It has been one fucking hell of a month, and I am trying to remind myself of that so I stop collapsing in despair over how useless I am.

First, the weather: all through March it did the thing March in Wisconsin is known to do, going from nearly 70 degrees and gorgeous to fucking blizzards with no regard for things like "astronomical spring." I am, in fact, a houseplant with more complicated emotions, and my apartment gets very little natural light, and I am well known for finding the outdoors inconvenient at the best of times, so I have unsurprisingly been wilting.

Speaking of which, I finally turned down my lease renewal to move to a new place. I don't hate this place, and the increase is a lot but not technically more than I can afford, but it is on the opposite side of town from my friend (...I keep saying friends but I do only have one person I see regularly) and everywhere I want to go, and more importantly, it gets no natural light. Like, at all. It's incredibly depressing.

I did find a place that sounded too good to be true - $400 cheaper rent, the second floor of an old house (I love living in old houses, okay), within two blocks of the queer bookstore and no pet rent. And then I ran into the clause in the lease where the landlord can give you ten days to get rid of any pet they deem to be disruptive and I decided I'd better ask what "disruptive" meant. Turns out "likes to meow to let me know where she is" is too disruptive and also I'm an inconsiderate asshole for even looking at the apartment with a cat like that, so okay, too good to be true after all. I've settled on a place that's more expensive and a little further away (although still less than two miles and an easy bike away from the queer bookstore) but that I used to long to live in the last time I lived in Madison, more than a decade ago, when this complex was owned by a shitty landlord. So I'm feeling optimistic there, at least.

The more I think about it, the more I think I'd like to stop using the second bedroom as an "office" and start using it as a dedicated craft room. I don't have the kind of job or the kind of personality where sitting in one room for eight hours a day is productive, so the office winds up being both "the place I have to drag myself to first thing in the morning" and "the place where my computer and most of my toys are," which is not a fun combination. At the same time I'm feeling more and more overwhelmed sometimes by how much I'm relying on screens to occupy enough brain space to keep me from going insane; I'd love to go back to having one day a week where I just don't look at screens, although that sounds terrifying, and having a room with no computers in it would help. (I mean yes, my bedroom doesn't have any computers in it, unless you count the Chromecast, but I've gotten pretty good at the whole "the bedroom is for sleeping" sleep hygiene thing, and I don't want to break that down entirely.) So I'm doing my floorplan fiddling with that in mind: Craft room, maybe study, but not office.

(I'd also kind of like to replace my computer desk with a sit-stand desk and I'm really liking the idea of using something like that in the living room for a variety of purposes, but I haven't convinced myself enough yet to pull the trigger on the $800 purchase, so.)

At least I was doing that until yesterday when my boss sprang on us that we've all been reclassified as non-exempt, which technically is fine (we're support, but we're not the kind of support who can do anything useful when enough of the system goes down to qualify as an emergency) except this is the latest in a long series of decisions that seem determined to turn us into call center support, which is 1) not what I was hired to do, 2) not a job I would apply for today, and 3) not a job I would accept if offered. So job-hunting again, only this time the tech industry is in an even worse place than it was the last time a job drove me to madness, so no quitting without something else lined up.

In between all of this my parents moved out of my childhood home, FINALLY, and the week after I went down to visit them my cat got sick. Like, call the emergency vet at 11:30pm sick. (The emergency vet did not think she needed to go to an ER, and they were right, so that's a relief, but god.) Around $1,000 and a week later, it appears that she had an attack of IBD brought on by a change of food followed by the stress of me leaving her alone for ONE NIGHT. This is throwing a serious wrench into my plans to travel for ArCon in June, although at least by then I'll be close enough to have someone she knows who can look in on her a couple of times. And we will be sticking with the food that does not cause her intestinal distress, even if she doesn't seem to like it all that much. Sorry, hon, we all have to make sacrifices.

Anyway as I said on twitter, I really think there ought to be some kind of cosmic law where at least one of the trio of job, home, and health of your household should have to be stable at once, this is Too Much.

