This week in squirrels…

Summary

  • Dang, all my articles are dark and rude af
    • It’s just a bunch of angsty news. It’s things I still want to share and raise the mindset of, but I also really want to try and balance it out.
    • I am going to try to spice up a lot more fun things, especially from now on.
  • New laptop!
    • I am back on a Linux laptop after so many years of Apple laptops! I purchased the previous-gen AMD 7040 Framework 13 to sidestep any issues with new hardware support.
    • The laptop feels and looks great except for the black transparent bezel and modules that I purchased as part of my “build-my-own” setup. I would love the return of 2k transparent electronics. Still, in this case, the accent is inconsistent and jarringly out of place against the beigeish-grey of the rest of the laptop. I purchased a dbrand artist series skin for the whole notebook, and it gives it a fantastic look and feel. Dbrand really did some excellent work on these.
    • It was exceptionally cool to have my Nix and dotfiles setup pop up and have 90% of my setup done in moments. I needed a lot of laptop-centric tweaks and experiments, but it would have been that anyway.
    • It took a little with Nix and experimentation to get my power profile and keyboard set up correctly. My initial battery cycles are going well. Not as good as I have seen claimed at 4-5W idle, but my 6.5W idle is still a good start, and it’s not ramping up during basic work and browsing.
  • The Streamer Bust
    • I have been sharing a lot of little news and videos about changes at Twitch and YouTube, and general streamer news, and all of this is starting to culminate into a bust, or market correction of sorts.
    • I am listening to more and more people talking about how the general economic struggles are combining with platforms’ aggressive changes in how they count viewers (a metric people get paid on). The skyrocketing costs and plummeting returns are making streaming an unviable career for many.
    • This also contributes to rashes of burnout over people who became highly public entertainers five years ago during the pandemic and were unprepared for the amount of high personal drama, social expectations, begging for money, and general turning of their hobbies into their careers.
    • I am well into double digits with the people in my circles who have already slipped off, officially announced their graduation, or are discussing their 2026 graduation.
  • A month on Niri
    • It’s been a month on Niri now (Oct 10th), so I’m writing my feelings after having used it on a few different types of systems.
    • My biggest impression is that the configuration has a great need for supporting includes. Sharing the same config across three boxes is a little painful since the screen layouts are so different. However, this DOES work because I can configure my screens by their name and ID. This means I can group all screen setups into a single config without conflicts.
    • Overall, it feels so much better than a tiling window manager. I have a lot of history with i3/Sway, but it was always clunky having to constantly resize all my windows, especially with apps that didn’t handle it well. And I never had a great experience on a smaller laptop. Being able to spawn windows and have them scroll off is nice on my desktop with three monitors, but heavenly on my laptop with the 13-inch screen.
    • The independent per monitor workspace is also nice for when I keep side monitors in one context, and shift the context of the center. This is really amazing when streaming, so some things are always there, and others get swapped in and out
    • The number of keyboard commands for navigating and moving windows is still not FULLY under my fingers, which is weird. I need to get faster at moving between screens
    • The amount of graphical flair is nice, moving windows has a pleasant but not over-the-top ZWOOP effect, especially when consuming a window into a column, something I have gotten very fast at. Also, the borders, transparencies, and such are just enough styling.
    • In fact, the spawn and consume is so much faster for arranging columns that select then spawn. I don’t know why that works better in my brain.
    • My only real complaint so far is that it’s easy to lose track of windows or forget to check in on one. I haven’t found a good way to do an activity view, so if I have a background task or conversation going on, it can get REALLY backgrounded. Now, for an adhd head that might actually be a good thing, more focus, less letting me multitask.
    • Setting up a window selector in Fuzzel was not optional, though. Niri doesn’t have Alt-Tab or any native way to jump to a window, so a script using some niri msg commands works fine.

Books

  • If I Could Reach You
    • I swear I will get through this, but I am very much not liking the plot or MC. I am hoping it turns around.
  • My Goddess is Precious Today Too Vol 1 ⭐️⭐️⭐️✨
    • This volume has some of the best overall short stories with intertwined couples, unfortunately hampered by not-so-great art, some hard-to-track paneling, and rough writing or translation.
    • I actually consider this a recommendation, even if I can’t rate it higher because of the combination of art, paneling, and writing all leaking against it.
    • I don’t usually do half stars, but I wanted to give this more than three. Because the stories themselves and some of the jokes really are great.
  • Aoi is too hot to handle - Blooming Love ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
    • Short, adorable, and awesome to see how much the artist and translators improved

Music

  • The Blak Dog’s “Fragments”
    • TBD re-released Fragments with a remaster and some extra tracks. I hadn’t bought Fragments when it came out in 2025, and putting out a five-year-old album as a remaster feels weird, but right now this album hits just right, so it’s been at the top of my list.
  • Ori and the Blind Forrest
    • It’s been a chill and soundtrack week, what can I say
  • fur:trash’s “LOST DOG”
    • After ten or so EPs, fur:trash really went above and beyond, going past more rote Dariacore and making an absolute end-to-end banger of an album.
  • Swans
    • I am working through a selection of the Swans catalog to try to find what my favorites and less-than-favorites are
  • Chillhop Timezones Japan
    • This one stands out a lot from most of their other ones, but I really like it

Reads and Videos

Quote of the Week

Cynicism: A distrustful, suspicious posture toward human nature that assumes people are motivated only by self-interest. A worldview that treats sincerity as naïve and integrity as optional.

Cynicism ensures that trust never forms. Trust is the soil where community grows. Community is where accountability becomes possible. And accountability threatens the entire foundation of white supremacy.

For white men in particular, cynicism is sold as strength. As intelligence. As leadership.

But the truth is: cynicism is isolation.

  • Kim Crayton