all these developments like llms and social media just make me want to engage with technology less and less (￢_￢;) i just want to be offline now. that's why the extent of my interactions with my computer and the internet have pretty much been limited to my homeserver and my homepage this year. the rest of my time has been used for more irl things.

i've been keeping a pretty healthy routine. on top of my caregiving duties for my dad and mom, i've been working out 3 times a week, getting regular sleep every night, and listening to a lot more music (part of my ongoing homeserver data clean up and migration process.) i've only been logging onto the internet once a day. usually, after i put my dad down for the night, i will write some email replies and then check some feeds/yell uselessly at the screen for a hour before i cut myself off and go wind down with music or a show. i'll read stuff like garbageday and just be glad i didn't spend the whole day feeling annoyed about all the stupid stuff happening in the world that i can't do anything about. sometimes my life gets me down but at least it's real life.

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i started watching a jdrama series called kimi ga kokoro wo kuretakara (english title: the gift of your heart.) this show is emotional torture for me! it's only 11 episodes and i'm on episode 4 but i can only watch one episode a day because i'm bawling my eyes out for an hour after of each one. every time the first notes of hikaru utada's naniirodemonai hana start playing, i know i'm about to be utterly destroyed (╥_╥)

i relate way too much to the lead character, ame aihara (i haven't made any tragic faustian bargains with any death guides that i know of though.) part of what makes the story so devastating to me is that all the frustrating decisions she makes are very much like decisions i would make or have made in my life and so i find myself internally screaming for her to not make them. but i know she will anyways because her character's logic/morality are similar to mine.

it's a very sad and melodramatic story but i feel like getting emotionally invested in and crying about human level things like love and heartbreak, dreams and failures, life and death, even if fictional, is somehow healthier than getting worked up and numbed out by the large scale horrible problems that the algorithms want to force into my view to make me feel bad and powerless.

in the show, ame is a pastry chef and the story is a lot about memory and the senses. it made me miss cooking and baking, which i used to do a lot when i lived on my own and before my dad got sick. i can't really cook anything nice and fancy for my dad anymore because his condition makes him only able to eat very simple and plain foods. anything complex in taste and texture, he will just get confused and refuse to eat it or spit it out. in the early years of his disease, i used to make him elaborate meals that he loved eating but, over time, little by little, he began rejecting everything as his brain began to disintegrate. now the focus is just on making sure he's getting the nutrients he needs, no adventures or aesthetics.

it makes me so sad as food was a big part of his life too. when he was able, he loved cooking and firing up the barbecue. i think he was a little disappointed when i became a vegetarian but he still went out of his way to make a special meal for me whenever we ate as a family. he worked in restaurants his whole life. when i was in elementary school he used to take time out of work and make me and my sister hot lunches. it was really important to him. he would drive over to my school and wait in the parking lot for me to come out to get it. i'm not sure how he didn't get fired from the diner for skipping out during lunchtime to do this every day (⌒_⌒;) i think most little kids usually feel embarrassed when their lunch is "weird" and not conforming to the standard protocol of ziploc bologne sandwiches, lunchables, and juice boxes that everyone else had. i think my sister felt embarrassed. but not me. i just felt lucky. i still remember the delicious taste of the fried egg sandwiches that he would deliver us wrapped in foil. i don't know what he put in them. seems like a simple thing to make but i've never been able to recreate the exact taste. now it's gone forever.

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sorry, i went on a sentimental tangent there. that show has really been sending me into my feelings a lot. but my homepage update this week is related to all of this. i finally got around to doing something with the boba drink sprite on the ground ^-^ in the early iterations of my page, the sprite was a stanley mug. i just put that in because i thought it was funny. the stanley cup was an annoying meme product at the time (i never actually owned one.) eventually i swapped it out for the boba tea to make it more personal and accurate to life since this is a personal homepage after all. taro matcha milk tea is one of my favorite drinks. it also has a lot of sentimental meaning for me because it's linked to a very special, somewhat bittersweet, time in my life.

i wrote out my semi-lazy recipe for the drink^🂠 and put it on the page for anyone that wants to make it for themselves (⌒_⌒;) i like the idea of having stuff on my page that sometimes points to doing things offline and having human level experiences rather than just more hopping around the web.

okay, i'm going to go mentally prepare to watch another episode of the show and become a puddle afterwards.

maybe it's partially my lack of sleep lately due to my parents, but i've been feeling extra exhausted that another war has broken out in the time since my last post. i hate it. it feels like a hopelessly endless cycle of more suffering, more destruction. it's made even more intolerable by the assholes in charge of it. it just makes me feel like there's no point in doing anything in this world if we're all just trapped in this neverending loop where nothing gets better. but the stubborn part of me feels the need to keep going no matter what. even if it's just to irritate the powers that want everyone to become apathetic and complacent.

it's just so fucked up that the world is still fighting wars in the year 2026 when we probably have more knowledge and technology than ever to figure out peaceful solutions. but some people just won't allow for it to ever happen. whether it's driven by greed or ego or hate or sheer stupidity, so much human ingenuity and energy is wasted building anti-human machines and deadlier weapons instead. all so warmongers can generate their cringe slopaganda and cosplay as tough guys committing real war crimes with their vibe warring.

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since last time, on my homeserver, i've added:

• nginx proxy manager to give my lan services easy to remember urls
• netviel for a nice web ui to search my notmuch email index when i don't have a cli
• notediscovery for a web ui to write and manage my notes (organizes my folder of of markdown notes and replaces apple's notes app)
• i also swapped out freshrss for miniflux instead as the latter works much better for me and my more minimalist style

now i think i've got everything i want installed. i still need to move the majority of my data in. but before i do that, i've been doing some administrative tasks like consolidating all my working notes that i've written down from scouring forums and website tutorials. i'm working on writing out documentation for my whole system. just in case i need to remember various commands and how to restore every piece of it if something breaks or i want to upgrade to new hardware at some point if hardware is ever reasonably affordable again (￢_￢;) not very exciting work but good for keeping my mind from crashing out over all the simultaneous global horrors.

