In many ways, not that much has happened since the last time I posted, but I guess I haven't been totally idle, either. I've made minor gestures towards sorting myself out and setting out directions in which to move at the very least. It's overall been a pretty mixed period of time, and I'm trying to embrace that to some extent. I think it's easy to get wrapped up in ideas of 'productivity' and become extremely anxious. After all, we're trapped in systems that spur us towards more and more for the sake of it, all to someone's profit. To try and find some level of comfort in one's current place is more human; it doesn't mean to not try but only to not kill oneself striving for striving's sake. Or so I say; I have to cope with life somehow.
This post's title has a bit of a double meaning. The first is a literal one. I've been living with a plumbing issue for a while in my kitchen. I haven't mentioned it very much, but cooking is a big part of how I stay sane. If it weren't for being able to enjoy cooking and eating, I'd have very few reachable pleasures in life. You'll understand, then, that the present situation leaves me in a fair bit of distress. For a while, it looked as if I was unable to use either side of the kitchen sink after the garbage disposal breathed its last. I spent time doing research and trying to figure out how to re-plumb the sink to just get rid of the garbage disposal, but found that it was far more complicated than expected due to the nature of the setup. Thankfully, calling a plumber to give an estimate, I did find out that one side was useable for the time being, a marked step up from having to dump water outside whenever running the faucet. The expense isn't something to be very happy about, considering my present financial state, but I have neither the expertise nor the physical health to do the sort of handywork necessary. Either way, those pipes are going to need clearing out.
The second intended meaning of the phrase is more figurative, of course. I feel in many ways a sense of accumulation of thoughts and happenings as time goes on. At some point, this accumulation is like a build-up of clutter in one's storeroom. In the past, I've simply let a lot of this 'clutter' fall by the wayside without addressing it, and it's certainly a strategy. Staying silent on the day-to-day thoughts and life experiences means that they eventually fade off into nothing. However, I think that's a bit wasteful, especially considering how hard-up I can feel for things to write about. I'm not the biggest advocate for journaling, especially in a semi-public manner, but I suppose it's better to at least set to paper and acknowledge the recent moments rather than separating them from time and rarifying them into abstract topics. Besides, if I don't post with some frequency, the habit of posting becomes more and more difficult to form and maintain, as does the habit of writing, one I've struggled to no end to maintain already; I don't put much stock in habits as virtues in and of themselves, but I do think being habitually creative makes for more chances of something good coming out. Ultimately, I've got to pass the time somehow, so I might as well use it in some kind of constructive way. That's why I have to 'clear out the pipes' at this opportunity, to loose a bit of what's been on my mind.
Part of what's facilitated this shift has been my being fed-up with a sense of dread and anxiety at forgetting instantaneous notions, not to mention things I feel the need to keep track of, like dishes I intend to make or ingredients that are getting near their expiration. To that end, I searched F-Droid for a notetaking app and found Quillpad, a phone-local Markdown notekeeper that works simply and slickly enough to let me jot down whatever necessary. This little(?) post has been in great part made possible by helping me catalogue what thoughts I have so I don't throw my hands up from losing focus once again. As I write, I'm looking down at a rough list of topics to cover, just enough to give me the essentials, and it can't be emphasised just how much that already helps me in getting things in order. I've certainly tried keeping notes in the past and have become overwhelmed by them, but looser cases like these posts are where a looser strategy can actually benefit. What I hope is that keeping a general habit of notekeeping for these sorts of lighter-weight matters can maybe help push me towards solutions for things like, well, story writing. But I'm getting a little ahead of myself with that. Suffice it to say, I'm doing my best to write down whatever I can whenever I feel the need.
Also part of this little organisational push has been the overall urge to improve this site. Since the start, this has been something of an 'engineering' project for me. I had a general desire to learn how to build and manage my own independent website, in part because I hoped to learn the technical aspects for their own sake, but also for the virtue of being a part of the greater, less-siloed internet. With rather modest ambitions of creating a simple website with the technical and content concerns segregated, I turned to a pretty simple static site generator called Cobalt. Simplicity is nice. Being able to just write some Markdown and have Cobalt spit out HTML takes some of the friction out of posting. Simplicity does come at a cost, though, in terms of flexibility. I've found that I would like to have separate pages and sub-pages for this site. The problem there is that Cobalt doesn't appear to offer any way of sanely having more than one addressable 'collection' of pages, which means generating listings beyond the front page isn't possible. That would mean hand-writing any other page's list of sub-pages, which defeats the purpose of being able to generate the site from Markdown! Aware of these limitations, I've felt a strong pull towards scaffolding the site in PHP in order to better manage and generate content. The obvious barrier here is that I haven't the foggiest about PHP, not having been that exposed to it beyond past little glimpses at THP's sources. It just means I'll have to learn, but I'll first need some idea of what I'm doing before I can even figure out how to do it. Which brings us to the present, where I'm using my newfound vigour in notetaking to keep track of site design. There's always the choice to not bother, but I really feel that I'd rather have this be more of a proper personal site of old than just a blog.
