Fox Status: November

Another month, another "oh yeah I should post" thought nagging at the back of my brain that I manage to ignore for a week straight.

I've been missing the days when end of year stuff felt good instead of just stressful and depressing. I don't know if it's just a symptom of getting older or what but I used to be able to just relax around the holidays; give gifts, see family, take time off work, and just generally have a nice wind-down to the year. I guess a big part of it is I've consistently had Big Things going on around the last few months of the year since like, 2021? Whether it's moving or big trips or coordinating holiday stuff with family, I guess the past few years have held a lot more thinking and planning around this time than they used to for me. It's not all bad by any means but it's using a lot of extra brain juice that I already was low on. Being farther away from my immediate family now also hasn't helped that a ton.

That said, November was at least eventful and offered a nice brain reset:

#I got to see Europe again!

My parents had been wanting to get together a Big family trip for quite a few years now. Usually we have a semi-tradition of getting together for a week or so every year or two, and most of the time it's to go to the beach or somewhere local to everyone, just something low-key to get to spend time together. But every handful of years my folks like to do something a bit more involved, so after them doing a lot of planning while I just kinda answered emails going "yeah that sounds good whatever you want," we took a trip out to Europe at the end of the month! I've only travelled out of the country a small handful of times in my life, nearly all of them to the EU, but it's been about 7 years since my last trip (where I went to Poland and Germany with a close friend). This time, we spent most of our time in France, but took day trips to places in Germany and Switzerland, mostly to visit the local Christmas markets since that was my mom's big goal for the trip.

I also took a bunch of pictures while over there, but I've been super slow at going through them all and getting them in a state where I can post 'em anywhere, so I may do a photo dump once I get around to that! I also took a small handful of pics on my Pentax and Vivitar film cameras, so I can't do anything with those until I finish out those film rolls and figure out where I can get them developed.

#Watching

We've still been working through a host of Dropout shows lately, with me being out of town for a while we fell behind a bit on D20 but hopefully will catch up on the latest Misfits and Magic sometime soon! Other than that when we're in the mood we've been watching old Simpsons episodes with dinner, since I've never seen much of that show somehow...

We also watched through Captain Laserhawk on a whim over the span of a weekend and man what a fun show, I wasn't expecting to enjoy it anywhere near as much as I did! Went in basically thinking "oh the funny show where they make Rayman say 'fuck'" but it was surprisingly engaging and way less shill-y than I was expecting a game about Ubisoft games to be? Definitely recommend it if you like wacky cyberpunk anime-inspired shit.

#Working on

Not a ton to report here tbh, I've been slowly poking at the follow-up post I promised last month on email and getting a workable system for dealing with email from the terminal. I'm not sure I'm super happy with it so far tbh, it reads a lot like just a tutorial of how I set things up (which is really just a conglomeration of various other tutorials I read in order to get things set up), instead of a more personal piece on my setup. I dunno, we'll see where that goes.

In a similar vein, I've been messing around with doing more things without leaving the terminal, because I'm just Like That. The latest fun thing has been using Newsboat to manage my RSS feeds for reading other people's blogs and updates and such, and syncing that config across all of my computers to keep things up to date. It's been pretty neat for the most part. I do miss a little bit by not using a web-based feed aggregator (mainly embedded images and syncing with my phone), but I still haven't found a replacement for ol' Google Reader that actually works for me.

#Other thoughts

I've been using Bluesky more lately, despite my thinking that the end of Cohost would be very nearly the end of my time on modern social media. Mostly it's just nice to see people there that I knew from the old Twitter days, and I still have a soft spot for dedicated short-form microblogging. But I also still want to spend more time in an online space I control. I've toyed with the thought of setting up GoToSocial on my server for future fediverse interaction, but that'd be some added cost to my hosting plan, and I still know more people that are in the bsky/ATproto world than on fedi, so I dunno.

I may start opening myself up to making more frequent and smaller posts here, instead of feeling this constant pressure to make Big Long posts exclusively. That'd probably mean just posting updates as they come (if I think of it) instead of doing these monthly status updates where I have to remember everything I did over the last month, so that'd be kinda nice. But I don't want to overwhelm any RSS subscribers with constant short-form nonsense.

Anyway it's after 5pm and I want to log off of the work computer for the day so I'm just gonna blast this one out without any further thought. See ya!