44

We got two feet of snow about a week ago and I had to go over to Karen's and shovel out her entire carport. Took about four hours and I was in agony the next day.

Speaking of my mother, her car is still regularly going in for repairs every other week since the check engine light will not stay off.

I recently adopted a ton of AUR packages and am now digging, finally, into the depths of the mess that is KDE IM clients. Wowie fun times.

Hoping to get something done for the 16.04 release. My major goal is to somehow get Matrix and Tox working in this mess, plus make a standalone desktop Qt client, so I can tell my nerds to start actually using good messaging systems.

The problem is that Tox doesn't use anything standard, and Matrix uses WebRTC for its telecommunications. Outlook questionable.

43

3 months again, guess my life is super eventful.

Phones happened. Rebecca got an S5 she has not used at all. David lost computer privileges, again. Marian got a Note 4, which is amazing.

Spent a lot of time and money fixing Karen's car, which is still broken.

Writing this on the first frost of the season, which is nice. Less snow is appreciated.

Rosemarie Kuntz (grandmother) died on December 22ed. Tried to organize a call with my mother involved to speak to her one last time, she was not particularly interested and her caretaker at the time Lynn (her niece) was not helpful trying to get it to happen. So my last words to her were to beat her cancer - I guess those can persist on, then. I did send her a handmade Thanksgiving Card I heard she received, so at least she got something from me before dieing.

I ported RBDoom3BFG to AUR4 to maintain it, and wrote a pkgbuild for Heretic 2. I also submitted patches to fix OPML on Gpodder and in Clementine, they were misusing fields in the spec.

Over Christmas David was here, playing Minecraft mostly full time, while also spending $90 on Clash of Clans. Amazon even made a ton of games free on their appstore last fall and that did not even phase him. He played WoW a bit, got a Paladin to level ~35, and stopped.

Just as a forward to myself - I better have a working prototype of Project Panorama by the next time I update this, which also better be soon. Mozilla just killed Persona, and now I need to use signin buttons from the major assholes of the Internet. 

42

Back to the Future Day! October 21st 2015!

Progress on Project Panorama took off in late August, and then in September I played Borderland 2 and in October I played Wildstar with the web nerds. Wildstars winding down just in time for November to be a big coding month, however.

The fall doctors runs are in full swing, Karen got a full time position at Turkey Hill and narrowly avoided sherrif sale for tax debt, Rosemarie (maternal grandmother, don't think I have mentioned her in my diary journal thing yet)  got colon cancer and is having a joy with her nieces in Cleveland.

Framed a carport with Jeff last week for Mary and Kenny. My hand felt numb from nailgunning 6 hours straight for two days. Not particularly exhausting work, just work. And overgrown hedge bushes that turned hmi into a temporary landscaper with a wood saw. Got paid about $16 an hour, so go federal $15 minimum wage!

PS: Entry 42. Yay!

41

Golly I never update this thing.

I'm finally working on Panorama. Title will change of course, since I want something I can buy the .com of. Something novel rather than just a verb noun or old Roman god or something.

Karen is getting her house sherrif saled on the 18th of September. I've been trying to get her to apply for sales positions anywhere, but she wants nothing to do with it - she wants a job at Turkey Hill. Still have no idea where she is going to live, but she does not want help so there is nothing much I can do. I am taking her to Friend Inc. tomorrow for recommendations on what to do. Her mother Roma is not going to help at all, mostly "I can't handle another problem right now". Karen made herself a gofundme to try to get the money, at least...

Marian is better, after several months of bad health in the aftermath of the tumble at Moselem Springs. The 2002 F150 with the black paint job is operable again, driving aroudn and all that. I am emptying the basement of stuff, trying to recover some old VHS tapes at some point, and I am intent to finally sell all this junk I have had stored for two years on ebay.

The Texans came and went. Great to see Josh again. The blow up queen air matress is missing its plug so it deflated every day. We got a blow up matress for the cot frame, and I went to the bicentenial parade with Josh. Their dog Mack is in bad shape, and got his eye removed today due to glaucoma. Ben is moving back to Texas permanantly in October and brought half his stuff back to watch the dog while they were up here. He is staying down there for a while though, so hes probably only coming back once to grab his goods and head home.

Finally got the Moto G's I bought David and Karen squared away. Best setup is the factory soak image for 5.1, but otherwise they work great on Freedompop. Going to see David this weekend tenatively. Took Marian to the eye doctor today, hopefully they don't try taking her license again, and went to Perkins and got a "Farmer's Omlette". I have no clue why they don't cook the onion and green pepper they put in it, would make it taste a lot better if they carmelize the veggies.

40

2015-06-11. We'll see how significant today was. The morning.

Its been a month and Marian has not been eating. Probably taking her to the hospital soon...

