Jess with a "J"

Long screenshot of a digital button interface as viewed on a phone, including a full recreation of a remote control, and a home in six rooms or area based zones with individual buttons for different lights.

A digital calendar interface with a clock, a daily weather forecast, a weekly weather forecast, and calendar entries for a whole month

The home assistant now runs all but two of the lights in the house, the living room TV, and has an integrated household calendar that pulls from the multiple calendar sources everyone uses to display a 'household calendar' on an otherwise uselessly slow ancient tablet we've printed a wall mount for

For my local friends;

If you have tech you're replacing or upgrading, consider me over an e-waste disposal service. I will take it, I will put it to use, and it won't go into a landfill.

Yes, even broken things. Even things that 'won't update' to run the latest stuff.

Give it to me.

Half of a boule of home made bread, as an from above. There are decorative diagonal cuts in the top surface of it

Home made bread, as viewed from the side to display the contrast between the crust and the crumb. It is a decent bread.

Was visiting friends a couple weeks ago and taught one of them how to make bread from scratch. It was a success.

A stack of small plastic food containers which hold lumps of dirty fat collected from cooking

A slow cooker with the lid up, containing mostly melted, off-white fat collected from cooking which is in the first stage of being rendered into clean, pure fat

Rendering down fat to make soap in March.

A basic chemistry glass setup for simple distillation, on a desk. The wall above it has a metal sign hanging that reads: "adult supervision required"

More alchemy work. This is a spagyric of St John's Wort in progress - a plant that I make a point to always keep products prepared from in my house.

A photo of a shelf mounted close to the ceiling. On top of it is a router, and mounted underneath is a RaspberryPi low power computer displaying a server screen. Held up beneath that is a tablet with a dashboard for smart home controls. The entire setup is for Home Assistant, which is an open source smart home controller that can be hosted yourself, requiring no internet access.

Finally got my shit together enough to start converting our smart home setup away from Amazon to Home Assistant. I'm excited that we'll still be able to control all our stuff without relying on internet access or consenting to excessive privacy invasion. #homeAssistant #smarthome #selfHosting

Inkscape for vectors, GIMP for raster. Both are open source and free for use.

Exhausting us until we give in serves their goals. Make peace for yourself wherever you can find it <3

If your last name on your identification and voter registration doesn't match the last name on your birth certificate, get that shit updated.

A name change or marriage certificate probably isn't going to cut it when voting comes around this year.

When I arrived, she was lamenting that she thinks she's getting dementia.

When I left, she was grateful that I had time to help her set up her telescope on the back porch so she and her husband could try looking at the stars tonight.

My day job is as a massage therapist. I do outcall work, which means I go to people in their own homes.

Today my client was a woman in her 60s, with several spine surgeries and a TBI in her history.

Yes, an excellent start to a multi- stage process!

Yes, this is just heat-assisted distillation rather than relying on passive pressure differential to get water evaporating and condensing. The petals themselves smelled bleh after this process - most of that ended up in the water!

I can't repeat here what I wrote to earn such praise, but trust me. It was terrifyingly poetic.

Today I received what may be my favorite compliment of the past many years of my life:

"You write in such a way that would terrify a therapist but thrill a poet."

This is the energy I strive to carry forward into the future.

Gotta extract the first of the three principals from all these rose petals and hips.

It's Alchemy hours all up in my [not so] secret laboratory.

Ah, I must be quite fortunate then. Where I get the canisters, I can return them for a deposit that makes a replacement exceptionally affordable compared to the price of buying carbonated water.

A bottle of mango pineapple vodka, sitting beside a compact machine for carbonating your own water at home

Remember, fellow adults: being thrifty doesn't require you to be boring.

Make your own hard seltzer at home.

Time to start focusing on format and layout edits for the rulebooks and supplemental documents.

I keep getting suggestions to use sidebars. I hate sidebars. I hate it when chunks of text are pulled verbatim out of context and put in little boxes. It breaks up the flow of reading so much.

Mostly cattle, lol

I've been building my system with this baked right in. All of the advanced mechanics are blinded for players on the 'use' side, but familiar to interact with on the 'receiving' end. They don't have to understand how it's happening in order to know what has happened.

Follow-up clarification: the entire series is just one dude. Just one VA. Amazing.

Three days shy of a year later, I've finished a final draft of the Rulebook for the ttrpg/crpg I've been writing.

It's beautiful.

Just listened through Deviser.
Fucking incredible. A+ sci-fi horror audio drama. I can't recommend it, because the psych horror is big, but I can absolutely rave about how amazing it is for people who enjoy horror.

On the Absence of Idols - “There is a very strong and very ancient emotion that is rarely mentioned or recognized: it is the anguish we feel for the absence of idols. If the eye has no image on which to rest, if there is nothi...

"There is something beautiful and terrible about symbols and metaphors because they are essentially us without ourselves."

gettherapybirmingham.com/16896-2/

Malevolent.

Amazing. The soundscaping is simple and compelling, and the VAs for the two main characters are *chefs kiss*

birthday activities:
gluten free pastries
a new game
coloring my hair

I should really be put in charge of advertising. Anything, really.