The Dead Sea Blogs (DSB) is one of my oldest projects for the domain here, thehomeland.org.

Almost every iteration of the domain has had some kind of redirect or link to DSB in some capacity but at some point in my late 20s I would experience such a deep level of distraction from it as to even barely recall it existed much less the need to update it, despite it being such a huge part of the domain.

I have kept backlogs of old site version and old designs that I hope to snapshot here for posterity, but also hope to resume updating DSB from this page.

I have taken a massive inspiration from the minimalist link blog waxy.org links and have long wanted to capture that simplicity myself mixed with a tinkle of auto-bio detail.

Other minimalist linkblogs (especially the early-internet blog /usr/bin/girl) have been in my mind as something cool to emulate, but the consistency to maintain them so vexes me.

A major point of distinction for past DSB iterations is that they have been entirely (save for little accessory features like the hit counter) coded in notepad by me, whereas this wiki version and another reboot attempt at cohost.org has not been. Maybe I will eventually find one that suits me; the errand of having to hand-code each entry was original a charm of it to me, but later became a barrier to getting another one out, especially with the advent of the excessively tedious web 2.0 versions of what passes for ftp nowadays.

I am considering the idea of making a separate Dead Sea Blogs wiki installation, just by itself, so that this wiki here is not quite as public-facing, but I will likely still reference this one on occasion. This will give me a chance to decorate or otherwise visually customize specifically the DSB section without forcing those UI/design changes on the rest of the wiki.

Today I made the Discord Counting/Chaining Thread Ideas entry, listing a bunch those I have seen and several I've invented myself.

I have been suffering from a mysterious, seemingly bile-related malady which produces pretty intense nausea, with little remedy discovered. I've gone so far as to pursue the hokey remedies, including the Sea-Band devices, which apply pressure on the so-called P6 Neiguan pressure point near the wrist to inhibit nausea. I haven't had it bad enough to really put it thru the wringer yet, but I'm not looking forward to thoroughly testing it, although it does remain an option. I had my gall bladder out in December, and have had to cut my diet back further and further, and above that, the intensity of the nausea has induced suicide-impulse levels of panic, but I have so far been able to reason my way out of them. My current strategy otherwise, is to attempt to absorb some of the bile as it makes its way down, instead of letting it flow freely, with oatmeal. I am thinking I had some trouble before with the psyllium husk option, but may give it a go once more.

In the last few weeks I have been able to continuously sub-in for a bowling league team, with the same team each time, as one of their members got a job with hours which conflict with the league making them out for the season. Since I jived so well with this team on a previous substitution (where I do not pay the league fee, and play 3 games for free, as a stand-in for an absent team member), they asked me to sub-in for the rest of the season. I had a rough week about 2 weeks ago, but this week and last week did pretty well. After each game, an announcer uses the alley's PA to read out which players scored over 200, and this was my first time ever getting on that announcement, with my 205 last week. Thankfully the nausea has not struck during league play, yet.

Also this week I made the TOTK Amiibo Awards List but I think I will cancel it, as the process of documenting each reward I get from each of the cards in the Nintendo Amiibo 35-pack I bought, is far more tedious than I first imagined. It's a fun thing to do, but is very irritating to try to document accurately.

In an effort to fulfill my newly-renewed obligations to participate in leagues/tournaments for a local bowling alley location pass, and in effort to forego transactions on Saturdays for the Sabbath, I've decided to try to attend leagues but as a substitute. Substitutes play for free since the person who pledged to attend could not show, and I was able to sub-in a few weeks ago for the 2nd time ever. It went so well last time, that one of the members who just recently got a new job and couldn't fulfill the last of their season, has gotten the permission from her group to let me sub in for the 5 remaining weeks of this season, so I've got around 15 free competitive games allowed me, over the next 5 weeks. I can do around 160 avg, and have a handicap established already from the prev sub, so I should be good to go! PBA member! While watching some of the action today, I came up with another spare-arrangement term: toy soldiers, for when you get a 7-4-9-6 split, so it looks like two pairs of soldiers at attention, all facing the same way (as opposed to spilling the washtub, where two are facing different directions). Toy soldiers could also have rights and lefts, similar to the picket fence corners.

