We put our cat to sleep this week. I actually introduced him to Hubski when we first got him - lil Elvis. The last two weeks his health declined quite rapidly, we knew he had kidney disease, and we knew it would be the thing that got him in the end no matter what we did. A month ago he was very active, happy as can be, and this week he would only sit on us and purr softly. He was slow to turn to anything that got his attention, and he'd stumble when he walked. He was eating almost nothing, drinking water all the time and most obviously, no longer cleaning himself. He just wasn't enjoying life, and we knew the time had come. We arranged for our vet to do a home visit to put him to sleep. The last thing we wanted was for him to be scared in his last moments. The vet arrived, took one look at him and said "Yeah, he's ready to go." One jab to put him into a restful coma, another jab to let him rest properly. All up it took about 15 minutes. My partner and I cried the whole time. We're having him cremated, and will plant a tree for him out the back. We've been meaning to get some fruit trees going. I've still got his collar. We have hundreds of photos of him. I took a little recording of him purring the night before he passed. He still sounded like a V8. I just miss him. He was our best bud. An incredibly calm, delightfully friendly cat who came into his own once we rescued him. We can sleep with the bedroom door closed now, but we don't. We can leave glasses of water around the lounge now, but we don't. We can leave the backdoor open when doing chores, but we don't. It'll take time to adjust, I think. It hurt to watch him go, but we gave him the last gift we could. He got to go sleeping, in his favourite person's arms (my partner) and without a worry. As far as he's concerned, he's still sleeping. He'll wake up when he's ready.
Hey Hubski :) Ehm... I have ADHD?? Sometime last year, I was reading an article about misdiagnosed ADHD in adults. Going through the list of symptoms, I was kind of shocked that 70% were "definitely" and the rest were somewhere between "sometimes" and "in phases". It made me question the possibility. I was then reminded of how I feel after I take stimulants. Specially on the days after. While many people are just drained, I seem to be quite serene. With a "silent" brain. Anyway. I started to notice more and more, and before I turned it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, I decided to get checked. 6 months and a few doctor visits later, I have my diagnosis. Since last Friday, I am on medication. 5 mg of Medikinet (Methylphenidate retard), twice a day. The doctor said that I should probably not feel much. But I definitely do. And what I am feeling has gotten me close to tears on multiple occasions the past few days. I feel it the clearest when I meditate in the morning. I have managed to meditate daily since April last year (missing the occasional weekend or odd day when I overslept). What used to feel like a tropical monsoon of though barrage feels now like rain. I realized that I am living under a constant thin veil of (mainly social) anxiety. Even though it is not completely gone, it is just more tolerable. It's not like a have superpowers or something. I am still doing the same things I do normally, I just don't get completely hijacked by my machine gun like thoughts. It feels good. With a hint of sadness. Knowing that I have been carrying this my whole life and I could have suffered less.
Congratulations! If you're not already familiar, I'd recommend skimming through a copy of Delivered from Distraction and continuing to learn more about ADHD. Understanding what is (and isn't) part of your ADHD experience is the first step to successfully responding to symptoms. That can be with with treatments, coping strategies or just acceptance. Living with ADHD is an ongoing struggle, but it is 100% possible to successfully live a good life, however you define that.
Movie's dead. Fuckin' sucks. I'm about $15k invested in it at this point, between plugin upgrades, studio upgrades, sample library upgrades. Not to mention about two months getting the studio from 6 channels to 10. And all the bullshit involved in that. Or the three months spent actually mixing the turkey. It was gonna be good. It sounded goddamn amazing. I had a scene in there that was stupidly preposterously meme-worthy. Fuckin' zombies meticulously composed in Envy, swirling clouds of cultist jungle PA built through granular synthesis and Radium, underwater zombie knife fights, fuckin' riduculously lush environments. Atmos is so fucking liberating to mix in. I'm pretty sure I have the smallest, cheapest, shittiest Atmos rig in the world, at least if you pare off the poseurs who are doing it in headphones like simps. Producers want to execute the completion bond. First time I've ever heard of that happening in post; there's very little reason to take it from the incumbents - who are doing it for free - to give it to a new group who are doing it for a fee unless you need to mark a loss RIGHT NOW for accounting purposes. So ultimately the task at hand is revealed for what it is: "take this money and lose it so we can balance out capital gains elsewhere, we actually don't give the first fuck about your project." No, I'm not getting