This week in squirrels…

From Sun May 31st to Sat Jun 6th

Summary

  • It’s “June”
    • And that means it is illegal to be straight now. Violators will be reported. J/K, but happy Pride Month to all queer people and those supporting us.
    • Does this mean it is now officially transphobic for me to have cancer?
  • It’s also 41c (106f)
    • First week of June and my home external thermometer read 41c around 3 p.m. the middle of this week.
  • Huge Journal Week
    • This week has been very busy, and I have been working to try to journal more. Especially since so many journals have been small or missing. So… sorry, not sorry.
    • The downside to how much I wrote during the week is how long it takes me to edit up my posts.
    • The upside is that editing this much of the week’s notes really helps me reflect.
  • Fixing up RSS feeds
    • Here is your quarterly reminder to sweep through your RSS reader and fix or clean out your broken feeds if you haven’t in a while!
    • This time I had four broken feeds. I was able to fix three of them by updating their new site URLs and feed links, but Axios is still broken. I have a working Axios feed URL, but it seems they’ve blocked the FreshRSS server. boooo.
  • The death of an air fryer
    • My air fryer’s temp control or some other circuitry was misbehaving because it stopped getting to temp. I had to double or triple the time to get it to cook like it did last week. Since this one was a very cheap “I am not sure I am into this” purchase, I went for the upgrade instead of trying to fix it.
    • The new one is such a massive upgrade for cheap. The basket has deceptively more surface area and is much easier to clean. The controls are actual buttons, and I have much better temp control. I do have to cut down all my usual times and temps because this one cooks things much crisper than I am used to.
  • Resetting my sleep and clocks
    • Since I have been all over the place, I have no real sleep schedule, so I am taking this week to rebuild it by adding back all my work alarms to get me into the routine.
    • Overall, I feel like it’s helping increase my energy levels and make me feel more normal human over “blob of chemo and cancer”, but it’s also not without consequences.
    • Busting out of bed with my alarm at 6am is bringing back my visual problems. It’s odd that if I sleep in, it doesn’t happen. The light burn-in effect clears up in an hour but still sucks to barely be able to see for the first hour of any day.
  • Mina the Hollower
    • Since I feel like I can enjoy some things, I finished fixing up my old downstairs gaming PC and started playing Mina the Hollower.
    • It is extremely fun yet also deeply cruel in its difficulty. It’s a precision 2d platformer with little grace and intense combat where you can very easily lose EXP faster than a high-level character in a classic MMORPG.
    • Luckily, the devs added a mind-boggling amount of tunables and toggles right in the game. They have a bundle that activates their own preselected set of toggles, which they say still preserves the game’s intent while making it more approachable. I feel like the bundle makes it easier than I’d like. Like now I only super rarely die… I will adjust the challenge a bit as I go.
  • DNScontrol time
    • I was working on DNSControl a bit when this all started to get the DNSimple provider better up to date with all the things DNSimple has added recently. However, that fell off once chemo got hard
    • But lots have changed, including their own new features and an org change.
    • First is reviewing and testing some open PRs and checking for issues. Then updating the DNSimple name servers since the time has come!
  • The mail sort of doom
    • This is something I wish I had done a while ago, but honestly I haven’t had the spoons as I have coming into this week.
    • It took most of a day to open, sort, and process what I have to deal with, and what can be recycled and what has to be shredded. Like usual, it was less than I thought it was.
    • I am glad I already own a shredder and some oiling & sharpening sheets. It earned its keep today since I ended up shredding a bin and a half of random insurance letters, schedules, discharge paperwork, old blood work, and paid bills. Easily a whole ream of paper.
    • However, actually dealing with all the remaining paper is going to take another week. There are a lot of bills I have to put on payments, forms to fill out and mail, some things I have to quiz my doctor on, and a lot to read.
    • For example, I received a whole box of paperwork, packets, and books from my case manager. It’s kinda interesting that I went from just winging it and having no idea what was really changing to having an overwhelming number of resources to read. Oh well, time to read a novel on my dietary needs
  • Not a new or unique complaint, but it cost over 70$ to fill my car, and I really miss not having to drive 40 miles a day.
  • Dropping out of the company summit trip
    • I won’t make the company summit. My second miss in something like 10 years. I hate it, but it’s not like I can travel in the middle of chemo and a non-existent immune system.
    • The “no summit” funk is big with this one; I wanted to go so bad and was holding onto it as a possibility till recently.
  • Preparing for surgery
    • Things have gotten to a point where we are preparing for a possible surgery, and this means the most invasive paperwork I have ever seen in my life.
    • Also like a ridiculous amount of calls and preparations.
  • Another week of no chemo
    • Since my body hasn’t recovered enough from the last chemo round, we have to wait a bit longer. I hate this wait because it pushes off so much I want to be done with. And I still get to spend a bit over 20 hours a week at a clinic getting infusions and blood work! I started bringing my laptop at this point. In fact, my phone has decided the TCT Clinic is work again. I’m hating that.
    • This comes with me feeling a huge recovery in my appetite and energy levels, which is great, but I am getting dizzy spells more often since I am more mobile but not quite fully.
    • But there is some “big deal to me” good news in this. I have reached the point of mobility and energy where the “room chairs” I had to place all over the house to get around are now more of a hindrance than a help. I have moved all but one back to the dining room table and haven’t missed them.
    • Also, I’ve started gaining back a bit of the weight I lost in that crash a month ago.
  • Healing mentally as well as physically
    • It is challenging to process exactly how depressed I am when I am in the thick of it. Even after last week when I caught how depressed I was, I was still very deep into it. To be fair to me, I have a lot to be depressed about and an uncertain future.
    • I lost a lot of the last nearly two weeks just zoning out and looking at the ceiling. I don’t like to get into where my brain goes during these times, but it’s not constructive.
    • The worst levels of my depression come in three parts: inability to enjoy things, motivation loss, then losing myself to very long destructive mental spirals that can last days and can be hard to pull myself out of, as they will suck me back in the moment I have any mental space to myself.
    • With all the increased energy, movement, and cleaning, I have been shedding a lot of the oppressive weight it feels like. There is also a lot of active work this week to stop myself when I start spiraling into intrusive thoughts. I can’t just brush away all the terminal thoughts and lack of motivation, but I can do things to pry myself from most of it.
  • Pressure headaches
    • Freaking ew. Something news.
    • I am not surprised that I am having some issues spending hours at the computer, but this really sucks; it feels like my brainpan is all cranky and it’s making me sick.
    • A lot of it seems to happen when I go from having my feet elevated while sitting at my desk to lowering them so…. damn.
    • Between the eye issues and dizzy things, my doctor is lost; we have done so many different types of brain scans, and they all come up clean.

