adventures in uncertainty

 what a weird day. the only times i went outside were to pick up reflective straps i'd ordered online (i haven't even opened the packages yet) and to take out the trash. the sky dripped a few drops on me along the way, but otherwise my time outside was uneventful and insufficient to constitute exercise.

from a health and wellness point of view, i'm not okay. i'm convinced that it's psychological, and that i'm just burned out and depressed.

...

i finished the first evangelion book this morning, and it is magnificent. or... manganificent?

i came across this at the library, and excitedly brought it home - only halfway through did i fully register that it's an adaptation of the series, not the other way around, but it's an adaptation with so much heart and soul!

all the little shifts really pull the series' threads more tightly together and make it not just emotionally powerful, but much more intellectually accessible. i recommend watching the original series first, but either way this is a fantastic book.

we watched the third episode over dinner, it was awesome.

...

i worked from home today, and i sat too long in my office chair. which i'm still sitting too long in, i guess. i'd to say i worked hard, but that expression's been slowly losing all meaning over the course of the year. we had an interesting online group meeting with my employer this afternoon, and one of the questions was "what do you do between prompts?".

well, i had an answer, but it depends on the kind of work i'm doing. for personal stuff, i'm usually messing with other projects while waiting for the response, so i cycle between them. for paid stuff, i'm usually either upgrading my "software factory", as one of my group put it, by improving my skills and refining my tooling setup, or i'm reading through the previous round's changes to get "closer to the source".

i went through a lot of that, today.

on a silly note, i misheard one of the group as we were all saying goodbye, and felt obliged to produce the following:

...

mr smear seems to have had a good day. fortunately or unfortunately, gd came to me today with the book report on maus he's been working on, and it said some disturbing things about the holocaust. so when he got home, we sat down to talk about it... he explained himself pretty well, and we're not alarmed any more, but in addition to coaching him on the language he uses to describe things (he "got it" pretty quickly), we're now planning a family trip to yad vashem. considering the fictional darkness he's already been exposed to i think he'll be able to handle it, and we want him to see and feel the reality and the human faces behind the numbers and clinical grim details.

...

i spent a lot of time thinking about investments today, i'm nervous about having all of our deposit money in indexes that may or may not crash. i've learned enough about investment and economics to be well into the valley of despair, so i don't trust any advice or theories on the internet but both sides make compelling arguments.

after thinking out loud and talking through a plan with my mom and gd after dinner, i decided to pull a chunk of money out of the traditional indexes, put some of it into an israel fund that includes real estate, and withdraw the rest to my bank account... in another few days i'm going to go in person to try and put that money away (along with the bonus i received) in a way that makes sense.

...

gd and i seem to be okay, but i'm still having moments of disconnection, still processing my feelings about the other night.

...

i've spent the past couple of hours working on security for one project and blockchain architecture for another, and it's approaching midnight already. i think i'm ready to call it a day.

the bubble

 i know enough about investment theory to know how little i understand, how little anyone understands. i know just enough to be helpless to make a decision when faced with a market full of noise, half doomsaying and freaking out that the AI bubble's about to burst, half calling for calm rationality and assuring everyone that things will get better, and that if there's going to be a crash it'll be sometime next year.

i don't know what to do about our deposit money. i should probably take half of it out and put it into something "safer". or maybe hedge it.

fuck.

...

gd and i left the apartment along with mr smear, and made the mistake of following the transport app's suggested route. we arrived about fifteen minutes later than planned for our meeting with the head dentist, but it didn't matter because she wasn't there anyway. the woman who was there - the office manager - was a right bitch. rude, obstructive, and it took everything in my power to not lose my shit while gd looked at me out of the side of her eyes, warning me not to let her get under my skin but amused that it was me getting upset and not here.

we left with an appointment to return in the afternoon, meaning they successfully burned my morning pre-office work time that i really, really need, as well as a good couple of hours out of my client hours in the afternoon which i also really, really need...

at least the head dentist was there when we returned, and even better, she speaks english so gd didn't need me to translate. she heard gd out, examined her, and sent us off with a recommendation to book an appointment with a periodontist.

according to gd, this *could* have been taken care of when we were in south africa and had dental health insurance, but the dentist magnanimously decided that it wasn't urgent enough.

smh.

