pavona's diary

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Did nothing yesterday after I logged off. Crawled into bed about midday and slept til it was dark, then ate leftovers and watched TV until I was bored with that, then came back to tweaking the haiku pages. Still not finished. Did at least figure out what I was doing wrong with the javascript-powered navigation and was able to fix that, thanks to ikewise.

Also still working on the redesign for this front/updates page. Want to include a simplified site map in the sidebar, so I have to figure out how I want to do that.

Meantimes reversed the order of the posts on the May updates archive page so they're in chronological order. Other minor css tweaking going on.

Whew! Twelve hours later it's finally finished. Definitely spent more time developing and tweaking the layout than on inputting text (the haikus, the teacher's comments, my present comments). And then I had some mega css weirdness when I was trying to fix some selector redundancies and only moving the link colours to the bottom of the css file fixed it. I have no idea why that was and it confounded me for a good half an hour.

So I've been working on this 12 hours nonstop and I need to sleep now. Or, I should take my laundry up, but I'm already justifying leaving it til tomorrow (though if I do that, I will have to take it up first thing in the morning and pick it up in the evening because there are things I need first thing Monday for an appointment). Because I'm lazy. Yep.

Oh, wait! I forgot to give the link! That's because I'm a sleep-deprived idiot. foodhaiku.html (a slightly longer intro to the one on the teaser page, and back/forth navigation at the bottom of each haiku pane, or javascript-powered navigation in the sidebar).

In hindsight I wish I'd waited to upload the food haiku pages. I've been having anxiety about them, especially after belatedly loading them on my phone and they don't display quite right in some ways (according to me, anyway; they do display and do function, nothing breaks, so I'm probably just being fussy). Also I rather regret including all the teacher's comments. I'm relieved nobody's remarked on it. Yes, she was a mean b!tch. I might take out some or most of the comments later, just leave the points. Or maybe take those out too. Not sure right now.

I was going to do a better "about me" section (better than what's currently in the sidebar on the front page and on some placeholder pages) so I started going through my bookmarks for ten sites to list as favourites, only to find one of the very few online game sites I use is down. It's still down more than 24 hours later so I don't know what that's about. I'm a bit panicky about that too now. When I do want to play something, that is the first place I go. I hope it gets fixed soon. Naturally because it's not available I suddenly want to play one of those ancient match-3 games. Feh.

Still figuring out some css stuff and how to integrate with javascripts for randomising content (or serving random links). I started making something the week before last where 16 images display in a grid and I can code that okay, but I want the images to be randomised and the pages they link to randomised as well, so, for example, a thumbnail of a flower can be in any position and the page it links to changes. It seems to work for the first row then it goes crazy and my browser hangs. When I take out the javascript for the links it works, it displays the images in a 4x4 grid that changes order each time I refresh the page, or when I hardcode the links array so that flower pic always links the same page... I dunno, it's making me feel stupid.

What do you call the bitter void beyond the friendzone? The dead zone maybe? The Boy rather carelessly (or maybe on purpose, who knows) had a public convo in facebook comments which he should have made sure I couldn't see (since he knows I compulsively lurk there). He's been bullshitting me. The worst thing he could do, and he knows cos I've told him several times. So. He doesn't miss me, he misses the convenience of me, as in the one person who's always there for him. All that "I don't want to date anyone right now" business was bullshit, of course he's seeing someone, but he didn't want to be upfront with me about it because I'm useful sometimes, like when he wants someone with a sympathetic ear. Lying by omission, ostensibly to avoid hurting my feelings... What a crock of shit. Serves me right for catching feelings, I know, but I really thought that the bottom line was we were friends and he valued my friendship enough not to bullshit me. Obviously not.

😢 😢 😢 😢 😢

I'm still bitter and hurt but out of necessity I have to put it aside and get on with self-care and developing some appropriate coping skills. Went for a walk earlier. It was raining a bit but too windy for an umbrella. Saw a sweet little doggy going walkies, although he kept trying to go into every shop doorway to get out of the wind and his owner had to urge him to keep going. The dog had a nice warm jacket on and lots of thick fur so I wasn't overly concerned for his welfare, but I wished I could cuddle him somewhere warm where he'd doze off and snore in my lap, haha. Oh well.

