sophia_sol | Entries tagged with anent: computing

one

Whew that was the worst illness I have had in a lot of years. And my whole household was laid low by it at the same time! I disapprove. I'm so glad to be (mostly) better at this point, and come crawling back with a functional brain again

two

a few weeks ago I decided to stop being so intimidated by bias tape, and tried making my own! Turns out it's much easier than I feared; it's merely tedious. It's very doable!

three

I am up to 27 wpm on thumbkey, the weird mobile keyboard I switched to! There was a while where I felt convinced I would never make it up to a reasonable speed, but it's happening! It just takes a lot of practice. But I persevered.

(The other issue: google has a bug in gchat that means the correct way of coding backspace into a keyboard doesn't function right in gchat. Thumbkey has filed the bug report; there has been no change. Yes, this means I cannot backspace when typing in gchat on my phone; I can only highlight and overwrite if I typo or want to reword something! Infuriating, but of course google is not incentivised to care)

four

I have been back to regularly working on my current fic wip this week and it feels so good to make my small incremental daily progress again. this is how fics get written!! thank you jingyi for waiting for me <3 I'm nearly at 5k now!

five

spent a while recently browsing historic gees bend quilts....I've looked at them before and I'm still blown away by the artistry in the form. I love how within that artistic community, asymmetry, skew, and playfulness with colour and design are such important elements, handled masterfully. SO different from the quilting tradition I come from!

(if you're not familiar, this is a good resource: https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers)

one

sorting through my photos from the last two years with the intention of putting together a photobook to print for myself, and wow there are really some major transitions within 2023 and 2024 for me! some more visible within the photos than others, tbh. But the biggest change for this purpose is that I take SO many more photos than I used to…..genuinely not sure how I'm going to pare these down to a reasonable number, lol!

two

Some bird photos are good because they are beautifully detailed shots that show you all the features of the bird. Some bird photos are good because they're fun.

This is absolutely the best photo of a dark-eyed junco I have ever taken.

( bird pic! )

three

I am trying out yet another weird mobile keyboard app, since the parent company of Typewise, the keyboard app I've been using for the last while, has become far too focused on ai for my comfort. The open source app store f-droid, though, has some interesting options on offer, and I am very compelled by Thumb-Key.

So far thumb-key is rather slow to learn, but I think its design will make it very fast to use in the long run. But the adjustment is hard in the meantime! I keep having to switch back to typewise in contexts where I need to be able to convey my thoughts efficiently, and then needing to remember to return to thumb-key when speed isn't as important so that I can continue practicing.

( screenshot of the keyboard )

On my first day of use, my thumb-key typing speed got to ~15 wpm, compared with 35-40 on typewise, and over 100 on a physical computer keyboard. Today, after a couple days of use, I am at ~20 wpm. So I am feeling very slow!

But when I used to use the standard gboard mobile keyboard, I was both slower and less accurate than typewise enables me to be, and already I can see how thumb-key will be even better than typewise once my muscle memory learns where the letters are.

I just hope I reach that day soon!

four

tfw the automatic association you have with a particular concept is a terry pratchett quote. I'm an edwardian era gentleman casually tossing off a quote from one of the classic works that I know all gentlemen of my status are familiar with because we all studied the same texts in school, except instead of latin or something, it's Going Postal.

"that greatest of all treasures which is Hope"!!!

five

Rereading old entries from previous years in my line a day diary and wow it is amazing how long it's been consistent that I regularly fail to go to bed at a reasonable time, become exhausted and miserable, and regret my choices. And then do it again.

I really wish bedtimes were easier for me!

Real nice though to see the way the overall tone of my entries perks up after I went on the right anti-anxiety med for me, midway through 2022.

the saga of my most recent efforts in maintaining my personal website, over the course of a couple days:

just spent some time updating the custom css for my linkding instance....nobody gets to see the results of that custom css but me, but I was able to fix some irritating aspects of the view that I hadn't done properly last time, and I am pleased!

SOMEDAY I will update my linkding to the most recent version! and then will be able to do some customizing to the css on the guest view!!

looking at the notes I took last time I did a linkding update....not inspiring, lol!

last time I tried multiple avenues of attack and had to end up doing it the "stupid way" :P

and then I had to reupload my bookmarks from backups, bc the fresh install didn't maintain the bookmarks, but I have so many bookmarks that linkding doesn't like to upload them all in one file, and it's a huge pain!

