The Art Of Not Asking Why

Three years ago on the weekend, I wrote a couple of conclusions in my journal after spending the night at M. She was a cute hair stylist who lived (and maybe still does) in a small town upstate. We met on a dating site (I forget which) and hit it off after chatting back and forth for a few days and exchanging pictures.

When I look over this entry now, two main things go through my brain. I cringe about the negative feelings I felt at the time and tried to push through, and I also realize how much I already understood about my own preferences.

M. was a good person. She was sweet, especially to me, patient, and very passionate. She just moved to a nice place in a quiet town with her best friend. Importantly, M. was interested in non-monogamy, and it was good to have an independent adult (age is not always the best way to judge adulthood) who understood I had my other partners back home.

So why am I writing about her in the past tense?

Space. I knew space was important to me, but explaining it to others, especially those who got invested, was always a struggle. I like to take walks alone, to be left alone with my thoughts. I enjoy sharing my personal space with friends and partners (often enough, they are both), but when the intimacy is over, I need to recharge. While others could understand what I said when I said that, it doesn’t mean they understood this need emotionally as much as I do. In fact, if to judge from M. and a couple of more I dated before her that year, their emotional need was exactly the opposite: they wanted to be together more.

I’ve been struggling with the stereotype of a man who wants to have sex and then leave. I often felt guilty (with M. included) that I forced myself to stay with the person longer. Give up the walk and lay there to talk to them, do something else together, whatever, just not leave them in the cold.

But the issue was that it wasn’t the sex specifically. My need for space comes up when I’m drained, regardless. I could spend two hours with a person, intimately or not, and then I need to be alone. It’s so obvious and sharp it’s unmistakable and often translates to mental fatigue that can become physical tiredness. I got to a point several times in the past where I just crashed and fell asleep. It can happen after a long conversation, a hangout with a couple of people, a party, or sex. Thinking it’s the “bang and gone” syndrome and feeling guilty about it made me try to apply the wrong solutions, such as holding off on sex and trying to be intimate for longer, which would drain me even more and make things worse for me.

We talked about this, M. and I. I explained before I took my walks and also after, but I had my needs, and she had hers - and hers weren’t fulfilled because she tried to fulfill mine, and I knew she was trying, and that in turn made me feel even worse because I wanted her to feel good and enjoy herself. In the end, it was too much compromise and too little fun.

I’d like to say I’m doing a better job today. The people in my life, my partners, are usually “alone” folks themselves and understand this need. I’ve been with them long enough that they see (if they ever needed the proof to begin with) that I come back after my walks, and if I’m done for this time, I come back the next time. Feelings get strong, and the pull to each other sometimes offsets this “alone time” clock, but the time always comes even when delayed. When it does, I try take the break right away (this is not always that simple, especially if you’re in the middle of being intimate to one capacity or another, as you can imagine).

I feel like I want to write this out after reflecting on my journal from then as a way to remember this myself, but also for anyone else out there, the “alone” people who think there’s maybe something wrong with them like I did. something “wrong” is a state of mind. It’s what you do about it that matters. So, hopefully, this helps them and me.

Hank Green explains why your DnD campaign will most likely fail if you go for a group of over 3 or 4 people. Science!

I currently “pay” for three news sources: two of those directly and one of those I get through work. As a general rule, I try to stay away from news involving the Tomato in Chief and the Musky Circus, but unfortunately, a lot of this nonsense ends up affecting me directly, so I need to read about those things more often than not.

Wall Street Journal: This is the one I get through work. The WSJ has been my replacement for the NYT for about a year now, and it’s been working well for “what’s important” and to some extent international news, at least the blurbs. The app works well and doesn’t bother me as much as the NYT app, and I can quickly scan what’s happening. I usually go through it a couple of times a week. There’s more to explore there, but since most of my interests are in technology, I find that I get those elsewhere - see below.

Wired: I subscribed to Wired about half a year ago, including their printed magazine. They are a bit messy in terms of their app, printed magazine, and their website (the website works, and the app gives PDFs of their printouts), but once I got it sorted out, it’s easy to follow their RSS feeds and then to the full articles. The Wired covers technology as a global topic with different flavors and trends and does in-depth interviews with known people. I also like their YouTube TechSupport channel, where they bring different experts to answer common questions people ask on the internet.

