I'm getting really sick of myself.

Three days have been lost now to WinUAE fiddling and related chasing after links to forgotten development tools. I started by telling myself I needed to refresh my memory a bit. I'm working on a story that involves a character who clings to antiquated systems and software, partly for technical reasons, but also for aesthetic motives. Before a lot of you were born, I sat and pored over technical manuals for systems that were, at that time, fairly advanced (going from 64k of memory to 512k was a major step, and when OS-9 provided multitasking, it was the stuff of dreams. Mind you, my job at the time involved programming a mainframe with a capacity that your Palm Pilot would sneer at.)

But, I realize, after losing a few days that I resent losing, that I'm not up for learning chunky-to-planar plasma simulator coding, even if I clearly understood what that meant. I never got too far with programming these systems when they were physically extant. The idea was to get the feel of such things again, to more accurately describe them in the context of some imaginary developer spending three sleepless days debugging and optimizing a bit of code that may or may not have metaphysical properties. Now that I spent so long in that dark alley, I feel like I ought to spend three days without sleep myself and try to write my self-esteem back to where I could stand to be in the same room with myself again. I know that made damn little sense, but don't look back, and definitely don't turn around to edit it. We have to keep going forward, or it will catch up to us, and then all hope would be beyond our reach.

Did I mention before that word processing software has failed to progress in twenty years, and might have become less useful in that time? I thought that again when I tried out a program I used in 1989, and it looked for the world like Open Office on a low-res monitor. It went at about the same speed, which is pitiful. Fuck it.