“Someone bought the thing you liked and killed it” is the defining experience of the 21st century.
Dan Brooks
I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.
This morning it was Giri Giri by ATARASHII GAKKO! (Okay, I’m cheating a bit here – I had this earworm since the album came out a while ago, but today they posted that practice video, so here we go.)
It’s early[1] on a Sunday morning, I’m sitting here with my coffee at the computer, stare at the text editor and think to myself: hm.
The biggest hm this week was probably a therapist appointment I had on Thursday.
Before I move on – we’re all friends here and perpetually online and therefore are comfortable talking openly about this stuff, right? If not, you’re free to leave, thank you very much.
Great, anyway. As astute readers of my blog know, I’ve been looking into getting some help with my mental health. Just like seemingly everybody on the internet, I do find myself nodding along to lists of ADHD symptoms, so I had decided to venture out into the wild and see if there’s a professional to either confirm my suspicion or tell me what else might be happening. Everybody who has ever tried to do this in Germany might know that this is an almost impossible task – most therapists are booked out for months, if not years in advance.
I finally managed to get a booking for three assessment appointments and I was quite elated – I figured I’d get some kind of onboarding experience for my mental health journey, tell the doctor a bit about my life, answer questions and voilá, more clarity.
Readers, this is not what happened. Instead if was frankly the weirdest doctor experience I had in the 40+ years of my life. And I went to the army doctor whose cure for everything were heat patches.
I mostly had to defend my vocabulary choices (roughly half an hour went to a discussion that I used the term “I learned by osmosis” even though I am not a biologist. wtf) and the fact that I had a pretty good childhood.
And in the end, after I talked about my many unfinished things, my inability to judge time and how I keep forgetting the existence of things, tasks and people unless they’re right there in my face and all the emotional turmoil these facts and their consequences bring to me, the doctor basically said that therapy wouldn’t help me because they can’t detect emotional turmoil and it can’t be ADHD because I don’t fidget or walk around.
Uhm. Okay. Thanks for nothing, I guess.
And oh, there’s a new beta of Diablo 4, but it’s the same content as the first one. And no, I didn’t get the new Zelda game.
So how was your week?
- as in: Soon after I got up. Not early as in early. ↩
I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.
This morning it was No Rain by Blind Melon.
I frankly don’t have anything exciting to tell this week. I went for a nice long walk after work on the one evening we had warm weather, that’s basically it. It’s finally warm enough to sleep with an open window, which is great during the night (oxygen!) and sucks in the morning. (construction noise)
This is it. Look at my friends’ weeknotes instead, they’re linked underneath this post. (If you look at this post in a browser. If you read this in a feed reader: Hi! I like you! But I’ll probably not add the feed notes box in my feed.)
I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.
This morning it was Azzurro by Adriano Celentano.
After two hours of sleep my body decided it had enough last night and was pretty adamant that it should now be awake. Only when the sun was already out and I was getting ready for work it remembered that two hours of sleep are not enough.
This is going to be a fun day.
This week went fast again – just when I started to realize that it started, it’s already Sunday and I’m here, trying to think of what to write.
When clicking around on meetup.com a few days back I learned of Shut Up & Write and saw that there’s weekly events of them nearby. The idea is to basically meet somewhere semi-calm, bring some material for writing and then just do that – timeboxed to an hour. Given that I want to blog more (see also: these week notes) I decided to give the whole thing a chance. It also gets me out of the house on a Saturday morning, which can only be a good thing.
The result was my post on Bluesky FOMO yesterday. So yeah, deciding what to write about, writing it, looking up a bunch of links, doing some light editing and posting it took pretty much exactly the allotted hour. I might just make it part of my Saturday morning routine. We’ll see.
(The FOMO has cooled down considerably from it’s already not too hot state, in case anyone was wondering.)
So, here we are. A calm-ish week. (I’ll probably think of roughly a hundred things I could have mentioned the moment I click publish, but oh well.)
In the beginning I wasn’t too interested in whatever Bluesky might be – the whole idea of yet another social network by the same people who ran Twitter into the ground wasn’t too enticing. And with my enthusiasm for the principles of the IndieWeb I was quite happy to look at Mastodon again when it was clear that Twitter wasn’t the place for me anymore and that I was looking for something besides blogs and my feed reader.
So I am happily posting there, untroubled by all the things that people don’t like about it – I don’t have a problem with the idea of different instances and I’m not super interested in search, “discovery” or following celebrities.[1] As long as “my people” are around and I can get the kind of ambient intimacy that has been the main reason for my love for the web, I’m content.[2] I’m not looking for “speech and reach” I’m looking for community[3].
But of course at some point fomo hits.
While I don’t really care about being an early adopter of these things anymore, I also don’t not care. When I read an article like the amazing Beamer Dressman Bodybag and I see an absolutely unhinged phrase like “emu lesbian finally milkshake ducked,” it does tickle the part of my brain that likes to be in on the joke. In a good way when I understand the phrase, in a not so good way when I don’t.
And now that I am not on bluesky, I am not in on the joke and it bums me out. Worse than that: it bums me out on a meta level. I’m annoyed that it bums me out. I really don’t want to use that app. Everything I read about it sounds like something that makes my life better by not being in it. And yet.