404 Media: I just decided to renew my subscription yesterday after being on the fence for the weekend. In the end, I decided that their investigative and independent journalism is worthy of support, even if I end up rolling my eyes at some of their articles these days. 404 usually covers scandals, and they go deep into how AI makes the world worse and how. As such, they become more of an activist outlet, and I feel somewhat out of place as a person who uses AI both for work and play. Still, the kind of raw and honest journalism they do is something unparalleled anywhere else, and I’d recommend you give them a read if you’re into tech and AI.

Other worthy mentions:

Ground News: I played with a subscription for a while, but the free version is also fine. Ground news is not an outlet but more of a spectrum of news. They take a story and match it across different media outlets, trying to cover both right-wing and left-wing sources. While sometimes I’m not sure how they categorize their sources, the sheer number of links to different stories available is good in itself and gives you a bigger idea of the facts, especially if you want to research something. It’s a good place to check out and add to your knowledge arsenal.

AP News: In general, they replaced NPR and BBC for me after I decided these last two tend to be more political than I liked. AP News has a free app that comes with ads, but you still get a quick overview of “what people are talking about,” mostly so you can dig in deeper later if you want. They rarely go deep enough to be worth a sit-through, especially with their ads.

From 404 Media:

A website called “DOGEQUEST” has posted on a searchable map what it claims to be the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of Tesla owners across the United States, and says it will remove the data if an individual proves that they have sold their Tesla. The map also includes the addresses of Tesla dealerships, the rough locations of Tesla superchargers, and the personal information of employees of the Elon Musk-headed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

I’d go as far as to say that it’s good to see something opposing to the DOGE-ish takeover of the government, but not this way. People who own Tesla may or may not be supporters of Musk at the moment, and not everyone can just get up and sell their car. Besides, the information can be outdated, incorrect, or misleading - there’s no way of telling (404 media themselves explain this)

The site’s cursor is a molotov cocktail.

Burn everything down and ask questions later. I understand the anger, but we can do better than this. Left or right, fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side. It matters not.

Someone else will always tell you their issue is the most pressing; it’s up to you, if you have the bird’s eye view, to correctly assign it to your time as you deal with everything else. And don’t forget to water your plants.

East Harlem. I used to run here when I lived in the area. 📷

Leading universities around the country are laying off faculty and staff as the Tomato in Chief is giving their funds to the company that has repeatedly killed people with its planes. I mean, I guess that’s the point?

Eyeing China threat, Trump announces Boeing wins contract for secretive future fighter jet apnews.com

Buying toilet paper with whogivesacrap part 2: I’m pissed and going to Amazon. VPN is on, Amazon doens’t care, directs me to their brand. I click “buy with one click.” Done. The correct address is on file.

And that’s how Amazon wins 😞

Buying toilet paper with whogivesacrap, part 1: ISP thinks it’s bad and blocks it with Cisco automated protection. Turning on VPN. Works. Buying .. Shopify: “oh no, you have VPN, you’re bad. Also, we have a different delivery and billing address on file.” Turning off VPN to fix. Cisco comes back 🤬

One of the future upgrades in the new apartment will be a TV—or something like a TV. Well, that’s the question, actually.

Our sofa should be here mid to end of April, and with it, it will be time to look into this more seriously. Nat and I are not TV people: Nat watches most of his content (mostly YouTube “let’s play” kind of clips) on his MacBook, and I watch my movies and show on my Ultra-wide screen in my room. We’re both very volume-aware, especially in the new place, and love to have earphones anyway (better sound quality, for sure).

We do have “our show” though, which is a habit I also have with other partners. It’s a nice experience. Besides, some things are meant to be experienced on a bigger screen with a warm order-in on a cold winter day.

I could go the route of a smart TV, probably a Ruko or Apple TV (since we both have iPhones, and my media library is usually served through my Mac). However, I was considering getting a “dumb” TV, even a projector, which would give me more screen room rather than “smarts,” because I have a mostly unused Mac Mini I’d love to use for that purpose.

Airplay from the iPhone seems meh at best, at least when I try to share something from YouTube to my Mac. The video keeps stopping after a few seconds, and the quality is not that great. However, with a Mac Mini, I should be able to use a Bluetooth keyboard and Mouse to navigate where I want. Typing on a keyboard, while more cumbersome than a remote, is a much faster way to get around and search for titles. Besides, I could arrange for quick shortcuts in the Background to launch a media center or even have a Siri Shortcut or something similar.

I’m just not sure where to start with this. I’m sure good projectors (instead of a display, which will probably be more expensive) exist and get cheaper than a large TV or even a screen at a certain point. And I’m not going to get a sound system, as we will both be using our earphones (at the same time? I know this is also possible). The money I will save on the sound system and the “smarts” of a smart TV I don’t need could go into the quality of the projector.

