numb3r_5ev3n

First and foremost: https://neocities.org

1. "Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?" Tumblr post with Old Web resources.

2. The Small Web

3. Resources List for the Personal Web, from the The 32-bit Cafe. (Thanks, finch!)

4. Website Background Archives. Most of the ones I remember from back in the day are there.

5. Free Code Camp! Learn to code your own website!

[Image with Caption: A black cat spotted atop the stones at Stonehenge during the Winter Solstice Celebrations. This is considered to be a good omen for the coming year.]

Current Mood.

My iron has felt low for about two weeks now, and I've gone back to taking a daily multivitamin. It may be time to go see a doctor and see if this is back at the point of needing actual supplements, but last year my job switched me to the shitty insurance (good luck getting in anywhere within a six month timeframe unless it's urgent care or the ER, and I need a referral for Planned Parenthood, LOL.) and it doesn't get switched back until the first of the year. But when it gets to the point where all I think about besides my fanfic is how damn cold I am all the time and how nice it would be to just chow down on an entire bag of steamed broccoli, I know there's a problem.

My dopamine levels are crashing again, and I'm trying to keep the momentum going on my writing. Like I know the process is going through a fuckton of drafts and re-writes, but it sucks having to go through so many drafts and re-writes? It sucks that this is what The Process entails? I mean regardless, the fact that I have written more in the past month than I have over the last decade is pretty important, I think. But I don't want to stop there.

I have voiced my opinion on Christmas and the Holidays on this blog several times by this point. It's a Neurodivergent person's nightmare (or at least THIS Neurodivergent person's nightmare) and the only things I like about the Holidays as an adult are making baked goods and actually hanging out with family and then getting to go to my friends' New Years Eve Party where we play In The Air Tonight to the Ball Drop every year (except for 2020.)


Current Mood.

I found this, and it's a whole mood:


I fixed up another laptop (my old Thinkpad T420) and installed an ssd drive finally. It's running Parrot Linux right now (a hacker distro, LOL) running on a Debian framework. Arch may be all the rage right now, but Debian and its different "forks" are still the best at what they do, IMHO.

People are doing a "Jobs that you, a neurodivergent person, have had" and mine are basically, from 1998-current:

Tech Support, 1998
Movie Theater 1999-2000
Tech Support 2000-2003
Auto accounts (aka the reason why I will never work for Capital One again, they literally fired me for reading The Onion while it was slow.) 2003
Tech Support 2003-2005
Tech Support 2005-2006
Server Farm 2006-2010
Tech Support 2010-2015
Tech Support 2015-2017
Tech Support: 2017-now.

[A review of Tron Ares by someone named Kiefer, with four stars. Text: "Kief you called this movie mid in your first review why'd you see it twice" I Cannot Overstate How Much I do Not Control What I Hyperfixate On. Tron has consumed my life and I've warmed up more to this movie as a result."]

I overhauled https://cyberarcadia.com/

I know this is a huge ask, but I was wondering if someone with a screen reader would mind checking it to make sure it is accessible? I went through and alt-tagged all of the images, but there are three divs involved in the layout and I want to make sure it works for folks with screen readers. Really, I should just get one and try it.

Current mood: I hope that people are realizing that if we all collectively refuse to recognize Donald Trump's authority, it will break. I think it's starting to happen now. He is not the legitimate leader of this county, and never has been. There has not been a "legitimate" Republican President elected since 1988, and that one sucked too.

EDIT: I went and changed it back to the 2022 layout for a number of reasons. Oh well. Thanks for your cooperation, everyone!

The situation in Gaza is so bad, and the censorship of any criticism of the ongoing genocide is so egregious, that Linsday Ellis has returned to Youtube from her long Nebula exile for first time in about a year to talk about it.

Purveyor of wicked tunes, you were the cool stepfather of all teenage rebels when I was growing up. And everyone who remained a teenage rebel in their hearts. RIP, sweet Prince Of Darkness, and thank you for the music.

( Cut because the image is huge. )
Image text: Japanese researchers have found a possible explanation for long COVID. They discovered that small fragments of the coronavirus's genetic material can remain deep behind the nose, in an area called the epipharynx, for at least six months after infection. These viral remnants irritate the immune system and may cause fatigue, coughing, dizziness, and "brain fog."

