If I can't write things in long, I can certainly write them in short. Thoughts are still thoughts, even if they're brief. Most of these are blog posts I've started but haven't finished for whatever reason. I may expand on them in the future. Rather than have them rot in my documents, I'm collecting them here. Maybe I'll do that monthly.

I love to cook. The food usually ends up delicious, but cooking it for or with another person makes it even moreso.

There's a very radical and important difference between protocols and services on the internet. I adore RSS and IRC and HTTPS and even E-Mail to some extent, but the moment it becomes a company holding the cards rather than a standard of information transfer, something like a Discord, a Dropbox or a Google Colab, I get a little bit more tense. Something about a change in incentive, or maybe just having some other party act as czar over the things I want to do. This website will move to a different domains some day. I had a good start of a conversation on this topic with my friend Bogo, which I hope to continue at some point. Maybe then I'll have enough to write about.

While I know that they're different phenomenons, my body isn't able to tell the difference between anxiety and being actively hunted by a tiger. This is especially a problem when it's late and I can't sleep. My solution to this thus far is to go for long runs in the middle of the night, which helps in many ways but is perhaps not the best coping mechanism in others.

In this card game I really enjoy, Magic: the Gathering, there's a somewhat obscure mechanic focused on getting tickets and then using those tickets to modify your cards. It's one of my favorite mechanics in any game ever. It's also basically universally hated for being weird. Most people never even bothered playing with it. I wonder if I could voice the things I like about it and teach other people the beauty I see in it. I've taken many stabs at it, but I seem to never be satisfied with my own words.

It's really strange to see my cat always waiting for me at the door when I get home. He doesn't touch his food and things seem to be all in the same place as I left them, so it really does seem like he just waits for me to get home. And how happy he is when I do return, purring and circling until he decides it's time to eat (with me now back to watch). It's nice to be a favorite. I think he'd benefit from a cat friend, if I'm ever in a place to bring him one.

I will soon need to move again, with even fewer safety nets in place. I don't know how far it will be, or what will happen exactly, but it's approaching rapidly. This is terrifying.

Bikes are a fantastic invention and I wish there was better infrastructure in the U.S. to support them as a primary mode of transit.

Dance games have become a very strong hobby of mine over the past year, and I've gotten good enough to do things I didn't think I'd be able to do when I started. I've also been able to help some other folks learn things that I struggled with. In particular, recently helping a newer friend Ryan learn crossovers on the same chart that my friend Dan had reccomended to me. Being able to fail at something and try again, and keep trying until it becomes possible is something I feel like I'm not often afforded to do in other places. Being able to then take those things I learned and use them to help someone else to get there even faster is (in this context) a small way to help people but helping people all the same. It reminds me of when I first started playing Magic.

Third places are incredibly important and it makes me sad that not everyone gets to experience them firsthand as I have. I don't know where I'd be without them, but it's certainly in a worse place. If I finish this article it will basically just be a book review of The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg and Karen Christensen. I highly reccomened reading it.

I've been thinking about my website recently. I don't really want it to look fancy, but I do really want it to have walls. Default HTML just happily fills whatever box you put it in, but it feels a little more cramped than I'd like. I'm busy right now, so I only really want to add more work with side projects that feel necessary. This feels almost necessary, but not quite. Aesthetics are only surface level, but the surface is somewhat important. Plus I would really rather my blogposts be viewable from a standard RSS reader rather than simply being linked. Migrating other things remains a future project until I have fewer tigers chasing me.