What I've been up to lately:

On February 18 I started a 100 days of writing project where I write for at least 45 minutes a day. It's been going pretty well in the sense that I have been writing every day, but not in the sense where I've been doing it for 45 minutes. It took a bit to get into the routine and I'm not sure if I have succeeded or if I've just done well writing the last few days.

There were a few days where I missed my morning meds so now that I'm taking them again, that may be contributing to the fact that I'm able to focus.

I had some dental work done; my gums are strong but my luxury teeth bones are weak AF so they often have issues (many of my baby teeth didn't have adult teeth underneath and fake teeth are not meant to last forever). Since teeth are not part of your health despite gum disease being linked to dementia, insurance didn't cover any of the work I've had done. All the work I did to save money for the last 6 months has been SHATTERED. That money plus half my last paycheck went to my dentist, I hope he enjoys it. However, I'm excited to have my main chewing teeth back! It turns out those teeth in the way back serve an extremely important purpose, and that's "comfortable eating."

I have a doctor in my family who says: Gum health is heart health! Don't forget. Somehow your gums are way more important than you ever expected them to be.

Because of this I've been eating soft non-complex foods throughout most of February and I have another few weeks of it while we wrap up the work needed. I cannot tell you how excited I am to eat pizza as a reward for all of this.

Playing

Monster Hunter Wilds was released Feb 28 and I put 25 hours in the first 3 days. I'm doing "okay" with not getting incredibly addicted because I like to take things slow. I did get through the story (to the credits/first final boss) and that felt like a huge accomplishment over the weekend, but for the rest I'll grind and explore and go at a slower pace. Monster Hunter games are both meditative and a great channel for letting out anger, both things I need right now.

However, it is in DIRECT COMPETITION with my webcrafting since I use the same computer to play. Sometimes I find myself getting on to tweak something on the site and automatically open the game and I don't even realize it until I've navigated all the way into base camp. Oh well, sites are not meant to be updated daily!

Watching

I finished watching Attack on Titan (except for the movie) which I started in January. When it was new I watched the first two seasons but never revisited when the last two came out more recently. It was so good. Very WTF. A wonderful illustration of how information sharing can impact how we view each other, ourselves, and the world.

I've also been watching Severance, but I think I'm too dumb for this show.

Reading

On audio, I'm listening to A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn, which has already been called out for bias, but which provides a unique view of this country's history that puts the current context into an interesting perspective. It's not a false narrative, you just have to look stuff up to verify it before you declare it as truth in conversation, that's all. I think the main complaint I've read from (non-conservative) literary reviewers is that Zinn relied on biased sources without further analyzation. That's basically everything in the news now, no big deal, I can handle it.

(I had to clarify "non-conservative" because conservative-leaning reviews of this book have a lot more to say about how the minority experience in America was and is "nothing like that" and this is "woke nonsense." Sure, Jan.)

I did not do this on purpose but my eBook is Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano. I am part of a "Decolonize Your Mind" reading challenge on Storygraph which is where I got the recommendation for this book. People's History is also on that list, but the reason I bought it was because it was on sale. I didn't purposefully read them simultaneously, but I'm glad I am, even though both are incredibly emotionally rough to get through. I'm so sensitive that I catch myself crying over written accounts of what happened due to imperialism in the 15-20th centuries... so it will take me a while to get through these books.

This is all sorely needed education on my part, especially as I've learned to regulate my emotions better and I don't shy away from books that will upset me. It's stupid how many parallels you can draw between European imperialism in Latin America vs the US, but even more gutting the differences in how slavery and exploitations were handled - really awful either way. Who knew there were so many different ways to be incredibly awful to an entire continent of people? Europeans were not cool and I'm pissed that I learned in school that they were the COOLEST.

Music

Recently I set up my NAS for my home network and dropped my entire MP3 music library on it. It's not very well organized, and not every track has the appropriate metadata so there are a lot of "track 01"s and "Unknown Artist"s to fix. I don't care at the moment, I'm just happy that I can use Plex to stream my music library anywhere inside or outside my house! This is my savior as I move away from YouTube and other music services that require you to pay to get basic features. I still use Bandcamp to find music but I've abandoned the idea of making playlists there because my MP3 library includes all those albums AND MORE.

I started pirating music with Napster in 1999, moved onto LimeWire, then finally ended with Pirate Bay. My collection includes everything I've downloaded since then, though I also still have tons of CDs and records without digital equivalents to catch up on.

Now that I've got it all set up, I'm going to start a new project to keep a music blog while I go through all my albums. Not only do I need to update metadata, but I also NEED to listen to stuff I haven't heard in 10+ years because it's been buried on some drive somewhere and too inconvenient to bring out. I've been quietly building my playlist site (which still has a long way to go) and I might put it there. "Why have 40 blogs, Max?" This is just how I do things online. I feel more satisfied separating topics than I do keeping it all in one place. That said, I might do a personal links round-up in these kinds of posts as I spew my words all over the internet.

Links

Some sites I came across in the last few weeks:

Hope your February was better than your January, though I know if you're in the USA it probably wasn't. For those of you in winter who hate winter, spring is on its way! It's already starting to stay light later, not LIGHT light, but a nice light blue late into the evening before it dips into darkness.