This week in squirrels… From Sun Sep 20th to Sat Sep 26th

Summary

  • Utah Week 3
    • I ended up paying to upgrade the hotel wifi to make things a lot more bearable. I’m not in love with dumping money on “upgrade your Wi-Fi,” but the internet is my lifeline lately, and I would burn too much phone data trying to tether for another month. Since I have more than half a mb to share across everything now, I can watch some streams and my shows without it choking constantly.
    • It’s been a bit warmer but still plenty damp and rainy up here.
  • The journal backlog.
    • Wow, did I let the journals pile up. This week I went through the slushpile to push editing, updating, and filling these out. I didn’t want these to fall so far behind, so I have been filling them out as I go, which is a lot better than I was during hospital time.
  • Broken Audio Player and the Downgrade-Upgrade
    • Noooooo! I was replacing the microSD card and put it in upside down. I didn’t push too hard, but still it clicked locked in upside down, crooked, and 4/5ths in. I got it out with tweezers without too much damage to the card, but it seems the port is trashed.
    • Instead of going another month without a DAP, I ordered another one I had my eyes on. The interesting part is that it is a cheaper player than my last one. Instead of being an Android-based player, it’s a sub-$100 custom OS player. It has slightly better audio hardware, but the rest of the hardware is smaller, including the screen and processor.
    • It’s arguably a downgrade, but I am giving the more restrictive UX a pass since I’m not fiddling with Android and apps; it’s just a music player again. The music player functionality isn’t feature-rich; yet it still plays albums and playlists. It makes me think a lot about what I really need/want vs. what I can have.
    • My biggest miss is albums sorted by year and being able to listen to all the albums under an artist. This player is set up far more for playlists, single-album listening, or shuffling through all the tracks for an artist. This only means I want to make a script to automate some playlists.
  • Fighting my mobile laptop setup.
    • I hadn’t really used a lot of my mobile setup in the last many years. Between the pandemic and my switching off Apple systems in the last two years, it hasn’t been a priority to work around.
    • My amazing laptop stand works just as well with my Framework 13 as it has with all my MacBooks. However, my Apple keyboard and trackpad did not want to connect and work with it easily. It took a weird amount of fiddling and doing the “connect then sync,” which I don’t think blueZ actually supports, but somehow made the old devices so much happier.
    • If only they were not still Lightning! I took those cables out of my kit, forgetting they still need it.
  • The end of the anime season.
    • I had some good shows, but a shocking amount of drops.
    • I have yet to see what is next season, so that’s next week.
  • My body has been so upset
    • My leg muscles have been so sore, my ankles angry, and my hips sad. Hopefully, with my mobile setup fixed, I can at least sit with better posture.
    • And then came the rashes. The skin under my dressing went critical, with weeping wounds that covered most of my arm. We went through a bunch of special dressing and cleaning methods, trying to heal this before I go septic. They think I either have or developed an allergy to a cleaner they use during changes here in Utah. Either way, I am losing my PICC line Monday early A.M., which is miserable.
    • And right after the arm started to hit critical levels, a rash started spreading all over my body. I am a human-shaped rash as I write this. They don’t think it’s the same thing as around my line, so we are playing the “swap all of your medications and everything and all the lotions” game.
  • Struggling to stay productive
    • I really feel like I am spinning my wheels and not getting any great work progress or even progress on my projects. It is a struggle to get momentum when I am fighting the urge to scratch myself raw.
    • Still, I am making enough progress on a backlog of documents and other things I have to do.
  • Dozzle v11
    • Speaking of app updates. Dozzle finally got its own auth and stores its state. Also, the UX has a great refresh.
    • Dozzle is the kinda app where I cannot recommend it enough for a simple self-hosted Docker stack. It’s great to have all the logs and some basic stats on one page. Nothing more, not trying to manage everything. Just stats and logs.
  • The Manga Backlog
    • To get back into reading, I am starting with my manga backlog. The piles of manga in my Kindle from preorders and other promotions are huge after a whole month and a half without reading.
  • Even more art
    • I have maintained my addiction to getting smaller and cheaper commissions on Vgen.co. I have been on fire getting icons, YCHs, and other generally discounted pieces of my OCs.
    • It’s been a big thing since I got sick, as a great pick-me-up that keeps on picking, and I am sure I mentioned it in prior posts.
    • Getting larger commissions from bigger artists is also great, but money’s not amazing, and spreading through small artists is great. I have found a lot of shockingly good artists through trawling vgen.

Books

  • Assorted Entanglements, Vol 10 ⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • Final volume! This one was a pretty weak victory lap, doubling over all the couples without adding much to the story or resolving any of the hanging ones.
  • Shino & Ren, Vol 2 ⭐⭐⭐⭐
    • I feel this one was a huge improvement over the first one. The art is improved, and it feels way more like a manga. It still has a lot of first-person pin-ups around story beats, but the story around it really improved. Overall, it is still saccharine and a bit horny, but it tells more of the story of these two than the first volume did.
    • From my review of the first volume, I still agree with my opinion on the first-person interjection art pin-ups and the overall way the horny art is approached: Instead of being shown as a part of the bigger picture of their relationship, they feel like a weirdly leery flaunting of the main character’s relationship.
  • Yuri Yuri Panic! Vol 1 ⭐️⭐️
    • Amazing art and a fun setup ruined by going way too hard on the weirdness of “the popular girl” and an obnoxious yuri-otaku character becoming pivotal to the story. This is a drop for me.
  • What Does the Fox Say, Vol 1 ⭐⭐⭐ 1/2
    • I almost feel bad giving this a 3 stars because the story is overall really good, but the wild inconsistency in the art and the confusing time skips took off some points for me. This is definitely sliding into the “Toxic Yuri” category, but not in a tryhard way. These are some complex women with complex feelings and maybe should stop hooking up.
    • I am reminded of a saying shared between my friends: “Just cuz he’s good for your hole, doesn’t mean he’s good for your soul.”

Music

  • Chat Pile
    • I have been revisiting their entire catalog now, and it’s getting me more into sludge metal as a whole. This strikes the perfect balance of super-noisy instrumentals, angry politics, and an understandable singer.
  • Acid Bath
    • A sludge fan friend of mine told me if I want a next stop, this was the place to go. I listened to both of their albums and didn’t adore it, but it’s pretty good.
  • Thou
    • Some of Thou’s albums also came up high on the sludge list. I loved the instrumentation more than Acid Bath, but the black metal-style scream lyrics I couldn’t understand didn’t spark joy.
  • Cult of the Lamb Original Soundtrack
    • When I need a metal break, here it is

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

4 Non Blondes underestimated how many times I’d step outside, take a deep breath, and scream WHAT’S GOING ON?!

- @Calm