I feel like I'm taking crazy pills

22 Oct, 2024

So, yeah, this is me attempting to actually blog about my dumb life - and it is dumb. I spent all weekend trying to force myself to do a course for a degree that I'm not even sure if I want. This is time I could have spent hanging with my family, maybe getting high as fuck and playing Crazy Taxi. But no, I've resolved to sit down and actually finish this course ...is what I told myself.

Instead of doing that, I proceeded to get high af to calm my anxiety, which led my to start work on Mesmerizer: the card game (yes, that Miku). After exporting a frame per second with ffmpeg and separating them into Miku and Teto folders, then working out the rules of a physical rhythm like game, a game that I intend to print out and cut out from basic paper and leave in local coffee shops... after all that plotting and prepping, I decided to try to focus on the course again. But then instead of following up with the coding stuff again, I instead made a video about setting up the extensible text editor Helix with an LSP. So there goes my fucking Saturday.

I should mention that I finally got antibiotics on Saturday, antibiotics that I hope I'm not developing a resistance to, for another double ear infection, from another expensive urgent care visit. My ENT appointment couldn't come sooner. Though, I doubt it'll help much, just like the last series of useless ENT visits. I guess the benefit is that I can't drink anymore because literally just a few drinks gets me reinfected. Hence the doubling up on weed and caffeine. Drinking always fucked with my creativity anyway. I've never had a creative thought while drunk.

Sunday was the day, I told myself. I threw on some background noise after once again getting too high. My laptop was open to the course material. I once again opted to try to read docs instead of actually doing any coding problems. Anxiety crept up again. I hadn't logged into either of my discords in over a week. I had stopped replying to YouTube comments. Like Friday and Saturday, I blew off everyone I could have hung out with. It sounds really stupid writing this down, but I thought that even the smallest conversation would distract me. Yeah, I wound up just distracting myself anyway. The background stuff I put on, Bits and Bytes, was way too interesting of a 1980s computer show not to want to watch. Same went for the Computer Chronicles. So, I tried some music. I put on New Wave theater, a live music program from the 80s. That was too interesting too and led me down the rabbit hole of discovering The Ministry and some really good industrial synth. I used to not think much of industrial, but I think I'm finally starting to get the appeal of the rough, repetitive, incremental, folded together sounds. 12bit samples are a damn good drug.

Fuck, gotta get back to the arbitrary goal of finishing reading the docs before I do coding challenges again. I turned off background noises. Ugh, but the text went in one eye and out the other, as a lot of text I read does. Videos on the subject matter weren't able to hold my attention either. This was the start of another rabbit hole that ended with me using the Read Aloud add on, which now has natural sounding voices from Piper. Before that, I had researched other projects that used Piper and even had it installed for use with the CLI. LLMs fucking suck. The one good thing to come out of them is decent natural language text to speech models. It's useful for someone who has issues retaining info from text. Like, I'll read something and feel like I read nothing at all. Shit is embarrassing and something I don't like bringing up.

Now it's late. I use Read Aloud to get past a couple of chapters before trying to rid myself of anxiety by going back to JAV land for the 4th time that day. Fucking free JAV. What will they think of next? By the time I decide to work on course stuff again, Wait Till Your Father Comes Home came on for its weekly MeTV Toons airing. OFC I had to sit down and watch. Really wasn't expecting the blackface part. Weird. Then, as the Chan of Chris would say, I crashed into slumber, ready to wagecuck (work a job I dislike) again. I told myself I would work on my stuff again on Monday. That was a lie.

Work was garbage again, because when isn't IT work garbage. It's been almost a month since 70 people were onboarded - some of them super important, others normal support staff. Our ticketing is out of control. The legacy software that vendors won't even attempt to support is starting to show cracks. The Office suite's monthly channel thrown in with programs that we'll never update is a terrible mix. And then there's the updated programs with vendors who have the rudest support staff possible. Fuck those assholes. Then you get very well meaning users who will write up a novel about the, if you think about it, very minor problems with these programs, which forces us to try to schedule calls with vendor support that no one has time for in the first place. But you have to keep moving along. Nothing seems to slow down. This dead end IT job is the same as my past dead end IT job. At least I get to joke around with the same people day to day. The last month brought out my trauma humor. Not that you could really compare working a shitty job to trying to lighten the mood while a family member is on their death bed. Still. That part of me is coming out at work now. My quips are getting darker. The reactions are better than ever. Did I mention that I have really bad, unmedicated anxiety? Fuck me.

School work got neglected on Monday, too. Not surprising, given my track record so far. Instead, I was tired af and hung out with my wife, got high and watched S2E2 of Fishtank. Discord: still logged out. Messages: unread. Comments: unresponded (fuck, I need to get on this). It was cozy tho. The production values of independently financed internet shows is getting wild. Fuck. I just remembered that I need to move my comics and zine templates over to GitHub. I put all of my templates on Archive.org, and that doesn't seem to be coming up anytime soon. A software repo with a markdown introduction seems like a better place for papercraft templates anyway.

I'm going to try to hand [person] a zine or two in person on Wednesday. It's gonna be cringe. Two really close friends and my brother are going too. I'm gonna have them hold onto a few mini pocket zines. Why? I'm not really sure. Is handing out comics to people after a comedy show considered "crashing" a show? What would [person], [person] or anyone else from [group] even do with the comics? Am I expecting them to find the format neat, download the template from GitHub and put them around in little boxes at coffee shops where they live too? Oh yeah, zine boxes. Do I bring little unfolded zine boxes and fold them into boxes in public? Really hope [person] is there. That dude's probably the funniest [group] guy. Forget I said any of that.

My wife, and she doesn't have to do this but is nice enough to, is drawing out another batch of comics for me. She has a lot of other, more successful, more serious stuff, that she's working on, so her putting together 30 doodle pages of my dumb jokes is very appreciated. We're weird creative types. She does these really well produced deep dive YouTube videos. I fire up OBS and do random tutorial videos. We sort of have a friendly rivalry when it comes to subs, but she's kicking my ass right now, and she totally deserves to lol. So, I'm 100% not doing any coding exercises tonight. I'm looking at about a half hour of arranging the comics with LibreOffice draw then a few hours of printing and cutting so I can, hopefully, make about 50 or so copies. Might take until about 3am. I did something similar the night before SummerSlam. I had a bunch printed and ready to hand out but felt too embarrassed to. This time I'm actually determined to shameless shill myself ...or I might ask one of the other 3 people with me to do that for me.

And my fucking Koss Porta Pro band broke. They must have survived a thousand walks in my pocket. Going to see if my brother has an extra band. You never know which part of your Porta Pros are gonna break and which parts you'll need for future sets. I love these little portable over the ear things. They make me not feel shitty about never being able to wear earbuds ever again.

What the fuck am I doing?