04-09-26 11:36 PM
feeling: chill

1.

hello!! it’s been so long since i’ve written anything here—nearly a month! that wasn’t on purpose. i’m still invested in this site and webdev and i have a lot of stuff i’ve been working on. but you know how life goes—especially once you’re nearly 30!

that’s right! my birthday passed a few weeks ago. i’m now 28 years old!! hot dog. i can’t believe it either.

it feels kind of cool. last year i had a mini existential crisis over my age. this included a brief phase which i can only attribute to biological instinct, wherein i was struck with an insane bout of baby fever after being firmly in the no-kids camp my entire life.¹

so by the time my actual birthday rolled around, i was feeling pretty chill about it. i’m actually pretty jazzed about getting older. i can feel my brain is finally done cooking, or nearly there. this has lead to some surprising developments, both good and bad. my politics have certainly moderated in recent years, and i feel more sure of myself and who i am. but then i am also unsatisfied with my station in life considering my age—no degree, no career, no savings.

of course, age isn’t a metric of progress. it’s just a measurement of time. the only way we can measure our success is in the context of our own lives, goals, and struggles. in that sense, there’s nothing to feel bad about as long as you’re always trying, and what that looks like is different for anybody.

i guess the question then is what that looks like for me. it’s something to think on for sure.

some cheesecake jem made me!! from scratch!! with biscoff :)

2.

i got the best present ever this year, which is my partner, jem, who’s been in the states for almost a month now. she arrived a week before my birthday and will be leaving a week from the day i am writing this post, so about a month. we’ve been together for 5 years and married for 3, and this is the first time we’ve been together for my actual birthday! long distance relationships are crazy like that.

i wish i could say the literal day of my birth was what i hoped it would be. my brake pads needed replaced badly so i didn’t have my car which sucked. we had plans to go to a local wildlife reserve which are now shelved until jem’s next visit—hopefully sometime over the summer.

her family pitched in and gave me some birthday money which was really lovely. i matched it with my own cash and finally bought a kobo libra color!!!

i felt kind of bad because while i could technically afford it, the purchase definitely strained my wallet and i’ve since had to dip back into credit in the days leading up to my paycheck.² but i’ve wanted it for soooo long now and i’ve already read so much.

the notetaking feature is great. i wish you could export handwritten notes from the ebooks, but you can’t—just highlights and typed annotations. although you can access the pages as images in the kobo files; notes are just svg files transposed on top. i’m sure there’s some way to convert it all into static images. i was going to try to figure it out.

i read kristopher triana’s along the river of flesh. it’s a sequel to his book gone to see the river man. i think i prefer the first one because i’m more a fan of individual, personal stories, and the sequel had more of an ensemble cast. but it was really well written and super fucking bonkers. i wrote tons of notes and made lots of highlights. and then…i deleted the book once i finished it without thinking, wiping all of that away lol. i was going to write a blog post about it all using my notes but now i can’t be bothered. oh well. now i know lol.

anyway, long story short it’s probably the best purchase i’ve made in a long time, and i’m so glad i got it, even if it was kind of irresponsible.

3.

speaking of birthday presents, jem got me two super cool things!!

last christmas i was in the uk. we went to a mall and i found this super cool hoodie in a boutique. it was too expensive and i eventually convinced myself to pass on it. well, jem got it for me!! she also got me a super awesome trucker hat we saw at superdry ages ago. i love both so much!!

hat pics!!

my new hoodie :)

4.

i read that some people use calibre to fetch news articles and convert them into epubs. using claude,³ i had it write a “recipe” as calibre calls them, which fetches news articles from rss feeds and runs the urls through archive.today to bypass paywalls.

right now i’m just pulling from the atlantic; it’s the only US liberal news source that isn’t leftist slopulism,⁴ bought out by billionaires, or managed by bari weiss. for conservative news i’m going to start reading national review, which appears to be conservative yet anti-MAGA (and therefore not populist).

when the “recipe” script runs, it pulls a week’s worth of articles from the atlantic’s rss feed—or at least whatever it can find mirrored on archive.today. i’ve got about 10-20 articles i’m picking through right now, or ~200-ish pages.

years ago i subscribed to the economist, a UK political mag of neoliberal (non-derogatory) sentiment. i liked it a lot, but it’s expensive and i eventually got an appetite for a more US-focused source. i also subscribed to my local newspaper, but couldn’t afford it anymore either. i also found that the daily papers were too much to keep up with, and oftentimes mostly just featured articles imported from USA Today with seldom local reporting.

