This week in squirrels… From Sun Jul 5th to Sat Jul 11th

Summary

  • Finally got back on some extra streams
    • Thank heck, a super good stream Sunday. Tons of people around, having maximum chaos.
    • Then later a surprise evening stream was great to have with a friend, too. An overdue collab.s
  • Weekly Review and Keeping in the System
    • Sunday is a good time to do the review now.
    • The single note with headers for all my contexts has been working really well. Especially after I made some small Obsidian tweaks like adding strikethrough and grey for done tasks, and a small plugin that automatically moves checked-off tasks to the bottom.
  • Desktop hardware issues this week
    • My desktop had some USB lockups when plugging in a controller. Turns out that not only does it have several controllers, but some are more problematic than others. And where they are located is odd.
    • Digging into notes it does look like this was not an OS thing but time for an overdue motherboard firmware update. I avoid these unless I need them, but this is my third lockup. It went cleanly and I used cyme to help arrange all my major devices to be on different controllers internally.
  • HomeAssistant lockups/offlines when playing music
    • As soon as I fixed my desktop, my Raspberry Pi 5 started having some sort of lockup or dropping offline when I started playing music through MusicAssistant.
    • I learned that the Raspberry Pi 5 takes some weird power for optimal use and without a very special hard to find cable a USB-C PD brick won’t cut it. I replaced the power supply with one specifically rated for it and had no further problems.
    • There were also a lot of HomeAssistant and MusicAssistant updates lately, so maybe it was just as much that. Either way my board has recommended power now
  • DNScontrol tests
    • Nothing big on my side: only verifying DNSimple’s integration works for the latest major refactor coming out.
    • I want to set up DNSimple into the built in CI/CD so we can auto test for DNSimpe, but that’s on the long list.
  • Obsidian Plugin Audit
    • This is your reminder to audit your Obsidian plugins once in a while.
    • I hadn’t really done so in a very long time, and I found that some of my plugins had been removed from the Obsidian plugin repos for… IDK reasons.
    • Either way, I was able to replace the older, unmaintained plugins with new hotness. Yay, I suppose. Part of me is “if it’s not broke” but also Obsidian’s plugin framework is a moving target these days.
  • Summer Anime Cour flood
    • I picked way too much anime to check out… but luckily, plenty is worth cutting.
    • There is only two or three must keepers and the rest might cut depending on how news comes.
  • Setting a record of socializing this week!
    • I got to a cafe meetup with JT, where I got to see Ainsley too!
    • Then I got to have the old order in dinner and chat
    • then after all that…
    • My first game night in eons. We played Nemesis Retrobution, and I think I like it better than the original Nemesis. Maybe. The higher action and agency of the players is pretty nice.
  • Getting back on top of taking care of this house
    • It’s been too long, and this house is too big. I have a huge list of overdue maintenance to do, but I can only do a few a week, and I will get back on top of it.
  • Pondering more blog posts
    • A lot of independent posts are being swallowed up in little though pieces in my summary sections. I am thinking about breaking these out and slimming down my summaries.
  • Money is getting to a sucky point.
    • And of course, I find that a bunch of bills haven’t been listed in my billing account, and so now I have this massive backlog of payments
    • And more keep coming.
  • Week Two recovery time
    • I dropped my vampire debuff! I needed blood for the begining but finally stopped needing a bag every few days. So awesome having my own blood.
    • Now, if I can have my immune system.
    • I also got a last minute addition to my calendar for next Wednesday with the doctor, so I believe news is waiting for me. Let’s hope it’s good news

Books

  • Hello Melancholic! Vol 1 ⭐⭐
    • This felt like it was a bit too much setup for a first volume of three
  • Hello, Melancholic! Vol 2 ⭐⭐⭐⭐
    • Suddenly, all the romance, all the couples, all the actual progress of the story.
  • Hello, Melancholic! Vol 3 ⭐⭐⭐
    • I overall like this, but the ending was rushed. Still, we got an initial conflict of the main couple in before it ended.
  • The Devil She Knows ⭐⭐⭐⭐
    • A fun romance that eases up on the hooking up and makes for a very entertaining read. I felt some of the attraction was contrived, though. I need more sapphic demon romance books. This is now my latest obsession. Vampires our out, demons are in.
  • Dungeon Crawler Carl ⭐⭐⭐⭐
    • I started reading this a while back, and it didn’t land. I don’t really know why. But it is blowing up again because the audiobooks are out and I now have even more friends telling me to read it.
    • Coming back at it, I still feel it’s wanting very hard to be a Terry Pratchet book without quite making it to that height. However, once past some of the bro humor it’s a really fun page turner. I was huffing at how it ended and was immediately into the second book.

Music

  • Seeming
    • Deep down somewhere I decided to be extra angsty and full of drama. Not quite ThouShaltNot angst, but maybe some of my favorite Seeming albums angst.
  • Mandy, Indiana’s “Urgh”
    • Angry Angst
  • Planet Mu 30
    • One of my favorite recent compilations, for when the angst starts to fade
  • The Prodigy
    • My random brought up one of my favorite bands, so I decided to listen to some of the earliest albums again.
  • Kneecap
    • I felt like making a runback on the two studio albums. So great
  • FlowerBoyDeMii
    • I needed a good break from the banging, and this is some ambient jungle.
  • Fiona Apple’s “Fetch the Bolt Cutters”
    • Sometimes you just gotta get angry and put the electronics aside for it.

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

Art should ring a bell in your own life. I don’t want people to say it’s great, I want people to say: it’s for me.

- Agnès Varda