I'm coming back to this site in what feels like forever! I'm still in that knitting group, and I love them; it helps balance my introversion that I have a set, scheduled Social Time every week. The friend who introduced me to the group feels particularly like a True Friend in the old sense of the term, and the rest are very nice Normal Friends. Also, just having people to compare life experiences with is very good for my sense of proportion and normalcy.

More recent news: I'm unemployed and sort of wishing I hadn't agreed with my last boss that I'd keep maintaining stuff, because I have found that without that default "9 to 5" setup, I really hate working on the stuff I have on his side. I haven't set any of it up particularly well, and I make so little money from it that I have zero motivation to actually work on it. And in the meantime my Nextcloud server keeps misbehaving and I have to sit down and fix the backup. This would be fine if my fixations were currently swinging to Tech, but they aren't; I've gotten into Dungeons and Dragons, finally took the plunge to join a game or two on Roll 20 and have fallen head over heels into obsession. I'm not very good at being creative with it yet, but I think I'll get there soon! I keep getting anxious about making myself useful in battle because I have so far picked support characters, and haven't had the brainspace to spare for roleplay.

The thing I'm really happy about, though, is that I'll be starting a Masters' in September. This is probably just the nostalgia, but I do miss the learning structure of a school environment. Plus, I'm planning to specialise in cybersecurity, which is not very doable where I live without a Masters degree. (Admittedly this is mostly because otherwise my specialy is going to end up being Javascript front-ends, which is not a good specialty to have and also very dull to work on.) I mostly want to do cybersec because A) hackers make it sound interesting to delve into, but I don't have the determination and focus to learn it on my own and B)because I think it's a career that's going to be around for a while and I'd like to have a stable specialty, even if it's one that requires a lot of ongoing reading.

I've joined a knitting group, I'm really happy about it! It's all girls but with a nice big range so we're all talking over and around each other, it was a little tiring but really nice. I've been kind of real-life lonely. All my friends are somewhere else entirely, usually also a different time zone, and now there's a lil group chat that I can kind of hang out in. I really need to set Discord to autostart so I can keep up with the other knitting chat, though - not working on my phone.

Also, I am at the point where I'm giving up on XFCE. It works fine? But I miss the pretty shiny things I could add with KDE. And really, XFCE isn't noticeably less buggy than my last KDE install, or for that matter the installation I have on a work computer. I will be setting it up with Debian just because it was a nice experience for the little old white laptop I take for my writing group, but I'm back to KDE. (And I might do Arch when I get bored with that, we'll see. One day I'll be really bored and try doing a pure Openbox install on my main and regret it for a month.)

I've swapped to Fedora XFCE and it's fine? I definitely miss my customizable KDE look, but realistically I spend 90% of my time either playing games or browsing on Firefox (which doesn't fit the design) so I don't notice often

In other news, I sort of forgot about this site for a while. Is it weird that I want to make it LESS organized? I feel like it'd be more fun to make the navigation Weird, and hide some of the pages in image links from other pages, maybe add pages for stuff that doesn't make sense for me to have - I really want to do that for some poems and short stories from around the webz

Alright, I've learned KDE pretty well I think. I've been using it for a while, and I've been pretty happy with it, but I'm craving something new! Plus, I've never used Fedora before, and that's feeling more and more like a blind spot. (Also, the snap store drives me batty.) So farewell to my current setup, and hello new install! I'm trying Fedora with the XFCE spin, since I quite liked that the last time I used it (with Arch).

Also, triumph! I finally got around to taking off and messing with my spacebar and now I can finally type properly. See you on the other side!

Building this site definitely helps me understand how great all the simple old websites are. It's actually ridiculously rewarding to be able to just write the whole damn thing without the reams of nested template divs. Plus it's a lot more free-flowing? Even if I'm currently just organizing everything as simply as possible (which is also still somehow more legible than a modern website!), having the freedom and options to tweak stuff in plain CSS is plain great. I'm currently writing two very similar embedded apps for work - javascript things that have to sit within a content management system - and the CSS formatting is basically the worst part of it, because there are always so many unexpected consequences running around.