welcome to remblanc 1.0

this status is written in a state of unease, one where i feel highly overwhelmed by the possibilities i can take with my productive currents: countless opportunities for work, many means of self-improvement or improvement as a whole, a lot of paths to take in different directions, some more important, some less... and zero idea what choice i can actually make in this sea of choices. it's a massive mental barricade i have towards making any meaningful progress on a macro scale.

this time, though, i actually tried to systemize it: i assembled the list of activities i felt like i want and have to do, and attempted mapping them on the Eisenhower matrix, and found that almost all of them are either in the "Do" or "Schedule" box, "Do" stuff being important things like looking for a job and writing an app to automate something for my mom, and "Schedule" being all the stuff that's good for me, but probably better tackled on the side, like managing this site and working on making YouTube videos.

this reflection and sudden mapping of my priorities ended up adding quite a bit of clarity to what I actually need to do, so now I can actually think of setting priorities right. in case you're curious, i started with writing a program for my mom. a bit overdue related to when she asked me about it, but it will help her a lot hopefully.

i had statuses in plans today but i didn't finish them in time lol happy weed day tho

more of a weighty update today, i just want to talk a bit about my health and my general headspace. you don't have to read this if you're not in the mood of seeing someone complain about life, you can just close this status anytime, such and such. i'll probably manage.

overall i'm not feeling great today

today feels like a slow and shitty day for me. just as i got into a different sleep schedule i started having different sleep issues from my usual pallette: i seem to be undersleeping and feeling like shit every time i wake up. i have a piercing headache right now, and it sucks. this kind of state is really terrible for me on all fronts: can't even take care of myself properly, let alone work on the stuff i want to work on. wack as heck.

therapy update

to update on yesterday, things went okay, although it turned out that i need to look for someone else, as the org in question is kind of overstretched right now and there aren't any specialists there who can provide assistance for my particular needs. i was actually suggested a program related to government healthcare, which, well, wasn't something i even thought of, so might as well get to it.

the creative rut

feels like i haven't been doing shit besides working on this site. aside from writing statuses, this might be the case, frankly. i lost the energy i had for working on a youtube channel, and i lost steam on all the post ideas i had, continuing the trend of that page laying dormant and without use. first thing i'm gonna think about once i feel better, aside from life and jobseeking stuff, is how to shake myself up creatively and finally get to work on all the things i planned to do.

fin.

not proud of this writeup, so i think i might even delete it later. my mind puts the feeling i have about this into the category of me once more straying from the initial purpose of statuses, as i ended up pouring much more effort into writing them to the point of feeling like i set myself a baseline for quality that i now have to meet for ppl to like me, which feels extraordinarily weird to my brain also. something something consistency, something something the perceived need to perform social media dance, just some funky shit i can't put into words.

i should probably go eat lol

fun fact, this is the first status i am writing using vim. less so because i decided to become some kind of a tech nerd, more because i do not have a computer rn. i usually come somewhere where i do all kinds of creative things with a laptop, but sometimes, like today, i came without one bc i decided to do it spontaneously.

what this place does have is a couple of spare keyboards, a freely available monitor, and an android tv box, and what i have on my and is a server to connect to. so i installed termux, connected to my server via ssh, cloned the git repo this site is on, and am writing this status in vim! tech is cool :p

i have a couple of things on my mind today that i would like to air out. still an unapologetically sizeable amount (promise i will use the posts section eventually), it just makes me feel better to talk about it.

time to get right into it.

mental health update 2: therapy collision course

first off, i got therapy session set for tomorrow. just realized i didn't explain why i need to have one in the first place, but basically it amounts to my depression and whatever is causing me to just lay around in bed and sink time into nothing, or procrastinate by doing whatever thing interesting me in the moment and sometimes doing something interesting as a byproduct of it.

primary reason i am seeking it out is my unemployment. finding a job in tech, more specifically breaking into the industry, had been immensely tough for me, both because of my internal pressure not handling well the fact that i need to write a cv, trying to adjust to some nebulous expectations i have no idea how to meet, as well as having the companies i do end up sending cvs to either not responding, or just rejecting my application. i have no idea whether it is because of a shrinking tech industry, or because i'm just not good enough, but either way my brain can't cope with it and as a result i am not able to apply to anything.

ideally, cv-wise, i feel like i'd need someone to help me focus on this, assist me in writing the right things in it, but due to a whole host of other issues i lost courage to write it, and i also lost courage to ask someone.