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over here on my homepage, i made some small layout adjustments and fixes on the flat pages. i also updated my uses page since my homeserver has altered my setup a lot! i also added some new people the blogroll and button links section.

like i said, i didn't have much computer time this week. so that's all i managed to accomplish.

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sorry if the title of this entry made you think it was going to be review of the pt anderson film rather than a literal description of my life right now (๑>ᴗ<๑) i did see the movie a while ago and thought it was good and pretty relevant to the current times we're living through. but i don't have much to say about it that i haven't said in other ways on other topics ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

another film i watched just the other day was good luck, have fun, don't die. it was quite entertaining and full of dark comedy even if it's maybe a bit heavyhanded in delivering its message. though i suspect that the lack of subtlety is somewhat intentional since it's about societal and reality collapse due to social media, ai, brainrot, etc. maybe it's probably trying to reach people who have already offloaded a lot of their reasoning ability and media literacy to the machines so it's attempting to speak in their language. i think that's also probably why it's lit and shot to look like the artificial high-contrast style that ai imagery (particularly sci fi stuff) is known for (that it ripped from movie cinematography to being with.) and then the costume and prop design mimics the inconsistent/illogical generic garbage style that has become recognizable as ai slop aesthetic. it even has the piss filter tinged color-grading (╥_╥)

i didn't know much about the movie when i went into it so i don't know if that was all intentional but i thought the visuals made a lot of sense with the story. afterwards, i had to go look up if parts of the film were actually ai generated. but the director, gore verbinski, is pretty clear about his feelings on ai (if it wasn't already clear enough in the story of the film): "Why is AI helping me write a song or tell a story? I don't want it to breathe or fuck for me; I want it to solve cancer."

worth watching if you want to cry-laugh about the current state of the world. maybe even more worth watching if you're stuck bed-rotting in the doomscroll or if you feel yourself slipping into ai psychosis.

if you have read my recent posts, you probably could feel through my words that i've been getting quite disillusioned about the state of the web in recent times. i've been taking a break from online for the past month or so and slowed my work on this page to work on my offline computer projects, like my homeserver, instead.

it feels bad to be on the mainstream internet these days. the doomscrolls, the algorithms, the brainrot, the slop, the grift, the scams. today's mainline internet is like an dystopian web of hate and vitriol and everyone's brains are getting cooked by it, even the brains of people who control the world. and it's not easy to just avoid the toxicity when surfing online. it's infected everything.

so lately i have been privately wondering a lot about whether it's just time give up the net as a lost cause. it's easy to feel like no one really wants the kind of independent web that i want anymore when everyone's internet usage is concentrated in slopweb apps. and how can personal websites even compete with the overwhelming flooding of the zone by the infinitely resourced corpo-backed algos? the lan is so much more peaceful than the wan. no worrying about chat apps harvesting identity and biometrics into systems backed by evil corporations that build databases and tools for secret police to carry out human rights violations. no worrying about being violated by ai bot home invasions.

my homeserver is like my personal internet where i actually get to choose what i want to do on my computer rather than have things forced upon me by all the automations and dark patterns and bad actors that have become dominant on the internet. of course, on lan, i'm not really connecting directly with other people but that's what email is for (⌒_⌒;) how much longer can we expect to have real human connection on the internet anyways with how bot-infested the web space is becoming. i was sad to see my internet friend, steph, limiting her rss feed (understandably) due to llm scraping theft (╥_╥) it makes for a much poorer internet when people feel like it's not worth sharing online anymore.

a lot of my web optimism has faded over the past few years but meeting some new nice people through my homepage this week has been a good reminder of what i love about building this place. it's not just for myself as a playground (honestly, i can just do that on my lan now if i just want to have fun with html.) it's also a way to connect with people on my own terms and to introduce others to a world that has the potential to be better than what is prescribed by those with too much power and control over everyone's lives. things feel bleak but i'm not ready to give that up.

thanks to everyone who stopped by. thanks to everyone who reached out and said nice things. i hope i inspired some new homepages to materialize! i'll keep working on this place. i guess i won't become a full-on lan recluse just yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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i did spend most of the past two weeks working on my homeserver again. it's just so much fun researching and learning about ways to do the things i want. and then figuring out ways to do it better. writing scrappy code and making little tools. i'm super happy with how it's shaping up!

• for rss, i ended up going with freshrss. i couldn't find anything that was much better or different in a way that i preferred.
• i took way too much time testing out different read-it-later/bookmark managers like linkwarden, karakeep, shiori, etc. some of these had a bunch of extra features like auto ai tagging that i don't really need/want. i found that the more "convenience" tools that were built into these things, the clunkier they felt for me to personally use. convenience has a cost, i suppose. in the end i went with a lightweight option, readeck, and it works great for what i want it to do (save static offline copies of articles/websites with good search.)
• i swapped out browsersync after learning how to put livereload in a docker container to run neatly like my other normal docker applications. it works like the parts of browsersync i actually want (live persistent mini webserver on lan) but in a much lighter way and doesn't have extraneous stuff to worry about

most of my time, however, was put into building a simple terminal dashboard^🂠 with python using rich and textual to give me a quick overview of my system. my python knowledge is rough but i can just get by with some creative skill-transfer of my better but still mediocre js understanding (⌒_⌒;) then i spent a lot of time making it all pretty by poring over the textual documentation. textual has its own a kind of css that's somewhat similar to web css which is much more in my comfort zone ^-^

i'm tempted to make it weirder and cuter now that i have a good grasp of its code. i can do whatever i want with it since the interface really only has to make sense to me as i'm the only one looking at it (๑>ᴗ<๑)

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i think i'm pretty close to getting my homeserver fully set up. then it'll take some time to properly move my stuff in. but maybe i can also start working on new homepage stuff again.