...

work was pretty good, though the office was freezing and i sat shivering in my hoodie for a while before anyone else decided it was a problem worth looking into :P

on the one hand i'm frustrated by how much time it's taking getting PRs reviewed (my usual complaint), on the other it's giving me opportunities to learn more about the system and make better decisions 🤷‍♂️

...

at work, i received a phone call from mr smear's math teacher. he'd hit a girl 🤦‍♂️

BUT.

the teacher had borne witness to the provocation that came before it, and it was clear as day that while he should never be using force unless he's defending himself, the girls were messing with him non-stop and his response was, at the very least, understandable.

aside from validating his usual claims which we're often suspicious of, something else happened in the aftermath of the encounter: he surprised his teachers, and his parents, by taking responsibility, apologizing, and acknowledging that he had better options like coming to a teacher for help. this in itself was big, but in his conversation with his homeroom teacher and the councillor - who's the one who usually freaks out the most about his behavior - he was very open and direct, and i received a second phone call to discuss how mature he was being, and how together they'd realized that the kids were conflating "asking for help" with "snitching" (so we can have a conversation about that), and how mr smear's keeping his distance from his friend with the mouth; this is precisely what we advised him to do a couple of weeks ago, and it presented an opportunity to talk with the teacher about how these kids are interacting.

so that was good. we held a family meeting when we all got home, and mr smear was caught off guard because he was expecting to be punished; we made it clear that he'd crossed a line with the violence (no matter how soft it was in effect), but our focus was on how well he handled himself and how proud we were of him. i think this is the first time we've ever witnessed him allowing himself to be proud of himself, and it was an emotional moment for all of us!

then, in the evening, he reported something to gd - his friend with the mouth had said something absolutely beyond all boundaries "as a joke" (as usual), and this time i fired off a message to his mother. i was pleasantly surprised by her response, she handled it immediately, and i hope the effects are long lasting.

...

i worked until dinner, even though my brain was frying. we watched another episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins, which is really great, and i encouraged mr smear to finish the carrots he'd removed from dinner by rewarding him with a video about uploaded consciousness (well, sorta. the fruit fly brain being uploaded). i read some more of the light fantastic to him at bedtime, which is honestly consistently more polished and funny than the colour of magic.

by that stage of the evening i was falling apart. i spent about ten minutes working on a side project - planning a security strategy because i'm terrified of becoming successful enough to attract DOS or DOW attacks - then chatted with gd about our finances, then had a long catch up with my mom, and now... it's already later than i thought. i'm going to wind down and try to go to bed earlier than usual.

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.

broken plates

 i don't know which was more effective in waking me up, the extra coffee or having to confront the cleaning lady upstairs after she threw dirty soap water onto our balcony again.

i finally made some progress on my projects before mr smear came home from school, and then we all headed out to the mall to look for a halloween mask for him. and also a tri-phase wall socket for the borrowed electric stove, which of course the mall hardware center doesn't stock. we spent considerably more money on his costume than i'm comfortable with, and that's after i told gd that i'm debating with myself whether the current AI subscription is really worth it or not (i think i'm going to downgrade, but i've got mixed feelings about it).

i felt downright ill by the time we eventually got home, and after eating something in the hope it would make me feel better, i napped on the living room carpet (and a beanbag) for what must have been about 45 minutes. i did feel a bit better after.

the highlight of the evening came after kneading the challah-peño: i sat mr smear down and we watched the first couple of episodes of evangelion together. it was awesome ^_^

dinner was nice, gd was very proud of her polenta and tomato pesto sauce and it went surprisingly well with the challah-peño and avocado (we call it "soggy pizza" now). we had a long chat with my mom while we ate, and we were planning on watching a movie together afterwards.

we never watched anything. the past few hours were absolutely miserable, unhinged, and were damned near the end of me and gd. i think we're (somewhat) okay now, but we're all feeling traumatized, exhausted, and disconnected.

...

at least the games are coming along nicely...

