[                      2026.01.16 ]
[ i'm trying to improve, but why? ]

content warning: vulgarity ahead. granted it's likelier to be more tame than 
most anything you encounter pretty much anywhere on the internet in the year 
of our glorb 2026, so named for the approximate number of revolutions the 
earth has made around sol since the gratuitous state murder of glorb's baby boy.

i now have an estimation of how long i have been off my ADHD meds: a little 
over three months. i'm basing this on (a) the timestamp on my last phlog post,
(b) the time since i last saw my psych nurse, and (c) the vague notion i had 
about how much time that was to begin with. i went back on adderall today, 
thankfully. we had a lot going on in the last quarter of 2025. aside from dog 
dying in september, my partner had a breast cancer scare in november and 
december. she's fine, thankfully. but there was a period of frantic appointment 
scheduling interspersed with frantic waiting for said appointments. as one 
does. the biopsy to determine the nature of her lumps was on 31-Dec-2025, 
just "under the wire" for medical insurance purposes. good system we have here,
wherein one must scramble to get procedures scheduled within a calendar year 
because one has already met one's deductible and... nevermind, in won't wax 
bitchy about the state of healthcare and health insurance in these united 
states of america. it's fucked, it's basically always been fucked, and i don't 
expect to live to see it unfucked. anyway, she's fine, excepting the lingering 
bruising beneath her right breast. but given that she has a family history of 
breast cancer on both sides of her family, it was a tense few weeks.

INSERT CLEVER TRANSITION!

i am taking this 25(ish)-week course through an organization called Code:You. 
it was recommended to me by a guy who teaches python at the local library. it's
a bit more serious than i thought when i first enrolled, but so far it's 
proceeding smoothly. i'm feeling arsed about some of the requirements, namely 
the required use of microsoft products. not the end of the world, but good 
glorb do i detest microsoft and big tech generally. and becuase this course is 
geared towards providing skills to make people "employable", i understand why 
we're using github and vs code. and for the most part, vs code seems like a 
fine IDE. except for the microsoft of it all, namely the clippy bullshit, by 
which i mean copilot being unsubtly inserted into every piece of microsoftware 
and enabled by default. at least the instructor was adamant about having us 
disable that nonsense. but i have to use windows for my work computer and i 
find it just... gross. vs code as a piece of software does what it does well, 
seemingly. i can't say the same for outlook or powerpoint or word or even 
really excel at this point. 

my hope, i suppose, is to learn python sufficiently to be able to use it for 
analyzing large data sets and omit excel entirely. as far as work goes. i'm 
also modestly interested in light hacktivism, if that ever becomes something i 
can do. learning new skills isn't bad, and i suppose having skills that expand 
one's professional oppprtunities is also a positive thing. i am concerned that,
though i want computers to be fun again, i'm moving in the wrong direction. 
except i'm also using my phone much less than i used to, and except for 
mastodon i'm off social media entirely. instagram was the last holdout. i quit 
twitter long before it became the world's largest nazi forum, and facebook 
even before that (2010, i remember that moment distinctly). 

ok well, i didn't get to any of the "fun" stuff in this post: the weird 
depression daydreams about body annihilation, for example. next time, perhaps. 
i do so rarely post here, but no pressure. it's just a gopherhole. it's more 
private than if i were to write it in my secret diary. who the fuck uses 
fucking gopher, you fucking sicko?