T w e n t y S i d e d

The story of Why I Moved continues…

Early August

The music roars from downstairs. I was just sitting at my desk, enjoying a hot cup of PVC herbal tea when someone downstairs decided to pump up the volume. Downstairs, Wilma has brought her sisterI assume. Betty to live with them, who likes to crank up the music until we can feel the furniture vibrate.

On the upside, she does this during reasonable daytime hours. On the other hand, my wife sometimes works nights and needs to sleep during the day. I try not to get upset about this. It's entirely possible that we're worse offenders when it comes to noise. We're on the top floor and we've got three teens. That can't be quiet. Moreover, they’re probably blasting music to cover up the the furious tunneling of the water company. Judging by the sounds I’m hearing, I figure that they have uncovered a balrog, which they are now fighting.

I kept hoping the problems with my asthma would blow over. I really don’t want to move. Apartment hunting is ruinously time consuming, tedious, and stressful. Moving is expensive. I have multiple projects going right now and I can't bear to have everything interrupted with that hassle. So I've been foolishly hoping that the cat wouldn't be a problem. Or that it would be a nuisance instead of a danger. I've been telling myself that my recent allergy problems were just seasonal pollen, and that the apartments should be isolated well enough to keep me safe. I've been ignoring the signs, huffing on the inhaler, and hoping for the best. In the meantime, the dander has been building up.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Something in the Water, Part 3”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The story of Why I Moved continues…

May

The water company is still at it. I’m up on the second floor, so I have a really good view of the spectacle from here. As before, they’ve blocked off one of the major intersections and they’re turning perfectly good asphalt into rubble as fast as they can to get at the rottenOne assumes. water pipes underneath. They’ll tear up the whole street, blocking off traffic and making noise and confusion for days. A one-way-street passes right in front of the elementary school, then in front of our house, and then into the waiting arms of the water company’s obstructionist demolition team. This – coupled with the triangular street pattern in this corner of town – creates a really bad case of “you can’t get there from here”. Especially when the school buses show up. It's madness.

I go downstairs to check the mail. I have to walk down the precarious wooden steps and all the way around the house to do this, which makes up 90% of the exercise I’ll get today. If the postal service ever went on strike I’d probably gain 50 pounds.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Something in the Water, Part 2”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

So we moved. You know this already, because I complained about it a thousand years ago, before my five-day internet blackout. Why did we move after only living in that place for a year and a half? Telling this story requires a bit of bellyaching on my part. Sorry about that. Also there are a lot of barely-justified digressions. I’m less sorry about those.

To sort things out properly, we have to go back to…

March

It's been a brutally cold winter, but the world is starting to thaw. I allow myself to indulge in the daydream that I might actually see the sun again.

It’s been a year since we moved into this apartment after that whole unfortunate business over the last twelve years. Things are quiet. This isn’t the best place I’ve ever lived, but it’s not the worst either and we’re finally living within our means.

This house must have been glorious when it was built, which was probably sometime during the Taft administration. It was no doubt a proud house in its day. It's got fancy roof work and a lot of space. Now it’s a sagging thing of rotting wood and shabby windows. The front porch steps are gone and the paint is peeling off the outside like it’s too ashamed to cling to the structure anymore. It’s been split into an upstairs and a downstairs unit. Even though we only have half the house, we still have three bedrooms, plus a living room and an office. Those house-builders of 1930 sure didn’t mess around when it came to living space.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Something in the Water, Part 1”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I'm back. Well, that was a stupid waste of five days.

Somehow, the designers of the Minecraft mod Technic PackThese days I'm playing a ton of the Technic “MoonQuest” mod collection. made it so that if you launch the game in offline mode, then it has no sound. I have no idea why, but I'll be sure to ask them right after I hunt them down and right before I kill them.

I couldn't play vanilla Minecraft, either. Once I was off the net and I discovered Technic wasn't working, I remembered that my Minecraft launcher was set to run in Oculus Rift mode. I tried to turn that off, which meant changing profilesNot change users, just profiles. It's complicated., which forced me to log in, which I couldn't do. I'd hunt down the person responsible for this stupidity but I'm not sure who to blame in this case. I always saw the Minecraft launcher as a convenience thing, but after fighting with it for an hour or so I'll say it feels very DRM-ish. It doesn't stop any pirates but it did prevent this customer from using the software when he really, really needed it. That sounds like DRM to me.

So my #1 time-killing game was unavailable. Instead, I composed a song. I spent my time waiting for the internet writing a song about waiting for the internet entitled, “Waiting for the Internet”:

You say it's repetitive? Yes, yes it is. I was trying to capture the tedium and frustration in musical form. The upbeat stuff at the end can be interpreted as the return of the internet, or the sweet release of insanity. The line between half-assed and avant-garde sometimes gets pretty blurry, but I know which side this song is on. And it's not the side with the fancy French words.

We will resume our regular posting schedule shortly. Right after I play some Minecraft. And catch up on my webcomics. And some YouTube videos. And blogs. And gaming news. And Steam sales. And email. And comments. And Facebook. And…

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Note that the photos in this post are unrelated. They’re just pictures I took while wandering around the neighborhood. Also because I think the Pepsi-door looks kind of strange and cool.

We are moving. Aside from the normal hassle of cramming things into boxes, hauling them somewhere else, and taking them out of the boxes again, I also have to make the phone calls to the utility providers:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Moving Day II: The Movening”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.