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I’m still far from an expert, but my DIY abilities are growing with every project. My latest progression began with my bike: a simple disc brake repair, new grips, and a new luggage rack.

From there, it continued indoors. I faced a stubborn curtain rod on a difficult wall that was a mix of metal, concrete and porous plaster (we are living in a building from 1938). Today’s biggest challenge, however, was a completely rusted kitchen faucet that took three hours, lots of sweat, and a fair amount of stress.

But it got done. The real reward wasn’t just a new faucet; it was the confidence of knowing I can figure things out and get them done myself. And while I hope I don’t have to replace another faucet anytime soon, I know I’ll be ready when I do.

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It made me think of something I’d said here last month when discussing my pacific circuit.

Complicating the idea of my pacific circuit is that through either resilience or resignation, as my world shrinks due to the still-undiagnosed fatigue, I keep marking most days as having been “neutral” (my general target for overall state of mind) despite, for example, not having been to the zoo—a once weekly, then monthly, activity—since May and not having blogged—until right now—for two months, when those things were of a self-regulatory nature. It’s entirely possible that through such resilience or resignation I’d continue grading on this kind of curve when imprisoned in that room somewhere in New England, but as much as this dynamic makes me sad now it would only make me all that much sadder then.

What I’m stuck on in thinking about that bodymind tension is this question of resilience versus resignation when it comes to grading my days on this kind of curve. If I adjust my thinking and feeling to grade my days based upon the options of what’s currently being made available to me, doesn’t this suggest the disguising of an inevitable downward trend?

What if this sort of “grin and bear it” grading curve is a kind of masking, that thing autistics do that if maintained for too long and too deeply risks burnout. “Compensatory attempts are taxing,” I once quoted some researchers as saying, “need to be sustained over time, and are often unsuccessful, resulting in a cost to wellbeing.”

There was a Vice piece about resilience during the pandemic that I ended up separately citing here twice without realizing it. There’s a quote I used the first time worth bringing into the conversation here.

Resilience might sometimes look like grinning and bearing it. “But there’s times when resilience may look like crawling back into bed and crying,” Bedard-Gilligan said. “Feeling those emotions and processing through whatever it is that’s causing them. It may actually be the most adaptive thing you can do at that moment.” Bonnano coined the phrase “coping ugly” for the things we have to do in some situations to manage in the moment.

The challenge, however, comes in the calculus of which is more detrimental to your health: grinning and bearing it or “coping ugly”. You can’t crawl back into bed every single day.

Me, two years ago:

We have something of a botched view of resilience as being something we demonstrate through endurance rather than through recovery.

When I talked here about “grading on this kind of curve when imprisoned in that room somewhere in New England”, the reason why I see this as a fate akin to dying is that there’s be nothing in it but the enduring of it. There would be no hope of recovery, because the situation would never end, until, eventually and inevitably, I did.

Me, one and a half years ago:

The funny thing about to some extent reclaiming that mediocrity is that, as I’ve also discussed in therapy, whenever I’ve done any mood tracking, I’ve tended and trended toward weaving back and forth around a basic midline. In my original tracking app, I had this labelled “Meh”. Now that I’m tracking at the end of each day on my Apple Watch, I select “Neutral” more than anything else, and only fill out the succeeding screens with emotions or causes if the deviation is strong enough in one direction of another.

What I mean by funny here is that, as I said in therapy yesterday, I feel like if an outside, third party looked at my mood tracking they’d assume that we needed to do something get me above that midline. Whereas I think that maintaining that midline is my goal. Whenever I have an extended period (by which I mean, say, a week straight) of making “Slightly Pleasant” or even “Pleasant” on my watch, I know that one or another of the weeks that follow are going to dip the other way.

That, of course, averages out to put me squarely back at the midline overall, and I admit to some skepticism of anyone who claims that they are happy or would mark their days as “Pleasant” most of the time. I don’t look at my habitual midline as a drawback. I think I see it as part of what resilience I do have.

Me, one and a half years ago, quoting from Deb Chachra’s How Infrastructure Works:

Resilience isn’t efficient because it typically requires an upfront or ongoing investment of resources, in the form of time, money, energy, or cupboard space, in order to head off worse outcomes.

