On Recovery

First Published: 2026 June 28

Draft 2: 28 June 2026

Recovery is such a strange concept to me. On the one hand, it brings forth for me an image of restoration, returning back to some prior state. On the other¹, there’s no returning to any previous point. When something is broken, repair is making something new, especially when it comes to a living being.

Every cell inside of me is being constantly replaced. Most every molecule is constantly being reacted and re-made, if not actively filtered out and replaced itself. I would have few doubts in my mind that most of the individual atoms themselves² are even being cycled through relatively quickly.

So, then, what does recovery mean to a body in constant change?

In this case, my acute recovery is focused on the large patch of skin that was removed from my arm. Something that feels somewhat strange now that I’ve taken a moment to think about it is how our body can regrow each part of our skin at the same place. The freckles and moles I have do not change location. In some ways this makes sense; the relative location of my skin does not change, so if there’s a piece that says to grow weirdly, I suppose I would expect it to keep regrowing weirdly. Right now, though, I’m less sure of that fact.

When the skin was removed from my arm, the surgeon³ sewed the edges together. The goal is to minimize the amount of scar tissue that forms. That raises an interesting question for me, though: what happens to the relative skin location of each chunk.

There are a few ideas that would make the most sense to me:

• The body, upon replacing all the skin cells, reproduces whatever arrangement existed before things are removed. Given that the goal of removing skin is often to remove a single set of mutated cells, this may not be what happens. Given that I was told to expect my mutation might grow back, though, it’s also possible.

• The body has the mental map of skin cells. There’s a distortion, where two previously disparate⁴ areas are now touching. The body is an algorithm, and so it has no relation between radial location of different skin locations.

• The body has a radial map, and it slowly regenerates the mole from its sewn location back to where it belongs. Removed area is replaced with new skin that maps to the specific radial location.

Unfortunately, I did not look for the location of any mole right on the edge of where the incision happened, so I do not know what my body will be treating as the answer to recovery. I’m sure that, in general, the body does some combination of the three. Honestly, given the strangeness of the human body, I’m sure that it actually does some other thing.

But, that’s neither here nor there. What is here is the fact that my body is rebuilding itself. It’s strange to me, therefore, that I am intentionally weakening and restricting my body from maintaining its strength.

It makes sense when I stop to think about how all that will stretch and tear, and I don’t want to stretch and tear the stitches or the fragile web of new skin that connects their pieces. It’s fun to me, though, that to improve one injury, I must allow other parts to become weaker.

This reminds me of what I’ve heard is a difference between European and Chinese teaching styles. Both compare children to fields. However, while a field of wheat needs time to rest and years to sit fallow, rice paddies improve when they are constantly maintained.⁵ As a result, European models include long breaks and discrete rest, while Asian models do not. I’m sure that this is moreso racial storytelling than anything real, but it’s something that can help here; rather than think about this time as becoming weaker, it’s time for my body to rest fallow. This is the time that I rest to allow for better growth in the future.

Fallow is something that I think we need to get back to as a culture. Not necessarily in the initial context of farming, I’m all for man’s domination of the natural world, but in the realm of our lived experience. Unlike the people who extol boredom and the experience of not having anything to do, I think that it may be better for me and others to consider the idea of letting the mind and body sit fallow.

When a field is left fallow, whatever happens to grow on it grows. This allows the minerals and chemicals that desired produce require to refill naturally. As we have improved farming techniques, lettings fields fallow has become less important. First, we know what plants can be used to replace missing nutrients, and we can intentionally seed them instead. Second, we know what chemicals are the nutrients, and we can manually add them to the soil and plants as they need them at each different stage of growth. This is certainly better; we have fewer years of famine as a result of fields not producing.

But, there’s a value in letting nature take its course. I’m sure of that fact, even if the analogy may not work for farming. OH wait!

When fields are left to fallow, the plants which return are often plants which local pollinators yearn for. Local pollinators, for all that we tend to consider them unneeded, are responsible for large portions of agriculture. Giving them opportunities to eat the diets they most desire helps with that.

Second, when fields are scheduled to be fallow, we are reminded that time exists not just within the cycle of the year, but within the cycle of multiple years. We have removed the Jubilee year from our society, and we are the weaker for it. So much of modern business relies on this idea that there will be eternal debts.

Nothing, however, is eternal.

If every debt came issued with the knowledge that at the next forty-nine or fifty year mark⁶, what changes would happen? Well, it certainly would be harder to get a loan in the years directly before the Jubilee. We would not have this issue of generations of wage debt. The company store never would have been able to trap people for their entire working life.

I note that, for all that we are consistently being told by the fascists and proto-fascists in power that we need to return to biblical principles, not one has seriously proposed that we have universal debt forgiveness.

When we do not let the ground rest, why would we expect that we would let our fellow man rest? The way we treat any part of Creation mirrors the way that we treat all of it. In the past, when we needed to let the world rest, we understood that we needed to let one another rest. Today, we know what chemicals we need to make someone productive. We know exactly when and how to give them for optimal performance.⁷

There’s evidence that fruit trees grow more fruit when they are not monocultured. That’s more work to harvest, though, so we will not do that.

As I take this time for recovery, I am reminded that the idea that I, a single man, would be expected to keep my home, feed myself, work, and all else is a completely modern idea. The boarding house was, so far as I understand it, the most stable iteration of the removal of young men from their families to follow their career. And yet, that idea feels so absurd now.

What does it mean to recover?

Recover comes, through steps, from the idea of seizing again. It is to recapture something which has been⁸ lost.

To recover, then, we must lose something. To recover, we must grasp something.

To recover, I must accept that I have lost many of the aspects of me that were my most joyful.

To recover, I must grasp for them.

Draft 1: 28 June 2026

I’ve been back home for the past two or so weeks recovering from a surgery that was far more disabling than I expected. That was not in my plans for the summer, but I’m also not entirely unhappy with the fact that it happened. I love my time with my family, and it’s been really nice being able to focus on the recovery and my family life.

It’s also been nice to be able to use this time to work on recovering some mental health. I think that I’ve posted here in the past with the fact that my rate of blogging loosely correlates with my mental health, at least over a few week to month term.⁹ Because I have had so few obligations on my time and attention, I have been able to put my focus towards figuring out what serves me best.

Some major takeaways from the physical aspect of recovery:

I hate having a shaved arm. It’s very itchy, especially since it’s wrapped in such a way that I can’t really use my arm.

I miss working out, and especially working out in Pilates classes. They feel really nice in the moment and they help me feel more centered in general. My hips are tight now, which is causing some lower back pain. Probably that’s because Pilates helped me strengthen some muscles that were previously weaker, and so now that muscular strength and endurance is degrading¹⁰, there’s a mismatch in what my body can do. It will be nice to be able to work out again.

When my arm is splinted, there’s still a fair amount of rotation possible in the shoulder. This is bad, as it means that I have to make sure my shoulder is rotated correctly to prevent my arm from hurting.

While I can use my right hand for a task for a few moments, within a minute or so there is a large amount of pain. This reminds me that I do not respect my boundaries or listen to my own body.

I am not great at remembering to take medicine on a routine that’s more often than “upon waking up”.

Showering is hard when I can’t use my right arm. Many things are hard, but the fact that I also have to ensure I keep it dry absolutely doesn’t help.

Great!

Some mental notes:

The things I have been given to help with focus help. In particular, when I am on my standard working dose of stimulants¹¹, I am able to churn through large amounts of work in relatively short periods of time. When I remove caffeine from the equation, I find that I am less able to go for as long, and I also find that I am less able to stay awake through the day.¹² When I remove all stimulants, I cannot do anything, it feels like.

I often feel like there’s this vague cloud of unease around me. When I sit down to journal, the cloud disperses, letting me know that, in retrospect, it was a worry that there might be something on my mind, rather than anything in particular on my mind.

Being in a relationship with my partner is fantastic. It both gives me another reason to feel better and helps me when I’m thinking about the future. I’ve not made a secret in life or on this blog that one big reason I have yearned for a partner in the past is for a reason to build my life along a certain path. In front of me at all times are infinite branching directions I can take my life. So many of these branches are now useless to me, as they do not involve my partner or are actively antithetical to remaining with her. That’s been honestly really nice as I consider my future.

Much as I would like to believe that I am a being that exists separately in separate spheres, I am in fact a composite being. Stressors in one part of my life bleed over into others, and when any part of me is struggling, all parts of me struggle more. This does also work in reverse, however. As any part of me improves, the entirety of me is bettered.

So, that was far more rambly than expected. Let’s take a bit, call a friend¹³, and then come back and see what we think. Great.

Called the friend.¹⁴

Upcoming Posts

• Wonder

• Curse of knowledge, esp re. Music Theory¹⁵.

  Most of a draft done, though rambly.

• Overview of a course on astrochem

  I think that I have writing somewhere about it.

• RebelFit

  A rambly draft done, and some more work which tells me that I was not doing anything wrong in the past, approximation just takes time.

• Why aspiring writers should practice typing¹⁶

Daily Reflection: 28 June 2026

• How’s things?

  Decent! Haven’t been keeping up on most things, but that’s life sometimes.

• What’s a recent win?

  Annotated my entire CV! That’s great and exciting.

• You have the big tapestry embroidery project! How’s that going?

  Not great. On Friday (two days ago), I did manage to get a few four by four blocks with gaps done, so now I’ll go through and fill them in to see what the color looks like.¹⁷

• Do you feel like you’re taking good care of yourself?

  Eh. I’m being gentler with myself, which is probably good. I was reminded yesterday that caffeine does make a big difference in my productivity, and also that breaks are bad. When I take a break, I do manage to get back into the work, but all I want to do next is take another break, and then that second break lasts forever.¹⁸

• What could you be doing better?

  I had things that I wanted to be doing daily this break, and I haven’t been doing all of them as much as I’d like. Could be doing those more.

• Are you appropriately keeping in touch with those you love?

  Mostly! Forgot that I was to call someone yesterday, so will call them after this daily reflection or maybe whole blog post.

• Big upcoming events? Preparation for them?

  • I have a two week camp equivalent coming up in mid July. I have submitted the necessary paperwork, now I just need to wait to go back to work to remind the work that it’s happening in case it didn’t get across.

  • I’m visiting my partner in mid July. I have booked tickets and shared the itinerary.

• Once again, then, how’s it going?

  Honestly really well. It is really nice to be at home with my family, and I do really appreciate the time that this is giving me to recover and reflect. I do wish that I was being better about journaling on paper, because I do really and legitimately believe that it the thing I do with my life that best serves my mental health in the short and medium term. Despite that fact, though, I am not about to go do so.¹⁹

Revisiting RebelFit in 2026

First Published: 2026 June 22

Prereading note: this is very rotational spec heavy and very rambly... readers be advised.