Is anyone familiar with an entertainment system like this? What are some keywords to search for?

I’m a bit late to comment on this: Micro.blog has released another great blogging tool - summaries:

When automatically cross-posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, and LinkedIn, the summary will now be included for long-form posts with a title.

Ok. But what does it mean and why it’s so great? To explain, let me explain my old process for long-form posts (posts that are longer than 300 characters, and usually come with a title).

Among Micro.blog core features is its ability to connect to your other social media accounts (like Meta’s Threads, Bluesky, and even Twitter back when it was Twitter and not the cesspool it is today) and post a link back to the post you’re writing on Micro.blog. So, this post you’re reading now will automatically show on Mastodon and Bluesky (in my case, since that’s where I chose to connect to) without me needing to log in and post to these services manually, linking back to this post here. In theory, anyway.

Because Bluesky and Mastodon have a character limit and most people there won’t read a full-length post even if it was possible, I had to create a summary of the post: I’d explain in one to three sentences what this post is about and then include a link back to my post here. I tried to automate this summary, but even if I had it working somehow through Hugo’s functions (which I didn’t), the summaries would still be manually written.

What Manton did is connect these summaries with AI. It’s the same AI tool you see everywhere that sums up what a post is about, only this time, it’s me, the author of this post, who chooses to turn it on and gets to see how the AI captures my post—not your AI, which might decide I just wrote something about gardening or snake capturing or something worse.

The result is a summary made by AI that passes through a human “quality check” before it’s released to the wild. Of course I also have a choice, as with everything AI on Micro.blog, and I could turn this off if AI was to gives me the gibbies - but it doesn’t, because here on Micro.blog, it is used responsibly and with consent, something I wish would be done more in general.

Here’s how AI summarised this post so far:

“Micro.blog has introduced an AI-powered summarization feature for long-form posts that enhances cross-posting to other social media by providing concise summaries.”

It’s not bad. It’s not great, but I can work with it in a dedicated Summary window from inside Mirco.blog—something that didn’t exist before. I’m changing it to:

“Micro.blog has introduced an AI-powered summarization feature for long-form posts that helps to automate cross-posting to other social media by providing AI-assisted summaries, allowing the author to tailor summaries to their needs.”

This is another example of how Micro.blog works for the author to help the blog. This is something I don’t see often enough.

Today, I woke up after almost eight hours of sleep. I don’t remember the last time I slept this long in my old apartment—it was always something I managed on vacations outside the city. In fact, I only remember waking up too early once this week and getting a glass of water before getting back to bed and sleeping.

Another hopefully trend in the making is my exercise routine. My new room is huge, bigger than I ever remember having (in the city, for sure), and it allows me to have a dedicated exercise corner with some of my equipment out. The neighborhood is mostly quiet, with one main road at the end of a long segment of stairs from our street, which provides a natural opportunity for a warm-up before a quiet run into the local park, where I can run different trails of different difficulties. I’m happy to report that I already tested it once, and with the stairs, my stamina has improved enough to earn me a nice protein shake with an espresso shot made at a nice local juicery.

I hope to keep this up and make this apartment my self-recovery and self-improvement place.

You know things are really bad when you get email after email from leadership with motivational stories and “Here’s what we’re doing” and “We’re taking this very seriously.” blerg.

Now that my personal projects and worries from January are fading into new (and good!) reality, my concerns revolve around the tomato in chief and the musky circus. Since I work for a large medical center and a university, these uncertain times affect my colleagues and me.

Yesterday, I was euphoric, the opposite of the stressful feeling I’ve been experiencing since January.

I went on a “run” (at this point, it’s a fast-paced walk as I’m picking up the habit again, hopefully) yesterday, going up our new street during the sunset. It’s an average slope, one that makes you breathe hard if you go as fast as I did. I continued to make a loop in the park at the end of the street and came back the same way. There’s a curve free of buildings right before our street merges with the main road, and the evening colored the sky in purple-blue. I looked down the slope.

Each apartment building is different, and each one is lit with slightly different lights. Some extend their lobby like an arm into the sidewalks, while others have a pathway and lit stairs leading into an internal U inside a courtyard. There was no traffic, and coming from Broadway, with all of its ambulances and loud music blasting from passing cars, it felt like I was in a different place, on a vacation in a different town somewhere.