i've really been enjoying the process of finding all the pieces and trying not to make catastrophic mistakes that require me to start all over again. so far so good. as of right now, i have: jellyfin for my movies, tv, and music library; browsersync for website testing over lan; komga for my ebooks and manga library; immich for my photo library; notmuch for my email archive; and borg for backups to my second ssd. i still need to add an rss reader (i'm thinking probably freshrss but i'm looking to see if there are other options.) and maybe find another thing to read my email archive with. notmuch is good for quick searching but not so great for reading (⌒_⌒;)

so my setup is pi os on the sd card and then all my data and files on one of the ssds with borg backing that drive up to a second ssd a couple times a week. i was able to write a simple script so i can run a single command on boot up to decrypt both the ssds and then start all my services ^-^

my goal is to centralize all my computer stuff on this lan-only homeserver machine and not have things spread out over my various computers/tablet/phone. i made some samba shared folders so i will be able get to everything i need over the lan ^-^ now i can treat my computers as interchangeable client machines.

that's the basic skeleton. i have a lot of files and data to migrate and organize. i think this will probably be the most time-consuming part of this project. it also doesn't help that i keep getting distracted by things in my archives that i haven't looked at in a long time. like reading and getting sentimental about old emails from friends from 15 years ago (╥ ᴗ ╥) the feeling of time passing can be quite intense.

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i've been pretty checked out of the world while working on the server and haven't scrolled social media at all. i kind of have the worst personality type for a "user" or a "consumer." it's easy for me to get obsessed with things and be really into them for a while but after i feel like they've run their course, i can just as easily step away from them. i don't really have the addictive personality that everything seems to be trying to prey on these days with the gamifying and gamblifying of every product. maybe my dopamine receptors are broken ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe that's why i'm not really into gaming that much. so with things like social media, it's hard for me to start using it again if i've decided i've had enough of the experience.

i had a pretty offline january and now it's half way through february and i still have no desire to log on. maybe this will be a whole offline year. i've noticed that i'm less irritated during the day without all the constant slop and regurgitated noise from the screens. it's made it a bit easier to manage my parents' frustrating reality without my mood being dragged down all the time. it's freed up time and mental space to focus on more local things (and not just my computer local area network (⌒_⌒;)) and i'm starting to feel motivated to do healthier things for myself instead of being depressed about things that i have no power over. i just ordered a new yoga mat to replace my old one that's falling apart because i want to start working out again. i probably do need to get a bit more fit to survive the dystopia this world is quickly transforming into (╥_╥)

not being on social doesn't mean that i avoided seeing multiple angles of another state sanctioned murder last week. it doesn't even mean that i haven't been crying and feeling hopeless about how messed up the world is. it's hard to avoid how bad things are unless you wilfully blind yourself to reality and/or live in constant denial and sociopathy, a "dual state." without the social feeds, at least i have a bit more control over when i'm exposed to the repeating infinite loop of horrors invading and assaulting my senses.

i saw that people have been deleting tiktok as it has been captured by the american government and its cronies. good. though, i'm so jaded about the internet now that i don't think that signing up for upscrolled or whatever as an alternative really changes anything. i don't have anything against upscrolled in particular. i just now believe that these types of services will continue to have the same social vulnerabilities and repeat the same negative patterns given enough time and scale. it's best to limit dependency on any service that filters and packages the internet for you. i'm convinced that the only way to break out of this cycle is if people just made their own websites again. even then, you can be at the mercy of hosting providers (if you don't self-host), domain registrars, and isps. but the risk is so much smaller because there's less hassle to just switching providers that aren't serving you well.

i'm not sure i have much use for social media in my life anymore. i do feel sorry that i'm not on there replying to friends. i still read their blogs and hope that anything they really want to say will be written on their blog rather than a social platform anyways.

i've also been writing a lot more emails lately to old friends as well as new people who have recently discovered my homepage and reached out to me ^-^ it's been nice to have more thought-out communications with people instead of quick exchanges in comments and replies sections.

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speaking of lessening dependencies. i've been making progress on de-apple-ing my computer life. as i mentioned last time, i cancelled all my big media and cloud subscriptions and am moving to a rebuilt homeserver setup. this includes getting rid of apple music, apple tv, and icloud+. tim cook seems determined to do everything he can to make giving money to apple feel as gross as possible. i can't wait to get more of apple's hooks out of my life. i'm still stuck with them for managing my mom's computing and homekit and i haven't found a phone option that's not equally as bad morally and ethically (￢_￢;) but it feels better not paying them monthly anymore.

for me, apple hegemony only works if they maintain the illusion of being one of the "good ones." like the illusion that propelled american hegemony post-ww2, allowing it to become the power it is today. but it no longer works if the nazi-defeating heroes are doing more and more overtly nazi shit themselves. we overlook flaws and contradictions and live in illusions which allow power and resources to consolidate in exchange for convenience and safety because the illusion soothes our consciences. as canadian prime minister mark carney said last week. but illusions can become lies that are too rotten to tolerate. is apple's hardware and ecosystem good enough to justify its cost if their progressive marketing illusions are hollow? for me and my use cases, no, and especially not with the recent developments there. (i know apple doesn't totally equate to tim cook but he is still the head and the one steering the ship for now.)

anyways, in preparation for my homeserver rebuild, i moved my pi-hole to it's own dedicated pi zero 2w. previously, i just ran it on the same computer with my other homeserver stuff. i think it's probably better security to have it on its own machine anyways and i also went ahead and added in stubby as well to give my isp some extra work if they really want to spy on me (๑>ᴗ<๑) i didn't want the pi-hole to keep going offline while i experiment with getting my new setup working. i will probably be making mistakes and rebooting a lot. i actually thought i fried my pi 5 board last week while i was changing the os but i only corrupted the eeprom and just had to recover it (⌒_⌒;) oops.

this weekend, i'll start getting the basic structure of my homeserver together. then i'll start processing all my files off of my apfs formatted backup drives and out of apple photos, etc. i got a pimoroni nvme base duo to attach storage to my pi but i've been waiting for the mailman to deliver the second drive i ordered. ssds are soooo expensive now (╥_╥)

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i did a bit more work on my cli page these past couple weeks.^🂠

i figured out a way to do a parameter input for the blog so readers can set the text to wrap at a certain character limit. without it, the terminal window just prints blog entries full window width and breaks words at the end of the line to wrap. that can get annoying to read so i came up with this option ^-^ to use it, just do this: curl elle.sh/blog/w=123. replace 123 with whatever width in characters that you want.

i also added two other pages which are self-explanatory ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ curl elle.sh/about and curl elle.sh/help.

normally, it would be torture for me to idle this much. but it was really out of my control. my body was not going to follow any of my directions so i just went along with it. and, honestly, it was a very refreshing forced break from everything. a break from content.