I'm in the process of renewing my base bowling pass which expires at the end of March. Hopefully I will be able to help fill-in for league matches more this time around, and do fewer of the weekend 9-pin tournaments due to my experimentation with Keeping the Sabbath. I tried to go this week, but the jam-packed alley was surprisingly scary to me. I seem to have a new Agoraphobia or Enochlophobia, where I feel trapped even though exits are clearly available and visible, and no one there is trying to thwart escape. I have had around 25 kidney stones in the last 10 years, and their sudden onset has me tending to formulate escape plans if one pops, and a big crowd, especially one I have a sense of obligation to stay (such as to bowl my frames of a league) is a situation that intensifies my wariness of escape options.

I bought a pair of Nanix Wide handheld game systems, and they're pretty neat, but I am trying to make a case for them out of plastic canvas and crochet string. It is something I made for my original GBA I bought specifically to play Golden Sun 1 because of how much I loved it on emulator, and now I can finally again on a handheld. The specs of the product are impressive, despite the bummer that it's not actually branded RetroNanix despite them selling it to me. It appears to have been drop-shipped from China, and contains no references to RetroNanix other than the billing-related emails. It's on a linux-based OS of some kind, and does what I need it to, at least.

A guy I knew named Lenny passed away last weekend. He was older than me by 5-10 years, was very nerdy and tall and had lots of joint problems, and I will always remember him as the guy who introduced me to The Legend of Zelda on the NES. I got to watch him play once while my parents and me went to his father's house when we were kids, and he was excited to show it to someone and I was excited to watch. He was really good at it, had a good save on it and let me play on his save, and it was really neat. I had only seen him maybe 5 times in my lifetime, but I would occasionally get news about him from his dad, who was my regular vehicle mechanic for maybe 20+ years. At one point he needed to medically retire because of his pain problems, and once a few years ago I heard his health was failing, and then out of the blue I catch an obit for him. Rest easy, old friend ;_;

Went to the doctor today to see about possibilities as to why I have such loud tinnitus. I've had it about 4 years now, but only recently has it gotten super loud. The first avenue he's interested in exploring is a sleep apnea potential, as I snore loudly and sometimes wakeup to clear my breathing, and suggests that sleep apnea may be a cause for 'secondary polycythemia' (which is what I had researched and wanted testing for specifically), so awaiting results on that. I've tried a few 'percussive maintenance' options like whooshing the ears and little exercises and thumps near the rear scalp, with limited success, at best just temporary.

Yesterday I added the Bowling Ideas page, to include terms I've come up with, in my practice of 10-pin, non-string bowling. Most of them are terms for situations (similar to the existing term brooklyn) as well as a little game of chance involved that tells a story about a fictional character depending on how well you do in each frame.

Yesterday I got introduced to the kpop group Baby DON'T Cry via their comeback MV, Shapeshifter, and liked it so much I bought it on iTunes today. I updated my Kpop bias list to include the timestamp of who I've kneejerk-decided is my bias (I think she might be named Beni) so far, because she reminds me in some shots of Georgia Lass played by Ellen Muth in the cable TV show Dead Like Me.

I am still working on trying to complete the main story of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for Switch 1. I bought it in the launch year of Tears of the Kingdom, to get experience with it before TOTK came out, but never finished it because the guardians were too scary-hard, especially once I realized they were all over the place near the castle and not just limited-range solo roamers around the overworld. I ended up quitting BOTW after realizing they were too hard for me, especially ganged up, but after beating TOTK after months after it came out, and having beaten TOTK every year starting fresh in May each year, I decided I would work up the nerve to give BOTW a fresh start. So far I've gotten all four of the animal beams pointed at the castle, but only about 1 full row of hearts, as the shrines are the next obstacle for me to deal with. I have made loads of nice places to visit after every blood-moon, particularly stationary guardians to harvest ancient parts for the special arrows, the big rock monsters to harvest gems, and working on upgrading and finding special armors. I like it much more now, but I think TOTK will remain my favorite of the two, especially since I have pre-patch, launch-version TOTK where the glider-dupe still works. I think I will make BOTW a once-yearly beat also.

