The Art Of Not Asking Why

This morning I wrote some of my thoughts down in my notebook:

This will not make a whole lot of sense to most of you, but you might recognize some familiar items, like Micro.blog’s photo challenge and notes about my wiki and my blog.

S3 is the name I gave to a project of mine a year and a half ago. The idea there was to put more of my “stuff” out there for people to see: my photos, my writings, and my videos. For the most part, this is more of a hobby than a project, and that’s exactly what I was after changing above.

Here are the highlights, explained:

New vid that will do S3

This has been the idea for a while. Instead of struggling with doing a video (on what? quality? PeerTube, YouTube?) that may or may not be a personal recording (which I call “jvid” for journal video), just do one video weekly. I will explain what I did during the week with my blog, wiki, photos, and videos. There’s always something to talk about. At the same time, it gives me practice in recording and editing videos. There’s no reason not to record more personal matters as well - I will get into that below.

Always do the vid

This is the spine of the project. Without it, it’s a “slug” thing that sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. Doing a vid every week means I have something to lean on, something that holds this together. For now, that’s the goal: just keep on going.

Just do it, experience will come

Don’t worry about blabbing too much (or too little), and don’t worry about what is said. That’s what editing is for. Did I make a mistake? Fine, I can repeat myself and flash it out in the editing process. I can even do an “uncensored” longer version for personal things (which I do for myself when I have a lot on my mind, hence “jvids”) and upload an edited “public” version. Then I can save the original - highly compressed - vid for storage. This way I’d feel even more natural and I won’t don’t need to worry about what I’m saying too much.

The next video I do should probably explain all of this again…

When I saw Hollie’s post about growing long hair, I thought it was a good idea to write about the “other side” of the story, as a person who maintains the shaved-head look. I aim for this to be a quick overview rather than detailed instructions. For this, I might use my wiki.

I started losing my hair when I was in my 20s. I went through a buzz-cut period, and when it was over, my curls never came back. It didn’t bother me too much; I was more comfortable with less hair to worry about anyway. No Rogaine for me.

Going to the barber stopped being a thing soon afterward. It didn’t make sense to go for a 10-minute 30-dollar buzz-cut I could do on my own. Over the years, I gained more practice and experience. Today I can shave my head with my eyes closed - literally - since I’m blind as a bat without my glasses which I need to take off for this.

Mornings

Every morning I wash my face and head with chilled water. I focus on the eyes (gently, no rubbing) and then bring water up over my scalp. I do this about 2 - 3 times. Besides waking me up, it also washes away the natural skin oils on the scalp. Our scalp produces much more oil than the rest of the skin, one of the reasons a shaved head always looks so shiny.

When I leave my apartment, I always have a head covering: a beanie for the winter or a military/army cap style hat for the summer. A hoodie/coat with a head cover also works well. I take the head covering off to get some sun on my noggin, but only briefly. Usually for short walks of no more than 10 minutes.

Shaving

Shaving is the main star of the show, isn’t it? I used a basic Remington trimmer for years but discovered a better alternative: a head shaver. I currently use a Pitbull Skull Shaver which I got as a gift, but it’s not the only one out there by any means.

Shaving takes me no more about 5 minutes with the Pitbull. The most important thing about head shavers (of similar models) is cleaning the shaving head. While not too complicated, this is a multi-step process I’d have to break down further at some point. Here’s a quick picture of the components set up in the sink:

The blades are the star-shaped parts at the bottom, with the guards laying upside down above. Once placed within the guards, the four razors go into the head’s front (upside down on the sink’s rim, next to the Skull shaver body), and are locked into place with the white plastic holder you can see next to the blades.

I clean the shaving head about twice a month. The blades cut the hair almost to dust, so I first open the head carefully over the toilet for the hair to fall down and then place the parts over a wet paper towel in the sink to catch the rest. I use pressurized canned air to clean the hairs in the groves. When I’m done and the head is assembled, I let the shaver run inside a shallow mixture of strong rubbing alcohol (over 90%) and water for about five minutes; this helps remove more hair and oil from the blades.

Cleaning the shaver like this allows me to use one shaving head for over 4 months. I shave my head twice to three times a week. With a price tag of $40 for a new shaving head, I give myself a haircut for a fraction of the price it would otherwise cost me at the barber.

Shower and soap

There’s this assumption that bald people don’t need to use shampoo because they have no hair. Not true. Most daily-usage shampoos (conditioners aside) are intended for scalps, not hair. I use shampoo (or Heads and shoulders when it’s dry). Sometimes face soap, which is gentler on the skin.

I shower after shaving my head to clean the hairs that are left, then shave the temples and above the ears with a razor. I also have a Nose/ear trimmer to finish off the pesky hairs above the ear, where using the razor is too dangerous. Don’t let the name of this trimmer make you uncomfortable. It’s very useful to catch hairs around your lips (if you have a mustache as I do) and eyebrows as well. It’s very affordable and worth every cent.

Ending thoughts

Sharing something as intimate as shaving on a blog feels somewhat odd. Even now, as I’m writing these words, I feel self-conscious. It’s important to share this information then as practice.

As well, there’s still baldness shaming going around. While this never bothered me and I always felt comfortable joking around, I know that for some, this is a sensitive issue. I hope this post helps somewhat.

Thanks for reading, and let me know if you’re interested in more details. I could expand on this process in my wiki.

The other day I took a nice walk:

#mbmar

Every night I go to sleep around midnight, I regret it. I wake up a few minutes before 6, no matter when I go to sleep.

