Before I met Amber I never expected to get married again. No joke, I really thought I’d just solo the rest of my life or just at most have a “life partner” that’s close but I’m not legally attached to, because it was a terrifying thought to be legally attached to pretty much anyone.

Then I met Amber, and she’s my life partner. She’s it. She’s my ride or die, and now she’s my wife.

I love you, my wife. More! ❤️

The borderline ex is being an asshole again. She’s been manipulating our son and trying to get him to “keep secrets” because she knows she’s a half-ass mother. She’s also getting called out on it and now being an asshole publicly about my wife. This from someone whose gut is so large she can’t keep her navel clean enough to stop it from weeping with infection. This from someone who had her tongue split. This from someone who has fucking face tattoos, for Christ sakes. Jesus Christ. Why are borderlines like this?

I’m sitting here on my laptop writing this, updating my blog to conform to the latest Hugo requirements, and holding my wife’s foot. She’s banging out an 18 page essay for her class and I’m just sitting next to her and cuddling her, enjoying her presence, touching her skin in soothing ways that say “I adore you”. It is a simple weekend, but a wonderful one. It seems like every week that passes we get closer, and if I have to leave town for work, it doubles the closeness that grows.

I’ve learned a thing or two about this fickle material. The first thing I’ve learned is; Holy balls does it warp. If you’re printing something rectangular, you’re probably going to either need “mouse ears” or five layers of raft in order to compensate for irregular material cooling. Yes, that’s why warping happens. Material is cooler in one part of the already established material than the rest, so the cooler part contracts and causes the part to warp.

Caffeine might be the most nefarious thing we humans have normalized. What a drug, right? It makes you feel like you’re exercising just being stationary. It increases your sitting heart rate. It gives you a burst of energy. It also strongly counteracts feelings of tiredness.

Well, those are the good things about caffeine. The negative points are all over the map, though. They range from the inconvenience of existing without caffeine for a day to the worst migraine you’ve ever experienced when you try to quit cold turkey.

Holy fucking shit. I just overhauled the theme I use on this blog with a ton of overrides to make it compliant with Hugo v0.130, and now I’m getting a warning about YET ANOTHER deprecated setting. I really need to look at the Hugo roadmap to see if I can get ahead of this theme nonsense. It’s unreal, truly. I appreciate the performance gains I’ve noticed over time, but the constant smacking down of conventions that have worked well enough for as long as they have is getting pretty tiresome. Especially when so much of it feels really arbitrary.

Do you remember where you were the day the planes hit the twin towers? I sure remember where I was.

Shit was crazy.

Never before had their been such an audacious action taken against US sovereignty. The red, white, and blue, violated within her borders by those who wish to do her harm. Ironically, they didn’t do nearly as much harm as voters did afterward.

It has now been 8356 days since the temporary provisions of the Patriot Act have been instated.

In order to create a post you have to give it a title. I never have a title for new posts, I haven’t written them yet. So I pick a jumble of words to create my file with and then just move on to writing. Sometimes I stay within the topic, but mostly the title is not the topic. I dunno.

Weekdays are certainly not my favorite days. They’re really the worst days. They don’t start getting good until about 5pm, if I’m being honest with myself. Weekends are where it’s at. That’s the good stuff. Those days where people don’t ask anything of you. Where you can just laze about your house in pajamas for a contiguous 48 hour window and just enjoy yourself. That’s really where it’s at. How do I make every day of the week like that? Do I have to get reincarnated as offspring of a billionaire? I think that might be the only way to do that. I can’t just “start” midway through my life as a billionaire or offspring of one. I guess that explains that weird 80’s genre of people inheriting massive amounts of cash. People really do daydream about not having to sit through this mundane bullshit ever again. I know I do. Though inheritance is maybe not the most optimal route. I guess it’s better than a kick in the dick.

Tomorrow is Friday. I can’t wait.

Apparently Elegoo has rebranded “OrcaSlicer”, which I haven’t tried yet, and released it as an official slicer for the Neptune 4 (and likely all their 3D FDM printers). I might try it out. PrusaSlicer was also based on slic3r, so it’s likely that it has a somewhat similar feel to PrusaSlicer.

I’m so tired. My grandmother developed emphysema in her thirties and I’m honestly terrified I may also have developed it. I know it made her life substantially more difficult, despite the fact that she wound up living to 70.

School is back in full swing for all grade levels by this point. Soon we’ll be folding into fall and then the holiday season, along with all the headaches and hassle they bring. I finally wrote something semi-technical recently! My last post, god dammit. It’s something, at least. Still don’t know what my lung issue is. Still having X-rays and tests and blah blah. The pulmonologist’s office is supposed to be calling me. The weird thing is I have a coworker that’s had the same issue. He also hasn’t received any answers from doctors on what’s going on. It’s kinda crazy. Maybe it’s something to do with weed vape cartridges in my state? I dunno. At this point I don’t think I can rule anything out, honestly.

