December 2022 Bullets - Top of Mind

Status report for the beginning of December.

• Despite trying to shame myself in mid-November by publicly announcing my incredibly simple NaNoWriMo goal, I persisted in not being bothered to do it, and wrote zero words in the latter half of the month.
• I’ve been listening to audiobooks at night when I go to sleep. So far I’ve completed four Jules Verne books from a massive, poorly-edited audiobook of “classic” (i.e. public domain) science fiction. Despite being a terrible production, the (uncredited, as far as I can tell) reader for these books is actually pretty good, and makes old-timey 1870s writing sound fairly compelling.
• I developed a toothache and went to the dentist. I have a history of dental issues and most people would be shocked and appalled at the amount of dental work I had done in my 30s. The vast majority of my upper teeth have had root canals and/or implants. Anyway now two of my lower back teeth have problems in the root area that will need addressing, so I have to schedule an appointment with a specialist to get some kind of new-fangled CBCT scan done. Luckily, the toothache faded and it no longer hurts… for now.
• Toothache was probably caused by stress from unspecified family drama. (Clenched jaw, grinding teeth at night, that sort of stuff.)
• Was almost done uploading Elden Ring “Extras” videos, so I decided to tack on my 17-video randomized Elden Ring playthrough, because I still don’t have anything else to upload.
• Yesterday I forced myself to play Hellpoint for about 45 minutes. It was the first time I played Hellpoint in almost a year and a half, and the first time I played any game at all for two or three weeks.
• Some people are playing the new World of Warcraft Dragonflight expansion, but I don’t see nearly as much talk about this expansion launch as I usually do, which might be because:
• Everybody who didn’t need to stay left Twitter due to Elon Musk drama. Most people went to Mastodon. Some people went to Cohost. Some people went to Hive and then Hive immediately imploded because of a massive security flaw. I made a bunch of test accounts in various places, but Twitter still works fine.
• Speaking of Twitter, I stopped following over 100 accounts, almost all of which weren’t following me. I tried to get the number of people I was following down under 100, but I only got to about 150. Twitter is very quiet and stress-free.
• Advent of Code started, but I’m ignoring it. It’s a good opportunity to learn a new programming language or practice coding interview-style problems, but keeping up with it in real-time is way too commercialized and stressful. Maybe I’ll look at it in January, because I’m working on this far more interesting and practical project:
• Continuing to spend most of my free time working on implementing an ActivityPub server for the blog. I’m starting to run out of momentum though. Thought I would be further along by now. ActivityPub is so poorly documented that it’s not very easy to work out how to do anything with it. It’s largely useless anyway, because you literally cannot communicate with most federated servers unless you implement Mastodon-specific, largely undocumented extensions (e.g. HTTP signatures). I’ve spent the past week debugging exactly one thing: Responding to a follow request. No luck so far.