#mostly notes to self

[mindfogandsleep]

Reminder that healthy people don't feel pain daily

Healthy people don't go to bed in agony from doing minor daily tasks

Reminder that you're not faking because you managed to do more than usual today.

You're not faking it if you can do more than another person with the same illness.

You're not faking it if your symptoms are less one day.

You didn't make it all up if you have a period where your symptoms are more manageable.

[crispsandkerosene]

Other sims 2 shader notes & experiment before I go to bed:

The StandardMaterial's parameters are listed in the Maxis Material Shader with the high instance "7AA57810".

The "BindsForLighting" function in "6E4B7F3B" sets multipliers(?) for the final results of diffuse, specular and emissive lighting. I tried changing the value for "finalShaderEmissive" to a colour ("(1, 0, 1)") and it worked. My goal was to try and see if it could be masked somehow, but it doesn't seem able to receive a texture reference.

The one that assembles the base texture, lighting, envcube and the like is "46BA93B1". It's the one I edited to apply the specular mask to the envcube.

I also tried and failed to renumber the sampler in which it puts the specularMask. Then I realized the samplers have to be declared beforehand. Have yet to try that.

[setnet]

Plenty of people have reflected that sewing patterns are designed for an average that doesn't really fit anyone. It especially doesn't fit me. Ramblings below the cut on how I've been approaching sewing/adjusting clothes to my own proportions.

I have a narrow back paired with a large and forward-projecting bust. There are two, two and a half brands (freya, fantasie, sometimes panache) that make bras of the right shape and size to fit me & be comfortable without fucking up my back. I can buy ready to wear knit tops that fit me pretty decently, or oversized shirts, but tailored garments are generally designed with a B or at most a C cup in mind, not a G cup.

So by trial and error over the past 4+ years I have been approaching a top basic block that fits, which I can then adjust as needed for garments which actually fit. (following guidance from people like the closet historian). My current attempt is pretty close - I think I need a little more room in the back shoulder and a bit of a dart to keep the back armscye from gaping. Feeling pretty positive there.

Then on the bottom, the unusual body shape strikes again. My high hips are the same width or wider than my low hip, and my butt is low and small. In making (or adjusting) trousers I generally need to take up to an inch of length out of the back rise and up to 3/4'' out of the side height. But I've got a fairly long torso and waist to crotch measurement (and a bit of a belly) so need to keep (or sometimes add) height to the front rise.

This works fine for wide leg trousers, flared skirts, etc. But for fitted garments I'm increasingly turning to the age old approach of just adding padding. After all most of fashion design is about silhouette & it's a time-honoured tradition to add padding in order to get the silhouette you're aiming for.

Here I've found there are a lot of tutorials on Nigerian fashion youtube where it's just a normal thing to do. I hadn't been getting much joy out of trying to make a sloper that both a) fitted my lower body and b) achieved the shape I wanted. I'm thinking I may just make a petticoat with the padding attached that I can swap out under garments as needed. It's pretty freeing actually.

[inimitablereel]

Pi-Hole debug log

I'm thinking about writing up a nice guide so let me know if that would be useful to anyone but in the meantime, some notes about difficulties I ran into setting up a pi-hole

First off, I do want to say that this is actually pretty technically complicated? Like it's been floating around tumblr for a while, lots of people have done it, you can too, but when OP on that viral post said they took 2 hours and don't know anything, I think they mean they don't know anything in the same way I do (I have a whole degree in computers I have used a terminal before, but I hadn't used a raspberry pi before)

Rest below the cut

Gathering Materials Good news: there's lots of viable options for a raspberry pi that works with pihole! The minimal requirements are really very minimal. You need some computer that you're willing to devote to blocking your internet. (Theoretically you could do this on a computer also used for different stuff but that would suck and make you have no ram.) In practice, unless you've got a spare working laptop floating around for some reason, you are going to want that to be a raspberry pi. Bad news: now you have to make decisions. The "official" pihole kit has been sold out for ages, so that's not an option. I said fuck it and bought kit for the raspberry pi 4 off of one of the licensed distributors linked from raspberrypi.com (because it had all the requirements) but that was ~$100 with shipping and there ARE cheaper options. It looks like the raspberry pi zero barely hits the RAM requirements and is $15 at a licensed distributor so that's likely as low as you can go. And if you're not just buying a kit you'll need at a minimum a power supply, a microsd card (the pihole requirement is 4GB but everything I was seeing was way bigger anyways), and a way to read a microsd card (either a USB microsd reader or if your laptop already has an sd card reader you'll need one of those microsd to normal sd card converters which idk where you get but a USB microsd reader is very cheap). You don't need but may want an hdmi cable that will connect to the pi

