There Are Five? ;)

List five things you do for fun.

You didn’t get an entry yesterday because, and I know this is lame, I forgot to charge my Bluetooth keyboard (I also completely burned out and needed some rest. I’ll still do the prompt at some point so I can do all of the “Bloguary” prompts, but I’ve moved on for now.

I cannot sit at my desk for long periods of time because my desk chair is an antique and it’s so uncomfortable my back starts tweaking almost immediately. Another reason I’m not really a gamer, which leads to the first thing I do for fun. I like video games, both the Fallout and The Elder Scrolls series from Bethesda Game Studios (that means they’re here in Maryland, by the way…..). I’m branching out, though. I have downloaded a few older games because I only have a mid-range PC and I want to turn the graphics up to stupid ultimate settings. Anything that came out between 2015-2020 is perfect, so if you have any recommendations, I’d like to hear them. Right now I’m thinking about playing “Dark Souls Remastered,” but I love Skyrim like I love “The Office.”

This is the first time I’ve owned a copy in 64-bit, too, because “Oldrim” was a 32-bit application and you had to jump through hoops to get it to work on Windows 10. Now, it’s completely stable…. but I keep starting new games because there are so many mods that I want to install that will not load correctly in an already established save file. The most recent I downloaded to try is “Saints and Seducers, Extended Cut.” The Anniversary addition already comes with the Creation Club original mod, this is just basically adding back in “Cutting Room Floor,” which they also did in Skyrim and you can actually download that mod as well.

I spend a lot more time modding Skyrim than I do actually playing it. I just have to be careful with new textures for things like grass, trees, plants, etc. because that’s what really slows down your CPU and GPU…. dense forests that have to keep loading as you walk across them.

It is a known joke in the Skyrim community that the city of Riften is entirely responsible for why we spend thousands of dollars on graphics cards. It’s gorgeous, but even the leaves are animated in Riften, so it’s the most intense city on your computer and when it’s running at full load, you can tell where you are without a map. 😛

The best answer that I’ve found is to install a plugin that helps you take it easy on your VRAM. My graphics card is actually decent when you’re talking about a $200 computer (I think it was a bit more than that, but I think I ordered it on Black Friday). What happens is that you have 512 MB of dedicated VRAM, but your graphics card will share another eight gigs with your processor (no biggie, I have 16 GB of RAM and could upgrade if I felt the need. I don’t. The reason why is that most games now have settings that might not make it the best in the world, but playable if you don’t care about FPS. I don’t, because I can’t tell the difference. The jump from my old PC to my new one is not enough to make a difference, because even though I had an NVIDIA, it wasn’t the latest and greatest.

This leads me to the second thing I do for fun. I think about the computer I would buy if money were no object, because I know how to get the most bang for my buck. A media workstation that I would actually use for recording and editing would have the same graphics power I’d need to play Skyrim the way it was meant to be played. There are so many mods that bring Skyrim into the future as textures keep updating to be richer and more immersive. I’ve watched ESO play Skyrim Anniversary Edition VR, and it blew my mind.

So, if I get bored, I go to Apple or Dell’s web site and see what’s new. My problem with Apple runs thusly. They don’t use Intel chips anymore, so I have reached my limit on the number of things that would run well on Windows (dual booting my machine, because the command prompt on Macs is UNIX as well. Don’t need to waste hard drive space on Ubuntu.). It’s not that Windows wouldn’t work. It would just run on a translation layer from Mx to an Intel codebase rather than on bare metal. I don’t think games would do well on this kind of setup, so actually the last Intel Mac with the fastest processor would be better for my use case scenario. Macs come with decent graphics cards, but they’re the same as mine- AMD, just with more dedicated VRAM and less shared.

However, it wouldn’t be very long before the last Intel Mac became irrelevant in terms of the processor speed, although I could make it last quite a few more years by spending an enormous amount of money on a video card because editing is mostly dependent on VRAM, taking pressure off having the latest and greatest CPU.

What is true of editing video is true of gaming. You’ll get better results with an expensive video card than an expensive CPU. The only thing that’s stopping me from adding an external video card to my PC is that I don’t know how well it would work through USB-C. The reason I’d change form factors entirely for an editing workstation is that I’d like a tower. Graphics cards, the really expensive ones, are impressively large  and draw a lot of power. In a modern workstation/gaming computer, you need at least a thousand watt power supply.

