It snowed the morning I had my dentist appointment. It was spring when I went to bed, and winter when I woke up. Then my mom texted me some bible talk, and I knew for sure it was going to be a bad day.

(Actually it wasn't so bad after that, I am being dramatic.)

One of our gaming friends works at a dental office and highly recommends her boss. We had to make the appointments in January, and finally appointment day arrived. Dentist says I got some cavities (to be expected) but nothing too awful. No root canals. My gums are healthy. After the dentist got done chiseling the buildup away, my teeth look way better than I ever expected. I've been using that tartarend toothpaste and it's good stuff, it really did improve things, but it only goes where the toothbrush goes. So I feel pretty good about the whole situation and it's nice to be able to smile without worrying about if I am showing ugly teeth. Genetically speaking I didn't win the tooth lottery. Short of putting a car's worth of money into cosmetic dentistry, my teeth will always be a sub-optimal color and shape. Is what it is. But I feel like they look as nice as they can right now and I'm pleased.

So now I get to chill out until my next appointment for cavity fillings in november.

Our clothes dryer broke - first appliance to bite the dust. The old dryer was okay - slightly annoying but it did dry clothes so whatever. We opened it up and poked around and figured it was either the motor ($100) or the motherboard (no longer made), so rather than dump money into a wild goose chase, we went shopping. It wasn't very fun. Seems like everyone has a "definitely don't buy this brand" story. All I know is we don't want anything super fancy, or a samsung. We ended up with a maytag one step above the base model. It's fancier than I wanted, but it has the door that opens flat and the lint trap isn't on the top exterior. I hate opening the lint trap and getting lint all over the top of the machine, esp when you just put a load of clean laundry there. So, it's alright, I guess, as long as it's reliable.

The snow is melting quickly and there's only some glaciers left in the shadowed areas of the yard. I have started some seeds and I'm planning what to do with the yard. I want to start creating some flowerbeds in the back, but they won't be ready for planting until next year. I want to plant some trees, but this year might be just settling on a layout and prepping to do that next year. We need to put that fence up between us and the slappers, so I figure while we're digging posts for that, we can dig some other post holes and maybe put up a basic pergola. See, I want an outdoor clothesline and a place where I can hang up floor rugs to beat the dirt out of them. And if I'm doing that, why not a place to put up a hammock or two or maybe those hammock chairs. So I'm trying to talk spouse into a pergola structure in the shady corner of the yard (perfect hang out spot in the evening, near the bbq grill). Combo clothesline/rug beater/hammock spot. He seems suspicious of hammocks. Hammocks are tricky, it's true. But I have fixated on hammocks as a premium yard decoration and I want to be able to hang a hammock (or hammock chair). If you go over to someone's house for a BBQ and they have hammocks in the backyard, it's like the fancy gel/acrylic nails of backyard decor. I find it impressive, anyway. So I'm working on that.

I'm gonna have to dig up some of the grass in the front yard and I'm not looking forward to it. I want to peel off a long narrow strip in front and dump a packet of butterfly and bee friendly wildflower seeds - see what grows. I want to remove the grass around the dead stump and plant flowers around it. I want to move the rocks filling up the space by the front walk and plant flowers and bulbs there. The yard is plain and could use some color. Removing that grass is going to be some work, but I figured out last year when I lazily put down morning glory and poppy seeds that it is necessary. I got a wheelbarrow on clearance at walmart for $35. Now is the time to get going on yard stuff!

I got peeved and ranted at spouse about how I felt like it was pulling teeth trying to get him to help with house stuff and he said I was right and he'll be more mindful. He replaced the bathroom faucet with the nice one I got at Costco (I've been trying to get him to do for months) and it looks so much better. He cleared out a space in the office for the exercise corner. So he's perked up a bit. The extra daylight and warmer weather is a help.

