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General Update
Jun. 22nd, 2023 05:48 pmThere's been a lot happening, and lately it's hard for me to sit at a computer and write at length. I post a bunch of short stuff in Facebook, sometimes with pictures, and then because it's hard to get pictures posted here, and without them more text is needed, I don't manage to cross-post here and on LJ.
-LEARNING TO CODE
My project to teach myself enough Javascript to at least write a program that automates cross-posting between my LJ and DW accounts has gotten derailed. I started teaching myself basic stuff, planning to move on to dealing with web pages once I knew how to just work with the fundamental parts of the language. When I told my parents I was learning a language, they talked about how they were trying to write their own home version of an old PBM game called Starweb, and I thought that maybe reverse engineering the game from the rules would be a good learning project. I got a few hundred lines of code into it. It creates basic data structures for the game and randomizes them, puts in some test values, and so on.
But then my mother said that it looked like Starweb might still be running and she was going to see if she could get into a game. I got discouraged and kind of never came back to the coding. Which is irrational because she said that it would be nice to have our own copy anyway, and that wasn't even what I was originally trying to teach myself, it was just a directed side-project. But I've been away from it for a while now. Maybe I'll go back to it; I'm not sure.
-VACUUM TUBE AUDIO FREQUENCY GENERATOR
Someone local was selling a giant collection of vintage electronic test gear on Facebook Marketplace. I was interested in the audio frequency generator I saw a picture of for testing amplifiers and such with, so I looked up the model number. It was older than I thought; it's a 1960 (the date of the manual I found online), RCA-made, very *not* solid state, unit. So I went and looked at it and bought it because I am a sucker for this kind of stuff. If it works, it will actually be a good tool, and if it doesn't, I can try to fix it. I loved fixing up the VTVM I bought a few years ago!
I also suggested the seller contact the local ham radio club or maybe a place like Oak Tree Vintage that specializes in restoring and/or reselling stuff like this. I said that this is the kind of stuff that people want to have and work with and on as a labor of love and that it kind of needs a specialized audience. It's from the estate of someone who died, and I'm not sure how much his wife and daughter-in-law know about this stuff, and I *really* want to see it all go to a good home so I hope I helped. If I had more money and space, I might buy more of it myself. There were probably a hundred or more pieces of gear of various kinds in the garage they have it in. While I was there, I asked the former owner's widow if he fixed TVs, since in the photos I'd seen things like a TV calibration device and a flyback transformer tester. "He fixed *everything*," she said. "He was out there from 5 in the morning almost every day, working on stuff." I told her I hope I can be that cool some day.
-LEARNING ELECTRONICS
Having a new antique toy to play with brought my interest in learning electronics back to the front of my mind. I've tried several times to teach myself more things during the past couple years (French, math, programming) and keep getting discouraged when I find it a lot harder to make things stick in my mind than I remember it being. But I decided I'd try again with more electronics theory. Especially since I just replaced my vintage Marantz and would like to be able to work on it too. I wrote about my experience with watching some lectures and trying to learn this stuff in the post before this one.
-READING YURI
For some years, I was rewarding myself for each 5 days that I biked to and from school with cheap used manga. At first it was Oh My Goddess, so I called the program "Bicycling for Belldandy" after one of the main characters. For a while, I was buying volumes of Inubaka, so it was "Cycling for Suguri," the main character.
To get myself to be active here and now, I've started buying myself a cheap used copy of yuri manga for each five days that I get out with the dog and walk for at least half an hour. I think I'll call it "Walking for Women Loving Women." The first thing I bought was the first of two omnibus volumes of Milk Morinaga's "Girlfriends" which I thoroughly enjoyed.
It's funny; if this was a hetero-romantic plot I would have zero interest. Possibly less than zero. But it being two women makes it much more relatable to me as a woman who, it seems, is primarily interested romantically and sexually in non-cis-men. It being a high-school story also kind of lets me live a fem high-school experience vicariously, and since that's the only way I'll be able to live it, it's really engaging. (This reminds me of the way I love a slice-of-life manga series called Azumanga Daioh that was just about high school girls who are friends with each other and their daily, sometimes surreal, lives. I love it *so* much that I've never read the last couple of pages in my omnibus edition because I don't want it to be over. I didn't realize it until much later, but the reason I love that series *so* much is that I dearly wish I could have had that experience myself growing up. Just being a girl with other girls. Maybe my life would have been less lonely and made a lot more sense.