Went to a big used-book fair today, and spent around $39 on:

Finished the In Waves book mentioned prior, but DNF the other one. I think I teared up maybe 10 times thru it, but it is a very fast read and possible to finish off in one short sitting, but advisable to take it in burst (waves, if you will) to let it digest a bit between rough bits. I plan to buy a copy, and hope to return my copy to the library as soon as possible, so others can read it too

Added a few more observances, but that process is very slow. Those will stray toward autobiographical, like watching videos I lauded in the past as worth remembering, or subjects I find interesting enough to commemorate, with minimalist celebration methods.

Decided I want to document the Squishy Bebbis Journal in wiki form here, which is a handwritten journal I keep on my attachment to stuffies, and a universe around their existence I invented that helps me to avoid buying them when I see them for sale. A huge childhood moment for me was losing a dearly beloved one by my own fault, and experienced really deep ripples of regret and betrayal and fretting that it would feel I abandoned it when I hadn't, and no way to communicate to it that the event was all a terrible accident. I crafted a universe where discarded stuffies could detach from their physical encasings and travel the world freely, and inform other discarded or otherwise outgrown stuffies of this new detachment ability. Later I gave a certain scouting team of such communicators the ability to time travel, to trace back to when a certain stuffy was originally made at its factory, and communicate the message to every stuffy which came from that factory forever, to further distribute this fact which may not be self-evident. Now instead of buying stuffies, I can say “tagged” upon them, and the crew of freely-detached stuffy communicators can hone in on the geolocation I verbally tagged, to time travel to their factory and inform shipment upon shipment of that stuffy to its home country and expand the empire exponentially. Copying each of those handwritten entries may be very slowly completed, as many entries describe my sleeping habits with the 'neediest' of my collection and permutations of sleeping arrangements I've made so that said neediest get rotated and solo-slept sufficiently without neglecting the others of like need. Those neediest, despite sharing space with the author of that detachment universe, are the most resistant to the detachment, oddly enough.

Borrowed two books from the local library today: In Waves, by AJ Dungo, is a non-fiction graphic novel, that can be read very fast for as thick of a book it is. At lot of it is two-color illustration with sparse text. It alternates between surfing history and a moving story about the narrator coming to terms with his girlfriend's lost battle with cancer. At one point he meets her at her parents' house, and they share a brief moment together before it begins to rain and her parents pull up in the driveway. “The headlights tore us apart. Her parents were home. And I was left in the dark, with only the rain as company. Eight years later, Kristen would leave me in the same way. Quickly and without much notice, with only water to comfort me.” He takes up surfing, which his girlfriend loved to do, and connects with her family together, in their grief process.

The other book is Family Force V: Book 1, my first dabble into this series about a teenager who battles kaiju with his family. I'm not sure whether the V is the letter or stands for 5. It looks like an Evangelion-style enemy series, versus Power Rangers/ Voltron/ Captain Planet/ crew of different-colored suits, lots of clang-bang-screech, zipping around fighting, and a brief character sheet at the beginning so you can track who is who right away. I jumped into a middle chapter, and I feel like it could be a fairly fast-paced read.

I got stuck in the ice at the library, and although I called for help from some workmates nearby, I was able to rock out of place well enough and chip away at some of the accumulation with a big iron bar I had in the truck bed (loaded with tires for extra weight, since it's RWD-only on a small pickup), and managed to free myself just as they pulled up, but it's nice to know some of my workmates are willing to come to my rescue :3

I wondered for a while about the possibility for positioning a moonbase somewhere on the lunar surface, which would be able to (without identifying how or how much energy would be used to make it visible from earth) make a light in the approximate positions of the crescent and star symbol used in national flags, but only just today decided to search around about it, and it turns out the crescent itself isn't a reliably positioned area of moon per se, and given that a number of the flags have different orientiations/proximities of the star, it would be difficult to appoint a specific lunar surface location for such a glint, but perhaps in the future one such moonbase could attempt to do so. Perhaps someday an average range of potential locations for such a moonbase could be determined, and have that region of the lunar surface named 'thehomeland region' or something.