I've been binge-watching horror movies again as a way to distract my brain from being horrible, so it's time for a recap of some of the more memorable ones I've seen in the past couple of weeks.

Night Swim

This movie has such Stephen King vibes, between the haunted swimming pool, the middle-class family with working-class roots, the fact that the main character is a baseball player fercrissakes. The side character who's a racist stereotype, albeit not the most offensive racist stereotype she could be; the way it alllllmost has something to say about learning to live with a disability but chickens out at the end. All of which is to say that how you feel about this movie will depend entirely on how you feel about early 90s Stephen King adaptations: if you have enjoyed not just Misery and Children of the Corn but Christine and The Running Man, you'll probably have as much fun with this as I did. It's not great but it made me feel like I was a thirteen year old renting the scariest movies the clerk would let me get away with for a summer weekend.

Noroi: The Curse

This was one of those movies I knew was going to be so much my jam that I put off watching it for a long time and fortunately I was right and it was terrific. I love a good mockumentary and this one was great, just the right degree of cheesy shock editing, lots of creepiness, and nothing that ever felt out of bounds for found footage (which, I have realized, is much easier to do with mockumentary than with Blair Witch-style found footage, which is probably why I prefer the former to the latter). (I've been on a found footage kick lately, by which I mean for the past year somehow.)

Wilderness

One of my other favorite subgenres of horror is "people lost in the wilderness," so naturally this one cropped up several times, but I'd put off watching it because it didn't seem to be exactly what I prefer (more on the accidental/animal attack side of disaster than the Most Dangerous Game side). I was right, but it was enjoyable anyway - kind of a spinoff of the concept of Lord of the Flies, a group of boys from a youth detention centre in England are taken out for a weekend of camping after they've bullied one boy into killing himself (it's implied they're all city kids so this is a punishment); shit goes haywire. One of those British movies filmed on tape so it looks much, much older than 2006, and featuring Sean Pertwee as the detention officer! (I love a surprise Pertwee.)

Infinity Pool

I remember seeing trailers for this on YouTube and being mildly offended that they were running a three-minute trailer as a YouTube ad, so even though it looked interesting I was trying not to be interested. This was pretty solid: not groundbreaking, but a good use of the doppelganger trope, a good use of obnoxious entitled rich people, and plenty of identity horror that edges into body horror with how graphic some of the violence gets. Good call on the totally fictional southeast Asian island nation (although it would have to be, given the mechanism the movie hinges on). (I'd go into more detail but actually having the mechanism be a total surprise did a lot for the pacing of the first half, and this is a long movie, so I'd hate to deprive you of that.)

The Bay

Another high-quality mockumentary, this one about an environmental disaster that manifests as a truly disgusting plague and also features what has turned out to be the most accurate depiction of how the government handles a plague that I've seen in a movie. It's essentially Jaws with parasites, complete with a mayor you can't wait to see get eaten. There's the full range of horror in this one: the creepy abandoned hospital with the one doctor's increasingly frantic calls to the CDC; the chaos of mass panic in the middle of a public event; body horror from the parasites; psychological horror from the subplot with the cops (which...damn, that is going to live with me for a while). Strong recommendation, I'm really not sure why this one is so obscure.

Would You Rather

Yeah, yeah, look I was browsing Tubi and I wanted something mindless. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this, actually; 90% of that is probably down to Jeffrey Combs having the time of his life as Discount Jigsaw. The acting overall is surprisingly good for this genre of early 2010s horror, actually; I also enjoyed all the main characters and was genuinely disappointed to lose everyone who died after the first forty minutes. The ending is pointlessly mean and not even in a way that's designed to maximize guilt, which is kind of a letdown after an entire movie that is 100% about making people do horrible things to themselves and other people.

....I've made the mistake of working backwards again, and now I've gotten to a good stretch, so I'll leave off there. This feels like a pretty poor return on investment for how many movies I've watched in the past two weeks, but to be fair most of those were whatever Tubi decided to autoplay, which is...certainly a selection.

