2026-09-26 02:21 — I've done a lot of self-probing with Duck.ai. I will use some of what I've learned to hopefully do more on the site.

2026-09-26 13:49 — A post on Wired led me to a browser extension called Tuck that lets you suspend tabs for set amounts of time, essentially 'snoozing' them. I left a tab with a news site I mean to read more stowed until tomorrow morning.

2026-09-26 14:39 — I learned how to use sed to add and delete lines from a text file. For addition: `sed -i "1i[text to add]" [file]`. For deletion: `sed -i "1d" [file]`. I found this through StackOverflow.

2026-09-26 16:37 — The way to handle input for a function in Fish is to just make a function with funced and use $argv; i.e., sed -i "1i$argv" [file]. I found this in the Fish documentation under an entry I can't remember. Might have been one of the function entries.

2026-09-26 17:58 — Playing Riichi City, I've realised that it makes sense to dama a hand when the wait is complete shonpai. This makes sense logically, but it's sometimes hard to make sense of when you have to make split-second decisions about what to discard. I still have no sense of how to read tedashi versus tsumogiri in other players' discards.

2026-09-26 20:44 — Making tiramisu, I realised that a better method than dipping the ladyfingers was to slowly ladle coffee over them, ensuring that there was an even enough distribution. It was more labour-intensive, but the result was better. I was able to pour the excess down into the bottom layer and have it all soak in.

2026-09-27 02:55 — I forgot to note it earlier, but I also had to do a bit of tmux setup on my laptop. In order to have niceties like vim keys, I had to install tpm (by git clone-ing to the plugins directory), ensuring that all the other plugins were pulled into the .tmux.conf file, and hitting ctrl-B+I to actually install them.

2026-09-27 10:49 — Looking into the outer communities this morning, I see there are people around who are fixated on Twitter and treat it like the entirety of the space of all discourse. If what they see bothers them, they should probably get off Twitter and do more productive things with their lives, especially if they can't see how algorithmic manipulation is the foundation of all content siloes.

2026-09-27 12:17 — Teru came in after a dumb, irrelevant exchange in the #touhou channel and pointed everyone at the #other channel. That seems like a more productive approach than trying to actively jump in the middle of things if they're not just outright hostile or violating the rules in a very clear way. It saves energy that would be spent monitoring pointless conversations and having to be prepared to bat down uncompliant users. It does leave a mess lingering in the channel, though.

2026-09-27 12:28 — Follow-up on Tuck: My suspended tabs didn't automatically pop up because the relevant time had passed. Because my computer was suspended at that time, it doesn't appear that the tabs will unstow without prompting now. I don't know if they will unstow if I'm up at 08:00 tomorrow; I won't find out because I'm never up at that time.

2026-09-27 12:58 — Because of my laptop's keyboard layout, I accidentally hit ctrl-L instead of meta-L. I found out that that key combination clears the screen on bash because it redraws the screen, so you can't see the scrollback afterwards unless you're in a terminal environment where you have a scrollback buffer. I was in a bash panel in tmux, so the scrollback is simply gone.

2026-09-27 15:22 — When I was in the kitchen making tomato sauce, I kept singing Daft Punk's "Digital Love". That reminded me of a Youtuber whose name I can't readily remember. He was skilled with a talkbox and made videos about talkboxing, and I felt that others were likely influenced by him. He didn't actually make that many videos, and I recall seeing rumours that he might have actually died years ago in more recent comments on their videos. I'm not even sure that those videos are still up; they were the last time I looked a couple of years back. That person's rendition of "Digital Love" was better than the actual released version in some regards to me.

2026-09-27 16:22 — I tried making a tentative grocery list just by touch-ing a file and inserting text a line at a time with sed. However, when I cat-ed the file, there was nothing. It seems like there needs to be something in the file for "1i[text]" to work. sed is mysterious to me in many ways.

2026-09-28 00:49 — It turns out that Tuck does unstow tabs past the original time, just with a significant delay. Caught me by surprise. Then again, I think it does underscore that you ought to just close tabs unless you're absolutely sure you're coming back at some point. Also, to get out of a frozen SSH session: type Enter + tilde + full stop. I had to look that up yet again on Duckduckgo because I couldn't remember. I really ought to just disconnect before suspending.

2026-09-28 01:40 — Forgot to note that my tomato sauce turned out super good. I used Pomi strained tomatoes that come in a tetra pak. I'm not that used to that style of packaging. Anyway, the strained tomatoes/passata itself wasn't bad, so I think that was pretty key. Gotta start with good tomatoes. After that, it was just a lot of garlic (most of a bulb, tbh) and a whole onion, chopped up and sauteed in olive oil, and a whole package of basil I had hanging around in the freezer. Add a couple of palmfuls of salt for seasoning, simmer good, set to low for a few hours, and you're good. I quickly made some spaghetti, which I promptly ate in a couple of minutes because I was starving.

2026-09-28 12:34 — Saw an offer for a BOGO footlong chili dog at Sonic on the app. Kind of tempted. I've never actually had one of their chili dogs. Not something I usually go out of my way for, but I'm not going to turn down a deal. Also, the talkbox guy on Youtube was talkboxmayhem; I looked it up last night. Hard to believe his last posted video was nineteen years ago.

2026-09-28 16:44 — My experiments with Duck.ai are nearing a close. I can see the utility in LLMs as dialogic external reasoning devices, but I also don't want to rely on them a whole lot. I've used them to develop a few procedures for myself when it comes to creative things and ways of dealing with anxieties that keep me from doing anything. I will cease using them within the next couple of days.

2026-09-28 17:29 — I really wanted to have three panels open next to each other in tmux. Consulting the help, it turns out there is a command to do that: ctrl-B alt-1. That applies the 'even horizontal' layout.

2026-09-28 23:13 — I played Riichi City whilst on a voice call. I've been scared to do anything like that in the past. Nothing bad happened.

2026-09-29 01:58 — Youtube used to have human curators when it was independent of Google. I noticed what seems like an effort to make the 'front page' relevant again, except it's LLM-powered 'personalisation'. I'm sceptical, to say the least.

2026-09-29 10:20 — I've noticed that it seems really hard for people in the outer communities to just direct people to the correct channel. Chatter about fanworks in the #touhou channel isn't very uncommon, and we (staff) often have to remind people repeatedly. This time it was music, and the last time it was fanfiction on other sites. It seems like it's failure to read the channel topic most of the time.

2026-09-29 13:57 — Maybe we could have a 'tap the sign' bot on the Discord side for when we have to remind everyone to actually read the topic or generally point out that a strain of conversation doesn't belong in a channel. That way, none of us staff would have to say anything; we'd just trigger the bot silently.

2026-09-29 14:01 — I made myself a complex of scripts in Fish to manage a list of tasks for when I'm restless and can't figure out what to do. One lists the tasks, one adds a task, one deletes the first task on the list, one moves the first task to the bottom, and one prints a reminder to myself that I don't have to engage the tasklist at all times and can prioritise 'taking it easy' on low-energy days. It's all done with bog-standard GNU tools like sed, head, and cat. The most complex is the rotation script, and it's simply calling 'head -n 1' on the tasklist file, appending the output to the file itself, and then calling sed to delete the first line. I tried to figure out how to do it in sed or awk, but the solutions looked overly complicated for what I needed, so I stuck with the most straightforward approach, even if it might not be the most elegant one-liner. I have a feeling I may eventually re-write all of this stuff as an actual program to have everything as a single command with flags. That won't be for a while, however.

2026-09-29 18:52 — Thanks to having a lot of points and a limited-time promo, I managed to get three footlong conies and a large fry for only six bucks at Sonic. That would have normally been around twenty dollars worth of food. It cost me nearly all of the points I had, totalling up to 1,200 points, but it was worth it. I hadn't ever had one of their conies. I wouldn't go out of my way for something like it, not being a fan of hot dogs in general, but I would definitely consider it again if a deal were to come along. It was a lot of food for the normal price, and I think I could easily split one with someone and have enough; the only reason I was able to eat mine in one sitting was because I was starving. Unrelated, but I've further refined my systems-and-methods approach by having a 'routing table' that helps me decide how to use my time when the answer doesn't seem obvious. I worried that I'd be overwhelmed in systems, but I think I can deal with things now.

2026-09-30 12:45 — It's been rainy weather around me after a long period of hot. I especially want to just stay indoors and curl up when it's like this. It's perfect reading weather. I'm thinking I'll try to continue with Abe Kobo's The Ruined Map. My understanding is that I reached something of a turning point. Up to that point, it's more of a detective novel, but I'm told it goes off the rails after a bit. There is certainly a sense that something is going on from the off, but it's very hard to tell what because everything is a bit weird. Also, I'd like to do something with CSS on the site. I started working on it a while ago and never got around to putting anything on the server. I think I had an okay look as far as spacing for text. The main problem was not knowing how to make it more 'responsive'.

2026-09-30 14:08 — I remember Firefox having a 'reading list' feature on desktop. That seems to have gone away at some point, though it does linger on mobile. I miss the convenience of having something like that built into the browser. There's a slight middle ground with things like articles you can't read right this second where it's overkill to bookmark them but it's also not great to leave them as open tabs. I appreciate something like Tuck to not have tabs permanently stored, but manual management is a little annoying, and it's really better if you have a specific idea of by when you want the tabs to reappear. More ambiguous cases are helped by something like the reading list; you won't get back to them right away, but you won't leave them forever. Could I do something like that for myself with this site? Perhaps.

2026-09-30 14:31 — Something of a rule I've set for myself is to try to seed torrents to 2.00. Seeding to 1.00 is 'good enough' by most standards, but I want to ensure that more than one person has the full thing; it's just good for the health of a torrent. I like to think of it as paying it forward in terms of preservation. Once they hit 2.00, though, I delete the torrent files. I do that for the sake of organisation, i.e., not having a massive list of torrents to pick through. At present, I have around ten 'active' torrents, but most are irregularly active. Some are definitely a ways off from 2.00. I'm trying to prune things down before thinking about grabbing anything else. I'm thinking I'll probably keep watching some of the Gundam stuff I've got. If Crunchyroll had some of this stuff, I wouldn't need to care, but I won't likely have a subscription much longer; the reason I have a subscription is a bit of an inane story about there being a sale at one point.

2026-09-30 16:39 — I saw news that Reddit is discontinuing RSS access. Not that I endorse Reddit at all, but I suppose it's worrisome the degrees to which the walled gardens will continue to be closed off. There is, of course, the consideration of LLM scraping, but that's an issue many websites are finding ways to deal with. I will probably have to implement some sort of anti-scraping measures at some point, whenever there's more to the site to scrape. Either way, it's unfortunate that RSS feeds continue to disappear from places on the wider internet, even from terrible content siloes. In a way, RSS feeds drove some degree of the preoccupation with constant publishing online, but I still think they're better than being corralled into a single predetermined interface.

2026-10-01 10:43 — I was bothered by seeing that my five-minute CPU load average was hitting over 2.00 during an Element call last night. The thing is that there were no performance hits during anything I was doing. I was simply overreacting to something that only matters to an extent. During a sleepless stretch, I searched and found numerous explanations of load averages, and they all pointed to the number itself not being too critical. There are certainly times where it can indicate issues, but most of the concern comes when there are evident performance issues. I got up at one point and did stuff on my laptop to observe numbers; I had load averages exceeding the number of CPU cores whilst running a Youtube video, and there didn't seem to be much in the way of negative repercussions. Additionally, I researched Zen 2 CPUs and found out that they 'run hotter' because they aggressively boost when temperatures are lower. In essence, they deliberately heat up as high as they can before hitting certain thresholds. This means that average idle temps and temps under light usage will appear somewhat high — the cores themselves are apt to briefly spike their own temperatures. I'd been concerned about my CPU fan running, since I have my fan curve set pretty aggressively. The CPU fan curve itself cuts on in the 65C range, which is actually considered cool for Zen 2 usage and normal under even fairly light load. My cooling is apparently good enough that I get below what are considered fantastic idle temps, in the neighbourhood of 33C.

