author: five_over_four
Learn Finnish, you'll get to say "in the 1997th" as "tuhannennessayhdeksännessäsadannessayhdeksännessäkymmenennessäseitsemännessä".
Or avoid saying things in that manner to save your sanity, but who am I to judge? "from 1994 to 1997" would colloquially just be "välillä/vuodet ysineljä ysiseiska" to avoid compound words with forty syllables. I had to consult wiktionary to make sure I was inflecting that properly, and I'm native!
I have purchased three separate tomes of Oxford dictionaries of English, each between 1100 and 1600 pages. Paper dictionaries are the best. You can get lost in them, and you don't have to go to the computer to check something with variable results and etymological veracity.
I want to see more youtubers who swear hard. Advertiser appeasement affects language itself, now. Fuck you. Ah, fucking solid catharsis I'd get, from that. Everything feels very soft around the edges, prepackaged and smoothed out for the consumer.
I'm hit by an urge to read lots of classic and modern literature. Shakespeare, Pynchon, and that godforsaken mess of infinite recursive reference that is Joyce. Maybe I'll start from the shallow end.
Interesting to think that all of culture is built from pretty much nothing interesting. Forests and sand and endless water. Thousands of years of culture from nothing. It gives me pause to consider just how arbitrary everything we value fundamentally is. And if we left the world as is and disappeared as a species, none of the things produced would ever have purpose or meaning.
I've thought for a long time that I've learned to deal with my ADHD constructively, but recently, I'm starting to think I have pretty severe issues with executive dysfunction. Periods of extreme hyperfocus sweep me away to dedicate everything to art, followed by intensely apathetic weeks of being unable to do *anything* but scroll reddit, because there's too many interests and hobbies that require your time, so you just fizzle out after two minutes on all of them. Bleeeugh.
I've been shredding some Yngwie Malmsteen stuff lately. It's so tiring for the left hand, makes you all sluggish after a good fifteen minutes of practice. Fun though. I never did much sweep picking so it's really filling in some blanks there.
I've begun to find the word "hobby" slightly irksome. It somehow makes me think "your passions are commodified distractions" instead of "this is what you're alive for and what you want to dedicate your life to."
Thought: the culture you grow in irrevocably influences your thought so much that a major reason the world is socially more fractured now is because the world is changing faster and faster (internet), making it harder for each successive micro-generation to relate to the previous and fundamentally understand the ideas they hold dear.
This occurred when I realised just how much "being Finnish from the early 90s" has to do with any argument I might have with someone from a different country. Very subtle, usually, but I've been paying attention more, lately. No one was born in a vacuum without cultural ideas, just associations made to stimuli. Arbitrary base truths.
Looking into getting a cheap 35mm SLR and developing the B&W myself. I'm sick of the perfect cleanliness of digital photography. Need to breathe life into them with physical manipulation of the film.
Watched Timo Suosalo's "Kalteva Torni" (The Leaning Tower), starring the inimitable Martti Suosalo. Bit cheesy at times, but the protagonist's depiction of a schizophrenic with his free association, demanding inner voice, and dramatic flair, what a great time. Coulda watched his parts for the whole film. Kupolit kultaa!
I have celebrated the changing of the year by violently expelling all the past year's woes into the toilet following a night of excessive drinking. I sport several layered headaches.
I'm completely radicalised by AI "art": I will never accept it, and in fact fundamentally reject any product made with the help of it. You have given up any right to ever call yourself an artist by giving up your autonomy and pursuit of skillful perfection. Soon, I may begin to consider no longer consuming certain mediums made past year 202X if the trends don't change.
realising basically everyone online is on mobile- i *hate* making every web page design conform to mobile devices, because it means you have to keep scrapping functionality by the boatload. no buttons, huh? alternative is ignoring mobile users, in which case your traffic will be zero.
ah, i've stalled in my writing. i'm stuck on a couple world-building necessities to move on, but i feel like i should just write and it'll probably turn out okay regardless of whether the ideas are *perfectly* planned out or not. blegh.
the worst part of aging on the internet is realising no one else is aging with you and everyone is still a teenager, forever.
I'm stuck writing this theme that I'm using for the story, right? I'm trying to do this thing where there's recurring motivic content for emotional impact as the story unfolds, but man it's easy to get stuck in two-chord loops, hah. I'm no Bach here, regardless of how experienced a musician. Been playing a ton of piano lately- different compositional feel to the guitar.
I've spent the past week just putting in the hours with Blender. Thing's basically magic with how it's free, too. Amazing piece of software.
I've spent all day learning Blender so I could create a couple assets for the next part of my story. That was painful. Maybe I'll get faster as time goes on, hah. Welp, back to writing.
On another note, I came up with some worldbuilding that actually had me consult my old graduate topology textbook and thesis to make sure it all works right, hah.
I've begun to believe that all online video essay content is trash where the value is entirely parasocial by talentless hacks who have no central thesis at all. Maybe it's just the blurry plastic film of advertiser appeasement on top, but god, feel like I've never seen anyone say something *interesting* in one of those. There's so many, and they all belong on the third monitor to keep the silence and your own thoughts at bay. Like most of the modern internet.