Not like I didn't already have plenty of things to do, but I've added twinery.org/wiki to my list of things to read, in the vague hope of being able to finally produce an actual interactive story that I've had floating around in my head for many years. (It has been attempted as a regular story many times but I always get hopelessly lost in it and have to put it aside again for however many months or years til I feel like I can try again.) Still trying to learn javascript things (I know what I want my code to do, just figuring out what I need to know to make it work is the complicated part). Also still working on several sections and layouts for this site. Link log needs updating but I've got a mess of links in a text file and I forgot to make a note of which sites I actually wanted to log versus which ones were just for me to look at later... So I have to look at them all again before I can update the log. Geez, I make things difficult for myself, don't I!

I finally found that story I've been looking for, the one I wrote when I was 11. It was in a strange place, I don't even remember putting it there. I've got so many site sections/projects in various stages of development, I feel I should finish at least one of those before starting on something else, but on the other hand, I want to put the story up because it will be quicker (only have to type it up, do a little bit of design work, but based on the food haiku layout). I'm good at starting things but not so good at finishing them, wah.

Got a message from The Boy, like everything was normal, like I didn't just find out he was seeing someone. So, what, he thinks I'll forget? Or he thinks I'm over him now he's hurt me? Or ... what? I'm angry and I can't say anything to him because I don't want to give him an excuse to avoid me some more. Another thing I'm good at is internalising all the bad shit, so maybe I'll just go eat a bunch of crap and hate myself some more... Sigh. It's okay, I'm just venting. Bingeing is reversible, bloodletting is not.

I binged, I feel like shit, time to eat healthy again. Public holiday today, Queen's Birthday long weekend (in Australia, although not nationally). I only recently found out that celebrating the monarch's birthday in June is something that predates Queen Elizabeth - I always thought it was because her birthday (April 21) was so close to Anzac Day (April 26). They shoulda taught us that in school, yo!

It took longer than I thought to type everything up - I had thought there were only 6 weeks' worth of diary entries in that story but it's twice as many (90 entries!). I had to proofread three times because I wanted to keep my original spelling (there are only a few obvious spelling mistakes) and my brain goes into auto-correct autopilot when I'm typing things up, so I had to go back and make sure I'd kept the mistakes! And then check again because I was starting to go blind from staring at the screen for so long and I wasn't sure! Whew! But it's done now.

I haven't used javascript for any navigation this time but I have done something a tiny bit sneaky, the idea being to encourage (or perhaps force) people to read the story in chronological order rather than skip around and read things out of sequence. So while the sidebar lists weeks 1-13, you can't click on week 8, say, when you're still only on week 6, and jump ahead, because it won't do anything. Sideways navigation at the bottom of each week (or maybe I shouldn't tell you that!). Might still tweak the css a little but need to rest my eyes for a while first. The story is all legible though, additional css tweaks are just for aesthetics.

Oh, look at me doing that again... you want the link, right? Course you do. /fic/newgirl. And please do read the foreword first, it's important! Thanks! :3

Not well. Pissed off. This will be the first year I haven't been to Vivid (it finishes Saturday and I don't want to be in town on Saturday because crowds and transport will be terrible and I will probably have to walk home). Also pissed off because I dreamt I had made a new layout for this page and when I wake up, no, of course I didn't really do it. I only remember how the top part looked/worked, and I suppose I could code it anyway, but the background doesn't really exist and I have no idea how to make that, and it was soooo pretty, awww. Not fair. Allllso, nobody said anything about my story? Bit hurt about that. Even if a person might want to point out all the plot holes and mixed tense and shoddy grammar ... ah, gimme attention, I'm sick and needy! :3

One of the things I hate about living in this building is you can only shower between 6am and 11pm if you want the temperature any higher than tepid. In summer you generally don't care if it's a bit on the cold side (as long as you have soap; it's no good trying to wash off greasy sweat without it), but when the bathroom is 15℃ or less you tend to want a piping hot shower, amirite? Perfectly reasonable. But, no, can't be done before 6am. If I was "normal" and kept "proper" hours I wouldn't have to spend an average of three days organising myself to have a shower at "the right time".

I haven't slept (yet again). There's no point going to sleep now for even a couple of hours because I won't be able to wake up when I want to, so now the idea is to stay up until I can have a shower, then sleep for a bit, and try to get myself out to Vivid tonight for a couple of hours. My head is buzzing, I've got so many ideas and things I want to do, but I'm dead tired and yawning every couple of minutes and I've got the fatigue jitters (like the coffee jitters, but with a distinct lack of caffeine).

