I almost forgot to write my weekly Ten Grats'… Such a shame… but honestly, I have been doing so much that I actually don't even know what to write about anymore…
Anyway, you can find all the other participants at the link-up… or choose to participate…
Ten Thing of Thankful #21
First—Sixers.
I am so sorry that I haven't yet read or commented on everyone's posts… but I will do it this week. I have been super busy resting this weekend. However, the Six Sentence blog hop gives one a reason to write every week, even if I personally feel that my creativity has been greatly affected by my other responsibilities.
Second—TToT.
This blog hop is a weird one—it makes you look at your week, and no matter how busy or hectic or horrendous it has been, you must find ten things to be grateful for. No matter how small or big… such an awesome way to either end or begin one’s week.
Third—Mechanical editing with a robot.
It seems lately that I am making more and more typos; I myself have set up my ChatGPT to actually assist me in my editing process… because I have found that it interferes with my drafting process less than, say, Grammarly, which honestly gets on my nerves most of the time…
ChatGPT I can tell exactly what and how I want it to do with the mechanical edits… I don't let it change my wording; however, it does spit out the typo and punctuation check at me and gives me some suggestions separately…
Given how many school works I write, it is of tremendous help… of course, you have to manually recheck, but it does make the process a bit faster.
Fourth—.git Version Control.
I use Obsidian to draft for my blog, and I also write all of my school works and lecture/study notes on there. And honestly, after losing my local version history twice because of a stupid bug, I can rest assured that if someone ever asks for the version history of a project I have written for school or anything, I have it.
It is something that, as an IT person, I was very aware of beforehand too, but I never used it for writing. Why… I don't know… it is just so simple to set up and actually see or revert changes that I am feeling like a dummy for not using it earlier for my writing process…
Basically, I can rewrite my thing 1,000 times, decide that I have butchered it, and grab the 400th version, lol… or… as I have it commit every 5 minutes, you can see how my pieces come to life… though it only does this once I am inactive, so in reality, it is not always after every few minutes. If I write for 10 minutes straight and then go on a pause, the interval is 12 minutes, but it is okay… because I usually edit the next day…
Fifth—Keeping more than one kernel.
I use Linux, Fedora to be specific… Simplistically… the kernel is basically the dude in the middle of your software and hardware that tells the hardware what the actual fuck the software wants from it… and a few other things… without going too deep into it…
… the other day I had a huge update with all the drivers, kernel, and everything… after which I had a black screen. After inspecting the logs and forums, I decided to wait for a fix and just switch to an earlier version of said middleman on boot… which shows that my—stupid paranoia, as people tell me—habit of keeping at least 5 of them, and one known to be working for sure, paid off…
And it was a widespread issue with my hardware… AMD 6000 series CPUs with integrated graphics, to be exact… and I do have hybrid graphics with a 6900HS CPU and an NVIDIA 3070 Ti GPU…
Sixth—I have not yet been boycotted for my usage of AI.
I have been very open about the ways I do use AI in my workflow and that human art should remain as human as possible. Also, my views may differ from those of most writers and artists due to my career choice, where we learn to use it professionally and ethically and to actually understand when it spits out utter shite—which actually is the difference...
However, one of my favorite artists is under public scrutiny because their label worked with a studio that uses AI… strictly for promotional things, by the way. Which I actually feel very sad about because I, too, use automated SEO tools and GenAI for meta descriptions for my site that allow me to keep writing. Same with mechanical edits—I see nothing bad in that because this allows me to put my energy into actually creating the story or poem and fixing the flow and such…
And that promotional tool idea was actually quite cool. Perhaps if a human checked and perhaps edited the quotes the daily TAROT-style card—to show you your ‘song of the day’—spat out, it would have been more effective… because the idea is actually kinda cool, having that driving people back to your songs, with all the tour info in one place, plus the AR thing…
Seventh—I had time to rest this weekend.
I spent it cleaning my home, doing laundry, cooking, drinking beer, and spending time with my boyfriend… to me, it was resting…
Eighth—Visited my mother.