Draft 1: 22 June 2026

So, I really want to get back into the spectral fitting program which made up the bulk of my Ph.D. dissertation. My biggest let downs with the project as it stood then were:

• The program required calling another program (SPCAT) hundreds of thousands of times, often in what seems like might have been redundant calls. When I looked at the runtime, I think that, to a rounding error, all of the run time came from calling this program.

• I couldn’t get the Latin Capped Hypersphere to work

The other major features that I would want to add to the program to call is something to be proud of:

• Extension into S reduction

• Now that I’m further from the actual project, using the 6 “true” distortion constants as the source of truth, and then using A and S reductions as the shadow ones.

• Making it easier to have the program take in other Hamiltonians.

So, how would I resolve this?¹

Let’s start with the first issue: calling the catalog generating program a number of times. This is not a new issue in the field of rotational spectroscopy. Since before even this program was created², there have been methods to approximate the value of the energy levels in a way that can be pre-computed. If I remember correctly, three-ish gigabytes is the storage needed to solve the primary rotational constants to basically floating point error. It also only took like twenty minutes to generate, and that gives all possible values of the rotational constants. Since RebelFit works within a range of values, that takes far less time. Still, thinking about the optimization part of it should come later. For now, let’s talk through what I would need to solve in order to get this to work.

1. Showing that SPCAT A, B, C and a hard-coded (read: manually solved (read: I put in the math and make my computer solve it)) A, B, C produce the same transition locations

2. Showing that SPCAT A, B, C and hand-solved X, Y, Z lead to the same transition locations

3. Showing that SPCAT A, B, C and A reduction lead to the same transitions as hand-solved A, B, C (or X, Y, Z) and A reduction

4. Showing that SPCAT A, B, C and A reduction lead to the same transitions as hand-solved X, Y, Z and Watson T reduction³

5. Showing that hand-solved X, Y, Z match up to the approximation version for X, Y, Z

6. Showing that hand-solved X, Y, Z and T match up to the approximation version for X, Y, Z and rho⁴

7. Showing that SPACT A reduction matches the approximation version

8. Reading and using the paper that defines transition intensity to match the approximation to the SPCAT intensities⁵.

9. Ensuring that this new version is actually faster than the old version

10. Hopefully don’t need to repeat to get the S-reduction available

11. Something something make it work for other forms of distortion⁶

Since I’m often told something that my writing⁷ lacks is connection between fact and conclusion, let’s motivate each step.

1. SPCAT A B C matching computed A B C.

   This is in theory not a step that I actually need to do. These are mathematically identical. However, I’ve tried to read the SPCAT source code before and I have legitimately no idea what it’s doing. Three rotational constants is easy enough that I should be able to do the coding for it in a few seconds, and then the issue is just having SPCAT run a few times. In general, I probably want it to run one very oblate, one very prolate, and one that’s just basically intermediate.

2. SPCAT A B C matching computed X Y Z

   So, in general, rotational spectra are solved using A, B, C rotational constants. However, computational chemists are more likely to use X, Y, Z. There are⁸ six ways to pair X, Y, Z to A, B, C. So long as I match them appropriately, this should take moments at best to verify.

   Given that I think it’s trivial to verify, why do it? A few reasons:

   • I think that the Watson paper which defines A reduction uses X, Y, Z coordinates somewhere

   • In theory, X, Y, Z are better coordinates to use because they can be taken straight out of a Gaussian or other computational software output

   • Something something, this makes the distortion work out.

   Once we ensure that we can reliably match the rigid rotor to the SPCAT rigid rotor, it becomes important to match them with reductions. There’s a slight hiccup here, which is that A, B, C in rigid rotor world are not, as it turns out, the same as A, B, C in A reduction world. As I write this, I am a little curious if that’s the issue that I’m running into or was running into, at least, when I last worked on this.

3. Showing that SPCAT A, B, C and A reduction lead to the same transitions as hand-solved A, B, C (or X, Y, Z) and A reduction

   So, this is better named as three different steps:

   • Showing that SPCAT A B C and A reduction match the computed A B C (A reduced value) and distortion

     This step is the first one. Using the same numbers, do we get the same outputs?

   • Showing that SPCAT A B C and A reduction match the computed A B C (Non-A reduced Values converted into A reduction) and A distortion.

     Once we’ve shown we can use A(A) B(A) and C(A), use Watson’s conversion from A to A(A) and etc.

   • Showing that SPCAT A B C and A reduction match the computed X Y Z (real values, converted to A reduction) and A distortion.

     Once we’ve shown we can convert A to A(A), make sure we can do all six versions of X to A(A)

   Since realistically, I don’t really want to manually compute these values, I’m likely going to have to trust that the values are as linearly interconvertible as I remember that they should be. In practice, this calculation is way more computationally expensive, because the Hamiltonian gets much more complex. Then again, since it remains a numeric matrix, computers do, in fact, go brrr.

   Assuming that I get this, I have more or less proved to myself that SPCAT and real Hamiltonians result in the same transitions.⁹

4. Showing that SPCAT A B C and A quartic match the computed X Y Z and Watson T¹⁰ transitions.

   The ultimate goal here is to use the approximate form of the rotational Hamiltonian that Watson outlines. Watson gives his T values in terms of A quartics and in terms of the approximate quartics. While I’m sure that there’s a better way to solve for them, I don’t entirely know what they would be.

   Two questions to try here are giving SPCAT values and back solving for T values, and giving T values and feeding SPCAT the T values.¹¹

   If this works out, then I have confirmed for myself that I can, in fact, solve five equations for five variables. Also, it makes it easier to test the next parts.

   At this point, I luckily no longer need to use SPCAT, which means that I get to save the half a gigabyte of storage that computing transitions takes up on my computer. That’s probably offset by the amount of memory that my computer is using, but that’s not something I have to manually clear, which is great.

5. Showing that hand-solved X Y Z match approximate A B C

   Again, this should be relatively straightforward. At this point I don’t really care too much about the transition energies¹², and so can just compare matrix outputs.

   I’ll probably want to generate a representative sample of values, just to be certain¹³.

   Above I had this listed as approximate X Y Z, but I’m like 99 percent certain that the approximate value calculation relies on A B C. In theory, though, it’s incredibly straightforward to match X Y Z to A B C, so again, that’s not a huge concern

6. Showing that hand-solved X Y Z and quartic distortion (either A or T, since we’ve demonstrated interchangibility) match approximate distortion form (most likely using the Watson approximate distortion)

   This one is likely to be the painful portion, if only because I’ll need to be really clear whether I’m working with A(A) or A. Then again, assuming that I calculate out the values for the hand-solved exact version, I can also play around with different options and versions within the approximate form. At the very least, it’s something that I can try!

   If this works out, then I’ve (through the transitive property) shown that the approximate version of the rotational constants matches the SPCAT output for quartic centrifugal distortion. Sextic distortion at that point should go really quickly.¹⁴

7. Showing that SPCAT A and approximate match up

   Having tested the intermediary, I’ll throw the program against what most people would use: SPCAT itself. Issue here will be again, ensuring that I’m using the right versions of each constant.

8. Showing that I can also calculate rotational transition intensity

   There’s, as far as I can tell, basically a single paper that people use for determining the transition intensity of a rotational transition. I’ll read the literature a little more to make sure that’s true¹⁵, and then have the calculations run given the arbitrary constants and some arbitrary values for the dipoles.

   Realistically, as long as they more or less approximate the values that SPCAT uses, I’m totally happy. SPCAT is known to produce approximate transition intensities, and so that’s so totally fine with me if mine is approximate as well. One issue I’m foreseeing is that calculating transition intensities requires population analysis, which is temperature dependent. My assumption is this is where most of SPCAT’s runtime actually occurs, and so that’s not great.¹⁶ Then again, it’s also likely something that I can extrapolate to a general form when solving the Hamiltonian a million times.

   E.g. if I solve the relative population as a function of energy one time at the start of the run (or for all energies before a run), then all I really have to do is use a lookup table! (Assuming that this is the right way of viewing the problem. I forget whether the exponent has other funky things)

9. Ensuring that this new version is actually faster than the old version

   Since we need to solve for energy levels, it’s possible that a single run may be much slower. When doing one hundred runs, however, I cannot believe that it would be anything but far faster. When doing more than ten thousand runs, there’s no chance that it’s not faster.¹⁷

10. Hopefully don’t need to repeat to get the S-reduction available

    The A and S reductions are the most popular ways to solve a centrifugally distorted rotor. Having done all the work to make A work, I’m assuming that the work to make S work will be trivial, especially because A and S reductions are interconvertible.

11. Something something make it work for other forms of distortion¹⁸

    There’re other forms of distortion that people care about. A lot of the research Hamiltonians focuses on these complex issues, especially because most easy molecules have been solved. Then again, there are still a number of molecules with no rotors or unpaired electrons, so there’s every chance people would jump on the promise of more or less instant solving.

How do I make the Latin Capped Hyperspherework? Few steps¹⁹:

1. Figure out how to pick the n+1 sample space based on the output of the n sample space.

2. Ensure that the powers of two are all lined up, because in the past I’m fairly sure I wasn’t letting it search as far

3. Ensure that it works to converge on the right answer

Let’s motivate the Latin Capped Hypersphere:

There’s a relatively recent paper that argues a better way to sample astronomical observations is via Hypersphere, rather than Hypercube. The main argument comes down to the fact that a hypersphere inscribed in a hypercube takes up vanishing amounts of the hypervolume at higher dimensions. If I remember correctly, it’s something like 1 percent the hypervolume by ten dimensions.

So, if one is relatively confident in their center point, then there’s effectively a hundred-fold increase in sampling density within the reasonable area by using a hypersphere rather than a hypercube.

My own personal motivation for capped hypersphere is that it feels somewhat rational. That is, I’m fairly sure that, at early levels of solving the rotational Hamiltonian, there is no real assumption that the center point is correct, so a Hypercube is the appropriate choice. When approaching the correct answer, however, the displacement that a transition needs is well-correlated to multiple values, and so searching around the near space makes the most sense.

As I write this, though, I’m realizing that I’m already intending to include multiple forms of distortion constants so that I can have for the distortion what I have for A, B, C: something which imposes constraints on the pure sample space. That’s pretty exciting to me, and likely will be exciting enough to others.

There’s a question in my mind about whether to use the limiting values based on A, A(A) and A(S) or not. I think that it could make sense to truncate the distortion constant ranges based on them, but not so much A, B, C. Mostly that’s because it feels rational to me that the “pure” rotational constants would be better able to be found than the distorted ones, but maybe that’s not true!

Ugh, then we get into the hard issue of “given that A(A) depends on A, Delta J, and Delta JK²⁰, what is the actual variable values of A given the bounds of A(A), the bounds of Delta J, and the bounds of Delta JK?” I don’t know that this would actually be too much of an issue, but it kind of feels like it would be.

Let’s assume not.

