I keep writing and re-writing lines in this post. I don’t actually know what I want to say. I’m just not happy right now. It’s not that what I do for work has fundamentally changed, or really changed at all, but that for the last few months I’ve been tasked with projects that are out of state. It’s unusual to spend months at a time out of state in my role. At least, it’s been unusual with my company, anyways. I know there are application engineers with other companies that are never home, and that’s never really been my experience with my particular job or the things I’m typically assigned. I had one project right at the beginning of my employment with my company that had me out of town every week for nearly six months. It happened once in the six years that I had worked this job. But it seems like now we’re going to try and outdo that previous record.

Slowly but surely I think I’m catching on to this “git” stuff. I’m just glad that I’m not the only one that’s had issues figuring out the details of it. It’s actually really well written and quite simple for the most part, but the problems it solves just happen to be very complex in nature. I think that’s really where it becomes pretty difficult to follow. You have to follow that the developers wrote git with merge conflicts in mind, I guess. Other than that, the file tracking stuff is insanely helpful. The file tracking from multiple disparate remote locations is also incredibly awesome. Being able to recover from me mindlessly editing crap on one device and then totally forgetting and modifying further on another before I make a commit; that’s what really got me to start thinking about it. I’m also still getting used to the whole file tracking thing. You can arbitrarily remove tracking status or add tracking status to files, but that doesn’t necessarily imply the file will “disappear” everywhere you change the status (or delete the file).

If you eerily stalk my blog in ways that definitely make me uncomfortable, you might’ve noticed a minor change in my totients post. In the last section of code starting on line 25, you might notice that line 27 is now highlighted yellow. That accentuation was always intended to be there. The problem was that I had done it incorrectly, because I didn’t understand the fucking directions.

I was using:

```lang {linenostart=25,hl_lines=27}
Blah blah blah
Blah Blah blah
```

What I didn’t realize was that hl_lines is independent of linenostart. What does that mean? That means if I want line 27 highlighted in the code, I don’t set hl_lines=27. I set, in this particular example, hl_lines=3.

I keep thinking about the current state of organized Christianity, and the more I think about it, the more disappointed I become. First and foremost; when exactly did Christianity become a grifting scheme? Originally, tithing was a sort of a tax you paid to the church to receive their services, as the earliest churches were not only places of worship but served as primitive “social workers” as well, houses of charity, and they were largely considered some of the first courts. It wouldn’t have been strange a thousand or so years ago for a priest to help two feuding individuals settle their differences as an objective third party. The church had a place in society, so not tithing was a considerable mistake in those days. It would’ve made you a social pariah and excluded you from services that were life saving at the time.

I keep seeing news dart across my phone of the GOP throwing a fit about the FBI raiding Trump’s syndicate headquarters. Listen, I’ll be honest with you- Even the best politicians are fucking lying criminals. A huge part of the problem is the culture of depravity orbiting the legal system, with far too many bar exam graduates contributing to how absolutely fucked up the government is. Yes, it starts with the sleazy piece of shit lawyers and works it’s way all the way up to congress and the white house. Especially the fucking supreme court. Total fucking clowns. Idiots who thump bibles and give zero shits about society at large. Fuck the supreme court. Fuck the GOP, too. They’re leeches, really. They draw district lines so that they can’t be ousted, then they take kickbacks to remove social safety nets and destroy the environment, and then they fucking retire to a board room where they rake in millions and put their kids through law school to perpetuate their trash nonsense. It’s a cult, and it’s time to deprogram the cult.

I really couldn’t think of a better title, I just wish it didn’t apply to 90% of my content. It’s fine, I guess. It makes me feel better to have a voice, even if that voice isn’t saying much of anything. Making thoughts, feelings, and ideas, manifest into typed word; this is the best therapy for me. It really is. It has kept me going for so many years when I really wasn’t sure how I’d do it. Even this blog has been around since 2012 solidly, but before that existed as a wordpress thing floating around the interwebs.

Time off. We dedicate 33% of our lives to sleep immediately upon existing. It’s unalterable. You can’t “opt out” of sleep. You don’t get a free pass. You can limit the amount of time you sleep, but at the end of the day you’re going to be wholly limited by your inherent biology. It’s inescapable.

We live in a society. Yes, it’s an awful meme, but it’s also a fact. We do in fact exist in a society, both global and tiered right down to nuclear families. We are social creatures, and as such we’ve absolutely fucked ourselves out of a perfectly good bartering system with what experts call “promissory notes”. You can now bluster and pretend to have assets when in fact you truly only have some imaginary numbers kept at a bank or, at best, a pile of actually worthless cotton that reads “Federal Reserve Note” on the front. Somehow we’ve allowed the assholes who ran fiefdoms to continue their terrible line of ideas all the way down to present day, where we’re now forced to dedicate another 33% of our lives to making money for someone else. As an aside, we’re allowed to subsist on the crumbs of our efforts, thanks in no large part to those who own the means of production.

I feel aimless and wandering. This month marks six years and the longest I’ve been at one company in my entire life. Not so much a brag, but more of a necessary evil for someone bent on ladder-climbing. For a good few years I was really shooting for a goal. It was awesome, and I even wound up succeeding. I met the goal I had set for myself. Really, there were two of them, and I knocked them both out of the park. The first one, I wanted to work at one specific company that made hardware that I loved to tinker with. The second, I wanted the title of “Engineer”. So I hit those both out of the park in one swing, and I work at the company I wanted to work at as an engineer. Awesome stuff. But what do you aspire to once you’ve met a goal like that? Is it defeatist to set another goal? Is it defeatist not to? I really must be the only motherfucker around confounded by success. I really don’t know the answer to that, and I’m honestly really fucked up about it. I feel aimless. I feel like I don’t know what to do anymore. If I just “make up” another goal it’s not going to be meaningful and I might just end up making myself feel bad setting arbitrary goals and not being able to meet them. I’m just left confused, I guess, by the situation and what to do next.