Waking up daily with headaches! Bad!
Got a few games for <$20 total in the steam sale. Avoiding AAA games
Also I keep bouncing off of Outer Wilds unfortunately :( sorry flounder friends. It makes the steam deck fan and battery life go insane and also I play so infrequently that I forget everything about it each time.
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idk when the heck I will have time to return to it but i miss the DSA ppl
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Happy to say I have met the possible next mayor of New York. Very nice guy.
Also voted for him ofc. Very happy our neighborhood was like 60-40 for him over Cuomo.
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sciatic pain???? wtf!
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Uwade album great, The Weather Station album great. working my way thru
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Thinking about the mighty quinn
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Logged onto substack and the algorithm served up a tweet-style substack post authored by Alex of flounder fame
The long arc of algorithmic microblogging bends towards flounder
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Baby’s social security card came in before his birth certificate. It’s another win for a big strong nanny state federal government, one big loss for small local “efficient” government.
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Crazy update: I took a nap and feel a lot better
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I think I might need to go back on anxiety/depression meds again lmao, literally ALL I feel is worry and exhaustion, and about all the things that need doing and havent been done, and all the things I am doing and how tired I am and how much more stuff I will need to do starting in a week when I am back at work and then after when I am back in school, and I am just so frozen and I cant keep only talking to my wife about it, I dont know any new dads, all the dads I do know basically have blocked out all memory of this time and can only say “ it sucks but it will get better” and the only place I see people talking about struggling was here (thank you jmax im rereading your message daily) and on reddit which is such a dark dark place because of the overwhelming number of strangers validating what i feel (in a bad way???)
I dont know i just dont know. Five minutes at a time, five minutes at a time.
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Those of you I ended up following on ig: A+ profiles love it all. Now to see if I can figure out a way to use it without going crazy.
Reddit is fast approaching the over saturation point for me, especially reading through all the new parent stuff. At some point it does just feel like a place for people to be miserable together.
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Still gotta finish Outer Wilds omg
Last night I got maybe 2 hours of sleep and was so delirious that I thought I was shaking the baby to death while just rocking him to sleep, and also kept asking L to show me how to hold the baby. This is true torture.
Also I’m back on Instagram (though it turns out my old reading account was banned while it was deactivated???? Maybe it got hacked? I don’t see how…?!)
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Dog/baby posting:
Rosie (one of our dogs) is obsessed with the baby, she’s always looking after him. Earlier this evening I was folding laundry with the baby sleeping in the bassinet. He started spitting up in his sleep and Rosie jumped up onto her hind legs to smell him, started whining and ran off to find and bring my wife over to check on him. Her maternal instincts are on overdrive.
Huey (other dog) is mostly tolerant of a baby being around, and honestly that’s about all I can ask of him. He still checks on the baby, despite being the cause of bad sleep for the last two weeks. He’s sweet in his own curmudgeonly way.
Some people in our families have not been very kind to the dogs, and have hinted that we are bad parents for raising the baby with the dogs around. I legitimately think so much less of them for saying shit like that, our dogs are angels. And I think they’re gonna be good for this kid.
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I have finally maybe unlocked the power of naps
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Keep buying gaming handhelds
I might sell one of mine actually. Let me know if any of you would like this one:
I have it in the nice teal/aqua color
I have a bunch of games, custom firmware (minUI) and a grip/case protector type thing for it. You can have the whole thing for like $30 if you want? Idk whatever seems fair.
Flounder — they’re calling it the people’s eBay
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This is so hard, and I mouthed off at my in laws in my sleepless stressed stupor so might be burning those bridges right when I need them lol
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I will try to respond to all of you individually but thank you all so much for the well wishes. I’m in awe and also terrified. He just had his first very loud inconsolable crying session that startled me out of a nap (he wanted milk). I will try not to baby post to much!