So, the ending sample space would have nine dimensions: X, Y, Z, XX, XY, XZ, YY, YZ, ZZ. That is, the rotational constant in X, Y, Z and the six quartic distortion constants. From there, we would sample I (real), which is defined as the sum of 1/X or Y or Z (real). I think that’s the best one to choose as our defining value, because it’s the one that’s most physically meaningful. Regardless of the representation we use or whether we ensured all inertia is along axes, it feels reasonable to assume we can know the total moment of inertia.

After I (real), we’d sample C (real). C (real) would be limited by the maximum of:

• lower sample bound of C(real)

• lower sample bound of C(A) given the current sample space of the distortion constants

• lower sample bound of C(T) given sample space of the distortion

• lower sample bound of C(S) given the sample space

• lower sample bound of C(rho) given sample space

• I can’t imagine that it’s actually going to be the limiter, but also the lower sample of C(X)²¹ given A(X), B(X) bounds. Wait, no that’s not going to be an issue at all, so that’s null, because we’re only calculating “real” moment of inertia, not I(X).²²

• It is theoretically possible, but lower bound of C given I and the bounds for A, B, C. I think that the code generally assumes this won’t happen, but always good to edge and corner check. I guess this means I should have the bounds checked²³

and the minimum of basically the above.

We now have two of nine dimensions sampled. Since sampling either of A or B gives the other for free²⁴, let’s see what we’d do there. Lower bound of A²⁵ is the largest of:

• Lower bound of A

• Lower bound of A(A) given distortion bounds

• Lower bound of A(T) given distortion bounds

• Lower bound of A(S) given distortion bounds

• Lower bound of A(rho) given distortion bounds

• Lower bound of A given B bounds, C and I

Oh wait, can I ignore A(X) for sampling C? That’s something I think that I need to think through more... I think so, but I don’t feel confident.

Let’s see, if we assume C max, then the possible ranges for A are dependent on that, and therefore so are the possible values for A(X). Is it possible that C max defines a value of ranges for A which, given the ranges for distortion, are not possible for A(X)? Mathematically it sure seems like it! Maybe. Given that we know that C max has to have an available value for A, I have to assume that it would never end up breaking. Still, probably good to ensure that it’s true for realsies. Maybe I throw that calculation in the C(X) calculations, though.

That’s a question for future distortion me.

So three variables later, we have (effectively) X, Y, Z and A, B, C.

From there, we know that each of the five distortion constants can be calculated based on some linear combination of the six real distortion constants.²⁶

Set each constant based on its limit given itself, the bounds of the other constants in each X, and the bounds for A(X), B(X), and C(X).

This goes point-wise, and creates a really weird sample space after the first hypercube. At some point want to set it to re-open, though that’s again a question as to when. Also, what are the starting ranges?

Part of me wants to go fully computing and say “we have no idea what literally any value can be”, part of me thinks that maybe asking the person for reasonable bounds would work, and part of me thinks that like starting at 1 percent of A, B, and C for distortion constants feels reasonable as an absolute limit? Or as a starting limit if not entered.

Realistically, all that would need to be input is a range for I and a range for C. I’m sure that one can reasonably well approximate the moment of inertia of a molecule based on just its molecular mass. And then let’s see, we know that C is greater than B is greater than A.  If all of the mass is in the C direction, then it’s value will be 1/I, and B will equal A will equal infinity. That’s not super helpful.

We could try asking for an approximate level of non-prolateness²⁷, or we could just set arbitrary bounds and let people manually set bounds if they’d rather. As a scientist, it’s always frustrating to me when a modeling software²⁸ doesn’t let me set arbitrary bounds. Exactly what the default set of inputs I’ll require and outputs I’ll give will be, that’s a question for the implementation team.

I do kind of feel inspired by the idea of using something with expected values. E.g. instead of a Latin hypercube, do an orthogonal search²⁹ based on the empirical CDF from the previous search. Maybe somehow have like increase the orthogonalization as the dimension searched increases?

Or something like “the more that the optimal value for a constant moved, the more/less to use orthogonal search?”

I just generally don’t like the current method of take the top 5³⁰ points and use them to define the new sample space. It feels ugly, and even if it worked in the sample molecule, it still failed a fair number of times overall. So, let’s come back to the question of rebounding later, once we’ve got the question of sampling down.

Oh wait, those two are kind of linked questions.

Eh, maybe a distribution with a floor function?  That is, less than some percentage of our maximum strength just doesn’t count?

I know that in the past, using previous values resulted in bad outcomes because one lucky guess would just forever fix the current values. I do still believe in the fundamental stability of the correct answer and the cheapness of computation. Throwing out a previous run’s values upon generating the next run does still feel pretty ok to me, especially if I store them for later use.

Part of me does still think about the question of the total hyper-radius, as much as that makes sense as a concept. Eh, that’s a problem for V2.

Upcoming Posts

• Wonder

• Curse of knowledge, esp re. Music Theory³¹

• Overview of a course on astrochem

• RebelFit

Daily Reflection: 22 June 2026

• How’s things?

  Pretty good. I’ve def been very high energy today, and that comes with all sorts of things. I set up two meetings (or at least one meeting and was told a second meeting is being set up later in the week). I got my hand writing done, and I called and caught up with a beloved friend!

• What’s a recent win?

  Recent win that’s safe to post on the blog: I connected one of my close friends with someone who works in a field they find interesting. Other than that, I’m feeling good today which is really nice.

• You have the big tapestry embroidery project! How’s that going?

  No real progress yesterday. Today’s big thing will be working on the design for the top layer. What does that look like?

  Who can say.

• Do you feel like you’re taking good care of yourself?

  Eh, overall I think that I’m doing ok. The wrappings on my arm continue to disappear and bother me, but that’s kinda not me taking care of myself so much as taking care of things which take care of me. Eating is going decently, consuming some liquids which is good, and I’ve done the hand writing.

  I was going to work on RF³² but (see above post).

• What could you be doing better?

  I could have been more prepared and realized I had deleted some of the relevant files for RF. That’s so so long ago, and so at this point the main thing is just that I could have been better about writing the things that I said I wanted to write. Because I noticed that my computer is running out of storage again, though, I did delete a bunch of games from it, which is good both for my productivity and for the general having storage on my computer.

  In general I could do better about showing my appreciation to those around me and revising my materials.

• Are you appropriately keeping in touch with those you love?

  Yeah! I called a friend and am currently coordinating to meet up with a different friend later this week. Also made³³ plans to see another set of friends.

• Big upcoming events? Preparation for them?

  • I have a two week camp equivalent coming up in mid July. Found out where I need to send paperwork, so now I just need to send it.

  • I’m visiting my partner in mid July. Still need to get tix.

• Once again, then, how’s it going?

  I think generally decent. If I stop to think about the question, though, it feels like it’s going less decently.

On Remembering to Reconnect

First Published: 2026 June 21

Draft 1: 21 June 2026

As often happens when I start writing anything, I begin to remember all of the other forms of writing I do. I’d planned on restarting one web novel, beginning another, and starting to journal again.¹ What I hadn’t planned on, though, is the fact that some of the writing which feels most impactful to me is my communication with friends.

I have a variety of things about me which make it hard for me to reliably and recurrently² message those who matter to me. That’s not a positive feature about me, but it’s also not something that I think is likely to change.³

Something that I have attempted in the past is making a list of people who I feel like I should message with some sort of regularity so that I remember to message them. This doesn’t feel like a great solution, and not just because it didn’t work. I also feel like it makes part of the connecting I do with some people more of a chore than something I do out of love. The distinction between doing something out of love and out of a sense of duty is not always clear, but it’s also something that some people in my life have expressed dissatisfaction about in the past.

Why is this the focus of the post today?

It’s the focus because today I remembered to reach out to a number of people I care deeply about today. I’ve not made a secret here or in life about the fact that these past months⁴ have been pretty rough for me mentally. As with many cycles in my behaviors, there is a clear feedback loop at play. When I feel bad, I am less likely to reach out to people. When I don’t reach out to people, I both feel and become more isolated. When I am more isolated, I feel bad. This repeats until something breaks me out of the funk.

In contrast, I don’t think that there’s a virtuous⁵ cycle in the same way for interacting with friends. Instead, I think that interacting with others serves mostly to put a floor on how bad I really feel. There’s a large subjective difference between objective symptoms. As an example, if I’m in a lot of pain from a recent surgery, the pain doesn’t necessarily recede from my attention or memory when someone laughs at my joke. What does happen, however, is that I am better able to ignore the sensation. Maybe that’s a bad example.

I’m no more able to move my arm when people say hi. However, I am much less bothered by that fact, even when the limitations I have are made clearer. So, then, what are some ways that I might better keep in touch with those I love?⁶.

I can update the lists and therefore have something in paper to reference to message people.

Pros of this approach:

• Makes it harder for one particular person to get lost in the shuffle

• Because it’s something that happens on routine, neither of us has to feel like we’re the one putting in a bunch of effort. Me, because I have a list that says to send a message, and them, because they’re being reached out to

• I like lists

Cons of this approach:

• Feels sterile. I’ll never forget the holiday I sent greetings to a number of people, some of whom noted that I sent an identical message to others. By virtue⁷ of the fact that I’m likely messaging many people at a time, the opening messages will become more rote

• Boom bust cycle to my messages. While I love being in contact with a number of people, I don’t always love being in a large number of simultaneous conversations. When there’s nothing else that I’m doing, it can be kind of nice. When I’m trying to also live my life, however, it feels less good to feel bombarded by a number of⁸ messages from a number of people.

• May be undesired from those around me. I’m sure that most of the people I don’t message as much as I would love to also feel that it would be nice if we talked more. However, I’m almost positive that there are people who intentionally stopped responding to my messages or otherwise failed to continue a conversation.

• Similar to the first two points, the conversations by necessity cannot be quite as deep. I’m splitting my focus and my emotional energy in multiple directions when I have conversations with multiple people at a given time.

• Hard to maintain. Historically speaking, I have not done this.

What’s another idea? I guess I can keep on with what I’m doing, but that is of course not really a solution.

Third idea: I could keep a bunch of names in a jar and then pull one out whenever I’m feeling disconnected.

Pros of this concept:

• I don’t have the many names at once issue

• I don’t have the “Hmmm... why do I get messages from J every X days” thought in the back of friends’ minds

• I have a fun game I get to play!

Cons of this concept:

• As with the first, means that some people will likely feel I’m messaging too often.

• As with the first, requires me to remember two distinct actions: open the jar and also write a message from the jar.

• Still feels somehow non-genuine

Message people on special events related to them. Big pro of this is that there’s a reason that I’d be messaging them. Big con is they’re probably overwhelmed by the sheer number of messages going out.

Another idea: maybe I just remake the daily to do list on this blog. Have an item for “have I messaged a friend to re-open lines of communication this (day? week? month?)”. Assuming that I can keep up with the blog⁹, that’s just a lil reminder each day that I’ve got something to do. I think that’s maybe the best idea.