2026-10-01 13:41 — The Humble Bundle had a bundle on that included things of interest, notably River City Girls and River City Girls 2, so I spent the fifteen dollars (minus points on my card) in spite of my misgivings about spending money. I started up River City Girls and was annoyed immediately by how 1) it started in fullscreen and 2) the interface is entirely built around using a controller, so the key mapping on the keyboard is nonsensical, making things like skipping the intro and navigating the menu next to impossible without just mashing the keyboard. Even more nonsensically, the options menu isn't accessible right from the title menu; you have to go into a save file and find it there. For a game from 2019, I would have expected a bit better in terms of basic design. Then again, it feels very console-first in its design, so I probably shouldn't be surprised. Still annoying. It's annoying enough that I've not spent that much time with the game itself. I had to dig my PS4 controller out from its long-time hiding place just to be able to play, which is exceptionally annoying. I'm always a little flabbergasted at how WayForward manages to make the most basic things not very pleasant.

2026-10-01 15:32 — My experience of River City Girls thus far is that it's an all right beat-em-up. Very in the vein of, well, the Kunio-kun games that inspired it and are notionally connected to it. Not sure how I feel about literally making the main characters Kunio and Riki's actual GFs, but whatever. People can make fanfiction if they want. Anyway, the story is dumb and I skip every cutscene because it's typical WayForward writing. Not that I begrudge the sense of humour for what it is; I just think it's a bit over-the-top and could always use a bit of dialling down. As essentially a two-button beat-em-up, a lot of the challenge is picking the right time to get in there and attack. There's also a guard/parry button that I can't seem to reliably use. The problem, as with all beat-em-ups, is that enemies like to just cluster on you, so it can be hard to tell what's going on in the midst of the fracas. Movement is also a little clunky because it's aping the original inspiration fairly closely. I would have like a dash button, personally. Anyway, I got past the first boss after a few rounds of getting steamrolled by charge moves and area-of-effect nonsense. Hopefully there will be further quality-of-life as I level up and amass new moves.

2026-10-01 19:02 — I've been watching a channel on Youtube featuring a guy named Wakebe going to different mahjong parlours, mostly ones that have sort of cracked rules, and mostly sanma at that. It's interesting to see the definition of 'mahjong' be stretched as far as it gets in some of these places. I think the average of sanma-focused parlours ends up being something fairly different to the mahjong a lot of people would be familiar with. Maybe it's partly because those parlours are more gambling-focused rather than competition-focused. I can see the appeal in things like JPML 'official' rules and rulesets like nashi-nashi seeing stuff like at those parlours. Then again, sometimes it's fun to just see what absolutely cracked things happen.

2026-10-02 10:58 — My sleep schedule has been a bit off. I fell asleep fairly early last night because I was really tired, then I woke up late in the night and was up for a while. I ended up taking melatonin to fall asleep at a slightly more reasonable hour, though it was still early in the morning. I suppose I ended up sleeping a while, considering the instructions seemed to consider six hours a victory, whilst I ended up sleeping more like eight. I would rather not become totally dependent on melatonin to sleep, though, given the potential for heart issues with long-term use.

2026-10-02 11:50 — I was consulting my documentation last night, and it turns out I've been ignoring a step in one of my processes in terms of logging things. Whoops. I intend to log braindumps as I'm meant to do, but I haven't done one recently. There are probably times when I ought to write one but I choose to get up and pace around instead. Just like the line between what I log here and what I shove in a local journal being a bit thin, the line between what I dump out in a text file and what I don't seems a bit thin as well.

2026-10-02 15:25 — Ended up going to Taco Bell for lunch out of inertia and difficulty coördinating things. The crunchwrap slider thing with the chicken nuggets was good, but the small gordita crunch things with the steak wasn't that great. I probably could have got three crunchwraps for the price of everything and been okay. It's been a challenge to want food today, though, so anything to get something in my mouth, I guess. Ideally, I like to get away with seven dollars per person or less. It's difficult these days, but it's doable with careful planning, especially with deals.

2026-10-02 16:21 — Braindump written — Machine: Desktop — Dominant feeling: Frustration.

2026-10-02 20:49 — In the same bundle as River City Girls I got Luck Be a Landlord, so I fired that up. I'd heard chatter about it years ago but didn't know that much about it other than it being a slot machine game. I'm not that big on roguelikes, but I suppose it's not the most obnoxious in that vein. I could certainly fathom it being worse. There's probably elements of strategy that I'm not seeing thus far, which is why my runs don't tend to get very far. It's enough to capture my attention and not demand a lot of me, so it's a good time-passer, I suppose.

2026-10-02 21:44 — I updated for the first time in a while and the first time since I migrated my boot disk to another SSD. I'm not quite sure what happened, but some errors came up when pacman touched the GRUB stuff. As far as I know, everything worked out all right, but it was kind of weird. It also created a duplicate entry for GRUB in the GRUB menu for some reason when I ran grub-mkconfig. More annoyingly, there were breaking changes with aerc (my email client) regarding how notmuch configuration is handled, breaking my setup. I have to look into exactly how the config changed so I can un-break that.

2026-10-02 22:12 — Unbreaking the aerc config seems like it was relatively easy. In the 'accounts.conf' file, I just had to change 'notmuch://[path]' to 'notmuch://' so it autoconfigs, and also add 'enable-maildir = false' to just show the notmuch tags. If that doesn't make things work, then I'm kinda stumped for the moment. Will report back.

2026-10-03 10:35 — Looking back at the #other channel, I am struck at how much activity around the outer communities seems to largely be driven by one or two people's momentary hyperfixations. It's honestly irritating. People can like whatever they like, but 'flooding the zone' over it is unsightly. It's that sort of self-centeredness that makes the community so hard to interface with. When people aren't primed to listen, it's hard to speak, which only seems to encourage the most self-centered people to take up all the more air. Frankly, as said before on a different topic, people need to spend less energy using THP's larger community as a space to fixate on things that have nothing to do with THP. If they simply have no interest in THP, they ought to entertain going elsewhere.

2026-10-03 12:47 — Thinking on it, about the only lingering positive thing from the *chan culture that THP sprang from is the notion of anonymity as a mindset, something that informs the very format of the site itself. If anonymity weren't a core assumption, there would be no need to remain an imageboard. Meanwhile, many of the negatives have either retreated over the years or have been outright stamped out through moderation. If we hadn't strongly discouraged some of the general types and tone of discourse common to 4chan years prior, I'm not sure we could have remained much of a community. That said, I think there are degrees of whimsy and playfulness that could be found in those days that are missing now. I'd probably need to write a whole piece on what it all means to me to convey that, though. Side note: aerc configuration seems reasonably fixed. I got further mail in the expected format.

2026-10-03 19:00 — One of the important people in the local mahjong scene is close to having a full streaming table setup, modelled on something like M League or JPML. Compared to where things were even a couple of years ago, that's a pretty exciting development. I wanted to involve myself in creating a local league and everything a few years ago, but I lack competence/practise on the basic organisation side of things. I'll admit it's been a little frustrating to see others do what I wanted to do years ago, but have been unable to do because I lack money and social connections. However, I don't begrudge what's happening. If there's ever an opportunity, I might still create my own small, scrappy competing league. That would require a lot of coördination and resources that I don't really have, though. I also probably couldn't get any kind of official recognition from ARA because I'm not able to have much contact with any of the people involved; to get any say in anything, you basically have to be the sort of person who can afford to travel the US for tournaments.

2026-10-03 22:42 — A Pipewire/Wireplumber update may have messed something up. Before restarting, I could just connect my Bluetooth headphones and have stuff automatically route audio to them correctly. Now, I have to open pavucontrol and get things to reroute every time I reconnect my headphones. I honestly don't know how Pipewire does things under the hood, and my journals don't give me much to go off of beyond errors with the Bluetooth that I've seen a number of times. I won't downgrade, though. I'll just deal with it, even if it's a bit of a pain. Maybe I'll look up Pipewire stuff again soon.

2026-10-04 00:16 — Luck Be a Landlord has allowed me to listen to some relaxing deep house mixes whilst playing. I think I can see where the appeal comes in. There is a sort of flow state when it comes to basic play: Click to spin, click to claim item/symbol, occasionally click to remove a symbol, occasionally click to use a useable item, repeat. I feel a rhythm to it. I also get the sense of certain synergies, like bees and flowers or goldfish and bubbles. I think the harshest part of things is the degree of randomness with which things will appear. For instance, I've had runs where I got a rare item that powers up bears... and yet no bears appeared in any rolls, nor any beehives, nor bees. Occasionally, you'll just get items or symbols that have specific synergies, and yet none of those other symbols will show up, or they'll show up with bad timing. I suppose that could be part of the theme of the game, given everything else, but it does make strategising a bit hard. It feels in some ways like the game goes out of its way to screw you when you're doing better. Either way, I ended up doing something like three or four runs when I only intended to do one, with a couple being fairly long. My stance on roguelikes hasn't shifted, but I can find the fun in this one. Sometimes simple really is best, at least in terms of presentation. The music is rather repetitive, though, which is why I end up listening to deep house mixes instead.

2026-10-04 13:38 — I had a bit of a moment where I felt a little irked at the THP front page seeing the number of flippant sorts of threads in the recent posts. I don't necessarily mind unserious threads existing in and of themselves, but it's a little chafing when they take up a non-trivial portion of the front page. Most of the activity on the site really should be story threads. For most of the site's history, the focus has largely been either that or event threads, which are themselves about writing, with perhaps some minor diversions to more general discussions, largely about writing or Touhou itself. Seeing things like 'roleplay' threads hanging around the front page really does make me wonder how serious people are about the site. Sometimes it feels like the answer in aggregate is 'not very', and that's discouraging as site staff. More actual serious activity to drown out the rest would be nice; unfortunately, I can't provide much of that on my own.

2026-10-04 22:17 — For the first time in a long time, I've done some work that will contribute to possibly being able to continue Lion-Dog. It's very initial work, more administrative than anything, and it's not even finished yet. The thing is that I don't have the 'original' documents for the updates, considering I wrote a lot of them on either Titanpad or Dropbox Paper way back when, so I needed to copy what was posted on the site to a document in order to have a local log of everything. This will be key to the further work to be done. From there, the real work will have to begin, which I'll admit I sort of dread, because it means I have to read back through what I wrote. I already know that I'm not happy with a lot of things. I've re-read the updates enough times to know that I would prefer to have done things differently. However, just saying that doesn't do a lot for me. I have to sit with that discomfort and use it to figure out why I dislike the updates as they are. Then, I have to work out how I can turn those points into something else. I have to somehow work forward, and the beginning is dissecting what I've done. I haven't had much energy or concentration, but I hope to do more soon. It's the first time I've felt like there's hope for the story in a while.

2026-10-05 19:09 — Weekly Review — Machine: Desktop — Source: jrnl/braindump — Unreviewed braindumps on laptop — Analysis incomplete due to procedural inadequacies.

2026-10-06 00:08 — The day's turned over, so it's technically 'yesterday', but I did my first weekly review of jrnl entries and braindumps. As the log entry above notes, it didn't exactly go fully to plan. The procedure I had somehow expected me to do it all in thirty minutes, an impossible ask because I had a lot of notes. Because the idea was 'set a timer, be done with it when timer goes off regardless of degree of completion', I'm not going to go back and continue the work. However, I do think that there will be some adjustments to procedure based on this week. That is, of course, part of the intention: making observations, noticing patterns, and making adjustments based on those patterns. It's just that this one is more of a strictly administrative adjustment than what was intended, I believe. In any case, I can see some value in what I'm doing, even if it doesn't take the most effective form at the moment.