Next day took Marian to the hospital (well, she called an ambulence at 8am) and she got an off-insurance prescription for 10 anti-nausea pills. Woohoo. We both agreed she should start taking Sulendac again, ulcers be damned!

39 Update This Thing Jeeze

So its been almost six months. It is hard to write journals when there is not much to write about - since November of last year, what has happened? I still do IT locally, my mother is still unemployed and borderline homeless. I guess a lot has happened - why am I not writing these again? I need to start setting reminders to just get stuff up here, I came back halfway through writing this thing to realize I'm going to write a whole book out of this.

I played a lot of WoW somewhere in there with Hiran on Molten. In January, the servers got shutdown by the provider because one of the team members sabotaged them. Somehow, they managed to have no backups of their character database, and lost everything. So now they merged with AT to make Warmane, which I have not yet played on because I'm still trying to get the returning players benefits they stopped handing out after the merger a month later.

Hiran built a new PC on my recommendations. He still has no monitor for it, though. I sold him my old 7870 and bought a Twin Frozr 290 since they just started working with Mesa. Also picked up a 144hz Acer panel for around $180. Strongly regret that it only has dual link DVI for max refresh and no displayport, definitely get displayport on future monitors, its so much better than the alternatives. The GPU runs really nicely though even while the AMD drivers on Linux remain underwhelming.

I've had to run exclusively off the discrete GPU now though, since somewhere in the whole stack the DVI port on my z87i-deluxe does not support dual link DVI 144hz modesetting. I now have the 144hz 24" panel, Marian's IPS hdmi 21.5" 1080p panel, and her really old Dell 1050p monitor from the 2004 PC she had. Only downside can be the noise, iits a lot louder than my last card, but that comes with the territory of doubling the power draw and performance.

Meanwhile, Jeff's computer (a mutant of Marians last computer) finally died. It had been on its last legs when I first replaced it with her Fractal Design build in 2012, so I was kind of expecting it. He got the old barely working junker from Keith Brintzenhoff for a while, and I built Marian a new mini-itx external power brick tiny PC with an AMD 5250. I think the first generation AM1 stuff is still too slow for real desktop replacement, but it was damn close. Eventually I sold that new computer to Keith when he asked for one, I bought my old desktop from my mother for $500 (at the time I was thinking of selling it to Hiran), gave Jeff that desktop and gave Marian her original PC back. PC switcharoos. Everythings in a good spot now - everyones got 1080p screens, Jeff got my old surround sound system, albeit his mechanical drives are all super slow.

I've had my own room for 2/3 of a year now. Honestly, my life is perfect. Everything I want I have right now. Some material wants that mean nothing, but unless I move from Kutztown nothing else can really be done.  I'll get into that later. I have my own bed, my bird sleeps on a chair in the corner, I do my own laundry, I eat the leftovers. I don't think I cost much to keep around considering I'm doing all the driving for Marian, since she lost her license after an eye doctor visit last fall.

That is probably some of the bigger - and worse - news. She had a stroke sometime between September and October that damaged her peripheral vision, and was found out by the eye doctor. A dozen doctors visits later including an MRI and there is a visible chunk of dead brain in her head now. She lost her license right before her personal trip to Texas with Brenda, and we had to do a rush job to get her a replacement state ID card.

David was around for Thanksgiving and Christmas. We put out the tree and such, and somehow David and Jeff put it away before I got up the day after... He has been here several times in the last six months, besides those two he also came for a three day weekend in February and Easter. He always ends up playing Minecraft with that hacked version with the see-through blocks xray patches I made him on multiplayer servers to cheat. Just wants to kill and raid other players stuff. Considering his treatment at home and age and focus, I am not surprised that's all he really wants to do...

I also have some photos and videos of taking Wilsom to Mary and Kennys house, where we had dinner for someones birthday or some such on August 31st. I cannot recall what event that was! Ben visted at the start of October after he got kicked out of Danielle (his band mates) house due to civil disagreements or some such. He crashed here for a few days before going back to NY to couchsurf with friends until he found his own place. He now works at a club called the Bitter End, and while writing this I just recently recorded his first performance with his band there and put it on my personal youtube channel.

So last fall and winter were mostly WoW with Hiran, and sometime in January I got involved with the Yogscast Civ 5 group, which lead me to start hosting games for them. I am one of the head officers of the group, albeit now it is starting to peter out - its too specialized to maintain a large community, but I honestly do not mind since I have started burning out on it all the same. I never lost a game too - I probably watched as much of Filthyrobot's Civ games as I actually played them during February / March. Between work, shoffuring, making sure my mother was still alive, my usual endless flood of DA / YT / Tumblr / Webcomic delights, I am extremely good at never having any downtime, even without some banal 9-5 brain drain job.

