Peak pittsburgh fall experience: eating a chicken parm I ordered from a neighborhood pizza/hoagie place while walking home, the leaves wet on the ground, the weather mild and gray.

Finished a re-read of Piranesi, which I first read back in april of 2021. I'm not sure if the villains of the story really work for me --- they seem a bit cartoonish at points --- but that's almost the only thing that doesn't feel like it holds up for me. I really enjoyed it otherwise. The fundamental vibe of the book really resonates with me somehow. Something about the relationship between the main character and the place he finds himself in is, in its own way, magical. Clarke is just the right amount of restrained in not saying too much about it.

Some progress at work. Finished off some leftover chicken for lunch.

I spent a number of years on livejournal. It was nice, for a while: a relatively low-friction interface, a nice community of people, some of which I knew from "real life" (back when "real life" and "the internet" weren't as indistinguishable) and some of which I met thanks to lj.

Around the mid-2010s, I migrated my journaling per se to a private text file, and my online social activity mostly to twitter. I tried dreamwidth, but it didn't really take. I was, for better or worse, part of a larger exodus: the community as I knew it on lj didn't ever really reconsistute itself. The set of people I interacted with on twitter certainly overlapped with erstwhile lj folks, but the feeling wasn't quite the same. It has been interesting in its own way. So it goes.

No matter how many "what are you whining about, it's always been a hellsite and isn't realistically going to get much worse" takes I read, I can't help but feel like history is, if not repeating itself, at least rhyming at the moment. I tried mastodon. Like dreamwidth, on a surface level it's an almost acceptable simulacrum of the thing I think I want to wean myself off of, but I'm not sure it's really going to take.