I should gird my loins and do it before the year is over though. I will be so much happier with the updated linkding!

hot damn I DID IT. I did it!!!! my linkding is now version 1.36.0 (latest) and I am soooo proud

and now, if you go to linkding.aviansoph.com you'll be redirected automatically to the shared bookmarks page! which is set up with some custom css so you can actually see all the details of each bookmark, laid out nice and readably, on a page that should respect your system's preferences for lightmode vs darkmode!

my linkding is FUNCTIONAL!!!!! as a place to direct people who want to see all my recs!

I'm so happy

aw heckity, I do still need to laboriously upload all my bookmarks from my manual backup. I somehow managed to port over a months-old version into the reinstall, and I did a lot of bookmark editing in the intervening months, so this is insufficient. OH WELL that's doable at least!

ok NOW I am done! my linkding shared bookmarks are a beautiful and useful thing I can show off!

https://linkding.aviansoph.com/

oh shit did updating linkding somehow manage to break the javascript on the rest of aviansoph.com????

WELP I restarted my vps to see if that would fix the javascript problem, and a) it didn't, and b) now linkding isn't loading at all. my gloating was premature!

....how does a person go about trying to debug a server. where does one start.

ok so I got my linkding instance back up and running so that's all successful now!

but javascript is still broken on the main site, even though it's working in linkding

I am currently working my way through trying to figure out how to update my ubuntu, since it's out of date, but the standard commands I'm finding online aren't working and so I am in the weeds of trying to parse the troubleshooting options I'm seeing

I think I will not get aviansoph.com's js functional again tonight. an ongoing project.

(the next day)

it's funny how much figuring out tech stuff is just about learning the specialised vocabulary, so as to comprehend what people mean when they explain things

how many different browser tabs does one person need to have open in order to figure out how to make their gd ubuntu actually agree to upgrade

"become a computer nerd" they said. "it'll be fun!" they said. I'm putting on my clown shoes.

wow the version of ubuntu I installed on my vps when I got it last summer reached end of life like a month after I installed it 🙃

I think? I might have successfully gotten my ubuntu upgrade to start?????

thank u to this nerd for the info: https://dandraka.com/2020/05/31/how-to-upgrade-ubuntu-from-an-unsupported-version/

anyway now I am in the "wait for a couple hours" step so we shall see how it goes, but I am tentatively hopeful! 🤞

so the upgrade worked and I'm running a recent long-term stable release of ubuntu now. and my linkding is still working!

but js is still not functional on the main aviansoph domain and I'm not sure how to approach this one.

the temptation is to just rewrite the pages to not need any js anymore lmao but I don't think that's the Right Answer

great news! the js error is one I accidentally introduced several weeks ago, and then just didn't notice it wasn't working till now! it's fixed now, thank u rae, and my website is ALL FUNCTIONAL again HOORAY!

(the next day)

I figured out what a robots.txt file is and what it does, and added one to my website, and WOW my CPU usage has immediately improved dramatically! damn. shoulda done this ages ago!

so as you can see my self-teaching efforts around computing continue to bear fruit! despite the struggles involved in learning things by accidentally breaking things that I then need to fix, I love my website very much. it makes me so happy!

one

I have done too well at insulating myself from the relentless marketing of capitalism.....I forgot that black friday week is a thing and went in person to an electronics store on saturday to buy a new phone grip.

that store. had SO MANY. people, noises, flashing lights & images, maze-like aisles & displays, busy employees who couldn't stop to help me because they were already on a mission, etc.

I escaped with the phone grip I went for but. whew. that was a real experience.

two

so funny to think about my feelings on a lot of characters in mxtx novels on my first read vs on subsequent rereads. the number of characters I found boring, irritating, or incomprehensible who I now adore!

this post inspired by thinking about pei ming, an asshole who sucks (affectionate)

three

I have really been on a hell of a handcrafting kick of late. SOMEDAY I will get back to personal web dev! that's also a very exciting form of crafting!

four

sorting through a recentish batch of bird photography I did, and gosh did you know birds are SO cute and photography is SO fun?! I'm verklempt

five

Every time I watch a Sally Pointer video I get so fired up to do crafting! Her latest video is on a type of nalbinding, a technique working cordage into a bag or basket which has been used across the world and throughout history, back to the paleolithic era.

In this video she shows you how to make cordage from scratch, from whatever fibres you have available, and gives tips on what kind of fibre you might be able to easily access that's good for this kind of work.

