11. 2026-02-19 / index

Hello and good evening!! This is thread.

I'm supposed to be following a writing subject that I assigned myself today. It's basically about what taking control of stuff in your life is like... what it's about? Or I guess what it's like? I don't really remember the details anymore...

See, I was definitely relating it to lots of things I did over the course of the day. I only came up with the writing subject looking back on my day with a pretty intuitive mind, for sure after the fact, toward settling down for the night and stuff. The problem is that now I sit down and I don't actually remember what my day was much like at all. I have no idea how the stuff I did related to whatever writing I was really just doing in my head. I think this is probably what vibe coding feels like for the thing doing the vibe coding. I have no idea what "vibe coding" even means, please don't tell me.

Anyway, the biggest project I did today was I made all the CSS for our awesome new forum, forum.hsmusic.wiki. It was just the default phpBB prosilver theme, or whatever it's called, and now it's this thing I made by changing a lot of colors and hacking some awful inline edits and also not rewriting or adapting any of it to use CSS variables or nesting or nicer selectors or any of that. I pretty much just got the job done. I added a new bug (I think) but I definitely fixed the bug I caught coming in, so it balances out, and it looks awesome. If you like Vector cereal. I like Vector cereal.

I also did some new forums (it was really small before, now it's only kind of small) and started a thread and read someone else's introduction post we had missed before. I'm pretty much basing the vibes (yeah) off of the Scratch forums, and that's not much of a coincidence now that I think about it, since we've just about totally ditched there and we want to do our own thing now.

This morning I did Duolingo. I have this thing where whenever Whisper or I am at front, we kind of just forget to do Duolingo, and I whammied that I think 50/50 because I grabbed this really nice book "Portraits of Montréal" like we sometimes do, and because we also were at the tail end of a friends quest that needed finishing up. I got our correct-question combo all the way to 250 before I messed up the gender on a new term, oops. Then I moved along and did a couple more lessons anyway, because hey, there's still the leaderboard and I'm basically at the top and I can be really at the top if I learn a bit more, you know? All the systems there play off each other kind of crazy right now and I'm glad we took a break for a week or so. I really like learning with Duolingo, actually.

I also caught up with basically one of my dearest friends who we hadn't spoken to in a month or so. I like her a lot and she's cool and I don't think she's reading this, but hiya if you are!! That took my entire morning and I love it and I also made myself food and it was nice.

The biggest brain motif for us right now is learning to be a little more deliberate about what kinds of experiences we bring our energy into, since we believe that that's reciprocal and basically everything you experience affects everything you do, and in the end that sort of makes you who you are. We've done a lot of believing in the natural lead that our body gives us and this new angle isn't about wresting control from that flow, it's about giving more power to it, because sometimes you do need divine (conscious) intervention to get much of anywhere. I mean, you can get a little anywhere on autopilot, but you can get more anywhere if you're helping yourself out, too. So it's all about listening to my own signals and acting as best I can in accord, which is tricky and pretty weird and scary sometimes, but also makes me feel really good. I like trusting myself like that. It's also cool when I'm right. It just takes a while to realize it, usually!!

Also also... I left a bunch of Discord servers today. Not any ones I was really active in, and I could still trim my list down a little more if I wanted, but I decided to stop where I did. I just asked myself "do I really want to stay in this space?" and the answer was a pretty easy "nah" or else "not right now" for most of them. I think I feel comfortable lurking servers if I'm gonna actually lurk them, but I don't want to stay in a member list if I'm really not there at all.

I'm pretty scared of making all these little changes. I mean, maybe it's not too many the way I listed them here, but we're doing stuff like this basically every day. We went one day without messaging one of our totally basically every day friends (you're probably reading, hiya), and we downloaded all our Discord messages and made a big map of the music wiki server and its channel IDs, and we're starting projects we mostly only dreamed about before, and we're thinking about how we split up our hobbies between all of us, and we're sometimes switching midday and getting ourselves used to that, and so on, and so on. I mean, we just made a forum! What! Lots like this.

It's funny because I don't exactly know why I'm scared. I'm not scared of us losing us (we pretty much got over that last year, or maybe over 2024 too) and I'm not all that scared I'm going to help land us in any really hot water, just by doing a lot of improvisation. I'm not scared we have Jade around and she's cool and I'm not scared that I don't really know which "me" is talking a lot of the time. There's lots I'm not scared of...

I guess I'm kind of scared of burning out.

That's why I'm taking a mental health day at work tomorrow. That means calling in sick by the way (and skipping pay). I keep feeling like I want to and then I also feel like, no, you know, we'll just be in high spirits the next morning, and then not take it, and do our job, and it'll never ever happen, and we'll be a perfect worker, and it'll stop being something we even CAN do. It already feels like that. I'm pretty terrified of calling in tomorrow. It's never ever been a problem and it's safe and it's okay, but I'm still scared. I don't wanna. I think that's why I have to just say I'm going to, and put it online and tell someone, even if it's no one. I don't step in and intervene with most stuff, but being able to call in is pretty important, so... let's just call this calisthenics and be okay with it, right?

(Please.)

It kind of hurts me to say this part out loud, but I want to stop having the way people express how they feel about me... well, affect my actions, affect my experience, so, so badly. I mean, so strongly. So forcefully.

I still want it to matter. I want it to matter a lot! But I want to be freer to... to feel how I want to feel about it, without it just capsizing my boat, if I happen to feel in not quite the right way of feeling. I don't want to game my feelings because doing so is necessary to even get me through the day. But that means I have to get a lot tougher, a lot better at moving on my own feet. Does THAT feel scary? I have to admit, not really... It's pretty much just exciting... I love weird, big, complicated, tangle-y challenges like that. I love thinking I'm able to change and that changing myself is part of how I make a difference for other people, too. Actually, I don't love thinking that, I love proving it.

It's just really hard work, lol

Anyway, thanks for tagging along, you are super cool and I appreciate it. Sending my blessings!! See you around!!