I think it's important that I didn't do it for anybody else. I asked myself what would make me feel better, and it was this. During the hard parts, I put a lot of weight on my lived experience that *I can do this.* And I really did feel better! That was the point. Not optimizing myself for some external grindset.

I'm very aware that I could easily make a brand out of being a hustle anticapitalist, and that would be very funny, but that would also miss the point. Even a lot of self improvement stuff misses the point, the why you'd improve yourself. Are you doing what makes you happy? Are you constructing the self you'd be happy in? That's the shit that matters. Your body, mind and soul are the only things you always take with you everywhere. You should be kind to them. You should be giving them opportunities to prove themselves and grow, so when you need them, you don't have to wonder if they can support you in a crisis. That's all.

And like, the thing is, I'm NOT up to my old capacity in a lot of ways, and I can't be. But what I am realizing is I was underestimating how much good I could make out of a bad situation, and that's a lesson I need to internalize and bring with me, so I have it ready the next time life kicks me. I can't always just make those bad situations go away. But I can trust my ability to rebuild, that I can do that better than looks possible from the bed of an AirBnB. That even if my body has a lot of limits, there's always a starting point to rebuild the trust and companionship I have with my physical form.

Anyways. Not only am I getting pretty close to attempting an uphill bike ride in max gear soon, after this morning's ride went so well... I did a mile on the elliptical this evening to burn off some emotional steam. I'm dealing with a lot on the front, but I'm bouncing back better than I expected to be possible. I've smiled and laughed and cuddled and helped and planned for tomorrow. I'm happy. Even if I'm sad.

Likewise, with my brain. I've got back into software again recently. I really do think it's because I'm getting fit and achieving things in *that* space that I didn't think I could achieve pre-surgery. My brain is reaping the benefits. I pretty recently was terrified that I hadn't written software in a long time, that I might be too rusty to get back into it or hold that core part of me as an identity anymore. I know @hyc remembers that. But by investing effort in my body and learning better how to operate it, I was able to get back in. My brain was there for me. I should have believed all along, but it was easier with a spark of evidence, and that was a flame I could fan. Lately, disruptive life events aside, I'm really enjoying programming in C again, and feeling rewarded by the experiments I've tried.

I've really got into rebuilding my physical self in earnest in the last couple months. That's been hard. @arichtman made me laugh recently with a line something like, "life really doesn't let up punching you in the dick, does it?" Because he's not wrong, but neither was my reaction. I'm stubborn. Life will learn the hard way that I kick back.

But that's still a little punishment-coded, I'm realizing. When I finally started really feeling progress, the reason it was so good is I could rely on my body. And I was learning the skill HOW. If you don't know your limits and you overdo things, that feels like broken trust. But listening to your body and growing into its feedback tells you: "this is a feeling I can address by slowing down" or "this is difficult but it's a thing I know I can do." You become your body's teammate. You learn to be trustworthy to each other, and that's incremental.

In February I was in really bad condition. Not my fault, some of you have already heard about how my last apartment poisoned me two different ways, *and* I lost a genetic lottery like a lot of women in my life, which still requires surgery to fix.

I couldn't really trust my body to do things I needed it to. Even after getting out of a literal toxic environment, I had to spend most of my time laying in bed. My capacity to do things came and went unpredictably. I couldn't really make commitments to people.

What really sucks is that your brain is a subset of your body, and I couldn't even keep intellectually busy. I always thought I could Stephen Hawking my way through life in the worst case. In hindsight, that was pretty naïve. So I couldn't even trust my brain, at least in a capacity sense.

Exercise can be really therapeutic. I needed that today. I ate a lot of junk food to cope with some stuff, and I'm not much a believer in exercising to burn off indulgences. That's some symbolic Christian mysticism. The math doesn't work out. But motion helps with symptoms when I eat stuff that isn't good for me, as well as building up my body in ways that it can take better care of me. Punishment is usually a bad reason to do things. Trust, on the other hand, keeps surprising me in its ability to frame and motivate good decisions.

I hate to make this the follow-up, but when you're having a possible final conversation with someone on the phone, it is not really an appropriate time for a Google Fi notification to show up crowing about how the audio quality of your call is being enhanced with AI.

Especially when she has to hand off the phone to someone else, because she can't understand you.

Really not having a great day.

Sometimes the hard stuff is easier to do when you're alone.

RE: https://glauca.space/@q/117090045049586556

Well that's how I find out there's a new one and I'll probably agree with its contents. Jottin' that down.

First phone call done. Now we wait. God, that must have been a disjointed voicemail I just left.

I don't know if I'm gonna get any code done today. Family emergency. Kinda frozen in place trying to psych myself up for a phone call. Maybe it's not a good thing that phones also have social media, where you can get lost in a self-soothing loop.

What's crazy is I heard "Girls in Bikinis" so long ago, and before I got into Poppy, that when I heard it listening through Am I A Girl?, I was like "oh! She covered that song, fascinating."