Anyway, I have *all* the feels, reading Girlfriends. It's not just an awakening-to-saphhism story, it also has a lot of content that's just girls being girls with other girls and sometimes that aches a bit. But I love it so much. I'll be reading next to Miriam and there'll be a scene where, for example, the protagonists hold hands for the first time and I'll make little squeaking noises about how wonderful that is. When the plot had progressed to a point where it seemed really clear that the two girls are in love with each other even though one hasn't realized it, I wanted to tell Miriam alla bout what's going on and how much I want it to be ok, and she even listened, with grace and patience, as I summarized the plot. I know that there's nothing really novel about this kind of story, and that a lot of folks would probably find this kind of thing boring, no matter what genders the characters are. But I've always loved yuri content, and now that I really understand *why,* that love has increased so much. I think I just really want to have had these experiences, and this is the closest I can get to that, and that makes them so precious to me.
Even the second time through, my feelings are just as strong, if slightly different because I mostly know what's going to happen and when. The second volume arrived a couple days ago, but I'm not reading it until I finish rereading the first one and can go right into the next.
-TARGETED BY TRANSPHOBES/GENERAL ASSHOLES
Someone on an Owl House group said they were starting HRT today. I told them I was really happy for them and said that I started a little over a year ago and had no regrets.
Trolls from some group dedicated to leaving laugh reacts on queer people's posts have laugh-reacted every supportive comment there, and some even followed my account back to laugh-react my profile picture that had still been set to public. I suppose I should expect that my picture will have been copied and will be circulated around hate groups now.
This has never happened to me before and it's really odd.
-CRYPTOBRO AT DOG PARK
I met a person at the dog park a little while back who I chatted with about dogs for a little bit. He had a long, somewhat unkempt beard and had named his dog Satoshi. "Is that a Japanese name, or a noun?" I asked. He told me that it's the pseudonym of the anonymous creator of BitCoin. I met a cryptobro in the wild!
He and his dog seemed nice enough and Ella and Satoshi were playing and chasing together for a little while. Then they suddenly got pretty aggressive with each other and it looked like a fight, so we quickly separated them. I'm not really sure what caused it, but Satoshi's person left the park almost immediately, and I do appreciate him taking that behavior seriously even though I'm not sure it was his dog at fault. Ella is fine.
-INSURANCE
We've gotten through most of the insurance process! The primary task now is to submit receipts to show our cost over the assessed cash value, which they will reimburse up to the replacement value, limited to the maximum covered amount for everything. It seems like this means we only need to submit about $6300 over assessed value and we'll hit our cap, at which point we're done with all the paperwork.
It's *so good* to be in sight of the end of this.
I think I've submitted the most complicated sets of things already too; all the parts that are collectively being counted as the replacement for a desktop PC, and all the receipts, currency conversion data, and customs fees for the $2000 CAD purchase of a replacement Marantz receiver from a seller in the US. The rest should be more straightforward, though there are likely to be at least a couple more international purchases.
-LEARNING TO CODE
My project to teach myself enough Javascript to at least write a program that automates cross-posting between my LJ and DW accounts has gotten derailed. I started teaching myself basic stuff, planning to move on to dealing with web pages once I knew how to just work with the fundamental parts of the language. When I told my parents I was learning a language, they talked about how they were trying to write their own home version of an old PBM game called Starweb, and I thought that maybe reverse engineering the game from the rules would be a good learning project. I got a few hundred lines of code into it. It creates basic data structures for the game and randomizes them, puts in some test values, and so on.
But then my mother said that it looked like Starweb might still be running and she was going to see if she could get into a game. I got discouraged and kind of never came back to the coding. Which is irrational because she said that it would be nice to have our own copy anyway, and that wasn't even what I was originally trying to teach myself, it was just a directed side-project. But I've been away from it for a while now. Maybe I'll go back to it; I'm not sure.
-VACUUM TUBE AUDIO FREQUENCY GENERATOR
Someone local was selling a giant collection of vintage electronic test gear on Facebook Marketplace. I was interested in the audio frequency generator I saw a picture of for testing amplifiers and such with, so I looked up the model number. It was older than I thought; it's a 1960 (the date of the manual I found online), RCA-made, very *not* solid state, unit. So I went and looked at it and bought it because I am a sucker for this kind of stuff. If it works, it will actually be a good tool, and if it doesn't, I can try to fix it. I loved fixing up the VTVM I bought a few years ago!
I also suggested the seller contact the local ham radio club or maybe a place like Oak Tree Vintage that specializes in restoring and/or reselling stuff like this. I said that this is the kind of stuff that people want to have and work with and on as a labor of love and that it kind of needs a specialized audience. It's from the estate of someone who died, and I'm not sure how much his wife and daughter-in-law know about this stuff, and I *really* want to see it all go to a good home so I hope I helped. If I had more money and space, I might buy more of it myself. There were probably a hundred or more pieces of gear of various kinds in the garage they have it in. While I was there, I asked the former owner's widow if he fixed TVs, since in the photos I'd seen things like a TV calibration device and a flyback transformer tester. "He fixed *everything*," she said. "He was out there from 5 in the morning almost every day, working on stuff." I told her I hope I can be that cool some day.
