adikos.net

Secret Worlds

2026-04-10T00:00:00Z

CWs: some spoilers for The Secret World of Alex Mack, a 30-year-old TV show; caveat legens

So I just finished a complete rewatch of The Secret World of Alex Mack (1994-97). Like a lot of people my age, I remember watching it when it first aired on Nickelodeon. I was 10 at the time it started, and remember loving it immediately. The story follows the life of Alex Mack, a "normal" middle-schooler who, as she's walking home one day, is nearly run over by a truck carrying a toxic chemical, GC-161, and a barrel of the chemical spills all over her. She flees the scene, heads home, and finds that she now has secret powers, including telekinesis, the ability to zap things with electricity, and also, she can change into a pool of liquid if desired. She tells her older sister Annie, and eventually her best friend Ray, but doesn't tell her parents. Most of the episodes involve running from the agents of the chemical plant, which effectively runs the town of Paradise Valley. Alex's fear is that if she tells her parents, they'll sell her out to the plant, and the plant will run experiments on her. (It's already running experiments on others, we find out, so she would be yet another victim, unfortunately).

Alex's dad works at the chemical plant, and her mom works there for the first season or so doing PR, but eventually does other things, and even goes back to school to study sociology. Alex's sister Annie is interning at the chemical plant, and so has a lot of opportunity to study GC-161 alongside her father. So all that ends up being very interesting. Alex and Annie try to figure out as much as they can about this bizarre chemical, while also tracking Alex's health to make sure she's OK. All the while, she's dealing with the ups and downs of middle school, puberty, friendships, homework; all the normal stressors in life on top of having these strange powers.

Danielle Atron is by far the main villain of the series. She runs the chemical plant, and once she finds out that a kid was involved in the accident, she sends her head of security, Vince, to do reconnaissance. Vince ropes in Dave, the driver of the truck involved in the accident, to help him in this search (ostensibly as "penance" for the accident). Dave is a bumbling, childlike man, who doesn't really know what is going on most of the time. I found myself wondering throughout most of the series if he were autistic, but I don't know. He starts off as not very likable, but eventually shows that he has a "heart of gold," honestly. He explains it pretty well himself: he thought Vince and Danielle were trying to help the kid involved in the accident, but once he finds out that they want to experiment on the kid, he's completely out, and working against them whenever he can. We see a bit of his home life; he lives in a RV/mobile home, and sends whatever money he can to his elderly parents, at least one of whom is in poor health. So he's overall a pretty good guy who got dealt a bad hand, and is working for the wrong people. At the same time, since he's working as a janitor most of the time, alongside his driving duties, and most people don't think much of him, he's able to get into nearly anywhere in the plant and be privy to conversations others couldn't.

Vince is a cartoon villain. He looks like a bargain-bin Ed Harris and keeps coming up with wacky schemes to find the kid involved in the accident. Most of them come off like Wile E. Coyote, straight-up ACME scchemes, such as a huge GC-161 detector disguised as a security system in a new video store that opens in town. Later on, he even pays a young woman to pretend to be a high-schooler and become friends with Alex and her friends, and try to expose Alex and her powers. It is some very weird stuff. He even hides in the Macks' attic after he almost gets caught snooping around their house. Eventually Danielle realizes he's ridiculous and fires him, even though he comes back with various attempts to keep up the search.

I really liked the friendship between Alex and Ray. They've been best friends since they were very young, and it shows in the writing and the acting. They're neighbors (he lives somewhere down the street from her), and they have a very believable friendship, with ups and downs and fights and everything one would normally expect in a friendship. But he's pretty much always got her back, and the feeling is mutual. At the end of the series, he gets trapped and she ends up coming back to save him. I wouldn't have it any other way. He goes from thinking the powers are "cool!" at first to realizing how difficult it makes her life at times, and mostly just tries to help her keep her secret and stay safe.

Alex is also good friends with two other girls, Nicole and Robyn. They are also quirky and fun and the friendships seem believable. Once the show moves to high school at the end of season 3 and all of season 4, Nicole disappears (I guess she got other friends? Happens), but Robyn sticks around. Another friend joins the group earlier on, Louis Driscoll. He's a redhead and just kind of a class clown goofball. I didn't really like him at first, since he was grating and annoying. He gets a massive crush on Annie (same here, I had a huge crush on her as a kid!), she rejects him because she's already seeing someone and isn't into him, and then he backs off. He turned out pretty much fine though, and over time he becomes just one of the revolving friend group. Hilariously, there's one episode with his dad, who is played by Tom Virtue, who plays the dad in Even Stevens. Louis reminds me a lot of Louis Stevens (Shia LaBeouf) from Even Stevens, so that's a fun connection.

There are a few recurring friends and enemies. Kelly Phillips is the cool popular girl who can't stand Alex, and also thinks something is extremely odd about her. Hannah Mercury is the cool popular girl everyone has a crush on. Ray dates her for an episode and ultimately completely rejects him. She is mostly OK but not great. Annie dates a guy named Bryce for a while, but she's way more into him than he is into her, and they break up. Alex likes this guy named Scott, who is Kelly's boyfriend. He's pretty vapid and boring and Alex just seems to like him for being a pretty face. I was glad to see him drop out of the show since that particular crush was really boring.

The show sometimes dips into the super weird, even paranormal. There's a Halloween episode where Alex, Ray, and Louis end up going to a house everyone thinks is haunted. Alex is sucked into the house by an unseen force, and after some scary scenes, finds out that an old woman lives there. She is a ghost and enjoys scaring some people at least, but is very nice to Alex and tells her to come back and visit whenever she likes. Just before the episode ends, we find out she is likely Danielle Atron's grandmother. She said that she is very disappointed in her granddaughter, and we see "Atron" on the mailbox outside the house. That story is never revisited, but it's interesting because it adds to the feeling of history throughout the whole show. Families have been there for a long time. A character who shows up near the end of the series, Hunter, comes back to Paradise Valley because he wants to figure out what happened to his father. His father used to work for the plant and studied GC-161, and he eventually tells Alex that his dad was "disappeared" by Danielle and the plant. So he's back for vengeance and closure. He and Alex end up dating, and he's the third person to find out her secret, and is surprisingly understanding. Louis is the fourth person, completely by accident, and Louis actually folds under "torture" and tells the plant that Alex is the kid they're looking for (Nice move, Driscoll...). It also completely pays off to look at things in the background of scenes; you will find some weird stuff!