We helped a friend (the friend with the tasmanian devil children who tried to murder each other in our backyard last labor day) move from her old apartment and it just reminded me of all the bad parts of apartment life. The sloppy paint jobs, the shitty fixtures, the small broken things that get fixed poorly or not at all. The "rat in a cage" feel, where you just live with things as they are because there's no point in taking the initiative to make them better. I remember why I have been so particular with our place, because I am sick of that cheap apartment ambiance. Our friend moved to a better place - it's a corporate owned mobile home park where she's renting a fairly new trailer, so it has finishes more like a small home and it looks to be in like-new shape. Hopefully her neighbors are peaceful, but at least appearance wise it is a nice upgrade for her. She's paying $1700 a month, which seems a lot more reasonable than the $3k for the other place she was considering, but still ... I can't believe that $1700 for rent qualifies as "reasonable" these days.

I read the "enshittification" article by Cory Doctorow and yeah, that tracks. So does the article from Cat Valente, "stop talking to each other and start buying things", where she describes being so angry about the state of the internet. She's so painfully articulate in some spots.

"Stop talking to each other and start buying things. Stop talking to each other and start hurting each other.

Hurting each other is just ever so much more useful than talking and connecting. Leaving people alone doesn’t produce narcissistic supply. It doesn’t feed the need to control and force that some humans, it seems, have always been and always will be born with."

"I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference. I’m so tired of lunch photos and fanfic and stupid jokes and keeping in touch with family across time zones and making friends and starting cottage industries and pursuing hobbies and meeting soulmates and expressing thoughts and creating identities and loving TV shows and reading books and getting to know a few of your heroes and raising kids and making bookshelves and knitting and painting and fixing sinks and first dates and homemade jam and, yes, figuring out what Buffy characters we are, listening and learning and hoping and just fucking talking to each other weaponized against us. Having our enthusiasm over the smallest joys of everyday life invaded by people who long ago forgot their value and turned into fodder for the death of thought, the burial of love.

These were our spaces, little people who just wanted to connect. And one by one, they get turned into battlefields where we have to fight just as hard to exist as we do in the real world. And every time a few more people you never thought the Absorbaloff of hatred and gleeful sadism would slurp up don’t come along to the next safe place, and start trying to take it away before anyone can get there."

Then I read her article about chatGPT - "The Great Replacement (Not That One, the Real One)" - where she describes chatGPT as "wordroomba" among other things (I might nick wordroomba) and goes off about the horrors writers are facing right now. She says, "ChatGPT isn’t being sold to us directly at all, but to our potential employers in lieu of us." And isn't that what people like about it? The selfish utility of it? The ways it can make us money, from the small personal things to the professional business level? If it saves us time, and time is money, then really we are just using it for merely greedy purposes?

A couple of our gamer friends have played with using chatGPT to generate some character flavor - little speeches they can read or quotes or the like. They tried to get it to write a song about buttholes because there was an incident that resulted in our bard character making up a butthole song in game. ChatGPT wouldn't write a butthole song because it's obscene or something. So I proclaimed the unrivaled superiority of human imagination and wrote it.

Behold my butthole song:

From the goblin chiefs to the dwarven lords

From the kings of men to the dragon’s hoard

The princes of the land have their matters of pride

But none so well tended as the elvish backside

At the dinner banquet he eats only greens

Neither fish nor fowl nor meat nor beans

This elvish lad with his fine silk breaches

Won’t have a stain on his secret peaches

Shiny shiny butthole

Fairest of the fair

Careful who you’re blinding

With your rump in the air

Oh!

The dwarves like their beards combed and braided

And high gnomish fashion is bright brocaded

Goblins can’t wear enough gilded shinies

But elves are all about squeaky clean hinies

Shiny shiny butthole

Fairest of the fair

Careful who you’re blinding

With your rump in the air

See, as long as our corporate masters have "decency standards", humans will have a niche.

I digress. Her article ends on a pretty upbeat note, all things considered. What else can we do, as creators, but stay relentlessly optimistic in the face of what looks like our destruction?

I want to write more but I also have errands to run.