paid, neither is anyone else. No, I don't want your fucking pity. It just fucking blows because I'm actually really goddamn good at this and I can feel in my bones that we're about a month or two from someone posting yet another "actually we like reading our movies" article. So for now? The massive pro tools rig is being used to DJ an hour's worth of industrial music a week. Next week we're live in the studio for the first time since like 2015 which means i need to move the rig to the Least Practical Laptop and entertain people for six hours while begging for money. The "six hours while begging for money" portion isn't really a big deal but I'm extremely apprehensive about plucking my shitty DJ controller and Rekordbox install and throwing it on a macbook air. And now it's time to reacquaint myself with the mechanical side. I had forgotten how fucking complicated this shit is. None of that is from a kit, none of that is from an eHow, none of that is from an instructables, none of that is from anyone else's advice. Which is probably why my connectors fit cables but not my "why doesn't anyone make this" cable ends so I'm gonna have to redesign the shell for the brain. Which is okay because I need to design the shell for the co-brain because this monstrosity requires an EC01 and an ECS-1 and a PAIR of 7535Ns. Control of this machine starts at an Ethernet cable and balloons out to three DSub25s, two Dsub 15s, six Dsub 9s, two HX6s and an HX4. And EtherCAT, can't forget the EtherCAT. I gotta test all that shit. But first I need to redesign it so the connectors fit LOL
I'm quitting my job. i put in my two weeks notice on friday, but really i said I'd work until the end of the month if i had to to give some time to find somebody new. i can't stand my boss and I'm happy to be gone. i have nothing in the works for a new job. the mood of the season is sour grape jealousy. the phrase of the season is "things are alright, but..." i wish i had some cash on hand to burn on some dumb shit. i wish i was having wild adventures. the steadier i start living the more my skin crawls for something new. I'm having relationship struggles. I've been with my boyfriend for almost 4 years. i love him and i want to stay with him. i turn into a piece of shit when he's not around. when he's gone i feel like I'm caged up. but I'm 23 and he's 21. i feel stupid when i think about the future or the long-term, but i want to. i really want to say my "let's be together forever"s, but I'm scared. I'm scared that either we'll change and not be right for each other, or that we won't change and will stunt each other's growth. we're both depressed underachievers with dreams that don't feel in reach, and i worrry that we feed into each other's bullshit. honestly the proximate issue is that we don't have sex. i think we average maybe once a month or every 3 weeks at most. when i get unhappy i want to have sex. when he gets unhappy he doesn't want to have sex. there are stretches of time where i stopped trying to initiate sex because it made me feel like a creep - but i can't wait for him to do it because the difference in drive is the way it is. it just builds resentment in me towards him and it sucks. this is the only issue in our relationship, but it's big enough that it drags it down. everything else is legitimately wonderful. it just hurts to be rejected over and over, and it hurts when i can't enjoy the time we spend together doing other stuff as much because I'm wishing we were fucking i like writing. i never wanted to make it into anything beyond a hobby. i was good at academic writing, or good enough to be graded well, but i can't stand the thought of going into academia. making money as a real author looks like hell, but i thought it would be fun to write some erotica and make some scratch on it on the side. every time i try to write something sexy it's all blood and guts and machines churning and chunks in the woodchipper. i keep trying to write porn and i keep getting body horror. so i think my niche has found me
On the sex/relationship struggle. I feel you. My partner and I have wildly different drives, mine being lower, hers being much higher. She'd happily have sex every night or so, I'm happy with once a week or so. It took some good conversations to get that sorted, because there was the inevitable "Don't you find me attractive?" query, coupled with my personal, and irritating, combination of being very tactile, but not hugely sexual. I like it when she touches me or I touch her, but I don't often have it leading into anything. I just like contact. Rubbing my back is a guaranteed way to win an argument with me, cause I'll just doze right off. She however saw it as an initiation, and so when I stop the contact or start a conversation, she felt it was a rejection. We compromised, essentially, with her being okay if some times just we focused on her, and other times I'd be in the mood too. We had some lengthy talks about it, and unfortunately I don't have any advice you haven't already considered, I can only offer understanding. It's much better now, but I know without a doubt she felt similarly towards me, as you do to him. Sick of the rejection, knowing it's not personal but still hurting anyway, thinking about it when we're doing something else.
