thinking of getting back on irc
also, what ive been up to
it's february...
a fair warning: this post is very rambly. i'm sleepy, and i'm eepy, and im tired. sorry about that. it's fine to skim, though.
something i've been thinking of a while - one of those things that i've been thinking for a while in abstract - is getting back on irc.
see, the thing is, i've been on irc for a good chunk of my life. i was on irc in my teens, i was on irc through the 2010s, i was on irc... well, until so many communications moved off irc that i just kinda fell off, i guess? and now i no longer have a convenient irc setup to go back to.
for the longest time i used to use irssi. it wasn't my first irc client but i think i've probably been using it since i was like... 14 years old, maybe, and it's the first thing i'd reach for if someone asked me to connect to irc. i'm familiar with irssi, i'm comfortable with irssi, i've got a computer to run irssi in screen on and i can even use something like mosh to connect to it if i'm having mobile network issues. everything about that bit is good.
where the problem comes in is that i spend so much of my time using my phone, now, and it's an android phone. for the longest time - i wanna say at least like seven years - i was using this funny little niche mobile phone operating system called sailfish, which was an offshoot of the open source continuations to maemo and meego, which themselves were nokia's attempts at making a smartphone operating system (some in the audience may be cheering for the n900 or n9 at this juncture). it's developed by jolla, and is probably my favourite mobile operating system. the user interfaces are consistent across apps, it's pretty much just plain linux, the user interfaces are qt and iirc qt quick is supported... it's just... it's just very good for me.
but there's no got dang apps on sailfish, and a lot of things in life insist that i use their mobile apps. at some point i just got tired of having to wrestle with aliendalvik and just... decide to move back to android a few years ago. and android's, like, fine and all. it got gesture navigation, like what sailfish always had, but genuinely a lot of the android ui updates seem like they're aimed at just changing the ui for no other reason than that they wanted to be able to sell their new update? stuff like that
but aside from my petty grievances about android, to circle back to irc, i now have the following problem: if i'm gonna be using irc, what should i use for irc? see, as mentioned, i've been an irssi girlie since before i... uh... since a long time ago. on sailfish dev mode gives you a terminal, and in that terminal i can just run ssh or mosh as much as i please, right? and it gives me a keyboard with all the right keys i need to drive irssi since it's actually, you know, kinda made for command line interactions. but on android all the terminal/ssh apps i've used kinda suck. i was briefly on android before sailfish and i used to use juicessh, but then as well as now i think i'd rate it as "passable" when it comes to something like using irssi. just not a great experience. task switching also matters, because that's quite different on android. so all in all, i don't think i wanna use irssi on my phone.
and now, finally, after all that rambling, we get to the core of my problem: the way i use irc is that i have an irc client running on a server somewhere, and then i connect to that server and use my irc client. this lets me use the same irc client from all locations, without the downsides of bouncers (especially on clients that don't understand bouncers) and with consistent user experience. but if i don't do that... then what am i gonna do, exactly? are there good android irc clients? should i set up a bouncer, should i (god forbid) make my own server-client structured irc client?
if you have answers for any of these questions (checks) uhh... i don't think i have any contact methods on here, yet. but if you know me and have good ideas, shoot me a message on some type of instant messaging platform. that kinda thing
anyway, that's my thoughts about running irc. having to move away from irssi after a decade plus of only using irssi is hard, as it turns out.
been a month and a bit since i updated on what i've been up to. well, what i've been up to is that i've been wrapping up some of the leftovers of last years bullshit nightmare tasks, and i've been working on some stuff that makes me shout "fuck" in an empty office at night, and i've been... keeping up with my core routines, i guess. still loving birds, still thinking about stickers. got some more stickers for my laptop, actually.
also, i've been feeling like crying a lot. dunno what that's about. i should probably figure that out.
a bit ago i read the manga "shimeji simulation" - which doesn't have an official localisation yet, but you can find it if you want to - and liked it quite a bit! not gonna write a review or anything, but a few things: it's by the author of girls' last tour (which i haven't read, admittedly) and it's ostensibly a slice-of-life, though things start off strange and get progressively stranger. if i had to say one thing about my impression of it other than that, it's that there's some things you could treat as Deep Lore Revelations but that to me work as just, background fluff for a fantastical setting. it's hard to mention without spoiling the final third or so of the series. i can recommend it, i think. it's got a big hole, it's got a salamander, it's got staring at the void, what more you need
i've been thinking of the idea of a "daybook" or "lab journal" for a bit, now, and finally figured out what i want to do with it. now, i want to note that i use these terms very loosely - it's just that i wanted to keep notes about various projects i'm doing, and only now figured out a convenient and good format for those.
the format is very easy to describe: i just write in a heading that includes the day, maybe day of week and time, and then under that i write Whatever I Please. as often happens, trying to invent a system and then following it has been stifling, but now that i know i can just write whatever i'm thinking about the projects i'm working on, i get a lot of notes done!
the downside is that the notes aren't systematic. however, i just find it hard to engage with systematic notes, anyway, and if i ever theoretically want to make some kind of more systematic notekeeping setup, the notebooks can be used as raw material. overall i'm pretty pleased with what i have right now.
as for the blog housekeepy notices: nothing here! did update the now page while i was here, but the todos are as they were a month ago. no email... maybe i should just make a protonmail or something. i'll get to it, some day, probably.
okay yeah i think i'm gonna go eep. bye!