This week in squirrels…

From Sun Jun 7th to Sat Jun 13th

Summary

  • DNSummit, but remote
    • This week had me “going into the office” most days of the week to watch all the talks from the company summit, offer up as much feedback as I could through a Google Doc reviewed in the mornings, and then getting to hang out with the team in an all-hands and final closing Q&A.
    • While not everything in the meetup was roses (it never is), the whole thing made me feel so energized to engage after being so disconnected and hardly around.
    • It’s so bittersweet seeing all the photos and chatter in Slack. I miss everybody so fiercely. I cannot believe I forgot to have one of my local coworkers bring a care package of all the coffee and some other things I have sitting in a corner waiting to be mailed.
  • My first date out in a LONG time
    • For the longest time I have had regular dates out and in with all the most special people in my life. Since the cancer hit those stopped. I chose to spend as much time protecting myself as possible to help prevent my weakened state from being the end of me. And part of the reason if this is because early on I caught RSV from somebody close and it led to me collapsing a few times and had me hopitalized for some extra weeks.
    • Still, it’s been so long and I have healed up so much that this Saturday I was picked up like old times and we went to our favorite family run cafe and had a breakfast and then hung out to watch a movie.
    • These are the kinda things that make life worth living to me, spending time with people that matter, so I want to focus on trying to do it within reason.
  • Broken NixOS
    • I finally broke NixOS… or NH broke NixOS?… or an update broke NixOS? Something broke in NixOS in a critical way, violating many of the assumed safety and rollback contracts. I was aware these gotchas can happen and so was partially prepared, but it was still brutal to experience.
    • It started with a npins update and nh os switch to nixos-26.05.1415.9b696460ac78, which only had a few desktop apps in its change set listed. But when switching to it, I received an opaque error about “tests failing.” At this point I was in some sort of partial apply where I could run new apps, but the new generation wasn’t showing. Something was wrong.
    • That is when I made the mistake of running a nh all clean before retrying, and that is when it happily purged a large part of my nix store unbeknowist to me. This included some of my build tools, my window manager, and lots of other somewhat important things. A second attempt at a switch resulted in the same issue, so I rebooted before trying further. This is when I learned about the destruction of the nix store. Suddenly I couldn’t get into my window manager, but luckily my login manager and shell were still there, so I was able to switch --repair my way to working.
    • It really sucks when old generations don’t boot because there are things missing from the nix store. None of the guarantees of rollbacks were there for me at all. I had several revisions that even wouldn’t finish booting, but I finally found one that would boot and also get me into a working shell.
    • It makes me question the new version of nh a lot because there is NO WAY in hot hell clean should have removed things from existing generations. I don’t dork with the nix-store at all just to avoid stuff like that.
    • Anyways. I repaired, got a working system, cleaned out everything else, used nixos-rebuild to build, switch, and boot the latest, and rebooted to test. Not how I wanted to spend my entire Sunday morning, but I got it taken care of.
  • Walker and Elephant
    • There has been a new Linux launcher on the block that is much closer to macOS’ Alfred than the resource-light Fuzzel I have been using. Since it is all packaged up and has run options in NixOS 26.05, I thought I would give it a try.
    • In the end, I played with it for a few days, but I found I don’t currently care about the extra built-in functionality enough. I reverted back to my current basic but fast launcher and scripts.
  • Redoing my task list
    • Ok, stop me if you have heard this one… No, but seriously, considering such a MASSIVE life change, I wanted to take a moment to tweak my task lists and clean out a lot of things.
    • So far I have kept everything more or less the same, a single kanban board in Obsidian, but I simplified the lists a bit more, did some rearranging, and did a deep audit of every task in there.
    • I also set up a quick add for tasks.
    • I considered jumping over to Everdo since it’s everything I wanted from NirvanaHQ, but I didn’t want to spend the time and energy on doing another shift. I don’t need that much more than a single board right now.
  • The continued obnoxious path to recovery
    • On Monday I was told we are back, baby! My oncologist reviewed my bloodwork and said it finally shows everything is regrowing well.
    • But then two days later I had some rough results, enough to warrant hours of transfusions and some extra shots before I could be let go to go pass out of big eepy. The rest of this week was brought to you by the symptom “bone pain.”
    • Luckily it was all a temporary dip and I re-bound! For now. Sadly this means I have to wait for Monday for chemo to restart; hopefully everything can stay on track till then. This also means next week is M-Th for it all, cry emoji.
  • My eyes, OMG my eyes!
    • The light blindness has been all over the place. For a while it was getting worse, and then I think it peaked and is getting less bad? Not wholly sure. I should find a way to test and log it or something.
  • The GOOD news so far
    • I had a call with another oncologist and surgeon, and after discussing all my results they declared that I do not need surgery at this time, and I have odds I won’t need it because I don’t have some of the genes that would indicate it, and my MRD is good.
    • This is a huge thing for me because I know the numbers on what we were talking about were not amazing, but it could become necessary.
  • Processing where I am emotionally and physically
    • Buckle up or skip, this is getting dark. Since I have been climbing out of the depression fog, I have been spending some time earnestly and honestly assessing where I am physically with this and also emotionally.
    • I have been absolutely squirming about being on extended sick leave. I have never even been on any extended leave or sabbatical before. Often I am too sick or lost in other things to think about, but it is anxiety-inducing, and I miss work. Since the beginning, I have always been like, “I am recovering a bit next week, I am going back!” Anthony knows this and keeps being like, “Sure, sure, just get better.” And then the next few days my doctor hits me with another round of chemo twice as hard as the last. And oh boy, at first this drove me mad, but now I am just resigned to it.
    • But over the last week I have spent a lot more time doing the thing I really choose to avoid and which my doctor doesn’t like to dig into either; the fatality rates for somebody my age, how rapidly this progresses when untreated, how close I was to fatality at the time I was admitted, and some of the later phases and how complex they can be… None of it was amazing or hopeful to read; I don’t have a particularly lucky set of cancer markers. My oncologist says I have better odds than most things list but… it’s still messy and hard to get through, with the understanding that I have odds now.
    • I read the blog of somebody who worked at WordPress who had similar blood cancer and died. Something I hadn’t really processed was that this really is a dark game of “hit remission before your body’s ability to handle all this chemo gives out or else.” He didn’t, and his liver hit the point where they could not give him any more chemo, and they sent him home to his fam. Month later memorial post.
    • Just like the person above, it really feels like I am either “full remission with a relatively low percentage of it coming back” or “a bad blood result and a couple of weeks out of suffocating on my own blood.”
    • That is hard to work through even on my best days. But I am doing that shadow work, I am facing my mortality AND putting on my best face. It’s gonna take a while, but I want to do this work now, not when I am at the end, or never because I fall back into the depression pit.

