Finally heading home
Wow, I’ve been traveling for most of the past week and a half. Aside from a brief stop back in Seattle between IndieWeb Summit and visiting San Francisco for family gatherings, I’ve mostly been away from home since June 28. Yikes.
I didn’t really get to see a lot of friends on the San Francisco side of things (although I had some good times with my brother and my friend Mark) but that’s okay, since I got a lot of stuff done on Publ. Or, specifically, on Authl, the authentication layer, and the Publ integration with it. I have sign-in by email, IndieLogin, and Mastodon working! I will also probably add direct auth for IndieAuth at some point, now that I know how easy it is to implement an OAuth basic authentication flow. Hopefully soon I’ll have friends-only entries going up on this site!
Pain-wise I’ve been doing a lot better. I’ve been tapering off the nortriptyline, but I’ve been taking magnesium supplements. I still hit a crash point in the evening pretty easily, so it’s not like this has, like, solved everything, but it’s at least doing more for me than the nortriptyline alone was. I’m currently at 20mg and taper down to 10mg tonight, so this is where I’ll probably start to see if it really was a placebo early on.
Gender-wise, something rather interesting has been happening this trip: I’ve been going into the men’s room as usual (because when I travel and am in “boy mode” clothing I don’t want to cause a panic), and pretty much every time, someone’s taken it upon themselves to point out that I was in the men’s room and redirected me to the women’s room. At the same time, I still keep getting “sir"ed a lot, although I don’t know how much of that is people changing their mental alignment for me after they hear my voice. (Probably a lot.) I don’t feel like my appearance has changed at all over the past year, so I dunno what’s going on there.
Also gender-wise, a lot of people have been respecting the use of she/her pronouns for me, and that just feels… off. Still. I think I’m back to thinking of they/them as my primary pronoun. Honestly, the main reason I switched to she/her was because if I was requesting they/them, people would just treat it as unspecified and still default to he/him. I think my way of specifying pronouns is going to switch to "they/them, but she/her is fine.” Because if someone’s going to misgender me I’d rather it go to the femme side of things.
And a really cute thing happened at my nephew’s 1st birthday party: Camille, one of my nieces (who just turned 6 yesterday), wanted to get to know me better, and the first question she asked me was, “Are you a he, a she, or a they?” And I sort of fumbled over things and I eventually said “it depends but ‘they’ and she are ‘fine.’” Anyway, I wonder where she picked that up from. Wherever it was, it fills me with hope for the future. It’s also what got my mind grinding away about, like, which situations call for which pronouns. I think generally it’s they/them for folks my age or younger, and she/her for folks who are stuck in their ways regarding “proper” English.
Anyway, I guess that’s all for now. Unless something else occurs to me in the next hour fifteen minutes, apparently before my flight boards.
Edit: oh yeah, I think I need to switch to a backpack as my only conveyance. They’re kind of cumbersome for keys and wallet and stuff but purses are heavy and lopsided, and having both a backpack and a small purse is really awkward. My current backpack is great for just carrying my laptop to work but it’s garbo for actually organizing all my needs. My larger purse carries my iPad and all my other regular needs but it hurts my back after a whole day of using it. Any recommendations for better backpacks (ideally ones which are femmy and have room for an iPad, a laptop, some sketchbooks, and makeup et al) would be appreciated.
Edit 2: oh and another thing: fuck all the plastic straw bans, seriously. I’m gonna start just carrying my own plastic straws with me everywhere. I swear, people see one injured sea turtle and suddenly all people with disabilities and sensory issues just get completely thrown under the bus…
Edit 3: oh god only 4 weeks until my next big trip why is everything happening all at once
Lending Club update
Remember how a few months ago I had a positive interaction with Lending Club regarding deadnames on 2FA emails? Well, the other day when I logged in it required a 2FA email and, amazingly enough, they actually fixed the problem! I hope more companies actually start to take these complaints seriously and fix issues with how they handle trans peoples' names.
Addendum to the previous
Kevin and Ryan raise some very good points about where OStatus went wrong. I absolutely agree that Webfinger is a terrible approach to identity brokering (and I have a lot of problems with the /.well-known thing in general), and while I haven’t looked seriously into Salmon because it seemed unnecessary, it also sounds like it was a major pain in the butt to deal with on top of that.
What’s frustrating to me is that Mastodon (and possibly ActivityPub itself?) makes Webfinger absolutely necessary to support (and provides worse feed discovery/modeling as a result!), and I believe it does something Salmon-esque for conversational threading as well (although I’m sure someone will correct me on this point).