Again, though, mentally time traveling to that existential prison in western Massachusetts, were I to grade such a degradation of my autonomy on this curve, devoting these compensatory resources to convince my bodymind, somehow, that I’m on that middle path, what worse outcome, exactly, would I be heading off? The worse outcome would be here, would be my life, and I’d be grinning and bearing it for what reason? There would be no metaphorical cooler weather coming to restore my autonomy and aid my recovery. I’d just be dying, slowly, inside.

Early on in my blogging about having been diagnosed as autistic, I’d happened upon a thread I’ve followed intermittently ever since: the idea that autistic brains do not habituate. This complicates the entire question of resilience versus resignation.

(This, I believe, likely is the entire basis of autism: a sensorium dysphoria from too much getting in. It’s somewhat akin to the “intense world” theory, and monotropism is how our brains address it.)

No, I did not, in fact and inside, “get used to” the hotter summer days that kept me inside, artificially limiting my autonomy and frustrating my agency. What I realized yesterday is that these past months have completely fucking sucked, and I simply hadn’t been allowing myself to recognize just how tightly wound my entire nervous system has been the entire time.

It’s not that this realization brought an accompanying knowledge of a solution. Maybe I do have the grade the shitty times on that curve just in order to get through, and then, eventually, past them. Maybe that kind of what only can be called resignation itself is some fashion of resilience—but only when it’s known to be a transient and temporary thing.

At some point, of course, I knew, the heat would break, the days that are too warm for me to leave the house, frustratingly at increasingly lower temperatures than even just a few years ago, will give way to cooler weather and even overcast skies, and those built up tensions in body and mind can begin to unclench and dissolve.

So, yes: I’ve spent the summer grading my days on a curve. Most days were not, in fact, that middling, neutral “meh” that serves as the guiding star for my self-regulation. Yes: I grinned and bore it (without the grinning, because that’s not me), and pretended otherwise. Now I know, or think I know, that I did this, that I was capable of doing this, because eventually it would end, and I new that eventually it would end, and room could be made for recovery.

It’s just that this only works when I know, or at least when its presumptively true, that there will be a light at the end of the tunnel, even if I can’t actually see and confirm the existence of that light for months on end.

This won’t work, however, when the tunnel isn’t a tunnel, but a dead-end cave with no exit.

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Personally, I don’t write much Python and am not involved in the broader Python community. That said, I love how this documentary covers a lot of the human problems in tech and not just the technical history of Python as language. For example:

• How do you handle succession from a pivotal creator?
• How do you deal with poor representation?
• How do you fund and steer open projects?
• How do you build community?
• How do you handle the fallout of major version changes?

And honestly, all the stories around these topics as told from the perspective of Python feel like lessons to learn from.

Here are a few things that stood out to me.

Guido van Rossum, Creator of Python, Sounds Cool

The film interviews Drew Houston, Founder/CEO at Dropbox, because he hired Python’s creator Guido van Rossum for a stint.

This is what Drew had to say about his time working with Guido:

It’s hard for me to think of someone who has had more impact with lower ego [than Guido]

For tech, that’s saying something! Now that is a legacy if you ask me.

The Python Community Sounds Cool

Brett Cannon famously gave a talk at a Python conference where he said he “came for the language, but stayed for the community”. In the documentary they interview him and he adds:

The community is the true strength of Pyhon. It’s not just the language, it’s the people.

❤️

This flies in the face of the current era we’re in, where it’s the technology that matters. How it disrupts or displaces people is insignificant next to the fantastic capabilities it purports to wield.

But here’s this language surrounded by people who acknowledge that the community around the language is its true strength.

People are the true strength.

Let me call this out again, in case it’s not sinking in: Here’s a piece of technology where the people around it seem to acknowledge that the technology itself is only secondary to the people it was designed to serve.

How incongruous is that belief with so many other pieces of technology we’ve seen through the years?

What else do we have, if not each other? That’s something worth amplifying.

Mariatta, Python Core Developer, Sounds Cool

I absolutely loved the story of @mariatta@fosstodon.org. If you’re not gonna watch the documentary, at least watch the ~8 minutes of her story.

