The holidays are horrible. They’re not necessarily inherently horrible, they’re fine. They’re whatever. It’s not my cup of tea, and the holidays themselves have no real meaning to me. They used to be about spending time with family and catching up. That did have meaning to me. I don’t get that anymore, though. My mom gatekeeps my family from me. She doesn’t want me around, and so I am not around. But I have nowhere to go for the holidays, I have nothing to do but contemplate what life would be like to have a real mother, and not whatever the hell I was saddled with.

Was staring at this damn thing recently and realized that I need yet another “proof of life” post, because why not? I have the space, I might as well use the space. So here’s my latest “proof of life” rant.

And rant is exactly what I mean. I don’t really have a point with this post outside of letting people know I still exist. I guess I could fabricate a point.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for a minute, you’ve probably seen examples of the Russian government actively oppressing companies they don’t like. Such as this. What a fucking joke. Fuck your propaganda, fuck your need to control a narrative, and fuck you in general. I hope someone shoots Putin in his fucking useless head. Someone really should, honestly. What a fascist piece of shit.

Can we arrange that, please? Honestly. Putin just needs to be assassinated. Useless fucking twat.

When I was a kid, I had a pair of those really awesome planar magnetic speakers from “Monsoon”. Surprisingly, I managed to hold onto those things and they’re currently connected to my mac mini. I need to get a DAC and preamp to really drive them appropriately, but they’re sorta rigged into the system currently regardless and honestly even with my patchwork bullshit setup they still sound very respectable. I do plan on getting a Schiit DAC and maybe one of those preamps they sell to drive them how they should be driven, but it’s not in the cards right this moment.

The election is this week. It’s wild how little elections in the past have mattered, yet they were painted as some high stakes game. With Project 2025 waiting in the wings, our democracy is actually actively being threatened. How good are our checks and balances? How resilient is our government to tyranny? Do we really want to find these answers out the hard way? Your vote this year can give answers.

I’ve been using “Arc Browser” as a daily driver for a few months now, and overall I have to say that the user experience is better than decent. The tools available within Arc make for quite a usable browser.

That said, Arc does nothing to protect your privacy. It looks like I’m switching back to Brave, I guess. At least until I can find something better.

I’ve had a relentless cough now for almost three months. In that time I’ve had pneumonia, multiple colds, and bronchitis. It’s not a great year for me to respire. Guess I’ll stop.

I think I’ve found a text editor that’s going to tear me away from vim. Helix is honestly really awesome. It’s not a 1:1 vim drop-in, but it’s definitely “inspired by” to a significant enough extent that migrating isn’t painful in the least. On the contrary, migrating to helix is awesome. It’s written in rust, multi-platform, and has some awesome features. 10/10, do recommend.

I’m sitting here on my laptop writing this, updating my blog to conform to the latest Hugo requirements, and holding my wife’s foot. She’s banging out an 18 page essay for her class and I’m just sitting next to her and cuddling her, enjoying her presence, touching her skin in soothing ways that say “I adore you”. It is a simple weekend, but a wonderful one. It seems like every week that passes we get closer, and if I have to leave town for work, it doubles the closeness that grows.