I'm taking a day off work today. I have a remote appointment with my psychiatrist at 11:00. I had an appointment scheduled at 16:00 a month ago, but it turns out that when I told them "I moved to another city so all my appointments have to be remote from now on" there's no way they can, like, write that down or something. I have to tell them I need a remote appointment every time, and the only time she does remote appointments is 11:00 AM on Thursdays. A 16:00 appointment would've been much better, because it means I would've just had to leave work an hour early. Having an appointment at 11:00 would mean I'd have to leave for work at 7:30, get to work at 8:00, work for two hours, come home at 10:00, get home at 10:30 (so I have time to set up the webcam,) have the appointment, walk back to work at 11:30, get there at noon, and work for 4 and a half more hours. That would've been a huge hassle, and Izzy and I have been wanting to go to the bank to open a joint account anyway, so since I'll be not working when banks are open for once, hopefully we can get that out of the way. That means I won't be getting paid for today, so if you've been curious about the sponsorship options, now would be a good time to check them out.

Luckily, they're allowing me to come in on quote-unquote "labor day", so I'll only be missing 8 hours on my paycheck and not 16.

the appointment

Well this was almost a disaster. I got set up for my appointment, but the website didn't say anything about an upcoming appointment like it usually does. So I called, and got "oh, we had you scheduled for an in-person appointment, but the doctor's not in today, so we need to reschedule it"

I did something I almost never do: I became incensed. It was the same person who fucked up my appointment last time. I assured them that I very definitely said this needed to be a remote appointment, and that the reason it was scheduled at this particular time on this particular day is because they told me that this is the only time the doctor was able to do a remote visit.

So they put me on hold for a few minutes and I was able to have the appointment at 11:30. It went well.

aitch-star-arr RW

I found a site that'll actually shuffle an entire youtube playlist (instead of just the X most recent videos, like youtube does by default) so I'm using it to watch all of the Homestar Runner toons they've uploaded. Here's the link: 🔗 Click

You miss out on the interactive easter eggs, but those don't work too well when you're using ruffle anyway. Also you get the high-quality audio from the DVDs instead of the super-compressed sound in the originals, and you can pause and rewind, which in my opinion is a worthy trade-off. They still haven't uploaded everything there, but it's still the best way to approximate the classic kick-back-and-click-rando-for-an-hour experience of old.

The randomizer is great in general, I've gotten a lot of use out of it. You can add multiple playlists, up to 10,000 videos total, so you can create your own little personalized TV station. And you don't have to deal with any of the cruft of youtube proper. It doesn't work for videos that are set not to allow embedding, but I haven't run into too many channels where that's an issue.

markdown down

My favorite minimalist markdown editor has been offline for a few days 😔 It's called minimalist markdown editor. Any recommendations for a replacement would be appreciated.

hubbub

I remembered that my monitor is a USB hub. It only has two ports, and they're on the back, which I always thought was weird and kinda pointless, so I never used it. It's essentially moving one of my USB ports to an inconvenient location for the benefit of one extra inconvenient port. Why have the feature at all if you're not going to add at least 4?

But, now that I'm using a laptop with only 3 ports, getting one extra is actually worth it. The three ports are always filled with keyboard, mouse, and bluetooth adapter, so if I wanted to plug in anything else, it required temporarily disabling one of the core functions of my computer. I'm using the monitor ports for the keyboard and mouse, since those aren't going to change, so now I can do fancy things like put files on my phone, or add books to my kindle. I can even plug in my microphone! I've been in the mood for some video game-talkin'. I won't make any promises, cause I still don't know how stable my computer's going to be, but it's not off the table.

computer

Oh yeah, I never wrote a proper update after my computer won't boot. I reinstalled linux again, as you've probably guessed, and this time I'm not updating anything. It's exactly as it would be if I were using the Mint 20.2 disc as a live CD, except it's on a hard drive, so I can save files and install new programs and stuff. So far (🤞) it seems solid. It makes sense that the version they release as a disc would be relatively stable, but for whatever reason I'm more inclined to want to install updates on linux than I was on windows. Won't make that mistake again!

the sosh meeds

After more than 5 years of service, cybre.space is closing its doors. I've had a hell of a good time there, and I'm grateful to chr and nightpool for building and maintaining it. I wasn't sure where my next home was going to be. Some friends suggested chitter.xyz, seeing as how I'm a raccoon, and that was in my shortlist. It seems like a friendly instance and I have a few friends there. One of the admins of tech.lgbt also very kindly extended an invitation. Not that it's an invite-only instance, but she said I'd be welcome and gave me an unofficial admin endorsement.

In the end, I settled on gamemaking.social. My reasoning might be silly, but I wanted to be part of a community that's about what I want to do. It feels somewhat pretentious, because in the grand scheme of things, making games is a very small part of my creative activity. It would've made more sense to join a writing-focused instance, but I don't think I'm familiar with any. And since writing is what people do on social media, in a way, every instance is a writing instance.

But if I had my druthers, if I didn't have to worry about rent and food and I could spend time doing what I want, making games would be a bigger part of what I do. At my last job, where I actually had a little bit of freedom to work on personal projects, it was. I put a huge amount of work into projects that have mostly been scrapped or placed on the backburner—but it was still valuable experience and I miss having the time to do it. Maybe if I'm part of a game-development community, even if it's small and informal, it'll help motivate and inspire me to get my brain to focus more on it in the time I have. I am still working on my puzzle game, in bits and pieces, and I should have something to say about it soon. It won't be a big update with new levels, but it'll be necessary polish for the eventual release.

new instance, new name

I took the opportunity of moving to a new instance to try out a new name. The syllable matt never felt like "me", it was just the path of least resistance. Sticking with the raccoon tradition of nominative punctuation, you can now call me... m·.

That's an m followed by a [·], a symbol known as an interpunct or middot. You can pronounce it minterpunct, or mmiddot,¹ or call me mint or mid for short. Minterpunct is the way I chose to represent it on fedi, but m· is the canon spelling, so interpret it as you will.² It's goofy, but I definitely like it more than I liked seeing the name "matt" all over the place. I tried to downplay it with the m; spelling, but it was still right there in my username. But I am goofy, and going by a boring ol' human name never felt right to me. Not sure why I ever thought it was a good idea.

I guess I had been lulled into a false sense of propriety by the 2005-2015 corporate internet homogenization, where everyone was using twitter and facebook with their human names and pictures of their humansonas. Thank goodness I'm on the fediverse where I can be myself again; it just might take some time to finish remembering/figuring out who "myself" is 🦝

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1. It rhymes with Godot, as in Waiting for Godot (whatever the correct pronunciation of Godot is)↩

2. "Minterpunk" is also a word one could use to describe the aesthetic of games made by Jeff Minter: 📺 a mess of bright colors against a stark black background (cw: flashing), and you all know that's my jam. Pretty good, eh?↩