pump the brakes

it's been a weird autumn! and a weird april. everythings settled down a little and i think im start to rediscover my love for notekeeping and personal organisation. i simultaneously feel like a bit of a void in me and my life and am starting to id things i want to do more - do more art, see more music, organise more silly little events - but i now actually have the energy to make them happen! i've been appreciating the little things a bit more, spending more time with the tighter inner circle of friends, talking to my interstate pals more, playing more silly multiplayer videogames with the people who live a bit further from me, and i think it's working to level me out a bit. i'm focusing on kicking the grass is greener feelings and wanting the things that i don't have, rather appreciating the things that are right in front of me

on that note, some things i did this month (and a bit):

• continued to make progress on my music library cull. this was one of the bigger months for it and im about 3/4 of the way through. i've archived about 400 albums so far (💀)
• went to my first ever medieval fair! we saw blacksmiths, drank mead, watched horse trainers and armored fighters and i bought a big the-hobbit style green felted cloak
• started watching a friend's volleyball games! i haven't really watched team sports with genuine interest ever, frankly, but this has been a lot of fun. volleyball is a super fun sport to watch!
• made a vegan tiramisu for a friend's birthday. i'd never tried using aquafaba to make vegan whipped eggwhites and i was pretty impressed at how convincing they are

i've been rethinking my planning systems a bit recently - for the last month or two i've got huge value out of keeping a weekly notes page for work that goes over what i did, which tasks i worked on and what things i have to try to get done in the week. i also used to (and am trying to again) plan my expendable income purchases against a running list of things that i want to buy - this ensures that the things i need and want actually get bought, thus increasing my quality of life, instead of me buying yet another fucking secondhand laptop from a corporate action site. i also am trying to do a better job of keep an eye on my ongoing projects. these converging ideas has led me towards some kind of fortnightly personal meeting where i refresh myself on all these concepts when i get paid so less things fall between the cracks. in lieu of this plan coming to fruition just yet, my current projects are:

• helping to put together a spring equinox event (giving ourselves a lot of lead time)
• helping to put together a pride party with my climbing group
• making a bike frame bag
• trying to upgrade an old shimano bike so that it's roadworthy again
• plan some new tattoos - i just got a couple new small ones and i want some bigger ones to start filling out my body
• make a korean style pojagi (patchwork) curtain
• start putting plans into actions for regular movie nights, regular bike rides and semi-regular dinner parties with friends
• get a better job

headspace

i've definitely realised how much mental energy i spend on protecting myself from a perceived harm, which i think is a negative, unhelpful thing, but also how im still mourning a more comfortable life that i used to have. this is not helped by kind of just getting older and feeling more sore all the time. people warn you about how your back starts hurting but no one communicated that you would sometimes not be able to move your head for a whole day for no reason. i need to talk to a psychologist and i need to talk to a physio

whenever i think about neocities i think about this blogpost i read where the writer was talking about their doctor (who they are in love with) and described their movements and expressions and the way they held their handsin agonising detail. i want to see the world that way. instead, ive been thinking about the news, bicycles, and linux

international news

this is going to be the least groundbreaking, least cutting edge commentary, but holy shit. the war and indescriminate bombing is horrific and i absolutely dont want to minimise it, but the absolute embarassment that trump and his lackies are to themselves is incredible. every morning i wake up and hear about some truth social post trying to convince us that every move is actually does make sense, despite its clear lack of forethought, or that every move by another country is just proof that theyre winning, even when it's clear that theyre not. don't get me wrong, i have no love for the vast, vast majority of politicians, but it's both more uncomfortable and more worrying when it's obvious that these particular ones are A. entirely driven by even more fragile egos than usual and B. the kinds of kids who would lie in the schoolyard about their uncle working for nintendo.

i started writing out a sentence commending a lot of politicians for magically growing a spine and refusing to take part in the war themselves, but that's hardly a big surprise given the optics of the whole thing. it hasnt stopped most countries from hosting american military sites and sharing intelligence, like we continue to be happy to do. thanks guys. big ups to spain though for actually putting their foot down and refusing access to air bases

on the petrol point, i'm thankfully blessed to live close enough to everything in my city to comfortably take public transport most places, and it's been a great opportunity to knuckle down on cycling more. i've been surprised by how far i can get at the moment with pretty minimal impact to my energy for the rest of the day! it doesn't take long, you've just gotta start taking it a little more seriously

bikes

i've been trying to get a little more into bike media, but i've found it difficult to find stuff that fits my specific area of interest. a lot of youtubers are either mountain / gravel bikers, hardcore carbon road cyclists or fixie riders. i watched an absolutely terrifying video of a fixie bombing down a san francisco hill so fast that his chain detached, meaning that he now had absolute zero way to brake. no thanks. the commuter-spec-who-still-wants-something-that-looks-kind-of-sleek-and-interesting demographic seems to be much smaller. it exists, but it's also easy for them to transition to one of the aforementioned hyper-concentrated styles and suddenly i'm far less interested

i rolled the dice on a cool old shimano 600 with a red and yellow paintjob on this fairly well kept lugged steel frame. i think the bike might actually be way too small for me, but i'm going to take the risk and get it back up to speed as cheaply as i possibly can.

linux

asahi fedora remix

i got a cartoonishly good deal on an m2 macbook pro a couple of months back, but never quite gelled with macos. so i went completely nuclear and installed asahi linux on it (disclaimer: installing asahi linux on a macbook is surprisingly safe and easy to install and also surprisingly easy to reverse). the real cool upside to this is that i got to do something i've never done before - build a visual linux install from a terminal and nothing else. it was honestly surprisingly easy and only required a few simple tweaks in the beginning, notably that a default user didnt get created and had to be set up manually. besides those, while i got a little caught up by some tweaking of printer drivers and trying to get hibernation working (i failed). anyway: my big thoughts on linux on macbooks:

• mbp displays have higher pixel density than i'm used to. this is nice, and niri handles this surprisingly painlessly, but i had to give up on my beloved bitmap fonts. terminus is the biggest pixel font i found that i didnt hate the look of but i still didnt look quite right. thankfully, the high resolution sort of renders the benefit of bitmap fonts on low resolutions null and void because the text is inherently cleaner and nicer
• how do mac users make do without navigation buttons. this process has singlehandedly started my (gradual and also not set in stone) transition toward vim keybinds, simply because the lack of pgup, pgdn, home and end keys makes using your computer way harder
• the touchbar works so fucking fast on linux. it doesn't have the fun custom tools that some software has on macos, but also most of the software doesn't have these tools so whatever. they've also made huge strides towards future customisability so new options might be there in the near future. anyway, the noticeable delay for the media keys on holding fn is completely gone, its basically instant. cool!
• the iosevka font is very nice, and is likely to be my go-to for non bitmap fonts in the future

im gonna do more chatter on this in the future, hopefully a full setup blogpost. in general my linux experience continues to be a great time, i havent really missed windows, except when reaper acts funny, but even then its more quirks than actual problems. the real issue is when you cross the hump of not understanding what's going on to getting a better idea, suddenly you realise just how much freedom you have and how you can sort of do anything, and then you start wanting to do anything and end up wasting a lot of time setting up scripts to automate away the most menial of tasks. i, for example, spent many hours picking the best system to manage my wallpaper, and many more trying to create a script for offline definitions and synonyms.

top 3 albums of the month!

bandcamp triple threat! fuck you youtube!

ookii gekkou - vanishing twin

portrait with firewood - djrum

therapy - brendan eder ensemble