journal-008 \ stacker news ~mostly

Dear Journal,

You would be nothing without the notes I take each day.

There are a lot of notes that I haven't included in any journal yet, and the number is increasing. I usually take more notes per day than I mention in a journal.

One reason for not mentioning some of them is that they are for me, not for you. I still want to include them on my site, though, so I can view them in a nice format. Maybe I'll play around with hidden links and encryption schemes.

Anyway, the number of 'unused notes' helps ensure that I always have something to write to you about. Without them, I probably would have already stopped writing these journals. I really wonder how long I can keep this streak going.

But at the same time, I should prepare myself for the day I skip you, so I don't end up quitting just because I skipped one day.

11am | waking up, still in bed

If I imagine my thoughts as travel destinations, and thinking as traveling, it's easier not to think about something bad because I'd have to picture myself walking a long way just to arrive at a shitty place. Essentially, I want to add friction to some of my thoughts, like a spam filter ... is there something like this?

12pm | leaving the hostel room

Wow, people really like Hollywood Undead here in the US. Everywhere I Go, there's someone telling me they like my favorite hoodie. This time, it was even a girl. We exchanged a few words as she continued down the hallway. She mentioned that HU used to be very popular, but not as much anymore. It was a pleasantly innocent interaction.

I wanted to write about my approach to parties yesterday. I didn’t, so I’ll start now:

I think I can be the bubblegum guy who offers people all kinds of bubblegum, so we can chew and blow the wildest bubbles together.

Thanks to bubblegum, I don’t feel like smoking cigarettes anymore. Sounds stupid, but it seems to work.

There’s more to say about how I approach parties (or how I don’t), but maybe another time.

I listened to Frame of Mind by Tristam today:

You can lift your head up to the sky Take a deeper breath and give it time You can walk the path along the lines With your shattered frame of mind Or instead, you could always stay We can wait right here and play Until somehow you can find A slightly better frame of mind

It’s a song I listened to on repeat when I felt really lost and knew I needed to save myself in 2021.

I was also torn, because I really wanted to take shrooms or acid at the time, to escape my frame of mind, but I knew that wasn't a good reason. I also had to think a lot about this quote from Alan Watts:

When you get the message, hang up the phone.

[For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope; he goes away and works on what he has seen.]

and about the scene in which Elliot cries because he can't hold in his loneliness.

I decided today that I won’t be able to ship the wallet changes incrementally, so I will have to ship all the changes at once.

I decided to merge this into a new branch wallet-v2 because I don't see a way to get this PR and #2146 merged into master without breaking master or too much code for backwards-compatibility that is basically dead on arrival.

Therefore, wallet-v2 will contain all changes to resolve #1495.

Ideally, the PR to merge wallet-v2 into master will simplify a lot. I expect it to remove more code than it adds, so the review of the remaining code should be easy enough.

— me, Github comment

That sucks, because I’m not used to changing so much code at once, but there’s also something relieving about it: everything is fair game now.

I prepared myself for this in commit 3ba6ca24. I annotated the existing code with a lot of TODOs and my thoughts on what I think I’m going to change. I also removed a lot of code where I already knew that updating it would take more time than just starting from scratch.