I was thinking about this a bunch last night after I watched the finale. It is a really good show. It can be formulaic (The Plant is looking for the kid! Middle school sucks! High school sucks! Parents don't understand!), but it's simultaneously a thriller and a slice-of-life sort of show. We get to watch kids being kids, and friends enjoying friendships. The Mack family really love each other and it shows, even if Alex can be a moody teenager. Alex & Annie's sisterly relationship is a delight as well. Even though they are sometimes furious and frustrated at one another, at the end of the day, everything is OK and they ove each other. There's an interesting resonance between something Annie says and the end of the series. Annie and Alex are watching a movie at some point and Annie mentions something about how the good guys always win in the end. And that's how the show ends. Just when you think the bad guy is going to win -- Danielle is about to get a billion dollars wired to her, and fly off in a helicopter -- Alex and her parents, who were captured and detained by the plant, and Ray, get out of the plant just before the explosives planted inside blow up! And Hunter runs after Danielle and tackles her, and the helicopter about to pick her up flies away. The ersatz FBI drives up in cars and jeeps to arrest her. And Hunter gets his revenge. And Alex and her family and friends are OK. The good guys win, and it doesn't feel cheap or silly or anything. It is completely on brand for the show.

It was a real rollercoaster. As I mentioned, I watched the show as much as I could when it was on, but I never did so systematically like now. Lately I've been watching 3-4 episodes a night, since they're 24min episodes. And it's been delightful to actually watch the whole thing. I really enjoyed it. I think, with very few exceptions, it's aged incredibly well. For '90s Nickelodeon, it does a lot of things right. Ray and Nicole are Black, but neither the show, nor the characters, ever, to my knowledge, treat them differently. And TV can be very racist at any time, so that is refreshing. There's a character that one episode focuses on, Nathan, aka "The Creeper," who everyone thinks is kind of a weirdo. But the show goes out of its way to say that hey, maybe you should try to get to know the guy, give him a chance. He very much reads as autistic, as he mostly keeps to himself and is very socially awkward. In that episode, the class is asked to make a video bio on themselves. Nathan secretly does his bio on Alex, and takes some very unflattering video clips of her, and embarrasses her and himself in front of the whole class when the movie is screened. But then Louis, who has been procrastinating on his own video, does the same thing and focuses on Nathan. He catches Nathan playing the piano beautifully, and takes some other footage, and his voiceover says "hey, give the guy a chance, he might have a lot more going on if you just talk to him!" It's sort of a saccharine feel-good thing, but it's also very typical of the show. Nathan shows up near the very end of the series again, and he's in some sort of junior ROTC army cosplay nonsense (yuck). So that's not fun. But in general, the show does a lot of things very right, which is again, surprising for a '90s show.

I'm really interested to see the Nick Knacks episode on this show. I'm about halfway through that particular series of YT videos, and very much enjoying the deep dive into everything Nickelodeon. I've learned about a ton of shows I'd never even heard of, so that's fun. Alex Mack is firmly in the Nickelodeon pantheon for a lot of people, though, and is still very well-loved, for good reason. I'm glad I rewatched it properly and I would encourage you to do so as well! Thanks for reading, friends <3

Instrument Calibration

2026-04-04T00:00:00Z

My friend was posting about guitars recently, and I remembered that I inherited a guitar from my spouse's late cousin. It was part of the stuff we went through, and I ended up taking it, and we brought it to Colorado with us when we moved from Florida. I hadn't done anything with it, but about two years ago I decided to restring it (the strings were completely shot) and try to get it working. It's an electric guitar, so I couldn't do anything without an amp. I didn't want to buy a huge amp, so I just kinda let it sit for years longer. Until recently. My friend recommended a mini-amp to me (maybe 5" high) that seemed affordable. So I ordered it, along with a power adaptor for it (anything 9V would work). And I was excited to check it out!

The amp got here on Thursday. Very cool. Adaptor works fine with it. I realized that I needed an instrument cable for it, though, to connect the guitar to the amp (1/4" male-to-male). Should've ordered it with the amp &c. Oh well. We went to Guitar Center today and I bought a 5' cable that was pretty affordable. Awesome! Tried it, though, and there's an "open" in the guitar somewhere. It's not registering any sound from the strings through the amp. Who knows what the issue is. The guitar is incredibly old and I have no idea how to fix it. My spouse said, "hey, if you're interested in getting back into this, you should get a new entry-level guitar. You never do anything nice for yourself, go for it!" I'm going to sleep on it, but I think I probably will. Looks like entry-level guitars are anywhere from $250-300 USD, and that's reasonable. My friend even recommended me a guitar sold by Sweetwater, where I got the amp. My mom also swears by Sweetwater; she buys a lot of music equipment from them and has for like 30 years. So that's cool (she was excited when I told her about the guitar stuff last night). So we'll see!

A little history about me and musical instruments. When I was very young -- like under 10, maybe a little over -- my parents suggested I learn a musical instrument. Somehow I landed on the violin. I remember playing it for probably 3 years or so and I think I was pretty good. I can't remember anything of what I played. Violin is incredibly hard, too. Think of a guitar with no "frets" on the neck which tell you which note you're hitting. It's all from memory and knowledge of the sound. I don't know how I ever became proficient at it, but I think I got pretty good. Eventually, though, I lost interest and stopped practicing enough, and my parents pulled me out of lessons. But it was nice while it lasted.

After violin I ended up taking up piano. My mom has played piano, guitar, all sorts of instruments, and thought it would be cool for me to learn piano. And it was very cool, for a number of years. I had one teacher for a few years, but I didn't really like him that well, and eventually switched teachers sometime in high school. Piano was fun. I remember learning Gounod's "March of the Marionettes" (famously the theme to "Alfred Hitchcock Presents"), and I even had some Star Wars, James Bond, and even Radiohead sheet music. That was pretty cool to learn. I did recitals over the years, which were nerve-wracking but mostly went well. And my mom always had pianos and keyboards around, so I got to use her equipment. The synthesizers she had were very cool (I remember one instrument was called "Meow" or something and sounded like the "Meow Mix" commercials, hahah). And my grandparents had a piano, although it was old and out of tune. My great-grandma had a very old piano that I played once in awhile, but it was again, very old, and mostly out of tune, with a lot of "dead" keys. But we had a decent piano at home and my parents kept it tuned and in working condition. I took piano lessons for about 6 years, and was very good at it, but eventually again lost interest in it, stopped practicing enough, and quit taking lessons.