Meanwhile, another reason to avoid ActivityPub is that things like this are necessary.
A long-winded IndieWeb ramble I wrote on the train back from Portland
(This is a somewhat-edited version of a disconnected ramble I posted on Twitter/Mastodon while on the train home today. I feel like putting this somewhere that I own it, but am not in a good enough mental state to actually write it properly.)
Yesterday at IndieWeb Summit, someone – Aaron, I believe – mentioned that one of the big differences between IndieWeb initiatives and ActivityPub is that IndieWeb is made up of simple building blocks you can pick and choose while ActivityPub frontloads a lot of complex work. This is a sentiment I very much agree with and it’s unfortunate that the main reason Mastodon switched from OStatus (which is very IndieWeb-esque) is because it made it slightly less inconvenient to pretend to have private posts. Which aren’t even implemented that well.
Mastodon’s “private” posts really suck from a bunch of standpoints. There’s no ability to backfill or even view on web without being on the same instance, and Mastodon’s actual privacy controls go in the wrong direction, so it’s still necessary for a separate vent account. As usual I don’t know if this is a problem with ActivityPub itself, or an artifact of how Mastodon shoehorned its functionality into ActivityPub, but either way, the end result is that Mastodon’s post privacy isn’t really all that useful, nor is it really all that private.
So, right now ActivityPub is the darling of the fediverse, but I’m hoping that the current push toward AutoAuth and trying to use it as a basis for private webmentions and the obvious next steps of private feeds and private WebSub will change that. I do worry that IndieAuth/AutoAuth are kind of hard to do in piecemeal ways though (well, okay, IndieAuth becomes really easy using IndieLogin but I don’t want to see a single endpoint become what everyone on the Internet relies on). And of course once you get into an integration between auth stuff and content stuff you also need to worry a lot more about content management and how it integrates, as well as this seeming fundamentally incompatible with static site generation.
At the Summit there was definitely a lot of compromise that people were doing, such as using Javascript libraries to introduce externally-hosted dynamic IndieWeb stuff onto statically generated pages. I think in this world where SSGs can be supplemented with third-party endpoints that use client-side JavaScript there could be a world where some level of privacy can happen via clever use of client-side includes of data at non-public unguessable URLs. (Although the ideal solution for that is to use the third-party APIs to generate webhooks that then trigger a file change → git commit → commit hook → build/redeploy.)
Non-public unguessable URLs aren’t great for privacy in general (and I mean, Publ has had “privacy through obscurity” since day one and there’s several reasons why I rarely use it anyway) but it’s at least better than nothing.
IndieWeb Summit day 2: Authl finally gets some love
One of the biggest bits of functionality I want to get in the next milestone for Publ is private posts. Doing private posts requires some way of determining the identity of the person who is reading the site. There are a lot of mechanisms to choose from. Most of them are largely incompatible with one another, and there isn’t any single mechanism that checks all my boxes. And of course the standards keep on shifting, and keep on getting a new unifying standard that will fix everything.
So, IndieLogin is a really great way to get started with IndieWeb authentication for people who are in the IndieWeb ecosystem. If you have your own website on your own domain name and an account on one of its connected RelMeAuth providers, it covers everything. But not everyone who I want to grant stuff to has their own website, or the ability to set one up. Siloed OAuth is still useful. And being able to log in via email address is also beneficial.
IndieWeb Summit 2019, day 1
First day of #IndieWeb Summit, scattered notes that I take as they come. Hopefully I don’t end up misrepresenting things too badly.
Feelings
So, the last few days have been feeling a lot better overall. I’m not sure how much of that is reducing my nortriptyline dose or how much is because I’ve been taking magnesium regularly. But either way, I’m just like… in less agony. My wrists still hurt most of the time, especially after I’ve been working for a few hours, and I’m still driving to work more often than I’d like, but all in all I’m feeling, I dunno, better?
I was in a pretty dark place about a week ago and now things are just feeling like how they are on average for me in general, so to me that’s a pretty big improvement.
This weekend I’m going down to Portland for IndieWeb Summit and I’m looking forward to it. Hopefully I can improve my understanding of the current ecosystem, and maybe make some contributions to it which are important to me. In particular it’ll be nice to chat with Aaron and Jamey about our respective areas of overlapping interest, and talk everyone’s ear off about Publ and what I’m trying to do with it. Maybe I can even get others to want to contribute to it! Also definitely looking forward to meeting Jacky, Darius, and everyone else I’ve interacted with in IndieWeb stuff!
