Harper Ray

The Friday Five for 21 May 2026 in thefridayfive

1. How long to you hope to live (to what age)?

I hope to live long enough to see my children into adulthood, at least until age 70.

2. Based on the lifespans of your grandparents and/or great-grandparents, what is your realistic lifespan?

If access to food, sanitation and medical care remains similar, I'll probably live until my 90s. I had a life shortening heart issue fixed two years ago. Per my surgeon it is a genetic issue and advised if I had siblings and/or children that they get screened regularly. I have some family who died really young seemingly out of nowhere in their late 40s / early 50s but given this was 50+ years ago, it was less uncommon for people to die younger and there is no way medical screening at the time would have caught it.

3. What is the average lifespan of people in your country?

Average life span in the United States is around 79 years.

4. At what age do you plan to retire (or did you retire)?

LOL, I fully expect not to be able to retire in this capitalist hellscape, working until my body just gives out. I am saving for retirement expecting social security to no longer exist, but even if it does it never pays enough to support rent and groceries at current rates.

5. What are your plans for retirement?

If I am able to retire, spending more time exploring the world on my own two feet. Maybe an artistic hobby like drawing or painting since these are skills I've let lapse and don't have the patience currently to relearn. Maybe learning an instrument.

Meatsuit

Allergies have been winning all week. Meds have been enough to get barely functional but by the time the end of the day runs around the symptoms return. All of us here have had rotating stay at home days when the symptoms became too much. I'm feeling pretty borderline about a sick day tomorrow.

Technology

I've been experimenting with the gaming PC trying to tease some additional uses out of the behemoth I made in 2023. Storage is so damn expensive now so I'm trying to make best use of what I have. I have two NVME drives, 1TB for OS/applications, 1.5TB for games and misc storage, then three 1TB WD Red SSDs from a home NAS project. The motherboard supports three NVME and four SATA but the case only has room for three SATA. I've been cleaning up and shifting around things so I can make the three 1TB drives a RAID5 array for both redundancy and to speed up reads for Jellyfin. After I get this done, I have a setup I want to test for a local LLM using Ollama to be able to query anonymized financial data. They don't have a spare machine with a big enough GPU for me to run tests at work currently, but the gaming computer can handle small to mid-size models depending on how much storage I have left after this shuffle. Like, this stuff isn't going away so I need to learn what I can.

Books

I finished Nona The Ninth on Monday. You got God's backstory, cow facts, and more fascinating characters. Each one had a story and I didn't guess the ending until about 80% of the way through, but even then I wasn't totally certain. It's completely unhinged storytelling and confusing, even frustrating at times. But, I'm looking forward to Alecto The Ninth when it comes out which is the last book in the series. Also, my copies of Dungeon Crawler Carl books #2 and #3 came in the mail yesterday! *excited*

From The Friday Five for 10 April 2026 in thefridayfive

1. What was the last book you read (or are currently reading)?

I just finished The Z Word by Lindsay King-Miller. This one was definitely an entertaining read if you enjoy sexy queer drama in a horror setting. I enjoyed it overall, however I did feel the ending was a bit of a letdown.

I started Nona The Ninth by Tamsyn Muir today. The first two books in this series, Gideon the Ninth and Harrow the Ninth were both dark and intense fantasies that I still think about. This series also has a fair number of negative reviews, that these books are too slow, complicated, and that the author is too detailed at times. That's a fair criticism. When I got to Harrow the Ninth I was contemplating giving up on it until about 3/4 of the way through and all the separate threads clicked in the most delicious way. It was the gothic space adventure with enemies-to-lovers lesbian romance that I didn't know I needed.

2. What was the last movie you watched?

We recently re-watched The Sandlot and I noticed many things in that movie I didn't as a kid. Like how nobody makes a fuss about a black kid hanging around a bunch of white kids and swimming in a pool. I'm not sure how I feel about the omission of hugely racist attitudes by white people in that era. I understand it was a kids movie and of course there was an element of fantasy with the dog. That said, it didn't age as horribly as I thought it would.

3. What television series are you currently watching?

I'm slowly rewatching Star Trek The Original Series with my partner. I think we just started season 2.

4. What are some of your favorite blogs or communities online?

Beehaw is small but most of the people I've interacted with have been enjoyable. Lemmy.zip is bigger but federates with larger Lemmy instances. Privacy Guides Forum is where I keep up with tech and privacy happenings.

5. What social media do you belong to and check often?

I am on DW and I still have Discord, but I am using it less and less. I created a Neocities account but haven't done anything with it yet.

Saturday

J and I ventured into the city, had lunch and went a plant nursery that catered more to commercial customers but was open to the public on weekends. I got starts for oregano, parsley, rosemary and two heirloom tomato plants the owner said did well in this zone. Then we got bubble tea and drove home. J was fighting a migraine and went to lay down and I went outside get my starts in some dirt and move some potted pepper plants to the ground.

