General

New Year Resolutions 2024: First month check-in

As noted in New Year resolutions for 2024 I said I would check in every month to see how I was faring. It’s time for Check-in #1!

To recap, my resolutions were (I’ve numbered them this time to make it easier to check progress, but they are not in any particular order):

  1. Get to 150 pounds. But for real this time. Gotta go with the classics.
  2. Finish my prototype game. Title to be revealed soon™.
  3. Complete my blog redesign. Another classic. It could happen!
  4. Revive my newsletter. I am actually working on this now, and have moved from Substack to Buttondown for the hosting.
  5. Complete one of my unfinished novels. Likely either The Mean Mind or Road Closed. I’ve been itching to get back into writing again, and either of these stories will be fun to noodle around on.
  6. Start a new blog or something. I kind of have something in mind, we’ll see what happens.
  7. Focus on:
    • Being happy
    • Staying healthy
    • Bringing good into the world
    • Getting decent sleep, which will help with all of the above
  1. I ended January up 2.6 pounds. Whoops. FAIL (so far).
  2. The game is in progress. I did not expect to have it done by the end of January. IN PROGRESS.
  3. I have actually been working on my blog! IN PROGRESS.
  4. I did not get out the first issue for January as promised, and I am rethinking the whole thing. STATUS TBD.
  5. I have chosen the novel to be completed. IN PROGRESS.
  6. I have not done anything on this yet, but am still mulling. IN PROGRESS.
  7. I am trying to find things that bring me joy. I am trying to reduce snacking (as always). Bringing good into the world? I am making some moves there. The sleep part is going well overall, with stress interfering here and there, but not regularly. Overall, a lot of this is IN PROGRESS but could be better.

So far…not bad, not great, mostly just starting to roll forward. We’ll see if it’s down Sleek Highway of the Future or hurtling toward a cliff. Check back in another month!

More things to look at (a small site update)

I have finally added back the ability to view some of my photo galleries in the right sidebar (currently a few birding galleries, one of planes, and a trio from hiking in the days of yore). I am going to redo this shortly because the current design will quickly become unwieldy, but worry not, the new design will be both more compact and expansive. I will defy the laws of physics!

I also added back the Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards comic. The bonus material page has been tweaked a bit with some better shots. Check it out for your early 2000s web comic/game mashup needs.

A twist on the ol’ ‘getting chased by things’ dreams of my youth

When I was a wee lad, I semi-regularly had two types of bad dreams:

  • Ferry disasters (possibly because I didn’t swim well and any rocking on a ferry kind of terrified me. Because I grew up on Vancouver Island, almost all of our holiday trips required taking the ferry.)
  • Getting chased down by various things and entities, including but not restricted to:
    • Vehicles of all types. They typically were missing the front bumper, because this made them more terrifying to me.
    • Vampires
    • Robots
    • Mummies
    • Assorted monsters

The chase dreams would usually end just as the thing was catching up to me, or in the case of a vehicle, just as I was about to be run down. I’d wake up, all frazzled, then eventually fall back asleep. Good times all around.

As an adult I very rarely have bad dreams and when I do, I typically wake up, think, “That was weird” and promptly doze off again.

Last night I dreamed I was either at the UBC campus or one that was subbing for it. It was vast and sprawling, and I must have been attending classes there, because I remember marvelling over how I was enjoying the science classes more than the arts, which was the opposite of my dream self (my awake self is the same, but not as strongly as the dream version of me). As I made my way across campus, it became time for me to leave. I was walking along one of those quiet campus roads that you see an occasional service vehicle trundling down, and as I approached the edge of the campus this road widened out into the start of a (I believe four-lane) highway. This was almost certainly my subconscious drawing in the Southwest Marine Drive entrance to UBC, which is indeed very highway-like.

Because this was where the highway started (or ended), it was very quiet. I needed to cross, and rather than going back to the quiet campus road, I opted to cross the highway.

