[!NOTE] This blog post is from my drafts archive. I was initially researching leaving my Kindle in Quarter 1 of 2025 when Amazon removed the ability to download your purchases from their website. I never ended up pulling the trigger for this and as of this posting, I still use my Kindle and the Amazon Kindle store heavily. That said, I think my reflections and research are still valuable enough to others to share. ...

This week in squirrels… Summary I took the week off for my birthday. This is the second week off, but last week wasn’t all that relaxing. I find it stressful that it takes a week to unwind enough to relax for a week. The layers of irony. My birthday started with a quick stream and then a family birthday brunch at a very loud but delicious Israeli brunch restaurant. I get the solid impression that my brother and mother have really given up the effort to acknowledge my transition. Since it’s been over seven years, I can’t believe somebody is ever going to try if we are still putting no effort into resisting the urge to refer to me as “he” to the waiter. I am not mad about it, but disappointed. After sitting down and documenting my career notes and processing my thoughts, I have some direction, or at least a lot of questions. I set up a new IPv6 ULA & NPT, then updated all my external monitoring for my self-hosted services to ensure all my self-hosted apps are still working over IPv6 locally and remotely. Returned to making and posting stream schedules for my live streams. I even made all my streams! No cancellations, and I hope to keep that up even when I am working. 😆 Reorganized all of my Forgejo repositories into orgs. There will be a blog post later on this. I started the blog post on my new Forgejo setup, which turned into the first post of a pretty long series. I have a lot to say and have learned from it. Set up a Terraria server and spent almost 10 hours playing it with friends. It was way too much fun, but I was also up way too late. The only bad part was that I became a bit too involved and started missing chats. The second stream of it was proof that I like screwing around in the game so much, but I was much better at being present with chat. Still, Terraria sessions mean fewer breaks and longer streams for me so far. Speaking of streaming, I set up a lot of Firebot v5 commands and fun stuff like auto shout-outs, a shout-out queue, and even have some overlay commands. It took a few revisions, but it’s great to have more features on the stream. Sadly, Fugi, the tool for sharing profiles and showing people you are collabing with on Discord on stream, is totally glitching out and breaking many times during a stream Since Mint 22.2 was released, I upgraded my desktop and then finally jumped into updating my servers to Debian 13. All the upgrades were a massive nothing burger, which is really nice; I love an uneventful update. Refactor all of my books tracking and logging into Obsidian bases instead of DataView, which fixed all my super slow renders. Switching from Goodreads to my own notes in Obsidian has slowed down my reading a bit, but taking all the notes has had me more engaged with what I am reading. My blood sugar has been rapidly plummeting in the back half of this week with a significant pullback on my insulin. I had a rough start to the week due to poor eating on vacation, but the rubber band is impressive. At the very end of this week, I am starting up a new med, and that’s always exciting and scary when I am already experiencing low glucose. Spent my usual Saturday working on plans for the next week with Kitty. It will likely be a lot of work on writing, thinking, and streaming. Time to think and write. Went to a brand new ramen joint in town. Incredibly delicious, quality ingredients, and rich broth. The portions were smaller than I have seen anywhere, but the price-to-quality ratio is impressive. Books How Do I Turn My Best Friend Into My Girlfriend?, Vol. 4 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Until I Love Myself, Vol 1 DNF With You Our Love Will Make It Through, Vol 3 ⭐⭐⭐⭐ My First Love’s Kiss, Vol. 3 I have rarely regretted buying a book so much At least all the romance fluff I read this week was good. ...

Welcome to a brand new series of posts. This blog began as a continuation of my LiveJournal, and I am returning to my roots for this series called “This Week in Squirrels…” This blog went pretty quiet after Twitter really took off, but after the great “Eloning of X,” I never entirely took to Mastodon or BlueSky. Because of this, I miss blogging my thoughts. My goals are two-fold here. The first is to return regularly and share my thoughts and content, even if it’s just brief updates on what is going on in my life. The next goal is to get back into the habit of regularly deploying to my journal and build workflows for improved blogging. ...

To prevent burying the leede. Buy your music, but make sure you download it in the best format you can and keep it backed up. Do NOT trust services like Bandcamp, Amazon, or Apple to keep your music you purchased. My Relationship with My Music Library I have made it no secret I love music. I love consuming it, decorating time with it, DJing, making it, all of it. Outside of a very brief stint in the 1990’s with Limewire and in the 2010’s with Spotify, then Apple Music I have always been buy on buying and having my music collection. ...

This post is written in mourning. Today I lost one of the most colorful humans in my life. Steph was absolutely the most amazing, delightful, and powerful women I have had the opportunity to love. Since the early 2000’s with all those nights at nightclubs, to the nearly decade as partners, to her help with my transition, she has changed my life for the better over and over and over. ...

One of the most annoying ADHD superpowers is many ADHDer’s are able to easily adapt to new techniques and systems, but that nothing seems to work forever. In one of the many ADHD books I have read recently, there was a specific callout that the brain craves novelty so much that it’s healthier to expect routines to work for a limited time. The recommendation was to give yourself a lot of grace for when your habits start to fall apart and instead use the flexibility to pick up something new, or old to keep evolving your system. ...