We're returning to the Windy City, or The Second City, or whatever euphemism you want to give it. We're living like a mile from one of $WIFE_UNIT_NUMBER_ONE's good college friends and a couple miles from some other people. And, importantly, half a mile from the lake.

Work is... fine. We need to actually get something I work on to actually do something. Make the problems more well-formed. See if we can get AI in there.

I wouldn't object too much to reddit's API flip flop if:

1. they actually had a mobile app that works
2. they actually had moderation tools that work
3. more reasonable timeline after their flip

They claim they're going to try to allow the third party moderation tools without billing, but the way they've been managing accessibility apps is not giving much hope. And their history of actually shipping features. If they had a working app and working moderation tools, I'd just say, well, that's business. But moderation is, like, the whole thing of the forum. Well, whatever. Scoop is the future.

Still having bad air quality around here. Tons of haze. Finally bought an air purifier, should've had one before, since allergies are a real problem.

Played a bit of chess recently. The local scene is actually pretty active, and paradoxically the new location will be harder to play at as regularly. But still fine -- while weekly play options are fewer, I think there are more occasional options. Like here there's basically one guy who runs quick weekly tournaments and a couple different formats for longer one-day events maybe 6 times per year (and maybe 1 bigger all-weekend tournament). And tries to get occasional small events together on the weekend. And there's another guy who's trying to get weekly events going, too. In the new city, there are a lot more places that run a handful of events per year. There's a chess center that says they do weekly events (in the middle of the week, bleh, that's a tough lift), but looking at their events list, they don't get them done every week. They do have at least one longer monthly event, though.

I just finished reading The Sisters of Dorley, an as-yet incomplete serialized work. A young closeted transgender boy (he insists as this point on being called male and using "he" pronouns despite his internal identity as a woman for various reasons) had only one friend in the world, an older boy who disappeared suddenly. Some moderate amount of time after the friend disappeared, he ran into a woman who looks surprisingly like her missing friend. He then finds out there have been several other disappeared students over the years and somehow works out that they're all tied somehow to Dorley Hall, a secretive facility near the college's campus. He theorizes based on what he's seen that it's a place that helps trans women in difficult situations with their transitions. Anyway, he finds out that in a sense, he's quite wrong, but in another, somewhat correct. It's been fairly interesting, quite long, but it suffers from some of the problems of the medium: as a serialized work, it goes on and on and is in need of an editor to punch it into a more conventional series of novels. The serialization also makes it keep adding more and more stuff, characters, etc.

Wireless, at least on this computer, has been acting weird lately. Wired connections are fine, wifi on other devices seems fine. Basically, very frequently, it'll just drop connection for a minute or so. Very frustrating. Very unclear what's actually going wrong here. Could it be my configuration, the wifi dongle, what? Writing this out made me decide to switch out the wifi dongle and see if that fixes it. This one has less of an antenna but we'll see if it does better.