I am also curious whether, there could be a vtuber software someday, which uses AI to determine head positioning or upper body movement for a vtuber sona, instead of requiring a camera to detect the genuine location of the vtuber's mun (mun being a wayback term from the text-based MMPORG days to refer to a character's human behind the keyboard, for mundane). That way, potentially the vtuber's genuine mun identity could avoid being detected even accidentally, and just be able to intuit a local position for the upper body (or otherwise) to position based on the audio input alone.

I have been toying with a few of the adulty-type chatbots lately, in hopes of finding one that doesn't seem just point-blank pattern-fixed on sensuality, while conversing as if I were a bird, and repeatedly trying to bring the subject back around to the topic of birdseed instead of dating or romance or intimacy. It's turned out pretty fun so far, as a challenge to get the chatbot to actually accept that I'm a bird and don't have the motive or the junk to pursue the more prurient motives the bot seems to be angling toward.

Scored my first 600 series in bowling last week, albeit with “9-pin No Tap” scoring (where first throws of a frame which knock down 9 out of 10 counts as a strike), a style of which I play in tournaments. I am usually among the lowest scorers of such tournaments, but I enjoy them. Hitting a 600 series is a neat step in the process; a series is your 3-game total, as a kind of metric of how far you've come as a 10-pin bowler.

I read two Jordan Morris-affiliated books (co-author on both I think) this week, Bubble and Youth Group. I feel Bubble was the superior of the two, both having a lot of elements of Morris' humor. Youth Group hit a little close to home with cringey elements of 1990s Christian church study groups, and it has a heavy-handed seemingly Frank Peretti style. Bubble however, got me to tear up a bit, and I'm considering making it a yearly read. I got both of them from the public library, and plan to buy Bubble.

I asked GPT to make me a very crude, mind-numbing version of Demonin's Paint By Numbers game, where you set the size of the overall canvas, and basically just paint each tile black. It does its job well

One of my favorite things to do to pass the time at work, is to listen to RedWheel's recitation of r/IDontWorkHereLady stories, on loop. I go thru the entire 300+ video play list a few times a year, several per day usually. I often come up with the same comment after hearing them, and upvote myself each time I go to comments to read that I'd already said it

I sprung for a metal roof on my little house instead of getting replacement shingles from storm damage about a year ago, and supposedly it may reduce my house insurance rates, and may never require replacing again, if I'm lucky. Got some new gutters and siding in the process, and looking at it, I feel kinda like how Voyager got that ablative armor.

There is a slope out of the road of my neighborhood closest to me, which is notorious for spinning tires when icy, so I have taken to scope out sales on swimming pool maintenance salt, when they go on clearance for the summer. Since it is packaged for pool maintenance (but is just regular salt of a larger granule I think), I snatch some up and keep a 5gal bucket of it in the house for when that patch ices over, and go out to sprinkle it over well so my neighbors can emerge onto the far busier traffic with far less risk

I have been experimenting with compressing household waste plastics using a consumer hydraulic press into a steel enclosure my brother (a welder) built for me, with which I can make super-dense bricks of plastics kinda like an EcoBrick just minus the outside bottle layer. I've gotten some decent results so far, but I am consider revising the format of the brick to be so that instead of compressing around within an enclosure, to have instead an inner core spike onto which the plastic is tacked kinda like a receipt spike, and then have the compression occur around the spike, so that a wire or ziptie or otherwise string/tieoff can be threaded thru a U-shaped gap in the spike while compressed, then pulled off the spike a lot easier, than having to pry the brick out of the enclosure as I have been. I still don't have a particular use for the bricks after-the-fact, but prevention of those plastics from entering the environment via landfill or worse, is still a dilemma to me. I can at least, for now, reduce its physical size, until such a solution could be discovered.