Then she shows how to use the cordage to work both the single loop and the loop and twist variants on nalbinding, and walks you through how to use these methods to make a bag.

She demonstrates how simple they are to do, how adaptable to doing whatever it is you want with it, and how it's great to just do what feels right to you instead of following a rigid pattern. Perfection not required.

I really want to make myself a netted bag using this method now. And other useful "holding things" devices!

one

people supporting each other. is good. ❤️ each of us in our own ways, with our own skills and capacities, being here for each other and our communities. we were doing it before, and we go on. no matter what.

two

sometimes.....it's 11pm and you are irresistibly taken by the need to fix a drawer in your craft room storage cabinet.

I did it! the bottom is no longer falling out of the drawer, and as a bonus the whole drawer is better squared and fits better into the cabinet!

very satisfying, and also, this kind of thing is why I can never manage to go to bed in good time

three

thinking about hua cheng spending 800 years knowing with a deep certainty that he is Sexually Into Men (well, Man. God. you know.)

and then when he finally manages to find xie lian after the third ascension.... xie lian has transed her gender. and hua cheng suddenly knows with a deep certainty that he is Sexually Into Women.

four

I remember my young naive teenage self who believed that sewing is the majority of what you do when you are sewing

five

I have learned how to use krita to crop photos! no longer do I need to download camera pics onto my computer with an sd card reader, email them to myself, download them from email onto my phone, use snapseed to crop them, email them back to myself, and download the new cropped pics onto my computer 😅

next: learning to use krita to alter brightness, contrast, and tint/warmth. then almost everything I use snapseed for will be something I can do on my computer!

(having used the krita user manual to learn cropping, I wouldn't say that their documentation is written with peak clarity, but I got there in the end at least. the user manual is not helpful on the other stuff though. it tells you what the possibilities are! it doesn't actually explain to you how to do anything with the tools available.)

one

still cannot believe svsss fandom doesn't have a thriving sub-fandom of ppl writing pidw mobing. me 🤝 peerless cucumber, rowing this rowboat together

two

ok what if I just have a recipes section on aviansoph.com. as a place to host the text of recipes for my bookmarks if they aren't from like a recipe site. that way I won't have any recipes still linking to old pinboard notes!

three

important take-aways from mdzs book club last week: did you know that wen ning isn't in chapters 99-101 (early in the guanyin temple arc)? did you know that this is a major failing? many things to love about these chapters. but. one misses wen ning <3

four

it is very funny to have turned into a person who cares deeply about personal fashion/style in a fairly intense way when I don't think I have a single irl friend who is invested in it like I am! look it's just very satisfying as a mode of creative expression, to put together my little outfits!

five

did you know....friends are great 💖

one

antiques freaks podcast, on the author of the victorian novel "varney the vampire, or the feast of blood": this writer has all of victor hugo's verve and none of his intelligence or talent

a sick burn! (and accurate)

two

well, the end of an era, last week I deleted both my twitter accounts. I haven't even gone on twitter in ages at this point but now it's final. farewell to what used to be!

three

it's amazing how every single bird is perfectly beautiful and astonishing in its own way

I love how much I love birds. the amount of joy and wonder and awe they bring to me every single day is extraordinary

four

I love having a changelog on my website, where I keep track of what updates I've made, so I can see the progress over time! very satisfying.

and it feels great to be back at it, after a break of about a month where I wasn't making any updates due to other stuff going on in my life!

the website to-do list is long. but all good stuff! and I'll get to it all eventually!

five

wearing white shoes today and my brain is singing the corb lund song it's hard to keep a white shirt clean

the things I do for the aesthetique

one

trying to flip between all the open tabs of my brain like "I know I left a thought in here somewhere that I wasn't done thinking yet, where'd I leave it? what was it about??"

two

tfw you read a REALLY good fic and go to the author's page and they're a prolific writer....for other fandoms. and that one fic is the singular fic they've written for your fandom 🥲

three

the time when I snap and install linux grows ever closer tbh

four

rereading what I've written in my cumplane (sqh/sqq) wingfic wip and just like grinning at my phone in glee, I love these assholes so much

did you know: I'm pretty good at writing!

five

sometimes you get up and get dressed and realise you do not own the correct neckwear for the outfit you set out, and there's nothing for it but to sew something new immediately

