Goodmorning, my name here and a few other places is dotdotok (read as "dot-dot-okay")–there are,
however, likely other false dotdotok's in the wild, and you can't trust
who is who.
This is not a tech-blog.
I've been running with my Unidentified Partner and a friend of ours for about a month now; it's been a long time–I did the Couch25k thing some years ago and then I fell off, I do wish bad habits had the fragility of good ones. We've been making decent progress, partially to my surprise- having one another to push along helps maybe, I won't complain.
What I will complain about is that I must have a concave brow or something- sweat seems drawn to the inside of my eyelids, and I very quickly go blind if I'm not constantly wiping them off with my shirt. A consolation; I spend a lot of our runs with my eyes closed, or otherwise open only very slightly. We're on a clean asphalt trail, so its not like I'll get lost, though I sometimes find myself veering off the edge of the path, or swaying like a New Years Eve driver. Closed eyes make the run feel faster, especially near the beginning, I'm not constantly aware of the glacial pace at which the miles pass- it's like watching the clock when you were in school (or working retail), time just manages to expand contort and stretch when you watch it. Shutting out the world helps make the run a little more meditative too, it lets me focus on my systems checks: What's tired? What feels wrong? How's my breathing? These too are convenient distractions from time, and the acids in my musculature.
There's some parallel to my teleportation habits here, maybe, how often are my eyes closed the rest of the time? etc. etc. Too often, probably, but maybe it's the intentionality that matters? Meandering intentionally?; still meandering?; technicality?
I found this blog maybe a year or so ago, the author goes by "Ether Diver", they're a music guy–and I'm actually an asshole because I don't even know what kind of music they themselves make, but they post1 this category they call 'OPM': "Other People's Music", and the shit in there gets esoteric. I don't look at it often, but it's existence does make me glad sometimes, and I've found one or two out-there groups from it that quickly entered my forever-rotation. "God Ribbon" is one of them; there's a song on their 2025 album Padlock Wonderland called "Driving With My Eyes Closed": I like it, and it has a nice texture on a late-night drive home.
I find the beast that I call my own
That's just the standard, so I'm told
I've fucking done it again. I said I wouldn't snipe myself again with this goddamn note-taking stuff, that I would stick to org-mode, keep it 'simple', and I absolutely did not do that. Shambles, utter shambles. In related news, trying out Logseq again, I used it for a couple years and it did me well, it's changed a bit, and I need to adjust to its new way of doing things, but I don't think that'll be much burden. Potential reports on that in the future, or something else. The wire buzzes with signal, he lifts the receiver to his ear, but it isn't ready just yet.
Much like a top FEMA official, I have a habit of teleporting. Sadly, I mainly seem to teleport with respect to time, otherwise flickering between work and my apartment, as opposed to more exotic locations–like a Waffle House. I can't call it time-traveling either, 'traveling' implies an awareness that's its happening- I blink, sitting at my desk, and then I'm in my car heading east; I blink, and I'm back at my desk, the date in the corner of my screen doesn't seem right.
For the last 9 days I have consumed nothing but liquids normally reserved for octogenarians whose bones are turning into powder, and I will probably continue to do so until I'm explicitly told by my dentist that I'm all back together again. The experience is slightly maddening, but I have personally done a couple longish-term (4-6 day) fasts, so I was sort of able to prepare mentally. I haven't been able to bring myself to touch the extraction sites with my tongue, the thought of doing that is like a form of body-horror for my monkey-brain.
I've found fasts of any kind to always be an interesting sort of 'reset', and I feel like each time they help re-contextualize my relationship with food and "energy". For example: since I've gotten beyond sick and tired of these drinks already, I've noticed that I've naturally just started to consume far fewer calories than I normally would, typically only reaching for one when I feel like I 'need' it.
Consumption habits in general are on my mind a bit. The ape inside of me holds disturbing power, and it often takes extreme effort to wrest the controls from his wiry hands for even a moment. I have loathed this creature since I became cognizant of it. The monkey-brain adores consumption, growing fat with poisons and pleasure. Such a disturbing urge to gaze into the void of the world, to breath in as much darkness as possible until it makes itself (and the rest of me) sick.
I take in plenty of the void on my own time, so I don't want to breathe it out here into your face- realistically, you've probably taken in plenty yourself already. I don't think this is a case of "many hands make light loads", I think its more akin to spreading airborne illness, breathing that poison right into your eyes.
So, "no void" here is the plan. References and speculation are possible, but no unadulterated void-spew.
Another step on the try-to-stop-my-body-falling-apart journey, currently down 4 wisdom teeth, the ability to speak, and the ability to consume solids. Currently more detached from the concept of time than usual.
Also, mild CSS update, code-blocks should have syntax highlighting now, I think. I am not built for this front-end world man, I'm sure there's some cases where its botched, but we're doing our best.
Do you know xkcd? You should, they've been around eons now, and still manage to be one of the most consistently reference-able comics ever, and I suspect they will continue to be until humanity's end (near or far? Who knows!).
I've learned that I am so obscenely vulnerable to sniping myself, specifically when it comes to any kind of categorization or organization of things, I will immediately feel an urge to design an entire world-model from the ground up to justify whether I should pluralize a folder-name or not. It is remarkably paralyzing.
I think part of it is some weird FOMO/loss-aversion thing, a kind of fear that if I make The Wrong Assumption early, that I will pay for it until the end of time. I blame my work for that partially, The Wrong Assumption made too early can have some disastrous consequences in software development, but…at the same time its still usually recoverable. This anxiety absolutely extends to things like "what tools do I wanna use to make this site?", and "what do I even consider a journal-entry vs a standalone 'post'?".2
So, I'm going to try and minimize the amount of organization I do here, or else I'm not going to upload a single thing. Some changes will be made over time, but, so long as I remain stalwart, there will be no divine decree of format or theme. Consider most things here Haphazard-by-Design.
I still need to figure some things out, WRT the structure of this whole thing. This isn't a tech blog, but there'll be some tech-ish topics that come up, most likely.
The structure of this site is one thing, I'm also wrestling with the structure of my (overall brain, and) notes. The PIM beast is one that I've gone to combat with many times before, clearly never resulting in a permanent solution. I think I'm just gonna try to stick with a mainly-vanilla Org-Mode this time around, and see how far it takes me. Some of these words (emacs, org-mode, pim) might not mean much to you, I do hope to write about them a bit more in depth later, when I'm not about to be late for $JOB.
Ok, I meant to begin writing this about a month or so ago, but then I fell into a mild ADHD+analysis-paralysis fueled Emacs rabbit-hole. (Video I took during the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W4NFcamRhM)
More to come from our ground-team.