-LEARNING ELECTRONICS
Having a new antique toy to play with brought my interest in learning electronics back to the front of my mind. I've tried several times to teach myself more things during the past couple years (French, math, programming) and keep getting discouraged when I find it a lot harder to make things stick in my mind than I remember it being. But I decided I'd try again with more electronics theory. Especially since I just replaced my vintage Marantz and would like to be able to work on it too. I wrote about my experience with watching some lectures and trying to learn this stuff in the post before this one.
-READING YURI
For some years, I was rewarding myself for each 5 days that I biked to and from school with cheap used manga. At first it was Oh My Goddess, so I called the program "Bicycling for Belldandy" after one of the main characters. For a while, I was buying volumes of Inubaka, so it was "Cycling for Suguri," the main character.
To get myself to be active here and now, I've started buying myself a cheap used copy of yuri manga for each five days that I get out with the dog and walk for at least half an hour. I think I'll call it "Walking for Women Loving Women." The first thing I bought was the first of two omnibus volumes of Milk Morinaga's "Girlfriends" which I thoroughly enjoyed.
It's funny; if this was a hetero-romantic plot I would have zero interest. Possibly less than zero. But it being two women makes it much more relatable to me as a woman who, it seems, is primarily interested romantically and sexually in non-cis-men. It being a high-school story also kind of lets me live a fem high-school experience vicariously, and since that's the only way I'll be able to live it, it's really engaging. (This reminds me of the way I love a slice-of-life manga series called Azumanga Daioh that was just about high school girls who are friends with each other and their daily, sometimes surreal, lives. I love it *so* much that I've never read the last couple of pages in my omnibus edition because I don't want it to be over. I didn't realize it until much later, but the reason I love that series *so* much is that I dearly wish I could have had that experience myself growing up. Just being a girl with other girls. Maybe my life would have been less lonely and made a lot more sense.
Anyway, I have *all* the feels, reading Girlfriends. It's not just an awakening-to-saphhism story, it also has a lot of content that's just girls being girls with other girls and sometimes that aches a bit. But I love it so much. I'll be reading next to Miriam and there'll be a scene where, for example, the protagonists hold hands for the first time and I'll make little squeaking noises about how wonderful that is. When the plot had progressed to a point where it seemed really clear that the two girls are in love with each other even though one hasn't realized it, I wanted to tell Miriam alla bout what's going on and how much I want it to be ok, and she even listened, with grace and patience, as I summarized the plot. I know that there's nothing really novel about this kind of story, and that a lot of folks would probably find this kind of thing boring, no matter what genders the characters are. But I've always loved yuri content, and now that I really understand *why,* that love has increased so much. I think I just really want to have had these experiences, and this is the closest I can get to that, and that makes them so precious to me.
Even the second time through, my feelings are just as strong, if slightly different because I mostly know what's going to happen and when. The second volume arrived a couple days ago, but I'm not reading it until I finish rereading the first one and can go right into the next.
-TARGETED BY TRANSPHOBES/GENERAL ASSHOLES
Someone on an Owl House group said they were starting HRT today. I told them I was really happy for them and said that I started a little over a year ago and had no regrets.
Trolls from some group dedicated to leaving laugh reacts on queer people's posts have laugh-reacted every supportive comment there, and some even followed my account back to laugh-react my profile picture that had still been set to public. I suppose I should expect that my picture will have been copied and will be circulated around hate groups now.
This has never happened to me before and it's really odd.
-CRYPTOBRO AT DOG PARK
I met a person at the dog park a little while back who I chatted with about dogs for a little bit. He had a long, somewhat unkempt beard and had named his dog Satoshi. "Is that a Japanese name, or a noun?" I asked. He told me that it's the pseudonym of the anonymous creator of BitCoin. I met a cryptobro in the wild!
He and his dog seemed nice enough and Ella and Satoshi were playing and chasing together for a little while. Then they suddenly got pretty aggressive with each other and it looked like a fight, so we quickly separated them. I'm not really sure what caused it, but Satoshi's person left the park almost immediately, and I do appreciate him taking that behavior seriously even though I'm not sure it was his dog at fault. Ella is fine.
-INSURANCE
We've gotten through most of the insurance process! The primary task now is to submit receipts to show our cost over the assessed cash value, which they will reimburse up to the replacement value, limited to the maximum covered amount for everything. It seems like this means we only need to submit about $6300 over assessed value and we'll hit our cap, at which point we're done with all the paperwork.
It's *so good* to be in sight of the end of this.
I think I've submitted the most complicated sets of things already too; all the parts that are collectively being counted as the replacement for a desktop PC, and all the receipts, currency conversion data, and customs fees for the $2000 CAD purchase of a replacement Marantz receiver from a seller in the US. The rest should be more straightforward, though there are likely to be at least a couple more international purchases.