I’d also want the latest and greatest motherboard, because the ones that are current now will last a few more iterations on chips. Therefore, I’d pick out the best AMD I could find, my preference over Intel because I got into them when they were cheap and the products are so good that I’m still dedicated even though the price has gone up. I also want a brand new motherboard desperately because I love all the cool things you can do with them, and they even have graphical interfaces now. It’s insane. I know that a thousand watt power supply may be overkill in some cases, but if I have a tower, I’m also using it as a charging station for nearly everything I own. So, I need a little overkill because I want to be able to hook up things like a PCI card that adds more USB-C ports rather than having the cabling of external. The only hub I’ve ever really loved is my TARDIS, and I don’t have it anymore. Now, it’s out of date because it was USB-2. Therefore, it would be useful for things like a mouse, keyboard, remote, etc., you just wouldn’t want to do data transfer with it.

Ok, here’s my thing with peripherals that have proprietary USB dongles. You suck. I’m going to lose them. I now have a very strict policy that I will not buy anything that depends on a low profile USB piece of crap taking up space on my hub. Therefore, I only need the USB-2 slots my desktop has for the mouse and keyboard. Because most manufacturers know that’s what they’re for, they add something to them so that the drivers load first because you need those the fastest.

My computer absolutely did not come with enough hard drive space, because I knew I could add it cheaper aftermarket, and I already had as much drive space as a could use…………… sort of. I have a 6TB drive that I could use as USB-3, but it would not be fast enough, I don’t think, to run applications like games because of the data transfer rate. However, I bought the wrong cable on Amazon and I need to return it for something else. It will add a drive that can run under its own power, like an SSD. I need something that plugs in so it’s not drawing from my tiny little power supply, supposed to be a feature, not a bug, because it’s environmentally responsible. If I wanted USB-C speed data connections, I’d need a splitter (“SPLITTER!”), because my only USB-C connection is the power supply. I don’t know that the data connection would be faster or not, because I don’t know if the power cord would interfere with it somehow or not. I’ll have to do some research. I know that Raspberry Pis are also powered by USB, so I’ll have to see if they have transfer speed issues as well when they split.

Because I look at computers for fun, I have become obsessed with all the Raspberry Pi form factors, from the 5 all the way down to the Zero because they’re made for tinkering, and that’s been something I do for fun for YEARS.

I started when I was only 19, so I’ve been in the game a while. I’ve done my time, technologically speaking, and now I have a history I can tell for fun on my web site that not most people have, because I was a computer nerd before it was cool and now even computer nerds are interested in people like me because the scene is getting so much younger that they like stories about what it was like working on those old motherboards and operating systems… for instance, here is my favorite story about my mother in life.

Red Hat is free for community users, but if you paid for it at somewhere like Best Buy, you got a license for support. Since Joe and Luke, my mentors in all this weren’t available to the extent I wanted to learn from them, so I needed someone to call when and if I hosed my OS by being an idiot. So, my mom went to Best Buy and bought me a professional copy. It was a Christmas present, and she told the salesman she was looking for a copy of Red Hat for her daughter for Christmas. He said, “wow, that’s a big operating system for a little girl.” My mom said, “She’s 20.”

I needed the professional support because I couldn’t rely on the community. That’s because there used to be a linux hazing ritual, before we cared about getting the general public involved in our shit. If you asked for support, they would tell you that you needed to type “rm -rf /.” The revenge for asking for help is that means “erase everything on my system.” If you fell for it, you were in a world of gut-wrenching pain. So, I used the professionals for about six months, until I knew enough about linux that I could at least read a command string and tell what it did. Now, command strings are my favorite way to work in linux because I type so much faster than I can leaf through menus.

I was lucky enough that I don’t remember who told me about it, but because I already knew it was a hazing ritual “joke,” no one could rattle me like that. But idiot users, unless they were on a server, didn’t generally create user accounts because the server administrator did it for them.

They’re doing everything as root (Administrator in Windows, except even that has confirmation buttons), where when you type a command, the operating system does it instantly. Linux will absolutely let you point a gun at your feet and let you use it.

