Are you tired? I'm tired. And not like, "man, I need to take a nap" kind of tired; I mean like my soul is tired. Like I've been alive for a billion years. Like all of my dreams were real, so instead of sleeping, I've been running. Running and running and running. I do a lot of that, in my dreams. When I was little, I had a recurring dream where a volcano was going off in my hometown, and I had to run away, playing hopscotch on lavabergs. Or sometimes there was a giant coming after me as I ran. Even my flying dreams tended to start off with me running, only I'd be running for the fun of it, and my feet would just sorta stop landing on the ground, then whee, and up I'd go. Less of those lately, but still a lot of running. From giants, from disasters, from monsters, from faceless enemies. Never resting. Is it just me? I tend to assume everybody is handling everything more or less better than I am, but I'm getting to wonder. I may struggle to maintain a job, but I've seen internet comment threads, and not all of those people could be unemployed. I mean, at least some of them are paid to post comments on social media. The general mood seems... cranky. Like we all need a snack. And a nap. Recently, I added the tagline of "I love you. Pass it on." to the footer on the site. I say "tagline". It's a genuine sentiment. Well... okay, so I was definitely calling for the heads of CSS developers withing 30 seconds of writing that in. I don't hate CSS developers, though. It's just that their collective decision to frame positioning around items in a page instead of the page itself makes it difficult to place a footer at the actual foot of the page without 20 lines of code, which makes me very, very angry. That's sort of how it goes, with me. I've said I do, but I don't think I've ever really hated any person for very long, if it all. Hurt, scared, frustrated, or angry? Definitely. But hate takes a lot of energy. and commitment. I don't have much of the first, and have often struggled with the latter. And, despite my cantankerous demeanour through my tirades, I actually am very fond of far more things than upset me to the point of diatribe. I don't speak up enough about what I love, though. I'm working on that, but the timing feels poor. Doesn't help that I immerse myself in a daily wash of YouTube video essays. But, while I don't believe any previous point in history was anywhere paradisial, I don't think anyone before felt the need to have, in common usage, a word which means "the process by which things become worse" quite so to-the-point as "enshittification". So, it's a struggle, but it seems like a common one. That's why I wanted to add that line to the site. To remind myself that I do indeed hold affection for people. That there are things to celebrate, and that celebrating the good is perhaps worthier than admonishing the bad. That said, I am still a salty bastard, and that block ain't licked yet. So, there will be more tirades, no doubt, as I already have a few half-written. But I am trying to close them on an up beat, if nothing more than that. It's true there's a lot of crap out there, but cleaning an outhouse does not make it a home. I hear more talk online of the importance of having something to replace what came before instead of just destroying everything and building it over again in a slightly different shape. Maybe that's just my perspective of the many-faced Algorithm, but it's encouraging, nonetheless. I worry often that I'm too scared, too rigid, too complacent, too ignorant, too much of too much to find a place in this future that feels like its barreling down on us faster with every passing hour. It's a weird mix of FOMO and existential angst. I want to keep waking up tomorrow. Most days, I'm not sure why, but mixed in with all mess, there's a kind of optimism. It's got to get better, right? Surely this isn't it. Today I played too much Civ, vacuumed, did some laundry, got some stuff at the thrift store, and sang some songs. Updates: + /tunes/lookin.html + /tunes/rescue.html + /tunes/auniverse.html + /tirades/cancon.html ^ added to /tales/machomen.html ~ added styling for displays in portrait mode to accommodate mobile devices ~ created inline footnote coding for tirades that doesn't quite work right yet ~ general tidying and tweaking of code