When I was almost finishing high school, I decided to take guitar lessons. My parents bought me an emerald-green (almost "Oz" green) Squier Stratocaster, a very nice entry-level electric guitar, some picks, a case, and I think even a tuner. Basically all the stuff I needed to do it properly. Very cool of them. I started taking lessons from a guy downtown. I have no idea how we heard of him, but he was a nice guy. He was great at transcribing music, too, and was able to write down chords and such. I would bring him tapes of music I wanted to be able to play, like a number of Live and Radiohead songs, and he would tell me the chords to play them. I learned how to play Live's "Lightning Crashes" (actually very easy with its chords), "Turn My Head," and a few Radiohead songs ("Street Spirit" was probably the one I was proudest of, since it had a lot of fingerpicking). I think I learned "Karma Police" and "No Surprises" as well but I honestly can't remember. It was very cool and I was getting kinda good at things. My mom had an amp (it was really like a monitor) I could use, so that was great. She had all the music equipment (that's another story I may or may not tell someday) for sure.

But eventually I lost interest in guitar, too. I think I only took lessons for a few months. Life just got in the way. School, and videogames, and whatever else. Too much else going on in the world. I eventually got into DJing. My parents got me turntables and a mixer and I got tons of vinyl over the years. That was also a short-lived hobby, but I had a lot of fun with it while it lasted. Recorded a bunch of DJ mixes when I was really into it, and that was fun. Somewhere I have a collection of photos my mom took of me while on the turntables. They are ridiculous. Sometimes I miss that. My mixer went kaput; the crossfader stopped working correctly. The turntables were fine, but the crossfader wouldn't work properly, and it became very frustrating. When I moved out of the house in 2005 to go to grad school in San Francisco, I didn't take the turntable setup or my vinyl with me. So that fell by the wayside as well. We recently got a turntable for the house, and I asked my mom if she still had my vinyl, but hey, it's been over 20 years at this point. I don't know if they have it. I should keep asking, because I'm sure there's some stuff in there I'd love to check out, and haven't ripped.

Over the course of my life, instruments have been picked up and sometimes quickly abandoned. Most of that can be chalked up to childhood inconstancy. But I think I'd like to get back into guitar. I have the amp now. I had the guitar, but it's not working. It is fortunately not too prohibitively expensive to get back into it with a new guitar, though. And my spouse has been very encouraging. So that's exciting. I think I probably will get a new one, but like I said, I'd like to sleep on it and maybe order a new one soon. I was thinking of doing Guitar Center and grabbing it locally, but maybe I will order the Sweetwater one. It would be fun to play around with again. I was thinking of a really great guitar version of FFVII's "Interrupted by Fireworks" and I bet that would be very fun to play. There are guitar tabs literally everywhere on the internet. As long as I have the instrument, I can access all of that. I love that. And of course there is sheet music I can buy wherever. So I think it would be fun. I love music so much and I think it would be fun to be able to make my own again.

Thanks for reading my little trip back into the depths of memories. It's been, and continues to be, an interesting life.

Software Apprehension

2026-03-30T00:00:00Z

Well, I found out that Eleventy is rebranding as Build Awesome and is part of Font Awesome now. Apparently the Font Awesome part happened a couple of years ago, when I was using Hugo, so I definitely didn't know that. But the rebrand is a change. And I am really hoping this doesn't mean the software becomes terrible and AI-ridden and all sorts of other nonsense. Change is good, except when it isn't. I really do not want to switch static site generators again, because I have a workflow figured out and I feel like I sorta know what I'm doing with Eleventy now. If all that changes is the name, great. It sounds like they want as much continuity as possible. Apparently there's going to be a "Pro" version (because of course), but one would hope the "free" version is staying the same.

I've used a lot of blogging software over the years. My first blog was on Xanga ca. 2002/3, which naturally had its own proprietary system. I learned a lot even within that walled garden. I barely remember it. I was mostly focused on just writing and not worrying about it "looking pretty." I moved everything over to WordPress in 2005, and had that iteration until probably 2009/10. I didn't have a proper blog for many years after that. In 2014-16, when I was on the tenure-track jobs market, I had a Squarespace, which was like a much more expensive WordPress. Went back to WordPress briefly while on DreamHost. Got sick of WordPress and, after hearing about static site generators, I set up a Hugo site. This was about 2019/20. I found a way to convert my WordPress entries to Markdown so I could "import" them into Hugo. I've since culled a lot of those, since a lot of them were geared towards finding a tenure-track job. Hugo worked well for me for a long time; I've written elsewhere about my quibbles with Hugo. So here we are with Eleventy. It works largely the same, but isn't quite as intuitive as Hugo was. But I've been learning its idiosyncrasies and it's OK.

Given that it took me awhile to land on Eleventy, again, I am hoping this sticks and I don't have to switch to something else. It's frustrating finding something you love and which works, then having to ditch it for something else. I feel like that with a lot of things in life. If it works well, I see no reason to change it. I always hope that products I like will stick around and I can keep using them forever. I've definitely gotten burned on that, because capitalism. Because planned obsolescence. Because we always need the newest and best and greatest and can't be content with things just working. Nothing flashy, just dependable and solid, getting the job done. I like software updates as much as the next person (it's a little dopamine hit I guess), but most of the time an upgrade is not a necessity and we shouldn't always think it is. I tend to run things into the ground, and not replace them unless I absolutely have to. And I think we need to embrace that philosophy more. Innovation is great, sure, but it is not always inevitable and certainly not always necessary. Out with "move fast and break things" and in with "move slowly and maintain things." Maintain things, and each other. I'd like to see people be better to each other in general.