2026-10-06 18:12 — Not that any of it applies to me in any way, but I find it funny how the ARA continues to attract drama over rules. There seems to be a little bit of a disconnect between non-stakeholder clubs and stakeholders on the need/want for a US-level set of standardised rules. Leadership is largely working on an internationally-focused ruleset, which requires the input and consent of even bigger stakeholders in Japan, which makes the whole process agonisingly slow. Meanwhile, there seems to be degrees of discontent domestically at tournaments and sanctioned events over applying different rulesets and the interpretations thereof. Honestly, it kind of feels like there's a bit of territorial antagonism going on, too, considering some people have made slightly derisive comments about things like Saikouisen rules, considering some ARA stakeholders are also Saikouisen pros, so there seems to be some impression of 'orgs pushing their own agendas' going on, whether or not that's true. I know that there is a need to be in accord with WRC for big international events and qualifiers therefor, but I do think that maybe the thread is a little lost on more domestically-focused things. Then again, it's a little hard to say a lot when the stakeholders who get pressed on the issue get evasive and/or defensive over it; there is 'work happening behind the scenes' that can't ever really be talked about. Does make me wonder if there isn't some degree of egos going into things as well. I don't know. It's just amusing in a kind of sad way how many politics seem to be getting played for a game that is still fairly niche in the States. Before focusing on big international business, the organisation probably ought to focus more on things at home for the sake of home. Then again, I'm not that close to the ground, so maybe I'm just misreading things. I'd like to hope.

2026-10-07 21:03 — Today has been a pretty lazy day with not a lot going on because I've been pretty low-energy. One thing I've managed to do is watch another episode of You're Under Arrest (OVA). I was a little hesitant to watch it because I wasn't in the mood for anything especially lighthearted, but I enjoyed it anyway. What I appreciate, besides the masterfully detailed animation, is how well every episode I've seen thus far is paced and structured. For the most part, there isn't any 'fat' that needs trimming narrative-wise. Anything that comes up usually comes up for a reason and is followed up on within the episode. When there are little off-hand things mentioned, there's no unnecessary pursuit of them for the sake of 'depth'; they're just allowed to be 'things' that stand alone. Sometimes the pacing of individual scenes can feel a tad slow, but I also appreciate that in a certain sense of certain things being given 'breathing room'. Sometimes the impact of a particular line or visual bit needs a couple of seconds to really sink in. I'm not sure how much of it is a deliberate directional choice and how much is the limitations of '90s era animation and video editing. Whichever it is, there's something about it that comes across as a product of its era. I find myself wishing others might learn from its example and do a bit more with less.

2026-10-08 13:47 — Braindump written — Machine: Desktop — Dominant feeling: Fatigue

2026-10-08 14:32 — If you have an image open in imv and can't read the titlebar because the filename is too long, hit 'd' to toggle the informational overlay. That will show all the information that goes in the titlebar over the image. This is handy for being able to tell what the filename is, something I found myself needing not too long ago. This is in the man page, but the reference for commands is a bit exhaustive and full of things I don't normally bother with; I just need to move between images (if I have the directory open), close the viewer, or view the file information.

2026-10-08 17:53 — Something that randomly came to mind is how we don't have that clear an idea of the relationship between Byakuren and the other Myouren Temple inhabitants pursuant to UFO and later. Back in their debut game, the picture was clear: They all saw Byakuren as someone to whom they owed a debt of gratitude. That's why they went on the whole caper piloting the flying ship and chasing the pieces of the flying kura in order to pull Byakuren out of her exile in Makai. After that, though, it feels like the thread has been lost a little bit. There's not that much dedication on the part of the others to the temple itself as an institution, by all indications, even though it seems as if it would be important to Byakuren. I'm not sure they've forgotten their gratitude as such, but I can't help wondering if the common bond to Byakuren is a little weak for the group in spite of its gravity on the individual level. The thing is that we have no real canonical interactions that would indicate much about how she sees them on an individual level, nor how she would approach such interactions. All we're left with is the general sense of some personal dedication on the part of the Myouren devotees(?) towards Byakuren, idolising her in a fashion or at least holding her in some regard, and a very broad sense that Byakuren views the others as organs of the temple. In essence, the others are drawn by a weak gravitational pull towards the core that is Byakuren, pulled into her orbit but potentially able to escape with little struggle. If we consider it like that, then there are a whole host of questions raised there alone.

2026-10-08 19:41 — It's not been that relevant to me thus far, but because of some activity on Arch's AUR general mailing list, I wanted to examine the headers of my e-mails. I ended up consulting the help command (which just brings up the man page!) and finding out that there's a command in aerc to toggle the headers: toggle-headers. So, basically, just type ':toggle-headers' and hit enter and you'll be able to see headers; do it again to hide them again. Kind of obvious in retrospect, but I guess that's what man pages are for. One of these days, I'll also figure out how to send aerc commands whilst in e-mail view. Right now, because it's in an embedded terminal running less, any keypresses go to less instead of aerc directly. I know there is a way to do passthrough commands. I just don't know the actual keypresses necessary.

2026-10-08 23:59 — I had a run in Luck Be a Landlord that got pretty far for once. I finally ran into a wall at 3,000 rent. That said, I think the real wall was my concentration at that point, considering I had the swapper item and could strategically place symbols to be adjacent. Having things like the copycat, the moon, rabbits, bears, and so on made it possible to get some pretty high rolls. I'm starting to see that rabbits are incredibly powerful as symbols. I'm also starting to see that managing how many symbols you have at a time is pretty important; I had over thirty symbols at one point, and I think the overabundance led to some wasted opportunities to have synergies triggered and get big gains. There is definitely a sense of strategy going on. Unrelated side note: I found out that there is a convenient flag for rsync: --remove-source-files. If I'm moving files from the remote source, I can use that flag to remove them from the remote directory after they're copied over. rsync really is handy; I used it to copy my entire boot disk to a new SSD, after all.

2026-10-09 12:40 — I was linked an interesting article from Club386 about the history of the Voodoo graphics card series. I'd been seeing videos about Voodoo cards (mostly repairs) popping up on retro PC Youtube recently, so I wondered if there was something going on. It turns out that it's near the thirtieth anniversary of the Voodoo line's release. I was 'around' at the time, but I was firmly a console gamer then. I knew nothing about PCs, nor did my parents, nor did much of anyone around me, so it was a separate world to me. Needless to say, I didn't know anything about the Glide API until it was considered a 'relic', something that others had to work to adapt to newer APIs to get old DOS- and Windows 95-era games working on modern systems. To see how they performed back then compared to the software-rendered approaches also seen, it's easy to see why they were considered so amazing. And to hear about what went into the design, cutting everything down to a minimal architecture of framebuffers and texture mappers, makes it all the more amazing. Things really would have been different without something like the Voodoo line. The sense that there was a whole lot happening in the '90s that I wasn't aware of just deepens learning about stuff like this.

2026-10-09 15:11 — An example of something I find a bit annoying is how people tend to assume, without any basis beyond her name, that Hecatia is, in fact, the Greek goddess Hecate and thereby represents Greek mythology being 'represented' in Touhou. The thing is that she's not even implied to be the self-same goddess anywhere. There's hardly any reference to anything Greek either when it comes to anything related to her. She's literally just 'some goddess with a weird name' who happens to run Hell in some capacity — though the extent to which she 'runs' Hell seems to be... limited, to say the least. Any assumption about 'a deeper identity' or whatever is merely that: an assumption, speculation at best. Now, people can think whatever they want, but it just irks me a little how people can take that sort of thing as some kind of 'established fact' when it comes to discussing Touhou stuff. Also, in the case of things like Hecatia, I think people largely miss a greater point when it comes to the core identity of Touhou: namely, Gensokyo — y'know, the main setting — being defined as much by things from outside its apparent cultural identity (i.e., Japanese pastoralist fantasy) as from inside. Thus, when you have a weirdly-named goddess from an 'Otherworld' appearing, that appearance is really making a sort of statement about Gensokyo and its relatively 'ordinary' Japanese-ness; whether or not Hecatia is a Greek goddess flies far wide of the point in any case.

2026-10-10 17:27 — Just playing Luck Be a Landlord I managed to trigger a win condition. At some point, there was a health bar, which I subsequently blew away in a single roll because of some very lucky synergies. Then, I got a message that I'd defeated the landlord and was free to continue endlessly without any lose conditions. I tried playing that way for a while, but I'll admit that it got kind of boring. I guess the real challenge is starting on the 'next floor' with stricter conditions and managing a win that way. I'm not sure the game will continue holding my attention quite that much, but I'll probably continue playing as a low-energy, low-brain time killer. Of course, it might be time for me to go back to watching all of the anime I spent time torrenting, since I haven't done much of that lately.

2026-10-10 17:34 — I've mostly listened to deep house or atmospheric DnB types of mixes when I've needed to zone out, but I've been listening to a lot more UK garage for whatever reason. I guess I've just been feeling a need for something a little more 'groovy'. I've also been trying to make an effort to discover more music by consciously noting tracks that have the right sort of feeling. That said, I haven't peeked the tracklist for one UK garage mix I listened to today, but there were at least a few tracks that drew my attention. There was also this deep house track that came up in a shuffle as I was looking at other stuff. It just hit me with atmosphere right at the start, something about the chords. Part of what hits me about deep house tends to be chords. Something about them adds to that 'deepness' of it, like you're out late at night, crawling the streets in a world all your own. I'd like to one day drive the highway at night listening to some good deep house cuts.

2026-10-11 01:57 — I like jrnl as a tool for capturing thoughts, but one worry I have is about what happens when journals grow past a certain size. The way journals are handled in jrnl is in plain text files that are appended to whenever an entry is made. It's a simple enough concept. However, as the files grow in size, things like retrieval have to grow more expensive computationally. From what I know, there's no inherent metadata or anything to track how to segment the files, so I think anything relating to retrieval has to be calculated on-the-fly. What I've vaguely thought about for a while is jrnl but with a database. Such a thing would be a bit more complicated architecturally, but I think performance and scalability could be improved. Since jrnl is a bunch of Python scripts, it would theoretically be possible to import all of the basic functionality and then rewrite the core bits that handle how entries are stored and retrieved. The main stopper for me doing that is a general lack of knowledge when it comes to writing anything longer than a one-liner — or some very clumsy object-oriented monstrosity as entry-level CS lectures taught me many ages ago. I'm also far from an expert when it comes to dealing with databases. I've done a small amount of experimenting with database code with the PHP stuff for this site, but I've never written any actual live script that does anything. It doesn't help that my familiarity with Python's peculiarities is basic at best; I can look at a lot of Python scripts and have a vague idea what they're doing, but it's not like I can write it without having to constantly consult documentation for basic syntactical matter. What it all works out to is that I've got some high hurdles if I want to either bolt database functionality onto jrnl or implement a jrnl-like tool of my own. As a side note, it'd have to be Python for me, because I have had immensely bad luck wrapping my head around Rust, which would be my first choice. I think, if nothing else, a 'first iteration' would have to be the dumbest, most inefficient Python implementation I could manage. Maybe afterwards I could look into doing things in a smart way.

