got to the last batch of stages in neon white and these might be the best yet. spoilers below

a friend asked me recently about my "poly" status with my wife, and i started to write a short thing which turned into a long thing. here it is as i sent it to her, to avoid editing and nitpicking it into not getting posted.

here's a bunch of pieces that all kind of commingle here, so it's a bit of a mess, but the short version is something like:

1. i am poly and can and do experience familial and romantic love for multiple people at the same time.
2. i am a human bound by causality and time, so i can only do one thing at a time at any given time.
3. conceptually "love" is infinite and i can care about many people without effort, but relationships require time and energy for them to have any depth.
4. given that, if i'm going to have a meaningfully deep relationship, i need to put in greater and greater efforts to both achieve and then maintain it.
5. at a certain point, i can love multiple people, but i find myself disappointed when i want to have a shared history with someone (my now-wife May) but my history is split across N people. Shared history is an important aspect of relationships, and personally, i find great joy in being able to say "remember when we did X?"
6. likewise, when i was single and ready to mingle in 2017, i had basically infinite time to meet people and to spread myself out. that extra time has shrunk bit by bit since and now i have roughly 1.5 free hours before bed every day. if i want more than that in a given day, i am necessarily depriving both my wife and kids of valuable time with me and forcing my wife to do stuff like "make dinner, entertain the kids, put them to bed" alone.

Me: the sunset is beautiful. Fall is amazing how it feels like the sun has been setting for 4 hours.
my wife May: so true bestie 😌

i have a number of friends i used to see semi-regularly (at least once a year) that was helped by us both being active on facebook. now none of us are very active on facebook and i had some kids and everything is harder to schedule.

it's easy to say, "hey i know we haven't spoken in roughly 4 years but i miss you and hope you're doing okay" but how do i have it continue after we finish the pleasantries? the opening is easy, i just wrote it, but after, one on one conversation is hard to sustain without the ease of in-person dialogue.

i keep up with other friends because we're in group chats, so there's less pressure to speak directly to one person, you know? i can just throw into the chat "here's a dumb meme, here's a stray thought, here's a comment about my day". but when it's one on one, it feels like the silences are longer and it's harder to maintain any sort of connection.

Before I got married, I heard lots of advice about how to handle money in marriage, such as “have separate bank accounts” and “only use one joint bank account” and “as long as bills are covered, you should buy whatever you want” and “every penny must be accounted for to make sure nothing funny is happening”.

Back when we were Dual Income No Kids, I just sent her my half of the bills (as I had moved in with her and they were all in her name). It was easy and simple. Once we had our first kid and she quit her job, there was a question of how to handle spending money. I switched my direct deposit to give me an allowance (personal bills, etc) and then send the rest to her with the comment that she could spend as much as she wanted, that I both trusted her and thought she deserved to buy whatever she wanted.

This seemed fine but after two years, she admitted that she didn’t feel free to do whatever, that because her money was muddled in with the bills money, it felt bad to spend it on herself (even tho she knew I was okay with it).

I’ve started Death’s Door as a palate cleanser after finishing Ghost of Tsushima. I’m an hour in and most of the way through the first dungeon. This game rocks. Feels good to play, the art is pretty and reserved, the music is real nice, and I like this little universe they’ve built. I’m surprisingly intrigued by the main conflict and I can’t wait to see where it goes.

On the one hand, I don’t wanna hate on someone’s favorite thing.

On the other hand, I’m watching a truly boring-ass deathcore band rn and while I already don’t like deathcore, these folks are only making me hate them and the whole genre even more.

Giancarlo Esposito face: you think deathcore is not metal. I think classification arguments are dumb as shit and deathcore sucks regardless of what genre it is. We are not the same.

got the platinum trophy cuz i was roughly one hour of collecting away from it.

good game, would recommend. i spent way too long on it tho. i tried to resist my base urge to do everything and accidentally did everything, so it took me 55 hours to reach credits.

i chose to honor my uncle’s wishes at the end of the game. it was the sadder choice but it felt right and it nicely wrapped up that story.

owning and running a company is already mired in a complex set of circumstances and power relationships that i don't have a firm grasp on, but i at least see an aspect of "thing i built alongside other people and have pride in and want to see succeed as a reflection of myself".

and it's like "yes, get the bag, take the money and run" but also, fucking no way dude, have some pride and dignity. “take the money and run” only applies when no one is reliant on you. once you have staff and people relying on you, you can't just sell out without ruining lives.