As far as Touhou-relevant things go, I can't say much has happened. I did stumble across a Touhou webring at some point, but I'm not convinced to attempt joining for various reasons. In particular, there is a strong lean towards the, uh, rather yuri-motivated sorts of fans, and the guidelines from the management seem a little touchy; it's become so easy for people to associate anything beyond theatrical shows of notional support for this, that, or other as whatever sort of negative thing they want to project, and I find that sort of attitude suffocating. Perhaps at some future date, should I push towards starting my own webring, I might revisit some of that one's members. I can't remember the last time I read either Lotus Eaters or Detective Monke, but I don't believe there's been anything incredibly recent. The last few chapters of the latter were especially underwhelming, and I have fairly low expectations to start. The former at least keeps what I feel is the general spirit of Touhou works, though I'm sure it will inevitably sprout a hasty plot in order to wrap up on time, like with all the others. On the THP front, little has happened of personal interest. There's the lewd (read: porn) contest that's wrapping up, which I had no real investment in to start. I haven't been able to even bring myself to read the entries since most are very long, and my impression from a quick skim is that there's nothing of even prurient interest to be found; I'll have to make a post sometime about my overall issues with written porn. I've had an urge to post in the writing discussion thread to talk about some of my issues with writing, but being unable to express those issues in a way that won't lead to unhelpful dialogue has been holding me back. Some of my current notes are dedicated to that problem. Behind the scenes, some minor movement has been made towards possibly getting at least another exhibition going, and perhaps even seeing our way toward more frequent mini-exhibitions. I'd particularly like to see lower-stakes events more frequently, if only because I feel that they're a good opportunity for people to experiment and write shorter, more standalone things. We'll see how it all shakes out. Things are still in their early stages, and we really need to discuss a lot more before doing anything concrete.
Beyond that, what have I been doing? Not very much. I've been fairly withdrawn for the past couple of months and haven't even left the house for a while. Due to a lot of things, like not being able to handle being around people, I haven't gone and played mahjong with my local club in a while, and I've made it clear that I won't be back for some time. Reading-wise, things have been a little slow going. I haven't had a lot of ability to focus for long periods, though I'm hoping notetaking might alleviate some of the distraction. Even when I have wherewithal, deciding what to read when I finish one book tends to become a problem; I have a post in mind about at least one difficulty of discoverability when it comes to literature. Either way, besides a full re-read of Kawabata's Thousand Cranes, I've moved into a re-read of his other great, Snow Country. I'd put myself at being around a quarter of the way in, so I don't have much to say about it at the moment. A literature blog helped me discover a sort of forgotten novel from the '60s called Office Politics by Wilfred Sheed, and I'd been reading that for a bit before kind of losing focus. All I'll say for the moment is that it feels like a story of its time. Between playing Riichi City and attempting to read, I've spent some time watching TV shows and films like The Sopranos or all of the Deadpool movies. At least, I was doing that for a while, but I've grown a little tired of live-action and have been watching more anime as of late. I've kind of gravitated towards 'cozy' or understated shows like Sousou no Frieren or Aharen-san ga Hakarenai, with punctuations of Kusuriya no Hitorigoto, something I started off reading in manga form a while ago and liked somewhat. A lot of it has to do with watching stuff late at night or early in the morning. At times like that, I can't handle a lot of overt excitement. There are moments in those shows, but I find that they tend to be less over-the-top than some. It would be nice if there were more outright slow and 'comfy' sorts of shows in circulation at the moment. I need as much to help me calm my nerves as possible.
So, I think that's the pipes emptied for this period. Perhaps with my notetaking, it won't take too long to come back with something further, but it'll depend on what's going on, I guess. Until then.