Tuesday Tomorrow Today

A hard day for Shanda, at least at times. She wanted my help but I was out until almost 9 PM and by then she was angry enough to make it a moot point – we never really recovered. So another day that ends with avoidance-denial-anger-unload-sleep. And another night when staying up until 5 AM after that feels like a good idea.

Robots went okay today. We’re still at 0% functioning auto code and BC is still trying to make the whole thing drop into place fully formed. I pushed past him on some testing and framework changes today so maybe that will help over the rest of the week. The drivers are still asking for nonsense controls, but at this point I’m just gonna let them have what they say they want for Saturday – we can fix it after they decide it’s too hard and slow.

I’m still undecided about the Wednesday robots meeting – school is out at 2 that day so if I can get there early I could be home around the same time as Shanda. But spending a few hours at a panic meeting is still pretty stressful, and I don’t have any days off until the end of next week. On the gripping hand, it would be an excuse for some more Baymax.

Talked to KTuck about their project and the challenges of smooth animation with low end hardware even in the information age. Scared myself a little with the idea of syncing 3k pixels around my theater roon. Even with 32 output pins that’s still only 3 Hz refresh. But there aren’t a lot of options for cheaply stringing up something 20 m long without a lot more wires.

Talked to DerbyK just a bit about grief and the complications of loss when it’s spread across time. I have lost a lot of things and people including my parents and sometimes myself. I used to worry that I didn’t care enough to feel grief – some people imagine I don’t have emotions or connections and talk about that as proof of my psychopathy**. But I think it’s closer to expecting loss at all times and simply being satisfied with that state as inevitable or even desirable***.

Talked with Shanda quite a bit about the rent-a-house plan from the last The Screed. It was fearful at first but I think she’s more excited about the idea after talking about how it might actually work instead of just worrying about how it might be hard. My hope is that it gives me about 2 weeks of down time in an environment where it’s slightly easier for me to not exclusively lay on the couch, and that I might find an option for winter holidays that isn’t so painful and isolating*. Plus I want to take Dog into the snow on a trip when I have time to see him.

Tomorrow includes both morning meetings and afternoon Melissa, which could be challenging. Particularly since she can’t even name a time this week, let alone stick to it, so who knows if she’ll show up at all. She would be out of pills if she took them all on time but I’m pretty sure she would have to be out for at least 4 weeks before she’d even notice.

Poof levels are high. Not high enough for a Pizzamas mustache, but high enough to make it easy for me to worry instead of being patient, even for things I know won’t change for weeks.

ZiB

*And if I’m lucky maybe help someone else with something similar.

**And for some reason aren’t afraid to tell me about their suspicion of my non-personness. I feel like that’s not the sort of thing you would want to admit to someone you didn’t think was bound by social rules, but I guess I have more experience handling psychopaths than the sort of person who tells me this.

***At least in my head where the best version of me is simultaneously helpful to others and entirely undetectable. Relationships where I’m seen providing anything other than self-sustaining and eventually unnecessary improvements to the process of their life are an indication that I’m doing something harmful.

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Sent from a phone.