You can see where this is heading.

I began to cross and almost at the same moment noticed a car approaching from the campus side, heading toward me. It was a low, dusty gold colour. It made me think of a 70s Dodge Charger. I looked it up and if this isn’t the car I saw in the dream, it is extremely close to it:

In the dream, I did a quick mental calculation and realized that the speed of the car meant I wouldn’t have time to get out of the way. Would the driver swerve around me? Plow into me? Was there even a driver at all? (The childhood versions of these dreams almost always featured driverless vehicles).

With no other options left, I did the only thing I could think of: I jumped straight into the air as the car approached. And it zipped harmlessly under me.

I woke up shortly after that.

Maybe the takeaway is that as an adult I have more control over things that frighten me, or make me uneasy. Or maybe my subconscious finally realized that three dimensions exist in dreams, too.

What is on this man’s head?

This is from a Costco ad. I have no idea what is on this guy’s head. It tasks me.

EDIT: I checked the Costco site and found out that this is a “Theradome PRO LH80 Laser Hair Growth Device.” That doesn’t seem snake oily at all!

Also, every time I read it, I see “laser hair”.

EDIT, Part 2: I had to ask an AI image generator what laser hair would look like:

Is nostalgia good or bad?

The real answer is probably both.

I will say this, though, it seems to grow more potent as you get older. This makes sense, as you have longer to look back, and more chances to trigger that nostalgia. I find this is especially true of music, since I probably bought more music in my 20s than at any other point in my life. I was in my 20s from 1984 to 1994, so the music of that era can send me off in a reverie pretty quickly1Excluding excessively cheesy synths and that weird snap drum sound that sounds extremely 19080s now.. Also, this decade saw the rise of rap, hip hop, grunge and R.E.M. probably my favourite band.

I may have more on this later. In the meantime, have a cat:

Oh snow (again)

Although I had EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN IT, it has snowed again. It is still snowing as I type this. It’s been snowing for at least 11 hours or so.

There is a lot of snow.

I did not go out running today, as I am neither a Yeti nor a hill giant.

It is pretty, at least until it changes to rain and turns into a slushpocalypse.

But no more after this, thanks!

Compare to January 11th (six days ago, slightly different perspective):

Change is in the hair

a vintage typewriter
I like this because you can’t actually blog with a typewriter (kids, ask your parents about typewriters). Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

I never had a lush head of fulsome hair, though when I was younger I grew it out to present the illusion that I did, most obviously during my Robert Plant hair phase, my own Stairway to Hairven1I won’t apologize for this, but I will promise never to use it again.. I first got my hair cut short for a play in 1983. It was set during WWI (“Oh What a Lovely War!”) and I had multiple small roles, most of which were soldiers or other military men. Most military men in 1918 did not have Robert Plant hair, so off it came.

I liked the look and my hair was kept shorn thereafter, until that fateful day in 2011 when I decided to remove it entirely before male pattern baldness could.

But this post isn’t actually about my hair, it’s about this blog (yes, I’m going meta yet again, maybe this will be my theme for 2024). Specifically, I think I’m going to start moving some of the stuff I post here to another site/service (to be determined).

What will move off of creolened.com:

  • Running and other fitness or health-related stuff (trips to the ER will be excepted, because that sort of thing is perfect for sharing here, as it’s always a comedy of mild horror). The running posts in particular have always been better-suited for a journal, as it’s not interesting to others. I mean, it might be interesting in some tiny way if you also run, but even then, not so much. (I think I started posting my regular runs here in part as a way to keep myself accountable, by making it public, but after 15 years of running, I should probably be OK to take this stuff offline now.)
  • Writing projects.
  • Art or other creative projects.

What would stay on creolened.com:

  • Ramblings and whatever pops into my mind.
  • Reviews.
  • Subjects that interest me, like tech, writing and so on. Opinion pieces, essentially.

