Archive - Icons - Previous 10/19/26 Sad news. Pillowfort is shutting down, largely because they have refused to try anything different than what they were already doing, but it is sad to see another site go down. Tumblr, despite how god awful it is, continues to outlive all its alternatives. It really goes to show that people are just not willing to invest in anywhere that doesn't already have millions of people on it. It didn't used to be like this. We did not have people bitching that something was dead because it didn't have something new for their eyeballs to look at every second. I think it's the instant feedback too. None of it is real connections, because it's about nonsense, but it "feels" like connecting because an exchange happened. That empty sort of contact started back on Myspace and early Facebook. I've been hating that kind of platform since day 1. It's always surprised me when people are nostalgic for Myspace when Myspace was already one of the worst things to happen to online connections, and Facebook was just Myspace but with less customization. They were both seen as places where people wanted attention rather than insight. That's why people posted their real names and faces their. Anyone with any sense on the old net did not do that. And I do think it's interesting that people are nostlagic for that and not the blogging era that was going on alongside it and lasted long past Myspace over on Wordpress, Blogger, etc, and of course the various forums around back then. The nostalgia is for the most shallow form of connection because even that sliver of nothing feels like so much more depth than what the big giants of social media "feed" you with now. But it was definitely already the dumpster of social interactions. I had someone this week comment on my other site who thought I didn't post anymore because I hadn't updated my main site in two months. My main site that I only post writing on and nothing else. I'm sure they meant well and they were just happy to see I was still updating, but it really threw me for a loop for a sec because I don't consider that to be that long of a time period. My last update, I posted something over 17K. I've posted +75K words to the main site so far this year. And you know, writing isn't my source of income. It's my hobby. But I feel like the modern web has trained us to think something is dead if it's quiet for a little bit, because it feeds people back to those tech giants and their addiction machines. We need to collectively get used to occasional silence again. I saw plenty of people recommend Dreamwidth as an alternative to Pillowfort, which if you were already trying to get away from Tumblr and liked the blogging aspect of Pillowfort, that probably is the next best thing. As usual, there were people suggesting the Shittiverse, including BSky, as if any of that is remotely similar to a blogging platform. It's like, hey, you wanted something like Tumblr but less toxic, why don't you try something that's nothing like Tumblr at all with loads of toxicity! Speaking of old sites, I made an LJ account recently to see if they ever let non-Russian users back into post. It looks like you can again, but there's no reason to. The actual post entry post looks like a stripped down version of Tumblrs, with 80% of the functionality missing and the whole website is super clunky and messed up in a way 2005 LJ would've never been. It's awful, and it just doesn't even look like LJ anymore. Really gives me Xanga pre and post-redesign where it's just a totally different site after that point. So, once again, that just leaves DW and I guess IJ if you wanted true early internet look and feel. Haha, you can definitely tell IJ split off LJ at a far earlier point than DW did and then did no major modifications after that for most of its existence. My wife told me they have been adding in some of the features DW has though, so it's not quite dead. IIRC, I think DJ finally is though. We may be down to just two LJ alternates. But I don't think anyone really cares at this point. Facebook, Twitter, etc have been around so long that people are just used to not sitting down and actually just doing longform posting. I don't think constant updates of short nothings shouting into the void are good for anyone. But I really don't know how we get people unaddicted to this stuff. 10/18/26 Finally finished up something I had planned to get done in September. Other than that, didn't really do much today. Finishing up a somewhat longer piece of writing always leaves me feeling really exhausted. That story still has one more chapter to go. I'm hoping I can get that done before the year ends, but I don't really want to look at it right now, haha. Did bit of organizing in Obsidian. I still have so much to transfer over there and organize. It's quite a process, but everything is so much easier to work with after doing it that I know it's worth it. I'm just really lazy. Sometimes, I peak over at the Reddit, but it's getting more and more like how r/Rainmeter got where the posters just starting bitching about any creativity at all until IIRC the mod just banned screenshots and destroyed the whole community. I don't use Rainmeter anymore since I'm on Mac now, but it was sad to see. The Obsidian subreddit is in that same death spiral phase of hating neat looking stuff and demanding "reasons" of "productivity" for every goddamn thing someone posts. They really hate Notion over there too, I guess because you can make Notion look very "aesthetic". I swear this sort of thing just didn't happen back on LJ or even old DA. I might