2026-10-11 18:48 — I spent a hell of a time figuring out how to open a random image file in a directory. I have a whole local directory full of pictures snatched from Danbooru and Pixiv for inspirational purposes, and I just wanted to open one of them at random. Long story short: I don't understand bash that well. I kept feeding the output of `eza | shuf -n 1` into imv, but it would just open to a blank 'file'. However, when I changed the input to `find . -type f | shuf -n 1` and put the shell substitution in quotes, it worked! I honestly don't know exactly why it wasn't working. I might mess about with it some more later, but I'm honestly kind of exhausted just figuring that out. Shout outs to random StackOverflow posters for helping me arrive at the answer eventually. Also, this track is a jam.

2026-10-12 01:02 — There's part of me that wants another exhibition. There's another part of me that just wants time to work on stuff on my own timetable. I'm guessing there probably won't be another exhibition this year unless there's one rather late. I haven't really got going with work on Lion-Dog, so that's probably a blessing in disguise. I also do technically have my own stuff going on anyway, though that hasn't bore much fruit yet, either. It relies to an extent on me being willing and able to read/watch things, and that's been difficult recently. Anyway, I won't be doing much on THP for the near future. As to this site, I have a roadmap for how to deal with developing the PHP side of things. I'll need to do some preliminaries, but I'm planning on more or less having a live test environment going at some point. If I can get some of the basics down, I think the whole thing should be relatively doable. The main thing will be picking up enough PHP to actually accomplish the task.

2026-10-12 17:52 — Weekly Review — Machine: Laptop — Priority Label: DECISION ANXIETY — Source: Both — SOP Exists: Yes — Improvements needed to existing SOP.

2026-10-12 19:35 — I feel the need to summarise what I've seen of Turn A Gundam thus far. I've only watched up to episode four, so I haven't seen much, but there's been a fair bit introduced within that short span. If nothing else, it'll help me remember certain things going forward. So, to start, we have a race of folks called the Moonrace who, unsurprisingly, seem to come from the moon. They have sent an advance party, protagonist Loran Cehak included, to scope out things on the surface. There is a 'return' predicted to occur soon, and that soon turns out to be an invasion. The exact reason is unclear at this point; there is indication that the nature of the invasion wasn't honestly conveyed to those deployed. They seem to have a queen-like figure, referred to alternately as Dianna Counter and another name that I can't remember. Meanwhile, as far as surface society, we witness a fairly Europeanised society with nobility and organised armies. There are references to wars with foreign adversaries. The technological level seems to be primative compared to the Moonrace, about congruent to our early twentieth century. Loran embeds himself in with Earth society, taking up with a noble family as their driver after being noticed for his mechanical prowess. In doing so, he's eventually allowed to take part in the local 'coming of age' ritual involving a ritual stigmatisation in front of a giant 'statue' called the White Doll, an apparently ancient custom that marks belonging in the community. The White Doll turns out to be a Gundam that's been buried on Earth by the Moonrace, and it activates during the predicted invasion. In all of this, there are references on the part of other characters to a 'Black History' that refers to technology like the Moonrace's. It also turns out that at least one individual, an Earth noble, has had contact with the Moonrace before by radio, and there has been conversation with them regarding the invasion unbeknownst to the wider public. That same noble, who has influenced Loran's placement in things up to now, further calls him into service with the Militia to engage the Moonrace. As yet, it's apparent that Loran believed that the intended events were a peaceful 'reunion' with the surface, but the death of his master and the closeness to his former master's family have swayed him to the side of the Earth. At the point I'm at, he's just been called into the Militia. We'll have to see what happens from here. What I'm most curious to know is what the Moonrace want as far as the invasion; are their goals genocidal, or are they merely assuming control of surface society?

2026-10-12 20:52 — Because I haven't done that much impulse/fragment work recently, I've decided I ought to at least catalogue where I'm at overall and show some concrete numbers. Listing tags in jrnl, I show currently that the numbers cluster around the tags @cold-clear, @wrong-pull, and @undercurrent, with a tie of ten entries for each. There's only a single entry that incorporates all three, and the combination that has the most entries at present is @wrong-pull and @cold-clear. I suppose this indicates that what's most on my mind is situations or images where there is a dissociated clarity paired with a sense that something is 'wrong' yet also attractive in a strange way. In a grossly oversimplified way, this could be taken as 'moodiness', which I wouldn't say is entirely wrong. In addition, I made the decision upon reviewing a few entries to come up with a new resonance tag, @hazy-jagged. The intended meaning is something like the feeling of a picture drawn in harsh, angry lines and in a 'mash' of loud colours. The feeling is something like a sudden disturbance and a blurring of circumstances; it's a rock hurled into a still pond; it's an explosive outburst; it's deliberate destruction of a picture. Right now, there are only two entries with that tag, but I feel like there could end up being more, hence I've added it. If it later turns out to be underused, I'll remove it; I'm trying to be as conservative as possible when it comes to new tag creation.

2026-10-13 12:19 — I often find myself writing impulse/fragment entries on the laptop during discovery work, but I treat what's available on the desktop as the core 'source of truth' for everything, which leads me to sync bits between machines by rsync-ing to Tekitou as an intermediate point; I could set up SSH on both machines in order to do it over the LAN, but that's setup overhead I don't care to deal with at the moment. One bit of dumbness on my part was when I tried to import an entry to the desktop earlier. I rsync-ed the 'laptop inbox.txt' file as usual and was about to just open the file in less and copy-paste the contents into a new jrnl entry, but then I remembered that jrnl has an import flag. However, I didn't read the help text closely enough, so I missed one important detail. I simply typed 'jrnl --import 'laptop inbox.txt' and was puzzled when it seemed like nothing happened. More than that, the prompt seemed to be stuck. I ctrl-C'd out of the import step, then tried changing the filename, thinking that perhaps jrnl couldn't deal with spaces for whatever reason. You know what the actual problem was? I'd forgotten the all important '--file' flag when doing the import, so jrnl was just expecting input on stdin. Needless to say, it was going to look like it was just sitting there, considering it was waiting for any actual input. Duh! Suffice it to say, next time I'm importing entries, I need to do `jrnl --import --file 'laptop inbox.txt'` instead of being a dummy.

2026-10-13 12:49 — Yet another 'd'oh!' moment. On the laptop, I use PCManFM as a file manager, and there is functionality for connecting to a remote server over SSH. I'd previously failed to get that to do anything but fail with an 'Operation Not Supported' error. I looked at the Arch wiki out of idle curiosity and found out that I needed to install the 'gvfs' package. After doing that, though, I still ran into a problem where I would end up getting a password prompt when trying to connect to Tekitou. This is a puzzling thing to happen because, out of security concerns, I have password login disabled; it's only possible to log in with a valid SSH key. A little bit of searching landed me at a Reddit thread where someone talked about exactly what I was trying to do, making a similar sort of realisation to what I would soon make myself. The issue was this: I was trying to log in as the wrong user! D'oh! The connection prompt in PCManFM automatically assumes you're using the same user name as on your local machine when logging in and fills it in that way. However, that's not the user name I use on the server side, so of course it wasn't going to just automagically work. The moral of the story here is that I need to be sure I'm trying the right user name when connecting remote in PCManFM.

2026-10-13 15:27 — After a bit of searching, I finally found the CSS file I'd experimented with locally before. It's a bit rough, but it's something that exists, at least. I was going for something like a hanafuda sort of theme with it, which is why it's all red and white. I might try to find some patterns elsewhere I can st^H^Hborrow for background elements. The main thing for me is having justification, centering, and width limiting on the text parts. I'm likely going to end up changing various elements in some way, but I think the layout part is more or less where I'd want it to be. One thing I'd like to figure out is how to make the CSS itself more adaptable to screen size; I know there is the @media query, but I don't know the exact parameters that would work best. I'm not very skilled with CSS, suffice to say, but I'd like to at least try.

2026-10-14 13:55 — One bit of analysis that came up at the start of the week was that I'm often indecisive over what goes in my local journal versus what goes in these logs versus what goes in other log files. The conclusion there was that I needed to improve my SOP around writing probes. I have the SOP written for myself to reduce the amount of time I spend ruminating on unimportant things, but the original SOP I had generated was more of a template than an actual decision-making tool. The binary decision tree that existed was also kind of nonsensical at best, so I had to go back and reconsider the most relevant criteria. What I landed on was whether or not I was making an observation that needed to be retrieved quickly, and whether or not I was primarily focusing on my own personal emotions or some external observation. With that in mind, I was able to produce my own binary decision tree that I feel should work. As an aside, I'm trying to be more proactive about updating these logs. I have done more than they often show in a day, but I've wavered as to whether or not to include those actions. Thinking on it long enough, I've realised that these logs are at least partly to account for how a day is spent. If I don't capture what I can, I'll end up looking back at a day, not remembering what I did, and feeling that I 'wasted' that day. So, some of these entries may become even more mundane and trifling. They're primarily for my benefit; this whole thing is meant to benefit me first and foremost, anyway.

2026-10-14 21:05 — Something I feel the need to note is that we staff probably seem distant and uninvolved most of the time to THP users, but we're actually always monitoring what's going on, whether in the outer communities or on the site. I've got the impression from some users that activity in the voice chat text channels on Discord is somehow considered a 'safe zone' for 'getting away with' things. That's not true at all. We watch those as well. We also notice when people trigger the filter bot a lot. We note patterns in people's behaviour. Some people might have this conception that we just smite people who displease us arbitrarily, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is, people are often let slide because stepping in to police specific things can honestly be a waste of energy. At best, it just makes noise and fuels resentment against us. Some people will resent us for doing our jobs, of course, but stoking unnecessary resentment from others is what we want to avoid. However, I should note that it's more about the noise; we have to be models for the community and not make unnecessary noise. That's why we often don't engage in very lighthearted sorts of chatter when we do show ourselves publicly. There are a lot of factors that go into our behaviour on the public side, and I think people don't really appreciate that. People don't know how suffocating it is sometimes to be an authority figure in a community. The weight of the responsibility is more than a lot of people can bear, I think.

2026-10-14 21:16 — An anime I've taken up watching again recently is SPY x FAMILY, a fairly mainstream title among things I often watch. Part of it is wanting to squeeze a little more value out of my soon to be expired Crunchyroll account. Another part of it is that I happened to see that the director for You're Under Arrest worked on it whilst looking through show information on Anilist. That spurred me to continue watching from the third season, where I'd left off. It's hard to say exactly what captivates me. There is fairly good music, for one, and I suppose I find the vaguely Cold War-ish Berlin-like setting intriguing enough. Beyond that, I guess it's the moments where the writing is allowed to breathe and not be completely trope-driven. The more over-the-top action sequences and the like are fairly whatever to me, and I wish it focused a little more on Loid and Yor instead of Anya. Still, I suppose there are touching moments. It is ultimately a story about keeping together a 'family' under ridiculous circumstances — it's something 'fake', yet it's hard to deny degrees of its reality. I'm often uncharitable to Jump properties for often falling into being what I consider run-of-the-mill shonenshit or trope-driven romantic comedies, so the fact that I actually kind of like SPY x FAMILY is a fair surprise. I think it's down to the fact that it's kind of neither beyond it's most general appeals to either type of work by making gestures towards them without totally committing. I guess, up to a certain point, it's a mainstream work that feels surprisingly 'human'.