Books

  • Whisper Me a Love Song 11 ⭐️⭐️
    • I still struggle with telling some of these characters apart, and now that we have piled on several new couples in the last volume. This volume feels so crowded. I am also not enthused about adding a siscon element.
  • Shino Ren, Vol 1 (manga) ⭐️⭐️
    • There are a lot of color pages, and the use of color splash is great. However, this manga is completely one-note, and that one note is “extremely horny teens have a ‘moe gap’ between their social and bedroom behavior.” Some of the chapters are nothing more than pinup pages with some text that kinda tells the story… of horny.
    • If I wanted cute and horny moe gap, I would probably be into this a lot more, but this falls under ’not for me’.
  • Assorted Entanglements, Vol 9 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • Speaking of toxic yuri… this one was shockingly not very toxic. Of course, all these women still are violent and have ethically complex relationships. But this issue focuses on resolving the troubled pasts of Minami and Shizuki. There was a lot of great feels and a big surprise at the end.
    • The outro marked this as the second to last volume, so it makes sense we are buttoning things up/
  • I Wanna Be Your Girl, Volume 4 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • This is the final volume of this series about coming to terms with identity and relationships outside of Japan’s standard conventions.
    • The beginning is Hime trying to resolve a lot of her feelings. There are a lot of confessions, and then we get a few chapters of how everybody ends up.
    • Huge feels. I’m not crying, you’re crying.

Music

  • Lauren Sanderson’s “LAUREN”
    • She is very angry and very horny, and I think this is where she does some of her best work. I keep wanting to compare this to her earlier album “Songs I will eat you out to.” While “Songs” is all slow horny jams, Lauren moves into her cruising fuckgirl bangers phase. Most tracks here make me wanna get done up and blast this on the way to ladies’ night at The Phoenix. The production is solid, and few tracks don’t reach banger status for me.
  • Boards of Canada’s “Inferno”
    • After spending a lot more time with this, I feel a lot of the vocal samples and choices really don’t help this album. It just makes it feel inconsistent and covered with non-sequiturs. This album pops out a lot from the rest of their discography because of it.
  • Chillhop Essentials: Summer 2026
    • I have been collecting these because they have been a replacement for soundtracks for deep background music. However, I feel like the last two have had a dive in consistency and quality. This one has some tracks that I feel break the flow, and realtalk, the flow is the whole reason to spend nine euros on these.
  • Kim Petras’ “Detour”
    • I haven’t listened to Kim before; she’s in a subsection of pop that is adjacent to some things I like but usually not in it. I was recommended Brutalist, and a bunch of people have been talking really positively about the album, so it’s worth a try. It’s definitely got enough hyperpop and industrial influence to keep me pretty engaged, but not quite enough to make me lose my mind over it.
  • Ada Rook’s “Cum songs.”
    • Ada Rook dropped this new album Monday. I have been really excited about how heavy her output has been lately. However, this is another of her personal and dark albums that features repeated lyrics about intrusive thoughts. I have to drop this on the back burner since I am trying to get away from that right now myself
  • Vylet Pony’s “Gonarch’s Lair”
    • I only gave this a single listen so far, and it’s a fascinating if not messy mixtape. I caught a lot of lyrics about incels and other topics around trash internet culture. I will have to give this a much closer listen soon, but it is also on the list of things I wasn’t feeling on a touchy week

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

The judges say “I demand the respect of a plausible lie” and the Trump people just don’t have the patience for it.

- Ken White on Serious Trouble discussing the “you fucking dingus doctrine.”