Home Stasis

I mean, I'm drinking ground coffee at the moment, people. Life is topsy-turvy. I can't even.

You know what it is? It's that we've never had a major renovation like this, not in the 37 years we'e lived here. Back in my 30s (ha! How weird is that?) I put up drywall in the basement, and we've done different things with cabinets and floors and fixtures, but nothing like this.

I think if this had been one of those newer homes I see go up around here, we might have killed this house long ago. It's solid, though (professional opinion, not mine, don't listen to me), built to last, so I guess we're catching up.

This mess was just doing baseboards and painting, taking advantage of a bare subfloor (carpet is coming) and people who are comfortable staying in one place for hours. Maybe in retrospect I would have headed for a hotel for a couple of specific days, but it wasn't all that bad. There were fewer things to bump into, and that's sort of a problem for me.

I keep thinking about Groucho Marx's line about not wanting to belong to an organization that would welcome someone like him, still a useful concept. I'm not a joiner of anything and never have been, so most of these situations are forced, and my little twist on Groucho is that I don't want to be in a situation where I have to join.

Think of an HOA, maybe. Or a 12-step group. Or a cancer survivors meeting. You get it.

A joke – A man walks into a room full of people. "Welcome to our meeting of Recovering Plastic Surgery addicts." He looks around the room, smiling. "Well, I see a lot of new faces here."

I love this joke. No, I adore this joke. It sounds punny, like a perfect Dad Joke, but there are several levels that make this joke just sing to me.

Anyway. I don't want to belong to the disabled community, or the chronic disease community. I mean, fuck that, seriously.

The online groups I've found for long Covid are awful, which is a nice way of saying the people are awful. At best there's commiseration, but mostly it's whining and bitching and I get it, people. It sucks. I don't need it reinforced, thanks.

I also don't believe there's a worldwide conspiracy to ignore long Covid – the opposite is obviously true. The subset of scientists, physicians and researchers, who study Infection-Associated Chronic Conditions (IACC), a small field that's been actively studied for over a century, are grateful for the new attention.

Because it's not Covid (I say for the billionth time). Covid caused it. Long Covid has its own constellation of signs and symptoms, but they overlap quite a bit with "long flu" and ME/CFS. It seems to be a thing.

So, while I'd be grateful to talk to someone one on one who's dealing with this, I'm avoiding support groups and crazy people. I see enough of that in the mirror.

All of this computer stuff I've been doing for the past few weeks has been about video production, and specifically animation. This has become a hobby and I'm leaning in, grateful to have something to do that doesn't require too much movement (sorry).

There are plenty of courses out there, weeks or months of tutorials, live feedback, etc. Not joining one of those, either, although there's appeal.

But I've always preferred to find my own way, design my own course, and it worked out, actually, perfectly. I learned how to do basics, frame-by-frame animation, stop motion, some primitive motion capture with a webcam.

It was a lot of fun. I've spent hours drawing walk cycles, the most basic animation sequence. You can do it in two frames, one foot forward and then the other, a la South Park, or go up to 8 or 10 frames or more, tiny steps to make a smooth walk (it's a cycle because it can be looped, obviously).

At the same time, generative AI exploded and no longer did I have to search for stock photos to make move. I could design my own characters and backgrounds, so that's what I started doing.

I also started using AI to help with tricky animations, and along the way it got much better at motion capture (you know those funny suits actors wear with the sensors all over? It's now possible to get decent results with a webcam alone). I could make little animations all day, much faster than before.

But it's not free. It's not expensive – in theory, I could produce a five-minute animation using nothing but AI for less than 20 bucks. But that's with a perfect result every time, no iterations at all, which is not practical.

I consider my little animations, whether it's the bonobo and the baby, or the cartoons of me trying to do stuff around the house, as comic strips. Short and sweet, a little joke or punch at the end to make it linger, and I need to experiment.

So I've installed the models on my own server, open source and free, and once I get the bugs worked out (needed a better GPU) I can make as many mistakes as I want to.

I've tried to watch more, just because I go through periods of absolute boredom, no desire to do anything I normally do, so it would help to be able to take advantage of the thousands of things I could watch.

I started watching in a big virtual theater in my Quest 3 headset, which was entertaining. I managed to catch up on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, although it's not been a great season so far and I feel pretty blah about it.

I tried to watch Alien:Earth until they did something gross to a kitty and No Thank You. I never cared for the franchise anyway; one xenomorph was enough.

I started watching a time-travel-ish show called The Lazarus Project on Netflix, which is good and compelling, and just brain-twisting enough to keep me watching into the second season. I can recommend (it's intense and a bloody, like an action movie).

And I'm reading a wonderful book about Neanderthals, although this lady writes so well that it can distract me. I just want to stop and savor a particular sentence, and that's not my usual experience with paleontology books.

See? I keep busy. I'm fine. Don't ask me to join your damn group.😊