I love how diving into one nerd rabbit hole can lead you to discover entire other nerd rabbit holes you didn't know existed:

1. get fed up with an aspect of microsoft word's functionality

2. finally download a copy of libreoffice

3. play around with libreoffice to figure out what you can do

4. realise you need additional info on how to make something work

5. do a web search for documentation

6. discover that someone has written an entire self-published book about how to use libreoffice writer which can be downloaded for free from the author's blog

7. download it, discover that the publication date is written in a way you don't recognize, but the date includes a link to wikipedia explaining it

8. learn about the Holocene Calendar

one

it's wild to me every time I learn something new about the way the brain and body are connected. what do you mean my emotional state can affect my experience of temperature??? that sounds fake!

two

current state of my wip: I'm writing sexy ear-licking. the things that the cumplane ship makes you do! 😅

though also, I will admit, I take a certain pleasure from writing sexy scenes that have different priorities and foci than the standard sexual acts featured in fanfic

three

ok having a computery friend explain to me what docker is has been FAR more successful at making me understand what docker is than any web search I've done. and it's much less intimidating to think about learning to understand how I'm using it with linkding now that I understand what kind of thing docker is!

the thing about so much tech info available online is that it assumes that if you're reading it you already have a grasp of the vocabulary and a sense of how backend computer systems work...

four

can't believe how many years I went without knowing that you can have different sewing feet for different purposes. sewing zippers on is so much easier with a zipper foot, for example! and last year when I got an even-feed foot for my modern sewing machine it was revolutionary for certain types of projects.

five

so glad

rigormorphis introduced me to wordhippo earlier this year. an actually good thesaurus site/app! what do you mean I don't need to card through the fluff of my brain to find the word I'm trying to remember, and I can just look up words in the semantic vicinity to find it!

(of course it still doesn't help when what my brain is providing is words in the phonic vicinity of the one I'm trying to remember, but nothing's perfect)

one

recently I was telling someone about crop milk and it is such a delightfully cursed bird fact that I have to share it here too!

did you know that mammals aren't the only living things to produce milk? a select few bird species have independently evolved it too! pigeons, flamingos, and emperor penguins all secrete milk from their crop to feed their young! lactation is even stimulated by prolactin, the same hormone that causes lactation in mammals!

crop milk has fat and proteins, like mammal milk, but no carbohydrates. it's also got the various immune boosting stuff and other similar intangibles

In pigeons, crop milk is....not quite a liquid. it's a pale yellow semi-solid that has been compared to cottage cheese.

flamingos have liquid crop milk! but it's bright red that looks like blood!!

(the colour fades over time though, it only looks like blood for the first week or so after hatching)

all I've been able to determine about penguin crop milk is that it is "thick"

two

I love being able to just go into the css stylesheet for my website and alter a detail about how lists are formatted....and then that change is automatically enacted for every list on every page of my site! it's so cool. coding is cool!

three

just finishing up listening to a podcast episode about pterosaurs and *dreamy sigh* pterosaurs are just so cool you guys

four

me spitballing funny fic ideas with a friend, and oh shit now I really want to write one of them!

it's amazing to me now that I used to struggle so much with coming up with fic ideas to write...these days I have far more than I can actually get to!

five

something I learned recently: it does not matter WHAT name I changed my irl name to, a certain type of cis people will find a way to hear a feminine name no matter what your name is, if they read you as female

I thought I had just insufficiently considered what my name could be misheard as! but no the problem is not with me.

posting about pterosaurs DOES mean I had to update my dinosaur tag. bc pterosaurs are not dinosaurs and I needed my tag to be actually inclusive!

The progression of my work on my website over the last week or so, as documented on mastodon:

one

heeheehee I get to learn JAVASCRIPT now via the method of just diving right in there! (aka. downloading the zonelets starter pack to use for formatting my website, and digging into the script to see what I want to change!)

awww opening the zonelets css stylesheet and it feels so comfortably familiar! I love how much work I put into understanding css, via creating an ao3 personal theme!

also, seeing how these files all work together, the javascript and css and html, I understand the relationship between what you do with each of them far more. It makes sense to me now! the structure of building a site!

two

I'm learning things about filezilla...I'm learning things about website structures....I'm learning how bad ao3's html download files are.

three

I have one entire fic posted to my website! YESSSS!