Anyways, hoping for the best, preparing for the worst. Such is life. Thanks for reading, friends <3

Palaces of Entertainment

2026-03-26T00:00:00Z

CWs: food mention

I've been thinking lately, as one does, about the past. I try to avoid seeing it through rose-colored glasses, if at all possible. A bit of the warm fuzzies as a balm against these trying, turbulent, bizarre times. My retro gaming podcast, in recent episodes, has mentioned renting games (NES, &c.). I miss those days of being able to try something out, for a small fee, before buying it. These days, I buy most of my games digitally on Steam, which has a relatively straightforward refund policy: as long as you haven't logged over 30min in the game, you can return it. Presumably they think that the first 30min of a game will determine whether you actually want to own it or not. And usually that's fine. Reading reviews is important for context, just in case that 30min doesn't do the trick, and you can't get a good grip of the game until after that point. And if you get burned? Well, that's the way it goes sometimes; you bought it. Again, it's mostly fine, but there are definitely some games in here I wish I hadn't bought, since they were not what I expected. So it goes.

The '90s, and to some extent, the late '80s, were a simpler time in that regard. Video stores would gladly rent you a video for a night or two, and same with videogames, often. Growing up in Oregon, I remember even renting videos from Winco (formerly Waremart), a discount grocery store that stocked videos near its customer service. I fondly remember, on a night we were set to sleep over at my grandparents' house (they lived maybe a mile or so away from us, max, most of my life) on a Friday or Saturday night, they'd take us to Winco and we would get snacks and rent a video. It often ended up being one of the Ernest movies, which we'd usually seen a bunch already, but loved. And we'd take it back to their place, enjoy the snacks and the company, and crack up laughing. It was magical.

Of course, we rented videos with my parents, too, quite often. We owned a lot of movies, after a time, but for a long time we rented whenever we could, to check out stuff we hadn't seen, or things that my parents wanted to introduce to us. Movies were great, but I liked renting videogames even more. When I was far younger, we lived not far from a place called Five Star Video. It was in a strip mall with a Safeway we often went to. They rented videos for a day at a time, $1/day, and same with videogames. I think they had a decent movie collection, but I was all about the games. I remember renting The Legend of Zelda there once (probably the first time?) and keeping it for nearly a month (My parents were not happy about that, nor was the video store). It was a great way to check out a game and see if I wanted to buy it (read: ask my parents for my birthday/Christmas/&c. and hope for the best). I feel like we rented from there a lot for awhile, but eventually moved on to other places.

Another place I remember really enjoying was a local place called Silver Screen Video. I don't think they had videogames; just movies. They had a lot of the popular stuff, naturally, but also had some more esoteric and obscure titles you might not find elsewhere. It was a little further away from us when I was younger, but once we moved, we were a bit closer. I definitely enjoyed going there, but I think it was a place my parents liked more than I or my sister did. Something about the experience of grabbing a little tag and taking it to the counter that was exciting! Some places had a plastic-encased box for the videotape sleeve, and later, the empty DVD/Blu-Ray case, but the oldest memories I have are of a little tag on a hook underneath the box. Usually the store would give you a thick plastic case for the video with its logo and name and such on it, presumably to keep the paper case intact. You'd bring the tag and they'd go back and find it, then voila, here's your rental! Money was exchanged, and off you went to enjoy it. Silver Screen was a cool place.

There was another very artsy video store with the excellent name "Flicks 'n Pics." It was further away from us, so we didn't go there very often, but it was revered in the community in general for its wide selection which also included very obscure films. I don't think they had videogames, though. They even had a "back room" with a beaded curtain where they kept the "adult" films. Really, like NC-17 ones, or more bizarro unrated ones (I have a feeling some of the weirder parts of David Lynch's catalogue would be right at home there, but I don't know). So you know it's fancy since they had a back room where, naturally, I couldn't go as a kid! All in all, though, they had a great selection, and whenever we did go there, it was a delight. A bonus was that the store had a fun logo with a caricature of Groucho Marx. I remember that pretty vividly. It was definitely unique! Also, the store was right off of Friendly St, which is a great street name.

The video store I remember going to the most, though, was called Premier(e) Video. (I put the "e" in parentheses because, as expected, they weren't always consistent on spelling, even on their own materials and labels and signage and such). They had a great collection of videos, and a great collection of videogames as well. I think they had a slightly longer rental period, too, which was a bonus. I have a very dim memory of renting Action 52 there, that terrible NES multi-cart, and I don't think it even worked in my NES. I can't remember much about the videogames I rented there, but we definitely got a lot of movies there over the years. I think here and there we turned things in too late, and got bad marks in our "record," but overall it was fine.

We also went to Blockbuster here and there, mostly because it was there, and another option. The selection wasn't great, mostly just the most popular movies and videogames. Occasionally one would find a gem there if the manager or employees were cinema buffs, but it definitely wasn't guaranteed. I feel like we got more videogames from there than movies. Strangely, I actually preferred Hollywood Video, later on, to Blockbuster, as far as "big box" stores go. Hollywood Video had a lot of random B-movies and indie stuff that you wouldn't necessarily find elsewhere. My best friend and I rented movies all the time from there back in the day, and same with videogames. Overall, I think they did a better job than Blockbuster.

I really think something's been lost, again, not being able to try things out before committing to buying. I'm all about open-source these days, so I would prefer games and software to be "free," but at the same time, I do miss the "shareware" ethos. If you're not familiar, "shareware" meant that a game was released, usually in part, and one would pay to get the "registered" version, which would give you the rest of the game. For example, Commander Keen episode 1 was released as shareware, and episodes 2 & 3 had to be purchased. The same happened with Commander Keen 4, which I played all the time; episode 5 needed to be purchased. Same with DOOM (episode 1 was free; episodes 2-3, and later 4, were paid) and countless others. Although as a kid, I was angry that I couldn't just play the whole game, since I often didn't have the money to buy the rest of it, I still appreciated being able to play part of the game for free. Again, games these days, you either buy them or don't. There's things like "Game Pass" or whatever that give you a subscription to a large game catalogue, sure, but then you don't own them, you're just "renting" them in a different way. (One could make the argument, though, that you don't "own" Steam games, but only own a license to play them, and I definitely get that argument; it is close enough to ownership for me for the most part). I really prefer buying things from indie studios (film or game), rather than the big names, because I feel like the money's going somewhere more meaningful. So that softens the blow a little bit for me.