make a page about what I use with Obsidian. If I do, it'll probably be within the LB Experiment stuff that I still need to write up and organize. Oh, it finally started to chill down. The high today is only 64 and the low is 48. Quite a drop from 88 earlier in the week. 10/15/26 Watched a little more of Last Exile. Definitely will be dropping that. As I mentioned before, it already had a lot of the same issues I had with BS#6, but the further I got in, then it had the same issues I had with DN Angel as well. It's just too juvenile. What I saw wasn't bad. It would be okay, at least from in as far as I got, for that same age range of 12-16. But I'm just too old for a lot of these character interactions and the plot doesn't have all that much depth to it either. I could get through this with Wolf's Rain because the plot and characters were enough to overlook it and the setting being at the literal end times makes the dull environments a bit more forgiving anyway, but Last Exile and BS#6 have the same issues of why the hell is everything so damn devoid of color. There's plenty of anime that go overboard with their bright color palettes to the point it's also obnoxious, but damn, real life is more colorful than these shows. Late 90s through 00s anime by in large seemed obsessed with having no nice colors in it. SEL is another one where this happens. If it wasn't so "out there" (by anime standards, it's less out there than X-Files or Twin Peaks), I don't think it would be remembered much. This was in the time period where everyone was shifting from hand painting to computer painting and because of that, a lot of everything looks like ass in general too. Even modern anime never quite got colors down, but they did at least get better at animating motion and added color back in. Last Exile is just a bunch of beiges, tans, and browns in a sea of other anime in that time period that were the same way, along with some laughable CG and uninspired plane designs. If you're not getting invested into these characters and their relationships, it really has nothing to offer. There's better plane/machine based combat stuff out there to watch. There's better worlds with more depth to explore. It's really only possibly good for giving a kid something to watch, and even at that I'm hesitant to give that suggestion. Because the direct sequel to the anime is about how much fanservice fan they do on underage characters who don't even look pubescent. That was another factor preventing me from even bothering with LE in the first place, but I was like I mean, it's a sequel made like ten years later for a story that was already fully completed, I'll just ignore it. But IDK. Rewatching and seeing how childish LE is, the fact that it's sequel is some chomo shit disturbs me even more than just the sequel existing in general. Back to hot temperatures. The high today was 88, with the feels like being higher. Tomorrow's still gonna be in the 80s, but it looks like it's supposed to drop quite a bit over the weekend. Maybe I'll do another long walk then. 10/14/26 About halfway through the month already. This entire shitty year has been flying by at lightspeed. Early voting for midterms has already started here. Haven't gone yet, but I plan to get that done before actual election day. Georgia has a pretty big early voting time frame, which makes all the "there's no time because work, there's not enough polling stations, blah blah" excuses pretty bullshit even in the most interfered areas. LOL, come on now. None of you are working 7 days a week, every week. You absolutely can just go in on your off day. Doing it early avoids most of the lines even in places with few polling stations and few machines. The most fucked with areas are also the few spots we have public transit too, so like even your inability to get there by car is really not an excuse for most people in Georgia. And nearly all of the state only lives in like nine counties out of two hundred something counties where most of the public transit is. Carpool, IDK man. Stop being lazy. And the ones not in the populated areas, well damn, you probably got a shit ton of stations and machines. You are never waiting in line. Again, no excuses. Good news is Georgia's already doing better than last midterms for day one of early voting, with a 40% increase from last midterms for first day early voting. The early voting period in Georgia is October 13-30, so yeah. You literally have over half the month of October to vote early, long before election day. Early voting locations can be found here. Just put in your county. I would encourage anyone else in the US to look up what dates they can vote, and if early voting is an option, always go for that. So much less chaos. I hate to be mean about it, but I feel like so much of "I don't have time to do this" shit stems from people just refusing to even bother looking anything up about voting. I think the argument I hate most is "I'm too tired from work to ever do anything on my off day but scroll". How do you think you'll ever get better work conditions? Votings like the least difficult, least time consuming option on that list of what could get you there. And it won't magically happen without most people doing, at minimum, the least difficult option. Social media has been pretty bad lately. Lemmy might be worse than Reddit right now with how obvious the political bot posting has been. I've been seeing people post around that Ukraine knocked out some bots, but they were just crawlers for Yandex search. They're not the annoying kind of bots at all, so just misinformation being