I'm doing my best to divorce from ao3 my sense of what structure and language I should be using in the various preamble that goes with a given fic. I don't need to use the same categories of data, and I don't need to call things the same thing! and I don't even need to have the same sections on every fic if I don't want to, if something isn't relevant for that fic!!

https://aviansoph.com/fic/habitat-behaviour.html

four

I made one entire change to the javascript for my site, and it WORKED, I am so powerful 💪

five

I'm just so emotional about the people of the smallweb who code their little projects and then give them away freely - with instructions! - so that others of us can build our own little projects! My website, the main site and the linkding instance, couldn't be what it is without the help of many people, friends and strangers! 🥹

six

I keep going to my website and shrieking a bit internally. it looks like a website!!!

seven

for most programs, there's not enough customization, I can't make it behave in ways that are useful to me, and it's endlessly irritating

visual studio code: I got u bro

I'm actually intimidated by the notion of scrolling through all the customization options of vsc, damn!

eight

look how many fics I have posted on my website now!

this listing page still has some tweaking to do for maximum clarity of reading/skimming over the info, but this is still great progress!

I am a firm believer of the web design principle of "if people have to focus to figure out how to find the info they're looking for, the problem is with the design rather than the user" and I'm not out of the woods yet

https://aviansoph.com/catalogue/fanworks-by-fandom.html

nine

OKAY I think I've got my fandom list page looking a lot more clear now, via tweaking my use of whitespace! hooray!

ten

oh my god. I just realized. the "zap colours" and "zap stylesheets" bookmarklets I use semiregularly are.....snippets of code. that I now know approximately how to read! and could edit to get slightly different results, if I wanted to!!

the world opens up to you, when you learn things about coding!

eleven

things I want to add to my website:

- theme-picker, so people who do better with dark mode etc can still comfortably browse my site

- comments on fanwork pages and blog pages

- table of contents on fic pages so you can easily jump down to the section you want to

- all the rest of my fanworks - 12 fics are up but that's not nearly everything!

- BIRD SHRINE.

and all of this is very doable! so exciting.

twelve

omg I submitted a feature request to linkding and LATER THE SAME DAY a fix is committed: https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding/pull/819

between this and the default guest profile stuff I am soooo excited for the next linkding release

thirteen

I've started to write up a podcast recs page for my website because I figured that would be cool content to have. but I forgot. how wordy I can be. and HOW many podcasts I listen to.

my original plan was just a list of podcasts. my second plan was to include a sentence or two about each one, as context.

my current document has multiple paragraphs per podcast. most podcast descriptions are between 150-200 words each. and I have so many podcasts to go!

fourteen

my list of fanworks by vibe is now posted to my site! https://aviansoph.com/catalogue/fanworks-by-vibe.html

also posted: just my faves of my fanfics! https://aviansoph.com/catalogue/fave-fanworks.html

and a history of the fandoms I've been in! https://aviansoph.com/catalogue/fandoms-through-the-years.html

fifteen

...and the next linkding release is OUT NOW. today! hot damn. ok. ok. I am not prepared, it's usually not this quick between releases!

I hope I have time soon to dig into this and get my instance updated!!

one

oh!!!! the linkding github notified me that the code has been updated to allow for a default guest user profile, so that I can set things up so people looking at my shared bookmarks page can see things in a more useful form!!!

VERY exciting news that this functionality is going to be available. rn my linkding is great for me but it's really not a good UI for guests looking at my shared bookmarks

it looks like this update is going to be in the next release; it was committed the day after the most recent version of linkding was released. no rush for me to do this right away, then, as I need to wait for it to be included. but soon I will need to put aside time to see if the notes I left myself from my last update are good enough to be able to do another update smoothly!

two

hearing a nuthatch from my front porch always brings me joy

three

SHRIEKING.

I can do it!!! I can update my website! I have the power!!!

LOOK AT THIS.

I successfully logged into aviansoph.com via filezilla! and made my way through the very confusing directory of files, to find the ones that are for my main website instead of alllllll the linkding related stuff!

(filezilla's user instruction info online assumes you already understand the file structure of your own website, which is fair lol)

which meant that then I found my index file for my main page, and I'll be able to update that page and create more pages!

look out, world!!! aviansoph dot com is going to happen.

four

I have so many wonderful things in my life - partner, friends, household, house, community, hobbies, etc. and yes not everything is perfect, but damn I am lucky!

and I am so glad for all of you here who are part of my online community! 💖 you're one of those things I am lucky to have as a part of my life!!!

five

I'm willing to tentatively pronounce that my new strategy for keeping on top of dreamwidth is working pretty well -- so exciting! fingers crossed it stays that way!