Setting Up and Using a Raspberry Pi You may notice for notes that aren't a guide (yet) this is going into Great Detail about the early parts of the setup. As someone who hadn't used a raspberry pi before, I found all the pihole guides I was looking at skipped the basics I needed and most of my setup time was trying to figure out what was going on with my raspberry pi, not actually doing the pi-hole thing. The raspberry pi getting started page actually had all the information I needed in conjunction with their pihole setup guide if I'd read it thoroughly enough but since I didn't a general overview: first you plug the sd card into your personal computer to image it; then once it's imaged you take it out and put it in your raspberry pi; then after it's blinked at you a bit you ssh to your raspberry pi while on the same wifi network you just set up in the imaging step. This is running your raspberry pi "headless" which means you don't need a monitor/hdmi cable but does make it harder to debug if you can't ssh. Also if you're on windows apparently you NEED to download a different terminal because windows command prompt for all that it's gotten better over time cannot connect to unix operating systems (which raspbian is).

AT&T hates internet configuration Now we're getting to the part that's specific to me. My internet is on AT&T, which has overall been pretty okay (and they've had great technicians for setup and repair), but AT&T fiber does not let you set your own DNS. The non-annoying backup is to make the pi-hole your DHCP server instead of your DNS server, which IS in every setup guide but is NOT very detailed. (Possibly if I wasn't on AT&T this whole paragraph would be complaining about the level of detail of guides about making your pi-hole your DNS.) To get DHCP working, I found a different, slightly outdated guide from someone else on AT&T fiber which was pretty useful but had some pitfalls because it is a bit out of date: https://otter-security.com/how-to/ht_post/28/

Key points for setting up a pihole as DHCP server:

Set up your pihole normally/following the raspberry pi guide for the prompts

You still need to allocate a static IP for your pihole. For AT&T, this is on the IP allocation of the Home Network tab of the advanced settings page. That static IP should be the same as whatever the IP the IPv4 one the pihole install configured.

Disable DHCP on the subnets & DHCP tab. THIS IS THE STEP THAT BREAKS YOUR INTERNET: without DHCP available only some sites will work. This will be fixed by enabling DHCP on the pi-hole

Disable IPv6 (more about this later)

Enable DHCP on the pi-hole admin page: this is just a checkbox under settings->DHCP. The router ip address should be the one listed on the back of your router/the one used to get to the advanced settings (probably already correct)

Let all devices connect to the pi-hole under Settings->DNS on the pi-hole admin page (this is the step that was outdated or possibly just different because it was wired on the guide)

Don't You Forget About Mesh More details about my particular internet setup: we extend our internet with a mesh network. This kept getting in my way as I was doing the setup because I treat them largely interchangeably but it's important to put the raspberry pi and your computer on the SAME internet to do a local ssh, where the mesh vs the router are different here. I wanted to put the raspberry pi ssh on the router not the mesh because my initial setup attempt did break the mesh, but I'm not sure that that matters? Also I don't think anything connected to the mesh is getting the pihole filtering right now? Possible fixes required are either changing the mesh DNS to the pi-hole IP or seeing if the mesh has DHCP enabled.

IPv6: Still Broken So in the DHCP setup step I disabled IPv6. I couldn't get my DHCP to be forced to the pi-hole on IPv6 and I'm not sure why. I did set up my pi-hole to be IPv6 enabled and try disabling just IPv6 DHCP on my router, but it didn't seem to be hitting the pihole. Reading a help thread on this has convinced me that my best option is to leave it disabled until such a time as I want to learn things about networking again (a class I liked but also worked very hard to get a B in)

Why is my computer sad?? So I've declared pihole "working" in that our internet isn't broken and it's blocking at least some ads from some computers... but my mac is now giving ominous no internet connection warnings.

