Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
Okay so Mozilla has gone deep into the AI hole again, so I’ve switched back to Waterfox, a fork of Waterfox that focuses on the core browsing experience and eschews all of the stuff that nobody actually wants.
Waterfox is great, but its app icon is ugly and doesn’t look like a browser to me.
macOS does let you customize app icons but it isn’t super clear how to do it successfully, so here’s a process that works for me, as of macOS Tahoe 26.4.
Fiona’s been dealing with some respiratory stuff for a while, with what seemed like a cold starting around a month ago. Over the past few weeks she’s been having continuous problems with mucus in one nostril, and this past weekend she was also having nasal bleeding, although that’s cleared up.
Anyway, she’s really tired of going to the vet, but yesterday she got another examination with the most recent developments and it seems that whatever she has is probably systemic and/or structural. The most likely issues are that she either has a tumor or other structural issue in her nose, or she has an abscess in a tooth. It’s unlikely to be a sinus infection since it’s not bilateral.
Unfortunately, because she’s so elderly (she’s at least 15 years old, possibly older), the vet is hesitant to do anything invasive (such as dental work or a CT scan) since they’d all require anesthesia, and that can make things a lot worse.
She’s also lost a lot of weight, but it’s been difficult to keep her well-fed without also overfeeding Tyler as a consequence. It doesn’t help that she’s had typical old-lady dental problems for a while which make her unable to eat dry food anymore (and I think the mucus has impacted her sense of smell so even wet food doesn’t seem so appetizing to her right now).
So for now we’ve just got her on antibiotics which should at least help to clear up the acute infection, and if it returns later we can try other palliative approaches like steroids.
Fiona’s still super energetic and cuddly and generally a happy little creature, but she’s at the age where things could take a sudden turn for the worse and it’s time to start feeling grateful for the time I’ve had with her.
On the plus side, she’s doing a lot better than Werner did at this age and he still made it to around 19 or 20, so hopefully I still have a few years left with her. But I’m not going to go out of my way to extend her life; I’d much rather she has a happy time on this planet while she’s here.
Today is π day, which is a silly day to celebrate based on a completely arbitrary calendar system that happens to share some concordance with the inferior circle constant in our standard number system1. But π day is a bit special to me. Or rather, this π day is special to me, because it’s the 10th anniversary of an important thing that happened.
It’s about time I finally write a timeline of how frustrating HRT has been over the years, because I’m tired of re-explaining it and just want something to point folks to whenever it comes up.
Short version: I have historically been done extremely dirty by the healthcare system when it comes to HRT access.
In every corner of my life right now I cannot seem to escape the increasing fervor of the ongoing debate regarding AI and machine learning in general, where on one side you have people who are completely anti-AI and others who are completely pro-AI, and any point made in opposition to either of these things is seen as a hardline stance that is an attack or something to be corrected.
As with basically everything there is nuance, and a lot of conflicting things that tend to be collapsed down into single talking points, and I am getting caught in the middle. Over the last few days this has reached a fever pitch, and it’s gotten to the point that I feel like I’m constantly on the defense and on the edge of a panic attack.
I’m also very tired, and I want to just write this thing in my own little space where I can get some complete thoughts out before someone jumps down my throat in the middle of a series of posts. I’m not sure that this will have any real positive effect, but maybe a public rumination will help me work through the latest panic attack that woke me up after a particularly emotionally-draining day.
These days I have quite a lot of ambition but not enough energy to execute on it. I’m trying, though.
It’s okay to not feel okay, especially when your hormones have been out of whack for months and healthcare is slow to try to help you with it.
It’s been nearly a week since I removed Cloudflare from my sites. As a quick followup, I did get a slight surge in traffic that lasted for a day or so after a bunch of bots' DNS caches expired, but they seem to have all given up after the Cloudflare “managed challenge” interstitial turned into an HTTP 401 error for them.
About a year ago I set up Cloudflare as a fronting CDN for this site and my music site because it was the most expedient way of dealing with an AI bot onslaught. It helped a bit but the bots very quickly figured out how to get around all that and while Cloudflare gave me some slightly-better management tools for some stuff, I figured out better approaches to the bot mitigation.
Cloudflare was also super aggressive about caching some stuff that I didn’t want to be cached, and of course, there are many, many political and ideological reasons to not want to use Cloudflare. So my plan was always to switch back to not being under Cloudflare, but the longer I waited the harder it seemed like it would be, due to how SSL certificates work. In particular, I use wildcard Let’s Encrypt certificates, which require DNS to be current, and a big thing that Cloudflare does is… take over your DNS.
But tonight I got a hair up my butt and switched back to my own termination, and it wasn’t too hard to do, with just a little bit of DNS and TLS juggling, and I wanted to minimize my website downtime.
Ughhhh, this has been a heck of a week.
As usual I’ve been full of pain. And my brief surge of enthusiasm for working on music got cut kind of short because of it. But I’m hoping that tomorrow feels better and I can go back to the studio.
I’m also not sure where I stand with my fatigue. The last few days I’ve had to run quick errands by car and those felt fine. But I’m not feeling courageous enough to drive further just yet, especially with how any escape from White Center means following curvy roads which are especially triggering to me.