My phone intermittently has these glitches where it absolutely stops being willing to vibrate for anything, despite having vibration settings turned on, and it doesn't fix until I restart the phone entirely. I recently realized that it only ever does this when I'm typing something on my phone, which implies it's associated with the keyboard app I use -- the default for my phone, gboard.

I've tried the other major standard keyboard apps available before, due to more prosaic frustrations with gboard, but hated all of them even more than I hate gboard. but this glitch was a strong motivation towards change, so I decided to try weird keyboards this time!

typewise immediately came up as an option, with a different way of doing the keyboard than the usual, and it tells you that it might take you a week to get used to but that it's worth putting the time in to learn how to use it. promisingly weird! I was willing to give it a try.

and within only a DAY of using typewise I already loved it? things you have to do regularly, like put in spaces or backspacing to delete typos, are done via gestures which you can make anywhere on the keyboard. capitals are made using a quick swipe upwards on the letter. and the hexagonal key shapes really do make it easier to hit the key you're aiming for!

I've always done swipe-typing on my phone, because I get soooo impatient with typing things out letter by letter on an intangible keyboard with tiny letters, but swipe-typing regularly writes a word that's entirely different than the one I intended, and capitalizes words I really do not want capitalized (no I will NOT be honouring youtube with camelcase caps), and puts in the american spelling of words that I want to spell with a proper canadian "u" in there, etc etc. I'm constantly having to go back and reread my messages to fix things.

typewise doesn't have swipe, but the design actually makes it fast enough to type a letter at a time that I don't feel it holds me back (at least, no more than ANY typing that's not on a physical keyboard will hold me back!). and honestly I prefer that. I have more control over what I'm actually writing, when it's me typing out all the letters!

once I determined I liked it, I bought the paid version like the next day. the free version is perfectly useable and good, but the paid version comes with some desirable features that seem worth it to me.

It's still only a few days since I started using typewise, and I'm still training my muscle memory on a bunch of stuff with it, but I'm already sure that this is a permanent switch for me. thank you phone glitches for inspiring me to finally make the plunge and try something really different, I guess!

wow I thought I was going to be short on thoughts to crosspost this week but I just have SO MANY that you're getting a bonus sixth thought, instead of the usual five I constrain myself to

one

last week I looked over my spreadsheet of short stories/novelettes I've read, and my rate so far for 2024 is that of the 195 stories I've read (or started to read and then DNF'd bc no thanks), I liked 13 of them enough to rec

which is 7% of the stories

WHEW.

now, there are a few other stories in there where my notes read something like "this is a well written story but it's not for me" so the rate of GOOD stories is slightly higher than the rate of stories I personally enjoyed.

but still!!

two

tfw you go to a pride themed thing with a bunch of vendors and you leave without having purchased so much as a single sticker. The marketable local queer aesthetics appear to be: witchy, goth, cutesy, horny, or combinations of the above

no shade on those aesthetics! but they are not what I personally go for

three

do any of you have recommendations for a good podcast on the history of korea? the more ORV I read the more I'm like....yeah I Would actually like to add korea to my list of east/southeast asian history podcasts I listen to.

I did give a try to the one Korean history podcast I found when searching around, "The History of Korea" by Allen Lee, but I listened to 45 seconds of the first episode and had to bail.

1. his "favourite" piece of history is a violent conflict: my eyebrows are up and I'm worried he'll be one of those dudes who thinks about history solely as a series of wars to obsess over, but I'll keep listening for now, I might be pre-judging too hard

2. refers to the "medieval" era all around the world as being essentially the same: uh oh, I have significant concerns, especially after the first point. I'm highly wary! I don't trust this guy!

3. refers to "peasants and lowborns meekly accepting their lot" as the way things were in that worldwide medieval period: ok now I'm done. immediately. goodbye!!

four

god my linkding is devolving even more. I just restarted my server and the pages loaded nicely for like... less than 5 min and now I'm getting errors again. I really do need to make the time to try updating the version like betty suggested trying!!

maybe tonight?

