed and stepped inside. the girl behind the counter was really welcoming, but when i told her what my problem was she stopped me.
"i'm so sorry, but you're in the wrong store."

what?! apparently people make that mistake all the time, i'd actually walked into eb games.

"penny arcade?" she asked, looking at my hoodie. "nice!"

i appreciated that a cute girl had said that. then i thought about it a bit. i love penny arcade and have been a fan since forever, but i'm a little disappointed by the rehashing of the dickwolves in spite of the response. i expressed my feelings during the transgender post, like everyone else i was upset by the mass stupid but i kinda ignored the fallout. i understand why they made the shirts but that really was going too far and i didn't really think about it until now.

i'm still a huge fan, but a little less gushing now.

---i was tired when i arrived at the office. so was everyone else. we spent a long day indoors which was only a thing because i went outside looking for lunch and it was an intensely beautiful day! perfect weather for anything except work! the supermarket was out of my usual frozen meals and the lebanese place was out of falafel (really?!), so i got to enjoy a bit of the afternoon as i strolled around looking for vegan food that wasn't what i'd had the day before. i couldn't find any, so i returned to the indian place.

in the office, i'd taken to playing my music loud as we were the only ones there. lots of rock, a little hip hop. before he went, most-likely-to-become-a-sex-offender played some of his playlist and he had some pretty good shit. then, as a goodbye, he played nirvana - rape me.

seriously.

...

by the evening i was done. "minimal" and "feature complete" were what i'd been instructed to aim for, but if you've spent a few minutes planning and base your software on an extensible design then all sorts of helpful features tend to creep in organically and effortlessly.
i called darn over to check it out, and he told me "i'll see it tomorrow."

what? when we're on a crazy deadline and need to be integrated and operational the very next day? i wasn't having any of it. i instructed him to come over and set him in front of my computer. he saw everything he and megaman had asked for. he tried to break it. he failed. he stood up.

"keep going."

nice one. just before committing my work and getting out of there i made a few changes and one of them introduced a bug that i'd only find today after a massive hunt; now that i know what the cause was, it *still* doesn't make any sense :S

---i dropped my gear off at home and headed down to aota's for coffee and venting (hah! "venti"). that turned out to be a really good idea because i discovered a few interesting things about the office dynamic that i'd been in the dark about. after we'd talked a heck of a lot, she took me to visit her rabbi (it was really late already) to pick up two mezuzot.

the rabbi's such a sweet guy, i really wish aota hadn't asked him to justify a deceptively racist statement i'd called her out for making earlier. he almost didn't fall for it, but he didn't want to make waves so he tried to step around it - this resulted in him unwittingly arriving at an even worse conclusion. amazing what power words have...

i put them up when i returned home, it's been a while. mystical. i spent some time recounting my work hours and remembering that in my case overtime is never unpaid because i'm authorized to take it back whenever it suits me. i can't say the same for everyone else, though... not cool...

---today:

i woke up feeling much better. spiritually. partially because of the conversation with aota, mostly because i managed to get through to my mortgage bank and the lawyer's given me a good feeling regarding the apartment sale. maybe the mezuzot had something to do with it? :P

i enjoyed a better attitude the whole morning and managed to keep a friendly face in spite of megaman and darn and their evil machinations. remember the "keep going" from last night? i was informed this morning that on friday they'd pushed back the deadline a couple of weeks. friday! so why did we all come in over the weekend?

when i asked when i should let everyone know, i was told not to say anything because it would be demoralizing if the devs found out they'd come in for nothing. so we should keep the pressure on.

those evil fuckers.

there will be Very Big Words soon.

---other than that, it was an oddly reasonable day. i left early and got home to find it right-side-up after the cleaning lady had done her thing - very cool! i had a chat with my mum and then rushed off to muay thai.

i thought i was better, and that the headache that was just beginning was standard sinus and nothing more. i swallowed a tylenol and downed an energy drink before training, and arrived feeling alright after an intense jog. it felt good to step onto the mat and the warmup began well... except that that didn't last. halfway through the warmup i was struggling. really struggling. when my muscles refused to respond and i was dizzy i stepped off to the side to recover my breath and focus. it didn't take long for me to realize that for me the class was over - i apologized to the instructor and went to drink some water and try to recenter. i hoped i'd be ready for boxing, but after about ten minutes i found that just standing (and talking) was tough and i returned home pretty bummed.

at least it was a good excuse to watch ted videos and fix the '99 pants i ripped. they're not dead! they're getting better!
i did some shopping, made a great salad and watched a large chunk of reincarnated. the documentary makes me take back laughing at snoop lion for his reinvention.

great, i had stuff to do but i needed to post. dammit.

gender insensitive

okay, i'm upset by the internet getting angry with mike krahulik over his transgender insensitivity.

i'm not transgender, so i'll never really understand it but i can most certainly accept it. especially after a long and enlightening lecture about gender biology where i learned just how weird male / females definitions can be. regardless, most people are not informed, and that's not because they're bad, or narrow-minded. it's because our species-wide awareness of these issues is new enough that it goes directly against what everyone's been taught since forever.

it is in our nature to fight conflicting ideas, and being antagonized doesn't assist the process.

not that i don't identify with the defensive nature of any minority that feels threatened! but it's counter-productive. and here we see a flame war on twitter that had a net negative effect for both sides. mike eventually started coming around, and that demonstrates that he's not simply a jerk. you can't demonize people who don't know about *your* minority, there are plenty of minorities you don't know or care about and that's just fine because life's too short to invest only in everyone else.

mike and jerry are the faces of the penny arcade empire, and they got that way because they're human beings, not corporate representations. *that* is why we adore them. because they're honest even when they're at their worst. judge them! but discuss things with them, instead of jumping to conclusions and putting them on the defensive.

---about the dickwolves thing: it was a really funny comic and did not in any way imply that rape is okay, and most certainly not that the guys are "rape apologists". anyone upset by this comic on those grounds is simply too stupid to "get" that [JOKE EXPLANATION WARNING] what's being ridiculed is the gaming paradigm in which your character doesn't have to care about the plight of NPC's no matter how horrible their situation is. it's saying that rape is bad, and that it's weird that these games are telling you that you don't have to care about all the victims.

which is realistic, i guess. IRL you can't save everyone.