So I hid my question for an invitation in a little jokey post, well aware how dumb and desperate it is[4] to ask for these things.
Oh well. The weather is nice, at least for the next couple of hours, so I guess I should go for a walk and rather look at the real blue sky for a while.
- I’m not above it, either. Once in a while it is entertaining to read what they have to say. Plus they often post selfies and they tend to be attractive people and who doesn’t like to see that on their feed once in a while? ↩
- As in happy. Not as in something being created for consumption. ↩
- This is probably a whole other blog post. ↩
- Maybe not is. But at least looks. ↩
Back once again for the weeknotes post. Hi!
Dear reader, this was a fun week. beyond Tellerrand was interesting, hanging out with coworkers in a new-ish context was great, the food in Düsseldorf was as good as expected and all in all those were two good days, capped on Tuesday by a great dinner with Alex and Teymur.
I got up pretty early on Tuesday morning and walked around Düsseldorf for a while, especially in the area where I used to stay and Königsallee and it was interesting to see changes since I moved away. I do admit that I was quite surprised how much I missed the place. Maybe it was just the early morning but walking around there sure put me in a wistful melancholy.
Wednesday and Thursday flew by – I stayed in Cologne to go to the office and faster than I could understand I was back home. Friday and Saturday were nothing to write home about.
And today it was a family trip again – those things tend to happen in spring and this time we went to the Préhisto-Parc in the Jura (of Jurassic fame) mountain rage. It’s a cute little place to visit, we mostly picked it for the children but in the end they were more interested in running around while we grown-ups enjoyed the dinosaurs.
I’m mostly posting this so that someone can contact me and say: Dude, you’re a numpty, that’s all very easy.
A few weeks back I said that I am thinking of writing my own router for Symfony and Andrew pointed out that it might be a good idea to write down why.
I’m currently looking at semi-dynamic sub-domain and domain routing. Basically I want to be able to do what WordPress multisite is able to do: have one big monolithic (yes, yes, I know) application that has the main interface at example.com, user spaces on user.example.com and as a bonus have the application be able to handle domains mapped to these user spaces, too.
To make things a bit harder – all of these domains and subdomains cannot be hardcoded, because the software is supposed to run as different instances in multiple locations.
I think most of it is possible with some configuration magic, but I haven’t quite cracked the nut, how. (To be honest, I didn’t dig in much deeper since my original post, but the requirements are still around.)
Maybe I’m missing something and you have a great and simple solution? You can send me a comment via webmention, copy the URL of this post into you mastodon search and reply there or just send me an email: dschwind@lostfocus.de
I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.
This morning it was I Am by Ive. (And yes, mostly because of the meme.)
Sunday evening in Düsseldorf, after having Tantan Men at Takumi (the Tantan one, the first one had an absurdly long queue and while I do like the Takumi ramen, I really don’t like them enough to queue for an hour for them. What the hell. Back in my days it wasn’t like this.) and now chilling in the hotel lobby with Martin. We’re in town for the beyond tellerrand conference – with a whole bunch of coworkers who are all living close enough to not have to take the hotel.
I personally love the fact that I am staying in a hotel. Especially one of those slightly soulless chain business hotels – every time I remember this tumblr post:
I really enjoy just existing in hotels. The long identical hallways. The soulless abstract art. The weird noises the air-conditioner makes. Strange city lights in the window. Six stories off the ground. Strangers chatting in the hall. Nothing in the dresser. No past, but an infinite present.
No past, but an infinite present.
So, what else happened this week? Not much, to be honest. Workwise it was nice – I quite like working on the current project, so that’s nice. And when I’m required in other projects, I’m usually just there to smile, nod and add my expertise in the end.
Twitter is finally gone from my last little grasp, too – I used to read a bunch of people through NetNewsWire and now that’s over, too. It’s sad, in many ways. But it has been for a while now and I guess I’m finally able to let go.
Annoyingly enough I discovered Warno for myself this week. I’m usually not much of a fan of these kinds of “realistic” war games but this one scratches the itch that I had ever since the last computer died that allowed me to play C&C Generals. It works scarily well with my brain – each round is about the length of time that I’m willing to invest and the (easy, lol) AI is just enough of a challenge that I get a sense of achievement when I win. So there’s that. I guess that explains where my time goes. Oh no.
I often wake up with a random song as an earworm – and now I note them down for your enjoyment.
This morning it was Dynasty by Rina Sawayama
That’s the thing about long weekends – when the Monday is a Sunday you’ll get the weeknotes on a Monday. And the notes will include the Monday, because no way I’ll remember to mention today in next weekend’s notes.
One thing I was looking at this week is what to do with this website. WordPress is more and more not what I want, especially when core and plugin updates break stuff. But I’m not quite sure what to do and where to go – no matter what I do, migrating 20+ years of content to another thing is a daunting task. Ugh.
The Easter weekend was very family-oriented. I’ve seen my parent, sisters, nieces and nephews on multiple occasions, including a “hike” today, so that was nice. A note to people designing kid’s playgrounds, though: why not put a couple of loungers for the grown-ups next to them? Sure, there were benches but I could have easily taking a nice nap in the mountain sun. (Well, no. Probably not. But in theory it would have been a nice idea.)