Just a quick note...
...to let you all know why I haven't been blogging for the past couple weeks.
After many years of fighting with illness, and multiple organ failures, my mother passed away peacefully last Tuesday night.
I'm doing ok, overall, but haven't had much motivation to write. Everything is still very surreal to me. I'm not sure when I will resume writing in earnest, or if I will comlplete the 100 Days to Offload this year. I'm also not sure if I will participate in Writing Month at all this year. (But I don't anticipate a terribly long hiatus, in either case).
I'm currently combing through over 200,000 photos stored haphazardly on an old backup disk (along with some duplicates, which I'm attempting to identify with md5sum) to collect photos of my mom for her upcoming Celebration of Life.
I've noticed one theme over and over again:
She's not looking at the camera maybe a quarter of the time. She was often looking to the side, at others.
The reason?
She was always more interested in making sure everyone else was happy and having a good time than looking pretty for her own photos.
Selah.
Songs to Improve Your Mental Health
Background
I'd be fooling myself to think that I could be the first person on the earth to note music's incredible ability to heal and salve the tormented human soul. My own journey with music is, well, unsurprisingly, about as old as I am. Most everyone on one side of …
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Speedrunning life with a Rube Goldberg brain
There's a scene in The King's Speech at the end where he's finally giving his big, inspiring speech, and while you hear is the speech, what you see is the scribbled crib notes and the incredible mental gymnastics he has to go through to get each word and phrase out …
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I really wish the Fediverse had more permanence
One of the things I hear people on the Fediverse celebrate is its incredible transience. There's no one big central network, so posts have nebulous reach throughout the network, depending on how well-"connected" your instance is, and many people set posts to auto-delete after a set period of time …
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A Toast to the Prolific ones
I wanted to take some time out today to acknowledge some folks on the fediverse that are remarkably prolific, just for fun.
Prolific blogger — Rubenerd
Oh holy moly. This fella has words. Lots of words. Many very fine words. Just look at bro's output for 2024:
~ $ curl -s https://rubenerd …
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I Miss RC
I was on a Signal video chat with my siblings today, and when I mentioned something about RC flight as an analogy for a person's health (being "three mistakes high"), my brother looked confused and then amused when I explained what I was talking about.
Oh, quick explainer, I'm not …
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The Last Stage of Loss?
Last night I had one of those "your loved one isn't actually dead!" dreams, but about my cat.
I used to have them a lot about my stepdad that passed away many years ago, and I had a handful about my boss that sadly ended his own life a decade …
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Do I Know You?
I was reading Deadly Headshot's toot on Christmas day, and it got me thinking about Object Permanence and social media.
The funny thing is, I can remember conversations I had on IRC in the late 1990s, but there are many people I greatly enjoyed conversing with on the Fediverse …
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My Favorite Bosses
Across three decades working in I.T., I've had the opportunity to observe some spectacularly good and spectacularly bad managers. I feel like writing an homage to the three that were the most memorable.
Name obfuscation methodology
I will be using the real name of the individuals mentioned, but I …
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You Really Can't Go Home
Content warning: This post deals with religion and politics
This is in response to my fedifriend's toot:
Sit down next to the fireplace my friend, as I spin my yarn...
In January 2016, after over two years of searching, I finally found a church home. I loved where I …
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