spread around. Honestly, I think that misinformation is a bit dangerous because it's giving people this false sense that there's less bot activity going on right now, when there's been no drop at all in the kind that's actually damaging. Unrelated to all that, I went back and finished Blue Sub #6, and then I tried an episode of Last Exile. Will not be revisiting Last Exile. It has all the same problems I had with BS#6, but turned up even more. I briefly considered DN Angel as well, because I remember it being kinda fun when I was a young teen. I watched about two episodes, and it's alright, but it's just too juvenile for me. Like, it would absolutely be a great show to recommend to a 12-16 year old. It's got a lot of hammy, fun stuff and an interesting set-up, and the teen romance is very...well, teen romance. It's perfect for teenagers, nothing wrong with it. But I am not a teenager. I'm closer to 40 than 30 at this point. It just doesn't have adult appeal, and that's fine. It was made for teenager. And I'm definitely not gonna go back and give Escaflowne another try. I don't want to see any more mechs. I don't want anime tropey characters either. Might go a bit forward in time and revisit Red Garden though. Just the TV series. I know the ASS OVA is not gonna get less ass with time. And why is there a mech even in that?! Trash. I know that anime will be a lot less tropey, but IDK how teenager-y it is though. Was thinking about Gankutsuou recently too, so that's another possibility. I need to do my little write up on the few I did try. Those were all from around a specific time period, so I'll be making that as just one page all together. In part because I didn't even finish two of them, and of the two, one of them was a short OVA anyway. Most of the page is gonna be about Wolf's Rain. Not sure when I'll get to that though. IDK I might give Last Exile one more short. I didn't make it far in enough to get to my favorite character, so maybe that could persuade me. Maybe. 10/08/26 It's been a while since my last update. Still mostly hot here. A little bit chilly sometimes once evening sets in, but yeah still some pretty hot days even after dark. It's dropped enough in temp that I can go out on more walks again without it being unbearable. The house with all the graveyard decorations got a giant, standing skeleton that has glowing green parts on it. Looks really good at night. Recently, after not eating any egg, meat, or dairy for some weeks now, I had a day where I tried a little of all of them to see how my reaction would be. My body's definitely already shifted to finding these foods gross tasting. Chicken broth just tasted like skin grease. Chicken meat tasted like smoke and not much else. Cheese was just a strange sour flavor. Eggs were just goopy mostly nothingness. I tried some Impossible steak chunks and that was close enough to actual meat that it also made me disgusted while eating it. So, uh, good job at that? I guess I'll stick with my Gardein crumbles. They don't really feel like meat and just taste like whatever spices you mix in. The most bizarre thing to me was eggs. I recently bought some black salt (kala namak) because I missed the flavor of eggs and wanted to make some dishes with eggs without, you know, using eggs. And the flavor is really addictive to me. It's like egg, but...better egg. IDK. I'd been enjoying it. But when I tasted an actual egg again, it was so...bland and kinda just gross in texture. I'm pretty sure that's over. The revulsion to the meat was the strongest. It just tasted bland, bad, and greasy. I don't know how I was enjoying this shit before because it doesn't taste good. I knew this could happen with dairy, because I've cut out dairy for long period of time before and going back to it was always a few weeks of "oh god why is this so sour and rotten tasting" before the brain I guess tricks you back into thinking it tastes good or whatever. And soda too, which just tastes like rust and metal or a pure refined sugar syrup overload when it's not a "cherry" based flavor, even when it comes in plastic or glass bottles. I'm still stuck on sodas for now. I had quit drinking them for a while, but damn that four months of homelessness back in '18 really fucked up my diet ever since. I bought some more teas from Brenden, since there was a big sale recently. All golden teas, as usual, haha. I've quit with coffee for good. Before, I was grinding it myself and drinking it black to cut out sugar. But between that, tea, and soda, that's a shit ton of caffeine and out of the three, coffee always makes me a little jittery. I'd like to get back to where I was in 2017, with the only things I drank being water, floral drinks, juice, and plain teas. Gutting the meat, dairy, and eggs will also be moving back towards that. I was already shifting away from animal food products then, but well...yeah 2018. Oh, recently I got a look into what all these vitamins my dad was spending loads of money on actually had in them. He had some bottles that were like one specific supplement, like Iron or Omega-3, and then a whole bunch of ther bottles with vague themes like "brain health", "mens health", "joint health", "multi-vitamin", etc. Most of these bottles had a huge amount of overlap in what was in them, and as is usual with supplements, they're already at a level abrsudly over your actual daily need for them. From what I gather, he never ever looks at the back of these bottles. He only reads the front and decides based on the bottle name. So he's spending loads and loads of money on these things to basically buy repeats of the