2026-10-15 15:04 — Something I find a little irksome at times is how I find myself forgetting about Touhou characters in almost their entirety, particularly more recent ones. Some might quip that it's because more recent 2hus are just worse than the Good Old Cast™, but I find that viewpoint irritating and reductive. The fact of the matter is that there's at least a couple of things going on at once. The first is that there are characters who have little coverage at all within official media. Take for instance a character like Keiki. She's a stage six character from a game that came out nearly a decade ago, yet she hasn't appeared in any official media besides her debut game. As a result, there's not a whole lot that can be said regarding her beyond what's in her profile, which is probably not the most indicative of who she might actually be in any given situation. As a result, there's just not that much to say about her, which means she's not likely to come up very often outside of things that are relevant to Wily Beast and Weakest Creature. The second thing is that there's just no 'cultural critical mass' for characters past a certain point in the way that the first three or four Windows games saw. That's partly a matter of timing, I would think, considering that was the period when Touhou saw a massive boom in attention in general and thus had a certain (sub)cultural relevance. By about UFO or Ten Desires, that hot period saw some pretty rapid cooling, and there were fewer fan works featuring newer characters; that trend has continued, with there seeming to be fewer overall Touhou fan works with passing time, though the decline has been a fairly controlled one, given the continued relevance of events like Reitaisai. Either way, what fan works are made tend to fall back on the same sets of characters because newer characters lack that same 'mind share'. There is probably a certain calculus being made when putting out a fan work, because not being able to draw attention means that fewer people will bother to look at it, much less buy it. However, there is also the simple matter of the newer characters not having the same symbolic value, not having — stated neutrally — the sort of 'baggage' that comes with being featured in fan works for years prior. I think all 2hus have the potential to be made interesting. The problem is often down to whether or not there's anything that can be said regarding them, and the unfortunate fact of the matter is that there's not much to go off of with a bunch of them, newer or older. Combine that with the cast expanding ever more and me getting older, more distracted and more unfocused, and I find myself in that troubling spot where I just start forgetting characters entirely, something that makes me a little sad when I realise it's happened.

2026-10-15 18:05 — Looking over my jrnl tags for impulse/fragment entries, I find that @wrong-pull and @undercurrent are the top represented tags, with eleven entries each. That said, there are only three impulse entries that incorporate both, one of which is related to an existing premise, and zero fragments. I'm unsure what the most represented combination is at the moment, since I haven't checked every iteration, but I suspect it's generally sparse for most. I haven't added many impulses or fragments this week, and I've noticed from timestamps that a lot of them have been added in bursts. Most are impulses rather than fragments, which means I'm not writing that much prose, either. From this standpoint, it seems like not much is getting done in an average week. That said, I also haven't conducted sweeps as I've meant to do. I think it comes down to a combination of not watching or reading much and not looking back over what I've added very much. I think it's easy to get fixated on image discovery or music discovery to the detriment of everything else. I'm unsure if there is an effective way of deciding a particular distribution of effort at the moment; it's not as if setting quotas is going to necessarily make things happen with more frequency or ensure that time is 'optimally' spent. Rather, I think that the most I can do at the moment is what I'm doing right now: Have readable observations about where I'm at, presented with clear figures so I can gauge how time and effort are spent. I will try to log my results for image and music discovery at the end of the week, keeping a running tally available locally as I go.

2026-10-15 21:55 — As I'm kind of spent already, here's a wrap-up of today and a bit of yesterday as well: I finished the third season of SPY x FAMILY in one go, then watched a few episodes of Zeta Gundam. I found the ending of SPY x FAMILY to be a reasonable one, though it's not exactly conclusive, considering the series is likely to warrant a fourth season or more. The overall anti-war message there drove me to continue with Zeta Gundam, where I picked up at the part where they go to Earth. Seeing the episodes with "He is a CHAR" and "I've come to laugh at you" back to back, I realised just what makes the series a classic. Earlier the same day, I did a very quick and dirty analysis of jrnl posts, trying to find any obvious sorts of patterns, and I noted an average of around three posts per day in the past couple of weeks. That said, I feel like that frequency has reduced somewhat recently. I'll see what the average comes out to this week, keeping in mind that it'll probably be lower due to a number of different factors. In the present, most of today has been taken up by private matters I won't speak of here, but I finally added my definition of the @hazy-jagged tag to the list of resonance tags. This was at least partly an exercise in trying to clear out my task list whilst in a fit of indecision and middling energy. In addition, I cleaned up my currentunknowns file and my SOP improvement notes, removing the notes on the probe decision tree in the case of the latter. All in all, mostly what should be routine administration. I'm hoping that tomorrow will see me with the focus to do some impulse/fragment sweeps or other discovery work. For now, I'm out of energy and focus, so I'm going to go watch more Zeta Gundam.

2026-10-16 14:18 — Late start to the day. To start off, a recap of last night: I watched a few more episodes of Zeta Gundam. I got through about episode twenty, covering when the Audhumla is fleeing from Kennedy and being chased by the Blutarch forces. We get a second look at Cyber-Newtypes vis-a-vis Four Murasame, who quickly becomes an important figure to Kamille when they meet in Hong Kong. We also reunite with Mirai — honestly, best girl — and see that time has passed. Beltorchika and Amuro have a whole thing going on, and it kind of annoys people around them like Kamille and Katz. The plan to get back to space gets complicated by a lot of Titans interference, which is why those left end up going to Hong Kong and Kamille has his fateful encounter. Unfortunately, Four is kind of a mess due to being a Cyber-Newtype, and she's also the pilot of a horrifying dreadnaught of a Gundam called the Psyco Gundam. She and Kamille aren't exactly lovers as such, both still being practically children, but they do have an immediate Understanding™ of each other that only Newtypes can have. The time they spend together is very touching, which makes it all the more poignant when they have to fight each other. Ultimately, Four sacrifices herself to save the Audhumla from a suicide attack by Blutarch and ensure that Kamille can return to space by using one of the attacking ship's shuttle boosters. At this point, we're into territory where I've kind of forgotten what happens. I know things bounce between space and Earth for a bit at one point, but I can't remember a lot of what happens. Guess we'll find out soon enough.

2026-10-16 16:08 — A random thing I started thinking about, or thinking back on, is how atomised everything is and how that affects the perception of what is and isn't 'common knowledge'. The subject comes to mind for me often because I'm unaware of things that are considered to be in the 'mainstream' often enough. I don't watch big streamers, for instance; I couldn't even name one without having to attempt to look them up by some kind of metric. I don't know what's current in music or film because I pay little attention to the mass media. Even if I did so, what would be the guarantee that others would know of those things? Nowadays, everyone seems to exist down their own funnels that dictate what reaches them. 'Common knowledge' becomes reduced to 'what I know' because there is little consensus to be found otherwise. In this sense, any notion of what constitutes reality begins to break down and become replaced with something entirely subjective. At best, reality on a wider scale becomes more like shared delusions. Clashing interpretations of what would be measurable, objective reality become flashpoints for conflict, negated by one's closest held views and unfalsifiable by nature. This is something that manifests both at the micro and macro scales. I don't really know what I mean by floundering about it, but I suppose what's most applicable on a more local level is this: We shouldn't assume that what we know is what others know; we shouldn't assume anyone has any familiarity with anything with which we're familiar; we shouldn't take our own feeling about something to be shared by others. This is a 'should' that has manifested numerous counterexamples on THP. However, rather than recount them, I think it's more handy to keep that in mind and make an effort to make it known going forward. I would like if we could form a consensus as a community, but there is no way to enforce that in any strong way, or any useful way, for that matter. All that can be done at present is to sway others into the 'gravitational pull' of the culture that we want.

2026-10-16 20:59 — I didn't keep up with my accomplishments list today, so I'm going to slightly wing the wrap-up. I got caught up in going out to dinner, so things were a bit of a mess today, anyway. A lot of stuff happened on the laptop today. I had to update some things in order to install missing fonts, so I had to make a layout for tmuxp; it's missing some things, so I'll have to go back and edit it. I also spent time fixing the formatting on the Lion-Dog document, so I've got some necessary administrative work out of the way for doing discovery work on that story at last. Over on the desktop, I cleaned up the current unknowns list a little more, did a bit of rearranging of my task list, and imported an impulse I wrote on the laptop early in the morning. I also spent a bit of time cleaning up the formatting on the probe SOP that I recently wrote, since the way some paragraphs were arranged looked messy. All in all, largely administrative work. I'd like to spend a bit more time on discovery sort of work, but I can't help being interrupted by IRL things. At least I got to have a good sour apple margarita for my trouble. As an incidental note, I'm thinking about sharing this with the VIPs in the outer communities. I'm still mulling it over. I doubt there's going to be that much interest, but maybe it could be something to share.

2026-10-17 16:47 — Today seems to be a fairly low-energy day, perhaps lower than usual. I woke up earlier than usual but only managed to eat and then fall back asleep for a while before I could get to anything especially productive. I did a bit of maintenance on the task list and fetched my fixed copy of the Lion-Dog document from the laptop, and that's about it. I was going to do some further work with that document, but I got too sleepy to do anything and lay down. I think I'll be conducting a sweep today and see if it produces anything of interest. Other than that, the rest of my day is going to be watching stuff like the local mahjong league's stream and probably not much else. Not every day can be a burst of activity.

2026-10-17 16:55 — Zeta Gundam recap from last night: Kamille and a bunch of others, including Fa Yuiry, have reunited in space. Fa is now a pilot in training, something that causes a lot of drama with Kamille, which results in them spending a lot of time fighting, much to others' chagrin. Meanwhile, Jerid has cropped back up under Paptimus Scirocco's command, mostly to be humiliated and jerked around in front of his new love interest, Mouar. We're also introduced briefly to a new Newtype named Sarah Zabiarov who seems to have something going on regarding Scirocco, though she's also kind of a fraidy cat of a soldier and flees battle after getting overwhelmed by psychic space stuff. As with other characters, Fa has some moments of rushing out to prove herself and nearly get killed, only for Kamille to have to use the shiny new Zeta Gundam to rescue her. There's also some exciting political action on earth with Blex and Char attending a conference on Earth, where the Earth Federation is voting to give the Titans control, a motion which succeeds, though not before Blex is assassinated in his hotel room, leaving control of the A.E.U.G. to Char. Following this, the Titans launch an assault on Von Braun City on the far side of the moon, looking to gain control of it for strategic reasons. The A.E.U.G. deploy to counter them, which includes Kamille trying to sneak in as a spy, though he's quickly spotted by Jerid and Mouar and saved from being double-teamed by Katz, who sneaked along despite being told no. They have a brief cat-and-mouse game, get locked in an air raid shelter together, and then eventually get to their mobile suits to continue helping their respective teams. And that's the last thing I remember.

2026-10-17 18:22 — I forgot to mention in the previous day's shuffle that I finally caught up on Lotus Eaters. I don't really know what to say about a lot of it other than that I appreciate the newer chapters with Sannyo, and Mamizou spooking Marisa and making her fall in the river was pretty funny. Oh, and I guess Marisa confessing about her minor larceny to Byakuren was also a snicker-worthy moment. Other than that, I'd say most of the chapters were a bit forgettable, perhaps a bit poorly-structured as narratives. In particular, the Myouren chapter was sort of a big nothing; it was a fairly formulaiac flow of: rumours about strange occurrence → strange occurrence is actually someone doing something because reasons → they stop without much prompting other than knowing about rumours → it's no longer an issue. The other one that had little going for it was the giant peony chapter, where the real significance was sort of just... not there. It turned out to be a scale from an uwabami — and that was kind of it. Reimu got hungover from touching it. Big whoop. I don't not enjoy those sorts of episodes within the story, but it does sort of feel like nothing in particular is ever likely to happen — which means that when something inevitably does happen, it will be sudden, poorly set up, and poorly executed. At least, that's been the past precedent with the official mangos. (No, I'm not even going to bother talking about Detective Monke.) If I had to say anything, I'd say: I have to wonder if ZUN isn't turning the uwabami thing into a whole thing at this point, considering it's come up twice in the same mango. Incidentally, with the latest chapter, he's doing the whole 'bad mixes of foods' thing again, which feels like a similar pattern; the last time, coincidentally, involved the uwabami. If the weird snake doesn't turn out to be significant, I'll be pretty surprised. Then again, things have been sort of a haze of 'episodic happenings' to the point that it's hard to say what, if anything, is significant. I'm just hoping we don't end up with another Forbidden Scrollery sort of ending.