ALSO I need to get around to making the rest of aviansoph.com work! see if I can figure out the FTP after my disheartening failure last time

but that's probably going to have to wait till like. July.

five

in almost every respect I appreciate that canadian culture is largely a shoes-off-in-the-house culture. HOWEVER. when I'm wearing cute shoes that are an important part of an outfit I've put together, I am personally victimized by this expectation!!

six

listened to a catbird singing in my dreams last night; listened to a catbird singing while biking to work this morning. life imitates art!

one

it is very convenient that my computer refuses to load twitter anymore. whenever I am tempted to go to twitter, the gods of technology reach down and say: no. you will regret it.

two

when I first started listening to podcasts I did not understand the scale of the problem of the gender distribution of hosts within the podcast sphere. I get it now.

these days for a new podcast to feel worth checking out for me, all I ask is that it have at least one host who is not a man. if it is only men, it needs to have The Most Interesting Premise In The World at this point!

any individual podcast is not the problem, but the pattern is exhausting

three

the latest update to the AOS's resolution to change all eponymously-named English bird names for north and central american bird species is a very interesting read!

https://americanornithology.org/english-bird-names/aos-pilot-project-to-change-harmful-english-common-bird-names/

I think they're doing a great job of talking through what's behind the move, what complications are having to be dealt with, and what care is being taken in developing the process for changing the names. Including starting with a pilot project! (I love pilot projects.)

I was also delighted to learn from this article that one bird species I know and love, the long-tailed duck, is actually one that had its name changed in the year 2000 due to its previous name including an offensive word! The current name is such an obvious, memorable, and useful name. I'm glad they made that change and I look forward to more changes like it.

four

I was recently having a convo with a friend and it's making me wonder... is there any book you would call a perfect book? and if so, what book(s)?

I started looking through my 5 star reviews and being like.... ok so I adored these books with so much of my heart but there are still things that could have been done differently to make them technically better

I do think that Kate Beaton's Ducks might be perfect though. and Nghi Vo's When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain.

but of course even if a book is perfect to me doesn't mean it's a book that will work for everybody!

five

ohohoho I have learned the power of remapping shortcuts on my laptop keyboard! I now have the power to create this unicode symbol ➤ in any program, without having to copy-paste it from somewhere else!

(the secret, if you're on a windows computer, is to download microsoft powertoys from github: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/releases/)

one

It's been about two months now of spending a bit of time working on my writing every evening at bedtime, and it continually amazes me how well it works and how much I like it. I enjoy the process of writing so much more like this! I never expected to be the kind of person with a daily writing habit; that seemed like it would never work for me and I thought people who did it were fascinatingly alien. guess I'm an alien lol!

my word count goal for each day is tiny (100-200 words) but I love to see my fic increase in size bit by bit, and to look over what I've written and see how much I like the story I'm telling

every time I stop writing for the night, it's at a point where I have no idea where I'm going next. all the next day I continue to not know, but I don't stress about it. and having so much time for my subconscious to process it between sessions of writing means that when I get back into bed for the night and open my fic to write the day's words, I'm able to figure out what to write next! and it feels so good

two

I have never gotten any tattoos before due to being afraid of needles, but I worked on that phobia and it's much less of a problem now....and I have a tattoo idea I love.

which is:

description of dinosaur-themed tattoo idea

dinosaurs are cool, right? and the scientific process is cool, and paleoart is cool! what if we take an example of a dinosaur which has gone through significant evolutions in our understanding of its appearance over time, and create line drawings of the scientifically accepted understanding of the dinosaur at two different points in the past plus our current most up to date understanding, and then line up the three versions of the dinosaur in a row on my forearm.... with space left for an even more up to date version to add onto it in the future as our understanding continues to grow

the thing is. I need to be able to get this art drawn by someone who has an art style I like, and has sufficient paleo background to know what they're doing in depicting these dinosaur variations, and is taking commissions!

I would definitely want this dinosaur to be a theropod dinosaur, one of the ones we're now sure had feathers. and I'm feeling fond of oviraptor in specific! not because it's my fave kind of dinosaur (I don't have just one fave!) but because it's particularly interesting in terms of its history in scientific misunderstandings of it, so it would be thematically resonant in this tattoo context

three

I just! am so fond of bingqiu! the way they're incapable of normal healthy emotional communication but are so crazy with respect to each other that they can yes-and each other into truly wild displays of horny possessiveness!

it's endlessly fun to play with. characters who WILL hold the idiot ball but only in extremely specific ways that nobody else could ever match. but they match each other! 🥰

four

"x character makes a different choice at a significant canon moment" is a fairly popular type of canon divergence au, and it's interesting to me to think about how it often doesn't work for me. in most contexts in a canon there's a reason the character makes the choice they did, so if the story changes their choice out of nowhere, it doesn't feel grounded in the narrative and in the character.

often these fics are about making things nicer for the characters in question because the canonical choice is ouchy, and I get why that's popular, but I usually find it boring!