same shit. He takes +10 of these multi-supplement plus single supplement pills per day every day. He did not used to do this, though he's always fallen for a lot of supplement and tonic-based woo. He told me he couldn't remember why he had iron pills, but he "knew" he got them for something and bought a new bottle. I'm pretty sure the iron pills were actually for my mom, because she's always had issues with anemia. So I guess he's just been taking any pill in his sights and was gobbling up the pills my mom had on hand for if she got anemic again because it's a pill, he must need it. I can't tell if some of his behavior is the warning signs of mental decline, or if it's alcoholic mental decline because he's still drinking a disturbing amount of alcohol weekly. I'm actually astounished he hasn't accidenally killed himself from how much he drinks. Recently, he also got a text message that was an obvious smishing scam and my brother had already told him it was a scam, but then he called me and wanted me to check over the messages in person because there was no way I could "judge" from just being told about it over text (or you know sending a screenshot). He got a text with a bullshit obviously scam email attached about him receiving a 20K deposit into a Venmo account (my dad does not...have a Venmo account) and to click on some very obviously scammy link to receive it. Again, my brother told him this text was obvious a scam, and once I also told him it was obviously a scam, he argued with both of us that how could we be so sure? He could get 20K out of it. My brother told him even if somehow he did receive 20K, it likely would be for another scam or he could get in trouble with the law himself because whoever was sending it probably stole it, etc. He gave him plenty of scenarios of how even if there was money, that wouldn't make it not a scam. And I went point by point on how to tell it was obviously a scam. My dad acknowledged it obviously looked like a scam, but "what if there really is money for me". And he just kept looking through that no matter what we said. Then he wanted us to show him how to open up a Venmo account, which neither of us would show him. It was like he was desperate to get himself scammed. At least he's stopped for now with sending me weird AI videos he made in some app he paid for. That was nonstop for a bit. Earlier, while trying to find some old resources, I went looking at old Wolf's Rain fansites. Because of the time period the anime came out in, the websites looked pretty nice in a way the modern way doesn't, and obviously in a way the early net wasn't capable of. I miss that look and when people actually made shit. A lot of fandom has turned into just gif sets (after it became significantly easier to actually make gifs, of course!) and fanfics (mostly porn). And what little is there is so scattered across a bunch of people barely connected together. The way modern fandom is reminds me of trying to follow a bunch of Twitter conversations where all the users yelling at each other expect each other person to know 100% of everything they ever tweeted ever. Things were better when we just had proper fansites and linked to each other. IDK, something about it and how people just accepted losing nearly all customization and good organization in all spaces people migrated to for greater "social" interaction feels so...IDK, like people don't even care about themselves anymore. They care about their edited selfies and quick slop and engagement, but the inner self has been left to decay on purpose. I know that sounds dramatic, but I was thinking about something I heard recently. That social media hasn't actually made us more social at all. We were having better conversations and interactions in the past, on average, both in person and online. So what is anyone really getting out of these social media sites if it isn't really about socializing and forming friendships? They're just dopamine and rage addiction machines, so of course the look of it doesn't matter. IDK. Something I need to think on more, and maybe I'm wrong, but I do feel like the shift of being able to increasingly personalize your own internet space toward having those options stripped away in favor of the promise of a "broader" audience...I feel like there's something to it, but I don't know quite what it is yet. 10/01/26 It's October. I've finished archiving September's entries. Supposedly, it's going to rain over the weekend. I hope it does, but you know the weather reports. They've all been useless outside of 3 hours forward at this point. Back to that 90s level of useless. Added a couple more icons to the icons page. The weather's nice today. Maybe I'll get in another walk later. My brains got a million ideas in it right now of things I want to work on, and I don't know what I'm actually going to end up doing, if anything. Sigh. The neighborhood is really filling up with Halloween decorations. Some people had them out even before it was autumn yet. There's one house with a shit ton of those inflatable ones. I've never cared for those. Don't know why those ever got so popular. Cause there's nothing to look at during the early parts of the day but a bunch of deflated things everywhere. I dunno, to me it just looks bad. One of the neighbors has a whole graveyard going on. Looks pretty good. They're usually one of the first to start putting decorations out. I hope it starts to cool down some more. The high today is 85, feels like 87. Not as bad as yesterday. But when I was a kid, it would've never been this hot in October. Archive - Icons - Previous