It’s been a long time, partially because I ended up with my blogging software in a state where I didn’t feel like interacting with it, so I switched over to Hugo and such, and now I’m gonna try to get back in the habit of posting things here. Where was I? Well, mostly I was on tumblr, but then they performed the Cartesian product of all acrobatic maneuvers and all sharks, so now I’m not.
A lot has happened. I was running a blog on tumblr with an open askbox, which meant that anyone could send me messages, possibly anonymously. And I have a sort of weird blind spot – I tend not to think about why someone is asking a question. If you give me a question, I’ll try to answer it. Maybe I’ll be wrong. Maybe I’ll be rude, or it’s not my place to answer it, but these factors don’t weigh as much as “this is a question and I can think about it”. Well, this produced some interesting stuff, a lot of it politics, but then someone happened to write in to ask whether the way their parents treated them was okay. (It wasn’t.) And this turned into a sort of thing; people would write in with things that were happening to them, and ask whether these things were okay.
Thing I learned: If a teenager asks you whether what their parents are doing is abusive, it’s probably bad. If nothing’s wrong, they aren’t even gonna think of it. If something’s straightforwardly wrong, they’re not gonna have to ask. So what’s left? Severe emotional abuse that makes them unsure whether there’s anything wrong. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can make me think I deserved it.
One of the people who wrote in had parents who took the door off his bedroom. Setting a new personal best in “unanticipated outcomes”, we eventually did manage to solve the problem; he no longer has shitty parents, because we adopted him. (The bioparents are still, so far as I can tell, really awful and deeply and terrifyingly incompetent.)
I’m still programming, currently mostly working in Go, but I use a bunch of other languages. I still follow stuff about C, even though I’m not as active in it. I have some cool research-ish work and some cool projects. Stuff continues happening, some of it is good.