In my mid-twenties my body was in pretty rough shape. I was suffering from chronic pain and had terrible mobility to the pain where my quality of life and mental state were being severely adversely impacted. I was also terrified at the idea of entering a gym. I worked with an excellent chiropractor in Birmingham (UK) who helped to provide significant pain relief and subsequently referred me on to a physical therapist.

The past few weeks I have been putting off updating my personal website, which has sat untouched since October 2019. I’ve done quite a lot of interesting work since 2019, so finally this past weekend, I forced myself to sit down, clone the repository, and update it. My personal website is nothing fancy; just a static website built with Hugo and a community theme, and hosted on S3. This should be simple, right?

While watching the implosion of Twitter in real-time over the past week, I noticed more and more people in my Twitter feed sharing links to their Mastodon accounts. During that time, https://instances.social was posted to Hacker News as a tool to help people find a Mastodon instance to register with. My initial experience with this was quite poor. Mastodon's onboarding story needs so much work. Still can't pick a server. Tried https://t.

User comments and discussions on the internet have a pretty bad rep these days, to the point where many people have just opted out of online commentary completely, going as far as using a combination of DNS filtering and browser extensions to remove them entirely from their browsing experience. I, on the other hand, have spent the last couple of years refining ways to separate signal from noise in the cacophony of online user commentary, as I have come to believe that the most valuable knowledge I acquire on a daily basis comes from commentary and discussion rather than publishing.

If you find, as I do, the act of physically marking books indescribably (in the literal sense) disrespectful (to the physical book), you probably felt great the first time you realised that PDFs could be digitally annotated. Equally so when Amazon’s Kindle brought eBooks into the mainstream. Unfortunately the story of highlights on Kindle has been one of some frustration and disappointment for me, in large part due to the restrictions placed on liberating highlights from the Amazon ecosystem, and the UX of highlighting on an e-ink Kindle, which remains to this today clunky, slow and always just a little too imprecise.

I don’t think I’m alone in having consumed more documentaries on cults between the years of 2020 and 2022 than I had ever before in my entire life. There were many great documentaries, but the one that sticks out in my mind even today is The Vow: A NXIVM Story. Every time I watch a scene in that or any other documentary about cults in which people are reunited for the first time outside the cult, every muscle in my body feels the reunion that is happening on the screen.

I have previously written about how I unwittingly found myself at the center of an accidental community with a shared desire for a stable, reliable tiling windows manager for Windows. Despite the huge growth of komorebi users, I remain for all intents and purposes the sole developer of the codebase. Several of the most important aspects of komorebi today however are in large part thanks to community contributions. In no particular order:

I am the only deaf person in my family. I’m 24 years old and none of them learned ASL or only took one course. They hardly know the alphabet and can say “bathroom”. I do not go to my family gatherings because no one is able to communicate with me. When they do, they talk REALLY loud and only ask me “small talk” questions. They are hell bent on me coming around, because “we’re a family and we love you”.

It was during the shutdowns of 2020 that I became increasingly frustrated with my Intel MacBook pro. It was slow, loud and hot; all the things that many people, myself included, dislike about laptops. I decided to build a PC. After a month or so spent scouring the internet for parts, I had assembled a PC. I ran Pop!_OS for a while, but this being my first desktop machine in over a decade, I spent a fair about of time dual booting into Windows to play all the video games that I missed out on as a macOS user.

Since my last post back in June, I have been steadily eating at a surplus while focusing my training on powerlifting. During this period I have run three different programmes: Metallicadpa’s Push/Pull/Legs Split nSuns 531 Linear Progression GZCL Linear Progression Metallicapda’s PPL While I was cutting I was running a full body calisthenics-focused programme three-to-four days a week, but I had been wanting to try a split programme which would allow me to train with more frequency throughout the week.