That’s because most of the time new users didn’t read documentation and didn’t know that once they were root, they had to create a user account that had admin privileges; you had to get them by using a specific command, not every single time you typed something. If you’re using your user account, there are all kinds of file restrictions that will keep you from not overwriting a system file or deleting it- fuck the Recycle Bin. We’re busy.

Modern linux has come a long way, but it’s because we finally got tired of coming across as assholes and wanted to reach out to the public and show people how cool open source software really is.

But let me tell you how the popularity of linux grew in the beginning. IT people, for the most part, spend 100% of the time working out Windows and Mac problems for other people. In the beginning, it was small community started in Finland and it was our space. Not wanting more people to join us was not born out of actively trying to be mean. It was more that it was the one place where we could talk amongst ourselves and not do anything like Microsoft or Apple. And in those days, Macs didn’t run on UNIX, they had a completely different system underneath the hood, just like DOS is completely different from either UNIX or linux (same operating system, a few different commands). No one wanted a UNIX codebase at Apple until Steve Jobs told them they did.

It worked out better for me because with dual-booting a Mac, I gained something instead of lost. That doesn’t take away the fact that since unix/linux was so incredibly different, we were the royalty of our own domains…. and we liked it that way.

I also know that there’s a truthbomb that’s not being acknowledged in our community, and that’s the fact that the unix/linux community became the computer community of STEM savant autistics and so we were demanding and rude even when we weren’t. That’s because neurotypicals were invading our space and that change was as hard to handle as having to help people bridge the gap from Windows to linux so they stopped being frightened of it.

If you actually have the latest and greatest AMD machine and a graphics card that would blow anyone’s mind, you can game on linux just as well as you can on Windows thanks to Steam. There are tweaks on some games, but even I’ve played Skyrim and Oblivion on Steam for Linux, and I was impressed…. but not that impressed because I didn’t have the latest and greatest hardware so my computer struggled managing both the game and the Windows emulator running underneath. That wouldn’t be a problem today.

If you go that route, you won’t save much money, but you’ll save at least $100 if you buy a computer piecemeal so that the price of Windows is not built into the price of the computer. You can start with Ubuntu installed rather than having to go through the kindergarten-fueleed nightmare that is a Windows first-run.

Plus, with the latest and greatest hardware, there won’t be a problem with the CPU power it takes to run applications that were meant to run on multiple operating systems and are naturally heavy because of the dependencies underneath.

It’s a double-edged sword, because doing individual packages for Debian and Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS works so much faster than the translation layer, but it’s easier and faster for the developers if they don’t have to code both. It’s a bug and a feature.

I can’t really put my finger on it, but I prefer flatpaks to snaps. It may be my imagination, but it seems that especially Firefox loads faster….. when the Debian package loaded as fast as it did on Windows and now that original deb file is not even available…. and I’m not sure that you can uninstall it, but I’ve never tried. I just hide it from my favorites and use Chrome (because it still comes in a cough .deb *cough.). If you download the latest binary from Firefox’s web site, then you just have to live with having two copies on your system, die mad about it. It’s why I’m so glad that even though the Waterfox project has merged with Firefox now that it’s 64-bit all on its own, there are still copies of the icon online so that I don’t get the two copies confused.

That’s because I use Chrome when I need to access something I’ve accessed a million times and Firefox is for when I want to be completely safe and secure by turning off all ads and scripts. There’s not a NoScript plugin for Chrome (or at least, I’m not aware). I don’t even install my password manager in Firefox, because I don’t even want it to show up in my extensions list if I want security.

Plus, it’s annoying when you have to set a tab to “Safe” because you’re on a web site where you need to run scripts to make the web site functional, like Facebook. So that’s why I use Chrome, when I’m not doing anything nefarious, it just cuts out all the crap and safety issues like pop-ups. They’re two completely different use case scenarios and why I’m glad HTML has progressed so much.

I remember the days when you had to include redirects in your code because it would look different in Internet Explorer than Netscape so you’d have to detect it first. They had different protocols underneath displaying web sites, so you had to code pages in both that looked the same and behaved differently. It was a right pain in the ass, to be honest.

