Forward Awkward Progress

Hey. I’m still around, mostly. I’ve been dealing with my pathological need to share the intimate details of my life…

…it’s okay if you laugh…

…by making (also mostly) weekly posts to The Novelry’s Accountability Group, and obviously being just enough okay with that level of disclosure to not be inspired to wander off and post here. But, I still make more frequent appearances here than I do on other social media platforms, Reddit not included. Have I figured out how to link Reddit to this blog page? Yes. Have I linked it? No. Will I be linking it? Also no, but I did add a link to my Goodreads shelf: so behold what I’ve been reading during meals instead of doomscrolling. Yeah, we read at the table when we don’t have company, have for years now, and I can’t believe it took me so long to go hey, you know you can go back to reading books or magazines instead of continuing to frown at Facebook?

I also added some new blog categories. No additional tags, because I’m still fuzzy on the difference between them and categories and I’m not sure it matters so much.

Speaking of progress, I’m in a happier place with my home computing situation. It’s been a while since I’ve had UNIX/LINUX as my primary system. My last lengthy go-round began with an early version of Mint (Cassandra, I think, because I vaguely remember that my husband was using Barbara at home at the time and he suggested I wait until the new version came out). I stuck with Mint through a few upgrades until the work side of my life made me pivot back to Windows at home, because work was getting in everywhere, all over the place, and it was just easier to let it win. I had a MacBook for the creative side of things until it died, then it became all Windows for me, everywhere.

Yep, a fun fact about me is that I don’t care what platform, hardware or infrastructure I use as long as it doesn’t get in my way. This has made for some awkward conversations at times. Not “Ahhh, sorry, I’ve never watched Friends/Gilmore Girls/Gossip Girl/Euphoria” or “Uhm, the last George R.R. Martin I read was Sandkings” levels of awkward, but … alright, not even in the same ballpark. My entertainment awkwardness just gets me stares.¹ My raging generalist tech agnosticism has lost me points with job interviewers.

As I’ve mentioned, Windows was getting in my way which is why I migrated to Pop!_OS last month. It’s the same reason I’m now on Cachy OS. Not only was Pop!_OS somewhat bipolar when it came to supporting games, but it … I just can’t even … its flavor of the Cosmic text editor woke up one morning and chose violence. I didn’t lose any writing but only because every time I opened the application, it locked up the entire system. Not a “oh, I can open the terminal and kill the process”, or a “CTRL-ALT-DELETE-RESTART” type of freeze, but a “switch off the power strip, count to twenty, and hope the computer comes back up”.

Three days after the first crash, I reminded myself that I was no longer getting paid to figure out WTFs², so if it had stopped being fun and I wasn’t learning anything from the experience³ … which it had … it was time to do something else.

I’ve been very happy with Cachy OS so far. I went with its KDE Plasma option instead of Cosmos, and knock on wood, the Kate text editor has been rock solid. I haven’t yet felt the need to reinstall my beloved Notepad++, or more importantly, call in an exorcist. I also have LibreOffice for when I need to get back into one of my Microsoft Office documents, or do something I’d ordinarily do in Excel. I’ve had zero problems gaming, other than the ones I cause for myself: I’m reward/torturing myself for finally enrolling in a cybersecurity refresher by hand-building a mod and patch collection for Skyrim.

But, Shai, there are literally hundreds of Skyrim mod collections out there now! They’ve all become practically one click installations since you last messed around with modding the game!

Yes, and almost all of them feature combat system overhauls, which I don’t want, and I have zero interest in NPC or player skins that look like they were inspired by … can I say ‘a Professor Genki themed bachelor party’ and anyone understand the reference these days?

1. I have a habit of developing a sudden thing I need to go take care of if a conversation turns to Broadway musicals. ↩︎
2. I switched from Cosmic to GNOME while I was still on POP!_OS, and the GNOME text editor was fine — but the gaming support was still bipolar after the switch. I’m talking “go ahead you can bust out Borderlands to see if I’ll melt down, and I won’t, but I still won’t let you play Balatro, and when you try to come back to Borderlands, I’ll stop letting you play that too. Do not even think about testing me by going back to EvE Online!” ↩︎
3. Reinforcement that I can be an incredibly stubborn patient person doesn’t count. ↩︎

Semi-related spoiler for Dungeon Crawler Carl: I yelled “DON’T TRUST HEKLA, SHE’S A GAMER FROM ICELAND!” at some point when I was reading Book #1 during breakfast. I thought it was my inside-my-head voice. It wasn’t. And she wasn’t a gamer, but she did play mind-games on a level which wasn’t that much of a difference from my experience in EvE Online. Er, maybe I should say the experience that I experienced instead of my experience or … just quit talking about it?