Also, while I do feel like part of what some people¹⁰ want from this site is updates about my life, I don’t feel like they go well in with many of the topics I’m discussing. Right now the solution has been a first draft that’s much more stream of consciousness, but I don’t think that is necessarily the best or most stable long term option. So, sure, let’s add a new section to the bottom of each post¹¹ where I can do some reflections.

Let’s do that daily reflection now!

Ok so going forward, this is likely a reflection I’d want to do before I write the post, but then we get into the whole “how do I make that work what with the whole ‘I sometimes am working on multiple posts at once’ thing”?

So where was i?

...

Oh, yeah I’m just going to use the daily reflection section of the blog to remind me to keep in touch with people. For now, I’m hoping that works. And at this exact moment, I’m feeling bathed in the love and good positive intentions of those who love me.

Upcoming Posts

• Wonder

• Curse of knowledge, esp re. Music Theory¹²

• Overview of a course on astrochem

• RebelFIt

Daily Reflection: 21 June 2026

• How’s things?

  Things are generally on an uphill swing. I think that I’m more and more realizing that my days are best when I start the day by doing something that nourishes me, like writing in a journal or moving.

• What’s a recent win?

  I got the blog post done two days ago, have a blog post today, feel generally good, and practiced left-handed penmanship today! Biggest recent win is probably that I convinced my brother and father to read the last post I made.

• You have the big tapestry embroidery project! How’s that going?

  Still have yet to put any real stitches on, but have done some more design work. At this point, I really think that I need to focus on the top and bottom layers, because I feel comfortable enough with the woven layer that I don’t think that I’ll really need too too much work with adapting it for any of the other questions. I do want to get better at stitching with my left hand. I keep defaulting to the right, which hurts a lot, and that’s probably very not good for me.

• Do you feel like you’re taking good care of yourself?

  Kind of! Yesterday wasn’t the best, because I didn’t really eat or drink as much as I should have, I didn’t move, and I didn’t do the activities which feed me.¹³ I’m generally feeling like today is going better, but this reflection is making me want to grab some water and a quick stretch before Father’s Day Festivities.¹⁴

• What could you be doing better?

  Ooh, this question is definitely a great meta question. When I’m not doing well, the answer is of course going to feel like everything, which means that I can look at the answer and my immediate default to see if I need to start looking for something. I can be better about following through on the internal commitments I made. I told myself that while I’m recovering, there were some activities I would try doing to force myself to feel better, and I’ve not been the most consistent about them.

• Are you appropriately keeping in touch with those you love?

  As of today, mostly yeah. In general, not so much. I wish that I knew which people in my life liked my being a nuisance¹⁵ and which would prefer me take a hint when they don’t respond.  Alas, this is real life, and I’m not brave enough to ask people these questions.

  I’ve at the very least re-opened communication lines with people, so there’s a chance that the communications are going to be better in coming days!

  I also have the weekly brother call this evening, which will be really nice.

  My schedule didn’t line up with my partner’s yesterday, so we didn’t have the chance to call, but I’m optimistic that they’ll line up today.¹⁶

  I miss writing letters, but that’s probably an activity that’s generally best saved for when I have my mobility.

• Big upcoming events? Preparation for them?

  • I have a two week camp equivalent coming up in mid July. I need to fill out some paperwork for that and need to figure out exactly where to send it.

  • I’m visiting my partner in mid July. I need to book tickets for that

• Once again, then, how’s it going?

  I think that it’s going pretty well. The slope is absolutely trending upwards and fairly steeply, which is really nice to have be the case. I’m going to take a little bit of time to stretch and drink some water¹⁷. Or maybe not. It may also be Father’s Day festivities.¹⁸

On Tapestry Embroidery

First Published: 2026 June 19

Draft 4: 19 June 2026

I’m working on a design for a tapestry embroidery. My plan is to have some sort of a color gradient beneath a loose woven layer beneath some sort of geometric design. Part of me would like to play with transparency between layers, but that feels better as a follow-up project once I’ve demonstrated to myself that I can do something like this at all.

There are a series of questions I need to answer:

1. Material:

   1. What count Aida fabric?

      Right now I think that I have a large roll of 18 squares per inch, so that’s a tempting choice. However, I think that the last project I did was on 14 count Aida?

   2. How many threads per stitch?

      In the previous project, I used 6. In some quick trials, I think I found that four looked best to me. Will need to see, though.

   3. How many colors?

      DMC makes an almost infinite amount of colors. The more I use, the more smooth of a gradient I can produce, but also the more pain it will be, because I’ll need to swap colors more. Also, there’s something to be said for the digital nature of stitch-work.

   4. How large of a piece of fabric do I need?

      This question is going to need to be answered based on the first Material question and the first design question. Ideally, smaller is usually better, but there’s also something beautiful in a large embroidery.

2. Design:

   1. How many stitches large?

   2. What base layer color or color gradient?

   3. Weave:

      1. How many stitches thick are the strands?

      2. What’s the strand density? I.e. how much of the base gradient is visible between crossings?

      3. What color or colors are the weave strands?¹

      4. Is the weave going to be a Celtic knot? If so, what is the design for it?

      5. Do we incorporate the base gradient colors in the weave strands, and if so, how much?²

      Of course, all of these questions are fairly inter-reliant. A thicker strand will result in a higher strand density, and a larger total stitch-count project will likely mean that I need to have a thicker strand for visibility. Then again, there’s also something really compelling to me in the idea that the strands might be almost invisible when looking at the embroidery from afar. Who can say for certain?

   4. Foreground:

      1. Do I want braids?

      2. Do I want a Celtic Knot?

      3. What shape?

      4. What thickness?

      5. How gappy?³

      6. What colors? I think that it could be cool to do something that gives an impression of depth, so like crossing gets darker.

      And, of course, I want the top layer to appear organic and not rigid, even if that’s going to be really difficult to do.

There are more than a few trials that I’ll need to do as well to figure out the answer to all of these questions. For now, though, I think that I’m going to work on trials for the base weave question.

That is, how thick and how dense, and then by extrapolation, how much that affects the visibility of the background. I have a vague idea, if nothing else, of how to make the weave design, so I need to think of the trials I’m going to run. For now, I’m thinking I just pick a relatively bold color weave against a contrasting background color. Then try one through four stitches thick per strand, with the same number of stitches per strand as the gap between strands, making four or so crossings? That should take up some time, so let’s go ahead and draw it out.

Oh, shoot, part of this will also end up depending on the number of stitches per inch that I choose. I’m just going to commit to the fabric I have with me being the fabric count I’ll be using for the final project? Eh, the relative density probably doesn’t depend too terribly much on the thread fabric saturation. Let’s just not worry about it for now.

Woo! Blog post ready to post.

Draft 3: 19 June 2026

I don’t think that I wrote anything about my design process for the last embroidery project I did. This one, however, I will document here, at least right now. I make no promises about continuing the documentation, but I hope that my writings here might be useful to a future me or other who would like to also make a design for embroidery.⁴

The planned design is a partially transparent flame and logs atop a woven pattern atop a sky gradient.

Open design questions:

1. How many total colors will I use?

2. How large will this be in stitches?

3. What size fabric am I using? Probably 18 holes per inch Aida, but maybe not?

4. How many threads per stitch. If using 18, then the answer is four, I think. If using 14, I think that the answer becomes six? Will need to run some tests to see what does what I need.

5. What gradient, exactly? I think that a sunrise to sunset motif would be beautiful, but need to figure out what exactly that will look like. Potential options include:

   • Center of fabric white, corners black. Diagonal corners for sunrise (warm colors) and sunset (cold colors) both into the blue of the morning and then into the white of the noonday sun

   • Center of fabric black, corners white, the same but in reverse.

   • Single gradient across the fabric from black to blue to black or vice versa for sunrise sunset

   • Rainbow

   • Something more chaotic?

   • Seasons? So like green into red into white?

   • Solid, monochrome color

   Right now I’m mostly leaning towards something that goes a variant of dark to light via warm colors back to dark via cold or have bright to dark to bright.

6. What weave density to use? I.e. how much of the gradient is visible in the gaps between weave lines?

7. What weave thickness? I.e. how many stitches per weave line?

8. Pure weave or make it a Celtic knot? If knotted, what knot design?

9. What color for the weave?

10. Does the weave line need to incorporate the gradient within it? E.g. if the weave is silver and it should be on top of black, do I do like two silver and two black?

    1. If it does, what percentage?

11. How do the fire and logs look?

12. Smoke?

13. Etc.

So, things to trial out now:

1. Weave densities.

2. Weave thicknesses.

3. Weave and background color ratios within the weave thread

These trials are of course all interlinked variables. The thickness is particularly going to depend on the final design as well. I’ll need to decide how visible I want the weave to be and how thick relative to the total size of the fabric I want it to be.

You know what, I don’t actually think that I want the art to be representational. I just want geometry. So, then, I’ll do a cute flowy Celtic knot made of a braid! That will be gorgeous.

Draft four for new set of questions.

Draft 2: 19 June 2026

I apologize for my absence. Anyways.

I’m wanting to make a tapestry embroidery project. My plan is to have some sort of color gradient as the base layer, a weaving or potentially even Celtic knotwork secondary layer, and then a flowing Celtic knot made of a braid as the top layer. My other idea was to have something like partially transparent glasses, and then attempt to make something like “the view of the floor from a lit low-saturation stained glass window”, but I think that might be a good third or fourth project.

So, what is keeping me from making the pattern?

First, I need to decide what color gradient to have as a base layer. Right now I’m drawn to the idea of black at the corners and white in the middle⁵ with two sides being sunrise color gradients⁶ and the other two being sunset⁷ transitioning into the blue of a clear day and then the whiteness of staring into the sun.

The second question is how to do the weave⁸. Depending on the density of the weave, it may be vitally important that I have the base color represented in it. Questions within this question include whether I can stitch multiple times and if that behaves the same as stitching once with multiple threads. E.g. I might want one strand of silver. If I just stitch the entire canvas in silver and then use three more threads for the appropriate colors, will that look the same as just swapping colors? I guess not, and also it feels icky to do that.

Third question is what the upper layer will be.

I usually feel inspired by flames and fire, and so kind of want that. I also love Celtic design, and want to incorporate some of that? Or, at least, I love patterns, and so that feels like a good thing to do. As a Catholic of Irish descent, I feel no qualms about using these motifs in my work. While I do love mandalas, or at least the Westernized versions I see in adult coloring books.⁹

However, as I mention in the first draft, I am also interested in potentially exploring some sort of representational piece of art. Fire would work well for that, as would a flame with smoke. If I did a fire, though, there’s a potential issue with the background gradient being lost? Though, fire is often at least somewhat transparent.

Hmm. Hard to say for certain.