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yes, i still heard about the horrible things like president kidnappings and masked psychopath cops murdering people. i felt sad about the state of the world but i wasn't pulled into it the same way i would be if i was physically able to doomscroll. it was more like reading about tragedies in the non-real-time newspaper and parsing them with some distance and delay and at a more reasonable pace.

i did catch myself feeling weirdly guilty about not being able to doomscroll, that i was excusing myself from the collective outrage against all the livestreamed acts of cruelty. it shouldn't be this way. it became clear just how much worse things had gotten in this current iteration of the internet. i was really confronted with the fact that this internet is no longer the internet i grew up with that taught and gave me so many positive things. this is a totally different machine that is shaping people and the world in many ways that i don't believe in. and it's exhausting.

henry wrote a beautiful essay recently about the "web we want" and i really want to believe in that still but it's getting harder to.

young people coming online today for the first time probably just experience it as a place to watch pain and psychic abuse being inflicted on others or to be attacked themselves. some probably think the main utility of the internet is for trolls and perverts to ask a robot wizard to nonconsensually remove the clothes in photographs of women and children. every day, i feel more relieved that i scrubbed my younger and more foolish instagram account a long time ago, before ai deepfake revenge porn, before any of this. at that time, it was because social media was already at the point of causing so much damage to my body and self image. i thought that was already bad enough for society, humanity. i guess that was just a beta preview for much worse things to come. the best case scenario today is that newly online people experience a week or so of wonder before they are profiled and fingerprinted enough for the algorithms to decide what brand of psyops to apply to their character type.

i've been seeing a lot of people write about how everything is "content" now. that the way the world works is no longer based on what's reality but, rather, what is the more memetic content. this is the slop and lies firehose strategy of the current fascist american regime that wants to consume the world's attention and impose their reality by sheer algorithmic force around the globe. it doesn't matter if it's their cruelty filmed and disseminated by their own officials and agents or by protestors and bystanders. their content is being broadcast all the same. the american slopmaster-in-chief literally signs his shitty social media posts with "thank you for your attention..." as if gloating that you've just ceded a bit more of your limited life energy to absorbing his vile and evil trash. the internet as most people know it is totally captured by this content.

being unplugged the last couple weeks made it clear to me that maybe i don't really want to spend time on today's internet. i fear that by doing so, i'm just playing into the sadistic hands of those who want to dominate my attention and demoralize me from doing anything that's actually good for myself. i don't know how it helps the world to constantly subject myself to these conditions and making myself feel more powerless to do anything in this world. maybe the only way to fight it now is to deprive it of the attention oxygen it demands.

i had already withdrawn a lot from social platforms over 2025, just keeping one foot in the "good ones" to stay in touch with the people i do enjoy talking to. but i don't know if that's enough. maybe it's time to fully disengage.

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in my dizzy state, i made some rough plans or intentions or resolutions or whatevers for 2026:

• continue working and writing on my homepage instead of spending time on social platforms. i might just set up automated rss updates to my mastodon and bluesky so i don't even need to go there anymore to share a blog post (just because i want to quit it all, i don't expect others to.) i want to keep up with people through their rss feeds. i want to go back to emailing (or matrix, deltachat, signal) people when i have something to say to them.
• rebuild my homeserver from ground up. as i've grown more comfortable with linux over the past year, it's time to take off the training wheels and make something totally tailored to my needs. i've been using umbrel which is a nice easy prebuilt os but it has a lot of things that are useless to me. so i'm going to install pi os lite and work up from there. i want to make it a live server for working on/testing my webpages over my lan. i want to make it a more robust media server for movies/music/etc because i've cancelled all my subscriptions. i also want to de-apple my photo library finally. and a bunch of other things. maybe i'll write about the whole project in a future entry.
• find ways to be happier. it sounds weird to say during this time of non-stop abnormal global crises and people hurting everywhere. i'll continue to call out bad shit as i see it but i think it's important to make room for some happiness in spite of it all. otherwise the miserable people who are causing all the ugly chaos have managed to drag you down with them to the hell that they live in. if i'm down there, i'm of no use to anyone in my life. this is the most nebulous thing on this list but tied to what i wrote earlier about being offline. maybe it means making the music that i failed to make last year or the getting the sleep i never got or maybe something else. i don't know but i'm going to try to focus on it.

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lastly, some homepage updates ^-^

since i've been enjoying doing more stuff in terminal these days, i made a satellite page^🂠 that you can use curl to call up if you are also a cli person (⌒_⌒;) i saw wibby post about making a lite version of his homepage a while ago and it make me want to do something similar but as i was designing an ultralight ascii layout, i got derailed by the idea for this instead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ just type curl elle.sh in your terminal. or you can type curl elle.sh/blog to get my latest blog post. i might build it out some more down the line, it's fun.

other than that, i've just made some minor additions like more 88x31 button and text links to people and did some tidying up here and there.

i self-diagnosed myself so don't take anything i write here as medical advice, it could be totally wrong. because it's christmastime and hospitals are backed up with the h3n2 mutant superflu and with my dad's condition being what it is, i wasn't left with many good options than to do what i could on my own. so, again, this is not medical advice, i don't have any medical training beyond the things i've learned from being a caregiver for many years. if you have a serious injury, you should seek real medical help. i'm just some random person writing about this in my diary here.