Even though I know the area quite well, I didn’t shop here before. My partner and I are surprised by the neighborhood-ish feeling of the local supermarket, the pharmacy, and the pizza place. It’s part of Manhattan, yet somehow it’s not. I can’t stop smiling. When I got back from my walk-run, I had enough energy to finish unpacking most of what was left in our common area. We are waiting for a few more new furniture to arrive in boxes so we can put away the other stuff we have.

The move is complete. New apartment. New neighborhood.

I have so many things to set up and many more to learn how to do here; I get stuck in mental loops of “I can’t do A before B, but that’s up to C, which comes with requirement D.” Oh well, getting there. Hey at least the internet is up!

Yesterday, I mentioned that I will probably set up a Windows virtual machine on my Thelio, My Linux Pop OS desktop. Later, I decided to play around with it, and I was surprised to find out how easy it was to get Windows 11 up and running. I’m surprised. Here are my notes:

Checking requirements

Before we start, we need to make sure our Host—the Linux computer we’re going to install the Windows environment on—has a CPU that supports virtualization. Most modern computers today probably do, but in case you have Linux running on an aging computer, you want to make sure.

To do that, run the command lscpu in the terminal and look under virtualization. It should say VT-X. If it is, you’re ready to go.

Of course, you will also need to get the Windows operating system. Download it from Microsoft and use their official Windows ISO (for this, I used the Windows11 ISO)

Install needed libraries and software

We’re going to install several components needed for virtualization. queue-kvm, the hardware component and the kernel level environment; virt-manager, which is the software and GUI we will be interacting with for configurations; and bridge-utils and libvirt-daemon, which are several components that allow the host to run virtualization as a service and connect your host to your guest virtual machine. We can install them all in one go:

sudo apt install qemu-kvm libvirt-daemon bridge-utils virt-manager

Restart the machine (the host) before continuing, or it will tell you the libvirt service is not available in the next steps.

After restart, verify the service is running with sudo systemctl status libvirtd. It should show as active in green. If not, enable it with sudo systemctl enable libvirtd and start it with sudo systemctl start libvirtd. Then check again.

Next, we also need to add our user to the appropriate groups for access. This is useful:

sudo usermod -aG libvirt $(whoami) and then: sudo usermod -aG kvm $(whoami).

Inside virt-manager

1. Launch virt-manager from the terminal or find it in your apps.
2. Select Local install media (ISO image or CDROM) and then Forward.
3. From the Choose ISO or CDROM install media select Browse and navigate to your downloaded Windows11. Notice that if the ISO is not in the libvirt library (the default location), virt-manager will prompt you for permission to access the location.
4. To install Windows 11, I used 8 GB of RAM, 8 CPU Cores, and 50 GB of storage (the minimum is 64GB, I’m not sure how I passed this, but you’d probably want more than that anyway). Finish and launch the virtual machine.
5. When launched, the virt-manager boot will prompt to “press any key to boot from CD-ROM,” so don’t forget to press something before looking into why it doesn’t work like I did…
6. The Windows 11 installer will locate the disk. Go ahead and install there, it’s the only virtual location you have if you followed the above example. Then it will ask you the usual nonsense (agree to terms, Language, keyboard layout,etc). Note: I always choose Windows 11 Pro, because home version doesn’t come with needed utilities.

Sharing common clipboard

Next, we want to install Spice-VDA, which enables us to copy-paste from the Guest to the Host and vice versa.

1. Install what’s needed on your Host with sudo apt install spice-vdagent.
2. On your Guest (in Windows), go to https://spice-space.org/download.html to get the Windows guest tools binary
3. We also need to install the Windows VirtIO Drivers ISO from https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Windows_VirtIO_Drivers ISO on the Host. Download the latest release from under Installtion and then “download the latest stable” link.
4. On your host, switch to the virtual machine’s configuration (choose the little “i” from the top bar) and select your VM’s CDROM configuration. Browse to the ISO you downloaded above to mount it.
5. Switch back to your Guest (select the display icon to the right of the “i”). Windows will detect the CD and ask you what to do. Select to browse the files, locate the 64-bit installer, and install.
6. Leave all options as is.
7. Restart the guest, and you’re done. Copy-paste should now work

Next, I want to set up a share between the Guest and the Host, but this is not urgent. It seems the easiest way to do it is to create a shared SMB folder from the Guest.

I know that in the past, I had to work harder to get Windows to work, and I still ran into some issues. The setup here took me maybe one hour and no more than two head scratches. It was easy, too easy, and I’m not sure how much of it was because of my hardware and how much because of what’s now included in the virtualization libraries… but it works. I already installed Photoshop, and it works perfectly in Linux, just as it should.