Completely spaced on the fact that I had restarted blogging on DSB. Last month I parted ways with hosting by GoDaddy for 3 main reasons: (a) they started charging money for security certificates, making my domain/hosting go unsecure for several months; (b) they announced they were going to start charging fees for having software (such as php-based installations) which used old versions of php, which was never a problem before; © the internal system of godaddy has become an amalgam of different systems that don't work well with one another: one system they added in recently asked me what business I wanted to work on today (I have never operated as a business nor designated myself a business in ~20yr of hosting with them), and asked me what options I wanted to use since I was on the free tier of hosting, which I wasn't and hadn't been for 20 years. THL is now hosted on AblePage foremostly because it offers free security certificates, backed up my entire godaddy hosting and transferred it to their site for free (after I signed up for paid hosting), and was recommended as a host by the dokuwiki system you're browsing thru now.

I want to ideally transfer all of my old DSB entries into this wiki format, but one hangup to that is my decision to keep the site fairly image-less, so I wouldn't be able to preserve the images from those entries.

I keep a list of links I visit daily to get the brain moving when at work (including Wordle and Connections, among 5-6 others), and recently added SWAP from the LA Times. I started playing on the LA Times when the NYT forced the Mini in go subscribers-only, because they had their own Mini. SWAP is like a different kind of Mini Crossword, except all of the letters are already on the board, and just need to be rearranged to their proper places within a certain number of moves. First played it today, and I'm adding it to my normal routine

I got my all-time high score in 10-pin bowling today, 226. My previous high score had been 220, for maybe 25+ years. Last Octoberish I restarted bowling regularly (1-2 times/wk) and although my first 2 games were weak (129 & 110) I somehow pulled out a 5-bagger from nowhere. Straight-shot bowling, no hook except on specific spares.

Found a neat game I like on POKI.COM (browser-based games you play with no install, of varying quality), called Quivershot. It's a fairly fast game to complete, maybe 30-45min, and reminds me a little of a top-down/angle-down Zelda, with hearts for life, a shop to upgrade weapons and stats, and spacebar works as a turbo button. Ad-supported with ad-watching perks. If you let the mouse cursor time out, it will auto-aim to the nearest-onscreen target. Once you beat it, you can restart fresh, or reload the page and play the last level over again. Most of the games on POKI I feel are real stinkers, but there are a few real gems I really like.

I've been experimenting with a yard-watering experiment, of letting 5-gal buckets with holes in bottom, drip straight down to minimize evap, with limited success, starting from a nearly completely dry yard. It may rain this weekend and mess up my progress, but it's been fun at least experimenting. The idea was to see how wide of a range a single watering point of water would impact the grass around it, and it did spread out from the original watering site quite a bit wider than the bucket diameter (and makes it so that watering can be metered out predictably, instead of unpredictable set-and-forget levels of usage) the grid of spots I used could be fine-tuned for later spots of dried patches.

Found a weird site called Reflect Orbital which offers 4 minutes of sunlight reflected from satellites, over a 5km diameter on earth, now taking signups for where to direct the light, with limited spots available, and planned delivery dates being fourth-quarter 2025. You have to fill out an application explaining where and why you need it. No known price that I can find.

I have been playing wogley for the last week or more, and I'm hooked on it as an idle incremental game to check on occasionally and less so to actually play with a lot of attention. You mine ores, use ores to upgrade drills, and break stone to find gems, smelt to make alloys for upgrades, and such. Made by the endlessly clever demonin.

Today is my 3-year work anniversary, working for my home city as a utilities-repairs dispatcher. It has been so weird to have a job I like so many facets of, after 25+ years as an adult hourly worker, and that I have so little critique of the wage amount. On this day-of, I got a new dress shirt with my particular ace-flag colors, got to drive alongside a freight train while out on errands and wave at the conductor, found a sneaky side-cap stash of store-brand root beer I love more than any other root beer as the shelf has been sold out for multiple trips, and bowled above my average.