This week in squirrels…

Summary

  • Family Time
    • I had a fantastic day with my sister and niblets on Sunday. We originally planned to go all out together, but things fell apart when the vehicles had a bad time. Still, we ended up staying in and chatting while catering to the kids.
    • It’s something my sister and I haven’t really had in a long, long time, since I usually see her in the context of full family events.
  • nix-darwin
    • It took two more tries before I was able to get a nix-darwin that I liked, and I am now moving the last of my Darwin systems over to it!
  • NixOS blog post
    • I am working on this NixOS blog post still. Instead of going off the cuff, I have been collecting many people’s posts to make sure I am writing to address the issues they have.
    • I see a prevalent thread of (1) the onboarding being a hot mess, mostly because most of them start with oversized flake setups, (2) there are a lot of resources focusing on everything you can configure and manage with NixNix, and less on “what brings most value”.
    • I am reminded of my long career with Chef-Infra™ and the lessons I learned about not trying to stretch a tool too far. Nix, like Chef-Infra, is a tool for generating idempotent definitions of a final state, and that tends to be a super sucky tool for lifecycle management and can be slow and clumsy for rapidly changing state
  • time off computers
    • In travel, conference, and family, I spent more time off computers in four days than I have in months. Good lil reset
  • Anime
    • I am struggling to keep up with all the shows, but I will not give up! I finally got a free evening to sit down and catch up a bit.
    • In the end, I am dropping things judiciously and trying to keep up
  • Reloading by fire
    • Sometimes we make mistakes. Sometimes it tests how well we use our configuration management and how good our backups are.
    • While experimenting with nixos-anywhere and seeing if I can pre-configure the hardware-config, I missed a flag. I wiped out the entire NVMe drive of my NAS and Docker host. Big oops
    • Luckily, while I hadn’t set up everything in Nix yet, I still had everything in Ansible that I could migrate to NixOS. I had some issues with boot and IPv6, but it only took half a day of experimenting to get it 90% of the way there.
    • It’s still not 100%, I am having some networking issues and instability, but once I pin some drivers and chase down some IPv6 RA ULA+SLAAC nuances, I am hoping it all clears up.

Books

  • Curses & Cold Brew ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • This one really sucked me in with tension and flirty heat. It’s written in a way that kept me engaged and wanting more with the mystery and “cozy” style.
    • Why are all these fall books “cozy”? What makes the “cozy”?
    • The book is not without some glaring flaws. It really ignores some huge ethical quandaries it raises, forgets about all the consequences brought up in the beginning, and spends a lot of time setting up the following books at the end, and trying to set hooks. Maybe that is what makes this cozy, no consequence, just hookups.
    • I didn’t appreciate how much this book relied on you to have read the first one, while also gesturing a lot to a paid story behind Patreon. To get all the heat and tension between these characters, you have to have already read a few other works.
    • For all my whining, I really liked it, yet probably won’t read any more from these two since they are leaning too much into “read our Patreon stories to get the buildup of this relationship.”
  • Rainbows After Storms Vol 6 ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • This is better than the last volume, but this series is falling off pretty hard.
    • While this had some progress and evolution of the relationship, it felt like this was stretched more than a filler season of Naruto.
  • The Moon on a Rainy Night 7 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • The volumes are only four chapters long, but the author makes each chapter a whole story on its own, which is very welcome; they don’t need to rely on cliffhangers.
    • The amount of growth and progress on display as all these girls grow up is breathtaking in this volume.
    • This author has a knack for really showing off some of their trials in impactful ways.
    • Also, this is dropping some hints that this is starting to shift from “subtle hinting yuri” to like… are they gonna try and hook up fr? But maybe that’s how you keep the yuri hook dragging.

Music

  • BBNO$’s self-titled
    • I have been getting into BBNO$’s singles a lot lately. It’s not exceptionally technical or complex, but it is fun and kitchy, and solid party music.
    • I don’t exactly love how in 2025 we are back to 2005’s “get money fuck bitches” music. Even the songs about him having ADHD boil down to all the hoes he bangs and getting paid. I’d love to hear something fresher than a Caucasian Ludacris in my pop rap. But every generation needs its own, and this one’s still catchy and fun. At least he does flip SOME hypermasculine tropes on their head. Progress?
  • City Girl’s “I don’t know why I feel ok right now, but it’s nice”
    • I am so jealous of her and want to be there with her for real.
    • This is such a nice chill reprieve of an album. A lot of vibes and influence from “In Love with a Ghost”. If you like high-production chill hop, this is a must-have for the collection
  • Ashnikko’s “Smoochies”
    • Here we are with fucking bitches, but the bitches are of all genders. It’s hard not to compare this album to BBNo$’s since they came out on the same day. I don’t think this one has the same production value but the lyrics and messages are far better.
    • Yes, it’s twisted, but also “mermaids… with hole” is a line I will never forget.

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

“user engagement” and “addiction” are the same thing, measured from different perspectives -JA Westenberg