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.

not up

 it hasn't been the greatest first-day-of-vacation-friday ever. it began alright, with some relaxed meditation (kind of) on the balcony, in spite of having woken up with a stiff neck and sore back after getting to bed *much* later than i'd intended.

then i watched in horror as the astra model crashed and burned, abysmally failing to understand my prompts and context, and making me understand that while outsourcing my developer brain to code that's inconsequential (like a video game) is one thing, but these new models are not significantly different from what came before and i still need to maintain the discipline of guiding, managing and keeping a close eye on the results.

then we went to the shops. but first we had a fight because misinterpretation on top of misinterpretation, and then we had back to back mall people and friday/erev chag shopping people and foreign workers on public transport with no sense of personal space people, although we did manage to pick up most of what we were looking for.

then we dropped mr smear off at home and did another run for the non-mall stuff, which was tedious but not as bad, and then we finally returned home.

which has mostly been okay, except for me losing my temper over mr smear doing something ugly while we recorded a greeting video for someone, and then much drama with gd have hidden something away that she needed, and now i'm sitting with chocolate halva and rum to stabilize while continuing to chip away at my projects.

i'm not really feeling the joy of the incoming holiday, but here we are...

shredding

 mr smear appears to be sick, so he came early yesterday and he's staying home today...

i bought him a lock yesterday morning on my way to my client, and discovered an amazing stationery store across the road ^_^

i realized on my way to the office that the client's catering is saving me a significant amount of money per month, which is a really nice bonus!

my day at the office was a combination of onboarding, meeting new people from the team, investigating the build failure that turned out to be affected more than just me, and all of this punctuated by round after round of shredding documents i've been gathering for the last eight months.

i'm most of the way through :P

my team lead has authorized me to take off a week for the sukkot holidays - i'm really excited for the staycation!

also, a decent lunch, a couple of healthy snacks, and too much shame to take an ice cream after going upstairs to find that the ice creams were all right outside an office filled with people and only a glass wall separating them. so my weight's down a little today already (back to 80kg after a week or two hovering around 82, and i have some shame to thank for that.

on the way home i called up sailor, and we ended up talking about his trauma-bonding. i hope my advise was helpful, but i also woke up around 4am this morning with an interesting idea for a game based on my understanding of mental trauma and spent twenty minutes or so working on writing it up.

while mr smear completed his rosh hashana cards (this was before i understood that he and gd hadn't understood the hebrew lit homework instructions), i watched more of des bishop's breaking china series, which is really fun!

we watched a sad episode of the wonder years over dinner (the piano recital), and after mr smear went to bed (relatively early) gd and i finally finished watching the first season of ludwig together, and i crawled into bed soon after.

...

we seem to have been out of the lice woods for a while now, and mr smear just got invited to sleep over at the carrier. so here we are strategizing over how to manage the next outbreak before he's even told us whether he wants to go or not 🙄

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.

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...

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.

some of the surprises were good

 i had a rough hour or so last night with my hip flexors, but otherwise i managed to get some pretty good sleep (going by the fact that i remember that i dreamed)

i started the day with volume 2 of my favorite thing is monsters, and aside from that and grocery shopping online i don't recall doing anything interesting.

work began with two conversations about game development - dx has apparently begun trying his hand at it, and one of the other guys showed some interest as he worked on simulations as part of his degree - and a little bit of jumping between tasks.

at noon, i received a phone call from the immigrant employment woman - i'll call her pioneer - and we talked for about an hour, this seems a natural fit for a partnership and she appears to be on board with my vision for a digital kibbutz. immediately afterwards, i received a message from a high school teacher i met last week informing me that she might have found some interesting people to work on another project of mine, one that ties in with the former.

this is all very exciting.

unfortunately, i learned that a meeting i was trying to set up with someone at my alma mata isn't going to happen, and i'm pretty disappointed because it should be something totally aligned with their values...

i came home for an employer group meeting, some of which was quite enlightening, and after an hour or two of more work i called it a day and mr smear and i strapped on our rollerblades and went for a ride.

oh, i watched a couple of my more recent spoken word pieces [1] [2], and i have the strangest sensation of wonder that i wrote those, because for years i've been feeling less than inspired and capable.

dinner was delicious, and i ate plenty, and then i gorged myself on chocolate, liquorice allsorts and whatever the fizzer-like candies are called. then we had a chat with my mom, which included a big discussion about mr smear's barmitzvah plans, and after saying goodnight to mr smear gd and i watched a bit more of ludwig.

