ELSEWHERE

Hair dye came out very nice, I look like a knock-off rocket-pop

Church this morning, as usual it was church. Choir director (in rainbow suspenders) arranged for all of the songs but the hymns to be about rainbows, for Pride. There has been a proposed change to one of the Principles going through the motions, which got voted on at the General Assembly and passed -- I can't fucken remember what the change is, but it's intended to make the church more inclusive and to highlight a need for activism with racial equality in mind, specifically (as I recall). I've seen pushback from two contingents, one being that the language change is awkward and they'd like to see the change done but rewritten to flow better, and of course a contingent of racists who are against it because they're racist, but tend to hide behind the first group. I've actually learned a fair bit recently about an alt-right movement within the UU, so that's a thing

Anyway, change passed, I'm sure I'll hear more about it in coming weeks.

After coming home I have sat around for like an hour, and now I should get up and do some things. ash and I have our game night tonight, so we're going to do that in a bit, and I need to finish up pre-inspection chores before tomorrow afternoon

I don't remember if I've mentioned, but a couple weeks ago I started scattering peanuts and such on my patio in an attempt to attract both general wildlife for Oz to watch and more specifically crows because I'm that kind of nerd. I more recently than that started putting the offerings in a plastic mixing bowl with a rock in it, to keep things a bit cleaner -- I'm definitely going to change that up eventually but it's what I'm going with right now

Anyway, the squirrels just cannot figure out the bowl situation. On day one one of the squirrels tried tilting the bowl, which made the rock move, which startled the squirrel and now it refuses to touch it again, I guess. It can tell there are nuts in the bowl but can't work out how to get at them

It's also the only squirrel that's come back in recent days, there were three-ish hanging around before but the other two have given up, it seems

Guy who has only ever seen David Lynch's Eraserhead watching his second movie: Well this is nothing at all like Eraserhead,

Alright, got things mostly ready for inspection, gonna go to bed and finish up tomorrow

Inspection happened, we seem to have passed (I say "seem to" because there hasn't been any Official word one way or the other, but I don't really expect there to be unless something actually was wrong). Basically guy came in, checked the fire alarms and taps, asked me to stop storing my space heater in the shower (I, uh, am not actually going to comply with this because there's zero fire risk of putting an unplugged space heater in a room with no outlets, but I get that people are irrationally afraid of space heaters), took a picture of Ivy, and left. He said it looks like we take good care of the place, and while he probably does not actually have the authority to Officially declare that, I take it as a very good sign.

 
Taking today down, but immediate-future plans will involve unpacking the things that got packed away for the inspection, and I also want to just pull all my clothes out and go through them and store away/donate whatever. I am out of hangers and drawer space and need to make there be less clothes

 
I recently finally got around to starting Rule of Rose, a cult-classic PS2-era horror game -- I will have actual thoughts about it later, because my impression so far is somewhat complicated. It is giving me big Silent Hill vibes, but I think that's "man who has only played Silent Hill playing another game for the first time"-effect. They are contemporary and there are a lot of games in that genre that do similar things, that I just don't have a lot of experience with to compare them. I am also getting some Deadly Premonition vibes, which is either a coincidence based on them both being translated from another language/culture, or is SWERY (DP's developer) being influenced by Rule of Rose.

The plot so far is: I am an adult woman (whomst I suspect is not actually an adult, and that there's self-image stuff going on) who has been abducted onto an airship by a contingent of orphan children; the children are forcing me to participate in a club, which involves finding a monthly gift for them or they'll kill me. I also have a dog

How Long To Beat puts it at 9 hours long, so I should be done with it in a few days, unless the combat turns me off, because the combat is, very bad. So bad. And I've only had one combat section to deal with so far, so it's probably going to get worse

I wonder if there's cheats for it, I should look that up

 
With all the stuff going on with reddit, but specifically with the federated replacements popping up, I'm considering starting a personal mastodon server -- I gather that mastodon instances can interact with the reddit-replacement instances? I'm not positive, I'll have to confirm -- but the federated reddit-likes can interact with each other and they're all largely built on the same things, I think? Anyway, if that is indeed true then I could use a personal mastodon as basically a jacked-up RSS feed, that I could also interact from, which would be nice. I was considering going a level up and trying to do stuff with activitypub itself, but that quickly got more complicated than I can deal with, so I'm going to look into the mastodon thing. I'm going to mull over names for it and look into whether or not any of this would actually work the way I want it to

Tentatively, it does seem to be true that you can follow lemmy/kbin/etc (reddit-alikes) through a mastodon account

If I could actually follow an RSS feed through it that would be ideal -- I could then also follow tumblrs, for example -- but this doesn't seem to be something that's moved past the 'occasionally talk about it' stage in the community

Well, spent the day on that, I now have my own mastodon server on my own private domain! Just need to follow things on it, and maybe actually post to it

Hold on fucking cat just chewed through my headphones

Well, I've been thinking about getting bluetooth headphones for a while, anyway.

Also I've had these headphones for years, now and just noticed they're openbacks. That's a bizarre design choice for this style of headphone and also oops I've been bothering people with my music and podcasts all this time. Almost made the same mistake ordering replacements, luckily I caught that

Anyway, yeah! I'll set things up more properly tomorrow, but in the meantime, mastodon instance.

https://hedgebound.net/@mek/110620537224119790

Another "exciting" realisation is that because activitypub content is, generally speaking, just fancy RSS feeds, that means that I can probably just subscribe to any I want to in my feed reader

Generally the problem I'm running into with all of this is that I, uh, don't really use reddit all that often anyway so I don't have anything that I particularly want to subscribe to. I'm playing a long game, though, and keeping my ear to the ground for anything that I do will

Today I am going to sharpen a kitchen knife, and then I may do a makeover on one of my sites but I haven't really decided on that yet