Some thoughts on friendship have been percolating lately. We saw friends last night for the first time in probably about a month (they tend to be quite busy, while we aren’t usually), and it was really nice to catch up. I don’t have many friends locally; some friends live elsewhere, and some friends I only know online. I’m okay with that, though. Quality over quantity any day. Reminds me of back when I was on Facebook, or Myspace, and everyone was so proud of having so many “friends” on there. I heard somewhere that you can only have meaningful connections with under 100 people or so, but can’t remember exactly what that figure was. I had a lot of “friends” on FB because people would add me, and the system encourages “collecting” friends rather than forging meaningful connections and actual friendships, in my opinion.

“Gladly reading,” a phrase that just popped up in my head. I’ve not been great about reading for the past few months, honestly. I’ve been playing a lot of videogames most days and/or watching TV instead. Years ago I used to read for 2-3hrs/night and just roll through books. I picked up Emily Wilson’s Iliad translation awhile back when it first came out in hardcover, and while it’s lovely, it’s daunting, and I think I’ve gotten a bit tripped up on reading and needed a break from it. Recently I read a collection of horror stories by the Denver Horror Collective called Terror at 5280’, which was really good. My spouse bought it for me as a gift a couple of years ago, and I just got around to reading it. After I finished that, I picked up Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, which I’d been wanting to read for a long time, and again, which my spouse bought for me (in April 2021, per the gift receipt inside the book). It’s been a quick read so far and I don’t think it’ll take me that long.

There in the title, that’s the post.

Kidding. It has been an incredibly busy week, as most weeks are wont to be. It was a good one, but just a lot going on. And I barely finished what I needed to finish (and not quite everything) today, but did my best, and that is what I aim for every day. The slightly-warmer spring weather has allowed us to keep the windows open at night, and I am loving the fresh night air (I am sure the kitties are enjoying it also). I’ve been opening the blinds behind my desk in my office lately during the day, too, and enjoying the simple beauty of the backyard. I should’ve done that years ago, but I honestly just haven’t opened the blinds much (the ones to my right look on the neighbors’ driveway and they use the side door all the time, so they’d be staring in, ugh). The ones behind my desk just, again, look out on the backyard, and it is a very pretty scene. My desk faces east, so I get to watch the sunrises and they’re really lovely, but I found that I need to wait a little bit to open the blinds, or the sun will stream right into my face, which isn’t ideal.

CWs: brief politics/war mention

Someone on Mastodon today made a post about how even if you only sporadically post on your blog, it doesn’t mean your blog is worth any less, or any less worth reading. And that really resonated with me, especially since I’ve been very sporadic (less so lately) about writing on here. I’m slowly changing that and writing a little more often, but it was incredibly encouraging and validating to hear that. Since I haven’t enabled comments, it definitely feels like an echo chamber, and functions as one, I suppose. But disabling comments (not enabling them?) is more out of a regard for protecting the site from spammers, &c., than discouraging discourse. I’m happy to hear from y’all on things I write, but it just has to be elsewhere (email; XMPP; Mastodon; in person if you know me offline?). I am trying to keep this site as purely Markdown as possible, avoiding JavaScript and scripts in general, and hence maintaining security, but also I want this site to be as lightweight as possible so anyone can peruse it without overtaxing a limited connection, &c. &c.

CWs: alcohol, food

So everyone predicted a ton of snow for Colorado the past couple of days – mostly the mountains, but also in northern Colorado and the foothills, and a bit even on the plains. We weren’t sure if they were going to call it and close our office for work, and I was hoping they would (they didn’t). I would have been working from home even if I’d stayed home, so oh well. I found out that things weren’t closed at around 6 a.m., so I got up, showered, and got ready. It really wasn’t too bad driving, mostly wet snow and slushy. The snow kept coming down throughout the day, and was pretty to watch out the office windows, but it was no fun to clear off the car when I was getting ready to leave. It snowed a bunch overnight last night, too, but the sun came out and melted most of it, so I didn’t have to re-shovel the sidewalks after I did them yesterday after work.