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It took 4 trips to the hospital at various hours, one completely sleepless night, 4 days of labor for my poor wife, and a C-Section, but m’boy is here!
Born one day after Mother’s Day/my birthday and bigger than we expected. He’s so lovely.
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Oh my god they’re sending us back home lmao
I’m gonna just stop posting updates until everything is actually happening lol sorry everyone that reads this
Alright it’s go time. Waiting for the doctor to come in and check everything out. On the way to the hospital there was a pretty bad car crash and it took us like half an hour when it should have taken ten mins.
Baby watch continues……………..
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Rude of my child not to be born on Pynchon’s birthday
American pope means you have to go to mass now
“On call” at work
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I have had like the most PMC succession of jobs and bosses compared to a lot of you. Opposite of relatable goddamn
Also it made me realize how few women I interact with professionally. I’m really jaded on corporate identity politics (as someone who was involved in setting up resource groups and then paraded around corporately a little bit for being brown and bi) but Jesus it’s bad.
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Hit back before hitting save on this, such a loss
Anyway we are still on baby watch 2025. Flounder may hear of the birth before some of my irl friends and family will!
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Woke up with such deep anxiety I haven’t felt in months today. Part of it was due to Huey acting strange (early onset doggie dementia…?) and part of it is the baby and related stress.
All of the mothers in both me and L’s families had wild dreams about her birth experience last night. My grandmother, my mother, my aunt, her mom and aunt. My mom’s was that we were all in India and my mom was running through town to the hospital. L also had a dream that she was back home with the baby and stressed. All the others’ were variations on “baby is home”.
I don’t have many dreams, and not ones I remember usually. Haven’t dreamt of our child yet but I do daydream about him.
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Been like a week since I meditated
Finding it interesting that people my age who moved away from religion entirely are sort of going back to it. Including me to a very small extent.
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My brother came over and did so many chores today that for the first time in a week I don’t feel completely overwhelmed. Feel truly blessed.
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Thinking about the movie Frank
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gotta pack my hospital dad bag oboy oboy oboy oboy oboy
im nit freaking out youre freaking out
*reddit voice*
TIL Mars does not have a magnetosphere…
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I might try to set up my old thinkpad as a jellyfin server to rewatch Simpsons and KOTH.
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What’s up everyone.
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Parents are in town. My mother is garrulous (wow SAT vocab over here).
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Does anyone use a NAS, I want to cut down on icloud payments.
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tummy hurts :( note to self: no fast food after spicy Indian food.
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I should mention though that I am better able to kind of observe said background anxiety better. And not ruminate too too much.
Background hum of anxiety is about as constant as it ever has been.
If anyone reading this is doing kitchen renovation for themselves or others, make sure the floor tiles are put in properly, it is insane how much bad initial tile work bites you in the ass repeatedly for years on end.
My new productivity maximizing self help book “The Diogenes Method” has left me friendless and in a barrel
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Inventing a new guy to be mad at: guy that read 100 Years of Solitude and talks about it incessantly but always rhyming Buendia with Zendaya
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Just saw two ravens kicking a hawk out of a tree and chasing it off. Crazy!!! Only in New York baby let’s go Mets
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I think I am going to have to cut out YouTube on a non-desktop device because my adblocker on my iPad seems to have stopped working. Good while it lasted
Back on my bullshit (needing to cut back internet use because I’m checking news too much and driving myself insane)
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Wanna become a true Vollmann guy
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Bookstagram/booktube guy I enjoyed interacting with heavily recommended Cloudsplitter…might be one for the to-read list this year.
Straight from Melville’s niche in my mind-palace….it’s
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Melville is so funny. Kinda wild to read two “dudes rock” novels back to back
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Cancelling Apple Music service, I haven’t been listening to much music that’s not on the classical radio stationsrecently…just not particularly interested I guess. Plus I’m sure prices will rise yet again soon enough. For the same reason, I’m looking into NAS again, try to reduce how much we pay for iCloud as a family. Most of it is photo storage. And it will probably get crazier with the baby coming.
