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.