This week in squirrels… From Sun Jun 14th to Sat Jun 20th
Summary
- Streaming
- My Sunday stream was amazing. A good stream is hard to beat. However, I didn’t take enough breaks and fell after getting up from my desk. Not good, super ultra mega not good.
- Double hang out
- Doing even more hang out, seeing people, going to the cafe, having my bestie over for one-on-one chatting till we gotta stop. Chasing away the depression of being alone with others.
- The Return of Anime Day
- More of me choosing to bring back routines and small social interactions over becoming a safety-isolated hermit. Sure, it’s just seeing one person once a week, but it’s a hangout I have been doing for a very, very long time.
- This week’s meditation on racism
- I have a minor addiction to watching media and social analysis by not while people. It has been a part of my anti-racism journey for a while now.
- For some reason, some of the themes that have popped up a LOT lately are how a lot of white racism is either rooted in or shown as a need to be superior to people of other races, especially Black people.
- I even made a tweet I caught this week on the topic, the quote of the week below. It seemed weirdly timely because I went to bed after watching two backlogged videos by two different creators, both of which brought up the topic.
- It’s not that I haven’t heard it before, but now it’s stuck in my head, and I am thinking about it a lot. Not the why, but how to break this down, identify it, and help others unfuck themselves.
- Friend Reached Out
- It opened a bit awkwardly, but we managed to talk out the incident that really went down between us. That’s really what needed to happen, at least in my opinion, talking about it.
- Vegas drivers
- Since I am on the road daily again, I have been a bit shocked at how much more aggressive drivers are. Vegas drivers are notoriously red-green colorblind and have been running reds for as long as I can remember.
- But this year it’s the tailgating. I don’t remember the tailgating being this bad. On a mostly empty freeway, people will tailgate down to feet in the right-hand lane. Like, bud, the other three lanes to the left are free. What is your malfunction? In a middle lane, you will see somebody doing an 80mph tailgate, again, with there is one lane to the left, like… is not getting over that important to you?
- The end of delays
- And even with everything scheduled, we hit more delays. My system is refusing to hold the marks it is barely hitting, and it keeps pushing and delaying things. However, we timed the bone-hurting juice just right, and we finally restarted.
- It’s been so long since I had chemo the bag was going in, and I could feel it in my head. My nose was running and agitated, and I wanted to sneeze; my eyes were watering. Everything started to clog up right away, and I began to feel congested. sadge.
- This chemo has me feeling like it’s not too bad… and then I suddenly take a nap where I am sitting and wake up feeling like it’s days later. The super swollen feet and sudden onset nausea have not been my favorite part either.
- Still trying to process my existence.
- I kinda have it in my head that I’m not gonna make it five years. Which isn’t a great place to be. I am really trying to kick that trash brain worm to the curb. Because it’s not like when I was 18, and I used something like how I don’t plan on making it to 30 to live fast and hard on parties and drugs. Oh no, It’s just depressing looking around like. “Oh, all this is a waste of space and potential; I’ll never get to X.” I’d really not like to sink back into the depression pool deep end with the “I’m gonna die soon, so everything is pointless” worm in my head.
- The intrusive thoughts want their run back
- Sure wish it wasn’t so, but this week started becoming a struggle after chemo started back up. There is definitely some link where I feel this sickness and my brain wants to sink into the bad pool.
Books
- The Delinquent and the Transfer Student Vol 1 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- The characters are all wild and over the top, which I expected in a “delinquent” story. The pacing and execution are well done. The classic art style is fun and makes it stick out in the modern manga landscape. Overall, really good; not a huge standout, but a great manga that starts off seeming yuri but then talks about actual wlw things.
- Ayaka is in Love with Hiroko! Volume 3 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
- Sometimes I feel like I get final volumes five stars too often because they hit me in the feels and make me feel so good. But this final volume isn’t even a victory lap. It’s a lot of them still working out their relationship, and watching them connect was done really well.
- Rainbows After Storms, Vol 10 ⭐️⭐️⭐️
- This manages to be pretty ok. There is some character development, and the writing is teasing even more changes and development
Music
- Girlcop’s “The More, The Merrier”
- Powernoise and Rythmic Noise albums can be hard to explain. This one tickles the brain, and that one does not. But this album right here really slaps just the way I want to hear it.