I had a week playing Star Wars Racer on the n64 version that was really fun. Always nice to revisit the classics - I was doing a lot of research on the state of game emulators at the time, since Wine was seeing Gallium Nine and the pipeline improvements to their d3d renderer coming out at the time.

In March I got roped into Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Explorers - a huge art group that I completely missed that started years ago and had hundreds of amazing artists working on it. I am talking full color deep comics with a huge continuity across so many people. I still have dozens of DeviantArt pages to read through of members, and I am reminded how truly infinite the creative spark of the Internet is - you just have to know where to look. I cannot really justify buying entertainment anymore (besides Pillars of Eternity.. thats next) when there is so much art, music, animation, video... created by people who just want to. There is something pure in labors of love like what most of DA, fimfiction.net, etc are.

I guess it is important to mention that PurpleKecleon, PK, started that group, ran it for years, and then dropped it when realizing she needed to make a portfolio and universe that was not under the thumb of some copyright holder like Nintendo. Which is a shame. It is always a huge shame - no, injustice - that IP is the way it is, holding back creators from forging their own takes on decades old works. Pokemon is going to be twenty years old soon, but nobody alive today will be able to create their own, legal, Pokemon spinoffs.

So Pillars of Eternity finally released. Really fucking good. Regret buying it on GoG, kind of, and at the same time not. It has no achievements which sucks - if for no other reason than knowing I have experienced everything. It was fairly buggy at launch, and I am now waiting a month or so for post-release patches before trying a tryhard Path of the Damned run. My first playthrough was a "good" hard mode druid and I tried to make the choices I would have. I only had to make one extra companion cleric to replace Durance when he got a huge slowdown bug that was unresolved for a week or so. Great game, but even it I cannot recommend for more than $10, and honestly as I would say in any philosophical IP debate should have been funded wholly by us backers and released as free software and free assets. I cannot imagine how amazing a community could be forged with a novel IP universe like Eora from some real professionals in the discipline of worldcrafting, but it seems like that potential is - for now - hugely limited.

Karen's hot water pipes broke over the winter and requried me to cut out and replace them. I also listed her shack on craigslist for $70k but she got no interest. She broke the Transformer Tab finally and I guess shes watching broadcast old TV shows and playing Skinner Box Android apps nowadays. She stopped paying for the Internet, which might be a good thing because now she cannot spend $200+ in in app purchases like she managed last year.

Marian went to Texas in January with Brenda - fortunately during peak cold temperatures, unfortunately much delayed by four days. They ladned on Janaury fifth and actually left on the nineth, after I had to drive to and from the Airport twice to drop them off and then pick them up when their flights were canceled. Made a bunch of Mac and Cheese in their absence and had a fantastic time realizing how little money it costs to feed oneself for the ~10 days she was gone. I hope she enjoyed her trip!

Guess I should write down the ongoing stories of the Becks and Georgians since that is an ongoing side narrative to my life. They have had Scotts old car in and out of garages for two years fixing and blinging it up. Just recently they sued one of the garages for $2,500 of undone service to the engine. The thing still is not ready and they have probably put half a new house into it already. Josh got a job working for an IBM subsidiary writing PHP, something I would not wish on anyone, but apparently he can bear it. He was always the better of the two of us grandchildren... though his alcohol connosurism worrying at times. Both Scott and Brenda got realty licenses after a lot of classes and such, and I wish them the best, but that just seems like such a saturated market. Brenda even went back to her old job after two years, and after saying she was sick and tired of doing tax paperwork - I guess its just too good an offer to pass up!

The Georgians have seen Bob out of work for the better part of two years after having to close his practice, getting the ringaround from hospitals not wanting to hire him, and then after landing a really well paying job (I think like 300k a year) as a senior surgeon losing it within the year. They had a big anniversary in Hawaii last summer and after having to replace both Mary and RJs cars after they crashed them they seem to be feeling the monetary squeeze now, and Bob is sadly drinking a lot again. Hope things can get back in order.

We sold the explorer finally, after someone let the air out of the front tires when it was sitting out front... Austin apparently likes it. He is Marians grand-nephew and works at Cracker Barrel, but still has his permit so someone has to drive him there for work. It seems incredibly dumb to me that someone is driving around a kid to a minimum wage job and probably spending half of what he makes each day just in gas money to get him there and back! He should just be doing online surveys for a few cents in my book.

I am writing this the day after Charles' birthday - and death day. This would have been 86. I legitimately do miss him, he was a great rock in my youth and the only grandfather I really got to know past my really early childhood. I still try to remember Bob-Pas voice, but I am not so sure if I am recalling it right anymore. Or his face. I am so terrifyed about all these memories I lose and cannot recall, like whole chunks of my history are just black holes that I can no longer fill. Its what drove me to start this journal / diary / thing in the first place, and its proving how important it is in how I started out writing interesting things about nearly every day and can probably still do it easily if I put my mind to it. It is just on the flip side, it is hard to justify writing down what you have done instead of doing more.