Started Moby-Dick again! Trying to train my “focused reading” with this book. Goal is to get through as much as possible before baby comes.
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thinking about making….a zine
Am I allowed to make a zine that functions as a holiday letter
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Reading my unborn child Mason & Dixon before bed…I must raise a Pynchon-head
Sometimes I will read a passage in this book and immediately be moved to tears. Like the bit about Mason and his father. I am preparing for the last lines which make me weep every time I read them lmao
Crazy how I start getting restless exactly 25 minutes into a 30 minute meditation session. The mind…it keeps its own time….
Also never thought I would be a video game soundtrack guy but between Stardew and now the Outer Wilds OST, I have become a video game soundtrack guy
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Friend is telling me to play Chrono Trigger which I have not tried before. Might finally set up emulation on steam deck.
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Outer wilds posting: wtf why is this ship so hard to control (I am really bad at most video games), keep crashing into things
30 minute meditation gang
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Update: picked up Outer Wilds. I wasn't getting too into Dave the Diver yet so I'm gonna give this a whirl
Think flounder is sending me “outer wilds vibes” in that I am now hearing about outer wilds for the first time and I uhhh I might pick it up
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“Finished” Stardew Valley yesterday. In that I got perfection. Literally the last thing I needed to do was collect a wild plum. I haven’t actually seen a game through to its “end” in a very long time (last one was RDR2?) so it’s nice to button that up and set it aside. I had become downright obsessive about it, spreadsheets, notebook, reading the wiki everyday, the works. And at the end I basically did a long grind which took a bit of joy out of it. Might take some time to redecorate everything in game but for now I will rest.
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Finished my ~6 month round of therapy. Feeling good. I told my therapist how good he was and I think he teared up lol
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Our dog Rosie was refusing to eat much of anything all week but this morning after the house emptied out again and our schedules became back to mostly normal, she has finally relaxed enough to steal food from Huey’s bowl (which is how she eats - they have an understanding). She’s been so on edge because we (especially L) has been on edge the past week because of all the baby shower busy-ness and general work/life/school stress. Plus she’s definitely very clingy with L especially at this point in the pregnancy.
My sleep is back to normal for a bit.
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L’s baby shower was today, it was really nice!
I am very tired now.
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Meditation is interesting in that it is one of the first skills I have tried to learn where it legitimately feels like one step forward, two steps back sometimes. I don’t know that I have seesawed like this in anything else I’ve taken on. Here I was thinking I knew everything at 32.
Today, I got thrown off because I needed to pee. Yesterday I had the best session ever. I’ve been writing down my thoughts after each session and it’s been illuminating reading things back, but mostly it’s a lot of frustration that something doesn’t come easily to me, and then beating myself up over my narcissism. 💕
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Someone on here posted their thoughts on tariffs and I wanted to read it again but can’t find it. Please send it to me if you wrote it? Or anyone just say hi I don’t bite
brolinxavier[at]posteo[dot]net
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deerhoof is so cool
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I appreciate that I can use it to learn languages (sorta learn) but I really dislike Duolingo. They keep changing the app icon, the ads are annoying and the gamification seems so unnecessary
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They’re gutting the DEI stuff at the hospital system L works in; she knows and works with the people on the team, and her own work is somewhat adjacent but not really. Apparently the DEI team is getting hate mail from employees using their work email, anti-woke people are extremely stupid and extremely bold in their stupidity. Really Bush era-level stupidity. They're really gonna freedom-fries civil rights.
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L’s shoe got a piece bitten out of it by an escalator at JFK. Crazy to think how much worse it could have been. Now I gotta see if LL Bean can repair it
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They should make a feature on large group messaging platforms where you can mute certain people in a groupchat but see other people’s messages. Really find two guys very annoying on a school groupchat but I want to see what others are saying
In Savannah GA for the week and everyone else here is also from the tri-state area. Someone next to us overheard that we were from Queens and turned out they’re from Flushing lmao.