i was already in bed, but then gd walked into the fan carrying a cup of water which was somehow my fault, so now i'm cooling off and hoping to get back into sleep mode soon.

a belated hogwart's letter

 it's mr smear's 11th birthday today! he got a hand-drawn pseudo-hogwart's letter, but considering the fact that he's already been at the real-life equivalent of hogwart's for the past year it's a bit late :P

he spent a good chunk of his day watching harry potter, when he wasn't just chilling. sounds like a pretty good birthday plan to me 🤷‍♂️

...

i just got home deeply frustrated, and i'm feeling burned out for the second day in a row. i've invested an enormous amount of effort in keeping my AI token usage down, and in figuring out how to use mlflow to gain insight into where my token spend is going, but i've hit my daily budget two days in a row and i've already burned through more than half of my monthly limit.

and i have very little to show for it, because anthropic's AI be dumb as fuck. i was complaining to one of the AI guys next to me earlier, and the guy sitting behind me turned out to be the head of the program (just visiting our side of the office for the day) and he jumped in to clarify that i must be doing something wrong. he explained "progressive disclosure" to me (i'm very familiar, just not with the term) and sent me a link to some good tips on writing CLAUDE.md, and recommended claude-mem, which seemed like a good idea, but in retrospect i think that's the reason that i blew through half my daily budget in the last session before i left the office thoroughly deflated and demoralized.

i can't be certain, though, because my teammate asked me to redirect my mlflow traces to a central location, and there they don't provide enough context for me to figure out what the actual calls entailed.

i'm so over AAALLLLLLLLL of this bullshit. it's just ridiculous.

...

tuesday night:

we started watching life of brian - after giving up on a bunch of other movies that plex wasn't playing nicely with - and i had to cut the evening short and climb into bed because i was done.

yesterday:

i've started the past two days reading inside moebius part 1, which is sheer brilliance. having said that, i only barely started it yesterday because i was so inspired to dive into the game design for the tarot-based game i started working on last week. i have some really exciting ideas.

unfortunately, trying to share those ideas with my wife that early in the morning led to a bit of a fight; although it resolved with us both learning something important, it did burn my "roadmap" time and started the day with a shitty vibe. then the work day dragged me down into the dumps, ending with an awful sequence of me losing my mind (and my token budget) trying to understand why all my metrics were disappearing (and subsequently learning that metrics must be whitelisted manually in order to be preserved, but not for all the repos i've been working on), and then being called into a meeting with my client team's lead and making a total ass of myself both because she was asking questions about how the service operated, which is a nightmare to explain and which both of us had very different understandings of, and because i was struggling to untangle a whole lot of related stuff in my head, when all she really wanted to know was "is this possible?", a question which had a very simple answer.

so that was the note i left the office on yesterday. i felt broken, and like my brain was melting out my ears.

...

i met mr smear at the bus stop, and we hopped on a bus to dizengoff in the hopes we'd be able to return the motion controllers we'd bought for his birthday. in addition to having a fun time together, i was extremely relieved (and impressed!) to discover that the guys running the second hand game shop are really decent, and kind, and they did what they could to figure out how we could make the controllers work before pleasantly accepting them and returning the money.

i'll definitely be happy to do business with them again.

we picked up some stuff at the supermarket (including a treat of malt beer for mr smear), had an awkward moment leaving because - for a second time - the self-checkout hadn't sent me my receipt and the security guard wouldn't let us out, and then we returned home for dinner.

after dinner, we finished watching life of brian. i was constantly worried that mr smear would bail, and he did want to at one point, but by the time it was over he informed me that in his opinion it's a solid 8/10 🤘

today:

i got up early, read, and spent just more than an hour on my auto-doc project before heading to the office, very much not wanting to go. as described, the work day sucked. in addition to everything else, during the afternoon i developed painful bloating, and that combined with my work stress to make me really unhappy and very, very keen to get the hell out of there.

gd's not feeling too well either, so for mr smear's birthday dinner we're ordering instead of going out. 

