This week in squirrels… From Sun Aug 16th to Sat Aug 22nd

Summary

  • Sunday stream canceled.
    • slime2 is hard broken and a few other things are wholly scuffed. Guess I need to do a stream repair time. It was a lot of little things, but the whole thing about my chat now being shut down was a drag.
    • I was so bummed out to realize that even though slime2 seemed to be all local scripting it relied fully on the upstream slime2 web app, which is now shut down by the dev.
  • Have you ever watched a three-hour documentary?
    • How about one about abusers and misogyny that frames itself as being about Obsession and other telling of Galatea.
    • Sadly it is a nebula exclusive so I can’t share it but I really enjoyed the deep dig into the Galatea story and different approaches to it.
  • Then I watched a Keith Haring documentary
    • Keith’s work was everywhere when I was young. It’s weird how much my brain recalls the dancing bodies, the dogs, and the business. I think my elementary school had a mural of his.
    • I did not know until much later in life that 1) he was gay 2) he died of aids 3) he drew a lot of dicks.
  • NixOS unstable test
    • I moved my desktops fully to unstable. It went better than I expected, and I found a trick that allows me to have some systems all stable and some all unstable with small exceptions.
    • I also got a bit sucked into redoing all the theming on my systems. NixPkgs dropped my Rose-Pine GTK theme. Somehow setting up default themes took more work than expected, but such is Linux fiddling.
  • Moved to wlr-which-key
    • This has been a finger-breaking task. To reduce the number of keystrokes it takes to run things, and make it way more consistent, I switched to wlr-which-key. This gives me a pre-written menu with a single key per submenu/app.
    • The downside is that this is fiddly. I now need to set up every app and all the menus. the upside is I can set up all sorts of scripts and custom commands. I already used this app for things like my power menu because of these abilities.
    • And now I have to retrain my fingers completely. It’s going a lot better now.
  • Losing financial support
    • Learning that the rest of this CAR-T stuff might be out of pocket is mind-boggling.
  • Disposable code
    • I’ve been thinking about how much AI enables far more disposable code. There is a lot of load-bearing code out there that tonnes of people and other software rely on, or at least some people rely on. That’s what it was like to post code and share code.
    • Now it’s almost too easy to make a thing to scratch an itch and then throw it right away. No longer creating, maintaining, and caring for a thing long term. Just like with cheap clothes, why keep them going when they fall apart in a dozen washes?
    • The author of SelfH.st blog and site recently wrote about how he wrote an app using AI but decided wholly not to share it to the community since he didn’t want to deal with other people. It’s odd he’d he mention it if he wasn’t making a point about the social dynamics of open source software.
  • Tech debt cleaning
    • Cleaning up a lot of small broken things was one of my goals in July, but it’s gone into August.
    • Hazel’s sorter just stopped working because uploading broke when I swapped the file server. ANd it didn’t recovery easily even after I fixed uploads.
    • Then I got a few refactors, like adding disko over mounts.
  • Music Desk re-organize
    • I finally bit the bullet and bought a guitar pedal stand. It fits my desk perfectly and has completely reorganized everything. I am shocked how much space it actually made on my desk.
    • This has made jam sessions and playing with things so much easier. I might start hitting record more often too.
  • REMISSION
    • I’m officially in remission! 🎊🎊🎊
    • Dance Dance Dance!
    • I am still MRD+ so… it’s time for another round and more CAR-T, but we finally found something that is working.
    • My body is in healing mode now, trying to recover a lot while I also try to push it with some remedial fitness. 6 months is a long time to be stunted by chemo.
  • Eye struggles and sleep
    • It’s not been all sunshine with health. Sleep is rough, and I can’t seem to get enough of it.
    • My eyes are struggling; they took a lot through all this, and so they are frequently fatigued and done with the day.
    • I also can’t get enough water ever. I am flushing something intense lately.
  • Work
    • I’ve been putting in far more hours, a lot of pairing calls. We pivoted on the project we are working on, and the new choice is going far, far better.

Books

  • Nope

Music

  • Slayyyter
    • How come NOBODY told me about Slayyyter? Ugh. I love her music so much now. Wow. I picked up her three albums and have been hard-rotating through them. I think STARFUCKER might be my favorite, but her latest is good.
  • The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy by Rob Zombie
    • This is my favorite of all the new Zombie albums. I have been trying to get into most of them, but this one has my number and is still one of my top listens this week.
  • Alien Meta by King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard
    • I was never really into KGY&LW, aware of them, but never really into them. But this latest album is a shockingly good house + prog sci-fi epic-ish album. It’s a great listen and loops well. I wish it was a touch longer and had a bit more… but still a huge listen this week.
    • PS. Also, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard has put up all 30-something of their albums for PWYW on Bandcamp; that’s huge.
  • MANIFESTO by Ennaria
    • Still a major AoY Contender

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

Seeing you win is also part of my dream btw

- BlueSky