On Saturday, my boyfriend wanted to take me to a SPA, but I felt way too lazy to actually go, so… he took me out to have breakfast and then suggested taking the one-hour-plus drive to my mum's place instead… my mother was so happy, and he also decided to stay the night, so we grilled and watched a movie in the evening… I am happy because my mother actually adores this man a lot, and he doesn't visit with me often due to his schedule…
We also went mushroom picking with mummy, and now I have some mushrooms prepped for the winter…
Ninth—Music.
Am listening to it now…
Tenth—Some labs were cancelled for the week.
It means no travelling to school until Wednesday evening, which means I have more time to do all the labs and studying from home, haha. Tomorrow I will lock in and do some serious coding lol…
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13 Comments
A great list of thankful, Reelika! I can especially relate to music and having time to rest.
You’re right about keeping more than one Linux kernel. The fact that the black screen was because of the newer kernel, and that you had a last working version, is great. Me too, I use version control on my projects to keep track of what’s happening. I have an automated workflow that makes a new release for me once I push one tag to a commit. I usually make a commit, called “fin – Finalized changelogs”, and make a tag out of it, then push it.
Here’s one example: https://github.com/Aptivi/Terminaux/commit/66a428e7284f3e4ec4d59385df3a9942be7ce4f7
And of course, I can relate to both #1 and #2.
Oh this is so cool. And I love the way it shows the version diffs… And I automated it through Obsidian to commit every few minutes and then push after 5-10 to see incremental changes… Really awesome.
rest is good.
(funny, though, the critical difference between ‘rest to recharge’ and ‘rest to procrastinate’ I, for one, am (use Samuel Jackson voice from Pulp Fiction ‘foot massage’ scene) the procrastinating Master! lol)
serially, many of us (in Sixville) find we need to play catch up on commentationing on the week’s new batch. The thing about the ‘real’ world, is that it is probably as important as the virtual one.;]
Your Grat (on participating in the TToT) is right on the money. It is beneficial and fun. And, we get to take from others (in their contributions) encouragement and cautionary tales (not necessarily in the same post.
glad you’re with us on this section of the Road*
*great book ‘Roadmarks’ by Roger Zelazny
I procrastinate a lot too… I call that doing side quests haha. And yes the grats’ are so darn beneficial… Lovely to be here.
A spontaneous visit home is a good thing. Your tech stuff is beyond me, but it sounds fascinating. It seems you keep a backup of something and I get this, I keep backups of my backups on some things.
You have plenty going on in your life, if you don’t get around to commenting on every Six or Thankful, it’s okay. Everyone has busy times.
I try to go around and give back as much as I can because I enjoy reading and socialising with all the other bloggers too…
However I may be later than usual.
The tech stuff is super fascinating and am often stuck on my computer now…
And yes the visit was awesome…
Visiting a close relative is a good idea. The bonus was the gathering of mushrooms. Wish you a good week ahead.
Thank you so much and yes… Mushrooms were a bonus because I got to go and spend time with my mummy… Am absolutely my mummy’s little girl…
I just started to use Grammarly. I can see how it can get on one’s nerves. I am glad to hear you were able to visit your mother. My wife loves it when our daughters visit.
Yeah, my problem with grammarly and other similar tools is that I want to explicitly tell it how I want it to function lol… Not enough settings for tweaking, at least not when I was using it… And if I wanted it to change my sentence completely to say… Make it more professional or more proper… I would not be writing…
Thank you for the comment and it does seem that mums love when their kids visit… I loved visiting too.
I love reading about your studies. Absolutely fascinating. I hope your week is a joy and endlessly productive.
Question: Why doesn’t the site keep/save my name/email address/website info?
Oh my. Because I have been lazy about it and using the Divi module for comments, which actually had an issue with the option to save them before. But it should work now, and I should probably switch it back… I will do it soon… I have to first do my homework…
Thank you for reminding me. It currently only remembers mine haha 😂 so I never noticed…
So I tested it out, and there is a small checkbox under the comment form. While it will not keep you logged in like on Blogspot and WordPress.com sites, where you comment under the same user every time, it will remember your credentials when you start commenting so you should not have to copy/paste all the time.
It at least worked for me in two different browsers.