...

good grief.

on the edge

 today was just... unbelievable.

i almost made progress with my auto-doc, but had to leave halfway to make it to the office on time for my team daily that i didn't know had been postponed.

aside from reviewing a teammate's code (which happened to provide some very helpful hints for my auto-doc integration), i spent all of my client hours working on the golang service that i'd said i was done with, but kept diving down the rabbit hole and discovering weirder and weirder things.

before noon i travelled to my employer's office to meet with the gameis guy. i couldn't find him, but i had a sync with my mentor anyway. then i looked for him again, bumping into my sales team rep and getting some "insider information" regarding which way the wind is blowing - anyone who isn't "with the program" as far as AI is concerned is going to have a very tough time finding employment or staying employed. i still couldn't find him, and ended up being drawn in to a "tech circle" (which was interesting), after which i finally found him but only had 25 minutes of his time before he had to go off to something.

so i sat down with him and his friend, and learned that they're both working at our employer as a day job, but run a gaming company as a night job as well. they gave me all sorts of advice, and insights, in addition to a brief summary of their crazy journey so far.

immediately after that i sat down with a guy i'd met at the hackathon, and i spent the next twenty minutes or so flooding him with info and advice (mostly about working with AI) and getting him onboard with my "async" game jam idea.

then i spoke to my group lead, and introduced her to my auto-doc, and she was super excited when she saw the demo ^_^

the rest of the work day - in the office, and at home - was all about refining my golang service effort and incrementally solving each wave of issues. it's been a trip, and a very expensive one: i'm pretty confident that claude's opus model has suddenly becoming considerably dumber and way more expensive :/

i got home to find gd in a state of shock, she has no idea how to deal with a little boy whose family isn't particularly into hygiene (or boundaries). i took the kids for a walk to pick up snacks, regaling them with AI horror stories; apparently, i was effective enough that mr smear's friend stopped me to delete chatgpt from his phone.

we were musing over whether mixing the salt & pepper chips with the balsamic vinegar & caramelized onion flavors of country chips would approach a salt & vinegar experience, and i decided it was worth a try: the kids were horrified, but i bought them anyway and after our sushi dinner (which we all ate too much of) we gave it a try, and while it wasn't what we were hoping for it was still a case of the whole being better than the sum of its parts.

i managed to get the two of them showered between getting home and eating dinner, which was quite a story.

my sister came home pretty late, after we'd begun trying to get the kids to bed (they're camping out in the living room), and while they amused themselves with non-screen activities (much to their chagrin) the three of us sat in our office and retold some pretty hairy parts of our life stories. and then it was midnight, and the kids had been asleep for a while without us realizing, and now it's time to call it a night and get ready for an important morning.

gameis 2026

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

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

lunch was surprisingly good, really decent vegan options.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

big week ahead

 guardians of the galaxy vol. 3 was a mistake, and mr smear and i have agreed that we're not considering it canon. gd and i  watched it three years ago and apparently we weren't bothered by the hollywood tie-everything-up-neatly-with-a-bow drivel and the stream of character assassinations at the end. it kind of feels like the grease fan theory, perhaps rocket did die and the end was his ascension fantasy.

also, it manages to be a lot more gruesome than the others and mr smear - surprisingly - didn't enjoy that.

so that was a good chunk of yesterday. i also spent a few hours on my auto-doc side project, which feels like it's on its way to being ready for integration 🤞

mr smear and i put on our rollerblades relatively late in the evening, and headed out for some exercise. the first part was dramatically unpleasant (we keep having to talk about not being disrespectful, and yesterday evening's incident was on the heels of him lecturing me about how i should teach him and whether i was right to make him learn to ride a bike first), but we managed to get through it and enjoy the rest of the ride together. on the way back, we saw a jackal jump into the bushes a couple of blocks from our apartment and i had to explain to mr smear that - at his current speed - he wasn't going to be outrunning anything on four legs and might need to defend himself with his wrist pads if keeping away wasn't sufficient...

the evening was smooth, and included a visit from our upstairs friends. on their way out, big data informed me that our new fluxx packs have arrived, and that the delivery tax includes them playing with star fluxx before handing them over. they're not too interested in cthulu fluxx, though :P

i continued working on the auto-doc until midnight, by which time i was having trouble keeping my eyes open. due to hip flexor issues it took me a while to fall sleep, and i had to wake up and stretch again a couple of hours later, but otherwise i slept relatively well.

i began my day on the balcony enjoying the green and the breeze, invited mr smear over to explain palm tree growth and how deciduous trees' leaves are like tiny palms begging sunlight from the sky, only they wither and die as the tree curls up to hibernate for the winter.