I don't think we'll ever get back to that time, though, in the '90s, where we could test things out for a much smaller fee, and decide whether it was really worth taking the plunge. Look at companies like Redbox, who were the last dying gasp of that industry; they folded up as well eventually. Yes, you can "rent" movies online, but it's not the same. I'd much rather check out a movie from the library these days. That is the "new" rental, but it's free (= paid for by taxpayers, well worth it). The service Kanopy is really nice, too, allowing maybe 4-5 checkouts in a month. It's limited, but that's OK. I've found some really cool horror movies on there that aren't necessarily elsewhere. More and more I am becoming fed up with paying for streaming services that I am not using. But my spouse and I make these decisions together, and if they get some use out of those services, then it's not for naught. I'm just glad we have some alternatives that feel like the old days. I feel like this particular nostalgia is a largely harmless one, but I could be wrong.

Thanks for reading, friends. I'd love to hear about your rental experiences in days past and reminisce. <3

A Nostos

2026-03-17T00:00:00Z

CWs: work, food, alcohol, physical health, death mention

It's been a busy day. It's St. Patrick's Day. I am about 1/16 Irish, and mostly just "celebrate" with a Guinness nearby on a non-"school night," if at all. Tonight we got home, fairly quickly (most of the schools are on spring break), hung out a bit, the milk was delivered, and then we made dinner. I had "corn ribs" which were exactly that: cross-sections of a corn cob, made to look like ribs. They were really good, but it was more of a side than a main. We also had some veggies. My spouse had pulled pork and some macaroni salad. I did my PT exercises, then took a shower, and here I am. I don't have a whole lot of time before I have to feed the girls, but I wanted to write. I'm listening to music and well, here I am.

Work was good. I worked with my supervisors on some things I need to improve for work, and they were very encouraging and I feel a lot better about things. I get very much "in my head" and I think it can get in my way. So it's a work in progress. I called out sick yesterday; I am getting over a bad cold that my spouse picked up somewhere on the way back from our trip last week and then gave to me. It's OK. It's basically gone at this point and I feel much better today.

So we went to Florida for our niece's wedding. That was the main event, but it also was good timing, I suppose, since my father-in-law passed away in recent weeks. My spouse has been understandably upset, and processing, and really wanted to see their family, especially their sister. So we planned on staying at my sister-in-law's place. My spouse is from St. Petersburg ("St. Pete") on the Gulf, so we were staying in that area, and then the wedding was down south in the Naples/Ft. Myers area. I say "wedding," but it was actually a post-wedding celebration; our niece got married months ago formally, but set a later date for celebrating with family and friends. Totally cool.

We left early on a Thursday morning, so we had to pack the cats up on Wednesday and get them to boarding. Our flight left at about 6am, so we decided it would be easier to stay the night near the airport. Otherwise it's about an hour drive to the airport, and I would rather have 30min of extra sleep and a 5-10min drive, y'know? We had a nice evening, dinner, then crashed at our pretty affordable hotel. We set alarms for 3am, which came way quicker than expected. Our trip went from Thursday to Monday, so it was a pretty quick turnaround. I took Thursday-Friday/Monday-Tuesday off, since I like to have at least a day on either side of a trip.

I am not used to the humidity in Florida any more. I lived there for 7 years and living in dry, high-altitude Colorado has completely ruined my ability to handle humidity. It was in the 70s-80s F when we were in Florida, so it could have been much worse. We had a layover in Atlanta, and the humidity hit me as we were disembarking from the plane. We got in late in the afternoon on that Thursday, and my sister-in-law very kindly picked us up from the Tampa airport.

We had a lazy couple of days. Explored St. Pete. My spouse doesn't get a chance to show me around much, so it was cool being a tourist. I lived, and we met, elsewhere in Florida, and I hadn't spent a whole lot of time where they're from. And it is always nice to see my sister-in-law. The last time we saw her was maybe 3-4 years ago when she came to Colorado for work, and we only got to see her very briefly since again, she was here for work. One of those nights, we went to a local bookstore! I got a book for my spouse (their birthday was the 11th), and two books for myself (one book about women in medieval times, and a cool period romance novel). I loved that bookstore! We checked out a couple of breweries after that, too, which was fun!

I was definitely happy to get some fresh seafood. My sister-in-law and her partner have a favorite spot on the beach, a Mexican place which has huge portions and delicious margaritas. We had a great time there. I got a shrimp burrito and loved it. The top-shelf marg was a lateral move from the mid-shelf Hornitos one; oh well. We also hung out with my sister-in-law's partner's brother, who was staying in town for a little while; my sister-in-law's partner's mother died recently as well. It's been a weird couple of months for my family in Florida. They were happy to see us, and we them.

Going to see our niece felt like a sidequest within the trip. Or was St. Pete the sidequest? I'm not sure. It was about a 3hr drive down south, and we left about midday that Saturday; the celebration was at about 5pm. We had a delicious lunch on the way down (more excellent seafood for me), and otherwise I napped on the way down. We ended up getting a cheap hotel to stay the night, since we didn't want to drive 3hrs back later that night. The celebration was lovely. I hadn't seen the bride since my own wedding in 2015, which is wild to me, and she was very happy that both of us came for it. Got to catch up with my brother-in-law and his wife as well; they are great people and I love seeing them. He's a firefighter and she's a paramedic and they work long hours and are very busy most of the time, so we don't get to see them that often, but when we do, it's always very nice. He said something about coming out to see us again in Colorado with his RV, which would be awesome. In probably 2017/18, he, his wife, and a couple of their kids went on a summer RV trip and stopped in Colorado for a few days to see us. We had an awesome time, and it would be even better now, since we know the area far, far better after 10 years here than we did after a year.

In any case, was great to see my niece and meet her husband. They seemed very good together. Her parents, and her grandparents, all live together on a massive property kinda in the middle of nowhere in Naples. So that was interesting to finally see "the compound," if you will. It is a massive house, a lot of acreage and space to enjoy. I laughed that it reminded me of Fort Wilderness, the campground resort at Disney World, where they tend to like to stay a lot with their RV. It really was like that, but their home. We were well-plied with alcohol, mostly champagne, and the food was excellent. All around a good time. We stayed until almost 11pm, talking and catching up. My spouse, their brother, and their sister took a shot of Jack Daniels together to pour one out for their dad. I think my spouse really needed to see their family, so that was good. Bittersweet but necessary. At some point I was getting pretty tired myself, and we eventually made it back to the car and went back to the hotel. My sister-in-law's partner had rented a car for this excursion, and was driving; by that time he and I, at least, were pretty sober and good to drive. We didn't have far to go.