RSS: there’s nothing better
David Yates wrote a great defense of RSS which I completely agree with. To summarize the salient points: RSS is open RSS works RSS is very well-supported by a lot of things RSS is a suitable name as shorthand for “RSS/Atom” because the name “Atom” is overloaded and basically anything that supports Atom also supports RSS and vice-versa
(Note that there’s one inaccuracy in that since that article was written, Twitter has moved over to algorithmic manipulation of the timeline. This can currently be disabled but who knows how long that’ll last?)
Most IndieWeb folks are also really gung-ho about mf2 and h-feed, and while I don’t see any reason not to support it (and it certainly does have some advantages in terms of it being easier to integrate into a system that isn’t feed-aware or convenient to set up multiple templates), I’ve run into plenty of pitfalls when it comes to actually adding mf2 markup to my own site (for example, having to deal with ambiguities with nesting stuff and dealing with below-the-fold content, not to mention a lot of confusion over things like p-summary vs. e-content), and so far there doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to doing so since everything that supports h-feed also supports RSS/Atom, as far as I’m aware.
For me the only obvious advantage to h-feed is that you can add it to one-size-fits-none templating systems like Tumblr where you don’t have any control over the provided RSS feed, but in those situations there’s not really a lot more added flexibility you’re going to get by adding h-feed markup anyway. I guess it also makes sense if you’re hand-authoring your static site, but that just means it becomes even easier to get things catastrophically wrong.
Keeping it personal
I just read this great essay by Matthias Ott. It does a great job of summarizing the state of affairs of blogging and social media, and how we can try to escape the current orbit to get back to where the web was meant to be.
I especially like the bit about “Don’t do it like me. Do it like you.” Because that is exactly why I’ve been building Publ the way I have; I have specific goals in mind for how I manage, maintain, and organize my site, and these goals are very different than what other existing blogging and site-management software has in mind. The fact that I post so many different kinds of content and that they need different organizational structures to make sense makes this a somewhat unique problem. I’d like to think that Publ is a very general piece of web-publishing software, but it’s probably so general because I have such specific needs. Which makes for an interesting paradox, I suppose.
I guess what I’m saying is that I want to see more types of web-based publishing where the schema and layout fit the content, not the other way around. But it also needs to be able to interoperate with other stuff, while still making sense from a producer-consumer UX perspective.
Stuff, and things
Last night I had another mini-spiral, brought on by making a joke in someone’s chat that didn’t land at all well. Which set off a cascade of bad intrusive thoughts. But I’m over it now.
I did decide from that to cut down on the spaces I’m chatting in. I’m spread too thin and need to focus my attentions on the things that are important to me, rather than the things that simply take up time.
Today the Dove Self-Esteem Project posted another Steven Universe short, this one about social media, and it reminded me that I’m long-overdue for cleaning up my Twitter follows. Given that I have, um, rather a lot, it’ll take me a while to KonMarie my way through them, but I think it’ll be worth it.
This also comes back to a lot of what I’m dissatisfied with in social media and modern communication these days. Everything’s about instantaneous updates and push notifications and micro-posts and conversations and so on. It’s a big reason why I’m not a fan of ActivityPub. It’s also the part of the IndieWeb focus that I’m less thrilled about (granted, IndieWeb is about a lot of things, and it’s not like I have to participate in every part to still make a meaningful impact). I keep saying how someday I’ll get around to writing a blog entry about impedance mismatches between what I like about blogging and the ActivityPub/Webmention/etc. world. This isn’t that entry.
Anyway, this is the… third? I think? day of my nortriptyline reduction. Which is to say I’m still at 30mg. My doctor agrees that we should try something else. Gabapentin will probably be the next thing I try, since it’s something that a lot of my spoonie friends have said works well for them (with caveats). I probably won’t be starting on that until August, though; it’ll take me a few more weeks to taper off nortriptyline, and then I’ll be doing Song Fight! in Madison (and hopefully not being in complete agony between the travel and the playing guitar all weekend). Meanwhile I think the magnesium might be helping as well.
Tonight I did practice a bunch of my Song Fight! material and actually managed to play for a decent amount of time without suddenly finding myself in agony. Which was a nice surprise. So I’m feeling a lot more confident in being able to play a full set in a month. And meanwhile I’m still doodling around with music for games and stuff. So maybe this is a good sign of things to come.