Watched it? Ok, here’s my quick summary:

• She loves to program, but everywhere she looks it’s men. At work. At conferences. On core teams.
• She hears about pyladies and wants to go to Pycon where she can meet them.
• She goes to Pycon and sees Guido van Rossum stand up and say he wants 2 core contributors to Python that are female.
• She thinks, “Oh that’s cool! I’m not good enough for that, but I bet they’ll find someone awesome.”
• The next year she goes to the conference and finds out they’re still looking for those 2 core contributors.
• She thinks “Why not me?” and fires off an email to Guido.

Here’s her recollection on composing that email:

I felt really scared. I didn’t feel like I deserved mentorship from Guido van Rossum. I really hesitated to send this email to him, but in the end I realized I want to try. This was a great opportunity for me. I hit the send button.

And later, her feelings on becoming the first female core contributor to Python:

When you don’t have role models you can relate to, you don’t believe you can do it.

❤️ Mad respect. I love her story. As Jessica McKellar says in the film, Mariatta’s is an inspiring story and “a vision of what is possible in other communities”.

Python Is Refreshing

I’ve spent years in “webdev” circles — and there are some great ones — but this Python documentary was, to me, a tall, refreshing glass of humanity.

Go Python!

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 Battery Powered Compressed Air

Over the weekend, I pulled out my TV stand and organized all my wiring. I also took some time to use compressed air on my gaming systems, which occurs less than I like, just because I hate buying compressed air. As I emptied the can into my Xbox Series X, I grabbed my phone to order another can from Amazon. That’s when I saw one of those battery powered air dusters for basically double the price of a can of compressed air. The reviews were much better than expected, so I figured what the heck, let’s see if it’s worth the fuss.

I’m happy to say it totally is! While maybe not as powerful initially than a typical can of compressed air, it definitely allows for a longer flow of air and is quite powerful. It was a great purchase, and it allowed me to really get the dust out of all of my electronics, portable A/C, and more. Heck, I even used it to dry a hose I cleaned out. We’ll see how long this $26 purchase lasts, but so far, I’ve definitely gotten a can or two of air out of it.

NFL Season Has Begun

It was kickoff weekend for the 2025-2026 NFL season, and I spent my Sunday parked in front of the TV for several hours. I wouldn’t say I’m a die-hard fan of any team, but I tend to root for the Steelers and the Lions, and then usually whoever is an underdog. Although, I’ve never really cared for Aaron Rogers, so it was a conflicting day rooting for him on Sunday (Although, I would have been fine if the Jets won, I feel like the Steelers did Justin Fields dirty last year).

Mary Tyler Moore

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been exploring a lot of 70s TV shows and movies. I feel like I’ve pretty much exhausted most of the pop-culture from the 80s and 90s, and since I wasn’t born in the 70s, it’s a fun decade to explore. It also helps that quite a bit of it mirrors today’s world.

When I was a kid, I used to watch the Mary Tyler Moore show on Nick at Night, but I hadn’t watched an episode in well over twenty-five years until last week. I decided to watch a couple of episodes on Hulu and wow… what an amazing show. It’s so good and usually gets at least one or two big chuckles out of me. So, now I’ve added Mary Tyler Moore alongside Taxi, Kung Fu, The Dukes of Hazzard, and WKRP to the list of 70’s era shows that I’m watching. I’m also mad crushing on Rhoda.

PlayStation Remote Play

A few months ago, my cat knocked over my bedroom TV. It would have survived if not for the Apple TV that was yanked off the TV stand and landed directly onto the screen. Since then, we’ve been down to one TV, and I usually concede the TV to my wife, and I use my iPad for movies or TV shows. However, when I want to game, I’ve been limited to my Switch.

Well, I decided to give PlayStation Remote Play another try. I wasn’t impressed a few years ago, so I was curious if it improved any. I’m happy to say, it has! It works so well! Within minutes, I was exploring the galaxy in No Man’s Sky on my phone (which I don’t recommend… the screen is way too small) but it’s nice to have a way to get a little gaming in and it makes me want a PlayStation Portal now.