i also, generally, lost courage to show weakness and, most importantly, be myself. i feel like i've gotten more inert, unwilling to against the currents of life, instead feeling like sinking in them and just moving down the stream. i lost energy.

this spiral began for me a while ago, before i even created this website. i tried to book a therapy session at a charity fund where i am able to receive help for free (naturally, due to not having a job, i can't make money, and we still have to pay rent :/), but it was booked very early, and, due to my sleep schedule being terrible, i could not make it at that time. that made me kind of embarassed and afraid to come again for months, for reasons i did recognize as irrational, but still couldn't overcome.

thankfully, the time i wrote my first update on this issue was the time i finally tried to overcome it, and now that i fixed my sleep schedule, heading into tomorrow, i feel confident that i can make it in time and take a shot at fixing myself once more. wish me luck, i guess.

leaving twitter for now

speaking of mental health, twitter fucking sucks and is conductive to some of my worst impulses, and i felt very overstimulated today but all the shit it threw at me, so i am now taking a forced break from it. fuck this site, and while i'm at it, fuck all the social media platforms that are driven by the algorithm and push algo stuff front and center without consideration for anything. "for you" pages/tabs are transparently evil, and it is so apparent on new twitter how they shape themselves around the hottest drama you interact with it's not even fucking funny. fuck this platform so much, it sucked so much energy out of me it's outrageous. i need to rebound from that shit.

biko update, or following the white rabbit

i do not intend to walk back on my statement that i respect other peoples' right to be forgotten. however, i still really wanted to back up some of biko's writing to study it and draw some wisdom out of it, only to find out that their wayback machine entries were also purged per request, only further confirming the deliberate nature of the site deletion. this caused me to despair even more, for reasons i will probably examine in detail in a proper post i seek to write, which are more philosophical and touch upon the nature and the pressures of upkeeping a website. regardless, after that short despair, i ended up brainstorming alternatives, accidentally stumbled upon some dirty laundry in the process (don't spin up your imagination, it's nothing terrible or even particularly private, but disrespectful nonetheless), and in the process actually ended up accomplishing the goal halfway.

basically, i got exactly what i wanted, but both in the process and as a result of it i did some breach of ethics, and now i feel like an absolute asshole :v

i swear i had good reasons for it, but now it feels super dirty given how i basically sidestepped their clearly deliberate attempts to remove themselves from the internet, and i sort of indirectly publicize that by talking about it as well.

i am still intent on honoring the short impact they had on me, and possibly spreading some of the ideas of theirs that really resonated with me on my own accord. i now realize, however, that i cannot in good consciousness straight up republish the articles i preserved and intend on restoring, which is something i originally wanted to do as part of a reference archive project somewhere in my site backlog. i got way too far with my quest to the point that it would feel like a downright desecration, even if i were to omit other reasons that would be pretty bad to do, ethically and legally speaking.

the takeaway i want others to have from this little story i'm sharing is that preservation can sometimes be at odds with someone's privacy. if you were to do the thing i do, with restoration of something you really like and whatnot, it's really important to consider the ethics of doing it, because no matter how staunch you might feel about leaving the mark, preserving the web and fighting the entropy of link rot, in the end you have to consider the wishes of the people who made the things you want to preserve. for as hard as it is to delete things from the internet, people are right to want to escape from it, erase themselves, be forgotten and left with nothing but their solitude. sometimes that is something they might really need, and the internet makes it incredibly hard not to leave traces and have that wish actually meaningfully respected.

not that i am suggesting not to preserve things, just don't be like me in this situation where i very clearly overstepped and learned something i was not supposed to.

closing thoughts

welp, a bit of a low note to end this on. other than all of what wrote above, seems like today's a good day for me! i decided to get my ereader back up and actually start clearing through the massive backlog of books i have on it. i have not decided what to read yet, but a start is a start.

hope you have a nice day as well~!

wanna keep things short: the nice links have been fixed, and i am on them now. the siteboxes are still not addressed, but at least i know the workaround and the bug has been reported. quite a good site update overall.

i am now considering moving this page to astro, so the experimentation on that front is underway. this promises to be somethins interesting, we'll see how this turns out and how much of "backwards compatibility", if one can call that, this will retain. i def have a strong reason to move to something like that, and that is component reusability, which will come in handy both for automating the existing things and potentially putting them on a CMS, as well as potentially iterating more on the more ambitious things i still have in plan for the site.

can't believe i'm having fun with a javascript framework. hope i won't be stubbing my toe once more here.