This week in squirrels…

Summary

  • I had really solid Sunday and Monday streams. I’m starting to build a little community, which is heartwarming.
  • New iPhone! I’ve complained plenty about lazy phone design, but Apple almost tried a little. The Pro has some curves and a lovely textured touch spot, even if it ends up being yet another slab of glass.
  • Upgraded OBS and my plug-ins; we will see how much I regret that later. Then, I upgraded the RAM in my big server to 64GB. I have started swapping due to the constantly growing number of containers.
  • Mental health is an extra struggle. I hate that I felt better after my vacation, but it took so little time to get really dragged down. It’s not just work, but it’s a lot right now.
  • I commissioned Halloween-themed icons. Nothing bank-breaking, but I want some spoopy season icons, and there are some good YCHs on VGen. A lil bit of retail therapy? Perhaps, but custom art of my characters is something I treasure and use frequently.
  • Now that I’m logging daily, I’m seeing Obsidian sync glitches again, doubled text, and mauled tables. I believe it’s a sync conflict, but it’s happening a lot. I wonder if it’s related to the linter, since it makes numerous rapid changes.
  • The more I deal with OS 26 Tahoe, the more I wonder if this is going to flip everything back around design-wise. When Apple switched to Mac OS 10.0 and made everything look like colored glass and “lickable,” everything suddenly had to be bubbles and colors. Then, with iOS, they made everything skeuomorphic, and everybody followed suit. Then, in iOS 7-ish, they ditched all that and made everything flat and minimalist. To this day, everybody is trying to make their logos as minimal, basic, and succinct as possible. Now we are back to the next generation of lickable transparent glass. Are we coming back around? Will everybody make everything glassy and gradients and blurs? It turns out that Google is already going gradient.
    • Also, as an aside, I lol because every time Apple’s design team realizes they have enough technical and CPU power to make everything transparent, they go ham.
  • This is the week for all the manga drops for this month. I had five books in a single day.
  • I decided to finally build out an OCI mirror after the Docker Hub outage last week. Skopeo and Forgejo made it extremely easy to mirror a large number of public repositories.
  • I really want people to stop saying things like “how ironic” when discussing the behaviors of the current people in power using tools of censorship and control. You know, the censorship and “cancel culture” they complained about being used against them when they weren’t in power. It’s definitely not ironic; it is the whole point. They will complain when it’s pointed at them, and the moment they can, they will use that power to the fullest. They are going to show that the real power lies in the fact that it shouldn’t apply to them.
  • Looks like my meds are stabilizing towards the end of the week. Finally, I am hoping they stay this way.
  • Caught myself ordering in way too much. Did this constantly during the pandemic, then stopped for years, but fell back into it with current anxiety and stress. The odd part is that it seems to be a stress response. I don’t even really care for the food or experience more than what I can have at home.
  • The Hades II drop day was this week! I am so excited to have more games out that I am really into. The first game has been non-stop entertainment, and I’d be happy to stick with it, but everyone mentions how much quality of life and story improvements exist in the second one.
  • I bought a Matter-compatible smart plug-in outlet for automating my downstairs Corsi–Rosenthal Box, but it has been a colossal disappointment. It appears that I need to link it to my iPhone to connect it to Home Assistant, rather than directly through the app. It also seems to fall offline frequently, does not report power usage to Home Assistant, and generally is an abysmal experience. Quarter the cost of a Z-Wave plug, but I’d rather have the features and reliability.
    • I am going to try out some Zigbee things and a cheap adapter. I want something that isn’t $40 an outlet but is at least MOSTLY reliable.
  • Two very opposing tech challenges came up this week, and I have been amusing myself with the first.
    • The first is setting up Semaphore and trying to centralize the management of my RPis.
    • The second is trying nix-darwin systems and bringing some other systems into Nix. The last time I did this, I found that making a multi-OS, multi-platform Flake for my environment was too much struggle, with not enough payoff. After several days, I agree with past me that it is better to have core flakes at maximum by platform, and then create some multi-use flakes to reuse code.

Books

  • Brewing Up Bedlam (Magic and Mishaps) Still in progress
  • Monthly in the Garden with My Landlord, Vol 5: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨ Honestly, this one really stuck the landing and was a delightful final volume.
  • My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today, Vol 5: ⭐️⭐️⭐️ The art brings this down, and the characters are somehow even less likable. However, the story and angst continue to pull at me.
  • How Do We Relationship Vol 13: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ These characters and these traumas and this story. It’s SO GOOD. Still minus one star for me, still barely being able to tell the characters apart.

Music

https://listenbrainz.org/user/dos_skwrl/stats/?range=this_week

  • Deftones’ “private music”: Everybody is talking about the new Deftones, which is weird because it makes me feel like it’s 1997. This still isn’t my main jam, but this album is excellent.
  • Projekt Melody & Cynthoni’s “Lost In Her Virtual Eyes”: I have been looking forward to this for a while. I really liked the singles and hoped this would be a lot longer. I would buy a whole album or two of these two together.
  • Grim Dawn OST: I don’t know why, but dark and moody is the main music for the start of the week.

Reads and Videos

  • Spacehey: Wait… hol up… Are we bringing back Myspace?! Fuck yes. Fuuuuuuuuuuck yes. I cannot wait to rebuild my top 8.
  • Mastodon and lack of compassion: This essay in Mastodon threads is an excellent dissection of what a lot of people have experienced and complained about on the fediverse, a space controlled primarily by marginalized white people weaponizing their trauma and attacking further marginalized people. I have gone over it several times, and it’s one of those things to reflect and discuss with/ my therapist.
  • When Values Eat Their Young: How Ideal-Driven Groups Drift into Their Own Shadow: This is the absolutely fascinating discussion on sociology and group dynamics I adore reading. It makes me think back a lot to the Furry and Open Source groups I have been involved with and how we could have changed things. Additionally, this blog style is absolutely stunning, and I may incorporate it into my next version of the blog.
  • Presidential Memoranda: Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence: It’s hard to see this as anything but a power grab using the horrible events to help silence and shut down all opposition at this point. Depressing. The end is near.
  • The Problem with YouTube: I have a love-hate relationship with Future Proof now Levi Hildebrand videos, and this is one of his better ones recently, and has some interesting points on how private equity is moving into what was people’s random content and the new content slop.

Quote of the Week

It’s very hard to maintain mental health because so many coping strategies are based on the idea that your anxiety is unwarranted, and right now needs more of an “okay, extremely warranted but you still gotta water the plants or you’ll have fascism AND dead plants” approach.

  • @pervocracy