This would be a Big Problem except that I definitely can in fact reach the internet just fine. I'm on the internet right now! I don't know why my mac is sad and I am struggling to google it because it's specifically a false warning and I'm only getting results about the real problem. My hazy guess is it's ipv6 related? I could test this by disabling pihole/re-enabling DHCP on my router while keeping ipv6 off... but not in the middle of the day on a Friday

Adguard vs Pi-Hole: A Mystery Pi-Hole is no longer new technology and in the ~12 hours that it's been set up here hasn't made a dramatic difference in my life, mostly because I already had adblockers on my laptop. You can add more blocked sites and I've been looking at finding more adlists, but one alternate option is instead of running pi-hole on your raspberry pi, you run a commercial network level adblocker called AdGuard Home. I haven't tried the AdGuard option but it might do more comprehensive blocking? On the downside, it's commercial, not open source, so I do worry about them switching to break your internet if you don't give them money...

[hithelleth]

The Cleaning Lady S1

It’s been a week since the season finale, so my feelings had the time to settle and I need to write out some things.

Mainly, look, I’m a simple, shallow fangirl. ;) I came here for a ship. The ship. Of the not quite enemies but maybe adversaries-to-lovers (hopefully :P) variety. And the show has definitely delivered on that with off-the-charts chemistry and real connection despite everything.

But also so much more.

For airing on Fox, this show was really good about how it tackled the topic of immigrants/undocumented workers and the difficulties they face and the unfairness of it all.

But mostly, I liked how it dealt with the notions of morality and really showed the complexity good and evil. (Emphasis on showed, because it really did that, not told, so of course it may have flown over some people’s heads.)

I loved how they wrote the characters to show that what’s legal is not always good and what’s illegal is not always bad and that and belonging to the group designated as good does not make one a good person.

That said, I do not hate Garrett (yes, this is about him, in part).

(I read some meta/opinions along watching while hunting for pretty gifs to reblog (and there’s barely any of Garrett, oh well [enter something about having to them myself but not doing it :P])and he seems to be universally hated and people seem to be mostly focused on shipping (which is fine, I’m too, but…).

As opposed to some other shows (okay, one in particularly), what I liked about TCL is that Garret as an FBI agent is clearly designated as the supposed good guy. But he is a) shit at his job (skirting and breaking the law) and a) often a disaster of a human being, although he means well, and sometimes, when he realises/acknowledges his fuck-ups, he tries to fix things and makes up for it.

And that’s what makes him not hate-able, not lovable-either, but interesting. And it’s what I loved the most in TCL: showing that and/or when the designated ‘good guy’ is not good at all and making it clear, clearly framing it as him being in the wrong. A fucking +++++++ job!

In the opposite way, they show Arman, the mobster who should be in the ‘evil’ group as often much more decent human being.

And then there’s Thony, clearly ‘violating the law’, but obviously set up as good, as the protagonist to sympathise with and root for.

Marco is a whole another issue I have not spoons or desire to deal with but again I liked the dichotomy between Thony leaving with Luca to get Luca treatment and him leaving with Luca (I called that, btw!) because of, I guess, his manly pride & need to be in charge, and maybe a bit of vengefulness (or a lot of the latter.) And I’m not even getting into his gambling (although at least he had some decency to save some money for Luca).

But, maybe somewhere behind there’s something good in him, too. At least, I think, he does love Luca.

So, yeah, I don’t like Marco, but I don’t quite hate him, either. Okay, maybe a bit, more than Garrett at least. Which says something. Maybe because we really didn’t learn much about Marco, definitely less than about Garrett, so he doesn’t seem as interesting. (And a boring/uninteresting character is worse than evil.) But they might flesh him out in S2, considering how S1 ended.

So, yeah, from what I read there are good chances for S2 considering the ratings and TPTB’s enthusiasm, but what worries me is it being on Fox. I guess we have to wait and see.