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i woke up monday morning and the whole room was spinning. i initially just thought it was a bit of sleepy disorientation. but then i tried to stand up and the whole room went upside-down and i fell back onto my bed. i wanted to throw up. closing my eyes didn't help. even though i was laying on my bed, i still felt like i was falling. after a couple minutes of being frozen in place, things stabilized. i picked up my phone and called my mom upstairs. i told her i couldn't move and that she would have to make breakfast for dad and get him through his usual routine (toileting, etc.) i felt so bad (physically and emotionally.) it was the realization of my fear of being totally incapacitated and not being able to do anything for them. she kept asking if i needed to go to the hospital or an ambulance but i said to wait and maybe i could sleep it off if she could do what she could with dad.

at that point i started getting intense chills so i crawled back under my covers but then i started overheating and sweating like crazy. i was shaking and my teeth were rattling. that little movement of curling up into bed made everything spin again. i was getting overloaded with conflicting signals and my brain hurt and my stomach was churning and i just kind of semi-passed out for a little while.

i stayed like that for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. my mom kept checking on me and i kept saying i just wanted to stay still. when i regained full consciousness, the room wasn't spinning so i thought it had passed and i tried to get up. but as soon as i sat up, everything went crazy again. i got back into the sleeping position i woke up in and waited for everything to settle. i called my mom and told her i had to rest for the whole day.

i realized that as long as i didn't move my head, things seemed fine, almost normal. i slowly reached for my phone and started looking up all my symptoms like you're not supposed to do. i ruled out viral infections like the flu and covid since i didn't have any other symptoms of those and also i haven't been in any public gatherings for weeks. i've had those and this felt very different. i've never had vertigo before but i know people who have and it was feeling like how it's been described to me. so i spent a couple hours laying there learning about the crystals in your inner ear that can get dislodged and end up in your semicircular canals to totally fuck up your life.

i learned about the posterior canal being the most commonly affected area for bppv and the dix-hallpike test. i did the test on myself. it was scary to do the first time since it intentionally triggers the vertigo and i didn't know how bad it would be. i didn't want to vomit (a lot these videos suggest having a bucket nearby.) but i got through it and it seemed to indicate positive. then i learned about the epley maneuver which is a sequence of positions that moves the crystals out of the canals. this also triggers the symptoms when performed so i just focused up and got through it as well. surprisingly, i immediately felt slightly better afterwards. i treated the right side since that was what was testing the most strongly but then the right side pretty much cleared up after a couple days but the left side was still causing symptoms. so i've been repeating the maneuver for the left. things are getting better.

currently, i still have some residual dizziness but it's manageable. i also have to walk super slow to not trigger any vertigo. if i'm staying perfectly still and keeping my head level, things mostly feel normal. that's how i'm writing this entry. i haven't been able to eat much for days, mostly just trying to stay hydrated. i was finally able to shower and wash my hair on the third day after two days of feeling gross.

i don't know what exactly triggered the bppv. the day before it started, i banged my head on a cabinet door that my mom left open so maybe i got a mild concussion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or maybe my dependence on wearing active noise canceling headphones overnight to sleep through my dad's nighttime wandering has finally caught up with me (there is anecdotal evidence that sustained overexposure to anc vibrations can cause bppv.) i don't know, those are just my theories. i'll see how things go over the next week and if there's no more improvement, i'll consult a physical therapist to make sure i've not misdiagnosed myself and i don't have a brain tumor or something. i'm just going to try to get as much rest as possible but it's proving to be a challenge if i can no longer use my headphones to get through my dad's dementia at night. that's on top of having to sleep in the most uncomfortable semi-upright position to keep the crystals from falling back.

thankfully my dad was pretty subdued on day one and two so my mom was able to handle him by herself. but on day three, his hallucinations flared up (probably because he sensed a change in the environment with me not being very present for a couple days) and he started acting out and i had to step in which caused a few super dizzy episodes for me.

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i was hoping to start off 2026 on a good note with some fun new additions i've been working on for my homepage but i guess everything is on hold for now while i tend to my new hobby of moving around ear crystals. hopefully this doesn't foreshadow another bad year to come (╥_╥)

then again, all the time i've spent the past week sitting in silence and stillness hasn't been all that terrible of an experience. it was quite peaceful once the room stopped spinning. if the foreshadowing means i'll be doing more of that peacefulness instead of falling into the toxic internet attention sucking traps, then it might be something to look forward to.

so i've been in recluse mode, waiting for the year to run out and hoping the arbitrary changing of the year number on the calendar brings something better. i know it likely won't but what if... (╥_╥)

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as i mentioned in my last entry, i've been wanting to get back to messing around with linux so that's what i've been doing instead of going online. i've been working on my cyberdeck^🂠 again (⌒_⌒;) i added a ups battery and a little e-ink display. i also finally got my pi to boot from an ssd by switching to an older msata ssd.

trying to get the e-ink display to work with my fedora minimal install was super frustrating so i switched to pi os lite. this also made the pi boot up much smoother so i guess i'll stick with it for now. i wanted to stay on fedora but i suppose it's really not a big deal to sudo apt instead sudo dnf ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i don't really notice that much difference between these minimal base distros anyways for my use case. the main difference is now i just hear rosé and bruno mars' apt. song in my head whenever i need to install something from the debian repos (๑>ᴗ<๑)

i wrote a little python script that shows me the date and time on the display. since i don't use a bar on my desktop, i thought it would be fun to make the hardware give me that info instead. right now, i have to manually refresh it with a command but i might try to add autorefresh after i look at some ways to make the refresh rate faster on it.

also, i spent a lot of time the past couple weeks organizing my framework system's dotfiles. dotfiles are basically all my user settings/configurations and the reason to have them organized is so that you can respawn your system easily whenever you want. i wrote a bootstrap script that automatically downloads all the programs i use and then symlinks/connects all my personalizations. for example, it will recreate my neovim set up so i don't have to manually recreate it again! i wrote the bootstrap.sh for a fedora system though so i'll have to rewrite it a bit to work with pi os. i think i'll also try to have it install niri instead of hyprland to keep things even more minimal and efficient for the pi 4's more limited resources.

honestly, i kind of feel like i'm just preparing for when the corpo-gov ai consumes all of the world's compute manufacturing and resources and regular people who want to use computers are left to scavenge the outdated and decommissioned scraps of hardware and software from the bygone age of the personal computing revolution. i suppose that's why all the technology in cyberpunk fictions always looks like it's cobbled together from random parts. we're just heading towards that future.

