🎊 I hope you like the new theme! 🎨
I only just barely got this new look ready in time for the weekly update. This brings the look and flow of my blog back to its minimal roots while improving readability imo.
Please let me know what you think, good, bad, or indifferent.
This week in squirrels…
Summary I cannot believe I woke up so early after such a late night of streaming. My Sunday AM Chaos stream quickly went into Terraria, turned into an epic-sized stream in time, and viewership again. However, Terraria was fun until it wasn’t, and then I was angry and frustrated, an event over spawned and stuck me in 10 10-minute death loop, so I bailed. I had a good conversation with Pixel during the stream about the struggle of newbies playing the game with veterans, because there is a big rush to get the game to a point for somebody who has done this enough times, while the newbie wants to explore and learn. I felt that at maximum volume by the end of the stream. Days later, somebody brought to my attention that Journey mode has a “god mode” button; in retrospect, that could have solved a lot of frustration. Ended the week with a second good Terreria stream, after Sunday’s torrent of frustration, I was handed a redic sword and basically melted anything and everything that could annoy me. It was a bit much that the game had no challenge anymore, but still, we got to play with all the bosses. The week of Debian upgrades continues. With both 12 and 13 receiving a point release, I have many boxes to patch. Mark my words, though. I believe Michiru’s (RaspberryPi) SD card is going. It’s so slow to do work on it. However, the system requires very little disk I/O, so I will let it run until it dies and then rebuild it. I lost a good bit of time to something the Debian 13 upgrade broke for me. NVENC and NVDEC were not working in Jellyfin and Plex. Plex silently switched to software, but Jellyfin started throwing errors. It took me a bit to realize it wasn’t something with nvidia-container-toolkit. The upgrade + auto-remove cleaned out libnvcuvid1 and libnvidia-encode1. 😆 Kinda need those. Did overhauls on my blog this week as planned. Feels nice to get things working better, but I don’t love how much time I spend fiddling with things. Getting things into a flow state takes work, and blogging is not something I always want to fiddle with. I hope all my week’s posts are not as big as last week’s. Luckily, hyperfocus and feedback put me in a huge blogging mood. I am stacking up drafts I can edit and post when I am not feeling like writing as much later. I really miss my old Hugo theme. It broke with a newer version of Hugo, and I switched to a more “off the shelf” one that looks amazing at a glance, but has a lot of things that bother me. I spent a whole evening tweaking my current theme to make it a touch more readable and fit better with how I want After all the modifications, I realized the theme wasn’t working for me, and I found one that fits what I wanted more. I worked on it extensively in PR, and even though it took a few days of on-and-off tuning and some feedback, I achieved the clean and stark look with PaperMod and a healthy dose of my own CSS. It might be too minimal, but let’s go with it. It is fascinating to me in some of the worst ways that people are trying to bring back the R-slur. I have been seeing it around a lot more and even heard some commentary about it. I wonder about the motivation and goals behind the attempt to make it socially acceptable again. It’s a weird cycle. Back in my day, we’d say it and get a wooping, then the Family Guy era hit, and it was everywhere, and then we realized that was a colossal mistake… now it is back? Now I am pondering “Words as fences” or how we define a space with words. Another random social issue I will spend too much time thinking about and writing about Renovate is only weeks old in my setup. I am already looking at the number of Renovate PRs I receive daily and considering how to set up auto-merging on passing tests, as well as how to test some crucial aspects, such as Hugo builds, since themes often break with new Hugo versions. However, it’s already caught some breaking versions, which is excellent. Coming back to work after two weeks off is a lot, a lot, a lot. But Pomodoro’s have been keeping me on and honest, which is excellent. Uuuuuuugh, Plex is having more issues with security. Last month, it was a critical client patch, and now it’s a service breach. Resetting my password and sessions has compromised my server to the point where I needed to delete my Preferences.xml and set it up as new to get it to authenticate again. I need to stop pre-ordering every last manga and book that looks like a half-decent queer romance. Over the previous two weeks, I have read two manga that I didn’t particularly enjoy. The first book was not to my liking, and the second was even less appealing. OMGOSH, the weather y’all. Towards the end of the week, temperatures started diving down to almost 20 °C by 6am, and I am so giddy. It’s cool enough to open windows at night and in the morning. AIR! FRESH AIR through my house. I received an absolutely hilarious piece of spam from Grammarly introducing their new feature. In short, “By now you are amazing at using AI to write for you, but it all sounds too stiff and like AI doesn’t, it? Introducing humanizer! The AI to make your AI sound less AI.” I am in stitches. My first major Jellyfin bug hit me. Trying to delete a massive music library broke library scans for everything and failed to clean up anything. I ended up having to add it back, remove it, and then perform an unfortunate amount of manual cleanup. At least Jellyfin’s file layouts and setups are mostly human parseable. My motivation has been a bit hard to come by, which isn’t too shocking, but I really felt my energy drop off at the end of the week, and the big depression swing came hard. I hate blaming hormones, but yanno what. I am staring at the calendar like… I know what this is. I have slipped back into a bad YouTube habit where I am spending too much time opening it and looking for something to watch to my taste. This eats into my reading time, and it shows by how much I have and haven’t read. Books Brewing Up Bedlam in Progress It’s all Your Fault Vol 2 ⭐ Music Yesss new Tierra Wack Björk: I am crawling her catalog this week. Although I liked Post a lot, I feel I never gave her enough of a chance. I appreciate and enjoy her work even more than I remember, and while it’s a bit disjointed, her latest album has fantastic sounds and tracks. Sophie: A co-worker mentioned Sophie, and now I am completely derailed and needed to drop everything and listen to her solo work—the founder of hyperpop who bore so many amazing artists in her wake. Sigh, rest in peace, and probably a lot of hype. Oh wow, one of my fave albums. Well, we’re listening to Spahn Ranch for the end of the week. I am not even mad at how old this is. Oh, that old muddy Cleopatra industrial metal sound hits me just right. Today is the 30th anniversary of the Spahn Ranch album “The Coiled One,” which was released on September 12, 1995, by Cleopatra Records.
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