Man, I can’t even tell you how much I’ve learned since I picked up my first 3D printer. It was encouraging to have my very first print take off and just look beautiful at the end. It wasn’t until subsequent prints that I began to learn limitations and methods of overcoming those limitations.

Hairspray is a game changer for bed adhesion. Throw the glue sticks away, they’re comedically useless by comparison.

It’s almost a certainty that some academic will eventual post meta-analyses on a link between an uptick in upper respiratory infections and climate change. More heat, more pressure for plants to overproduce pollen, more problems for those sensitive to allergens. If it hasn’t already been published, just wait and watch. I contracted pneumonia for no good goddamn reason. I’m not even the only one.

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know everything. I don’t even know half of everything. I would venture so far as to say I don’t know a quarter of everything. “Everything” as a concept is kind of heady considering it involves… well… Everything? It’s even meta, because meta is absolutely a part of everything. Does that make it ultra-meta? I don’t know. Add that to the list. In any case, I don’t know everything. I don’t know how scary climate change is, or if it’s even scary at all. I know there are natural sine waves to everything. Nearly any system has a pendulum or a heartbeat, an ebb and flow.

It’s only Thursday. Why can’t it be Friday? It should really be Friday instead of Thursday, honestly. I’m really tired of staring at these parts I’m working on.

Finding balance in a project is really hard. If the project is too short, time management becomes really problematic and starts becoming the majority of burden in the project. Many short projects run over because you’re spending more time on budgeting time than actually doing the work. On the opposite side of that are the long projects. They’re great for time management because you’re literally dedicating weeks to tasks. Time management is no longer the problem with a bigger project. Instead, you end up becoming soured on the project because it’s far more tedious. You find yourself in repetitious loops of doing the same tasks over and over for all the volume of work in the project.

Jesus. I can’t even tell you how much time and effort I’ve spent keeping the same theme limping along for Hugo while Hugo continually progresses and advances in how it’s generating content. The theme I picked hasn’t changed a ton over time. I’ve had to address essentially every deprecation along the way using “_default” templates. I can’t even count how many I’ve had to do at this point, but I might as well just fork the damn theme and own it myself, since the original author isn’t really interested in keeping it up anymore.

I think I’ve entered the point in my career where I’m skilled enough to be bored, but not bored enough to change the scenery. I don’t even have a notion of what a change of scenery would look like at this point. I think the best I could hope for is someone else deigning to make plans for me.

Lately I’ve been getting into meshtastic. It’s pretty awesome, honestly. Two planes have flown overhead and said “hello” so far. Very neat stuff. The distances that meshtastic can achieve over 915mhz is really quite wild.

90 Day Fiance “star” Angela Deem, a woman who is purportedly 58 years at time of filming but looks like she’s 75- she’s upset that her Nigerian husband doesn’t want to be her slave.

Let it be clear; There is an unfortunate group of Americans who seek relationships with foreigners in order to start a relationship on unequal ground and hold citizenship over the other person’s head. Angela Deem and a few other “90 Day Fiance” stars are decidedly just trying to buy slaves.

Algeria knocked the absolute lights out of Italy in the Olympics in Paris recently and everyone’s tits are sore about it. There seems to be a lot of information swirling around this individual, but there are a few facts that really shouldn’t be discarded. First, Algeria isn’t exactly a “LGBT-friendly” country. Homosexuality is illegal in Algeria. So how exactly would a trans person obtain a passport legally if they cannot legally change the gender they identify with? It’s stated that Imane Khelif’s passport lists her as female. As a direct result you can assume her birth certificate was issued identifying her as female, which would mean the doctor who facilitated her birth observed she is genetically female.

Holy shit, I’m almost positive I have Cystic Fibrosis at this point. This is just fucking absurd. A full ten day regimen of Doxycycline, Albuterol, Prednisone, and I’m still not actually better yet. It feels like someone laced one of my joints with industrial abrasive. I guess I have to go back to a doctor and see what the hell they say, which is just ridiculous, because God damn.

I can’t just live at the clinic.

Tried working this week with the cough going on, it didn’t go great. I got some stuff done, but certainly not as efficiently as I could at 100%. In any case, I’m home and bored and recovering right now. I’m starting to feel better. I’m producing gunk from my lungs and the more I remove from my lungs, the better I feel. It’s almost as though I can impactfully feel elevated oxygen levels in my body. I probably can, in all honesty, but I don’t have an oxygen sensor to definitively track it.

Kamala Harris needs a personality coach if she’s going to make the needle move this election cycle. I’ve checked her voting record, and it’s pretty far left. She’s going to have to find some swagger as well as some common ground with people that I’m sure she’s upturned her nose at for a considerable amount of her life. That was always something Biden seemed to struggle with, getting into public shouting matches with construction workers and other randoms.