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Trying to track down who administers an old HSA so I can access the money that’s still in it; i am currently waiting to speak to someone at the SEVENTH company in the chain of companies this thing has bounced around to. With every call, the call quality seems to get worse. It’s the disintegration loops for healthcare bureaucracy.
The quality gets worse, the hold music has gotten progressively more chipper. Now we are in full on stomp-clap-whistle territory. I am in hell.
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I LIVED IT: I made it to the end of a Sam Kriss essay. What a windbag.
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zine-heads of flounder, do you use this?
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“Keep cool but care” becoming THE maxim for ya boi
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Acquired new cheapo fountain pen. It’s smooooth
A friend of mine sent me a template he uses for making mini zines…thinking of sending out zines this year for our “holiday card”.
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Flounder, lmk if you’ve modded an old iPod! Kinda overwhelmed with choice
Are you there Jah it’s me Ras Trent
Oh wow I can’t read essays that aren’t capitalized properly anymore. Like physically can’t, everything runs into each other. This eliminates many substacks from my reading list, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately).
A few sentences or spaced out longish tweet-sized paragraphs are okay, but I have a really hard time with long paragraphs of uncapitalized sentences. Interesting.
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I checked the news and there is a weight on my chest™️
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My therapist has encouraged me to get more disciplined in my creative writing practice. So far it’s working. I have written something every day this week. It’s all bad but it’s still writing.
Thinking about starting a youtube channel about all the weird shit I want to talk about.
Also I’m feeling an itch for a new fountain pen. I finally tossed my cheap shitty MUJI pen that looked amazing but wrote like absolute garbage. Might get another twsbi.
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I got my chalazion removed. Rather unpleasant experience tbh. My doctor was super nice though.
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The doctor told me I have “the most deviated septum” he’s ever seen.
I’ve been really enjoying the transformation that my passport size travelers notebook has taken on. I have been keeping in my hands, pocket, or bag pretty much constantly. It’s beautiful. I think I have handled it more in six months than I did my regular TN in six years, and it shows. This has made me realize I want to use my regular TN more. Perhaps a reading/commonplace notebook type deal? Stuff that I can’t cram into my passport TN? Any Travelers Notebook-heads on flounder?
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As a moth to a flame, I have found myself drawn again to orgmode.
Meditating has been good to me.
I gave myself forearm pain by grinding the pepper mill too enthusiastically.
Any flounder folks play stardew valley? I am very late to this and I am obsessed
I’m writing up a big long blog post about all of the gadgets and stuff I use on a regular basis.
The default signed out YouTube home page is a nightmare omg
I tried out a no-tech day yesterday. Spent part of it bored out of my mind. But it was good! And I might do it again this coming Sunday.
If any of you are in the LA area I hope you’re unaffected by the fires. A bunch of my coworkers have had to evacuate and the fires are getting really close to their homes. Crazy stuff.
Feel like half of what I post here are health complaints lol
I think we’re gonna name our baby Adrian
Steroid ointment for my eye, I hate having a sty/chalazion
Man this cough/cold thing is just not letting go; of course the cold wind this morning made it flare up but my god it's soooo annoying.
Think I’ll just do one big long string of thoughts for the year. No dates unless I feel like it!!
Finished Sea of Tranquility, ehhhhhhh
The Steam Deck is amazing. I don’t remember the last gaming thing I enjoyed this much. Maybe the GameCube when I was a kid?
Ok so L and I are both sick and we spent a few hours clearing out our bookshelves and cataloguing everything.
Some portion of that will be given away soon enough.
Also planning to do the same for all my records. Though that will be a much much shorter list.
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In for 2025:
- going on the computer as a place
- meditating
- scribbling
Out for 2025
- rage
- thinking about politics (mental health reasons)
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