Some days I don't even feel like I exist. Mental health is such a quagmire. But I do exist, it's just the continuity of my self-awareness gets fractured. Things I used to know, I don't know any more. I have a vague flavour of them, like a dream you can almost remember before it slips away. I get deja vu a lot. But this is not what I wanted to say.

A couple of hours ago I screwed up my courage and joined discord (which I've been thinking about for a while). Found the neocities server (one of them?). Was very pleasantly surprised to be treated with kindness and patience. "Explain like I'm five" does not work for me; explain like I'm 95 and deaf is more the case - speak slowly and clearly and keep checking that I'm still awake, haha. Also discovered that some people are quite a lot younger than I supposed they might be, and one or two are older. But that's okay, it's just one of the wonders of teh interwebs.

This needs to be in my dedicated "about me" page or section, if and when I ever get it done, but in the meantimes it can go here and I can expand on it later...

On the internet nobody knows you're a dog/potato/lost soul. I've been trolled or cyberbullied or whatever you like to call it, more times than I can honestly recall. Some of those times were perhaps justified in that I naively stuck my neck out and wore my digital heart on my sleeve or whatever; other times definitely not. I'm not going to go into the details (not here, possibly not ever again; it's counter-productive), but one of the reasons I don't do chat (and have been 99% clueless about discord, except for "it's some kind of chat") is that I tend to get baited far too easily, say waaaay too much about myself, and then get mercilessly trolled. Which is not good for the ongoing mental health thing.

To those lovely people who said my site was cool (or words to that effect), thank you so much! 💖

To everyone who interacted with me on discord, thank you for making me feel welcome (despite me so obviously being a clueless n00b). Extra-special thanks to jackomix and billsworld.

Wifi is down again. What exactly is it I am paying for? Because it's been raining and the internet stops working when it rains? I'm sorry, is this still 2004? What the hecking heck?!!?

Times like these I get extremely paranoid and have ugly thoughts like: What if The Boy did what he did on purpose to set me up, just to kick me down, to get back at me for that one time I rejected him? What if he intended for me to fall for him so he could have a bit of an ego trip, then laugh at me? Ugh.

Had a strange dream where I was rewriting a book (which I'd supposedly written ten years before) and although it was a paperback I was handwriting it, and sticking postcards in as "interactive" images. I was going to give it to my dad although it was my mum I was explaining it to. Something about a post-apocalyptic scenario and how everyone was going to survive. Except it had already happened (?). Weird.

As well as the internet going down we also had a power outage. Not surprising given how heavy the rain was. Parts hereabouts got badly flooded, but that's what happens when you live in an ex-swamp in a 90 year old building with inadequate drainage. Hmpfh.

I did finally find the "Pav" story I've been waffling on about, but it was partly converted to html, which I don't remember doing (no surprise there) and the last 5 or so pages are missing, so I'm still looking for those (typed or printed from Word or something, in 2012 I think). Then finally I can share that piece of crap with the world, haha. I had something else almost ready to upload but like an idiot I forgot to do a final check of the javascript before I uploaded, and when I remembered, of course it was a total mess. I'm still trying to fix it. It must be something really simple that I'm just not seeing. At this point it's become more important to uderstand why it isn't working rather than to actually make it work. Meantimes either I redo the code without the js-powered random elements or I put it aside until I have a better understanding of arrays (seriously, I do flipping well understand arrays, just that I have multiple arrays and obviously there's something I don't understand because it will. not. work.) So. Yeah.

Shoutout to billsworld (aka he who Jaups) for making this lovely button for promoting/linking my site (should anyone want to). If you're on neocities you can direct link voov.neocities.org/voov_button.gif

I've been working on the expanded "about me" section but I keep taking things out, putting them back, rewording them, going back to the previous wording, rewording them again, wasting 45 minutes tweaking the style before suddenly hating it and finding I accidentally overwrote the first stylesheet instead of making a copy... So basically that's another thing that's nowhere near actually being finished. I had to put the javascript problem aside for a while because I got to the point where the code became more meaningless the longer I looked at it.

I went out yesterday afternoon, spent too much but got some clothes I have been needing (I hate clothes shopping because sizing is arbitrary and trying on endless pairs of whatever that don't quite fit is depressing). Also bought some lined notebooks I don't need but couldn't pass up (Typo was having a sale, yay). I really wanted donuts but couldn't find the kind I like, only Krispy Kreme (too insubstantial for my liking), so got some fudge instead. I rarely have that because it's so strongly associated with my ex.

