Man it's almost been a month since I last updated. Feels like a long time, feels like I got so little done, all that regular jazz. Just more days scratched off, living in this new cyberpunk dystopia. Apparently in Portland they're just grabbing protesters off the street into unmarked cars to go God knows where.

In other news the Chinese government is sending Uighur blindfolded into train cars to go to concentration camps.

I've been having a little more stress at work from just getting more cases to handle and it isn't helping that for some reason people at the office want to talk about "all of this BLM noise" in the US and give these whatabout-isms about slavery in other countries throughout history, "what the violence statistics REALLY say", etc. I've gotten pretty used to the sense of utter powerlessness, after all I've felt it pretty much my whole like. My opinion on things matters very little to most people and even if I get a good point in after preparing in advanced for these "political discussions" at the office, it's usually forgotten. Why let facts ruin a perfectly good narrative. Over the course of the last few years, I've seen that my pushback to outright climate change denial from my co-workers hasn't changed their minds at all, they have just shifted from "climate change is due to solar flares", something that is easy to debunk, to "well we can't do anything about climate change anyway so it's probably not that bad".

I clearly remember a time a few years ago when a co-worker had claimed that an arrest of a cartel boss from Mexico led to a seizure of assets that are "going to go build the wall, Trump was right after all!". Two years later, no wall. But who cares anymore, right?

I've had this project going on for some time to shift my mindset from trying to influence people's opinions, which I can almost never do, to just trying to develop technical skills. At least in that way I can do something positive with my existence. Over the past few months I have been able to solve technical problems people have been having and that has given me a sense of accomplishment.

This month I got all of the stuff that the American Cryptogram Association sent me a few months ago. Man the USPS is dying, everything I have ordered that went through them took over two months to get here. Now I have my membership card and a few issues of their journal. I've been cracking some of the easier aristocrat ciphers to get a better intuitive understanding of how encrypted text looks like. It has the same appeal to me as crossword puzzles. It just takes time to crack them and keeps your mind sharp.

Otherwise I've been doing some technical projects whenever I don't fall asleep immediately after getting home. I've been biking every day to work and I'm noticing my physical well-being has greatly improved. I find to totally baffling and funny that I can understand that I need regular exercise to make myself feel better but I will never go out and exercise on my own. The few times I went to the gym were oppressive and simply dull experiences. How people flock into those places on a nearly daily basis fills my mind with dread.

I was thinking of writing a guide about my current technical project, learning Assembly for ARM chips, as a way to better document my progress. This is something I've wanted to do for years and attempt every year but I drop it once I get stuck so I end up having to start from the beginning every time. At least with a website or something I would be able to catch up with what I did. It would also give me a feeling of actually accomplishing something. A lot of the time my projects just end up being, like Minecraft, things only I ever see or appreciate. It would be good to change that.