my brother responded to the above with:

https://oromet.bandcamp.com/track/familiar-spirits?_layout=standard&_theme=dar

• Wallsocket by underscores (alt pop)
• Blackbraid II by Blackbraid (atmo black metal)
• Hostile Architecture by Ashenspire (avant-garde black metal)
• Blast Furnace by Fugitive (thrash metal/crossover)
• Extreme Transgression by Transgressive (thrash metal)
• Cavern of Inoculated Cognition by Spinebreaker (death metal/hardcore)
• Songs of Abundance, Psalms of Grief by healthyliving (dark rock/post metal, ffo: emma ruth rundle)
• Legacies of Frailty by Woe (black metal)
• Oromet by Oromet (doom metal)
• Ontological Mysterium by Horrendous (progressive death metal)
• Idol by Horrendous (progressive death metal)
• The Enduring Spirit by Tomb Mold (death metal)

some real bangers in this haul

Me sowing (staying up until 00:45 having sex): haha fuck yes!

Me reaping (my kids waking me up at 6:15): well this sucks, what the fuck

One of my favorite thrash bands is Warbringer. Their lyrics are generally anti-war but they fall into the trap of accidentally glorifying it . The same way full metal jacket is anti-war but it was used as a recruiting tool because soldiers love it.

For example, the song Remain Violent is anti-cop and yet the lyrics and the t-shirt makes them look sick as shit. Put some red and black protestors in there! Don’t repeat their slogans!

The constant threat of a shot to the chest But defending yourself is resisting arrest City streets that I called my home Are starting to look like a combat zone

All that's what they want for you to say Is to remain silent Now you have the right to remain To remain violent

i watched elemental last night and while i'm still coalescing my thoughts on it, i decided to rank the pixar films. feast your eyes on this and scream at me in the comments and rechosts

descending, so cars is my fave:

cars
toy story 2
turning red
coco
ratatouille
cars 3
a bug's life
the good dinosaur

i do a lot of hobby programming. it's my primary hobby. i spend a lot of time writing code for fun, but it's quote unquote boring stuff like tinkering with an alternative test framework or building a linter or fixing a bug in a library i use.

i sometimes think "i want to make a game, i like games, why shouldn't i?" and then i'm just... empty. completely devoid of ideas or thoughts. i know it's probably something of a muscle i must flex, but i haven't flexed it yet and it's hard to start new things.

i'm only thinking of this now because of the unity stuff. feels like there's excitement in the air alongside the dread, people writing tutorials and recommending things, so why not.

idk why or when this happened but at some point i learned about super stimuli and became deeply unsettled by them and i’m now leery of anything that resemble one. feels too easy to fall off the cliff and lose a sense of what’s “average”.

maybe i’m just particular susceptible to them. i read some erotica earlier today and it made my chest constrict in such a way that left me shaken and a little emotionally numb after. a fairly pleasant but also worrisome experience. i want to enjoy my life, i want to be present and engaged, i don’t want to be distracted by thoughts of when i can sneak away to get my next hit of erotica lol.

there are many things that feel very good but they’re mostly quite hard to get. what changes when they’re suddenly abundant?

up front: i gotta pee real bad and im falling asleep on the couch but i had this desire to write some thoughts down and i wanna get them out before starting the work week and forgetting everything until next friday so excuse me. this is gonna be rambly and all over the place.

what's my sexuality? i've been thinking about it a lot recently.

in short: i like women, but i think i'm "my wife"-sexual.

My wife and I finished Fast and Furious 6 last night. Overall, I really like the series. The action is fun, the fights aren’t gratuitous, the characters have plot armor but there’s still plenty of tension, and I’ve totally bought into the whole “family” thing. I genuinely like the characters and watch to see them happy in their lives.

However, the stakes have grown such that the last couple have felt closer to Mission Impossible or a Marvel movie than F&F 1. We’re well past “over the top racing sequences as finale” and I think that’s really sad.

I’m gonna keep watching them and enjoying them no doubt, just a little sad we’re so far past the (somewhat) grounded stakes of the original trio of movies.

roughly 20 years ago, i watched a live action web series, a "tv show" but made by nerds and uploaded to the internet in mp4 or quicktime or whatever format we were using back then. i'm searching for it now and cannot find it (cf popular post about how google sucks now).

the show was about the crackers and hackers and leakers who got early access to music and movies and released them online, while trying to dodge the feds. the format for each episode was a view of someone's desktop screen and their IRC-equivalent chat windows as they typed messages to each other. in the corner of the screen was a live feed camera of them sitting at their computer, like twitch but with the camera angle usually being from somewhere else in the room.

i remember there being like 8-10 episodes and all but the final one were this way: irc chats between the person we were following for that episode and their compatriots, and a nearly static image of them sitting at their computer, fake typing. and then the final one had some handheld camera stuff, some bad acting, and a finale i don't actually remember watching.