now to start the new week, wondering if and when the war on iran resuming will affect us (especially with mr smear at his day camp for the next couple of week), and resuming the auto-doc work for the next hour or two before jumping on work-work (though the auto-doc is technically supposed to be that too) and trying to get as much done so i can take tomorrow off for the game dev conference with limited stress. oh, and planning for my sister's visit.

friday mall stress

the good parts of the day:

finishing up the baseline functionality of the auto-doc project, and it seems pretty solid! i've also written up most of the first article. the sun has already set, so i've effectively stopped for the day. that all took quite a lot of hours.

watching guardians of the galaxy vol. 2 together, even if i did fall asleep for a bit of it.

the not-so-good parts of the day:

the shopping mission... both parts. between not finding the stuff we wanted, and mr smear being a bit sick (snuffly, but he seems fine now), and occasionally quite disrespectful. and mall people, i was irritable as hell. also, gd and i having a fight over something (one of those relationship-long fights), and i've just learned it's still not done.

preoccupation

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

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

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

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

...

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

good grief.

eleven

happy fourth of july! another wedding anniversary with us still going strong in spite of ourselves.

...

 i did sleep better last night, but that's (as usual) off a low bar and my back's really sore right now.

i haven't done anything "constructive" today. first coffee with gd on the balcony, me continuing to very slowly make my way through the footnotes of the thrilling adventures of lovelace and babbage,

it took us a little too long to get out the house this morning, but mr smear and i went on a rollerblading journey, with a couple of fun stops in the park, a couple of attempts to encourage nervous dogs to befriend humans on wheels, and a coffee and orange juice stop along the way.

then it was cold showers and mix-and-match lunch and gaming and massage tool and napping.

i'm soooo tired, and my back's sore, but so far it's been a pretty good day nonetheless.

trepidation

prior to leaving the apartment, we wanted to record a video for my freshly octogenarian cousin. this ended up in drama because mr smear and i had had a misunderstanding about screentime...

...

my mentor didn't get back to me until the evening, and i couldn't not say anything. after getting to the office, i spent an hour or so preparing a message for my client and manager, and ran it past my mother as a sanity check, and fired it off.

it wasn't until the middle of the night that i got a response, which was my client politely thanking me for my input and scheduling a face-to-face. so today's gonna be interesting.

because i'm generally bored, i got a phone call from my wife to inform me that my son, at the public toilets at the mall, had managed to drop his phone into the urinal. and because that wasn't enough, he'd decided to wash it thoroughly with soap and water 🤦‍♂️

then later she called again to inform me that she'd shorted the kitchen circuit by trying to "fix" the toaster while it was still plugged in. FML

for my afternoon meeting, i sat down in the phone booth and waited a few minutes for the guy to show up... he didn't. but while i was there anyway, and i didn't have a heck of a lot of productive stuff to do anyway, i randomly revisited a project i worked on a couple of months ago and got to work fixing memory leaks. i was so excited about doing something constructive that i ended up leaving the office much later than i'd planned...

during that time - after i'd returned to my desk, at least - two weird things happened. i missed the beginning of the first, so i have no idea if this literally happened or if everyone was in on some big joke: apparently one of the guys i've been working with pooped himself? and had to pick it up off the floor? or maybe they were kidding and a dog had left him a present? i don't know. it was very strange, and after i asked (and was told it actually was him) i felt really stupid for asking.

the second, i heard that another guy i've been working closely with just got fired. i hope that's not true.

the third, my client paying our section a visit. after my message. at no point did he attempt to converse with me, but he wasn't unfriendly when i walked past him and said hi, so 🤷‍♂️

...

mr smear was an asshole to me when i got home, which on top of everything else really sucked.

i spoke to my mentor, who used much more colorful language than me when i described the level of idiocy i'm dealing with.

over dinner, we watched half of fern gully, which is good, but upsetting to gd...

after mr smear's shower we had a massive fight over him being rude, but we did have a good conversation afterwards and bedtime was pleasant enough.

i went to bed a little earlier than usual, and i slept alright.

mr smear and i both woke up too early this morning. after reading and resting and stretching, i hunted down the old phones and began the friction-filled process of switching him back to his previous phone. also, learned that rescuing a phone with rice is an absolutely useless old wives' tale.