And that brings me to recent events. I have had the most emotionally tumultous week in a long while this past week, and not due to anything in life. I am so happy right now absolutely nothing is happening outside of my computer screen. I took a dive I should have taken a decade ago when I first discovered it, but banal concerns of being "found out" have held me back too long. Even writing these words feels silly, considering its just furaffinity. I never realized, one, how many artists on DA were also on there, and two, how many were only publishing a tiny dribble of their work outside FA. Catmonkshiro was always one of my favorite artists and that was before I found out he had made tens of thousands of works well between the paltry few he throws up on DA. There are some amazing longrun comics by artists on there as well. 

I also got to watch tons of videos of furry conventions. Telephone the Angel Dragon mostly, who is worn by a costume creator who uses a bird call to make adorable chirps and likes dancing a lot. I still must be missing something about these events, because everything I am seeing looks like it could be pretty well accomplished in someones backyard without blowing money renting out a hotel for a few thousand people. I guess scale comes in. Its just a big party really, though. The whole sense of belonging looks great, but I know me - I am way to introverted and reclusive to do something like that. Though I must say if I were ever going to be outgoing it would almost certainly have to be in a costume like that. Maybe that is why its so fascinating? it is obvious how the suiters are much more energetic and outgoing and it probably something psychological to being able to "become" what you think of your inner self as being. The happiness is incredibly contageous. I hope to have friends like what some of these guys were showing off some day.

Oh, and so many of the casters are impossible to stand with their gay lisps. I want nothing more than for them to be able to do huge dogpile yiff sessions in costume whenever they want, but it does not stop that accent from being ear ripping annoying. I am actually surprised so many of them are strictly gay - I would fully expect furries to be much more sexuality and genderfluid because its a much more open minded atmosphere, but that should leave most of them bi. What do I know, I am asexual after all!

I find it to be quite strange - I have been into so many eclectic and non-mainstream things - Sailor Moon, My Little Pony, Anime (especially Shojo) - but for some reason always thought going full furry was too much, even though almost every night I go to sleep dreaming of transforming into mythical creatures and living out adventures in fantasy worlds. Guess you just need to admit who you are sometimes, even if I will not write it down on a Google blogging client... maybe when I self host my own blog and encrypt it where I can be sure nobody can read it. Because these kinds of things ruin lives and mine is going way too well to wreck now. I need to start commenting on shit on my FA account, at least pointing out the sequence breaks in several galleries.

It is really interesting how not too long ago I would have been mortified to browse some of what I am right now so openly knowing my browser history can backstab me any time someone is watching my screen. At some point you stop giving as much of a shit as what others think. I've loved anthropomorphasm and especially transformation works for over a decade and I am content to just stop caring if the various walled gardens of my life start bleeding over.

What is the point of a journal nobody else can ever see? I have never even touched on the things that gave me waking nightmares and panic attacks since I was twelve on here. I have not even scratched the surfaces of my "undesirable" traits. There is so much I cannot even write here because I know its not actually private at all. The kind of thing I could not even write in an encrypted text file on my own desktop that never left it, because there would be risk of it getting out. It is hilarious how in a world of increasingly open homosexuality, passions, interests, and habits that some things just need to stay buried at all cost. Meh, I have a traditional family. When I am on my own one day I will have to put in the effort to find those like me. For the first time in my life... praise Wilson giving me someone to talk to.

38

Diana's computer seems to have gone well. Uncle Bob visited for a few days this past week, apparently he needed a break from his month long return home after getting laid off. He drank and smoked a lot, but otherwise it was nice to see him again.

Molten came out with its MoP server, took ~52 hours to hit max level, proceeded to level up inscription, I'm trying to dominate the glyph market, we shall see if that works.

Computer problems are still rampant, going to do a hard reinstall with the 2014.11 live iso. Same with Marians desktop, it is getting either Netrunner or Suse, and I'm not sure which yet.

I reformatted the external hard drives, one media and one backup, both with btrfs for the tasty transparent compression and checksumming.

I ended up with Beckys junk laptop again, removing hundreds of malware and dozens of virus files from it. What a wreck. Windows 8 is such massive shit too, I cannot for the life of me get this thing to install the 8.1 update.

Finally got in contact with Karen after a while, mainly due to trying to avoid wasting her phone minutes. She wants me to start all her heat sources for the winter, otherwise I have no idea what she has been up to.

Bird is a tyrant. The only place I can put him to sleep is a dark room with no one in it, or else he starts yelling. I tried covering his cage with a towel last night and he just rattled the door all morning trying to get out.