so due to those factors and me slowly going broke, i stopped reading the news and went back to watching clips online and browsing reddit comment sections rife with doomerism, bad takes, and misinformation. which sucked.

sitting down with a written article is the best way to take in information. there’s no algorithms. you don’t have to contend with hundreds of people blasting their own reactions and thoughts. TV networks aren’t lining up a panel of talking heads to fight with each other. you just sit down, read, and process.

of course, print media isn’t without its own pitfalls. but the medium is less susceptible to bullshit, or at least how we interface with it is. so i like it a lot, and i’m really happy to get back into it.

here’s the recipe claude made for me if anyone wants to use it. you just click on the “fetch news” menu in calibre and select “add or edit a custom news source” and paste the recipe in advanced mode. images are wonky and don’t fetch properly, but from what i’ve seen they’re hard to parse in a set up like this.

you can switch out the title and feed url with your news source of choice.

from calibre.web.feeds.news import BasicNewsRecipe

class ArchivePhRecipe(BasicNewsRecipe):
    title          = 'The Atlantic'
    __author__     = 'you'
    description    = 'Fetches articles via archive.ph to bypass paywalls'
    language       = 'en'
    oldest_article = 7  # days
    max_articles_per_feed = 20
    no_stylesheets = True
    auto_cleanup   = True

    # Image settings
    scale_news_images            = (800, 600)
    scale_news_images_to_device  = False
    jpg_quality                  = 85

    feeds = [
        ('The Atlantic', 'https://www.theatlantic.com/feed/all/'),
        # ('Another Feed', 'https://another.com/feed'),
    ]

    def get_article_url(self, article):
        """Rewrite every article URL to go through archive.ph."""
        url = BasicNewsRecipe.get_article_url(self, article)
        if url:
            return 'https://archive.ph/' + url
        return url

    def preprocess_html(self, soup):
        # Fix relative image URLs from archive.ph
        for img in soup.find_all('img'):
            src = img.get('src', '')
            if src.startswith('/'):
                img['src'] = 'https://archive.ph' + src

        # archive.ph wraps content in a div — pull the real article out
        content = soup.find('div', id='CONTENT')
        if content:
            body = soup.find('body')
            if body:
                body.clear()
                body.append(content)
        return soup

5.

since i’m reading news on my ereader now i literally have no use for reddit anymore. i only stuck around to participate in a centrist politics sub. i joined the discord server instead, which is super chill.⁵

i’ve been trying to escape reddit for ages. it feels good finally saying goodbye. i’ve cut out all social media now outside of youtube, and even then i only watch smosh, game grumps, supermega, and random ASMR videos.

it’s kind of weird. i open up reddit and immediately click away. i’m going to keep my account to post my art/writing/buddhist stuff but i think i’m gonna nuke all my existing posts/comments and just start fresh.

since spacehey’s whole mod debacle i haven’t been on there either, and while i check in every once in awhile mastodon never holds my interest for long.

so i’m effectively social media free outside of discord. i want to write up a blog post about it eventually describing my journey and all the stuff i’ve tried and what i’ve done to occupy my time in place of social media (a lot of reading and building this website!).

6.

despite all this super cool stuff and having jem around, my mental health hasn’t been great. i’ve got some whack home/family stuff going on which is really affecting me. luckily, i found a new job that pays a lot more than my current job, so i’m hoping i can move out and find my own place again.⁶

it’s for a custodian opening at my old high school. oddly enough, this may will be a decade since i graduated.

i feel bad that becoming a janitor is the big break i’m hoping for right now, but like i said earlier, all i can do is contextualize things with my own life circumstances, and it’s a huge improvement over what i am doing right now (fast food shift manager).

i applied a couple days ago and just got a call this afternoon that went to voicemail. i haven’t listened to it yet because i’m too nervous but i’m going to listen tomorrow!!

i’ve had the same job for 5+ years. leaving is really daunting. but i need this for myself and my partner. once i get my finances in order and get my own apartment again i’ll be so much better off, and it will let me focus more time/money on starting the immigration process for jem’s move.

7.

that isn’t everything—but it’s enough for now. hopefully i’ll be able to start posting more regularly again.

one last bit: jem and i went to a new japanese restaurant that opened up in town, and it’s so good! i wasn’t a fan of the ramen to be honest but i LOVED the tofu and spring rolls. it was all super cheap too—i’ll definitely be coming back for sure!

yum!!

take care everybody! <33