After we got back to St. Pete on Sunday, we didn't have a whole lot of time. We hung out for a while. Got lunch at a sort of beach-bum bar, delicious food, good drinks, filthy bathroom (per my spouse). Buffalo shrimp were divine and so were the fries I got. I missed Yuengling, my cheap beer of choice during my PhD. We went back to my sister-in-law's partner's house and played board games and tried out the bourbon he'd gotten from 3 Daughters Brewing (who knew they made hard liquor?) earlier in our trip. We also got to meet my sister-in-law's cat Opi. He's a little scrawny orange kitty and he's getting up there. He was a little skittish but it was nice to see a kitty while we were away from ours. My spouse had met him before but I hadn't, so that was cool. The cat has been living at my sister-in-law's partner's house, ever since my sister-in-law's house was damaged in a hurricane a couple of years ago, and he seems happier there.

We set it up to have an early flight on that Monday morning. Got there about 6am for an 8:30am flight. Uneventful, which is OK for flights. Made it over to pick up our kitties from boarding in late afternoon. My spouse went back to work on that Tuesday, and I had the day off and hung out with the kitties. It was a really nice trip and I'm glad we got to take it. This is my spouse's busiest time of year, so it was hard for them to get away, but obviously very important to make it, not only for our niece's wedding, but also to reunite with their family after their father's passing. It was well worth it, even though it was a quick trip. And I'm glad I was able to go with them. Normally it's hard for me to get away, and it's also spendy to board the cats for an extended period of time (this trip alone, for 5 days, was like $400 USD, just for boarding). So we can't do it often, but sometimes the stars align and it works. I'd like to be able to get away and see my family in Oregon more often, but it's hard to do it together for the same reasons. I told my spouse they should go see their family more often, with or without me, since again, it's cheaper if either of us goes alone. Having family to stay with definitely cuts down on the expenses. My parents live in Oregon, and so does my sister and her lil fam (partner and best friend), so it's easy to go to Eugene and see them. I would like my spouse to go with me, but again, we have to plan it and save up usually.

I'd like to take more trips around here where we don't have to necessarily board the cats. There is a ton of Colorado we haven't explored yet, where a long weekend would likely suffice. We have plans to go to Mt. Rushmore, or Scottsbluff in Nebraska, or elsewhere. There's places in Wyoming I'd like to check out. So we have a lot of day/long weekend trips we could do. It takes a little more planning with the EV, sorting out charging, but it's totally doable. I like road trips. We might take a day trip up to the mountains this weekend, I dunno. I just love living in a place where we can do cool stuff not only in town, but also around us, very easily. I guess you could say that about anywhere, but I dunno. It's more special when it's where you live, somehow.

I called this post "a nostos" because it was just that: a "homecoming." Not to my home, but my spouse's home, but by extension that is another "home" for me. I remember while I was working on my PhD, I would visit Oregon as much as I could; that was a long flight from Florida, but well worth it. And it always felt like a proper "homecoming" seeing my parents. In the summers I would often go and stay for a month or so with them and soak it all up. I didn't have a ton of work obligations like I do now, so it was easy to get away, and again, staying with family makes it much, much cheaper. My spouse's family lived about 3h south of where we lived, so it wasn't too hard to go see them, but I don't think they saw them as often as they would have liked, even so. We did our best. And I always enjoyed the time with my father-in-law. We would often meet up at Disney World since that was a little closer for both parties. I hadn't seen my father-in-law since our wedding in 2015, and I am sad about his passing, as I always liked him and I think he liked me. But the whole thing is bittersweet since he was ill for quite a while, and is now ideally at some kind of peace. I'm glad for the time we had and will do my best to take care of my spouse over the years, of course.

Anyways, overall the trip was bittersweet, but really nice, and I'm glad we got to do it. I really tried not to make this a minutiae-riddled post like the ones of old, so I'm working on that and just sketching things out a little more. I appreciate y'all reading this, as always. Lots of love, and talk soon. <3

Khremata

2026-03-15T00:00:00Z

Well, it's the Ides of March, always an interesting time to reminisce. But I digress. We are talking a bit about money today, χρήματα (khremata).

My friend recently wrote a post about how much it costs, roughly, to run their website. And I thought about it and figured I would do the same, because it's an interesting data point. It's not something I've thought about much. Running this website is really important to me, and IMHO, well worth the money. I have a repository to share my thoughts with the world (qualescumque sint, "of whatsoever quality they may be"), and I also run services for myself, family, and friends. The services (NextCloud; Navidrome; Vaultwarden; Phanpy; &c.) are ones I myself use pretty much every day, and most of them I am happy to share with others. So I get a lot of personal utility out of the site, but I also like sharing my thoughts with others, not only in hopes that they'll be helpful, but also because it serves as a record for myself. Of course our thoughts are almost always distilled, mediated, edited; if you got my unedited, pure thoughts, it would be like automatic writing, just pure stream-of-consciousness; who knows what would come out! I'm OK having some control. I always aim to present an authentic portrait of myself, despite that mediation. I rarely edit things on here, except to correct factual inaccuracies or update things here and there. And I'm OK with that too. I remember, laughably, writing at one point of a previous iteration of this blog, "This will become a book one day. I swear it." Uh, never did. And that's OK too. I don't like the idea of sharing those juvenilia with anyone really; my blogs from 2003-2008/9? were unremarkable annals. I revisited them in part looking through a WordPress dump, and I don't care to return to all that. In any case, ultimately I'm happy to have this space to share with y'all.

Here's a breakdown of costs to run this website:

Domain name registration: $12.50 USD/year via Porkbun
- This is definitely subject to change, depending on registrars' whims, but AFAIK my domain name is not super sought-after.
- I recently renewed for 3 years, I think, in 2025. I'll probably re-up for longer when that's up.
Virtual private server (VPS) hosting: €14/month (= ~$16-17 USD/month based on exchange rate) with Contabo
- I previously had a more high-powered server which wasn't necessary, so I was able to lower the costs a bit, thankfully.

Cost per year for each:

Domain name: $12.50 USD/year
VPS hosting: $198 USD/year (using $16.50 USD/month average)

Therefore, total cost to run this site is ~$210.50 USD/year.