Details on what I find more interesting than that

I think I'm just more interested in the question of why people make the choices they do. and less interested in "let's turn this story into straight-up fluff," though there is of course a spectrum of how much this kind of story is interested in going straight for the fluff.

I think to do this type of fic in a way I'm most likely to be into, is to write it so that there's a small but significant change BEFORE the moment of decision, which allows the situation to be just different enough that the character would make a different choice. and even then I'm more interested in exploring the things that lead up to that moment of decision, what makes the character choose what they do, how the change to canon has affected things. Ending the story with "they made the good choice" rather than beginning with it; that's the happy ending right there!

or make the fic an exploration of how you'd think that this choice would be immediate happy ending times, but actually has its own complications and problems as well.

or make it a time loop!

five

As you may or may not know, I have been a power user of online bookmarking services for nearly my entire time in fandom. I was of course on delicious back in the day, until it got altered into unusability, and then I switched to pinboard. I've been trucking along with pinboard ever since.

But I heard that the pinboard guy is a jk rowling supporter these days, and I'd been thinking about trying to leave pinboard anyway because it seems to be basically abandonware at this point. But the jkr support was the tipping point on overcoming the inertia of staying with what I know.

Extended description of my efforts and successes in setting up a self-hosted bookmark manager after finding no other good options online

I'd heard good things about raindrop.io but when I gave it a try, despite some interesting features, I ran into major problems. My biggest problems with it were 1. that it truncates all bookmark descriptions and tags after a certain length, to save space, and I use a LOT of tags and description space; and 2. that I couldn't actually get the website to let me log in on firefox. So that was a deeply disappointing result for something that had seemed promising.

I also took a look at larder.io because it looked intriguing, but it failed to import the description field from my pinboard export, so that was a nope right out of the gate!

After a bunch of reading articles and listicles about other bookmarking service options, all the other online bookmarking services I could find were even less suitable for my needs, and I was getting pretty disheartened.

But then I learned from a friend about the option of setting up Linkding on a personal website as a way to self-host bookmarks, so that you don't have to rely on a service provided by someone else anymore, and it was so exciting to think of having personal control over my own bookmarks like that! I knew I had to give it a try.

I am very glad I went down that rabbit-hole of teaching myself css earlier this year for the purpose of ao3 site skin development, because it made me feel a lot more confident in my ability to try out unfamiliar tech things, and indeed my rudimentary css knowledge was helpful in keeping me from feeling quite so lost in the process.

Linkding has particular requirements around getting it integrated into a website, so I gather this means that what I did to get it set up is playing "my first website" on hardmode. But here's what I did:

I followed the "start a website" steps at https://landchad.net/

And then the linkding instructions here: https://www.maketecheasier.com/create-own-bookmark-manager-with-linkding/

It definitely involved some moments of deep confusion, but I figured it out eventually, and I'm super happy with the result! You can see my public bookmarks here: https://linkding.aviansoph.com/bookmarks/shared

Having my very own website with my very own bookmarking instance feels very "I am learning the forbidden magic" in a gleeful way tbh

But just because I have this set up does not mean I am done! For I would like to CUSTOMIZE my linkding instance!

Linkding has a built-in way to customize a user's view of it using custom CSS, but that's only for what that specific logged-in user sees, rather than changing the appearance of the public bookmarks page for visitors, so that doesn't quite accomplish what I'm wanting to do. I am investigating how to make more direct changes to my linkding instance but I'm still on shaky ground there. (if you have any useful advice, I'm all ears!!)

Also I want to do things with the rest of my website, aviansoph.com. As I mentioned above, I'm playing create-a-website on hardmode for the sake of linkding, so I can't follow most of the guides you find online for building a personal website. But it looks like if I set up an FTP server on my VPS I should be able to make a reasonable system for doing my website? I haven't had time to try this yet but we shall see!!

I can't believe it took me until my mid-thirties to become the kind of nerd who has their own website for the purposes of cataloguing information. I feel like this is one of the kinds of nerd I was destined to be all along.