I so love coding for fun, but WordPress doesn’t let you switch into code mode and add all the HTML/CSS that you want. First, it will break the paragraph “block,” and then it will say it can’t recover from it.

You can absolutely show code on WordPress, you just have to add a “code block” so it knows that you’re trying to show code on a web site, not add coding to the entry itself.

I like the code blocks because it shows off my linux ninja skills, starting with my idealistic Red Hat phase in college. I just realized that absolutely none of my college IT experiences are tied to educating people about computers. I do that because of my jobs in IT all having to do with translating “Geek to English.” What my most precious memories involve is finding autistic friends and not knowing I needed them so badly. Because I didn’t know, I didn’t know to talk to them about it. I just understood them on a deep and spiritual level.

I’ve spent way more nights on the desk when it was quiet shooting the shit about science fiction, so I know for sure that this is a community to which I belong. What I lose in that transaction is being fired, because I don’t want to be “Dooced,” and because of Dooce, companies are very aware when their employees have blogs and they check them, regularly.

Depending on how you spin your company, they will either love you or hate you. The problem is that when I point out problems, I also point out solutions that I think would be helpful and it is not taken by management well. It’s a double-edged sword, because just like my friends, they come for the things that adore them when we’re in new relationship energy, and then when you figure out problems, the top downs stop wanting to do conflict resolution real fast.

“If you treat your employees like kindergartners, they’ll act like it. If you treat your employees like you value their opinion, they’ll act like it.”

However, I have had one boss that saw all the good and the bad on my web site for months before he reached out to me, and that’s why I got the job. He knew I could dish it, and he could take it.

The man who hired me was the CEO of his own company, and I think he wanted me to be his sounding board because he knew I would be kind and not nice because he’d watched me do it.

He showed me absolutely that we were going to make it work because we were Sam Seaborn and Ainsley Hayes.

“Sam is getting his ass kicked by a girl.”

“Ginger, get the popcorn.”

The thing is, we never had a fight over it, ever, in terms of him pulling rank over me. In fact, in my first meeting at that job, where the whole company was gathered, the CEO said “I hired Leslie because she’s an incredible writer and I thought it was only fair that I let her take pot shots at me.” Can you fucking believe that?

I am great at beginning jobs, which is why I wish I was a STEM savant because they keep their jobs for two reasons. The first is that the company literally can’t function without them. The second is that they’re so “rude and demanding” that they’ve gotten everything they’ve asked for int terms of autistic accommodations, because they were the ones that were kind and not nice. I would have an incredible amount of job security if I was someone like Linus Torvalds (Finnish inventor of linux), not so much as someone who failed logic once and got a D when I took it over.

I’ve had the most success on CodeAcademy, because their interface makes it a “Facebook Game,” sort of like Duolingo for Python (or whatever). You get badges of achievement like you do in Steam/Xbox. Aaron, a coder and coworker back then, told me that I was a much better writer because I was dedicated and I had to choose, because it would take years for me to know enough to get a real job. I felt I couldn’t choose coding when the exercises on that web site got too hard, too fast.

It is interesting to note that Dana made it all the way to the end of the first lesson. What Aaron didn’t say is that “Dana has it. You don’t.” But I knew it, and her interest in coding was nonexistent after that. But, if you know her, don’t ever let her bullshit you that she can’t have a good career as a coder if she uses her hyperfocus to learn to speak Python, the language of the web. She’s already completed the first lesson. 😛

I had such high hopes for Dana and me because the reason we moved to Houston was so that Dana could teach, because all you needed was a Bachelor’s degree and a certificate to teach in Texas and you needed a Master’s in Oregon. So, when we first moved there, we were trying to become middle class.

What happened is that she didn’t get into the one program to which she applied, and never tried another one. It was too much rejection after her DUI, and I truly empathize with what it must have been like to be in that much pain with a partner who was incapable of recognizing it at the time. However, I did try, but not until I got overwhelmed and reached out to Dana’s mother. I told her that I was just as sick as Dana, and that I couldn’t handle her all by myself and I needed help.

It was another two-edged sword because in one conversation she said she would help and kissed me on the lips to show that she was dedicated. Then, in another conversation that Dana didn’t hear (she actually didn’t hear either of them. I wanted time with her parents alone), her mother said that she really didn’t know how to raise Dana and that she’d never be the mother that Dana needed and she should find someone else.

