Hey hey people, Chef here.
It’s been about a month since I last posted, so I figured it was about time to play catchup.
Car Troubles, and related issues
At some point in between last month and now, the metal on one of my rims had fatigued to the point that it could no longer create a good enough seal on my tyres, so I ended up having to replace the wheel.
This was before I resolved to start doing Uber Eats on the side to try and make my ~15 hour weeks more liveable.
After that, I ended up spending a lot more money renewing my car’s registration which had been out of date for about 2-3 years (surprisingly I never got a ticket for that). Additionally, I had to pay for a forged inspection, because there was no fucking way that I’d end up being able to pass an inspection.
Right, I also had to renew my bloody driver’s license, it had actually expired on my Birthday back in June.
This had a considerable impact on both my wallet, and my morale.
Outdoors Stuff
As a result of starting work at QT last month at an urban store, I was forced to confront the things I hated about my homeland frequently and without the option of running away. Perhaps coming face to face with what Baudelaire termed modernité. As an escape, I began mentally retreating1 to the serene comforts of the countryside.
Ultimately, it got to the point where I couldn’t stomach being indoors for too long at a time, and if I found myself idle, I’d go walk or do something instead.
This led to me looking more into camping/bushcraft and hiking. As a direct consequence, I ended up re-watching and then reading all of Yurucamp. Very, very, very, good series. I can’t recommend it enough, will probably write more on it later.
And now I’m prepared (relatively speaking) to start going on expeditions whenever I have more money.
At some point this month (November 2020), I’d like to go to Cedar Hill State Park with my mate tora, who helped contribute to my gear significantly by handing down his previous sleeping bag to me.
I was concerned that this may have been a whimsy of some sort, but about one month later, my feelings about the outdoors remain the same. I was a fool to stay cooped up for so long.
Magic the Gathering
My mate Bert is really, really, really, into MtG, and his enthusiasm was contagious. I ended up getting sucked into the lore and interesting meme builds possible due to the game’s intricate mechanics and litany of keywords. He ended up blessing me with some of the bounty of a recent bulk purchase he made, and now I have two pre-constructed decks as well as a WIP 60-card-casual (Kitchen Table) Blue/Black Control deck.
I’ll make a decklist for it on Scryfall later, and update it as I go along.
When the Foxears Wiki is back up, I’ll dump some resources and useful links in there related to Magic.
Foxears Downtime
What was supposed to be a routine operation ended up being a pain in the fucking arse. This is going to have its own post in the near future so I can have more space to talk about what went wrong.
The tl;dr is:
foxears.life was previously running on btrfs, and our performance was seriously unacceptable. One of my tenants is running a VM, and that in addition to postgres, synapse, and a handful of other services fighting over already very limited IO bandwidth was leading to situations in which postgres would just choke, and then everything depending on it would also choke.
Our solution was going to be reinstalling our current OS, but opting for ZFS instead of btrfs. Sounds simple enough, right?
Wrong.
Whether it was due to settings we changed in the firmware, or something else, we hit a bug of some sort which prevented graphics from functioning correctly, which meant that most of the time we wanted to install something over KVMIP, we’d end up with an unusable black screen.
And believe me when I say that was only the beginning2 of it. But more on that later.
I will say though, this was a major contribution to my general dread in the latter half of October.
Halloween Party
I know what you’re thinking, and believe it or not, none of the participants have the Coronavirus, or developed it afterwards
The Party Itself
Well, for once in my life I was cool enough to get invited to a Halloween party. And I had a lot of fun. There were a lot of beautiful/handsome3 young women there.
However, my heart really wasn’t in it. At that particular moment in time, I kinda just wanted to find a corner to sit in and try and work on getting my server back up. Or maybe browse Twitter next to one of my friends.
It ended up being a more energetic gathering that I was mentally/emotionally prepared to deal with at the time. So I ended up drinking a metric fucktonne. Following that, I was like “damn, I should really stop,” because even in excess there is moderation.
I ended up finding a decent flat area to lie down in, and so I did, I got quite comfortable actually. Until the host(ess!?) and one of her guests fell on top of me. I had already been suffering from back pain that day, a little shoulder pain to compliment that wasn’t the end of the world, I suppose. Although I joked about being fell upon, I wasn’t really that bothered by it.
The host(ess!?) caressed my face afterwards, and I think they also hugged me earlier that night. That gave me a really complicated feeling, tbh.
That Complicated Feeling
You see, fair reader, I’ve been touch-starved for most of my life. As a young child I got plenty of hugs and such, but at some point in my adolescence I became extremely autistic and developed a great aversion to physical contact and loud noises.