What I’m, unsure about:

  • Photography. One-off photos and especially stuff I snap with my phone will still get posted here, but I am undecided where I want my birding or camera photos to live.
  • Anything else I haven’t mentioned already.

I’ll start with the running stuff first, then go from there. I’ll probably keep the running posts here, but maybe make the category non-public, so the posts aren’t visible, then find some clever (?) way to move those posts elsewhere.

Onward to a year when things are different, but hopefully better!

Oh snow

Guest parking at 1:53 p.m. Note: Ventilation shack was not pulverized by the snow, it’s been like that since August 2023.

Today we had our first real snow of the winter. Considering we’re well into January, that’s not too bad. It is still unwelcome, albeit pretty. We are expected to get a few days of below-freezing temperatures before going back to our usual mild winter. Take a look-see at tomorrow’s low temperature:

  • Normal low: 2°C
  • Record low: -9°C
  • Expected low: -13°C (!)

And just a few weeks away we set a record for the high temperature hitting +13°C. Climate change is fun!

AllerJAZZ!

person holding allergy medicine bottle
I tried using AI to generate the image, the results were…not good. Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

I think my allergies have been bonking me over the head the past few days, and this lead me to having a dream (I think it was a dream, I was in bed and all) about a new anti-allergy medicine called AllerJAZZ! The packaging had the compelling slogan: “Takes care of your allergies…and all that jazz!” Apparently, my subconscious mind is big on exclamation points. Also, jazz hands were a prominent part of the logo.

I can kind of see the packaging for this. Maybe I’ll mock up something later. That seems like a good use of my time.

A goose with a pipe (Welcome to my blog, 2024 edition)

Probably my most-used Signal sticker.
What does it say about me? Speculate!

Hello! If you are not a bot or LLM scraping this site to help churn out AI-based internet flotsam, then welcome to my blog! I don’t know how you got here, but if you stick around for a few moments, here are a few things you may find useful to know as of January 2024:

  • I like lists
  • I frequently write about my jogging (three times a week, usually). This is probably not interesting to anyone but me, but I never found another good place to write about it. I at least include a photo or two in these posts for you to enjoy as you scroll past.
  • Other popular topics include:
    • Book reviews (these have fallen off in the last few years).
    • Complaining about Apple (they’re big and carry an outsized impact on us, so I hold them to a higher standard; I am trying to reduce complaining in general, though).
    • Technology (I am not an engineer or anything fancy like that).
    • This blog (I often go meta).
    • Birding (started this back in 2021).
    • Writing prompts (both creating and using them).
    • Photography (mostly birds–see above) and drawing. I don’t get into the technical aspects of photography, I just post my photos.
  • Like a dinosaur, I use WordPress’s Categories.
  • I have plans to redesign the blog, but until I do, some things, like photo galleries, are hard or even impossible to find. This is bad and I feel bad.
  • Generally, I write about whatever I want to write about.
  • Last year, I gave myself permission to write about anything that popped into my head. I have done this multiple times since.
  • I have a Mac and a PC. I generally prefer the PC. I do my drawing on an iPad Pro.
  • My tone can be sarcastic at times. I try never to be mean. I think life, in a way, is absurd, and my writing here may reflect this at times.
  • Starting this year (2024) I am writing a monthly newsletter called Doodlings and Noodlings1We’ll see if this one comes back to haunt me.
  • I am working on my first video game. It should come out this year2We’ll see if this one also comes back to haunt me. Also, I like using footnotes..
  • I am white, male, Canadian, left-handed (but I use a mouse right-handed) and gay.

That’s about it for now. Thanks for reading. I don’t have comments turned on due to spam, but if you want to say something to me, or just send me an inscrutable emoji, I can be reached on Mastodon here: @stanjames@mstdn.social (I’m on other social media platforms, but rarely check or post to them these days. I’m a very low-key social rebel). You can also reach me using old-timey email here: ned@creolened.com