Oh my poor lethargy. The sunlight hours are about to drop under 7 a day. Not that any sunlight shows for those either through the permanent overcast!
https://fiveoverfour.com/story/quiet i did a new update. the plot is doing some peeking. but hell, the soundeffects and music and coding are so much work, lol. on that note, fading in and out music in javascript suuuucks. gotta find a good way.
I just came up with some *worldbuildy stuff* for my site. Oh, it's on. I'm probably gonna mess it up but time to get to writing some sound effects...
so exhausted. no more work. here, have an incredible piece of drumming and soundscape: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZS7otxuUGZM a friend showed me and i'm impressed.
i think i'm waking from my design frenzy. it's been three or so days of non-stop css and feature-creep. everything is way too meticulous, time to get on the creative side again.
...just one more UI/UX feature i swear i can quit whenever i want.
Wrote a bunch more tonight. I got to use my new features of sound effects and branching paths. I'm so glad to be done with the JS for now. More coffee forever. I'm pretty excited about the project.
https://fiveoverfour.com/ redesigned the entire site. keyboard controls. save and load features for progress. way too much JS for one lifetime.
gonna finish polishing the front page and then i can get to writing text and music again.
http://fiveoverfour.com/paths/path_one/rusty (also /shore) working with more designs. also new update-notifier at the top means don't gotta click through all the dialogue prompts hehe. ow my hands. photoshop is NOT keyboard-friendly.
http://fiveoverfour.com/paths/path_one/quiet built this music-storytelling thing for my site. god, it took *so* much coding, probably 10-11 hours today, but i've got the main structure working. now i can focus on the creative side. check it out, i'm kinda proud of the design.
hehehehe i bought fiveoverfour.com for my little tilde page for fun. it's basically free. sure am glad the whois privacy worked out, lol. gah.
I've been using the talon software for a voice dictation for all of today, and it works way better than I ever expected. while I'm not going to entirely retire my hands, I feel like it's going to make a big difference in the strain by cutting out a lot of unnecessary mouse and keyboard use. I wrote this entire message without touching the keyboard or the mouse, hehehe.
Oh the sleep cycle, it goes round and round and round... Woke up at 6pm, 8pm, 10pm, midnight, 1am, 2:30am... One day, there will be two weeks where I wake up within the same hour.
someone in the finland subreddit interested in building a 1kW square wave generator with a <50ns dropoff to somehow generate ''''free'''' energy. unbeknownst to him, it would be simply be a very illegal broadband jammer, lol.
An inexplicable urge to watch either Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Mind Game, or Perfect Blue has struck me.
Ugh, my cybersec practice died when my laptop died. Friggin thing, gotta fix it. Something about the CMOS- OS wipes every time the battery goes out, replaced the SSD, too.
Also, trying to get your home network to allow all the stuff you're trying to do is *a pain*. Was doing Black Hat Python and man, nothing goes through internally, lol.
i'm totally getting some minimalist wide-toebox 0-drop shoes. sudden urge after restarting training, to be more healthy, lol.
gotta badly get on strength training again. been on-off through my entire 20s, making thus meager progress. bleh, just gotta keep doing it. it's not even hard to set aside the *time*, just the effort.
Note to self: clean your ears more often. Went swimming and was deaf for a week in my right ear until I fixed it. Again went swimming, so I'm now deaf in the left ear. Fuck, lol.
Back from the US, learning Ravel's 'Forlane' from 'Le Tombeau de Couperin'. It's pretty interesting to play. Ten thousand augmented and diminished chords.
Oh woops my flight is cancelled suddenly. Fun! AAAAAA. Ok there's flights the next day. Gahhhhhhh. One more airline for the blacklist, huh?
Going to the US on holiday tomorrow. Looking forward to everything but the CBP and TSA, lol. And the trillion hour flights with barely enough time during layovers, of course.
Thought: man I wish that 1. you could clear notifications from the front page and 2. usernames in notifications were clickable links.
Extremely minor activism of the day: if (window.chrome) { document.title = "use firefox lol"; } My rebellion is unstoppable.
Dang hands are hurting like hell again, shame to have so many hobbies involving a kb+mouse, a guitar, a piano... and have to periodically avoid them due to overuse, boo! In similar news, playing around with network programming in python, it's very cool to manually deal with sockets and packets.
The 802.11 protocol is a pain in the ass. Who the heck decided to make the internet this complicated, aaaaaaa. In similar news, reading Black Hat Python 2nd Ed. It's a pretty good time, though my hands are killing me (rip typing with my precious, overused tendons).
Spent last night having fun with google dorking and open IP cams etc. Good times- the internet is not as locked down as one might think. Hopeful? Maybe a tiny bit, in the face of WEI and the whole world antagonising encryption, anyway.
In other news, I am starving, my sleep cycle is on its head and I'm waiting for the rice cooker to stave off my death for another evening. Gah.
Hello, everyone. This looks pretty cool. I was thinking of ways to build notpron-style puzzle sequence on my tilde.club page. Anyway, new to Gemini as well- salutations etc.