I guess I’m feeling cautiously optimistic for now. Which is better than how I felt two days ago, I tell you what.
Improvement
So last night I kind of hit rock bottom, in that I was incredibly depressed and ruminating about every single mistake I’d made in life and so on. I had a good cry and went to bed at 10 PM (and didn’t use my CPAP because my nose was all stuffy), and then the next morning woke up at 6 AM, still feeling kinda like crap, and I stayed in bed until 7:30. But when I got up I felt better, and I ended up going to the grocery store at like 8 or so and bought stuff for making a decent breakfast for once.
Today was basically a self-care day, and I think between having reduced my nortriptyline dose, having gotten a full 8 hours' sleep, not having used CPAP, and having been taking magnesium supplements, well, at least one of those things helped out. And today I was… well, not pain-free, but lower pain than I’d felt in a while. This afternoon I ended up taking a brief walk and managed to go a lot further than usual, too, although it was still only like a mile total. But I didn’t feel completely worn out by it.
Nortriptyline etc.
Early on when I started using nortriptyline I seemed to be having some results but I also admitted it might be a placebo. Over the last four months since then it’s become more and more clear to me that it isn’t actually helping me with anything at all.
It’s supposed to make me sleep better but my sleep is just as restless and terrible as ever.
It’s supposed to help me downregulate my pain but if anything my pain response has only gotten more severe.
I’m also dizzy and tired all the time, and have pretty much constant headaches.
I thought maybe it was time to increase my dose, so I did a bit over a week ago. And the last week has been even worse than it was before I started on nortriptyline to begin with.
So, it’s clearly not working for me, so I’ve started to taper off of it. Probably really bad timing for it what with IndieWeb Summit next weekend and then a week of visiting family immediately after, but I’ll still be on a dose of it during that (I’ll probably step down by 10mg/week).
It’s frustrating that this hasn’t worked out, and I was really hoping to have something that works for me by August but hopefully I’ll figure something out.
Over the last few days I’ve also started taking magnesium supplements again; I remember it helping me somewhat with anxiety a few years ago, and there’s considerable research which shows that it’s actually fairly promising for some. And between reducing my nortriptyline dose and starting back on magnesium, I’m feeling somewhat better today, at least, although that could very well be placebo effect combined with the fact I did basically nothing yesterday.
I want to be able to get back into doing the stuff I love doing. I miss making comics and being able to play music and even being able to be even vaguely functional at work. I’m determined to find something that will let me get my life back.
Thirds
Kitt wrote an entry about splitting a pastry in thirds, which has a few different solutions. I hashed out what I thought was a correct solution in the comments but I’d actually made a pretty big mistake that came from me not actually drawing a diagram. So here’s a version with diagrams.
Support networking
I’m in the midst of a really bad fibro flareup lately, and am burning through my sick days at work pretty quickly. It’s frustrating and I need a way out, and something else that I can do as sustainable income.
I’m in a bunch of differently-intersectional support circles, and I’ve noticed the following:
Disability circles: Doesn’t understand the impact of my disability on my profession (because they don’t understand what my profession entails)
Technology circles: Doesn’t understand the impact of my disability on my profession (because they don’t understand what my disability entails)
The thin segment of disability+technology together: Doesn’t have any answers either, just sympathy and relatable experiences with not knowing what the hell to do
I keep asking in technology circles to see if anyone knows other jobs that would use my brain without needing to use my body and I keep on having to grow the list longer and longer with preemptions. No, I can’t go into management; I’m not good at coordinating other peoples' moving parts and it’s not what satisfies me as an engineer, and the brain fog from the pain makes this not a thing I’m likely to be able to get good at. No, I can’t go into teaching or training; that has even more requirements and rigidity in terms of my scheduling and I cannot do anything that requires that I be available at precise times on specific days.
I ask in disability circles, and there’s another, different list; no, I can’t use voice recognition software to program (not while there’s shared open-plan workspaces or I’m working in languages which aren’t suited to it – and I usually don’t have a choice of language). I still can’t go into management; it’s a completely different set of skills and not a natural progression. I already have a good ergonomic setup, both at home and at work. And employers don’t look too kindly on me smoking weed all day.
And in the intersectional circle, the only response I ever get is: “I have no idea, let me know if you figure something out.”