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i've been slowly making my way through the whole ghost in the shell: stand alone complex series. i've never seen it before but i've read the original manga and the direct anime adaptations of that, as well as the live action movie with scarlett johansson. it's interesting to watch ghost in the shell these days. everything feels even more dystopian with the backdrop of our current reality. when i watched the other stuff in the past, there was probably a part of me that thought uploading consciousness to a cyberbrain could be cool.

but now, with where our real world tech has ended up, i feel like having a cyberbrain or being a full prosthetic cyborg would just mean being trapped in some billionaire tech bro's shoddy vc funded piece of junk full of surveillance and ads and drm and endless bloatware. imagine having to install/update third party adblockers in your brain like how, today, you might take acetaminophen or nsaids to manage a migraine. and if it's not full of garbageware, it'll probably be totally out of reach for the average person or have extractive subscription-based models. after everything i've seen with how technology has evolved into our lives, especially the past few years, i'm no longer optimistic that the people who could build this kind of technology would do it purely out of the goodness of their own heart to help humanity as a whole.

so yeah, even though i'm watching my dad's brain fail right now and thinking about my own brain eventually failing, i'm probably going to decline the cyberbrain upgrade if it ever becomes a real thing and just embrace the messy finitude of being human.

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this is probably my last entry for 2025 (unless i get inspired to write something next week) so i hope everyone reading this has a good end of the year. thank you for visiting my homepage in 2025 and reading along and sending me nice emails and messages. even though i'm not feeling good at the moment or really at most points of 2025, making this homepage continues to be a bright spot for me in dark times. so i'll meet you back here in 2026! ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ <3

the year ending just reminds me that i've lost yet another year to this horrible disease. each year gets harder, not just because my dad's condition continues to get worse and he becomes harder and more work to manage. but the time that has slipped through my fingers piles up even more and weighs me down with the slow motion grief of not just losing my dad but my own life as well. all this time i'll never get back. and i can't really do much about it. all i can do is scratch another tally mark into the wall.

it sometimes feels weird to me that i haven't changed my "now" status since i created this /now page. on most /now pages that i've seen, the status gets updated pretty regularly as people have lives with actual events to update with. in my status, i describe my current situation as a limbo and that's still what it is. for the most part.

i may not be in a position to do a lot of the things i wish i was doing or visiting a lot people and places in the world that i care about but i'm also not just sitting inert and wasting away. the nice thing about having a blog is that, even though i think nothing has really been happening, i can look back at old entries and see that it's not totally nothing. as small as the little adventures that i'm able and allowed to have on my computer or in my mind may be, they happened. it ain't much but it's a living ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

and also, caregiving is not nothing either. despite what the capitalist eugenicists want everyone to believe, lessening the suffering of another human being is probably a better use of my time than being "productive" contributing to things that end up intentionally or unintentionally moving the world faster towards whatever hypercapitalist ai hell we're in the process of moving towards. instead, i'm actually making incredible gains in terms of insight into the human condition (⌒_⌒;)

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a few people have mentioned to me that my blog has become hard to navigate because it's basically one long page and there are so many entries now. and i agree. when i started this blog, i never expected it to still be going at this point or have so much writing on it. i didn't have any confidence in my commitment to blog regularly so i didn't bother building a blog archive to list the entries. my previous attempts at blogging have always been pretty shortlived. i would make a blog, write on it for a few weeks and then new entries would shorten and become more and more sporatic and that's what i expected to happen again. for whatever reason, that hasn't happened yet. i know there are people with blogs that have run for decades so my 1.5 year old blog isn't really that impressive but it still feels like a big accomplishment to me ^-^

so, i suppose it's time to add some more navigation to move around the entries easier. it would also help me because sometimes i want to link back to a previous entry and it's become annoying to scroll or ctrl/cmd-f to find stuff.

i spent some time the past couple weeks making a nice html/css-only menu for the list on the flat blog page. i was tempted to misuse <details> and <summary> for this but, in the end, i went with the same checkbox trick i used for the xerox filter. this keeps things more consistent. now you can toggle on the entry list^🂠 at the top with the new control button next to the filter button and jump around the page.

i'm not 100% happy with it yet because it has some cross-browser issues because of the xerox filter on it. sorry chrome users, it looks a little bad on there. for now, it works fine enough but i need to think some more about how to solve it a little better.

i also added some more links in the 88x31 buttons section and on the flat links page, along with little tweaks here and there.