The researchers used an old Japanese treatment called epipharyngeal abrasive therapy (EAT), where the area is swabbed once a week with a cotton swab dipped in 1% zinc chloride solution. After three months, the patients showed:
- significantly fewer viral remnants
- lower levels of inflammatory substances
- noticeably reduced symptoms
The treatment appears to both remove the lingering virus and calm the inflammation. A larger clinical trial is now underway in Japan to confirm the results. This discovery could lead to more targeted treatments that address the root cause of long COVID symptoms instead of merely managing them.

I've started to notice that I'm having a lot more trouble regulating my emotions recently, since things started to get really stressful back in March. All of the red flags are flying (binging Skyrim, difficulty keeping my composure at work, struggling to remember words mid-sentence, impulse buying, interrupted sleep, etc.)

I'm taking some time off from work after this week. I'm going to have to probably fight not to spend the entire time playing Skyrim, because Skyrim is where vacation time goes to die.

However! I am reading books! I am nearly finished with Lewis Spence's Druids, Their Origin And History," after which I am going to finally try to work on his other book The Magic Arts In Celtic Britain. Which Robert Plant claimed was one of his inspirations for the song Stairway to Heaven.

And the reason for so many Druid Books is the result of the fallout from seeing the film Sinners. And the paradigm of colonized people spreading colonialism like a virus - or like vampirism. Can those of us whose ancestral culture was repressed or assimilated into white supremacist Mayo Monoculture still reclaim some aspects of it? Especially when mostly what's left is a bunch of hazy impressions, and occasional intense spikes of longing for something that people struggle to define in words?

Or as Robert Plant wrote it in Stairway To Heaven, "There's a feeling I get when I look to the West, and my spirit is crying for leaving. In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees, and the voices of those who stand looking." Yes, I know those lines are also very evocative of the Lord Of the Rings, which was a huge influence on Led Zeppelin's entire discography. But yeah.

(Maybe if someone could express it in words, it would lead to the paradigm shift I've been waiting for my while life.)

I feel like I should also acknowledge at this point that Led Zeppelin became famous in part by adapting Blues tunes written during The Great Migration, which is important in context with the influence that Sinners has had on me since I watched it, and the themes of cultural appropriation within the film.

Anyway, there have been times when nonfiction books have been incredibly difficult for me to get into. It happens whenever my ADHD flares up really badly, and it's gotten worse since I've been addicted to the internet. Learning to be able to focus on one thing for a long period of time is crucial for any kind of Occult practice, and it's something that I've struggled with as I started to become "extremely online."

So, I deactivated by Bluesky account. Not only to save my brain's ability to focus, but because the brainrot there has been especially bad these past few weeks. It's worse than the last post here where I swore to quit Bluesky.

Listen, Joe Biden was certainly not perfect as President, and he made mistakes. One of those being that he did not step aside and hand the reins to Vice President Kamala Harris the moment he realized he was impaired. And I realize that some of this is happening because some hack has recently published a book about how he apparently had dementia equal to Reagan in his second term, etc. But when I see people who I formerly regarded as "sane and well-adjusted" claiming that Biden is literally the worst President ever, and that his term was, in the words of one, "America's lowest point" - when Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump were also people who recently held that office, and Trump is literally shipping people off to concentration camps - it just proves to me that my worst fears about the detrimental and deleterious effects of algorithmic "fast social media" were all justified. Like to the point of asking these people to draw a clock, and post the results on their feed.

Whatever. I'll miss seeing takes from Faine Greenwood, but yeah.

I've been tempted to switch back to Reddit, but that was just as much of a dopamine skinner box. The point is not to switch to a different skinner box or echo chamber, but to abandon skinner boxes and echo chambers entirely. When I find myself going "I need to curate my takes to conform to the consensus of the Group Mind," maybe it's time to sever my connection to the Group Mind entirely.

ETA: And an interaction I had a short time ago on Tumblr kind of clued me into something: the first generation of kids who essentially grew up on Web 2.0 social media were indoctrinated to the black-and-white "You love pancakes? So that means you hate waffles, right?" type of discourse, and that's the only way a lot of them know how to interact.

I keep forgetting that Mastodon even exists. But I don't want that to turn into another skinner box. I guess let's see how long I can keep this up.


"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune

Then the piper will lead us to reason

And a new day will dawn for those who stand long

And the forests will echo with laughter."