I do hope there is another season, because there’s a lot of potential from Thony (hopefully) getting Luca back to trying her new criminal enterprise and manoeuvring between working with Arman and not going to jail (I guess the deportation trial is still on? I forgot.) and everything else.

I also loved Fiona and the kids and Fiona and Thony’s friendship and would love to see more of them, too.

[spectralcaptor]

but i feel i need to remember things i did tonight in a dream journal kinda way otherwise i'll lose it

so this was at christmas party number one

was bought tequila by danny from maintenance b/c last time he got us tequila it was warm and tasted like shit

it tasted a lot better this time woah - and i took it like a boss, according to a third party - didnt even grimace a little

maintenance supervisor was super wasted like super wasted (started at 4pm wasted) bought maintenance and me two shots and we got a free shot from sam the bartender who was a sweetie

so many high fives seriously wow for a person who is so serious at work i never ever expected him to be so drunk he was sloppy and slurring and it was excellent to see b/c he is always so dang serious

i defs said i was in a relationship b/c we got talking about highschool sweeties b/c he and his fiance have been together for nine years since highschool- didnt drop the bomb

tested the theory about getting free stuff by saying "y'know i've never tried 'x'" - but he was very very very drunk but he bought just me a dirty hooker shot b/c i NEEDED to try - he ended up saying yep there's your dirty hooker virginity b/c he was very intent on saying 'dirty hooker' as many times as possible and very very loudly

i ended up getting the boys jaegerbombs (expensive sheesh but tasty) so rob me and roman had those but danny declined

i was a lil drunk at that time and there were a lot of high fives tossed about before marnie dragged roman home and a lot of people headed out

kelly, jack, andrew, sherri, carrie, danny and i ended up trying to go to the grotto but it's 21+ and they actually checked my id what up with that i'm drinking age just let me in goddamn i was with a group of 30+ so we ended up at carlos ugh personal defeat they id'd andrew (who turned 31 tonight) before me and so they checked me too goddamn so angry so we went to carlos instead

kelly treated us to a round of drinks and also shots and jack and i talked music and higher education v loudly while i saw people i graduated with like dang

& there was a talk about pregnancy and how badass their wives were btwn me andrew and danny

sherri and carrie were looking for dudes to potentially date and were asking the guys in the group whether they knew any not creepy people that they were willing to set them up with

it became andrew's birthday at some point

andrew loudly exclaimed MEN PLEASE GATHER AROUND and people looked around he was like yeah dang there are some dudes over there and sherri was like yo how old and he replied like yeah they about twenty and i was like yeah well that's about my age yo and she was like naah and i was like are they cute

and then he asked well what about your "friend" and i was like woah what

and he was like y'know your "friend" and i played confused

and we went back and forth like that for like five or so minutes and i was like "friend" or "friend friend"????? and i kinda got his drift and was like daaaang

how do you know about that

and then he shrugged and said he knew all

and he is my boss' husband and so i asked how long has my boss known and he replied with "maybe a month after you started working there" so like a year

that fucked my head right up but he basically told me well she didnt want to say anything because she didnt want to out me or anything if people dont know she doesnt wanna be the one to let the cat out of the bag

and i already think my boss is the greatest boss in the world?????? but tonight she went up like five hundred percent because wow what a great person holy crap

like i was so blown away to hear that she had known that the whole time???? and i was so stoked and nearly up and exclaimed how gay i was to the world which i didn't do

and then andrew told me a story about how he and kristi first started going out and how his life could have turned out and it was a really nice story that i'm very happy he felt like he could tell me wow and it kind of just reinforced exactly how cool she is

kelly paid for all our drinks (sneaky sneaky) and then sherri urged everyone to go to the grotto after all and i was trying to get danny to stay for a few waters but then he was like yeah dang sorry guess i'm gonna head and he helped me find an atm though because i was drunk and a little lost and quite confused b/c i had gotten directions but there were so many people and they were really loud but what a sweetie seriously i was so grateful he led me there and pointed me in the right direction

so i got some cash, caught a cab (immediately awesome) and now i'm home i guess

tomorrow is christmas party two which will be twice as scary i'm thinking