2026-10-18 00:49 — More Zeta Gundam recaps: The couple of episodes following the Von Braun City battle sees the Titans attempting a colony drop on Granada, also on the moon. This course of action on the part of Jamaican prompts Scirocco to send Sarah as a leaker to the A.E.U.G. forces, spilling the plan before exfiltrating courtesy of unintended help by Katz. This is the start of a mini-arc of 'Katz does dumb shit', started by him making goo-goo eyes at Sarah and getting led to let her escape, ending in him sortieing in the new G-Defenser to show off his piloting. In the latter case, that turns out to be helpful when he saves both Emma and Kamille. Rather than Jerid, Kamille continues to clash with Yazan Gable, a hot-shot Titans pilot he encountered briefly during the Von Braun City battle. Yazan gets sent out to attack the Agarma, with Jamaican hoping to humiliate him when the attack fails, but he ultimately lures the Zeta Gundam close to the Titans' ship and dodges out of the way of a shot that fatally strikes the bridge and kills Jamaican. There's some foreshadowing of Zeon-related stuff with part of the fighting taking place inside an old Zeon ship and some intel being revealed that the Titans have collaborated with 'remains of Zeon' to construct something with part of A Baoa Qu. Oh, and Emma saves the day by setting off a nuclear pulse on the space colony, knocking it off-course and only 150 km or so away from Granada. Things end off with word that Quattro Bajeena (Char) is making his return to space.

2026-10-18 01:36 — Very late, I'm calling it an end to this day. I've done truthfully little other than watch Zeta Gundam and the mahjong league stream, do a bit of catching up on recapping things, do a small bit of sweeping, and write a new impulse based on a random recollection. I won't go to sleep right away, but I'll probably be going back to bed soon. This day has been a little bit of a bad mood one, though not due to any one thing. I'm hoping that tomorrow will be a slightly higher-energy one. It would be nice to be able to do a little more without collapsing for most of the day.

2026-10-18 14:47 — Memory is a very funny thing. I was going over things last night and randomly remembered Isabel Allende's The Japanese Lover, a book I heard the audio version of during a previous job some years ago. It wasn't a great book, but it somehow nestled in my memory over the years. What brought it back was a plot point about a character receiving letters from someone that were actually quite old; they had arranged to have them sent to themselves to relive the experience of receiving them. The plot point itself was rather trite in the context of that book, yet something about preserved memories in an impulse note of mine brought it to mind. I ended up writing a new impulse based off of that recollection, funnily enough. I suppose what floored me in retrospect was how accidental it all was remembering that fairly insignificant thing. These things that don't particularly matter somehow end up lodged deep in our memories whether we like them to be or not, and the most random things can just shake them loose without warning. Yet, at the same time, I can't remember much about what would notionally be 'important' episodes of my life. I can't remember what people said, what they looked like, what was going on, etc. All I remember is that such and such thing happened as a matter of fact. There's something quite ironic about all of it in that way.

2026-10-18 16:52 — I've gone back through my main document detailing the impulse/fragments process numerous times, yet I think I've come closest to finally intuiting the aim of the process. The thing is that I realise that, on some level, I haven't been 'doing the work' necessary to make the right things happen. The intention has always been to engage in regular sweeps in order to notice patterns among impulses. I haven't been doing that with any regularity, so there's been less opportunity for me to make connections. Thus, I've only written a very small handful of fragments. In addition, I feel in retrospect that I've been slightly dishonest and put my finger on the scale a little for existing premises. Most of the fragments I've written have been for those premises, and it's because I've wanted to rush into working those premises into stories. However, that would just be forcing the process. The intended process is for me to sweep, notice patterns, write fragments, sweep more, notice patterns in fragments, develop thread tags, and eventually seed a document with fragments tagged with a recurring thread tag. If I can find enough connections between material, I can export it into a document together and begin the process of trying to build something forward. If it still doesn't work, then it just means that the recurrence wasn't as strong as I'd hoped and I need to look it over more. Thus far, though, that hasn't been anywhere within my realm of concern, since I haven't produced many fragments at all. The process is entirely random, but it can be made slightly less random if I spend the time to review things.

2026-10-18 21:02 — It's slightly early, but I'm going to go ahead and call it an end to the day here. I still haven't managed to get going on Lion-Dog work. I ended up delaying because I wanted to try and do more general impulse/fragment work. As such, I did sweeps for several different tags. I ended up writing an impulse and a fragment each, so I suppose it was at least a little productive. If every day could allow for this, if not more, then that would be great. I also did a bit more administrative work like updating my grocery list, which I hadn't touched in too long. There were also further issues and inconsistencies in the formatting for my probe SOP that I noticed, so I went ahead and fixed those. I wish I could account for where a lot of the hours went, but it's a bit difficult. I think I ended up being a bit lower-energy than I'd hoped. I definitely slept longer than intended, waking up past noon. Perhaps tomorrow can see something more reasonable.

2026-10-19 10:06 — It's an early start to the day despite a late end. Last night, I managed to write an impulse and a fragment a piece, so I've imported those to the main jrnl this morning. I've got a busy day of self-analysis ahead of me. Given that it takes me at least an hour to get through, I may save it for later. I've got shopping to do today. Given that I'm running on less sleep today, maybe I'll have slightly less filter to hinder me with things. The result could be good, or it could be disastrous. We'll see which it is.

2026-10-19 12:52 — Weekly Review — Priority Label: UNFALSIFIABLE ANXIETY — Machine: Desktop — Source: jrnl/braindump — SOP Exists: No — Will need to consider how to set targets in order to feel that time has been used 'appropriately enough'. Don't belief that an SOP will be necessary, but some rubric will need to be formulated.

2026-10-19 16:50 — Aside from getting my weekly review done earlier, not a lot productive has happened thanks to sometimes harshly shifting energy levels and IRL obligations taking up time. In the midst of other business, a thought that came to mind is my own slight aversion to producing amorously-centered stories about 2hus. This is somewhat of an ironic thing given that general trends in the impulses and fragments I have built up at the moment point to a sense of longing and undercurrents of tension between people, two factors that lend themselves to exactly those sorts of things. I should note that my aversion doesn't mean I haven't made attempts; much the contrary, I've made quite a few attempts over the years. The problem is that those same efforts ended up losing their lustre fairly quickly, and I found myself questioning if I ought to be working on them at all. I think the heart of the matter comes down to this: I don't like to feel as if I'm writing full-on wish-fulfillment fiction. Again, somewhat ironic, given that all fanfiction could be said to be 'wish-fulfillment' on some level. However, I'd say my qualms come at the level of incredibly brazen examples, where a surrogate for the author engages in an affair de cœur with some favoured character or other. I've thought about it quite a while, and I can't say that sort of thing is apt to be satisfying to me on any real level. First of all, no matter how much I have any liking for a particular character, they can't ever be 'real' to me. They are fiction and will always remain that way; it is simply an impassable barrier. Secondly, no matter my positive favour for them, I can't say that my emotions for any character approach what could be called 'affection'. At the very least, I don't simple favour as anything like actual affection. In my mind, one needs to know another as a person to find actual affection, and the first point makes that an utter impossibility. As such, simply projecting myself onto some avatar and engaging in a simulacrum of romantic fervour won't do very much to stir me. Where does that leave me, then? Well, it's hard to say. What I believe is that it comes down to a story where such a relationship is a feature but not the focus. As an aside, some might say, "Why not just pair up 2hus romantically?" To that I say: Nope, not my thing. At least, not in and of itself. I feel there would need to be quite a compelling case made beyond 'it's easier than making up a new character'. Of course, this does mean I am locked into a course where some newly ordained original character will need to appear and be relevant, and that introduces a slew of challenges. That said, I feel that the story itself will ultimately dictate the needs there. The real trouble will come down to how convincing any depicted relationship will be, and that's where I have a lot of reservations. If I come back to this topic, I think that will need to be a part two.

2026-10-19 19:29 — My energy has rapidly cratered, so I'm ending the day here. My accomplishments were largely getting started with fine-toothed Lion-Dog formatting work — which implies degrees of initial reading involved. Hopefully, I can fall asleep soon and get on somewhere close to a normal sleep schedule. Until then, I'm going to take it easy. So much for exciting log entries.

2026-10-20 15:01 — Life obligations have dictated a fairly late start to the day. I think it's going to be a pretty low-energy one. Falling asleep early didn't do much to fix my sleep schedule, unfortunately. If anything, it was just more of the same at a slightly adjusted schedule. If I do anything of consequence, it will probably be more working on document formatting.

2026-10-21 12:03 — That was probably the quickest I've updated the server in a while. Not that I rely on PHP for much of anything on the site, but I didn't want to take many chances. I pretty much rolled out of bed and saw the security bulletin. Thankfully, updates were already available by that point or I'd have probably spent time freaking out. Anyway, back to scheduled programming soon. P.S. I know I didn't close out the day properly yesterday. I'll do a recap of accomplishments for yesterday when I get to it.

2026-10-21 12:27 — Somehow, in spite of everything, I've managed some degree of restful sleep. I guess taking it easy yesterday might have helped, though I can't say for real sure. Anyway, to recap yesterday and the day prior's accomplishments real quick: I watched somewhere close to eleven episodes of ZZ Gundam across two days, resuming it after being told that where I left off was actually where the series picked up. I managed to get past the first ten updates of Lion-Dog in my formatting work, which was a pretty significant amount of text to check over. I also fixed the vimode script for my weechat installation on the laptop since I'd forgotten that post-4.x.x broke that script, and the script itself hasn't seen a proper new release on Github in like three(!) years, necessitating manually downloading the newest script into the correct directory. Arguably the biggest accomplishment of yesterday was going shopping, since it had been the better part of a week since I'd needed to go and stock up on groceries; thankfully, it was far less painful than expected, and I even ate barbecue whilst I was out. Just to throw it in here, not long ago, I updated the server to get the new PHP fix installed. That doesn't seem like a whole lot across a couple of days, but it was a lot considering my low energy level. We'll see what today allows, considering I'm a little better-rested, though not terribly high-energy.

2026-10-21 13:02 — I needed to clean up my daily accomplishments file, and I wanted to use sed instead of opening the file in Neovim to manually remove the lines after the little header I made. Not knowing how to deal with what I needed, I looked at the manpage for sed and saw that the 'd' (delete) command accepts ranges, but I didn't know how ranges are expressed in sed. I was forced to look at the infopage (GNU info) for sed instead, which constitutes the more in-depth documentation. A quick look at the basic scripting pages in the infopage gave me an example that showed that ranges are a simple matter of "[number],[number][command]". Thus, I figured out that I'm just deleting all lines from the third line to the end, making the appropriate command: `sed -i '3,$d' [file]`. Edit: This is wrong, or at least did not work in my case. I have had it work with '0,[number]' for some things, but what ended up working for me in this particular case was '3~1d', going one line at a time from the third line.

2026-10-21 15:17 — I've finally finished the formatting work on the Lion-Dog document. Now I'm left with actually re-reading the updates and figuring out the parts that give me the strongest 'no, I don't want this' sort of feeling. I'm not sure I've got it in me to do that right this second, so that's probably all the work I'm going to do for the moment. As an incidental note, the Tuck browser extension stopped working correctly for me on the laptop, so I ended up removing it. I honestly don't know what happened, but an extension that can't do the main thing it's made to do is kind of useless, and it gives almost no useful information for troubleshooting, so there's little I can do but remove it. Frankly, I was questioning if I really needed it, anyway. That just made the decision easier.