Books

  • Boyfriend, Sometimes Girlfriend, Volume 3 ⭐⭐
    • I feel this volume lost itself in being a series of “welcome to womanhood later in life” training sessions. About two-thirds of this volume is devoted to detailed explanations of how to use makeup, femme posture and movement, the ins and outs of women’s clothing, and, finally, some of the dangers and risks of being a woman. All of this makes little sense to me to include unless the author is actually trying to make downlow transfemme training resources sold as TF manga.
    • I think that this could have been done in an interesting and engaging way, but in both cases the book set up a quick antagonist that threw in a McGuffin to set up the next lesson. What story movement that happened felt underdeveloped for a whole volume.
  • The Feminist Killjoy Handbook ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • I feel compelled to take a star off for how overwritten parts of this book feel, and how flat I felt some of the author’s attempts to be poetic fell.
    • Beyond that, this book is amazing, and I would recommend it to anybody in a heartbeat. This is possibly the best reference book on intersectional feminism, checking yourself, and being a healthy amount of killjoy. The author does not rest on her own words but spends so much of it contextualizing and sharing the works of other very great authors. The ebook version is approximately 80% the author’s own words, with 20% appendices containing additional resources to read and quick summaries of the author’s main points.

Music

  • My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult’s “Sinister Whisperz: Wax Trax Years (1987-1991)”
    • Hot remixes of some of my fave classic tracks. I started listening to TKK and now it’s going to be weeks still I can go a few days without more TKK
  • Kim Petras’ “Detour”
    • Ok, I guess I like this album more than I originally gave it credit. I keep coming back to it.
  • Lauren Sanderson’s “LAUREN”
    • This album remains my current obsession. This woman is making the best

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

“If you died nothing in my life would change” remains one of the coldest bars ever posted

- Bsky