Look. I'm not going to blame it all on Google shutting down Google Play Music, a lot of other things happened in 2020, but rounding out the year by losing that easy, streamlined access to my music collection (a messy, massive thing built over decades, starting with my very first CD ripper and Napster) did not help my mental health. And I've been struggling to find a replacement ever since.

Play Music was so simple: my entire music collection, with recently played or newly added items at the top, easy playlist creation, and a convenient "I dunno, just shuffle everything" button. And once that went away, it was weirdly difficult to find a drop-in replacement. WinAmp hasn't been good software in a decade or more, and just when I started to get MusicBee doing 90% of what I wanted it to (still couldn't play from my phone, but I was managing with streaming from my computer to my speakers) I switched to Linux and had to start all over again.

You think the Windows music player ecosystem is unfortunate? Jesus christ you should see what it looks like on Linux. I cannot find a single player that can handle a large library, playlists, and shuffle-all, and also looks like it was developed sometime in this millennium. I was settling for Clementine for a while; although old, it's pretty full-featured and it worked. I couldn't stream to my Google Home speakers, but I could have music while I worked, and that covered me 90% of the time. Sure, I had to switch back to my personal computer from my work computer just to pause or change tracks, but I managed.

At least, I thought I was managing. See, I couldn't find anything that worked comfortably from my phone, which is one of the reasons I even got a goddamn smartphone in the first place. Playing music on your phone is so seamless; it's just there. But I refuse to pay for a music streaming service to listen to music I already paid for, and besides, sometimes I like to be able to do things without needing internet access. So I just...didn't listen to music as often. Always in the car, unless I was listening to a podcast, but hardly at all just hanging around at home. And since I started working from home, that's basically all the time.

Well, it turns out the magic solution has existed all this time, it's just weirdly opaque and hidden behind the fact that technically it's designed for hardware that isn't being manufactured any more. Yes, it's the Logictech Media Server, an open-source continuation of Logitech's verison of Google Play Music (that, let's face it, Google probably ripped off in the first place) for their now-defunct Squeezebox smart speakers.

Now, the problem with this is similar to the problem I had trying to figure out mpd, which is apparently what everyone uses on Linux: it's a multi-part system, and as such the core piece works incredibly well and is very well supported but any given client is probably a one-person project and is liable to be dropped at any moment. Fortunately the LMS has its own client built in, in the form of a web player, and with a mobile-friendly skin it's perfectly useable on my phone.

...actually "perfectly useable" is damning with faint praise; I can see my playlist, I can browse my whole library, I can save and edit playlists, I can pull up the song that's currently playing and add it to a playlist, I can hit "shuffle all and don't stop until I turn it off," I can do everything I used to do on Google Play Music. And I can do it all with my own music collection, on my own computer, and the only internet connection I require is a functional router to connect to the local network. Add in the Chromecast bridge plugin and I can play it all on my Google Home speakers. I'm currently listening to "Beauty Mark" from Rufus Wainwright's self-titled album, an artist I'd forgotten existed but am delighted to be reminded of.

Plus, it all integrates with Home Assistant. I could start playing music to wake myself up in the morning again! I used to do this every day until Google Play Music broke and I couldn't figure out a replacement. God. The possibilities.

Being open source, there are a zillion plugins available; I can't wait to start playing with dynamic playlists so I can generate mood-based playlists again (wake-up music doesn't do me a lot of good if shuffle-all decides it's an Enya day). And this makes the prospect of replacing those Google Home speakers much more plausible; there's a Raspberry Pi solution that already exists, and you just plug it into any working speaker.

I'm still pissed as hell it took me three full years to find a replacement for something that was such a fundamental part of the scaffolding of my daily life (and mental health) but I am overjoyed that at least it's working now. And yes, I have learned my lesson about allowing proprietary tech to become such a key piece of my life. (Now it's all open-source and self-hosted stuff, so I have no one to blame but myself if it goes down...)