I’d never wanted to punch someone in the face before, but that came close because first of all, she wasn’t brave enough to say that to Dana, so she decided to wreck her wife instead. Fuck me running, it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to hear, because I know that my mother felt the exact same way on some level.

Neither my mother nor Dana’s had any idea what the hell to do with me, but they tried so hard, and I accepted that effort for all it was worth. It became my widow’s mite. Their contributions to trying to understand my queerness seemed small, but they meant more because they were giving me everything I needed when they were equipped. So, they did understand me better than anyone else except my partner until they realized they were above their pay grade. So, I heard Dana’s mother’s voice and saw my mother in my head, because both of our mothers treated us the same way.

Dana laughed when she came home from college in a backwards baseball cap and her mother said, “ah, my son is home.” Both of us are still cis women, even when we wear hats. She laughed it off, I didn’t.

That’s because I’d had previous conversations with Dana’s ex (we get along well because we’re both IT nerds), so I know that her parents have always taken digs at her partners and it isn’t personal to me. One of the jokes she said to me that I’ll always remember because it blew off all my anger is that I’d told her that “at this rate, I’ll need to win a Pulitzer to be mildly acceptable.” She said, “don’t worry. They’ll find a way to have a problem about that, too.” You cannot imagine how good it felt to have an ally in my own struggle with my in-laws. I know I talked a little about it to Dana’s sister, but not everything because I didn’t want to make her “monkey in the middle.” It was excruciating watching Dana need approval from people who’d never give it.

It’s why I love Supergrover so incredibly deeply. I’ve always confided in her like the mother I didn’t have, in effect, reparenting myself to get everything I didn’t get by watching how a mother loved her own kids and realizing the lessons I would have learned had I had children of my own. It’s easy to talk about issues with a big sister/favorite aunt/whatever type relationship than with your bio mom, I think, because even though you’re getting female advice, it’s not tinted with the want to make you into them.

I have been searching for that mom my whole life, the one that could accept me for my whole self. I have gotten that from myself and the friends around me that are moms, because it’s a different energy. It’s a higher frequency when you can look at yourself as your own parent.

The difference in Dana’s relationship with her parents and mine is that I wouldn’t take any shit, and she would take it up to her eyeballs because that’s what she’s programmed to do. So, we had at least two blowouts because I was tired of not being able to take up any room in that family and watching you crush Dana is unacceptable. It often takes an outsider to see family dysfunction because they’ve been doing it so many years they can’t see it.

I wasn’t as harsh with her mom as I was with her dad, because he was the kind of person who always had to be right, and he would fight you to the death over it by trying to legally trap you. So, when he started bullying me, I started bullying him back. I do not think he expected this, but I’m an adult, and you don’t get to treat me and my wife this way. The one time they stayed with us, I threw them out.

Dana was furious because she was happy continuing the pattern of being devastated and trying to fit in. I needed them to get there, faster. The reason I was so angry is that they ate our food, used our utilities, and still treated us like crap. Sometimes, the only way to get a bully to stop is to call them out on the carpet. They chose their church over their child, and I was tired of watching Dana be tortured by it, because it drove her to do all sorts of things that furthered this toxic relationship between all four of us.

I call out the toxicity, but I was the bad guy because I always am. If Dana wouldn’t protect herself, I’d protect her.

And the thing is, very few times in my life have I been in relationships where I had a relationship with their family that actually seemed like an in-law. Most of the time, their families have been deeply homophobic and dinner was always awkward.

So, what I do for fun is all tied to every one of these paragraphs. I write down my memories the way my AuDHD brain works and go through a million topics because everything feeds everything with no executive function.

Every thought comes with bonus content.

For instance, I’m also a huge reader, but I’ve forgotten to mention it. I’m not currently reading anything because I’m interested in other media right now, working on my own voice. I go through binge/purge phases because if I write while I’m reading, then I tend to pick up the voice of the last writer I just read rather than my own.

The book I’ve really enjoyed the most recently is “Mad Honey” by Jennifer Finney Boylan and Jodi Picoult.

I also sit and talk to the bees when it’s nice outside, because there’s lavender in the backyard.

That’s probably five, wouldn’t you say?