2026-10-21 18:56 — Maybe it's just because I've been more into landscapes and traditional media, but it seems like most of the Touhou art I've seen lately that has impressed me has come from Chinese artists. I remember a time when most artists were Japanese, and certainly a lot of the artists that did stuff I found impressive were largely Japanese, though there were occasional Korean artists who did interesting things. Granted, it's hard to tell with a lot of artists unless they explicitly call it out in their profile or if they post commentary in a language other than Japanese. That said, that sort of explicit information has called a number of impressive artists out as Chinese. I'm not sure what, if anything, that changes materially, but I suppose it's an interesting thing to note. It would be interesting to know the nationalities of artists still producing Touhou art as a whole. For a series that's as Japanese in its core identity as Touhou, for there to be a sharp decline in Japanese artists paying it any attention would be a pretty interesting turn of events.

2026-10-21 19:40 — Bee brought up The Heart of the Fool over on the Matrix side kind of at random. At Teru's behest, I tried to transplant the discussion over into a more public-facing channel, but that doesn't seem to have taken. I wish more people cared about The Heart of the Fool. It's a story with a lot going on beneath its surface, though there's a lot that's being spelled out through the narration, even if the full picture isn't presented. The main issue is that there's not a lot that's happened in terms of story events, so it's hard to say much about anyone in terms of concrete circumstances; we simply don't know anyone's 'deal' because not enough has been revealed. We know that Kawanami is a son of a merchant family, probably reasonably prosperous, and someone who had a lot of time on his hands back up top, and we know that Yuugi is some sort of authority figure in Former Hell. Details in either case, however, are scarce. And Parsee is pretty near a total enigma at the current stage; she's a pretty stranger who hides something like madness behind her entrancing facade. Overall, we need more story to say much more, and that relies on people showing any kind of enthusiasm for it. At this stage, I'm not sure what can really be done, because a monologue can't constitute a discussion.

2026-10-21 19:58 — I figure I ought to try and summarise as much of ZZ Gundam in hopes of remembering: The action follows Judau Ashta and a gang of kids who were formerly junkers in a colony called Shangri-La and who subsequently joined the crew of the Argama in the A.E.U.G's war against the former-Zeon forces of Axis, led by Haman Karn, an antagonist introduced late into Zeta Gundam. The early series is largely comedic shenanigans as the Argama faces trouble from a silly cast of antagonists looking to prove themselves to Haman, including a rose-wearing dandy and a Gem and the Holograms reject who goes crazy handling any mobile suit. Somewhere in all this, Judau gets to be the pilot of the new Double Zeta Gundam, which easily devastates anything the Axis forces throw at them. Meanwhile, Bright Noa, still captain of the Argama, has his hands full trying to deal with a lot of his crew being literal kids. Also, a couple of the kids get sick of not being taken seriously, defect to Axis, create trouble for the Argama, and eventually come crawling back. About the time I picked things back up, the crew of the Argama ended up at a colony called Moon Moon, where technology was shunned and the inhabitants were largely abandoned by the Earth Sphere or Axis. Most of what followed was the capture of the neon-haired crazy Chara Soon, Judau sneaking away to try and rescue his kidnapped sister a couple of times, and the general advancement of Axis forces towards Earth. With the Earth Sphere in a state following the destruction of the Titans in the Gryps War, Haman sees the opportunity to seize the Earth and intends to descend with an advance force. As the Argama heads there to intercept Haman's forces, they find out that the Earth Sphere assembly in Dakar has already been seized by forces calling themselves Neo Zeon. Judau initially tries to go off on his own but rejoins the Argama yet again, not liking what he's seen in terms of civilian casualties of military conflicts on the ground. Where I've left off is the so-called Gundam Force, consisting of the Mk II, Zeta Gundam, and Double Zeta Gundam, trying to sneak through the desert to get to Dakar. The initial parts of the series were definitely more silly and comedic, but it feels like things are getting more serious from here on out. It remains to be seen if things will be as depressing as Zeta Gundam, but I doubt it will be without its tragedies and its casualties. Tomino just can't let things get too exuberent, after all.

2026-10-21 20:25 — Calling an end to this day. I can't say it was an exceptionally productive one, but I did get more initial work with regards to Lion-Dog done, and I managed to do a quick tag sweep at one point. I think I have some emerging thoughts on something, but I need to leave it to marinate for a bit, I think, and I need to have a look through my images and maybe watch and read a few more things to have the chance to germinate some new material. I feel the need to look back a bit more at official Touhou stuff as well. My thoughts regarding specific characters are feeling a bit faint, even though I've looked at some degree of art not so long ago. I'd like to hope I can get some more impulses and fragments written before the week is up. Oh, and I'll need to review my analyses again, especially my most recent one.

2026-10-22 17:35 — Different life things necessitating a later start to the day plus the site being unreachable for a little while have convinced me that today is probably best left as a 'take it easy' sort of day. That's fine by me, as I was pretty low-energy when I woke up this morning. I'll do whatever I can, but I'm not going to be manic about being 'productive' today. If I miss something in my accomplishments log, so be it. Also, I need to devise an SOP for when the site is unreachable. The assumption to now has been that I'll have SSH access all the time, but that's not a safe assumption to make. I'll need a procedure to ensure that I can keep the logs updated on a best-effort basis. Additionally, because I've felt a bit of pressure to add doing synopses of things I watch as a near-daily thing, I'm going to cut back on that; I don't want to turn it into an obligation that I feel anxiety around if it doesn't get done.

2026-10-23 11:23 — Early in the morning, whilst I was awake and restless, I did a quick search about unloading tabs in Firefox, still annoyed by Tuck crapping out on me. As it turns out, I don't pay enough attention to Firefox development, because manually unloading tabs has been a thing since version 140 released. The thing is that it requires right-clicking on tabs, and I tend to do as much as possible with the keyboard. Most things that use a context menu are likely to go unnoticed by me because of that. Anyway, you can right-click a tab, hit 'Unload Tab', and voilà. There's also a new(?) 'about:unloads' page that gives information about Firefox's automatic tab unloading metrics. Of course, that only really kicks in under memory pressure scenarios, whereas I don't even want to get there as far as tabs go. I guess I'll be using that feature more going forward.

2026-10-23 13:53 — As set out for myself yesterday, I've written out a preliminary SOP for dealing with Tekitou being unreachable. There may be factors or situations I've yet to consider, so I'm going to consider it more of a draft or a quick note than a binding SOP at this stage. I'll try to re-examine it when I get to checking over SOPs again. If I should need to engage it, I'll try to keep notes about what happened and see if I can't adjust it to any conclusions drawn.

2026-10-23 16:57 — Attempting to play yonma in Riichi City got me busted back down to Moon rank for the third time. I've played more sanma than yonma, so I can't help but feel my skills in the latter have deteriorated a bit. Then again, there are degrees of transferrable skills, so I don't know if I'm just hitting bad matchups more often than not, considering yonma has a larger player base by default. I think I definitely play a little too aggressively in yonma, though, especially after I've been playing sanma. Sometimes, I play too defensively for sanma and end up losing pretty badly. It's hard to find a good balance of offence to defence when going between the two game styles. There are times when I feel I probably ought to just stick to three-player, but I find myself wanting to be good at the 'vanilla' game, too. Still, the fact that I've been ranked down three times already makes me feel like I've plateaued somewhere. I'm not sure what sort of skills I lack besides very difficult-to-develop ones like reading discards. I know that I often get WWYD questions wrong, but it's often because I disagree with the utility of the particular 'right' discard in actual play; I don't care how much theoretical 'value' a particular discard has if it's not going to be that likely of a good play in an actual game. Some would say that means I have problems with tile efficiency. I guess that's the case, but I also don't think being strictly efficient with discards is going to guarantee anything. From what I've seen, it's not like it even guarantees a statistical advantage; you're still at the mercy of probabilities. Ultimately, I probably need to work a bit more on push-pull dynamics and get a better feel of when I ought to fold even before someone calls riichi.

2026-10-23 20:59 — I managed a fragment early in the day, so I think I'll call it a victory, considering I had to go out for dinner for the rest of my day. I need to knock off pretty soon.

2026-10-24 17:01 — Something that's stayed as a constant in my days of Touhou fiction writing has been wondering about society in Gensokyo. That's a fairly broad subject, but I suppose I mean the way people congregate and what happens when they do. Even more solitary youkai are shown to be among people at varying times. I also wonder about the 'shape' of society, particularly how youkai society might differ from human society, or how human and youkai society might mirror each other. It's not really a fixation on 'civilisation' as such; it's more about how people interact in a broader sense; what sort of niches do they occupy relative to each other? These are things that canon material doesn't comment on in any real solid way. Even the tengu are presented in broadly generalised terms that could just as well be untrue as true, or at least not fully reflective of any actual reality.

2026-10-24 23:51 — I feel like a broken record at this point, but IRL kind of got in the way of everything else today. I especially had a lot of time stolen by needing to look after someone else's incredibly needy dog. The dog was at least cute. Still, I managed to get a couple of impulses out in middle of a bunch of other stuff, and I did a little maintenance on some lists I keep for things like groceries. I've found that I need to change my probe SOP to account for braindump scenarios, as I didn't consider them before. I will need to make those additions and edits at some point. I'm also considering setting a soft target for myself with the start of next week for the number of impulses/fragments I produce; it won't be any sort of hard goal that I must reach, but I will consider it a good week if I can reach it, and I will aspire to reach it if at all possible.

2026-10-25 13:44 — Between last night and this afternoon, I've done an amount of messing about with sed and trying to read documentation. Most of what I've figured out is that I still don't really understand sed all that well aside from very isolated use-cases. For instance, I still don't even know how to execute multiple commands in one invocation; my attempts have all led to errors. What I do know is that doing something like "i[text]" will append a line with [text] before every line in a file. Basically, if you don't have some kind of pattern matching, either an explicit line address or "/[pattern]/", then sed will do whatever specified operation to all lines. Of course, I tried to append line numbers in front of every line with just "=" and got standalone lines with the line number instead, so I'm not exactly sure how that works in practise. I've also learned that I need to learn regexes like yesterday; I can sort of parse them in a basic way, but more complicated ones immediately lose me. The only real way to 'edit' a line in sed (that I've found) is using "s/[pattern]/[replacement]/", and doing that effectively calls for regexes.

2026-10-25 17:40 — I don't look at it too in-depth very often, so it's not surprise that my activity routing table could use an editing pass. It hasn't been touched since I generated it, and I think there are a few unfactored elements or pieces where the LLM didn't quite have the right context. In future, I'll do this sort of work entirely by myself, but I won't discard the utility of having used the LLM to produce an example for myself. Without that example, I wouldn't have thought to create a procedure to follow or a categorisation of activities without a great deal of complication and granularity. Either way, the routing table needs a bit of updating, so I'll need to keep it in mind.

2026-10-25 18:28 — A new procedural goalpost I'm going to set for myself here is to spend a little time every Sunday reviewing these logs. I mean to give myself reminders of goals or possible directions to pursue on things, and there are also possible things to address that might come up in these entries if they form enough of a pattern. Every observation should be a data point, but I also have to actually look them over to make that determination. Thus, Sunday is going to be my log review day.

2026-10-25 20:52 — The day wasn't the absolutely most productive in the world, but I did do some stuff by some measure. I certainly learned a bit about sed, and I've taken the opportunity to look back at things and try to set aspirational goals and procedural goals to hit to ensure I know where I'm at in the week. In the time I was futzing with sed, I also managed my grocery list, which needed a bit of attention. I also did a tag sweep for @brink and came out of it with a new fragment. I'll also just sweep a couple of impulses I wrote in the early morning in with today's accomplishments. Definitely far from the worst day today.

2026-10-26 14:57 — Weekly Review — Machine: Laptop — Source: jrnl only — Not much material to review for this batch. I'm considering pulling in these logs as part of reviews in some fashion, considering there is some information to be gleaned there as well. Will be in consideration for the next week.

