JP @pixelpaperyarn@hackers.town

Oh, hello there.

I'm a #queer, #pagan, #autistic senior software engineer from my beloved NJ. I write #fiction & #essays, play #videogames & #read. I like #tea, #comicbooks, #baseball, #oldtech & #music. I'm older than most of you.

Most of my posts are self-indulgent ramblings about stuff that passes through my head and grumblings about technology. I don't shitpost. ymmv.

I enjoy showing my learning process, hopefully demystifying how the tech industry works. I chat about the ideas I have that I don't have time to manifest.

I'm a neutral good paladin and I am friends with chaos. Systems have their uses, but my moral code will always take precedence.

I believe in kindness and do my best to help when I can.

Links in my profile if you're interested in what I'm working on.

#introductions #reintroductions

I’m unabashedly proud of something I’ve made. “Take On Me” is the best thing I’ve ever written.

It’s a story about love, grief, food, music, and the people who accept you exactly as you are.

And now it’s not just mine anymore, it’s yours, too.

https://takeonme.xyz/

Did the designs for the carves on the body and started in on it.

I’m using a combo of a japanese rasp saw (excellent) and my dremel to get the carves in. It’s going well so far, just a lot of work. I can see it going faster with some kind of power tool bigger than the dremel, but it’s nose to have the more subtle control.

I’ll post picks when I get the front carves done tomorrow.

Got started on the guitar kit yesterday. Spent most of the time prepping my workspace and doing an assessment of the kit.

All parts are there and the dry run went well. Everything fits as expected.

There’s a couple rough spots on the back of the neck, a little sealant to buff off the fretboard and the frets need some work.

The hardware is of okay quality. There’s some rough spots and the black coating is a little uneven in places. This is stuff that’s relatively easy to swap out if I want to purchase better ones later.

The pickups look cheap so those will be the first things I upgrade.

I’m going to work on the body first so today’s task is designing the arm and belly carves before cutting into it.

Playing with priorities lately. It is more important right now to practice guitar than to make sure the toilet paper is on the dispenser. More useful to search for a music blog that will show me shit I actually want to listen to than to wash the kitchen floor.

Having a meal plan of some sort is more important than cleaning out the car, but less than working on my book.

Started on a Fender thinline Telecaster setup today.

The weird thing was it’s missing a mounting screw on the bridge. Looks like the hole isn’t aligned properly but hopefully it’s just that the whole bridge is off a bit. Regardless, it means I need to acquire the screw and take the saddles off to fix it. I was hoping to avoid that because the intonation is really close and I’m not great at doing that part of the setup yet.

For now I’m going to continue with the setup and fix the bridge next time I change the strings.

Currently feeling Adam Savage levels of needed to reorganize my workspace. It took me 10 minutes of digging to find my spare mouse.

Now I'm wondering if I have my hotmail synced on some old hard drive or machine I have hanging around. Like, I remember I used to use Thunderbird back in the day.

I might be plugging the old Vista machine in and seeing what's there, though I remember cleaning that up a long time ago.

I'm also a little bit "damn, I need to get better at backing my shit up". I'm using backblaze on my main machine and my email accounts are all backed up locally.

I don't trust the cloud for the most part, so now I'm wondering why I've trusted it with that older stuff for so long.

(yeah, I'm gonna be feeling like an ass for a bit over this)

I will say that at least with the blog, I had long ago ported it to a wordpress installation so I do at least have all of my entries back to 2002.

This is making me think I should invest a bit of time in creating some more backups of things.

Been an age since I logged into my old hotmail/outlook account but I was seeing if I could get to my old blogspot account because the "when did you first have a blog/website" question came up.

Imagine me sitting here right now extremely disappointed and yet utterly unsurprised to find that not only are all of my hotmail emails from the last 20 some odd years completely gone, but I also cannot get to my original blogger account.

Oh fuck you, Microsoft.

Seeing folks doing print zine stuff and layouts makes me want to do something interesting with that stuff again.

Print design will always hold a special place in my heart.

Things are busy. Quick personal updates:

• My guitar kit came in! It's a birthday gift so I don't get to start working on it until next week, but that's fine because I'm researching how to do a fret dressing and that's scary so as much knowledge as possible is key.

• Work is good, though obviously busy. Some thread of tension released this week and I felt like I was acting like myself as both team lead and manager (they're different roles here) rather than some version of me that was trying too hard.

• I missing writing code all of a sudden. The break has been nice, but I have an itch now to do something fun and for myself, something little. Maybe time to go back to my game engine? Maybe time to learn python? Maybe just enjoy studying for it's own sake? Frontend toys or webscraping fun? I dunno.

• I'm not writing or playing enough guitar lately. I'm not getting enough work-related studying done. Time feels crunched. I need to step back and shift things again. Vacation time will allow me to do that. Soon.

I came up with a name for my music project and bought the domain name/soundcloud/bandcamp for it.

I honestly have no idea if I'll ever actually put something together I want to share, but it felt neat to create a place to hang it if I do.

Ordered my guitar kit today!! Cannot wait to start working on it.

Someone at work was talking about sipping broth and linked to some mixes.

It's getting cooler here (at last) and now I'm ready to spend the weekend making broth. There's a couple good looking vegan recipes I'd like to try.

https://plantyou.com/vegan-chicken-broth/
https://www.organicauthority.com/eco-chic-table/a-vegan-bone-broth-recipe
https://wallflowerkitchen.com/gut-healing-vegetable-broth-better-bone-broth/

This also reminds me of one of my favorite cookbooks "Twelve Months of Monastery Soups" by Brother Victor D'Avila-Latourrette.

There are some recipes in there that are decidedly not vegan/vegetarian, but most can be easily adapted.