I’m a firm believer that when something absolutely shits the bed as hard as the CrowdStrike Agent software has, they should be reporting directly to Congress on what happened, why it happened, and how it could be prevented in the future.

I would also love to see exploratory hearings on opening this sort of software up, making code transparent, and fostering sharing among security professionals. Truly, this is the way forward for humanity, and the only thing in the way is greed and arrogance.

It’s an odd thing to think about, but I think it speaks to the maturity of our species. Most of my life I remember physics being the search for grand and unifying models and equations that explain all processes and activity from the micro-world of muons to the macro-world of quarks. As a species it does appear as though we’re entering a new era of discovery, and part of that new era is realigning our expectations of the data we gather. So far we have seen unexpected maths popping up in odd places and maths that you would expect to cleanly explain things just fall apart with little deference.

Yesterday marked the absolute most absurd incompetence ever displayed by the United States Secret Service that the country has ever witnessed. They absolutely screwed the pooch. They may as well have been a monkey fucking a football in the corner. This twenty something managed to crawl his ass up to a rooftop of a building that was occupied by useless donut-swallowers. Then this Reddit-obsessed soyboy proceeded to fail to hit a target no fewer than eight times despite spending a pretty penny on some serious kit. Charles Whitman is frowning from his grave. Thomas Crooks will have died for absolutely nothing, without contributing anything to humanity, and for absolutely no reason. What a waste. His mom should’ve swallowed him.

Okay, I wrote the last post, and I kind of regret it. I do have something to say, I was just hesitant to say it. Realistically, I have a lot to say right now, but I’m trying to be selective about it. But I also know that getting things off my chest feels pretty good, so I think I’m going to lean into that with this post.

My mother and my sister are apparently far right “anti-vaxx” goons. My sister has wanted to be a physical therapy assistant since she was small and had seen PT’s working with disabled children on TV commercials. “I want to do that!” she would say. Then COVID happened. My sister got some weird ideas stuck in her head from the inbred morons she was dating. She got into “mudding” and “pink camo”, so that tells you what sort of garbage she found herself dating. I guess the garbage rubbed off, because she refused to get vaccinated when the COVID vaccines finally hit. Now my sister has given up on this supposedly life-long dream in order to pursue a lower paying career that doesn’t have vaccine requirements.

I’ve typed and erased the first line of this post a few times already. Sometimes the hardest part of having your own soapbox is not knowing what you want to say in the moment. I guess I don’t always have opinions that are actively trying to claw their way out of my brain. Sometimes my opinions are more than happy to exist without popping their heads up or making themselves known. I know it doesn’t look that way on the outset, but it’s true.

I am a tired person these days. It’s not a physical exhaustion so much. You know how society drives “respect your elders” and “you should always treat your parents respectfully because without them you wouldn’t exist”? Well, imagine for a moment that your parent is really unconcerned with your feelings. Taking it a step further, what if that parent had unreasonable expectations to boot? Now lets string this situation along for literal decades. Sprinkle in a mixture of supporting cast that alternates between “wow, that’s fucked up” and “why don’t you just apologize?”

The debate performance that has everyone up in arms really is just the beginning. Every corner of the internet that’s watching closely is screaming at the computer monitor or cell phone screen as fascism begins to creep up. Everything is going to hell in a handbasket, and all you have to do is lie to people about giving a shit. These dealers in misery, brokers of despair, they’re selling US citizens for pittances. People like Jason Miller who knocked a woman up and then poisoned her with plan B.

Holy fucking shit. That’s really all I can say about the debate last night. Holy. Fucking. Shit. The Democrats are really banking on the whole “don’t vote Satan into the White House again” strategy, when I’m not entirely sure the left has that kind of endurance. In all reality, I don’t think anyone has that kind of endurance. It’s a huge ask for an entire population to maintain vigilance. An enormous ask. A large enough ask that makes me wonder what the hell kind of a strategy this is.

There’s a distinct air of incoming depression, if not at least recession. The number of open jobs is still higher than the number of unemployed people, but each is trending in the opposite direction in a bad way. I can’t personally say whether or when the axe will fall. I don’t really know anything more than anyone else. All I really know is that I’ve been told in school over and over again that capitalism is a sine wave of expansion and contraction, though the ripples are supposed to increase in intensity over time. That means extreme expansion and extreme crontraction. The wildest part is that we’ve currently sailed into this mess riding a wild crest of previously unheard of prosperity for the top one percent of the country. Every other class also did well, just not as well as those on the very top.

Everyone’s more than accustomed to pride and black history months, but I think the puzzle piece few are paying attention to would be the amount of money dumped into those months by American corporations. While those months are reminders for everyone on the hardships endured by people classified as minority groups, they’re meant for being celebrated by the public at large. Corporations are not party to the public at large. They don’t represent us, our wishes, or our voices. They are parasites telling you you’re worth less than the spooge that made you. So if that’s true, why are corporations just such “good guys” and pouring so much money into these events?