I feel like I was paying a lot to run a site on Squarespace back in the day. I had a site on there ca. 2014-16, while I was on the tenure-track job market. At the time of writing, Squarespace's "Basic" plan is $16 USD/month = $192/year. That includes a domain, true, and hosting, but still. You get your site and it's all managed for you. That's a savings in time, but a loss in versatility. For $20 USD/year more (so one more month, roughly), I have a whole computer to play around with, put whatever I want on it, and also run my site. Granted, again, running a webserver can be a timesuck, and does require technical skills. But it is doable, even if you're very new to this sort of thing. And I think it's worth it. DreamHost, where I had my WordPress site for a time, was decent while I had it, but again, limited, and after the initial deal, they jack up the price by about 30%, at least at the time of writing, for the managed WP hosting. But again, since I have the technical know-how, I'd rather pay a little more and have near-complete control of my server.

I could always get a cheaper VPS with lower specs, I suppose, and less disk space. But I like having space for my music, for whatever other files I want to put on there. It's lovely. And again, it is a little expensive (works out to about $18 USD/month), but I love it. And I'd rather cut in other areas than this one. It is well worth it to me. And I'd like to be able to place as many public services on my server as possible, for others to use and enjoy, if they like. I do have private services on here that only I and friends/family use, but there are plenty of public ones. I don't know what other ones to add at the moment, but I am always thinking about it in the back of my mind.

If you have a VPS yourself, have you tallied up the costs? Is it worth it to you? I'd be interested to know the answer. I know everyone has different needs and requirements. Thanks for reading, friends <3

Itinerantia

2026-03-13T00:00:00Z

CWs: physical/mental health

I am too out of it to write about this tonight but I want to, in more detail, soon. We were in Florida for a few days, mainly to go to our niece's wedding celebration, but we also stayed with my sister-in-law and that was very nice to catch up. Both my spouse and I are getting back into the swing of things; I went back to work Wednesday and my spouse went back on Tuesday; we left for Florida last Thursday, early in the morning. So it was kind of a whirlwind trip but we had a great time. The kitties came back from boarding with colds; Lyra seems to have gotten the worst of it, and Ajax is also a little goopy and sneezy.

My spouse came down with a cold shortly after getting back, and has felt bad for a couple of days, but is now feeling a bit better. I worry I am getting a little tickle in my throat personally too, but we'll see how it plays out. I'm hoping for the best.

I finished the slew of Latin projects, for now at least, which is nice. So we'll see when more come through, but none quite yet. I'm OK having a little more time to myself, even though I did take a bunch of time off of it while we were travelling.

I'm working on finishing Sofia Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria. I'm really enjoying it, and about 2/3 of the way through it. I found out there is a sequel, and I sorta jumped the gun in my excitement and put it on hold at the library. I need to pick it up within the next week, though, so I'm just gonna try to finish the current book before I pick up the new one from the library (I own the book I'm currently reading). I'd rather read it while it's fresh in my mind, y'know? Then I'll read something else after that, no idea what. I have a lot of interesting stuff to choose from, but I am trying to go with "older" stuff (i.e., stuff I've had around longer). Maybe I'll intersperse a new one though in there, we'll see. And Proust is a constant. I love it but I've been too tired to properly read it lately. And I'm almost done with the African-American poetry collection I'm reading; it is really, really good. I'll be interested to pick up another poetry collection after that -- perhaps the book of socialist poetry I've had on my self for awhile now.

Anyways, I hope the weekend is off to a great start for y'all, and you're enjoying yourselves, whether that means resting, or going out, or gearing up to do stuff tomorrow. There is a lot of doom and gloom to go around, and I'm trying to ward it off with the positive to the extent that I can. This is by no means a doom-and-gloom free zone, but I find I don't have the bandwidth to handle it most of the time. Even keeping up with my doom-filled RSS feeds takes a lot out of me, but I want to stay informed at the same time.

Take care of yourselves and each other, please, and spread as much love as you can. Thanks for reading, friends <3

Windswept

2026-02-26T00:00:00Z

CWs: food, work

It's been a dry, warm, non-snowy winter, and windy lately. I don't like it at all. I want my winter back. I want my cold weather and snow (despite needing to shovel) back. Highs in the 60s and 70s F is not okay. It's going to be a nerve-wracking late spring and summer, given our wildfire risks in the area. I like listening to the wind, though, and if it weren't so dry all the time here, it would be more welcome. We've had the windows open recently since it's been in the high 30s F the last couple of evenings, and as long as it's above freezing, windows open is nice at night. The trees and plants don't know whether to hibernate or bud. I don't like being part of the problem. I'm just doing the best I can to live with the decisions others have made. Things largely out of my control.

Maybe I'll break out the telescope soon if it's a clear night, take it in the backyard. I miss looking at the stars. I would love to go out to an open space late at night and take the telescope there.

It's back to normal pretty much around this site. I like the new system and really, as long as I can throw Markdown files at it, I'm totally OK. So that's been nice; it took a lot of setup and some tweaking but we're good.

I saw my physical therapist on Monday. He gave me two new resistance bands, one a little higher-resistance than the original one (green), and the other a replacement for the original (red). He also assigned me some new exercises, but I don't think he added them to my app, so I need to send him a message. I can't for the life remember any of them except for the one using the exercise ball against the wall. I'm sore, though. He also suggested I start using 5lb weights instead of the 3lb ones I had been using, and I can feel the burn. It's a good feeling but also I'm sore.

I got a new work computer on Tuesday after almost 4 years. The old one was very long in the tooth and glitching out a bunch, so it was a welcome change. It's bigger, but otherwise mostly the same. I'm just glad to have a working laptop. My spouse had a haircut appointment on Tuesday evening, so I took a bus down to downtown, grabbed the car, drove home, hung out with the kitties. Once they were done (their appointment was a cut & color, so it took like 3hrs), I met them at a park and ride, then we got dinner on the way home.

Lyra kept me up for a lot of the night on Tuesday after that, unfortunately. She was a little hellion. I ended up sleeping out on the couch from about 4am on, and slept very poorly. I did not feel up to working after that, so I called out on Wednesday. It was nice to rest and I worked on Latin and also played videogames, and perused the PBS streaming app, inter alia. Lyra was much better last night and I slept far better, even though she still got me up a bunch as usual.