Netflix binge when I got home. I haven't done that in a while. Two better-than-expected films and a documentary. In the second film I could've sworn the lead guy was Daniel MacPherson with overplucked brows and looking unnaturally lean, but it turned out to be someone else. I was annoyed by the ending of that film though - they outran a pyroclastic flow (which just suddenly evaporated; shyeah, riiiight...) But otherwise it was good (if a little predictable in parts).

This weekend I need to do laundry, seriously. It's a never-ending challenge. To really catch up I should probably do five loads, but just one will be an achievement. I'm sliding into very bad habits again, a quasi-feral existence. I would be ashamed for anyone to see inside my place right now, and not just because it's messy (it's always messy; anyone who knows me knows that). I should stop working on website stuff (because that should be a leisure activity, not what I spend most of my waking hours on) and do the things I know need doing, like a proper clean of the kitchen and vacuum the lounge. And laundry. Bloody laundry. If I had a dryer it wouldn't be an issue, but hanging stuff on the line when it's cold is just misery for my fingers. Oh, listen to me, I'm such a wuss.

Something amazing happened last night - The Boy sent a lengthy text apologising for being an asshole.
✨ ✨ ✨
I'm calling that a win 🏆 (while also not reading anything into it - if he is interested in pursuing something with me, he will say so; he hasn't said so, but at least he has a conscience, and has made an effort to communicate, and that counts for a lot).

I've done almost nothing for three days other than sleep or try to sleep, have impossible food cravings, itch a lot, and be light-sensitive. Not quite a migraine, doesn't align with the criteria, but something similar. I'm still craving certain fruit (but can't go out to get any) but at least the light-sensitivity has gone. I'd like to be reading something now but my eyes are getting sore already, so it's either Netflix or tv til I fall asleep, I think.

Another 24+ hours just slid by. I thought I was writing a story but it turns out I had a temperature so I imagined it all (delirious?) and the only bit I can remember is the opening sentence:
"I was, if you believe my mother, the most ungrateful child ever."
No idea how it went after that. I'm still quite itchy so I'm guessing prolonged allergic reaction to something but I don't know what. Not unusual for me, allergic reactions, though normally I have some idea what set them off, but not this time.

I'm belatedly wishing I'd kept a note of the order in which people followed me. I could go through my activity log I guess, write it down off that, but there are lots of pages to wade through, and I'm left wondering why those I follow are listed in order but those who follow me appear in seemingly random order with each page load. Perhaps there are secret ways of getting the information one wants if one is sufficiently geeky? The CLI, or API? I'm extremely vague about what they are and what they do but I also sort-of remember having a command line kinda thing at livejournal to enter special commands to do things in bulk or in a special way that weren't possible through the normal interface? Or I could be imagining that as well. (As an aside, I'm wondering if my old LJ still exists or was hacked into oblivion; I have no idea now what my login was.)

And it's almost the end of June and I still have at least eight site sections under construction and nowhere near ready to upload. I'm thinking of scrapping three, because one I've lost interest in totally ("dtur"), one I hate the design of and just want to forget all about, and the other is just too hecking complicated (javascript angst, again).

Rather than do any of the things I'm supposed to be doing, or even attempt to finish some of the innumerable things I've started (important or not), I started looking through the really really old neocities sites and eventually I was rewarded with bunnies. Like so:

* fluffy bunny
* yawning bunnies
* hopping bunny
* more bunnies
* nomming bunny
* dwarf bunnies

Other amusing things I found:
* derpy dog faces
* followed by about 11 rows of derpy dog face sites
* cat version of derpy dog faces, but not as good
* soylent (because food is boring; see also)
* typewriters (they go clunk)
* dune (earrings, of course)
* gangnamstyle (because I'm 500 years behind)
* one day this will look like a website
* Kevin, dat you?
* xfiles and mulder
* cake (may hurt your eyes)
* static (may irritate your eyes)
* occam (may cause vertigo)

Now, really, all the above (and all the other stuff I found which I'm not going to put here) really needs to go in the link log, but I haven't even fixed May yet, and it's already almost July. I might have to give that up as a bad job, or redo it somehow. Meantimes it's hecking cold in here, 11C or about 52F? Brrrrr.