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i haven't had much time and energy to play with my linux setup too much lately. but i'm feeling the urge to dive back in again. i want to get around to trying out some other window managers. i also have a couple small parts that i want to try to add to my pi. maybe that's what i'll work on for the rest of the year. who knows how much longer normal people will be able to tinker with computers. computer components are getting so much more expensive as manufacturers succumb to ai brain worms. i just read that micron is shutting down crucial, their 30 year old consumer ram and ssd business to direct all their resources to the ai bubble business. i've always used crucial ram and ssds because they were always the most dependable in my testing. this sucks (╥_╥)

i had to waive my rule of not joining any feed-based sites that don't provide bare minimum profile rss feeds. if you've been reading this blog for a while, you know i'm very tired of walled gardens and closed ecosystems. see my recent linux and hardware posts. even this very homepage was born out of the desire to exist on the open web instead of closed systems (and it's why i try to stick to using open standards like basic html, css, js, rss, openpgp, etc to make everything here.) i don't enjoy feeling like all the time and energy i'm expending online is trapped in and limited to one specific closed place that i have no real control over. one recent egregious example for me was another platform i was on for many years that semi-abruptly turned from a nice place for talking to internet-building people to now a full-on crypto casino. it's like if a local nightclub that brought in good bands and a cool clientele slowly kept adding slot machines by the bathroom area until the machines spilled out into the main space and the noise of slot machines drowned out all the music/conversation and only the only people left in the place were gambling addicts, grifters, and in-denial nostalgists (╥_╥) sigh, another profile with years of posts and connections in the trash heap. in hindsight, i should seen the red flags since that platform never offered native rss support (⌒_⌒;)

anyways, back to cyberspace. cyberspace is made by someone that goes by the name genghis_khan and, as the faq explains, is more of an art project than a commercial project at this point. i've been enjoying it. i love that it's terminal themed and text-focused. other things in this genre include itter.sh, a real terminal based social feed that you ssh into. i'm also @elle on there but i don't use it. again, no rss. there is also tuitter which is currently in closed beta. but cyberspace being a regular browser based platform that is just styled to look like tui makes it easier for the average user to get into it (so maybe it's more like the text-based subreply but styled for cyberpunks.) it has markdown and the codeblock formatting is handy for drawing ascii art. if you couldn't tell by a lot of the parts of my homepage, i love ascii art and kaomojis (cyberspace has limited image posting but i prefer not to use it.) it doesn't have likes or up/downvotes, or really any of the annoying dopamine-inducing clout metrics of mainstream unhealthy social media. it does have follower counts, which i could do without. there are chat rooms called circ and direct messages called c-mail. you can also navigate it with just your keyboard ^-^

it doesn't have fancy things like federation/decentralization, portable social graph, or even encryption (i assume khan can read everything everyone writes in the feed, notes, circ, and c-mail.) some things are a bit buggy and there are some weird superficial quirks. for example, why does an anti-ai platform have a giant ai generated cyberdolphin as the hero image on the support page (๑>ᴗ<๑) i know many artists who would be immediately turned off by that and write the whole thing off. whenever i see pure ai slop imagery like that on something like a newsletter these days, it's an automatic skip because it's kind of become a universal signal for low effort. of course, there's no way to stop users from posting ai junk in the feed but i feel like the platform itself should avoid that stuff in order to set the example. besides, the site design is so beautiful with just the text, it's a shame to pollute it that way.

the ui/ux of the site is very simple but in a nice way that's more about just talking to people. like on the old internet where you would wander into random chat rooms and see what was going on. it's a calm oasis in a very chaotic and overstimulating time on the web. because of the design and ethos behind it, it has attracted a particular type of person looking to escape the current social hellscape we live in. i've been meeting some interesting and fun people on there!

is this sustainable as it grows? i don't know. i feel like i'm already seeing more of the familiar signs of the bad internet discourse creeping in now that it's reached 3000+ accounts. i've been an early user of a bunch of social platforms and communities that always ended up crashing out and dying from growth. maybe that's the natural progression of these things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

given my experiences, i also expect that as the user count grows, khan will be receiving more and more inquiries from sleazy vcs and companies looking to capitalize. the centralized nature of the platform makes it vulnerable which is why modern platforms are trying all sorts of "can't be evil" decentralization mechanisms or just being fully open source. currently, cyberspace is supported by user donations but the cost of scaling could get so out of control that it's just less headache for khan to take on funding partners or even cash out and exit. remember the slow motion heartbreak of david karp selling tumblr? on the $1.1 billion sale to yahoo, he loudly proclaimed "we're not turning purple," suggesting that tumblr would not be changed by yahoo. well, a palette swap was the least of tumblr's worries as we're still watching it suffer indignity after indignity to this day in its zombie form. hopefully the delete account button will be built before this happens to cyberspace (⌒_⌒;) in the meantime, i'll try to enjoy the fun days while they last.

i still maintain that the real web 1.0 experience is simply just having a personal homepage and an email address.

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my field trip to cyberspace took up a lot of time the past couple weeks! since i've been avoiding social in general a lot lately, diving back into it via cyberspace brought up a lot of bubbling thoughts about these kinds of social spaces, as evidenced by the wall of text above (*~*)

so, for homepage updates, i didn't make any major changes this time around. mainly just some tidying and small additions:

• cleaned up some messy html
• updated the time machine with some more recent snapshots
• added some more blogging friends to the blogroll feed

i suppose one good thing that happened recently was zohran mamdani winning the mayoral race in new york city. i don't live in ny and it's been a long time since i've been there but his win still made me happy and i celebrated it. if only because it proves that the billionaires aren't omnipotent. and that caring about marginalized communities and lifting people up is not out of fashion and is still a winning message that is more powerful than the cynicism-drenched pvp times we find ourselves in. a glimmer of hope that society is not in a race-to-the-bottom nihilism death spiral. i'm really hoping he does well and actually goes even further with his plans and that the system doesn't water him down like they try to do with people like him every time.