Now, one benefit of doing all of this pre-work is that the number of stitches I will need to do is completely independent of the complexity of the design, which is a huge perk to me. Like with cross stitch, each stitch is effectively a pixel. Since I’m planning to use every pixel, the only question is how compressible the pixels will be.¹⁰ And, I enjoy this part of the planning too.

Another question I have is how many colors to use. The last embroidery I did was with non-DMC colors¹¹, because I bought a sunburst kit from the store. That had a limited number of colors, which meant I had to and got to be creative about my choices. I did a six-strand embroidery, but doubled up each strand¹² so that I wouldn’t have to worry about the thread falling off the end of the line. That meant I had up to three color options, which did make it really pretty.

In general, I don’t see a lot of people mixing and matching different colors of thread, which I’m not totally sure I understand. Sure, Yellow and off Yellow may approximate Yellow three, but the interplay of which exact thread is on top for any given part of the embroidery is unknown until stitching, which gives it more animation. Then again, if the goal is to draw attention away from the thread, I guess I can see why it is that people would use the specific color they want.

Oh! I remember what I don’t like about Bargello now!

Because it’s worked vertical, the Aida fabric vertical strips often also shines through. Tapestry embroidery, by contrast, is worked diagonal, so is able to cover the full thing.

Not for this project, but for a future project, I’m also very curious about layering tapestry embroidery. That is, if I embroider a base layer all going like a forward slash, if I then use a single strand of floss to go in the back slash direction, will I be able to see two images? I don’t know, and I am more than a little curious.

Back to the point, though: what do I want to have as the major image of the picture?

It needs to be something with gaps so that the gradient can shine through. It needs to be representational, because I decided it does. It needs to be pretty.

I guess I could do four layers and in such a way still have some sort of a Celtic triquetra as the third layer? Eh.

Maybe text as the top layer? That could be really nice, actually. What would the text say?

Hmm. There are so many beautiful texts in the world.

Maybe just a classic “Love”, or something like that? I could make the most fun commentary on modern art with three tapestry embroideries that are super detailed that in total say “Live, Laugh, Love”, but that feels maybe a little too on the nose for my taste.

A net? That’s got some promise, if I do like a net that’s been draped over something.

Something burning?

A tree branch on fire?

A lightning strike?

I think that a partially transparent flame does actually seem like my favorite idea. In the next draft, I will write down the series of questions that I actually need to answer here.

Draft 1: 19 June 2026

So, I haven’t been here in a long while. I’ve even written a few posts since the last time I was here, but none felt up to the quality of a returning post. However, I’m currently disabled¹³, and have therefore decided that now is as good a time as any to get back into this site. I know that I feel better when I write, and I know that I have multiple¹⁴ readers, and they have expressed sadness that the site lacks updates.

I’m going to go back to calling it a blog and saying that I’m blogging for now, because, while I am interested in the meaning of what I’m doing, I’m also not willing to stop myself and remember what I decided to call the site. I am still interested in doing meta-data and whatnot for the site, but that’s something that would need to happen in the future. I have ideas for how I don’t have to use the new blog¹⁵ and still write in markdown, but I’m also out of my love of markdown era. Ideally I think that there would be a way for me to use mediawiki as the base writing, because I like how it lets me do nested lists the best. However, that’s not the purpose of this post.

As I assume everyone who reads this blog knows¹⁶, I’ve begun seriously dating someone. Among her infinite wondrous qualities, she also has an aunt who was¹⁷ a medievalist and does tapestry. When I first heard this, I assumed tapestry in the woven on loom sense, which was wondrous and fascinating to me.¹⁸

I later learned that she does tapestry embroidery.¹⁹ I loved my Bargello embroidery project, but I had some dissatisfaction with it, much of which I think came down to the vertical stripes, for reasons that I cannot fully articulate here. Tapestry embroidery, by contrast, is performed with diagonal stitches, like the first half of a cross stitch. As such, it is more something that I cannot find the word for right now.

And so, I decided that I really want to make a tapestry embroidery project.

I recently watched a documentary about Jerry’s Map, which is a performance art piece²⁰ or an algorithmic art piece²¹ or something. It’s a series of panels that an artist has been working on for decades. It never ends, and part of me is inspired by that same idea, even if I would not want to make a tapestry in the way he does it.²² Anyways, that was something I have been thinking about as I think about how to make this tapestry.

Why come back to embroidery now? A few reasons.

1. I know that it’s good for me to do creative things

2. Right now I can’t use my right hand for much, and embroidery feels like a good way to get some dexterity in my left hand.²³

3. I like making art

4. I want my internal association with embroidery not to only be the grief embroidery I did

5. I like showing off the things that I create

6. I like seeing beautiful things and want to make them

What’s stopping me from making the embroidery right now, then?

A few things.
Chief among them, however, is the fact that I don’t entirely know what I want to make. The tapestry that my partner’s aunt²⁴ made was a portrait equivalent²⁵, and that does lead me to think that it might be best to make something representational. In my last project, I made a large Celtic knot with a cross in the white space. There will not be white space in this project, because tapestry embroidery fills the entire page.²⁶

I loved the color gradient in the initial embroidery I made, and would like to really lean into that. Many parts of my brain love Celtic knot and adjacent patterning, and so I was thinking it could be really nice to have a Celtic knot background²⁷ underneath whatever I make. I don’t love that the last project I did was so blocky. That’s not the right word.

Digital? Maybe.

I guess that I’m trying to express that I don’t like how rigid²⁸ the previous one was.

I was considering perhaps doing a braid or a flowy Celtic Knot²⁹, so that I can use something there. I think that might be the best bet, so will be doing that! Now I just need to do the design portion.

Alrighty, on to draft two, which is hopefully going to be more coherent.

Upcoming posts

• Wonder

• Curse of knowledge, esp re. Music Theory³⁰

On Feeling Heavy

First Published: 2026 April 5

Draft 2: 5 April 2026

I do think that there could be something interesting in my trying to see how tight the correlation is between the number of words in a draft or post that I take to get to its subject and the amount that I don’t want to interact with the subject. I right now assume that the correlation would be very strong, only limited by the fact that I do not always have the same writing pace.

The first draft touches much more on the title of this post, which is feeling heavy. Right now, I’m remembering the second half of what I must do every time that I feel like this, or in this realm, at least: I need to ignore that voice.

Right now, the albatross that feels like an anchor is the fact that I have not been writing. Another albatross is that my home is not clean enough to host those I wish to host.

Those are both real and true things! It is not just valid that I feel them, it is if anything probably a good thing that I feel dissatisfaction with the state of my home and the absence of words I have written.¹ However, spirals, fascinating as they are to look at when drawn, are just as captivating when dragging me down.

This month starts a biannual writing competition on the site I write² my web serial. I told myself that I would use that to make me write again, and this feels like the reasoning I need right now. So, what are the fiction ideas I’ve told myself I would like to write some day? I guess you’ll have to see!

Draft 1: 5 April 2026

So even though it has been far too long since I wrote anything, let alone on this exact site, I do want the record to show that I did write a full³ post yesterday. But, I didn’t feel like I had gotten to a stable point in my thoughts.  I’m currently removed enough from the daily practice of this site to remember if I used to feel this sense of closure, but I’m going to imagine that I did. Even when I ended somewhere that wasn’t a final answer, it at least felt like a final enough answer. Yesterday’s post, perhaps because the first 2500 words were me attempting to discover what the post was going to be about, did not feel finalized.

My past writing is, in one sense, the topic of today’s proflection⁴. In general, however, my goal for today’s post is to externalize the internal feeling that I have right now.

In previous posts, I know that I’ve expressed, whether implicitly or explicitly⁵, the I have felt as though my body and mind betray me. I still somewhat deal with this struggle, though I am actively putting in the work day by day to accept that my body does not fail me. Either I failed it by failing to give it the nourishment it needed, or it was not a task that my body was capable of.⁶

N.B. to future me⁷: maybe try starting the inevitable draft two with a meta reflection on how the amount of time it takes me (or number of words, at least) to actually start talking about a thing here is probably correlated to how uncomfortable I am with it.

It’s relatively easy for me to accept that my body has limitations, because I can see the effects of aging on myself, and I know that much of the athleticism I once was capable of required double digits of time spent actively working my body. That is not my priority right now, and so it’s unfair to expect same results with less resource allocation.

It’s much harder, however, for me to accept the ways it feels as though my mind fails me.

My memory feels terrible these days, and I don’t like that. I can still remember facts, at least in the eyes of most, but my visual memory is effectively gone. I have very few moments I can see in my mind’s eye, and those that I  can tend to be from a third-person perspective, letting me know that they’re more imagination than recollection. I assume that this, like the fact that I’ve gotten worse at mental math, has more to do with where I focus my mental energy than much else, and so I can somewhat accept it.

But, last night I felt a migraine setting in. I, in what feels like a big change for me, left where I was and went to sleep, rather than trying to power through the pain and keep going, like I would have for much of my life. I don’t like that my body needed the break there, especially because I cannot point to a cause.

But, more than that, as the title suggests, I have difficulty with the way that my mind makes everything feel heavy right now. Depending on the metaphor I’ve used, depression has been a variety of things. However, at least as far as I can remember, the load has felt metaphorical. These past few days and today in particular, I feel as though I am actively being pushed down.

Each time that I try to stand, there is a voice in my head that tells me it’s pointless. There’s another that points out that I’m already feeling kind of light headed, so do I really want to risk standing up? Another mentions that we’ve just gotten to a good point in whatever activity I was exercising.

To be clear, none of these voices are verbalizing within my mind.⁸ I have these vague impressions that I should not stand up. Vague may be the wrong word. I have amorphous but powerful impressions telling me to not move.

As the series of posts I have made about feeding myself might imply, I struggle to nourish my body.

Today in particular, when each breath actually feels like effort, when even the act of blinking seems to take a bit of effort, food is much more difficult.

But, more than anything, it’s this weight that presses me down and tells me not only that I cannot do anything right now, but that anything I did would be pointless anyways. I have an unwelcome visitor right now who tells me that I have failed to live up to my own potential, that I have failed those who love me, that I have failed myself. I don’t like feeling this way.

Right now, I think that it may be most acute, because, like most procrastinators, I had an external point where I told myself I would start writing again. The website where I used to write my web serial has a biannual writing competition, where authors attempt to put out a little over half a century thousand of words in thirty five days. It’s something I’ve done before, while actively keeping up with my other novel. I think that my idea was that, realistically speaking, fifteen hundred words a day is not that many for me.⁹ A shock to the system might be what I need to get back into this and the other writing I do, was the thought at least.

Of course, I did nothing to keep track of when, exactly, the event started. I realized yesterday, after writing the three thousand and some words about where I am right now, emotionally, that it had started on the first. Missing five days isn’t really that much time to miss.¹⁰

Honestly, part of what I always tell myself is that the weight I feel is not a sign that I should give up. It’s a sign that I should ignore the pain and power through. Let’s take that advice to heart, at least for now, and try to write these 55000 words before the next four and a touch weeks have gone by. I guess I need to figure out what I’d write about; I think I want to at least start a new story, even if I’m not totally sure where/what or anything else. That’s something I can consider. Or, I can just start writing and see what happens? I can look through my notes and see what fiction ideas I’ve had in the past.

