Fox status: September

(Update 2024/10/16: Renaming this for September since it probably makes more sense for these posts to be retrospectives of the past month lmao.)

It's now been one day since Cohost went read-only and, even though I didn't exactly post regularly there about what I've been up to, I'm already missing the sense of community and life updates and stuff. So gonna give a shot at semi-occasional posts like this where I just say "here's what I've been reading/watching/doing" that don't come with the pressure of having to write a full, thought-out post about A Topic or anything. I mean that's kinda what blogging is supposed to be anyway right? Don't wanna let this thing get too formal now.

#Reading

I technically started reading Leviathan Falls, the last book in The Expanse series (aside from the final short story), back in January 2023, but I was struggling a lot around then with trying to settle in to a new place and lots of general Life Things were happening, and I found myself basically picking up my kindle, reading half of the first page of chapter 6, and putting it back down again when I couldn't focus.

But recently, with Corey releasing the first book of a new series that I also want to get to, I picked it back up again for real, started from the beginning, and am now a little over a third of the way through. I had to catch up a bit on things I forgot from the earlier books, given how long it's been, but I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far! If you haven't touched The Expanse yet and enjoy near-future, relatively grounded-in-reality sci-fi (at least as far as like, physics working and the time scales of space travel), I highly recommend it. There's also a show that closely follows the first few books, and loosely follows the next few up until book 6.

#Watching

Most of what I've been watching lately has been dinnertime TV with the household, which tends to be whatever the newest release on Dropout is. This past week that's been a new Dimension 20 season which I've been incredibly excited about since it's S2 of Misfits & Magic, and in between those we've been catching each new Make Some Noise, and very occasionally watching Dirty Laundry

Tbh there's been a bit of a lull in the Dropout content we're actively interested in this past month or so though, so we've been filling the gap with my first watch of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Somehow I actually had never seen more than an episode or two of any FMA until now???^* Wild considering some of the weird obscure anime I used to watch growing up, but very glad to be catching up on it now. Not sure if we'll go back to watch the original series at any point since I'm constantly hearing mixed things about which version is better and if you should watch both, etc.

Other than that, in my own exceedingly fleeting free time I've been occasionally watching through Dark Matter, since I read the book some years back and really liked it. The show is... alright I guess? It's so far much slower and grittier than I was expecting for something based off a fairly fast-paced quick read thriller, but it's otherwise interesting enough to hold my attention. I'm only on like episode 4/9 so maybe it picks up.

^{* Just checked and I watched the first two episodes in February 2015 and then nothing until this year, lol.}

#Working on

Aside from all my talk lately on getting this blog up and running, most of my work has been at-my-job work. Our main project right now is rebuilding our university's main news site, since it's on Drupal 7 which has been threatening to hit EOL for... quite some time now but it really for real truly is come January 2025, so we're finally getting around to updating it to D10 (not even 11, but that should be an easier undertaking when we get to it). Most of what that work entails is figuring out how the fuck recipes are supposed to work in new Drupal versions (spoiler: shrug emoji; there's next to no rigid documentation and the community response seems to be "it's still a work in progress but also it's in production right now"). I dunno, it's a learning experience at least?

Outside of work I'm continuing to poke at Laravel since I do really enjoy working with this framework. Might have some other projects to pick up that I can use it for but nothing that's so concrete I can talk about it here. I'm just having fun learning it and also trying to get up to speed on other "modern" web tech like Nginx and Postgres (since I never really grew out of my rigid LAMP stack mindset from learning web dev in the early 2000s).

That's about all for now I think!