Even though it's been a "short" week with taking Wednesday off, I'm still ready for the weekend. We have errands to do, per usual, but it's a short week as I am taking some time off at the end of next week and the start of the next. So that will be good.

I was thinking of a title for this post and it took me a while to come up with one. I am not great at titles any more. Either that or I'm just tired. I'll either come up with something cheeky or something Latin/Greek, or something alliterative. I suppose that's OK. Sometimes it's a little stressful coming up with something, especially if I'm just writing a quick thing. I guess I'm seeing how the fediverse and microblogging are sometimes more useful for that sort of thing. But I like sharing with y'all, whosoever you may be, and keeping a record for myself, especially since I have a cron job slowly chipping away at my older posts on the fediverse. I honestly don't 100% know if it's working, but I hope it is. I have no easy way to tell, though. Well, I just looked and I think maybe 100ish posts have been deleted in all? I don't know. I'll keep running it hourly as a cron job.

I like having this space to collect my thoughts and send them out into the aether. It's been a really interesting almost 6 years running this server and I hope to keep running it for a long time to come. I don't see any reason to stop. I use the services on here myself literally every day, and I am happy to share as much as I can with others. I'm always looking for more things I can make into "public" services on here and share with others who either aren't interested, don't have the expertise, or can't afford to self-host them. I'll have to look at the YunoHost apps store for more stuff.

Speaking of that, I've been very frustrated with all the nonsense Discord has been pulling with their "age verification" (read: data-collecting) push. I am part of a few communities on there and I really hope they move elsewhere. One of my dear friends is thinking of setting up a Discord alternative, and I offered to help with any self-hosting questions as much as I can. I'm honestly thinking of trying to spin up that particular service on my own server just to see how it works, so I can help my friend better when they spin theirs up. It has Docker Compose instructions, and I went through that with Koito on YunoHost, so I think I can probably figure it out. Hey, maybe I'll even set an instance up myself to help signal boost, if it seems worthwhile.

Anyways, thanks for reading as always. I'll write more soon. I don't have a lot to report right now since I'm a little scattered and out of it, and not much exciting has been happening in life beyond the normal stuff. <3

Static Site Generator Thoughts

2026-02-22T00:00:00Z

I completed the move from Hugo to Eleventy today. I'm grateful for this list of static site generators I came across. There's a lot of them out there, in various states of maintenance and disrepair (just as any software project). I wanted to try to find one that is actively maintained and used, and Eleventy seemed like the best of the bunch for my purposes.

I will say I tried Cobalt which is very nice, but was not exactly what I was looking for it. It was also very picky about date formats in metadata, which was offputting, but if you're OK with that, it's nice. With such a common name, though, it's also impossible to find pre-made themes for; I didn't find any, but again, perhaps there was a lot of noise vs. signal in my searches. I think it would be nice for simpler sites and ones where you're OK rolling a lot of the theming yourself via CSS &c.

HydePHP is another strong contender. I was actually juggling and testing out Eleventy and HydePHP at the same time and seeing how closely I could hew to my original Hugo site. I was generally pretty happy with HydePHP, but I wanted a light/dark mode toggle and couldn't figure out how to code one in. It ended up being a little easier in Eleventy. So they were very close for me, and I think if you're looking for a good, solid static site generator, it's a great option as well.

I'm sure there are plenty of others, but I think this was a good move. Hugo was good to me for years, but the switch is worth making, for me at least. With that said, I'll get into a few of the tweaks I had to make to my installation to get it to work the way I wanted it. I used Eleventy Base Blog to get a working installation. I didn't see an easier way. Maybe one of these days I'll play with it more, but I'm happy with how it turned out for now.

I came across this light/dark mode toggle for Eleventy. I'm a big dark-mode fan, but I know plenty of people aren't, so I definitely wanted to give people the option. I thought hey, this is great! I'll definitely add it to my site. However, I had to tweak a few things in the CSS file:

:root.light .theme-icon {
    background-image:
      url('../img/sun.svg'),
      url('./img/sun.svg');
}

:root:not(.light) .theme-icon {
    background-image:
      url('../img/moon.svg'),
      url('./img/moon.svg');
}

This is probably a me problem, though. I placed the sun/moon svg images in ./public/img/ off of the root of the Eleventy installation. However, I have a few pages which are in a subdirectory when the site is published, so using ./ (for the current directory) will not find the image correctly. I thought about it for a second and found out that the CSS background-image can take two URLs. So that way, if one fails, it'll work with the other. A little hacky, but it works!

A little update: I found instances where even the .. relative link fails. So it's probably better to just use the full absolute link to the svg files. I've since done this and it's worked much better.

Otherwise, I can't think of any other bespoke stuff that I had to do with my site.

I've been running a static site for nearly 6 years now and it's overall been a pretty lovely experience. Sure, there's no WYSIWYG editing in place, but I kinda like the idea of "compiling" the site and then reuploading it. I also find it really, really cool, that it doesn't depend on a database in the background that can be easily hacked. I love it and I'd like to keep this site going for a long, long time. Thanks for reading, friends <3

Looking for a Replacement

2026-02-20T00:00:00Z

So I recently found out that Hugo uses AI for development (these are just a few examples I and others found). I'm really disappointed about this, because I've been using Hugo for my site for nearly 6 years at this point and loved it. But I am not at all interested in anything developed with AI, at least that now that I know about it. It's really frustrating because I don't want to switch.

I've looked at some other static site generators, such as Eleventy. All I really want is something I can throw my existing Markdown posts at, and not have to do too much modification. Eleventy seems extremely complicated, though. I also came across Cobalt tonight, which seems closer to what I'm looking for. But it's almost too barebones. It is also extremely picky about dates; it asks for the field published_date in the format YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss.sssssssss TZ. So I've had to do ls -l --full-time on my existing posts and copy over the string from that. It's not a big deal, but it's a little confusing.

Still, Cobalt is a frontrunner. But I am having trouble finding any kind of theming for it, and I don't know enough HTML, or any CSS to speak of, to theme it myself. I may have to look at others also.

It's a work in progress. For now I'll keep using Hugo, but it's not ideal, and I would like to find something else if possible. I'm just frustrated that so many projects seem to be using AI willy-nilly and don't care about all the issues it causes and brings up.