On Another Year of Thanksgiving Bagels

First Published: 2025 November 28

Draft 1: 28 November 2025

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone. For the first time I can remember, we did Thanksgiving not at home. Except, that’s not true, because I do also have a firm memory of going to Thanksgiving at a friend’s house sometime when I was the same height as the chef.¹ It’s possible that I’ve gotten that holiday mix in my memories with some other seasonal celebration, it’s possible it was one of the years near COVID being in the public consciousness, and it’s possible that I’m remembering back to high school, which is further than I can remember.²

This year for Thanksgiving, my family decided that we would not be making our own dinner. I’m generally not opposed to the concept, because very little about Thanksgiving that’s important to me is also related to cooking. Part of me is a little sad that I don’t get to enjoy slop³, but that’s a fairly minimal part of me. Not having to make the meal⁴, and especially not needing to clean up the kitchen after making a large meal is really nice.

It was also so incredibly nice to not have to worry about timing when it came to making bagels.

For whatever reason, this year I decided that I’d like to make exactly a gross of bagels. Unlike previous years, I didn’t have to finish cooking before some arbitrary deadline, which meant that I was finally able to do the bagel making in what, in my mind, at least, felt more photographable. So, I slept in a little⁵, and then broke the large dough into twelve smaller balls, each of which was then shaped into a dozen small balls, with mixins as appropriate. Once I had a beautiful⁶ 144 balls of dough, I punched a hole in each and started to boil and bake them. Rather than trying to shove as many pre-boils into the pot at once as I could, my brother pointed out that doing them by the dozen wouldn’t actually end up costing any more time.

So, 144 bagels went into the oven and came out delicious and brown.

Unlike every year before, I also⁷ did not let people start eating bagels until I had a photograph of the entire batch finished. I’ve never before seen all the bagels at any stage, in large part because of the historic process.

Back in the before times, if I was making a large number of bagels, I would separate the dough that was getting whatever form of mix-ins, shape balls and bagels, and then immediately boil and put into the oven. The overall timing ended up meaning that I was more or less constantly moving between putting bagels in water, shaping them, putting them in the oven, taking them out of the oven, and mixing new flavors into the base dough. It’s definitely a faster process, probably saving more than an hour of overall time. However, it’s also much more stressful of a process, and it’s significantly less photogenic.

While making my variant of a poolish⁸ the night before, my brother commented that it’s “terrifying” the way that I actively avoid using measurements. Although this is not untrue, I feel like, especially for bread, it’s an unfair expectation. The general considerations that come into making a good bread are the relative moisture content and the protein content of the flour.

Flour can vary by such a large margin in its protein content, and I’m honestly not sure how much I trust the companies when they make claims about the protein content of their flour. After all, a difference of one to two percent is around what I remember the FDA regulations control, and is often also the difference between bread flour and AP flour.

Even more importantly, though, the relative water content of the flour can vary by such large amounts, primarily from the ambient humidity.⁹

If measuring by weight, as so many people recommend for some reason, then the higher moisture flour will mislead about how much water needs to be added. After all, if 100 grams of dry flour is instead reading as 110 from the moisture it absorbed, then a mass or weight based measure will imply not just that the ten g of water need to be added, but also the water to make up the 10g. If using a standard hydration of 100 percent¹⁰, that means that the hydration will, instead of being 110 g water and flour, as desired, 120 g water and 100 g flour, a twenty percent difference of hydration!

So, with that information as justification, I made my bagels the way I make most of my breads: by heart.

This year, rather than using potato starch,¹¹ I decided to try adding some dark rye flour to the dough. In general, I love the way that rye tastes, and I adore the depth of flavor it adds to a basic flour loaf. Given the response from people who ate this year’s batch, I’m not alone in the judgement.

My brother did comment on the fact that the raw dough had some strange looking flecks in it, which were quickly explained away as rye.

So, despite not measuring any of the ingredients with anything but my heart, I think that the final dough had about twenty pounds of flour, six ounces of gluten, and a pound of dark rye. How much water?

fantastic question.

Once the dough was able to rise, I divided it carefully into what appeared to be a dozen evenly sized balls. As luck would have it, they were not evenly sized, but that’s the nature of life sometimes. Each of those balls¹² was then divided into a dozen balls, which I tried to have be about evenly sized. Once the 144 balls were shaped and¹³ flavored, I punched a hole in each and then started to boil.

I did find it somewhat humorous that I was so carefully breaking the dough into even balls, despite not measuring what went into the dough. My father commented on the fact that I tore off chunks of dough at a time, rather than subdividing the ball of dough in quarters and then thirds.¹⁴ Realistically, I generally have tried that approach before. For whatever reason, it ends up working out much worse for me.

I think it’s because I internally decide that if I’m going to be subdividing multiple times, I might as well just go for prime factorization. I’d divide the dough in twain¹⁵ and then half again, then split each of those into thirds. When considering how much correction I tend to need to do, I do find that I need less when I’m just grabbing hunks of dough off, especially by the end of the process. After shaping about fifty dough balls, after all, one tends to get a pretty good impression of what size to make them.

Ok so that’s enough about bagels for now.

On to the rest of Thanksgiving.

Upon finishing the bagels at the objectively ridiculous time of 1147, I went and had a nice nap. From there, we went to two different Thanksgiving parties, both of which were fun and lovely in different ways.

The first was with a close family friend’s family, who had us and two or three other families over. We played what they call “the bag game”, which they claim is a game of luck, even though I know better. I’m still not sure I loved the method for sorting between rounds, but it was as good a method as any other.

In the end, I won what was called the best gift¹⁶ which did also come with two shooters.¹⁷ I was told I had to do both shooters at once, but was then judged for doing so.¹⁸

We then ate a nice meal, and then the brother father and I transported to the second party.¹⁹

At the second event, we saw what I imagine are my father and brother’s students.²⁰ The food was delicious there, but I was fading incredibly quickly, and so took the fall to say I wanted to go home.²¹ From here, we’re now asleep, awake, and once more giving out bagels.

At party number one, people were shocked to learn that it is not my father who’s the bagelmeister in the home. I think that there are likely two explanations. First, my father made them bagels recently. Second, before I was born, my father apparently made bagels often.

I’m not sure which reason is the main one for the people’s surprise that they came from me, but regardless.

Reviews from the bagels were generally positive. My first comment was “dang, it’s really hard to complain and go ‘my bread is too fluffy and light and delicious’”. My family agreed, commenting that there was not enough chew to the dough. There are apparently two things that can lead to a chewier dough²², more water and more kneading. I do always fear that I underknead my bagels, but they were higher hydration than I normally make them, so I don’t think that the water is a real answer. Also, I did much more kneading of the small balls than I normally do, so I don’t know that I think that it’s that either. Who can say.

From the non-my family people, I got much better reviews. Many said it was the best bagel that they’d ever had, which may be true but is likely just a kind thing to say. Given the excitement in people’s eyes when we told them they were welcome to come by today to take more bagels, I think that at least some of the joy was real.

Some, almost two thousand words into a story of crafting bagels, might wonder what I made.

I made seven dozen un-adulterated dough bagels. Of these, three dozen then were covered in everything bagel seasoning.²³ Because I once saw a post about how some place’s bagels were much better because they had seasonings on both sides, I seasoned both sides of the bagels. The thirty six everything bagels did use almost half a container of Costco everything bagel seasoning, so it’s possible I did more than was expected. Then again, thirty six bagels is a lot of bagels!

After the thirty six everything, I made four dozen plains.²⁴

From there, two dozen rosemary and sage bagels, where I mixed the two ingredients into the bagel dough. It wasn’t the most even mixing I’ve ever done, but honestly they may be the best bagels I have had in ages. Something about the Thanksgiving spices in a warm circlet of bread is just unbeatable.²⁵

Two dozen cranberry bagels, which didn’t go super well. I don’t think that I realized how much craisins can rehydrate, and I didn’t put as much effort as I often did in the past to incorporate the dried fruits. Still, cranberry bagel isn’t a hard sell.²⁶

Those who know me might know that I recently had a fairly intense falling out with a friend over the concept of a jalepeno bagel. I said and still say that they feel like an abomination. Unfortunately, I am too much of a pushover. Just as if the friend was there that day, my brother looked with pleading eyes as he asked if I would make jalepeno cheddar bagels. And so, despite feeling like I was committing a crime through every stage of making them, I finished the day with a dozen of those abominations. They were well received, which almost hurts more.

Of the 144 bagels, I no longer know how many we have left. What’s important, though, is that I got to share joy with others.

When looking to see what I’ve written about bagels in the past, I learned that I’ve apparently only made one post about bagels before. It’s likely that I commented on their output in a future posting, but I love the brevity in that one. I’ve also reflected about morning baking before.

At the end of that post, I mention that my recipe of adding flour and water until an appropriate amount of dough exists was not helpful. That’s fair.

OH!

For the people in my life who comment on the salting I ²⁷ do in my doughs, the bagels were salted, and no one commented on the lack of salt. Tasting them, there’s perhaps less salt than some might put in the dough, but I often find that people love very salted toppings for bagels.

And now to the sad part of the musing.

It’s hard to think about Thanksgiving without thinking about my mom. She and I were the ones who did most of the Thanksgiving cooking for the past few years. It’s her side of the family where our mashed potatoes²⁸ and butter mushrooms²⁹ arise.

More than that, though, I remembered yesterday how she was always the one who remembered the little things that mean so much. I’ve never been a huge fan of cream cheese, but I’ve generally always liked flavored cream cheese.³⁰ Every Thanksgiving, she was sure to stock at least a few flavors of berry cream cheeses. Yesterday, when I asked, I learned that we had not picked any up. Of course, that’s also on me; I was going through lists of ingredients for Thanksgiving bagels and never once mentioned it. But, there’s something really nice in not needing to ask for something because someone who knows and loves you remembers it without asking.

It’s just one of the little pains from the life.

At the first Thanksgiving party, someone I had never met before and I ended up talking about something that led to another person at the party commenting on my mom. It’s always so lovely to hear the memories that others associate with her. It’s a little strange that she is remembered so identically in the minds of so many people, if only because I feel like normally people are crystallized into a single role in others’ minds. The fact that more than a year out, though, people still comment on how much some medical thing my mom did meant to them is lovely.

I’ve been thinking about a post for a little while now about many things, but primarily the idea of greatness and how it is or isn’t somewhat of a curse. In thinking about that post, I realized that mostly, I’m trying to justify to myself whether or not I need to strive for greatness. It’s hard, seeing the incredible impacts my parents have and had on so many people, to not think that I need to do the same. Every time I try to tell myself that their impacts are probably exaggerated, though, I am faced with people who actively dismantle that thought. My mother was a great woman. My father is a great man. I will think more on greatness in that post.