CWs: food, alcohol

My spouse’s birthday is in a few days, so we’re celebrating this weekend with friends. We are doing an escape room tomorrow (dinosaur-themed) which will be very fun. We’ve done escape rooms at this place twice before, so this will be a room we haven’t done. We’re probably going to have dinner out with friends, and alcohol will be consumed, that is a given. I have some errands to do tomorrow before that, though, and at least some Latin to get done before we meet up with our friends tomorrow evening. I am needing to get a new pair of dress shoes (my Skechers “dress shoes” are blowing out at the seams, likely since I didn’t get “wide” ones, ugh) so I need to look for that. And we’ll probably get breakfast out. I also need to return Saw X to the library before it auto-renews again, since I’m definitely done watching it. My own birthday is in a few weeks, I’ll be 40 and I’m looking forward to it.

CWs: mention of suicide in media, mental health, physical harm, negative self-talk in media; caveat lector

The title is my phrase for of “terrifying Internet videos,” using the Neo-Latin Lexicon’s coinage interretialis, -e as “(of the) Internet” (inter-, “between” + rete, “net”). I’ve spent a lot of time going down the rabbit hole with scary videos lately and thought it’d be worth sharing with y’all. The high-water mark for me is still Petscop, a highly-unsettling video series involving a “Let’s Play”-style deep dive into a seemingly-cursed, unfinished PSX game (now that is a bit of a shibboleth; I grew up referring to the original PlayStation as “PSX,” while a lot of younger people call it “PS1” to differentiate from PS2 &c.). I got in almost on the ground floor for that particular series, and while it was frustrating waiting for new videos to come out, it was really fun at the same time. Sad it’s over, but it was a wonderful run. If you know me, you know I am a big fan of horror in general, and I’ve been really pleasantly surprised at how good the scene for it is on YouTube. People are really doing some wonderful stuff over there and you should definitely check some of it out if you can. OK, let’s get into it. (FYI, this is very much inspired by another list I came across, so I’ll try not to duplicate things from there, but I want to give my own take on it)

Talia per clipeum Volcani, dona parentis,
miratur rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet
attollens umero famamque et fata nepotum.
Vergil, Aeneid 8.729-31

“[Aeneas] marvelled at such things throughout Vulcan’s shield,
And his mother’s gifts, ignorant of these matters, and rejoiced in the image,
Raising up on his shoulders the reputation and fates of his descendants.”

The phrase dona parentis (“gifts of his parent”), in this case, Venus, popped into my head, so I titled the entry after that, but modified the genitive to a plural, parentum, hence “gifts of the parents.” My parents were visiting here for a few days last week. I hadn’t seen both of them together in a long time (July 2022), so it was really nice to have them both visit us. They flew in fairly early and my spouse and I picked them up at the Denver airport, then headed home after that. Neither my spouse nor I had planned much to do with them, but mostly just wanted to hang out, show them around town, and catch up. We planned out a couple of excursions, mostly checking out downtown in our city and the city up the road. I was also excited to have my parents meet Lyra, our new kitty, since neither of them had met her before. We got her in May last year, after my dad visited in April last year.

I’m making my way through the week as well as I can. I have Friday off and my parents are coming into town for a few days, which will be busyish, but it’ll be really nice to see them. My mom visited last when we moved into the house, in Oct 2022 (can’t believe it’s been almost 2 years we’ve been here!), and then my dad came out here last April to visit. They last both visited in July 2022, so it’ll be good to have them both here. I’ve had an incredibly busy week thus far, even though “it’s Tuesday, Cap,” but the next couple of days should be pretty chill. I have some loose ends to tie up at work, and hope not to have too many on Thursday, but it’s all good. The weekend, while really nice, was too short as usual, and we had a really nice time (see here for more on the weekend.

So all week, we were told that we’d be getting quite a bit of snow here, and there were a lot of winter storm advisories &c. We had plans to see a movie Friday night, which I’d gotten tickets to a week or two ago, but by the time we got to Friday, we were both too tired to go out again, and ended up staying home. The tickets weren’t too expensive (it was going to be a nice cheap date), and the venue is owned by the city, so I figure it’s keeping that space running. Snow was supposed to pick up overnight and into Saturday, so we thought we’d probably be staying home Saturday as well, rather than going to the festival put on by the city downtown.