Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021AD
Generally speaking, I try my hardest to stay off and away from social media like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, &c.
I (fortunately) am not often afflicted with FOMO, but when I am, the cause is typically social media's 24/7 highlight-reel-of-everyone-else's-life. Watching videos of couples going out, people on speedboats, other people at concerts, &c. just makes me envious. It's unreasonable for me to demand other people change their activities because I feel bad watching from behind a screen, so I've simply stopped watching. I guess that's why I'm here, blogging in plaintext.
Someday I'd love to get "my own place" in Geminispace, i.e. start self-hosting a server or get a space on a public UNIX box. I have a place on tilde.institute [A], but it's only Gopher right now. Gemlog.blue [B] is great, but I want to upload dithered images and admire them in Lagrange 😅. Maybe checking out SDF would be worthwhile.
I'm so glad this job's temporary. It's exhausting and I hate it and I can't wait for it to be over.
I've been writing the summer camp's schedule in gemtext! Sometimes I'll include links to documentation for the activities we do with the kids prefixed by
=>
and I've been putting in the weather each day from floodgap.com's Groundhog weather service [C]! I like adding little touches like that, it makes me feel like I'm doing something other than assembling materials and moving campers from place to place.
The community center where I work has a pretty disfunctional management situation, but not withtin the team I'm on. I'm (temporarily) part of a contracted company that runs the fitness/aquatics/for-profit side, while the non-profit/building/programming side has a completely different team in the building. The building team's management basically took the summer off, stranding the fitness team, while those from the building who were working in-person kept complaining to the fitness team that they were working in-person.
Fitness has been here through the whole [redacted] pandemic.
The camp program that my super's in charge of has been limited by all these arbitrary-feeling rules handed down from on high by people who aren't even in the building. For example, the camp program cannot send campers home in the case of egregious misbehavior because \speculation{ the finance team doesn't want to process refunds }. There's one specific camper that should *not* be in the camp based on his behavior, but we can't get rid of him. My supervisor has a degree in special education, and she's armchair-diagnosed him with some kind of oppositional-defiant disorder or something. I just want him gone.
That being said, I'll be gone from there in like, a week or two, so 🤷 whatever. The job is annoying as heck, but temporary. My super's looking for a new job because it sucks to work here.
I really like Byzantine music, both secular and religious. Dynamis Ensemble [D] has excellent albums in English and has recently released the sheet music (in Byzantine notation) for their Paschal hymns.
On the secular end, you can't go wrong with Christodoulos Halaris' albums. I like one song from his album 'Medieval Greek Songs' called "John and the Snakes" [E] because it sounds kinda like American folk music in a weird way.
I like writing systems, and I like inventing them. I know how to write with two already, but I'm best at Elian Script [F] which I use to take obfuscated notes and for fun.
Earlier in the year I was working on a constructed language loosely based on the grammar of Ojibwe and with some vocabulary from English, Russian, Ojibwe, Romanian, and Spanish (with a little French for good measure). I haven't worked on it for a while now, but I should get back into it. One of my friends went more into learning Ojibwe than I did; going back to study Ojibwe is another thing I should do.
John and the Snakes [E] (Apple Music!)