This week in squirrels… From Sun Aug 9th to Sat Aug 15th
Summary
- Streaming while I can!
- My Sunday stream was a wild amount of scuff and things being broken.
- But I discovered I really like the 2.5D Bloodstained game a lot. I am looking forward to playing it more soon.
- Returning to my GLP-1
- I have been roughing it on double insulin for most of the chemo, and I am so done with all the side effects of that. I got my medical clearance, and I am back on Monday! weeeeeee! Please no more insulin.
- Time to get big procedures.
- The first couple of days where consumed with all the calls, all the prep for the second half of this week.
- How am I this sleepy?
- Even after eight full hours, it feels like I’ve had 2.
- Utah and the Extraction
- The car rides to and back were mostly easy breezy, just really long at a solid 7 hours. We did have an incident in Beaver with someone. In retrospect, it was mostly a funny moment, and afterward most people I talked to about it warned me that Beaver is the place you stop when you want to deal with “the crazies.”
- Since it was a trip to Utah we decided to listen to Satan music the entire time. I bought a lot of the new Rob Zombie right before the trip for it. And then during the trip, I got the new Marilyn Manson album that came out. I talk about them below, but overall it was a pretty fun way to theme the trip.
- We found the gayborhood at 9th & 9th early on. They had a great coffee shop thought it was constantly packed to the gills and with a line to the door every time. Next to it was a Thai place that was also heavenly.
- While most everybody in Utah hosputal was great, I had some nasty complications on the installation of fresh tubes into my neck. The radiologist going at me was not having a good day.
- Then we learned the extraction “made me a little too relaxed.” This is medical for “caused my blood pressure to plummet.” Not the worst problem to have since we could manage it. I did learn what a calcium deficiency feels like: mostly going numb.
- The odd part about the trip was how mid-August in Utah was super rainy and cold the whole time. Pretty big difference from the +40c in Vegas.
- My mental health has not improved.
- One can imagine that this whole week has been… a lot.
Books
- Still no
Music
- Rob Zombie
- One of the big classic scary man say spooky things acts. I never really kept up with him since “Past, Present & Future”, so the car trip is a good time to get caught up and see what he has been up to. I picked up a lot of the new albums and listened through most of them, trying to figure out which ones really stick, and which went through the wash.
- I do have to say it really feels like it’s been going downhill since the White Zombie breakup. There were some huge initial projects, and then a lot of… mid. That said, there are still a few bangers throughout.
- Marilyn Manson
- When you think of “spooky man say scary thing” it’s hard not to put Manson first. Sadly, he’s also the top of the list when I think of musicians who are drug-addled shitbags.
- His new album came out this Friday, so I started going through some of my favorites. I can’t say I still adore listening to him like I used to, but still he is the peak of scary man saying spooky thing,
- Sadly, the new album fell even well below “One Assassination Under God, Part 1.” Shockingly so. I went and relistened to Part 1, and it was even better than I remembered compared to Part 2. Still not top three. But up there after digging through the catalog
- My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult
- The trifecta of satan music for me. The early albums were extra Satan music, while some of the later ones still have it, but with a bit more funky 70’s camp or horror.
Reads and Videos
- The Best Transmasculine Comics to Add to Your TBR List
- Amazing! Perfect! yessssssss. I always need some new graphic novels and webcomics to check out
- The Fascists Are Making You Sound Crazy | Bad Faith Times
- I don’t love the “fascists” framing in this, but outside of some name-calling, I read nothing but straight facts here. It’s about dismissal and handwaving. The “Alt-Right Playbook” series on YouTube also goes over this a lot.
- Amazon Is Spitting Customers With Unhelpful Order Confirmation Emails | Daring Fireball
- I hate this with a seething fiery passion. This is completely hostile to the users of the system.
- A Google insider spills the tea on how the company forsook its founding ideals | Ars Technica
- We all know “Don’t be evil” is long past, but it’s interesting how we got from there to here.
- Mark Zuckerberg Posts Deranged 6,500-Word Essay About Giving Everyone AI Superintelligence | 404 media
- I mentioned this in last week’s post, but 404 Media curated some of the weirdest parts of this into the article.
- Peer review is overwhelmed—can it survive in the AI era? | Ars Technica
- Same complaint, different field. How do we manage the deluge? Oddly, we created so much AI to create these problems, but nobody seems to be in a position to use AI to address them.
- How AI is breaking the British state | The Economist
- More complaints of content floods, this time on a governmental level
- Trump signs bonkers order that cuts vaccines, promotes ones that don’t exist | Ars Technica
- The scientific community is rolling in their graves. And yes, I am assuming they are all dead after this.
- Netflix Has Peaked | Daring Fireball
- This breakdown goes over some of the things that still make me feel like we actually are in some broken “post-capitalism.” These companies are making phenomenal amounts of money. But they are not making enough because the snake can’t stop eating its own tail.
- Google hammers another, extremely petty nail in the Android Open Source Project’s coffin | OSnews
- I think this might be “fork found in kitchen” for a lot of people who pay attention to Android’s development, but it’s still so upsetting
- Hundreds of fake Chrome VPN extensions route traffic through a proxy | BleepingComputer
- Technically, all VPN extensions run your traffic through a proxy. That is what a VPN does. (just laughing at a headline)
- Twitch Says Quiet Part Out Loud: Amazon AI Is Opt Out Because ‘Nobody Would Opt In’ | Aftermath
- This is the definition of a dark pattern. Silently turning something on and making people find an opt-out because you can’t be bothered enough to incentivize people to use it otherwise.
Quote of the Week
You say God, and I say, say 10, say 10
- Manson