Males are violent and rapey.

It's nine a.m., and I finished a five-hour walk about half an hour ago. I never walk for five hours straight; usually I do three hours in the morning and more later in the day. I have in my legs that wonderful ache that comes after a workout that is good but not overwhelming. I'm used to feeling it only in my upper body, after a weightlifting session. "Ache" is not the right word because it doesn't hurt. It feels good.

I've got another homemade pizza in the toaster oven, I finished my overdue Mandarin flashcards yesterday, and I'm gonna relax and watch G.J. Lee Ukelele Channel. I feel fortunate because I've found a vlogger who

1. is male
2. speaks Mandarin
3. adds subtitles
4. is on Odysee
5. doesn't have one of those grating, circus-like adhd channels full of music, sudden video cuts, and random memes.

That pizza was very satisfying. At least I live some place where the government doesn't allow people to starve.

It's ba-aack. I switched from instant coffee to black tea a couple of days ago. I was afraid the tea wouldn't work, didn't have as much caffeine as the coffee, because green tea is rather weak. But one black tea bag seems to contain more caffeine than one of the cups of coffee I was making. Not much more, just enough to make me feel awake enough to enjoy my morning walk.

Once again an Internet search led me to Reddit, and, to my surprise and dismay, I found that there's an Ozempic sub-reddit. On one hand, I shouldn't be surprised because there is a sub-reddit for damn near everything (except anything that's womyn-only); on the other hand, I am surprised that Ozempic has because mainstream enough for this to even exist. When I first heard about people using Ozempic specifically for weightloss, I had the impression that it was a niche thing that a few celebrities managed to do via, presumably, private doctors because, Ozempic was originally for diabetes or something. But that doesn't look like a diabetes sub-reddit. It looks like a weightloss sub-reddit.

Drugs are almost never the answer to obesity. I don't know much about Ozempic but I do know that injecting foreign substances into the body is something that should be avoided. Even tested and approved drugs can have unforeseen side effects. Eating fewer calories/moving more is all that's required. The morbidly obese don't even have to go hungry; mere dietary changes would suffice because there's no goddamned way they are getting up to 300+ pounds on a wholesome diet. It's sick that modern medicine has come to this. It's sick that it's come to weightloss surgery. It's as if doctors have given up on patients having any kind of personal responsibility. Then again, obesity and diabetes supposedly go hand-in-hand so often that maybe these people were prescribed Ozempic for their diabetes and just so happen to be discussing the weightloss on the first couple of pages.

So I'm trying to use the vlog I mentioned as study material. The guy is way easier to listen to than my podcasts, which are all hosted by womyn. Voice pitch in the stratosphere plus sloppy pronunciation is what I get from the podcasts. Male vloggers are almost always easier and more pleasant to listen to because they don't alter their pitch or intonation as much, also they don't usually have histrionics in their videos. However, they are the main ones with choppy, circusy videos full of back-to-back memes.

The problem is that the subtitles are hardcoded. I need a way to extract them. I had to find some software that's available for linux, but it's not in my repo, so I have to install it from pypi, along with all the dependencies, but one of the dependencies requires another dependency, and to install the second dependency I had to fix a previous installation that was broken, and now I'm waiting for a twenty-minute update to finish before I can install. In between most of those steps was an internet search for figuring out the next step. It's simply amazing how long some computer things take. But I'm hellbent on processing this vlog because I need to start branching out to material for native speakers and because such material is more interesting than the textbooks.

I got a written response to my complaint to the county public transportation agency. I procrastinated, didn't open the letter for days because I didn't want to be reminded of the event that motivated the complaint nor disappointed in the response. Finally I read it yesterday on my way into town; I'd decided that would be a good time because, if something in the letter angered me, the grocery shopping could serve as a distraction. The department had reviewed the videorecording on the bus and agreed that the driver had acted unprofessionally. He supposedly got a talking to, and that's enough for me. The department agreed that they could do more to deter passengers from being noisy on the bus, but I'm not confident that much will be done. The letter also said that, although drivers should enforce the rules on the bus, they are not to do so in a way that will compromise safety. Practically, I guess that means that, while the drivers are driving, they won't try to stop any noise unless it's super loud. I don't think they can even usually hear any music or shows playing on the bus. So I'm mostly on my own.

I've confronted people on the bus about playing smartphones out loud, but I typically don't have the mental energy to deal with this. If I had the money, I'd buy a bike and a little bike trailer and brave the roar of the highway on the trail into town. But I cannot earn the money I need to accommodate the disability because the disability prevents me from working. The social worker who, I assume, is supposed to help me with the VA work program has left one message, and I've not been able to get in contact with her. No one ever answers her phone and my two messages haven't been returned. I hope she hasn't called while my phone wasn't working. The goddamned phone cord keeps getting disconnected from my voip adaptor. I hate having to rely on voip.

These blog posts get ridiculously long. I need to find a way transition to doing better things with my time than typing out some of the unnecessary details.

Looking back through the journal, I find myself saying on some days that I can eat less and saying on other days that I have to keep eating more than I want to. I wondered about the discrepancy, and now I think I've got it figured out: the days on which I exercise the most are also the days on which I can eat the least without feeling ill. So I'm going to try to exercise more.

I was surprised and dismayed today to come across news about a mass shooting in Prague.

https://www.npr.org/2023/12/21/1220939974/prague-school-shooting-deaths

My beloved Czech Republic, a proper first-world country, to which I'd seriously consider moving if I could stand the cold, being shot up like it was a common USian city. How disappointing.