From my later teenage years to my early 20s, this aversion disappeared for one reason or another, and then I became acutely aware of what I’d been missing out on– and what I’d taken for granted.
10 years later, I’ve become acutely aware of the externalities borne from this feeling. But that’s a post for another day.
If I were to express to you what I felt in that moment:
- Initially I was happy, somebody fell upon me and was then genuinely concerned for my wellbeing, perhaps not me personally, but me in the abstract category of guest. I was still happy4 to be worried after.
- After that, I was irritated, because I saw the same person wantonly hugging people that I actually wanted to hug myself, but that I can’t, due to my own cowardice.
- Finally, I became upset, because I realized that I had been trapped in my head all evening, and there was no escape.
- Incidentally, this is when began to come to terms with some of the more annoying parts of my character, as mentioned above.
I’d like to believe that no part of the emotional cocktail constituted jealousy, though. I’ve worked hard to get over that.
The Aftermath / Reflection
The ride home was pretty amusing in retrospect. Half of the crew was laughing at me, while our designated driver was trying to ascertain the machinations of my overly sentimental mind.
I think if I learned anything from the experience, it’s that I need to communicate more frequently and more clearly.
When I make an effort to avoid making my usual embarrassingly earnest/sentimental remarks, I end up sounding worse in the end, so I should just let it out instead of measuring my words.
I love and trust all of you guys, so forgive me for making it awkward sometimes.
Catching up with Tora
I finally managed to hang out with tora after some long stretch of time.
It was a sober hangout, too. We ended up testing out a tent I’d gotten on sale, as well as starting a fire and chilling outside. We ate a lot of good food (stew with meatballs, and chicken sausage), and ended up starting watching Yurucamp together. We should probably finish that sometime.
Additionally, tora ended up selling me his extra chair and headset on credit, feat. a very generous payment plan starting like Q2 of 2021. All things considered, it’s a pittance and I’m grateful.
So if any of you lot end up playing games with me and:
- You can hear my voice clearly
- My back isn’t in excruciating pain
You have tora to thank for that.
Restoration of Foxears
Well, uh, now foxears is back up, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read this post in the first place. Somehow we’ve ended up running Alpine, and now I’m a believer a non-systemd init methods again.
On btrfs our machine would die on 10 MB/s write throughput or 20 MB/s read throughput
On zfs, we can handle 2.5 times the write at 25 MB/s, and reads can handle upwards of 200 MB/s with no issue.
Nextcloud, the Wiki, Terraria, Minecraft, and Murmur will be back soon, Scout’s honour5
I’m Broke As Fuck
I usually pay all my bills before the 5th of any given month, and to say that I was insolvent this month would be a gross understatement. I’m still not getting enough hours at QT, and I started doing Uber Eats way too late in the game.
I suppose all of the recent car trouble and car-adjacent trouble ended up being more expensive than I thought.
Moving forward I hope for things to improve, especially because I should be getting a promotion at QT not on the week ending 11/22, but on the week ending 11/29 (which once again, may prove too little too late, but my hours have been marginally increased, at least).
I ended up taking a loan from JD on generous terms, and I fear where I might’ve been if it weren’t for him.
I think what hurts the most about this situation is that it’s the first time in at least 13 months that I was near insolvency.
Moving forward, there is a plan, and by the end of Q1 of 2021, I should have savings again.
Conclusion
I suppose the past six weeks have given me quite a lot to write about.
I’d like to believe that’s primarily a good thing, because these things tend to be either things that I’m grateful for, or things that led to me growing in some capacity.
And it’s because of all of you that I’m allowed the privilege to feel that way6
Thank you for sticking around all this time, and thank you for reading.
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I also fantasized a lot about possible methods to cultivate てぇてぇ with some of my male friends. I think this may have had an adverse effect on my behaviour later in the month. ↩︎
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Ultimately, I didn’t restore Matrix until 11/4, lol. Nextcloud and the Wiki are still down. fml 😩 ↩︎
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In another word, delusional. It bears mentioning that I7 really like tomboys though. ↩︎
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Hospitality is very important in my belief system. Being in the presence of a good host is a privilege. ↩︎
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I’m not a scout 😉 ↩︎
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Look at that fir tree, bare upon the hill. Neither bark nor needles shelter it. Such is the man who has no friends– how may he live longer? ↩︎
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Would I classify as a tomgirl? I dunno, it’s kind of a stretch. ↩︎