2026-10-26 19:44 — Because I feel like Touhou stuff is falling out of my head, I feel the need to go back and read as many of the official works as I can. I had started a re-read of Wild and Horned Hermit, so I might continue with that first. Then again, I feel the need to refresh myself on the early chapters of Lotus Eaters. I probably also ought to just go back and read the Akyuu works for the hell of it, even if I don't hold fast to every detail. A re-read of profiles might also be warranted. I feel I've been away from the official works so long that I've sort of forgotten the spirit of them. I guess I could always keep playing Unconnected Marketeers as well.

2026-10-27 16:35 — This might have to be a write-off day, as my sleep was disturbed earlier and I ended up sleeping again until just recently. I don't feel especially high-energy, either, as a result. If I can manage a sweep, perhaps write an impulse/a fragment, and do something on my task list, that will have to be good enough for the day. Due to the relative lack of time, it's not like I can plan it all out in any effective way.

2026-10-27 17:04 — Weekly Impulse/Fragment Target: 28 — NOTE: Due to this target being set on Tuesday, this cycle will be a truncated one; every SUNDAY will be the endpoint of a given cycle.

2026-10-28 04:15 — Just a quick note before I head off to bed. I had a generally fumbled start to the day, so I wasn't able to do a lot. I'll still count watching an inconsolable dog and keeping her in control as an accomplishment, even though I never wanted to do it. Besides that, I wrote a procedure for myself around impulse/fragment targets and set a soft target of twenty-eight for this week as a starting value, meant to be adjusted downward based on the week. To keep up with that goal, I did manage to write at least a single impulse today, which is more than I've done in a few days.

2026-10-28 12:23 — I've been doing a sort of discovery work by finding artists with appealing work on Danbooru, going to their Pixiv pages, and picking up any artists in their follows or bookmarks for further consideration and putting them in a list. Because I'm not going over it with a fine-toothed comb and just taking it as it comes, there's bound to be repeats. Needless to say, I grepped my text file where I keep these interesting artists and found a repeat recently, and I wanted to de-duplicate. My naïve approach was to just try matching the pattern and use a flag to ensure it was only the first match (i.e., "/[pattern]/1"), but that's not valid syntax. I ended up doing a search and found an answer to the question on StackOverflow: Just use address range limitations to ensure sed stops at the first match. Thus, all you have to do is "0,/[pattern]/{//d;}" to delete only the first occurrence of something. I don't quite understand the empty double-slash part; I'll look it up later.

2026-10-28 13:07 — Through experimentation, I've figured out a way to dupe-check my list of artists straight from my clipboard. I use wl-copy/wl-paste as my clipboard provider because I use Sway as my GUI environment, giving me access to the clipboard contents from the shell. As such, when I've copied an artist name from Danbooru, I can actually search my list with "wl-paste | grep -f - [file]" for duplicates before even attempting to add it. I could probably write a script for doing that and adding the copied artist if there's no dupe. For actually adding the artist, I can just do "wl-paste >> file".

2026-10-29 01:00 — Most of the day was devoted to combing through artists of interest on Danbooru and Pixiv. I ended up adding about fifty-two(!) to my list for winnowing down. I will follow up by finding further artists by looking at their follows on Pixiv and/or art sharing similar tags to pieces I find interesting. I also saved seven images as a result of my hunt, so that's a bit more potential inspiration for impulses/fragments. Speaking of which, arguably my biggest accomplishment of the day was writing out two more impulses. Perhaps if I can build on that pace, I can come close to the weekly soft target; I somehow doubt that will happen, but I will otherwise have better data for what is more realistic, at least.

2026-10-29 16:50 — I've spent a little time reading over this site and experimenting a little. Not every example I've tried has worked, and I'm not quite sure why, but I suppose I've learned a little more about the syntax of sed and things like appending things to every line; the way to put something like 'https://danbooru.donmai.us/tags?=' in front of a list of artist tags is `s/.*/https:\/\/danbooru.donmai.us\/tags\?=&`, where `&` is the contents of what's matched by the `.*` part. There's more about using the 'hold space' and 'pattern space' to do a bit more advanced trickery, but I've not managed to do more than move the first line down to the last.

2026-10-29 20:38 — I'm calling it here for the day. Besides learning a bit of sed, I also took the opportunity to look up how to do @media queries in CSS and some general information about how CSS can be made a bit more 'responsive'. Testing results on my phone have been mixed. I'm not sure how well it works, but it's not like that's going to be the only changes that happen, so it's not like it needs to be perfect at the moment. There's an effect I'd like to achieve where the layout is divided into three columns, with the middle being the main content and the outer columns being patterned elements that float with the viewport as it scrolls. On top of all that, I wrote two more fragments today, though not without a fair bit of difficulty. Part of me feels that I might have been able to do more had I got started a bit earlier. Then again, how much earlier I could have started is a bit questionable, considering I needed to mind a dog for a fair stretch of time.

2026-10-30 17:22 — Because of IRL chaos meaning an early start to the day and a long nap in the middle, I'm going to take this as a rest day. If anything gets done, it's going to be a tag sweep. I might still attempt to write an impulse or fragment, but I'm not going to cross my fingers. These sorts of days will happen as well.

2026-10-31 14:20 — Something of a reminder to myself: I need to do some media discovery for books as well. It'll be a little more of a pain because information isn't as conveniently organised as with music or animu art, but I still need to do it. I'll try and gather a shortlist of publishers and pursue it on a higher-energy day.

2026-10-31 19:27 — I managed to finish re-reading Wild and Horned Hermit volume five today after not touching it for a while. It ended on the chapter where the kappa put on a planetarium show near the village because of a shooting star. Honestly, it's a very strange chapter. Most of it is just talking about constellations and the idea of how Gensokyo is demarcated from the outside. Kasen seems fixed on the idea of breaking the barrier — for reasons that are pretty obvious in retrospect. That said, it raises a lot of questions about Kasen and her relationship to Gensokyo. We're more or less told at one point that she's a 'youkai sage', which generally implies involvement in the creation of Gensokyo. However, Kasen displays an ignorance of the barrier that doesn't seem like a put-on. (The obvious meta-reason is, of course, to provide a stand-in for the audience who asks obvious questions.) If she really is 'one of the sages' — I can't even remember if a number was ever specified, though I've seen people convinced it was four — then it would be strange for her to not know much about Gensokyo's fundamentals. Besides that, there are points where she obtains things from outside the barrier, implying she's either able to employ someone else's help or is able to go outside herself. Yet, there seems to be a contradiction here: Why would she be so hell-bent on breaking the barrier if she can move outside it at will through means arcane? Even if she's borrowing someone else's hand, wouldn't she just be able to use them for her goals? I won't claim to have any idea what that conflict means, but it is something that's interesting to note, and it's something that a first read and even a re-read of WaHH didn't particularly raise as questions for me. All the more reason to re-visit.

2026-10-31 20:34 — It's been a little of a tiresome day due to IRL interruptions. Unfortunately, I didn't add to my fragment or impulse count today, even though I did do a couple of tag sweeps; there was a vague notion of something, but it wasn't enough to produce anything, so it's left to marinate for now. I think I'm running a little low on material for impulses, considering I haven't done many recently. I need to take more time to read and/or watch things. I did, as mentioned earlier, finish reading a bit of Wild and Horned Hermit and also started re-reading the early chapters of Lotus Eaters. The rest of the day's activity was largely limited to doing maintenance on some of my lists, finally making some needed edits to an SOP, and reading a bit on regular expressions. If I don't produce anything else by some fluke later tonight, I guess my total for the period is going to be low single-digits, far below twenty-eight. Of course, as stated before, that's a soft target intentionally set to be adjusted downward, so I'll have to make a consideration as to what might be more realistic by the end of tomorrow. One factor I really need to consider is days where I either have no energy or no time due to IRL interruptions. I also will do a review of the week's logs tomorrow ahead of the Monday jrnl/braindump review.

2026-11-01 13:10 — I've made my analysis of log entries for the past two week period. What I've noticed is that they are fairly procedural in focus. However, I feel a tension with that in that these logs are supposed to constitute site activity. I feel I have forgotten what I've wanted to do with this site. Most notably, discussion of media has been largely without actual discourse, lacking much in the way of opinion from me on what I've seen. Though I feel it's important to note things like goals and targets, I also feel I must consider how procedural these entries are apt to become at any one time, especially when some can end up coming off more like journal entries than log entries. Also, based on a listing of entries starting from last Sunday, I've only managed six impulses/fragments in the period. This is around a quarter of the set soft target. As there were several days where I didn't even attempt any impulses or fragments, this isn't surprising. However, I still believe that I should aspire to higher numbers. I will set the next goal accordingly.

2026-11-01 13:18 — Weekly Impulse/Fragment Target: 12 — This number is accounting for around two low-energy days or days with unignorable obligations.

2026-11-01 17:46 — Braindump Written — Machine: Desktop — Dominant feeling: Despondency

2026-11-02 00:35 — Quick note: To reduce the amount of procedural noise in these logs, I'm going to leave the daily accomplishments as something I quietly keep in a file locally and collate weekly to go along with the other auditing that I'm doing. If there's something particularly noteworthy, I guess it can be reported here, but I'm going to largely keep it as a personal thing. Hopefully, that will cut down on the friction and feeling of compulsion that comes with maintaining these logs that I've been feeling lately.

2026-11-02 15:17 — Weekly Review — Machine: Desktop — Source: Both — Little to act on in any immediate sense. I have tried to address some of the frustrations I've felt over a perceived cognitive weight around following procedure and what I've felt is an unnecessary layering of procedure for its own sake. I will need to try and assess my own goals with these procedures and see where any further adjustments or management of expectations can be done.

2026-11-02 20:27 — I wanted to append more than one line to the end of a text file from the shell, and I knew that '\n' is typically used to insert a newline in a lot of scripts and programming languages. However, when I tried that, it just added the line with the literal '\n' included. Checking the manpage for `echo`, I found that backslash literals have to be enabled using the '-e' flag; by default, they are not interpreted and will simply be echoed as-is to the output. In future, I'll know to use `echo -e` when including things like newlines.

2026-11-04 13:18 — For the purposes of humour, I wanted to use spoiler-text on Matrix. However, there's currently no implemented Markdown for spoilers in Element (not sure about other clients), so there's no easy way to do that without just using HTML styling. I knew that already, but it had been ages since I'd tried doing spoiler-text. Thanks to this blog, I now know that it's using the "data-mx-spoiler" attribute on a `span` element. Thus, the full way to do spoilers on Element is: `/html <span data-mx-spoiler>[text]</span>. Also, just because I had to learn it just now to type it out: to escape the less-than and greater-than characters for displaying literal HTML tags on a page, you have to use '&lt' and '&gt', otherwise they will be interpreted by the browser as actual tags.

2026-11-06 14:55 — In the past couple of days, I've been reminded of the Candi Staton classic "You Got The Love" and have been listening to it constantly. Most people are familiar with it because of the mash-up with the Frankie Knuckles-credited version of Jamie Principle's "Your Love", not to mention the subsequent remixes released comercially under the same name as the original songwriters, though in actuality an unrelated person who was part of getting the mash-up pressed on a bootleg vinyl. It's kind of a shame that it's impossible to find the original track on any streaming services. Thankfully, people do upload rips from the original twelve-inch on Youtube. The original is a funky little number that fits right into the late eighties, and it wouldn't be far off from the aesthetic of City Pop if it weren't for Candi Staton's gospel vocals. The current best rip out there is this one. I suppose it would be a track I wouldn't mind owning on vinyl if I could find it for less than a mint.