Today my therapist said she was holding herself back from rounding up a bunch of cool and nice trans women with similar interests and telling them to be my friends. It’s a sweet gesture, and part of me wishes she would though I know that’s probably a huge overstep of professional responsibility. I know it’s her job, but it really comes through how much she actually cares about me as a person. I think she would make a good friend if she hadn’t been my therapist first =P We were talking about the intense and unknown sadness I’ve been experiencing through the weekend. I’m still inclined to say it’s a monthly hormonal thing, but we super dove into my loneliness in therapy today. We talked about the losses I’ve gone through over the past several years both externally (two cats and so so many important people) and internally (health and ability).

Don’t worry, this whole post isn’t just emotions! Just one more paragraph, I promise :)

Maybe I’m emotionally crashing? Recently after months of intense emotional pain it kinda feels like there was some pressure release. There was talking, there were heartfelt apologies, there were explanations, and there were understandings. I was surprised (and confused, but that’s my thing to work through) at some of the understanding I was given about my Borderline Personality Disorder. There’s still a lot more, if that’s even an option, but at least right now.. it feels better to me. I don’t know if I should be talking about this here, it’s just that I don’t have any other outlet besides therapy. And sometimes I just need to express myself outside of a therapy context. A good chunk of my pain feels like it got acknowledged, and after everything that feels huge to me. It’s not everything that’s needed, on either side I know, but it’s something, it’s more than I feel like we’ve had ever. I’m hesitant to say there was closure, because, frankly, I don’t actually know what closure looks like. When I’ve bounced from person to person, I’ve never actually sat down and processed my pain and worked through it.. Regrettably this has caused me to make that pain other people’s problems more than once.. And it’s not like all my feelings about this have been resolved and whisked away. But at the moment, it is something and to me it feels like something big that helped. And I hope it helped in the opposite direction too. So, yeah, maybe I’m emotionally crashing after the past several months! That could make a lot of sense!

Last post, I teased my new ereader, the Xteink x4. It’s a tiny little eink ereader! The resolution is 480x800, which is really funny to me because that’s the same vertical resolution of my 2010 Kindle Keyboard (600x800). I guess this explains why some people are reading manga on the x4, since I do so on my Kindle, but I can’t get over how tiny all the details must look on the 4.3 inch screen. It gets kind of annoying on my Kindle’s 6 inch screen! I’m definitely gonna keep the Kindle in rotation for manga and for any book where I’m taking notes (the physical keyboard is just fucking amazing for annotating like, e.g. On Repentance and Repair, which I need to pick back up).

The x4 is fantastic for several reasons that the Kindle just can’t match though. First off, the size is just, phenomenal. It’s designed to magnet to the back of a magsafe compatible phone, which my ~5 year old Pixel 6 is not truly compatible. But I got the folding book cover for it and I just toss it in my purse. While my Kindle fits in my purse, that device’s cover adds weight and the device is really big. The x4 isn’t even noticeable. My wife and I went shopping recently and I finished up before she did and pulled out my x4 to read while she was trying on shoes. It was easy and just… perfect for the occasion. I’ve already completed a book on it that I’ll talk about in a moment.

Here’s a picture of the two devices side-by-side:

Image description: A photo of two ereaders. On the right is a Kindle 3 (aka Kindle Keyboard). It is a good size device and has a 6 inch screen. On the left is the xteink x4 which is 4.3 inch display. For visual reference entire x4 device fits inside the screen space of the kindle 3 with a little room to spare. Both devices are displaying text, an excerpt from the Simpsons twitter fanfic called “Marijuana Simpson.” This shows off some of the text differences. The font and line space on the Kindle 3 is bigger than on the xt4, but both are very readable. There’s some epub rendering differences too, with some headings not being centered on the x4. More text is displayed on the kindle 3 despite the same vertical resolution and a larger font.

Jailbreaking the Kindle is easy as pie, however you’re still largely stuck with the Kindle’s particular linux build. The x4 runs off an ESP32 system microcontroller, which is incredibly flashable with whatever firmware you or anyone else can develop. We have several ESP32 devices around the house as air quality sensors, for example. This has led the community to quickly develop a massive variety of firmwares. A few are listed here. I’m currently using CrossPoint myself, which seems to be the basis for most of the others. CrossInk looks like a nice fork as well. Because these firmwares are all opensource, I can take any of the proposed pull requests and just flash them to my device too. So currently I’m running a development build that lets me take Kindle-compatible highlights/clippings (though no notes). More features are being developed literally every single day. The pace is breakneck! I’m contemplating getting a second device to flash TRMNL as a nightstand information device. I could probably hook it into Home Assistant too for some basic smart room controls!

The major downside is that most of the devs are using AI LLM bullshit to assist with creating these features……. I kinda feel like this might be unavoidable at this point :\ It gives me massively sour feelings.

With the x4, I finally picked up the first book in the Stargate Atlantis Legacy series! It takes place right after the wild ending of the Stargate Atlantis TV show! The writers are fantastic and I am able to picture everything in the book perfectly in my head and I’m reading every character’s voices just as if the TV actors were speaking the lines. It’s literally like watching an extended episode of the show with even more insight into the characters minds. The writers have a massive and deep respect and understanding of the source material and it makes me so happy to have a continuation of my favorite entry in the Stargate property. I named myself after one of the main characters for crying out loud. Elizabeth Weir got done DIRTY in the show, and I’m intrigued by the books because it sounds like they give her a far better story to counter that.

When I say that I grew up with Stargate, I’m not exaggerating. The Roland Emmerich movie was in 1994 and the final tv show ended in 2011. I was six years old when it started and I was in college when it ended. Stargate is DEEPLY meaningful to me.

I don’t know what I’m doing differently right now, but Olive is finally letting me sleep these past few nights without interruptions. I know that I AM doing something differently, I just cannot pinpoint what! That feels weird to say, but my wife and my therapist say it does make sense, so I’m trying not to fret too much about putting it into words. I love this boy, but damnit I need my sleep. It’s been MONTHS of him fucking my sleep up real real bad. I’m so tired all the time and I just need to recover so much sleep…

I kinda pushed through my sadness and lethargy to write this, and I’m glad I did. I love having an outlet :)