I saw a post on Reddit a few days ago that said something along the lines of "if you don't feel caught up, your brain is moving the goalposts on you." The post was deleted (and I'm unhappy about that), but the idea was that as we accomplish things from our to-do list, instead of letting us feel a sense of completion or satisfaction, our monkey brains instead fixate on all the tasks we _haven't_ completed yet.

I say "we" and "us." Maybe this doesn't apply to you, but it's me to a tee. (Yay #anxiety.)

I'm working on being better about seeing when I've got things done and feeling a little bit of accomplishment at that before diving into the next to-do item.

I'm still here, hi! Just not much to say lately. Quietly doing my thing.

Here, lemme list the five holiday movies I always enjoy watching at this time of year:

* Spirited, with Will Ferrell and Ryan Reynolds - I'm a sucker for big Broadway musicals, especially with songs written by Pasek and Paul
* Noelle - one of the first films on Disney+, it's almost a Santa Clause and it's just a fun little feel-good film
* Muppet Christmas Carol - the version with the love song in it, of course
* Muppet Family Christmas - find the version on YouTube that hasn't had all the copyrighted songs and the good jokes butchered out of it
* Die Hard - ho ho ho!

Exactly 70 years ago tonight, lightning struck the clock tower at the Hill Valley Courthouse.

10:04 PM, November 12, 1955.

I use the awesomely readable Zenburn color scheme everywhere I edit text, but Emacs has insisted on using its own colors, which turn out to be a not awesome unreadable set of dark hues against a dark grey background. Today that finally annoyed me enough that I figured out how to use the Emacs package manager to install zenburn-theme and use it. Problem solved!

I've been using Emacs since 1987. It's so weird to think about that.

#emacs #zenburn

I realized that one thing that I love and hate about Mastodon is that I can follow hashtags. Wonderful because I can fill my feed with stuff I'm interested in; terrible because ... it fills my feed, making it difficult to follow friends.

Then I discovered Lists. And then I almost immediately discovered that I can't add hashtags to Lists. D'oh.

I found the GitHub ticket asking for that (https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7692), yay! But the ticket was opened in 2018, boo! But someone has a workaround in the last comment, yay! I'm trying that and I'll see if that works for me.

I'm feeling really disconnected from people. Having left Facebook is a large part of it, but I can't stomach so much of that content being ads and material I don't care about. (I am VERY TIRED of it showing me terrible videos of baby cuckoos pushing other chicks out of nests.) And, much as I prefer working from home to being in-office, it doesn't help close the distance between me and other intelligent life-forms.

Bluesky still feels like shouting into the void. Few of my friends are there, fewer ever look at it, and most of my posts go unnoticed.

Mastodon still seems like it has life. Maybe I'll prune the people I follow who are no longer here and the hashtags I follow that are bringing in a lot of noise, and try to reconnect with old friends and find new ones.

Hi!

Bluesky is nice, but when I post there I feel like I’m shouting into the void. Few people I know have accounts on it, and it doesn’t seem to be easy to make new friends there. I blame the Twitter paradigm of blasting content to followers instead of conversing with people.

I really miss LiveJournal, and making long-form posts so that people could have substantive discussions with each other.

Anyhows. I’m taking today off work, and I think I’ll spend it playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on my old Wii U. I picked up the game recently on eBay cos I’d never played it.

Playing video games may seem like a waste of time, but it’s a big step for me to be doing this instead of spending all day running in circles as my anxiety tells me I need to work harder and make more lists and get more done.

I'm still here!

Just, nothing much to say. 🙂