Joel @cincodenada@cybre.space

It's a good thing I live alone now, because otherwise I might have to explain to someone why there are no fewer than three seperate jars of bread and butter pickle chips in my refrigerator

Finishing S1E1 of I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats and starting out with some more food for thought from Darnielle:

"Responsibilities are gifts, you know? If you have a responsibility then that, for me, is a hedge against the dark places. When I have a responsibility, I can be outside of myself.

I think that's a lot of what making art is about, is being able to make some connection where you have something bigger than you to take care of, and that connection that I get is a huge blessing to me."

Also, TIL I've been mispronouncing John Darnielle's name for years, sorry buddy (in case anyone else is in the same boat, it's Dar-NEEL, not Darn-YELL)

John Darnielle, agreeing in response: "When I was a child, reading the authors that I loved and listening to the music that I loved, the thing I got from that is what you're describing, that feeling of being understood somehow, by a stranger, and that weird connection, where it's not the person, it's not the stranger, it's the thing they've made that opens this space for self-reflection, for being able to see yourself through an outside eye."

Finally listening to I Only Listen to the Mountain Goats, and it's already very good. They're touching on a thing I've posted about, which is the unique power writing, music and otherwise, has for connection:

John Green: "There's a thing that music does really really well which is that when you're alone and scared and you feel unheard or unhearable, great music, the right music for you, can make you feel less alone and can make you understand that whatever you're going through is not unprecedented, and is not without people who feel compassionately towards you even if they're very far away and even if they maybe don't know you that their love for you is genuine and can reach across space."

Woah, so my UPS stopped doing its thing the other day. I still have a month left on my warranty, so I contacted support, expecting a drawn-out process. But here I am six hours and a couple emails later with a new battery on its way, free of charge, tracking info and everything. CyberPower is doing it right, apparently, can recommend!

#ListeningNow: David Bazan, Opposite Soul

Not opposite approaches, opposite goals
Not opposite sides of the aisle, opposite poles
If you need people broken to make yourself feel whole
Then baby, you've got opposite soul

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bik06hm_Bcw
https://genius.com/David-bazan-opposite-soul-lyrics

Got tired of trying to exclude matching giant blobs of minified Javascript while grepping around this codebase, and just hit upon the exceedingly boring option of piping grep to `awk 'length($0) < 200'`, which works great. Silly but it works!

Update: I remembered, you just gotta not forget the leading @ in the username and you're golden. Federation, here I come!

Okay, phew, got my #BookWyrm instance all upgraded and migrated and things, hurrah! If you haven't migrated a database using database dumps and a diff program, have you really lived?

Now to figure out how to follow people on other instances...

Having a real Berenstain Bears moment here looking at my domain renewals...turns out the website featured in Schitt's Creek S4E5 was not in fact badnewsalert.net, the domain I registered a year ago and then sat on, but rather SADnewsalert.net, which is indeed registered and, while in a state of decay, still has an homage to the Schitt's Creek site.

So, uh, if anyone wants to set up a portal for bad news, there's a great domain for you coming available in a couple weeks!

Just found a spreadsheet in my Google Sheets titled "What do I want to do with my life" that I didn't remember making, so I opened it up to see what I had been planning, and...

My favorite line from the new Mountain Goats album right now is "I eat half my crispy chicken club / I get extra mayonnaise, it's a mess", and I'm no music critic, but I think that's a testimony to its delivery and storytelling.

It's a silly-ass line on its face, but the patter and the way it flows as part of the rest of the song is just delightful.

That line comes at the end of the second verse, after which there's a two-line chorus, and then we immediately segue into the emotional turn of the song where it's confirmed in two sparse lines that this chill, seemingly-lighthearted song is about the narrator's divorce.

#TheMountainGoats #PictureOfMyDress #GettingIntoKnives #music #nowplaying

@anna Hey, I was just perusing the Nintendo Store and noticed that Conduct Together (the one-controller train co-op game I mentioned a bit ago) is once again 80% off and thus $2 this week, in case you wanted to check it out 🙂 https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/conduct-together-switch/

Went to upgrade my little test #Bookwyrm instance, got it all up and running, set up a new database cause I didn't feel like fiddling with migrating, doing some final database checks, and then realized one of the non-me users in my old database was local!

Went and checked and someone actually signed up for an account and has been, like, actually posting stuff! So I backed everything out and put the old version up, moved all my upgrade efforts to a parallel instance on a test subdomain and...uh, I guess I'm an admin now?

All that aside, in the little poking around I did get to do, looks like lots of nice updates over the past few months, @tripofmice! Excited to poke around some more when it's not all of a sudden 1:30am 🙃

A blessing from Bobby McGee this morning: less doomscrolling, more snoozing.

I will note I've tapped the power button with my toes many times before, but this is the first time I held it down long enough to actually power off. So this was inevitable, really.