Thanksgiving bagels were fantastic. It’s lovely having a family tradition, and I hope that someday soon I’m able to share that tradition with my own children. It would be somewhat beautiful if I also had to stop it because taking care of children is hard, only for my own son to bring it back as a teenager.

Current Pen List³¹

• Hongdian Black with Fude Nib: Empty

• Jinhao Shark: Diplomat Sepia Black. 10/6

• Pilot Preppy: Diamine Bilberry. 10/6

• Shaeffer (blue): Empty

• Diplomat: Laban Zeus Purple 11/23

• Kaweko: Stipela Sepia. 10/6

• Monteverde: empty

• Shaeffer Calligraphy: missing

The Inks I’ve Loved

First Published: 2025 November 28 (I keep forgetting to post)

Draft 1: 24 November 2025

I have been playing around with fountain pens for a little while now,and something I’m beginning to realize is that I want to have a record somewhere of what pens have worked well for me, what inks I love, and the like. With that in mind, today’s post is just going to be the start of the list of inks I love.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I also want to be doing some writing, so let’s talk about ink going forward.

Every month, I’m taking in five five mL samples of ink.¹ That means that ideally I’d go through twenty five milliliters of ink monthly, if not a little more to start working through the backlog. I know that’s not true, but I’m not entirely sure how untrue.

I also have the issue that by inking each pen with a different ink, I don’t get the chance to see the way that it behaves with different nibs and feeds. With that in mind, I think that going forward I’d like to start using up each bottle of ink as it comes in, filling all my pens with the same color. Downsides of this are of course that I have only one color of ink at a time. However, I’m really not finding that there are many times in my day to day where I actually want to have multiple colors.

This also comes with the secondary benefit that I am going to be working through the number of inks that I have. Even if the rate of usage doesn’t change, I’m still getting each bottle of ink done with one at a time, and so there’s no chance that the ink can dry.

While I’m here, may as well give a quick review of the two new inks I have in pens.

Shimmer Lilac is a relatively translucent lilac color That is, with the fude pen, I can use it to highlight other text. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially because it’s still perfectly clear and readable.

It also nominally has a gold shimmer to it (little flecks). For whatever reason, I’m not getting a lot of that in the pen so far. Instead, the occasional word is just perfectly golden. If that was an effect I could control, I would absolutely adore it. As it is, though, I find it a little disheartening. Looking at a review of the ink, seems like the color palate I’m seeing is about what they saw as well. It’s also got a fair amount of shading, at least on the notebook paper I’m using right now. Fair amount of what feels like feathering, even though the words themselves aren’t smeared out. Moreso it seems like the ink is clumped around individual fibers?

Zeus Purple is the other color. It’s definitely much closer to red than purple, at least to me. That being said, it does very much read as a sort of greco-roman imperial color. In the pen I have and writing only on printer paper, doesn’t seem to have much by way of shading. Looking at the review, there’s apparently a bronze shimmer/sheen that can show up as well.

It feels at least mostly professional, which is a plus in my book. The lilac, less so.

Inks I’ve Loved

Emerald of Chivor: it’s been a while since I used this ink, but I remember absolutely adoring it every time that I’ve used it.

Monteverde Ocean Noir. I’ve only used this in the fude tip before, but it was just such a beautiful color. Definitely the sort of ink that someone who’s #professional might be using too, which is always nice. A kind of low saturation dark blue.

Current Pen List²

• Hongdian Black with Fude Nib: Esterbrook Shimmer Lilac 11/23

• Jinhao Shark: Diplomat Sepia Black. 10/6

• Pilot Preppy: Diamine Bilberry. 10/6

• Shaeffer (blue): Empty

• Diplomat: Laban Zeus Purple 11/23

• Kaweko: Stipela Sepia. 10/6

• Monteverde: empty

• Shaeffer Calligraphy: missing

On Returning to Composing

First Published: 2025 November 23

Draft 1: 23 November 2025

I’m not entirely sure why, but for some reason I cannot seem to remember how to compose. Looking at the timelines, I don’t think that it’s been so long since the last time that I wrote something relatively large. I suppose that I have not been writing any other music lately, so that could be part of it. Still, it seems like there’s got to be more to it.

Since I have no idea what’s going on with composing and the absence of it, I figure now is as good a time as any to consider other composition and analysis tricks I have heard of¹. Luckily, the commissioner for the piece has a few pieces that she wanted as inspiration, so I can look at them to hopefully get ideas. Even better, she sent me the text that she wants me to set.

Perhaps I’m struggling because I’m not writing for unaccompanied choir or for myself with whatever instrumentation I feel like on the given day. Instead, I’m writing for solo female voice over pipe organ. I’ve never been good at writing for pipe organ, or really any keyboard. That’s another thing that this score study might help with.

So, what score study am I planning to do?

First, I want to try doing a visualization of the vocal line. My main idea is to have two lines, one for the highest and lowest note that the singer sings. From there, vaguely trace the melodic contour, with space for breath and whatnot. At the end, I’d love to go through and figure out if there is some middle point that the singer hangs out near.

I’m going to do the normal chordal analysis. Luckily, because the pieces I was told to use as reference were originally scored for a full orchestra, I have the advantage that someone else has already done a chord analysis, so I just have to look at the chords they’ve named, and then use that to figure out what the overall structure is. Tbh, I’m kind of hopeful that it won’t be too painful, because I would love to be able to figure out exactly what the chord structure is during this writing time right now.

Given how overwhelmed I felt during mass today, maybe the reason I feel so tired is not just because I generally feel tired or anything like that. It’s entirely possible that I do actually need to be resting more than I have, and that for whatever reason I have not been recovering from overwhelm before going forth again. I have a whole book about that, and I should really like to finish it.

So, when we consider the list of things to do², I have the draft of the piece that I nominally promised a draft of today. That’s priority one.

I have the book I would like to read about dealing with overwhelm. That realistically belongs as priority two.

I have the general desire to do some more creative writing again. That may be something worth considering, but that’s also probably a low down the priority list item.

I’m going home soon to visit family, so worth making sure my home is in a good state for that. Otherwise, I think that I’m really just good to keep reading through the stack of books I checked out from the library.

...

I was planning to write with a friend, but they’re running very late. I’ve already journaled almost an entire hand written page, and this is far from useful about the concept of composing, which I don’t really feel deserves much more exploration.

Oh!

I have been thinking a lot about this site.

Especially over the summer and early fall, I did a fair amount of relatively in depth/intellectual posts. I don’t think that’s sustainable, both because I don’t have the mental time or energy to devote to considering deep issues daily, and also because there aren’t that many things to consider.

If my current readers (sound off) don’t hate this format, I might consider doing more blog style posts, and then hopefully the constant writing will encourage me to explore the deeper thoughts³ that I want to work through.

Oh!⁴

I want to generally get into composing again. I’ve been listening to a lot of minimalism lately, especially Reich and different covers⁵ of Piano Phase. In the weekly album club my family is now doing, I have commented a few times on the fact that older music⁶ is often much more willing to sit with an idea for a long time than newer music. I don’t generally think that either approach is better, but it’s making me think about Musicking again.⁷

Small points out that the modern experience of being able to listen to a piece countless times is an anachronism. If I’m going to listen to the same song 100 times, I think that it makes sense to explore any given idea less. In a way, listening to the same song over and over is itself a form of exploring the idea more? Hmm, thinking about listening to a song on repeat as a form of minimalism is something worth thinking about. Especially when I consider the embodied nature of listening to music, the fact that definitionally an environment is changing around me as i listen to a song on loop is something interesting.

also, i’m considering whether doing no caps is a form of writing that appeals to me. it comes up because I didn’t capitalize the i in the last sentence of the above paragraph, and something about it felt right. great question whether or not it will continue as a phase i suppose the other question comes in the form of punctuation

just listend⁸ to a video this morning about what it means to be a successful writer. in general the answer was writing is successful when it affects others. having a more unique affect is certainly one way to effect things.

Ok but going back to Small

Listening to pieces on loop is a relatively modern idea. Listening to disparate pieces together is incredibly modern. I think about the stories that my dad tells⁹ about making mix tapes. There’s something fundamentally different, in my experience, in even burning a playlist to a CD compared to just having the playlist on a digital medium. I can’t imagine how much more different it felt before music was all digital and easily shifted onto a mix.

The fact that it’s almost easier¹⁰ to listen to different parts of an album separated than together these days perhaps does something to explain why the album is dying. By that, I mean that like rock operas are clearly a story told through an album. Even non-rock opera, though, tended to have a clear thematic through line. A video essayist I really appreciate¹¹ somewhat bemoaned the death of the album.

Something I’m thinking about, too, is the soccer web novel I’m reading.¹² One of the chapters focuses on our MC, a brash twenty-something, interacting with an older musician. They meet in a record shop, and there are a few pages¹³ of discussion about the way that listening to a vinyl is a fundamentally different experience to streaming. The embodied nature of putting a record into the player, and then having to carefully place the needle, is used very briefly as a metaphor.

Sorry, where was I going with this?

Uhhhh...

Records don’t exist anymore. Don’t listen to songs how they were composed. Exploring an idea.

Oh!

So yeah, as I’m listening to a lot of early minimalism and really loving the slow nature of the change they use, I’m considering what that could mean for me as a person composing my own music. The VST for choral words I got seems like it’s going to be a bit of a pain to figure out, but part of that may also be the composition workflow I use and that they assume I’ll use. My issue yesterday¹⁴ centered around the fact that if a single syllable was wrong, it’s really hard to fix it in context. I’m sure that as I use the software more, I’ll be better at knowing how what I type translates into what I hear. It’s also possible that they expect me to be generating the piece word by word, rather than having all the notes and words, and only then putting them together.

I’m also now thinking about the ways that I can sample with these. It’s trivial, as it turns out, to have a virtual choir sing at any arbitrary tempo. Something that’s fun to explore in minimalism is two voices with slightly different tempi. The way that they phase in and out of sync with each other causes some fun things to appear.

Ok so that’s a thing I can do.

I can also try finally getting a recording of the pieces I wrote. If the VST ends up any good, I can recommend it to my college director, who a few years ago now sent me the best bet he had for doing auto-singing. If it becomes something I can do with any real speed, it’s worth considering doing it as a side hustle; I know that at least one of the choirs I sing for spends money to get practice tapes¹⁵ for people to practice with on their own. It feels rational that I would be able to undercut whatever price they pay, but then we get into the fun conversation about morality and ethics and taking work from performers by using machines.

Anyways.

Friend has arrived, so this draft is done.