is likely a significant contributing factor of It's worth doing everything you (both) can to fix that, because it is slowly killing your relationship. Once you're on the other side, you may be amazed just how much better everything is between you two, inside and outside the bedroom.we're both depressed
we don't have sex
i have a new bit where i connect a few big words and big concepts together in my head on my way to work and then google them on my phone when I'm at the front desk when nobody's around. there's always somebody with some thoughts on it, a paper on it, a book about it, etc: you just need to know the right words to summon them up. my latest ones today are "necropolitics of homosexuality" and "queer phenomenology". i've been having a slow-motion crisis of faith that i still have no resolution for. it's a crisis of belief in all its forms. i haven't talked about it much outside my own head and it's ourobouresque so bear with me. i don't know what truth is. i don't know where morals come from. i don't know what's real. i know there are methods of figuring out what's true, but functionally, they all feel no different to me. there's a whole chain of thought you can go down about perception, is it the same as reality, etc, but I'm not smart enough for it. i don't understand the difference between the physical and the mental. if thoughts are electrical impulses in the brain, it seems like everything is physical on a certain level. are numbers physical? are morals physical? i get twisted up about a lot of silly stuff like this, but when you keep questioning things you end up with the silly questions at the end. i have a bone to pick with the kind of assumed that try to evade the silly questions. my problem is with science, and the problem is that no matter how i slice it up, i have to rely on faith to use science. i'm not capable of understanding everything out there. even if science was able to perfectly represent everything in the perfect infinite future where everything has been reduced to its most basic principles, there'd be no way to know it all in one head. there's no way to verify everything you hear yourself. you can't replicate every study you see on the news. at a certain point, you have to trust that the person telling you that X is X is correct. for everything that you can't personally verify and see with your own eyes, you have to rely on trust (not even getting into the perception vs reality can of worms). so functionally, what difference is there between the belief that i have in something established scientifically to be true, but which I have no way to verify, and some belief made by something else? and how do you scientifically establish a moral, anyway? i just go round and round about it. i'm only knowledgable enough to get myself in trouble
in summary I've been reading too much in other news, Cumol inspired me to send my PCP some paperwork that I've been needing to send for 6 months - i got diagnosed with autism last year and the psych said that it might be worth a try to go on "a mild neurostimulant" so i might be microdosing ritalin in the gauntlet of other pills that I'm taking i remembered the point to the previous post: basically i feel like society is a big machine that's designed to diffuse things. the doctor not treating you because you're trans is localized blame - the doctor not treating you because your insurance doesn't cover trans stuff is diffused blame. science at its core is a mode of inquiry. it uncovers truth. but the way science is used socially is to diffuse truth. it gets spread around until you can see through the cracks. communities are machines for sharing. science feels like a mechanized faith. it's truthfinding made capital m Modern. it feels like instead of pointing to god, you can now point to the machine. it's insufficiently material. and it just feels phony when it's applied to things that are socially constructed. I'm sick to death of the science of social science, where people make models to worship and indianajones-swap them with the real world i keep losing my train of thought
OKAY SO here's the latest and greatest: We're going to reference the last Hubski for numbers. - Girl 1, went out again last night. Another good date? More good sex? She's really cool, but I'm not sure if I'm feeling enough of a spark with her to really keep things going. Idk, she's really pleasant and genuinely interested in me, my interests, and I feel the same about her...but... - Girl 2, went out a great 2nd date for dinner over the weekend. She's pretty much out for the next 2-3 weeks though due to a work trip and subsequent family trip. The thing with her is we already have some more common interests, and there's just a lot more flirting/ribbing/roasting back and forth which is super entertaining, and makes for great conversation. - Girl 3, out of the running. Overall though, here's the rub: VP of my department asked me a few weeks during our monthly 1:1 "why am I here", and "why do I work", and "what's stopping me from doing everything that I want to do" and spent some time telling me how she sees flashes of greatness from me at work. This is something I feel is true in nearly every part of my life, and is a truly fleeting feeling. I have enough savings to fuck off and not work for 2-3 years, but would like another $35ish thousand in the bank to really go off and do whatever. And to take an aid and big wall climbing course. It's a weird feeling - kind of Willy Wonka-esque. I've kind of gotten everything and more I thought I'd ever want and have in life up to this point, and it's like, what now? What happens next? Maybe I need to spend some serious time on figuring out more deeply who I am, what my values are, what my vision is for myself.
About halfway through our biking trip! The last few days were flat and easy - we’re making better time and having lots of rest days because the cities are mostly on the west coast. There are harder days coming in the second part, with hills and headwind and more daily kms but I’m more confident now that it’s very doable. I’ve been in a general good mood, reflecting about my past and future. There are still worries and regrets that bubble up but I feel like it’s getting better. Having lots of fun hypothetical conversations with my friends. Jerome is convinced AI will lead to the end of the world within 10-20 years. AND that it’s statistically most likely we’re living in a simulation. It’s all wild and cooky ideas but he’s thought about it a lot so I don’t have any very convincing counter-arguments, just a general “naaaaah” feeling and loose ideas of why it doesn’t seem right. Mostly because it feels unlikely that the truth would align with our current zietgist of popular theories. But in the end we’re all in agreement that it doesn’t impact how we live our life so it’s just fun things to think about while we ride. Another topic of recurrent debate is what’s “heathy” - and that’s easier to research on the spot with nutrition and stuff. Should we fast? Eat different color veggies? Is animal fat unhealthy? Etc…
The Passenger, by Cormac McCarthy, is a masterpiece.