I have clay soil that is ridiculously hard to work with in my area. Every time I plant something I augment it with sand and compost to hopefully (eventually) make it easier to work with. It has been a couple weeks since it last rained and it was rock hard. I practically had to chisel the dirt to get my starts planted. I ended up getting overheated and had to stop, but I got the most critical things done.

J wanted to watch Perfume: The Story of a Murderer because "I saw it in college and remembered it being good". 30 minutes into the movie I had to give it a hard veto which I've never done before with him. I don't even want to write it out, but it was when the main character murders for the first time. It was viscerally disturbing and I wanted to throw up. I do watch horror movies with J sometimes but interestingly this was not a horror film.

Instead we ended up watching Sneakers which was far more enjoyable.

Sunday

I ended up having nightmares related to the point which we turned off the first movie and slept maybe four hours. I ended up going back to sleep after J left and woke up with about four hours until I had to leave to pick up the kids. I ended up playing Breath of the Wild for a bit before leaving.

Return to Work

Unfortunately I only got 3-4 hours of sleep again, even with melatonin. I had to drink more coffee than I normally do to be functional, which was too much. Even without the sleep issue, today was really full and tomorrow is showing the same promise.

When I'm that exhausted my heart beats faster than normal anyway paradoxically (Not unheard of according to my cardiologist). Around 3pm I was sitting at my desk at work when my watch buzzed, "Congratulations on your workout!" Needless to say I'm going to bed early tonight.

Work

I took this entire week off as vacation. Oldest and Youngest are on spring break and I didn't have anywhere else for them to go this year. Work has also been weird about granting WFH in these circumstances compared to previous years. It's okay, I needed the time away to reset a bit.

The Feds

( I owed taxes this year, and there was no way around it. )

Spring Break

Today I'm taking both kids shopping for clothes and shoes. I'm probably going to go ahead and buy the next size shoe up if I can afford it because damn, Youngest had the biggest growth spurt and their last pair of shoes only lasted about 6 months. Both of them are super rough on clothes too. Even though it is a sensory nightmare, we're going to the thrift store first to see if we find anything. The college students usually pick it clean but sometimes we get lucky. I don't have it in me to do bathing suit shopping yet. With Oldest we need the entire day just for that.

Media

This weekend my partner and I watched The Cabin in the Woods together. I'm not a big fan of the horror movie genre but I really enjoyed this one, especially since it pokes fun at the entire genre. I'd definitely watch it again at some point.

I started watching Silo today and already two episodes in I know I'll have to binge it to the end.

Meatsuit

My shoulder and ankle are finally feeling better. I haven't worked out all week because I wanted to give it time to heal. I'm going to try doing some slow flow yoga soon and see how that goes.

Organization

On my desk is what I refer to as "paperwork mountain". This is what happens when you only deal with emergencies and everything else gets put in the pile, until it grows in size to the point of intruding on your work space unless you relocate the pile to temporary places.

When I have an hour or two, I work on scanning and shredding. It is already a bit smaller. I figured out how to use my ScanSnap with XSane. I still haven't figured out an easy duplex scan, but I managed multipage scanning by only using the front feeder over and over per page. I may try running the ScanSnap software on Wine to see if it works better.

The Feds

I will owe a large amount for the first time in years. I'm super annoyed and will probably need a payment plan because I don't think I can swing the entire amount. The plan is to go through it all again to really make sure that number is right.

* Sigh *

( Cut for mention of animal death )

I had seen this posted somewhere but I don't remember where so this isn't purely my own invention, but I used it in my Dark Urge run for Astarion and it was really powerful.

Starting Stats

STR: 8
DEX: 17
CON: 14
INT: 13
WIS: 13
CHR: 10

Levels

Level	Class	Notes
1	Rogue	Starting class
2	Rogue	Access to cunning actions: Hide, Disengage and Dash as a Bonus Action
3	Rogue	Thief subclass: Fast hands gives an extra bonus action, and Second-Story Work reduces falling damage.
4	Fighter	Pick Two-Weapon Fighting as your fighting style.
5	Fighter	Gain Action Surge
6	Fighter	Champion subclass: Gain Improved Critical Hit
7	Fighter	Take the Dual Wielder Feat which improves weapon options and gives +1 to AC when dual wielding
8	Fighter	At the 5th Fighter level, gain Extra Attack
9	Rogue	Take Ability Improvement Feat to increase DEX and WIS by 1. The latter is for perception checks
10	Rogue	Gain Uncanny Dodge, which halves damage on a hit
11	Rogue	Improve skills Perception and Deception
12	Rogue	Gain Evasion which improves ability to survive against deadly spells

Equipment

Two Finesse weapons because they use DEX instead of STR as their attack modifier. Good choices are Knife of the Undermountain King, Justiciar's Scimitar, or use the forge to make two Adamantine Scimitars (my personal fave).

This is an interesting place. I was here in the early 2010s for a while but got out of the habit of writing like I used to. I remembered Dreamwidth when thinking about when the internet was less shitty and was delighted it was still around.