Current Pen List¹⁶

• Hongdian Black with Fude Nib: Esterbrook Shimmer Lilac 11/23

• Jinhao Shark: Diplomat Sepia Black. 10/6

• Pilot Preppy: Diamine Bilberry. 10/6

• Shaeffer (blue): Empty

• Diplomat: Laban Zeus Purple 11/23

• Kaweko: Stipela Sepia. 10/6

• Monteverde: empty

• Shaeffer Calligraphy: missing

On (Computer) Mistakes

First Published: 2025 November 22

Draft 1: 22 November 2025

I’ve been commissioned¹ to write a song for a friend’s upcoming wedding. As part of this, I’ve realized that I have really wanted to get some sort of way to have my computer automatically sing back the music I compose. I’ve had mixed feelings about this for ages.

After all, I have not hidden my general feeling that having performers is good. I’ve been clear that I don’t like AI. Why, then, am I so adamant about wanting computer to sing for me?

Also, I’m not sure if I’ve written about it here, but in general I am also opposed to the idea that the composer is the sole determinant in what the piece of music is in terms of notes and shapes. Making computer music is sort of the antithesis of this view.

In general, I’m realizing that it comes down to two main considerations: first, I like the digital samples that come from Musescore, and am willing to listen to those. Second, I don’t know that the music I write is worth being sung. Until I hear the words and melodies together, there’s a chance that I would waste my money and a choir’s time by having them sing it.

Third², I also don’t generally enjoy the process of producing. I recently got invited to a group and weekly discussion of musicians, and I realized that what I mean by making music and what they mean is so fundamentally different. Almost all of the discussion was on recordings of works, generally in what’s vaguely describable as singer-songwriter genre. Most of the music I’ve written is somewhat “classical”, for as much as I don’t love the term. Also, most of the works given were at least somewhat produced.

Production is always the part of music that I hate the most. When I took a digital music class, I found myself dreading the parts of the course that were most applicable to the work I would generally be doing in my current role as a musician: adjusting filters and plugins to slightly modify the sound of recorded audio. I don’t entirely know why I dislike it, other than the fact that it’s a digital skill that I’ve never needed or felt the need³ to learn. Unlike most manual skills, where I can at least understand that I don’t have the time at the exact moment to work on the skill, I have never found that sort of peace with really any digital skill.

All of this culminated in me purchasing a VST for choir on Thursday night. Yesterday, I was far too exhausted to do anything, and that’s a worrying trend.⁴ I think part of the exhaustion comes from the sense that I’m constantly running. The sense that I’m constantly running comes from not knowing my life ahead of time. The not knowing my life comes from not journaling. The not journaling...

Anyways, once I had purchased the application, I tried to download the music. It was⁵ a nearly 60 GB file⁶. For whatever reason, the creators of the software believe that it’s totally fine to require double the final storage space for downloading.⁷ So, on Thursday I managed to clean about 80 percent of the files I would need.

This morning, I decided to clean the remaining percentages. After mucking around on my computer for a little while, deleting files from hidden folders with abandon⁸ and uninstalling countless software, I decided to also shift to cloud storage for some files. Now, fervent readers of the blog may remember a previous time I attempted this⁹ cloud storage. At that time, I was running the code that became my dissertation locally, which involved¹⁰ generating and deleting tens of thousands of files a minute. Obviously, the sync was not happy with that, and so I disabled it.

When all was said and done here, however, I had just under the necessary storage, but had enough if I was able to use the “purgeable” storage. I quickly googled how to purge it, got the answer of generating an arbitrarily large file and then deleting it, and ran the code. What I forgot in doing that, however, is that the computer was also willing and able to pump everything off of my computer. So, bright side: I have more storage free on my computer than I had since probably the day I got it. Downside: literally nothing was local.

And, of course, the software still refused to install. I ended up finding a workaround¹¹, but that was very frustrating. I came here to start to write about that, and then realized I never posted my last post. I tried to post it, but of course, the blog folder was now in the cloud.

Github, for whatever strange reason, is not great at dealing with files that are not stored locally.¹² By this point, I was frustrated beyond normal¹³, and so I just did a hard reinstall of the blog.¹⁴

That’s where I’m at right now, but I can look at the bright sides. First, my computer is free of a lot of the random files I generally want to hoard but have no intention of using any time soon. Second, I have the software that I have wanted for a while, and I’m nearly positive that it’s even working at this point. Third, my blog works again, and I’m even blogging right now!¹⁵ Fourth, uhhhh this is something that I did, which is always an accomplishment.

However, the title of this post has computer in parentheses. Much of the problems that came up today happened because of prior events. Right now, I’m thinking about a soccer-based web novel I’m reading. One of the characters is asked why he isn’t mad when referees make bad calls, and his response is that if his team played perfectly, there wouldn’t be a chance for refs to make a mistake. That is, the thing he’s concerned about happened twelve moves earlier, when someone made a bad judgement or mistake.

That’s something that resonates with me right now. Most of the things that are not going according to how I’d like right now are entirely because I made previous bad decisions and have been doubling down on them. Why am I exhausted?

Primarily because I decided to suddenly go from waking up whenever to waking up at 630 to waking up at 5 am. While I do generally think that it would be best for me to be awake at 5 am, I have to modify other parts of my behavior first. For example, I need to make sure that I’m going to bed at a reasonable hour and getting enough sleep. Given the fact that yesterday and Thursday I came home and immediately fell into ninety minute naps, and that today I again slept for three extra hours when I gave myself the chance, that’s clearly not happening.

Of course, there’s far more to it than just the lack of sleep. I often live my life in phases of crash and run.

I’m not feeding myself emotionally and spiritually/mentally.¹⁶ This is evident in the fact that, upon waking, I still simply want to lie down and simply not have to think or move or experience. That’s a symptom of burnout, I’ve learned. Even though it’s hard to figure out where burnout ends and depression starts, I’ve got a few cues I’m using as general tells.

Chief among them is that, when depressed, I don’t want to do exactly nothing. I want to be watching bright pictures, or listening to something, or playing a dumb game. Something, that is, which takes just enough of my mind to keep me from thinking.

When feeling burnt, by contrast, I find that I really just want to lie and let time pass me by. Since I’m still feeling some of that, it might be a good time to take a break and go lie down until no longer bored. I’ve mentioned uninstalling games¹⁷ a few times, and that’s also been about storage needs.

It’s nominally, however, been about the recognition that I will sit and play some games for hours on end, leaving and feeling nothing so much as numb. I don’t like that, even if it is sometimes a necessary thing. My goal is to more and more find the things I can do that also let me let time pass by/recover from feeling too much mental energy gone without having nothing to show for it at the end.

No, that’s not totally right.

I want to find the activities that actually restore me, rather than simply tide me by. It’s the unfortunate reality that the better things go, the better they keep going. When thinking about the plate spinning analogy, as I am right now for the first time in a while, that makes complete sense.

Spinning plates are at their most balanced when they’re spinning quickly. The hardest part is getting each plate to spin. So, not only is maintenance easier than starting, maintenance can be delayed a little bit without causing a plate to wobble too much. That’s something worth thinking about.

Also worth thinking about is food.

I’ve stopped eating oats most mornings, bringing my diet to a breakfast pastry, lunch¹⁸, and then rarely anything approaching a dinner. That’s not great, because I do think that at least two full meals a day is important for me. Of course, when I come home, I rarely feel like I have the energy to cook. Maybe I do need a microwave, because the idea of turning on my stove feels like too much sometimes. Worth thinking about, at least.

So, nearly two thousand words in, I’m realizing that the mistakes I made on my computer are, generally, symptomatic of the general mistakes I’m making right now. Rather than consider what I’m about to do hiding, I’m going to go recover as much as I can before working with a friend on one of the many tasks I have that aren’t essential but are good to have done.

Current Pen List¹⁹

• Hongdian Black with Fude Nib: Empty

• Jinhao Shark: Diplomat Sepia Black. 10/6

• Pilot Preppy: Diamine Bilberry. 10/6

• Shaeffer (blue): Empty

• Diplomat: Empty

• Kaweko: Stipela Sepia. 10/6

• Monteverde: empty

• Shaeffer Calligraphy: missing

On Pilates

First Published: 2025 November 22 (forgot to post)

Draft 1: 13 November 2025

I mentioned in a few recent posts that I’ve been starting to do Pilates. It’s definitely my favorite form of exercise to talk about. My brothers and I have on multiple occasions enjoyed joking about it.¹

I’ve absolutely enjoyed the few classes I’ve gone to, and wow have I learned that there are parts of me that do not want to move at all. Mostly, that’s my hips and legs. I’ve always known that I was tight, but I never realized quite how tight I am.

And, of course, my shoulders continue to ache when I hold them up for long periods of time. That being said, each of those is absolutely improving as I continue to go to the classes.

However, there’s a very fair question that could be asked: what do I like about Pilates?

I kind of joked to a friend that I like it because so much of the workout is done lying down. That’s not entirely untrue; I do appreciate the fact that I can be horizontal and supported, because it means that I can close my eyes and make the workout more mindful. Also, I’m officially reaching the age in my life that it’s probably best to start being concerned about my joints. Much as I do adore box jumps, my knees probably don’t as much. Doing slower and more controlled motions, even though they aren’t as fun, is probably better.

It is somewhat strange to see what parts of the workout is difficult for others versus myself. I very rarely have issues with moving smoothly or slowly, but lack the endurance to continue through entire sets. This is, so far as I can tell, the exact opposite of the normal experience in the classroom.

So, all this to say, I do really think that going to Pilates will be a good thing for me to continue doing.

Misc

This feels like a great place for some journaling!

I’ve recently started using a calligraphy pen, and wow it feathers so much, and also wow when I hold it right, everything I write looks absolutely gorgeous. It’s a hard practice to make sure that I am holding it correctly, though. For whatever reason, a part of me is unconsciously shifting my grip to keep the stroke width identical through the entire character or word.

Also, the pen is definitely designed for cursive.

1 mm is incredibly broad for what I tend to write, but that might help with the whole “I am gradually getting too much ink” thing that I complain about below. Also, doing a page a day of writing will probably serve me best there.²

Current Pen List³

• Hongdian Black with Fude Nib: Empty

• Jinhao Shark: Diplomat Sepia Black. 10/6

• Pilot Preppy: Diamine Bilberry. 10/6

• Shaeffer (blue): Empty

• Diplomat: Diplomat Caramel. 10/6

• Kaweko: Stipela Sepia. 10/6

• Monteverde: Diplomat Burgundy. 10/6

• Shaeffer Calligraphy: Whatever ink they sent: 11/10ish

  So far really liking the pen, even though it practically gushes ink. Should refill the other pens that are starting to get empty sooner than later. I forget what all is empty, honestly, but I want to get through them all sooner than later. Given that I’m getting 25 mL in a month, I would like to start shooting for more than that amount out. A quick Reddit search implies between 12 pages per mL and 3 pages per mL. That means between 75 and 300 pages a month, which is between 3 and 10 pages a day...

  That’s not not doable.