Today I set up my work VM on what used to be my work computer. As my freelancing career wound down (half because of illness/stress, half because of homelessness) four or five years ago, my Windows workstation became a gaming machine. Not that I'm actually a gamer—I just played a lot of Steam puzzle games.

Last year, I deleted Windows and tried to set up a sort of hacking lab with a security-based OS. But that turned out to be unusable for typing in multiple languages, so I deleted that and created a homespun security-based OS based on a bunch of libvirt VMs running on an Arch-based host. I've had that for a year now, and today I installed a work VM. I settled on Trisquel because I wanted a libre distro that I didn't have to set up from scratch (like I normally do).

I was so pleased with my PureOS gaming VM that I would have installed PureOS for work, too, but I didn't want to go through the custom keyboard hassle again. I'm still not sure whether it's even possible to use a custom keyboard in Gnome. Gnome is kinda bloated anyhow, so I deleted it and went with LXDE.

Now I'm going to start working on my writing portfolio. On my way home this evening, it occurred to me that I could self-host blogs to fill out my portfolio. An Internet presence would help me get a job, I think, but I don't want my name on the Internet. If I self-host, don't advertise, and instead just share my blog links with potential employers, I can benefit from an online portfolio without compromising my anonymity so much. I'm not sure what I'll do yet.

My monthly energy bill arrived day before yesterday. It's nearly 50% of my monthly income. January isn't going to be fun. I have no choice but to pay it because I'm on a payment plan and will be kicked off if I miss two more payments (I've already missed one). If I'm kicked off the plan, however much of the $500+ I owed last year and haven't yet paid off will all become due immediately, and, since I won't be able to pay that, my electricity will be shut off. Then I might lose my apartment because the housing authority thinks it's better to take their clients' housing away than to pay for us to have housing with no electricity or gas. At least, that was the policy of a previous housing authority that was serving me. I'm not sure about this one.

I expect February's bill to be lower; I haven't needed the heat as much. Then again, I'm not sure how much electricity my heated blanket draws. I'm assuming that running the heater costs more.

I've tried for years to learn Arabic, but I never get anywhere for lack of good learning materials. My options for learning materials are limited because I'm hellbent on learning the language without English translation, and translation is how languages are almost always taught, it seems. Arabic grammar is apparently too complicated for Rosetta Stone's teaching format. It's certainly too complex for the shitty gamification language apps that have multiplied like roaches throughout the Internet.

Yum, I'm having a delicious apple cinnamon protein cookie for the second half of my dinner. I'm in my cozy apartment, which I don't have to share with anyone. I have a safe and more or less comfortable place to sleep tonight. It's times like these that I really appreciate being homeless, out in the cold, and in the rain especially.

Anyways...Today I tried out an app that specializes in Arabic (which is unusual; all the ones I've seen so far offer at least six or so languages). I was going to give up on it once I saw that it's only available as a mobile phone app (because I don't have a network-connected mobile phone), however, I do have virtualization software, and I even had a virtualized Android OS set up on it already, so I'm able to use the app, which is called Arabigo.

Turns it that it also is a gamification app! Gamification language apps purport to make learning fun by presenting information in a way that games are presented; in my experience, what they really do is cater to ditherers and the unmotivated, dragging the learning process out for much longer than it needs to be. Duolingo is probably the most popular one, and it's one I've tried the most times and subsequently gave up on. The stupid, cutesy presentation is annoying and the information is presented too slowly. Maybe the rate of presentation is ok for someone who has no language learning experience or a shitty memory, but for me, it drags ass. Also annoying is that the learning continually gets interrupted by notifications about user achievements, which are achieved with so little effort that they are the equivalent of participation trophies.

These are the two problems I'm having with Arabigo, but it's still early in the lessons; maybe the pace will pick up. Also, I know a few basic Arabic words, and that makes learning seem easier than it is. I have to remind myself sometimes that these apps aren't designed with an experienced learner like myself in mind.

The most attractive characteristic of this app is that the language is taught without translation. It's all pictures and words in Arabic. I find that this makes learning go more smoothly for me, as I don't have to focus on switching between two languages and I don't have to worry about imprecise translations (about which I tend to worry a lot).

My feet have been hurting. I hope three hours of walking per day + being on my feet for hours (I use my standing desk full-time now) doesn't damage them. Seems like it shouldn't be too much. Aren't hunter-gatherers on their feet for hours each day? Without any shoes even. I stand on a blanket that lies on a carpeted floor and walk on a soft track. Maybe I just need time to get used to this.

I've gone through three email applications in the past couple of days. I had to give up on the first two; the first would fail to send and receive mail for no clear reason, and the second provided no clear way for me to enter my email account password. I skipped a third because it doesn't even provide POP3 access. At least two of these three are relatively lightweight, which is what attracted me to them; now I'm with a bulkier email client that has a busier UI but seems to work fine. There aren't many email client options available in my distro repository (I'm a Linux user), presumably because it's such a privacy-and-OSS-focused distro. OS stands for Open Source Software. Privacy and non-proprietary software is definitely what I wanted, but the lack of software options cramp my style sometimes.

I can no longer stand my chilly bedclothes, so I'm on the hunt for a heated blanket or a large heated pad. Cold blankets at the beginning of the night can keep me awake all night because I tend to not fall asleep at all if I don't fall asleep soon after I've gone to bed. Because I'm so sensitive to environmental factors, a comfortable bedroom in general is crucial for me.

I half feel that I should start these blog posts earlier in the evening because I never have time to type everything I want to type and tend to forget things because I'm sleepy later in the evenings, but posting before the day is over, before everything I might want to post about has had a chance to happen, feels wrong as well.