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Half A Year

Published by Josh on July 4, 2024
How quickly daily became weekly became silence while time was absorbed by those who’d purchased it wholesale. I assure you, dear reader, I still live, still breathe, still think and feel and jot and jitter, just not here, not so publicly, not so regularly. The tick has not given to tock in this space.

Half a year marked and spent. Half a year to go.

The work is good, fulfilling, if oddly tangential in form. It has evolved from the rote cranking of various knobs to the patient tooling of new parts. From maintenance to engineering. Satisfying, if with more ripples, deeper valleys to descend and climb back out of. It saps, but develops in the stretched places new tissues, new joints, and thicker fibers.

Outside those hours, things continue. A table built, some maternal material requests acknowledged and answered. Items acquired, cataloged, and stored, for further use, or further ponderous potential.

Hopes for various projects to regain their steam stare at the back half of a year, parcelling out potential. Casting their wisps into the unwritten mornings and evenings and ends of weeks, playing for holds upon un-yet-tethered time. We shall see.

Time marches, on and apace. On and apace. Ticking and, here, now, at least, tocking once more. Ever forward.

Weekly Journal – 2/5/24 – 2/9/24

Published by Josh on February 9, 2024

Holy hell, I forgot how much goes into starting a new job. Took three or four different courses on how not to be a dick, plus all kinds of fun trainings on PPE and Tool Safety and Asbestos (asbestos? yes, seriously, asbestos.) which were wild to run through as a tech worker whose office is inside his own house. My brain is a thick sludge and I’m gonna sleep for 12 hours tonight, but it was nice to have some structure and some duties for which I have an agreed-upon wage. ANYhow, here’s some stuff I took in this week!

Also, yep, likely going weekly for a while. At a minimum until I get into the groove with work.

Inputs

1: I was not at all aware how difficult it was to make blue LEDs. I remember when white LEDs first became a thing commercially and how that shift in light generation fed throughout the world, but didn’t quite grok how going from white to colored emissions worked. Pretty wild lesson in physics wrapped around this engineering problem.

2: In other brain-bending videos, the future may have already happened, and we’re just moving through our present experience of time. This, tied in with the proofs that free will doesn’t exist don’t break me at all. Nope. Not one little bit.1Don’t mind my existential screaming into a pillow.

3: “It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, $10?”2Ok, yeah, just posting a link to an XKCD is cheating, but damned if inflation projected outward in time isn’t fuckin’ nutty to grasp. Also, I got to share the Is it Worth the Time chart with my boss today, who’d never seen it before. So there, two comics.

4: De Bruyne’s back, Haaland’s back, and Foden scored a hat trick. It’s over for you bitches. Game on!

5: It’s Ten New Brews season! I’ve been playing Magic on and off since Revised (so, like 1994?), as a semi-serious amateur and a very casual, and all points in between there. It’s feeling like I’m near to picking it back up a bit again, at the start of a new set, and watching Jim Davis go nuts brewing gets at that itch that the game has always scratched for me, of finding new ways of solving a competitive puzzle.

I’m never going to go pro3Though writing that was harder to admit out loud than I’d have figured, but since that’s not the goal, I can allow myself the space to have fun while putting in the work to be good at the thing. Anyhow, niche audience for the last one, but I’m in it, and hey, maybe you are too.

Notes:

  • 1
    Don’t mind my existential screaming into a pillow.
  • 2
    Ok, yeah, just posting a link to an XKCD is cheating, but damned if inflation projected outward in time isn’t fuckin’ nutty to grasp. Also, I got to share the Is it Worth the Time chart with my boss today, who’d never seen it before. So there, two comics.
  • 3
    Though writing that was harder to admit out loud than I’d have figured

Daily Journal – Friday, 2/2/24

Published by Josh on February 2, 2024

So, the big news I’ve been hinting at was finally fully confirmed yesterday: I got a new job! Huzzah! As such, starting Monday, I’m likely not going to have the time to consume enough random media to write about it daily. I’m thinking I’m going to transition to a weekly summary, with more items in it, that sums up some of the top bits I’ve read, watched, or otherwise consumed throughout that week. We’ll see though, I’m playing all of this pretty much by ear.

Inputs

1: Everyone’s favorite rascal in a tree stump, Punxsutawney Phil, emerged from his hovel and, for the first time since 2020, did not see his shadow. Good work, rodent!

2: In positive news for those beholden to artificial insulin to survive, it looks like another startup biomedical firm is launching to increase insulin production at lower prices.

The patent to the process of creating artificial insulin was given to the world. Afterward, various “improvements” have been patented and used to drive costs in the US to astronomical levels. Anyone seeking to crater this continual injustice is a friend of the people, and one I’m happy to see succeed. Fuck the greedy drug companies, as well as America’s asinine belief that medicine is some sort of free market. The supply is life, the demand is the prevention of pain and death, and any ghoul who insists on squeezing the lifeblood of America into outsized profit deserves our scorn and our shame.

3: In what might be the most Borgesian thing I’ve seen this week, a guy made a .pdf larger than the universe. Specifically, 37 trillion light years square. The map is most assuredly not the territory, and damned if folding it back up again wouldn’t be tricky.