And then from all I can find now, she was one of the writers! It's her song! Ain't no cover about it. Which explains the bisexual power move of that little "I wanna see boys in bikinis too" bridge. The whole song is admittedly doing the thing where it's riding a line between commentary on objectification vs objectification itself, but like... I do have to respect the confidence of it all.

Also, there's always this divide where devs feel pressure to Add! More! Features! For the users!

And as a user, but possibly an atypical one, I tend to gravitate towards simplicity and performance.

So one of the coolest outcomes we might get out of having multiple different viable transformer plugins (at different levels of complexity/feature richness) that can work on the same data schema, is actually getting to see what people prefer when given a genuine choice.

I suspect the answer is going to be some kind of "simplest thing that gets my needs done, but no simpler." Which varies from person to person of course.

Like, I don't think we necessarily have to go all the way back to the 2G-era(??) "plain text and menus" model. I actually think it would be quite cool and useful to support things like LaTeX formulas and images, and you can do that even on the lower-power chips these days, in a way too simple to confuse screen readers (although whether they can keep up with audio synthesis is another question - I remember seeing @freya once rail against ESP32s as an accessibility pothole, and I suspected it was a synthesis performance problem but was too intimidated to ask!).

But like. "Dumb phone made in the last 5 years" is probably a good reference point for an intentionally pruned feature set for basic respectful web browsing. And then other more "behavioral" transformers can vary from simple to advanced to cover a wide range of use cases.

Also, this will probably be the last time I post the link for awhile since I don't want to be spammy, but I just yesterday wrote a blog post about a consent-related topic and then (as Endeavorance would say) STUFF KEEPS HAPPENING. It's probably just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.

The more I've thought about this from a specifically consent perspective, the more it irks me. Even JS that doesn't need any funky permissions can still infinite-loop or otherwise burn through someone's phone battery, it raises the bare minimum features a browser needs to support, and the line between what needs a permission from the user vs. not is not just arbitrary - it's heavily influenced by techbro culture (even in the FOSS side) and pressure from companies like Google. And meanwhile, things like Reader Mode in Firefox exist to unfuck the web because people often don't want all this! That actually might be a good starting point for what a pared down formatting model should contain.

https://maddiem4.cc/blog/fuller-stack/0037-the-static-speaks-my-name

My initial read is it probably makes a lot more sense to join the Island One Network than to run my own instance, though both are possible. Heck, maybe I'll do the latter someday. I'm not in an urgent rush to even do the former, I just kinda want to be better informed on my slate of options so it can cook in the back of my brain.

https://codeberg.org/oliphant/pelago

I kinda want to get more into the Pelago stuff at some point. I was reading this article earlier (as posted by @onepict) and thinking "man it would be nice if our idea of social media was carefully scaled up from group chats instead of carefully scaled down from the public-everything model that closed platforms normalized because it served them," and then realized I was talking about something that kind of already existed (and still used ActivityPub as the federated data protocol).

https://thenexusofprivacy.net/consent-for-fediverse-developers/

Given the current zeitgeist of pointing and laughing (or more) at Fedi scrapers, I'm curious to get some other people's reactions on something.

There's this bot. It's in German. It seems to be some kind of hype bot that nobody really paid attention to after initial configuration? And at least from what I can see on the profile page it literally only boosts MY posts? I'm utterly baffled at it. I've never blocked it because it's never done anything that felt intentionally obnoxious or wildly irresponsible. I just... I don't get it. Why. I have been wondering why for months.

Should I block this? Like what the fuck.

https://mastodon.pnpde.social/@nachbarschaft@pnpde.social

Now normal, well-adjusted people will probably jump to the conclusion that Hex Core is a band. It is not. Some people who play League of Legends will make a 🤔 face and say "isn't that part of Victor's passive that has 3 upgrade tiers?" and you're getting warmer, even partially correct.

Pentakill is a fictional metal band releasing real music. If you've heard of K/DA, same idea - Riot Games does these as fun promotions. I unironically love all three Pentakill albums - they're GOOD! And there's a running thing where they'll have a song with "Hex Core" in the title, which has a bit more electronic production vs the rest of the album, arguably becoming more NIN-like. For some reason I Mandela Effected myself into believing Lost Chapter had a Hex Core Mk. 3 song on it, but that seems to not be real.

Anyways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVbNyR5h6IQ

Between the bike ride and preparing the prickly pears after I got home, I finished The Fragile. I can tell this is going to be an album I listen to regularly - and like, no surprise, it's Nine Inch Nails.

The little troublemaker in me kinda wants to post Starfuckers Inc., which is genuinely a good song. But I'm actually going to highlight Just Like You Imagined. It really stood out to me as I powered up the hill (I wasn't even that winded at the top! I am actually physiologically adapting and getting fit!). Why did it stand out to me? Because the style of bitcrush makes this the most Hex Core sounding song by NIN I've ever heard, and it's kinda wild that no NIN song has ever struck that connection for me before. It's just the Hex Core-est.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqWM-tXtoBU