There’s always an excuse to go to bed late. Last night it was watching some more Critical Role. Come on man, when will I learn…? 🥱

When I joined Micro.blog, I was confused. Coming from Mastodon, I didn’t know how to wrap my head around the integration of the two (to be honest, I’m still learning what works best), and I was struggling with my blog’s CSS and various tweaks. As I learned, I started to take notes which turned into wiki articles.

Now, the MB section on my wiki is good enough to stand on its own. It contains a short introduction and a couple of notes and tricks. It’s nowhere near complete, and I plan to keep adding and changing information as I go. Most importantly, it’s meant to be read as an opinionated guide. It contains information as I understand it and instructions for my own way of doing things. It doesn’t have to be yours. As a matter of fact, if you have a different way of doing things, I’d love to hear about it.

This must be the first time (or the first time in a long time) that I couldn’t launch into my Linux Desktop environment and managed to fix it within 5 minutes. Good job, me.

“Why no RSS?” - an update on why I don’t have RSS on my wiki, and what workarounds I’ve made.

taonaw.gitlab.io/taonah/

Had a nice social gathering of sorts with a few folks last night 🍺🍷. Thankfully no headaches this morning, just a bit of lack of sleep. Worth it.

You’d think it’s easy to use your blog as a journal, but in reality, it’s not that simple. You don’t say everything you think, and you don’t blog everything you journal.

Say there was a meeting at work. Cosmo, one of the system administrators, was leading a discussion in favor of pushing a desktop shortcut to create support tickets to all computers in our system and phase out our help@compnay.com email address. I had a couple of conflicting points to mention, but I couldn’t bring myself to talk in the meeting. I ended up sending an email instead, raising my concerns.

I will write the above in my journal, making a note of the meeting and what I wanted to say, including the email I sent. Taking this as is though and using it as a blog post doesn’t work well.

For one, using real names is never a good idea. The same goes for the email contents or anything specific. Being too specific is also boring and shrinks the number of people who’d want to read about it. I need to expand on what I have to say first.

To do so, I like to ask myself why. Since posts should usually be short and convey a single idea, I want to focus on one such why. Looking over the above paragraph, I think the here is “why couldn’t I bring myself to talk about it?” Since I’m writing a personal blog. A certain nervousness, a worry of being exposed, is shooting through my brain. Ah! Looks like I hit a nerve, which means this is personal, which means this is good.

I could write how since my high school days I had issues with confronting opposing opinions to mine. I’m not sure why it started and when, but Authority has always been something I don’t deal with too well. I either follow it too blindly or oppose it to the point of confrontation - and let me tell you, it’s not that great when it starts causing issues at work and with friends. These days I’m better because I know I have an issue and I developed ways to handle it, like the email in the above example.

Isn’t this more appealing than the original journal entry? I think so. You’d probably also agree that more people can relate to this topic. As well, there are no security/privacy issues affecting anyone but myself. Nice.

It takes some time to find those personal points and expose them. It takes even more time to write to the point, with a sense of direction. this is something I’m still struggling with at times.

What about you? Do you prefer to use your blog as a journal, and if so, to what extent? Is your “filter” different? Do you have other tricks?

It is here. I’m part of the ⌚ cult now.

Now to get a nato band before I scratch my wrist off.

Maybe it’s because I drastically lowered my sugar intake in foods and drinks 🤔, but I can tell the difference between different kinds of seltzer 🥤

Good morning 🌞 What is the plan for today?

Mousa has a problem. Its main actor, Karim Mahmoud Abdel Aziz, is trapped in a crappy movie.

The settings of the story are not too bad: a gifted but socially-awkward electrical engineer has a tough life at the university. He lives alone with his father and has an interesting relationship going on with him. Yehia (Karim) has a possible love interest(s) (it’s not obvious with Yehia’s shy approach, which makes things more interesting), and as he tries to maneuver those with the guidance of his sympathetic father, things go bad.

Unfortunately, things go bad not just as part of the plot, but also for the whole movie, which flatlines to a dumb terminator-turned-a-good-guy superhero flick. (Spoilers alert)

The bad guys show up for some vague reason, steal money and watches (the father was a watchmaker), run, and let the father die in a fire. Yehia, paralyzed in fear, has to watch his father die. He survives the fire and comes back, sells the house, and decides to live in the lab (the “hut”), and build a termin… sorry, a remotely-controlled robot called Mousa who will avenge his father’s death.

It doesn’t take long before his engineer-woman friend shows up. She hacked Yehia’s computers and knows his secret, but is somehow too dumb to figure out how to fix her car. She convinces Yehiya to go beyond simple revenge for his father into a full vigilante and go after the bad guys. There’s a professor at the university who has some jealousy issues with Yehia also. I’m pretty sure he will become the nemesis, but I won’t know because I stopped watching after the second skirmish between the term… Mousa, and the bad guys.

The robot animations are bad. Not awful, but seem to be a couple of years behind. I’m sure the producers don’t have the budget Hollywood movies do, but I’ve seen better animations made in Blender by college students in their free time. That, however, I can forgive.

What I’m grumpy about is the waste of talent and story. You have a good actor who plays the role beautifully. The character is smart and capable. There’s also a gifted woman who happens to be a hacker. Why not use that raw brain power on the bad guys? Do some more of that flashy matrix-rip-off hacking? Why not develop the complex relationships Yehia has with his peers? Maybe give the father more of a role somehow? Anything is better than the bad guys. They are so flat and boring evil robots would have more personality.

Director Peter Mimi is rushing to get to the juicy action part and leave the “boring” introduction as soon as possible. The problem is that the juice reeks of rip-offs and cheap effects with zero depth. The only good part is the rushed introduction.

Too bad.