I want to write a new novel. How cool would it be to be an author? Wait a minute, I’m already an author. Let me rephrase.
How cool would it to be a prolific author? Like, a novel a year for the rest of my life? That would be something. Then if or when a novel gets traction and a loving audience, I can make all sorts of extra shit like visual novels or comics or games!
That might be the way to grow an audience. That might be a way to live the lifestyle that I like to live.
I don’t want to work in an office, I want to work from home and only go out to do fun shit!
Well, if my job was in a fun office that would be fine, I could handle that sort of job.
I couldn’t sleep last night. It’s 6:45AM and I didn’t sleep a wink. I have a dentist appointment at 9AM so I’m not planning on sleeping at all until after the appointment.
I have a lot of eBay packages to ship out today. I’m planning on dropping them off before my appointment.
Anyway, I think this is a good goal. A novel a year for the rest of my life. Why the fuck not? I loved writing my first novel, so why did I take 2 years off? IDK. I guess it’s because I was depressed and I didn’t care about living in the moment. I just wanted the next thing, I didn’t care to put little snippets of effort into my daily routine which would get me closer to my goals.
IDK if that makes any sense. IDK if I really understand why I didn’t write in 2018 or 2019.
I think it boils down to depression and living an unintentional life.
Things are a bit different now. I have financially cut off myself from my parents because I saw no indication that they would ever do the same. I feel like I can say no to their requests now. I feel a sense of independence and I’m struggling every day to figure out a way to make money and live a life worth living.
But a novel… Yes, a novel. I’m going to start now and I’ll be ready to release it at the end of National Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) 2020.
Maybe I’ll spend NaNoWriMo editing it and making it shine. Maybe I’ll write a completely new novel during NaNoWriMo? Who knows. Who cares. My goal is 1 novel a year, so if I get more than that it’s icing on the cake.
Ok then, I’m actually starting right the fuck now.
Ok, this is harder than I thought. I can’t think of what to write about. I gotta describe an environment which is the hardest fucking part of writing. Describing everything because the reader can’t see what’s in my head…
I gotta make characters and develop those characters and everything. Yuck! Ok, I remember why I don’t write much. It’s hard! LOL.
It was a cold morning in the urban jungle of Metropolis. Steam rose from the rooftop boilers of The sun shone through the gaps between the metal louver blinds and frame in the window of Craig’s messy office. The Craig opened his eyes as a sunbeam encroached onto his eyelid.
“Fuck, it’s morning already. I should have known I wouldn’t get any sleep.”
Craig kicked the blankets off
Fuck writing right now. I’m tired as fuck. I went to the dentist and wow, I realize I had a great dentist back when I had a job. This Apple Valley Dentist on Sprague with the octopus on the roof is not so great. Not great for me with my teeth in the condition they are in. Damn, I told them I had sensitive teeth but they used the coldest water to rinse my teeth. I was in tears because of the pain. And fuck my co-dependent behavior of not telling them the first time that the cold water fucking hurt. They rinsed 3 times total and I couldn’t help but guard my teeth the third time and water sprayed everywhere.
They don’t do periodontal cleanings like I was expecting. My guy at FBH who got me signed up with Apple Valley Dental said they do periodontal, but the sign up sheet at the place said otherwise.
I’d need some valium or something to get peridontal work done in the future. Every dentist I ever talk to recommends numbing toothpaste. I reject the notion! My teeth only hurt when I don’t keep them clean, or I am unprepared for cold. Or at the dentist.
I reject the notion of damaging the nerves in my teeth. I don’t even know if that’s what it does, but fuck that. I think the real solution is to know myself, and treat myself well to the point where I don’t cause myself tooth pain.
No cavities. I’m fucking stunned. I thought for sure I’d have cavities given the time I’ve spent away from the dentist.
I’m really not satisfied. They would be great for someone with healthier teeth, but mine have bone loss and I have receding gum lines. I need a periodontist to be satisfied.
Props to the dental hygienist who cleaned my teeth though. They were very careful and gentle. I would recommend this dental office to people who have healthy teeth! It’s not their fault, it’s my Healthcare Engagement Specialist at FBH who dropped the ball. I specifically told him I was looking for a periodontist and he said this place does it.
Anyway, enough of that. I’ll get this sorted out eventually. I’m just happy to have learned from this experience and going forward, I hope things will go better for my oral health.
Next up, head health! Not like therapy shit, but like actual internal inner ear area brain area scanning is in order. I got that consistent pain in my head that I need to look into. The hard part is finding the right place to go, which will accept my insurance. There’s no way I can foot the bill for a brain scan, not at my current income bracket.
I got food stamps. I did a phone interview and I got an EBT card which will be getting mailed to me. DSHS is providing me with $194 per month, which is good for a year. In April, some new law kicks in which will limit this unless I can get a Dr.’s note stating that I can’t work.
If this were a month or two ago, I would concur with a doctor that I can’t work. Now my depression and anxiety are at lower levels to the point where I don’t think I want to get a Dr.’s note. I think I want a job. If I could get unemployment benefits, I think that would help quite a bit.
Anyway, if I make greater than $1,354.00 (gross) in a month, I have to contact DSHS by the 10th of the following month. I think that’s when I’d be no longer eligible for food assistance.
So it’s a limited time thing. And that’s okay. That’s the dealio. This is a limited time thing because I want to support myself.
Anarchist me be like, “fucking finally. I’m getting back some of the money that’s been extorted from me.”
Hah, if only I could get back what I’ve paid in taxes over the years.
Whatevs. Don’t wanna get into that. Escaping taxes is a fantasy at the moment. Maybe someday, some future society will find a better way to live, without bureaucracy and classes and creation of criminals and exploitation of minorities and just the right amount of peace and chaos.