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instead of reading things on the internet, i've been drawing more with my ipad (on airplane mode.) i haven't been drawing much lately and i've been missing it. getting lost in sketching for hours has always been a good way for me to refocus and clear my head, especially when my brain feels overloaded with negative thoughts and other garbage that i've accumulated from the outside world.

there's been a homepage feature on my todo list for a while now that i needed to draw some art for. to continue with the video games genre visual language i'm using, i wanted to make something that referenced visual novels/dating sims. i made a little kitty button that watches your cursor position and when you click on it, it brings up a helpful "tutorial" mode^🂠 in the form of a visual novel dialog ^-^ i like to think my homepage is inuitive enough to navigate but, if not, this can provide extra hints. and it's just fun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

as i was sketching out different expressions and poses^🂠 for the main sprite, i kind of felt an urge to make my own vtuber model. this is something i think about doing quite often. i haven't done it because it's a lot of work to draw and rig a model and i don't really have time to do vtuber streaming anyways. so to make one and not really use it, i would only be doing it as technical exercise. maybe if i ever get around to making music again, i could use a vtuber model to make videos (⌒_⌒;) i think that's why i was so inspired by the music and animation of kpop demon hunters. while not exactly vtubers, i like how the kdh singers have kind of taken on the characters as personas like a music vtuber (ejae even said that she wanted to be an animated singer when she was a kpop trainee.)

anyways, i think vtubers are cool and a good way to exist in a digital world full of surveillance and deepfakes and ai porn. maybe i'll do it one day. i'm already halfway there as most people online probably know me better as my drawings since i don't post many photos of myself anymore (i learned some hard life lessons during my young and foolish instagram days.)

i was reading this profile about the trueanon podcast and found myself nodding in agreement with a lot of liz franczak's views of the current internet/"bum-fight content economy" and the desire to avoid it:

She also wants to keep as much of herself away from the algo-churn panopticon as possible, and instead to center her digital presence on her observations about the external world. “I have no desire to pimp myself out on Instagram. I respect my life and my family too much for that. I don’t know, is that a bitchy answer?

“The thing is,” she continues, “we need to all aspire to be more interesting than our own conceptions of ourselves. I genuinely believe that I have much more interesting things to say instead of talking about myself. Unfortunately, we have a social infrastructure that rewards that.”

this might be a somewhat weird opinion to be in accordance with on a personal homepage (⌒_⌒;) but i do hope i'm striking a good balance between the internal world and external world here that is interesting for more people than just myself.

btw, after all the framework stuff i talked about last time, i decided to go check out how hyprland's discord is and it seems to have been cleaned up from what it was described as a few years ago. from my cursory glance, it still kind of has teenage boy vibes (which is maybe just the discord vibe? idk, i don't use discord) but it doesn't appear to be another "young" republican groupchat 凸( •̀_•́ ) there seems to be some effort to do better (ie. stating clear community guidelines/rules that stress respect for others) which is commendable in a time when the more common pipeline for people who are caught being assholes is to dig in, double down, and radicalize into whiny bigot podcasters/influencers/politicians. still, i want to try other window managers because hyprland has more features/overhead than i actually need.

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regretfully, i must inform everyone that i have fallen into another time-consuming computer hobby (⌒_⌒;) with all the disappoinment in apple and then framework, i began jokingly thinking that, at the rate things are going, my next computer is going to have to be a plane ticket to huaqiangbei market in shenzhen to buy random parts to make my own cyberdeck. but that funny thought kept developing in my head after i realized that i probably don't need the plane ticket since i already have a bunch of extra computer components laying around that i could use to make something out of.^🂠 if i really believed in more sustainable hardware, i should make use of that stuff.

i have a spare raspberry pi 4 left over after i upgraded my homeserver to a pi 5 last year. i have the glassed ipad mini i mentioned a couple posts back (i say it's glassed as a variation on "bricked" because it's still functional but essentially bricked as liquid glass is a glitchy mess and i don't want to use it.) i have an old keyboard and a bunch of cables and adapters stored away that i'm not using for anything. as my linux setup has become more streamlined and lightweight, i wondered if i could actually just run it smoothly on the pi 4 with the ipad mini as the display.

now, do i need more computer hobbies? no, i barely have enough free time to work on my homepage and learn linux (๑>ᴗ<๑) but, following the pattern of those two things, it was probably inevitable that i'd end up experimenting with customizing/personalizing my computer hardware too. i guess i'm really in my serial experiments lain era. (sidenote: whenever i see the term selinux, i always think it stands for serial experiments linux ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

i cobbled together all the pieces and installed fedora minimal for arm because i like the stability of fedora but don't need everything in the full install like on my framework. i had to reflash the os around 10 times because i kept making mistakes and kept bricking everything (╥_╥) after a lot of poking and prodding, i finally got fedora to boot up somewhat fine, did the initial configuration, and got into the tty to install hyprland, kitty, and other utilities. i learned a lot by having to repeat the same process over and over again!

as it stands now, there's some debugging i need to do to make it run more smoothly. the boot up forces me to manually kill processes to proceed. hyprland sometimes doesn't connect with the ipad/hdmi adapter and i need to fix the pi output aspect ratio. i also need to figure out why transparency isn't working in kitty. but other than that, it works pretty good if everything loads in properly. i would also like to figure out how to run it off the ssd instead of the microsd card. i tried and failed a few times so i just went with the card. it would probably be snappier from an ssd.

i don't know if i'll make this into an actual self-contained cyberdeck. i would want to get a smaller keyboard, maybe a low-profile 60% one, and figure out how to power it all efficiently on batteries. i'm fine with it just being a bunch of loose parts for the time being. if i need to take it anywhere, it's not difficult to throw it all into a box and set it up again. also, i don't want to get sucked into learning soldering and 3d printing right now, i've already got way too much going on (⌒_⌒;) i'm just happy i was able to get it working and now i have another linux computer to do experiments with and don't have to worry about messing up the computer i do my work on. maybe i'll try out some other distros like arch linux arm and see what that's like.

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finally, on my homepage, i just made some more minor edits on the flat pages. i fixed a possible accessibility issue with my self-portrait being a giant ascii rendering (ie. screen readers getting stuck reading a huge block of ascii gibberish.) i put the ascii block in <figure> tag and gave it a descriptive caption while also hiding the code block with aria. i also cleaned up some of the copy on the pages and added some more page headings for clarity.

that's all i've got for this update. i'm still trying to get my energy back up. not sure if i'm perpetually tired because of neverending home life stuff or if the constant horrors of the world have just totally sapped the life out of me. probably both (￢_￢;) hope you're all doing well <3