...

i'm trying to solve a big organizational problem in my head before my meeting with my client. my world is mad.

girl drama claude drama

 hoooo boy, it's been a couple of days. i'm going to be rushing through stuff i don't want to rush through...

yesterday:

arriving in the office just in time for my meeting, then spending a good half hour trying to get my computer connected to the network. nobody knows why my vpn connection keeps dropping, and i lost a significant amount of ephemeral context - not just work time - resolving it.

i spent a good chunk of my day running test jobs to enable me to finish working on one of the changes, and then i had to leave early to pick up mr smear, grab a bite to eat (and a cup of coffee), and head south to his class end-of-year pool party at a country club.

not only did we have quite a time getting there, between bus line switches and an unhelpful transit app, and some drugged out guy aggressively harassing innocent bystanders (he came too close for comfort while mr smear was fiddling with his sandals, but i think he ducked when he picked up my vibe).

while we were trying to get there, gd had managed to get herself lost on the way to the dentist, and there was much drama as i tried to troubleshoot remotely for her...

the pool party was really cool. the kids in this school are a different culture completely, much less cynical, and there were a few "performances", a couple of nice speeches, and then into the water. only a couple of parents went in with the kids - myself being one of them - and i had a good chat with the mom of one of mr smear's friends. and then some fun with mr smear before getting out (he was disappointed, but he was having a good time with his friends) into a chilly post-water 28 degrees.

i sat with a couple of other parents and we really got in to politics, ai, economics and ideologies, it was an exhilarating rabbit-hole dive and i think we all enjoyed it. when we were thinking about leaving, the mom offered me and mr smear a ride home, which i gratefully accepted.

suddenly, mr smear came out the pool and declared that he was "bored" and ready to go, but i could tell by his expression that something was up. i walked with him a little and managed to get it out of him - one of the kids had told his class nemesis that he liked one of the girls, they all were chanting it loudly, and the girl in question heard and apparently seemed to quite enjoy the idea of mr smear liking her.

he was mortified, dying inside, and i gave him some calming advice... but also, when i asked him what her name was, had to inform him that we were going to be going home with them in the car!

both the kids were a bit distracted on the way to the vehicle, but she saved mr smear from the scenario he was particularly dreading by jumping into the front seat. but then, as we pulled out, mr smear let one rip - i don't think anyone else heard it, but he opened that window really quickly 🤣

the ride home was much less awkward, the little girl's very sweet, and he made it home in one piece :)

it was pretty late, we had an amazing dumpling-y dinner that gd's concocted, and a good conversation about relationships and responding to teasing at bedtime.

today:

i didn't sleep so well last night, i spent at least a couple of miserably hours lying in bed, not quite awake but certainly not asleep.

i received some good news this morning, and some not-so-good news: gd's physio treatments are finally being covered - half the amount, but considerably better than nothing - and my request to have the parking fine cancelled was rejected.

the main thing this morning before heading to work was switching my copilot subscription for a claude code one. i figured it made the most sense, not just because it seems better from a value-for-money point of view, but also because my client is switching everyone over to it and i have to learn how to work with it anyway.

so that was pretty much the story of my day: trying to get real work done while simultaneously trying to get claude code to work the way i want it to. it's not a trivial migration at all, and claude code does a bunch of things in an utterly infuriating way (and i'm not the only one in our area to feel this). that stretched the day into a particularly long and emotionally draining one - lots of "i REALLY hate claude" moments - and i got stuck on something at the end of the work day that made it take longer to get out of the office than i could handle.

i picked up some healthy snacks from the supermarket on the way home. i wanted to take mr smear rollerblading, but he was doing hebrew homework and i walked in just in time to go over it with him. we both learned some stuff, but overall i'm very pleased with how he's doing.

we watched some more grease at dinner, which is initiating quite a few interesting conversations, and after dinner we had a lengthy and heated discussion about an incident with the crazy mom's manipulative daughter at school today; i'm so grateful that he voluntarily let us know immediately after school came out, because that gave me an opportunity to text his teacher before the madwoman poisons things.

i managed to do a little bit of productive stuff since putting him to bed, but i had to stop to write this and now it's feeling like bedtime.