The Mr. Barry Lewis Drinking Game
One of my favorite YouTube cooking shows is the eponymous one run by Barry Lewis, formerly known as “My Virgin Kitchen.” Given how long it’s been running and how many videos Barry has made over the years, there are certainly some standards that happen.
So, in the great tradition of Internets past, here’s a good old-fashioned drinking game. Actual amounts to be determined at the discretion of the viewer.
Black Mirror, Season 5
A few days ago I watched season 5 of Black Mirror, a show I have a sort of love-hate relationship with. The premises are usually pretty interesting, but the morals feel heavy-handed and often don’t even say anything of actual substance beyond “Technology is bad” and “Privacy is good.” It tries to be a modern-day Twilight Zone, but I feel like most of the plots in Black Mirror were actually done better by the original run of the older series.
(As a note, I’ve seen the first two episodes of the current Twilight Zone revival and they’re fantastic. I need to get around to watching the rest of it at some point.)
Anyway. Season 5 returns to the series' original 3-story-per-season format, which helps to keep things fairly tight and focused, unlike the sprawling, interconnected mess that was season 4. (Okay, “Arkangel” was pretty good, and “USS Callister” was at least a fun heist episode, although it over-relied on a bunch of tropes which rubbed me in the wrong way but that’s a subject for a different blog entry.)
So far, critics seem to be loving the first episode (“Striking Vipers”), just apathetic to the second episode (“Smithereens”), and absolutely loathing the third episode (“Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too”). My feelings on the episodes are pretty much completely inverted from that – “Striking Vipers” was just okay (with a decent, but hollow, payoff at the end), “Smithereens” was a lot of setup for a story that didn’t have a lot of substance, and “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” is probably my favorite episode of the entire series so far.
Some more detailed thoughts have been pinging around in my head for the last few days so I figure I’d share them. I’m going to try to limit any actual spoilers here, but you probably need to watch the episodes to have a point of reference; this isn’t a review, but neither is it a recap.
Current sleep/pain/etc. checkin
Let’s see, where am I at right now…
Sleep: I got a weighted blanket on Meh. I’ve slept with it two nights. First night my sleep was aborted because of a… thing, second night I slept pretty well under it and woke up sore in the morning as if I’d been lifting weights for the last several hours. Interesting.
My new CPAP mask has been working pretty well for me. Although somehow I managed to not only take it off but take it apart in my sleep last night. Wat.
The… thing: I was feeling a mysterious pain in my left leg and hip starting on… Tuesday, I think? and it was getting worse and worse, and felt a lot like the DVT I had back in November 2017 which threw a clot and turned into a pulmonary embolism which wasn’t exactly a fun experience that I have any interest in repeating anytime soon. So I went to the ER to get it checked out, and it turned up… nothing. So, good news, no DVT. The doctor suggested I just take it easy for the next few days, which I am trying to do, and oddly enough I’m feeling a lot better, go figure. Also I’m glad I’m with Kaiser because the whole thing only cost me $15.
But it’s hard for me to take things easy because I want to get my home clean, because my birthday is coming up soon and I am intending to host a completely unrelated pizza party at my home. (Incidentally, if you are in the Seattle area and are interested in pizza and you think I know you well enough to let you into my home, let me know and I’ll maybe extend you an invitation to the party!) Fortunately a friend is coming over tomorrow to help me out with the cleaning stuff (for which I am incredibly grateful!) but I am oh so very tired. So I mean I’m taking things easy at the moment, but I’d rather not.
iPhone sync bug report
Remember the iPhone sync issue I was having? Which had me switching back to my 6S and planning to sell the XR? Well, it started happening on the 6S too, a couple weeks ago, so I’m glad I never managed to sell the XR. (That and it would have been a nightmare).
Anyway both of my phones are now stuck in this no-sync state, so here’s the Apple Feedback (née Radar) I submitted last night. Maybe someone else will enjoy reading it, or maybe it’ll just get a bunch of search hits from other people with the problem. (I have a few acquaintences at Apple who are already looking at it, at least.)
Glad to see @hankgreen repping the new space merch from @AmazingPhil - the perfect shirt for drinking gushers juice in. @irlmerchandise
Alright, so the latest version of https://publish.koype.net supports images. I’m going to have to make a light stylesheet to impose some visual constraints on my end. Namely on the maximum dimensions that images can have in the editor. I’m also itching to have extend Koype’s implementation of Micropub to allow for template blocks to be sent back. This way, I’d know how exactly to send what an image should look like to the endpoint under the user’s ex...