L.J. Writes

You know you're officially Grown Up(TM) when you're actually excited about taxes and insurance, specifically achieving savings. No, I don't have an offshore paper company funneling billions of dollars: I saved the equivalent of a few hundred bucks in liability by tracking down discrepancies between figures and making use of all my available deductions. It's a tiny fraction of the total sum owed but significant in the day-to-day, so it was a good moment when I finally tracked down a missing deduction. I got a lead on insurance premiums savings, too, and plan to follow up on that with my insurer and maybe change insurers altogether if necessary.

When not being a sensible adult (which is most of time, lbr) I've been going down fun rabbit holes like building a Dreamwidth posting app in Emacs, the Lisp interpreter that comes with a text editor. I've set it up to auto-complete tags and icons and stuff, and I'm pretty satisfied with how it works though I have more testing to do before it works fully as envisioned. This post itself made use of these auto-complete functions, in fact.

I've also gone through two playthroughs of Volcano Princess (火山的女兒), the Chinese roleplaying/simulation game about raising a beloved daughter and also having her solve human-monster relations if that's how you want to play it. I saw the "true ending" on my second playthrough and have many thoughts about the gameplay, which I'll probably talk about in another post. It's also a queer and polyamory-friendly game so I had fun romancing characters of different genders and multiple partners.

July has been slow work-wise after a very busy June, but I've been getting inquiries from several places about future availability so keeping fingers crossed. It's been a slow year overall for work, what with the political crisis we've been through and the recovering economy. I'm also trying to take advantage of the free time while I have it, though. That's just life, I guess.

A couple of days last week went by in housework to get my new desk set up and change the furniture arrangement. This was after an all-nighter to send in my Soul-Sucking Neverending Work Assignment of Doom From Hell in the morning followed by a nap to sleep it off, so that was certainly a choice I made.

In the afternoon I rose from the dead to clear out the old desk and brought in the assembled pole-mounted desk, wiping down the desks and floor in between. I also moved my secondary Dell monitor from the old desk-mounted monitor arm to the new pole-mounted one (after snapping a pic of the old setup so I can sell the old arm on the flea market app Danggeun), then moved my computer housing to serve as a side desk. More wiping because the inside of that housing had gathered some dust over the years. The monitor was plugged in on its brand-new arm, and I turned it on to check the power supply-

And nothing! The monitor wasn't turning on! I wasn't sure if the monitor itself had somehow met its demise while being moved to its new mount or something was wrong with the power supply. So I dragged our cable hoard out of storage to see if I could find a matching power cord, which there was. Two of them, actually. Changing the power cord got the monitor working again, whew. Maybe I'd kept the monitor power cord too tightly curved on the old mount, or maybe its time had simply come.

Anyway it was a good thing we had the extra cord on hand, but the cables had become a tangled mess in storage and I somehow had the energy to group them into different plastic bags and tag them by categories like "power cords" and "charging cables." It doesn't make an immediate difference right now, but future-me will thank past-me the next time a cable needs to be found.

The old, bigger desk wasn't being dumped; rather, it replaced the side table of the living room couch. The couch-side table had been hanging on in bad shape for years after a younger Tater had jumped up and down on it, tilting sadly and precariously from a missing wheel, so it was a mercy really. (Why are kids?) I dismantled the old couch table and replaced it with the one I'd been using in the office. Also wiped down the living room floor while I was at it. After putting away or tossing a bunch of stuff, the new setup was more or less complete. I even took a night to do a deep-clean of the keycaps and board, a process I live-tooted on fedi.

( Before and after pics! )

I'm very satisfied with the new setup, despite all the work it took. The desk layout is more compact than before, the computer housing no longer gets between me and the monitor, and everything I need is within reach when I'm sitting at my desk (or desks, rather). The change was a while in coming and I'm relieved to have it over with.

Hello again, Dreamwidth!

It's been a while. Lately I've been hankering to keep an online journal for everyday, chatty stuff that's less serious than my author website (yes, I have one now!) but also archived in a more orderly and discoverable way than my fediverse social media accounts. This DW account was the obvious choice for it and I've always been meaning to do something with the account again, so might as well run with it! I'm hoping to stick around for longer this time.

So what have I been up to? I've been getting busy with work again after a five-month dry spell since a little coup attempt in Korea you might have heard about. A lot of the long, anxious winter and spring months were spent following the political news and going to protests, doing independent research, working on ttrpg translation, and lots of home cooking because we had more time than money.

The political situation is finally starting to stabilize with the Presidential election, and so is the economic situation. Literally work started rolling in the week of the election early June, so that's been a win on more than one front lol. I'm getting back to normal-year levels of work and income which is a huge relief, though it also means I'm busy and stressed again. I guess life is a choice between problems and this is better than the alternative!

So it's going to be a busy weekend crunching for a work deadline, monsoon season is here and it's raining again, I have a bunch of things going on and more I'd like to get into but I'll get to that post by post. Like I've been mildly obsessed with Kpop Demon Hunters, did some small coding projects, been working on side translation projects, ran some tabletop games at events... keeping busy, I guess, in addition to the default family, work, and home stuff.

And I continue to work on my writing, of course! More about that, too, as things come up.

After my prior post on the subject, here's yet another commonality between the fandom policers and the woobiefiers/apologists: They think their personal emotional reactions define the morality of a thing.

Again, they go to opposites from the same premise. The fandom police think that since they react with disgust, shame, fear etc. to a fictional depiction, it must be objectively harmful and therefore immoral to create. The apologists think that since they react with positivity and excitement to a fictional depiction, it must necessarily be harmless and objectively moral. The emotional and intellectual dishonesty is staggering in either case, which isn't surprising because they both start with the same dishonest and flawed premise.

I am a Christian atheist.

Let me state up front what I don't mean by that; I don't mean I believe in the obscure branch of Christian theology which states that God is dead and we must love each other and save each other in that absence. While I admire the poignancy of it, it doesn't gel for me even as metaphor because I don't believe God is dead but rather that he never existed, at least in any physical sense outside the sensemaking that we do through story.

I also don't use "atheist" as a pejorative here, as a Christian pastor does in his book The Christian Atheist criticizing Christians for living as though God does not exist. I don't think it's morally or intellectually inferior or superior not to believe in God.(1) By atheism I mean, simply, the lack of belief in God as a supernatural being. I don't assign any moral or other value judgment to it.

Fortunately, Christian atheism seems a lot more visible than it was back when I was first searching for the term back in 2013. The above two senses were the only ones I could find at the time, but now I am able to find entire articles on cultural Christianity(2) and more expanded information on Christian atheism itself, not to mention modern Christian atheists openly expressing their convictions.

( What Christian atheism means to me )