I’m starting to crash. 11:31AM. I keep getting a pain in my right eye because I’m so spent. So tired. My eyes want rest but my body does not seem to be on board.
Oh, big NERD BONER moment this morning. I finished a basic web scraper for p-memories.com. I think it works, but I didn’t let it scrape more than a few pages because I don’t want to be rude. It really needs request throttling. I’m thinking like 5 per minute or something. As it is, it makes like 5 requests per second, and I’m afraid I’m using more than my fair share of the website’s resources.
I’m going to add some throttling of some sort. I’m thinking Axios might have some built-in mechanism for throttling, or if not, i can always implement my own. No big deal, I just haven’t got the time to do it yet.
I am planning on adding said feature this evening, assuming I can get some sleep first!
No way can I have another code session without my eye exploding from a spasm attack or some shit like that.
Shit fuck shit. I swear a lot. Rarely do I swear out loud, but swears are a part of my daily internal dialogue.
I got food stamps! I’m not gonna starve!
I submitted my tax return today. I figured out that I didn’t need the $60 “PRO” version of H&R block, but I discovered that there is no way to downgrade without calling them. They have a chat option, but that’s an additional $60.
I got triggered by that.
I unsubscribed from H&R block’s reminder e-mails, and I searched for alternatives. I found TaxAct Online, which has a free version which I ended up using. I had to re-enter all my W-2’s from last year. There were 4 or 5! Worth it to save $60.
I also got a $15 return from Idaho because of the landscaping company I worked for in CDA.
So those returns are doing their thing. I’m getting some money from the government that was never rightfully theirs to begin with…
Anarchist Chris says, “Fuck the police!”
Hah, not really. More like, “Fuck the system!”
I don’t want to get into it. I’ll just say I would like less government, less polyticks, more engineers solving problems.
Actually I think the world is moving in that direction. Just thinking of today’s heroes, they aren’t presidents, they’re engineers and musicians.
Elon Musk. Kayne West. Satoshi Nakamoto, Gaga.
Not that I really follow any huge musicians like Kanye or Gaga, but I hear they have quite the influence.
I just saw https://github.com/syscolabs/kasaya mentioned on Hacker News. Might be worth looking into in the future, with all the web scraping I’m doing.
Right now, Axios and Cheerio are doing everything I need. I started out trying to use PhantomJS or CasperJS which I have used in the past, but it seems that those projects are both dead.
Nowadays it looks like headless firefox is the thing to use, but I’m not sure how that would work with node. There’s gotta be some library that has bindings for that sort of thing. Or maybe I’m not seeing something that’s obvious about web scraping.
Anyway, I don’t need an actual browser in this particular case. P-memories.com is simple enough to where Axios and Cheerio do the trick quite nicely.
I’m really digging Promises in Javascript. The more I use them, the more I realize their latent power. I want to figure out how to harness that power, while writing clean and highly readable code.
Here’s a code snippet of a control flow function which uses promises.
/**
* ripperoni
*
* accepts no parameters and downloads all card data and card images
* found p-memories.com.
*
* @returns {Promise} - A promise that returns a number if resolved
* or an error if rejected
* @resolve {Number} - The number of card data ripped from p-memories
* @rejects {Error} - An error which states the cause
*/
const ripperoni = () => {
let dataCounter, imageCounter = 0;
console.log('ripping all sets');
return ripAllSets().then((setUrls) => {
return Promise.mapSeries(setUrls, (setUrl) => {
console.log(`ripping set data ${setUrl}`);
return ripSetData(setUrl).then((cardUrls) => {
return Promise.mapSeries(cardUrls, (cardUrl) => {
console.log(`ripping card data ${cardUrl}`);
return ripCardData(cardUrl).then((cardData) => {
let imageWriteP = downloadImage(cardData);
let dataWriteP = writeCardData(cardData);
return Promise.all([imageWriteP, dataWriteP]);
}).then((writeResult) => {
if (writeResult[0]) dataCounter++;
if (writeResult[1]) imageCounter++;
})
})
})
})
}).catch((e) => {
console.error(e);
}).then(() => {
console.log(`done. card data: ${dataCounter}. images: ${imageCounter}`);
return (dataCounter);
})
}There’s gotta be a better way to write this. It makes sense only after intensely reading it. The indentation leaves something to be desired as well. There’s gotta be a better way.
Some parts need to be done in series, others are okay to happen in parallel. There’s gotta be a better way!
Anyway, I think that code artificially inflated my daily word count. I’m at my daily goal of 2000 words so I think I will take my cake and eat it too, or something like that. There’s gotta be a more appropriate expression but I can’t think of one. Two birds fed with one seed! Sure, I’ll go with that.
I’m grateful for my dentist visit. I’m grateful that I learned how good my old dentist is, and that I prefer a dentist with wonderful periodontal support.
I’m grateful for vegan nacho cheese. This is kind of random, but I just thought of it and I want it NOW! LOL, I don’t have the ingredients for it, but there is a great recipe in Hot for Food Vegan Comfort Classics which I have made a few times and it is AMAZING!
I hope to eat it again soon. Maybe in a week or so when I get my EBT card, I could get the ingredients and bring it to Saturday board games day! Actually that’s probably a terrible idea because it has the potential to be VERY MESSY!
If I could figure out a way to add it to bite size wraps or something, that might be good. But I think nachos and board games don’t mix! Too greasy!
I’m grateful for books. I think I wrote this same thing earlier this week. I’m really digging books though. Books contain a wealth of information. Sometimes it’s a life’s worth of information, refined and condensed down into something that can be read and digested in a couple weeks. I am going to read a lot more books in the future because I really enjoy the new ideas that I can take in!
21. My smile can make anyone feel better.
20. I am imperfect but I'm still perfectly me.
10. I will inhale confidence and exhale doubt.