- Marconi Union’s “Multiforms: Ambient Transmissions, Vol. 3”
- I was excited about the return of the Ambient Transmission’s series, since the first two are probably some of the most popular albums. But I don’ think this holds up
- Lauren’s “Lauren Sanderson”
- When i need the energy, we goin to the club and going down.
Reads and Videos
- Yum Brands to sell struggling Pizza Hut chain for $2.7 billion as demand slumps | Reuters
- Somebody finally out-pizza’d the hut.
- I shared this link solely to make a Spaceballs joke.
- What Your Favorite Nintendo Direct Announcement Says About You! | Jake Blennings
- Happy Pride Month
- This Pride, Disabled LGBTQ+ People Don’t Need Your Apologies | Autostraddle & (Un)safe Refuge | The Flytrap
- This word really needs to get out. You can’t be body positive with a safe, supportive space unless you are actually accessible. Seeing two articles like this in a week is great.
- Intersectionality includes disabled people.
- Both of these articles talk about organizers and space owners lashing out for “attacking them” and making their lives more difficult while they are excluding others. This makes me want to scream in feminist killjoy. “To expose a problem is to be a problem” and “Power works by making it hard to challenge how power works.”
- AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less | Charity dot wtf & The Phoenix Architecture
- This is totally my “I get it” moment. Not with AI overall, but the argument for how to use AI programs without burning the house down. Let’s see if Charity’s prediction pans out.
- My favorite pull quote from this is “I am not worried, at least in the near term, about AI creating massive, discontinuous returns on investment in the absence of engineering discipline. (Many will try, and it will be entertaining to watch.) But value is backed by durability, not disposability, and I don’t see that changing. Bits are cheap and fast and governed by the rules of logic and language, but anything with value must ultimately resolve with physical systems: persistence on the one side, user experience on the other.”
- The “No Straights at Pride” Debate | Foreign Fridays
- Watching this conversation was an absolutely fascinating experience for me. I am a very queer person who was watching two straight men discuss the topic in the title.
- What made it so engaging was that their primary way of engaging with this and discussing this is equating pride to spaces made for, by, and catering to Black people.
- Also, they bring up the concepts of IRL/AFK discourse and OL discourse, which this particular topic is the latter.
- How pull request limits are cutting down the noise | The GitHub Blog
- I didn’t think the solution the community would laud was “limiting how many PRs somebody can have open.” I figured they were working “AI fixing AI problems,” but in the end, it’s a rate limit.
- What’s Actually Happening at Kadokawa? | Anime News Network
- A really good dig into what is going on at Kadokawa and the big web of subsidiaries and investors around them. I find this fascinating because I remember when Re:Zero blew up and suddenly they built this all out. I was actually in Japan around then.
- Judge Rules Blacked.com Can Sue Meta for Scraping Its Porn | 404 Media
- What a wild headline. Just sit with that one for a while.
- Fox Corporation to Acquire Roku, Inc. | foxcorporation
- Sad Day for Roku owners. I know the platform has been getting “enshittier” by the month, but this will only turn the whole platform into a communications arm of Roku.
- Banned Book Library | Rick’s Blog
- I adore projects like this; what a fun idea.
- The Web We Know Is Going to Disappear | Minid.net
- This is a cool futurist rant. This reads and looks exactly like something I’ve read before in magazines back in the 90’s when everybody was trying to figure out how the internet would change computing. As an aside, we also had fun colors and transparent casing on electronics, and I miss that.
- I don’t know if I agree with it, but I really like a lot of the ideas posed and how it is posed.
- Is this blog written by AI? - Marc’s Blog
- The parts about the social construct and value of writing and what makes something worth reading is a pretty important part here.
- Fox News viewership increases belief in the anti-immigrant great replacement theory
- …and more after our headline story “Fork found in kitchen.”
Quote of the Week
I definitely spent YEARS wrongly perceiving racism as a misunderstanding on the part of a person who simply didn’t know better, or didn’t have all the information.
But nah, racism isn’t a mistake. It’s just about feeling good. They don’t care it doesn’t make sense, because it’s fee-fee based.
This is why the election of Obama initiated an emotional meltdown of white America we’re all still dealing with. The cognitive dissonance of a Black man being President, and also widely loved and approved of during his term, was too much of a challenge to foundational beliefs in Black inferiority.
The average white racist couldn’t feel superior to every Black person alive anymore without a glaring, unignorable exception. And they’ve been setting the house on fire over it ever since.