I am, as usual for me and ROOPHLOCH, sneaking things in at the end of the month. One reason has been that it has been too damn hot here! It doesn't normally start cooling down for autumn here until October, but this year it has been especially bad. Temperatures in the mid 80s F, with heat indices in the 90s. We've finally started to have cool evenings and mornings as of last week, and now after the equinox, I had been hoping the days would start being tolerable. Today at noon, it's 83, feels like 93, so no such luck. I should have come out to write this morning.
I'm sitting at a picnic bench in the shade of a large white oak tree, and a smaller hickory, in a public park a short walk from my house. It's okay when there is a breeze, but it's hot out of the shade, and there are gnats. I'm writing this on the same eeePC I used for the OPC this year, but running with its full specs (2 cores, 4GB) with my Atreus keyboard. I'm writing it in org-mode, in Emacs, and I'm going to export it to Markdown and Gemtext for publishing on 3 protocols. Thinking about how Sandra at Idiomdrottning notes that Gemini is fine, but hasn't made anything simpler for her.
Maybe in reaction to the heat, maybe in order to push back the depression, I started Spooky Season at the beginning of September rather than the beginning of October this year. More candles, more macabre decorations. I can't claim that consumerism played no part in this — Halloween decorations came out at the art store in mid-August, and went on 40% off in mid-September.
But I've also been on my stupid Goth shit again, listening to a lot of Gothic and adjacent music, some of which is new-to-me. I'd like to recommend the Android app InnerTune, available on F-Droid for music discovery. It's basically an ad-free front-end to YouTube Music, giving you a lot of the paid experience for free. Of course, when you find an artist you like, you should see if they have a Bandcamp page so you can throw money at them.
I haven't picked my classic Gothic novel for this October (past years have been /Dracula/, /Frankenstein/, /The Mysteries of Udolpho/, and /The Castle of Otranto/). I want to read one chapter of Zelazny's /A Night in the Lonesome October/ each night, but I still want to keep my classics streak.
I've been basically too burnt out and depressed to work on any of my free-software or adjacent projects, like Gemini Quickstart. I did finish the week in 3rd on the bronze league leaderboard for Klingon on Duolingo, so that's poking my head above the water, I guess.
Music for this post: /Tear You Apart/, by She Wants Revenge.