I use FreshRSS to manage all of my RSS feeds. It is wonderful. Maybe the best thing I use on a daily basis. I adore being able to use the internet in this way, for many reasons. I’ve talked about my eternal love of RSS before, so I don’t need to get all gushy over it here. But damn is it good.

But I have a problem. Back in August, I participated in Blaugust 2025 along with a couple hundred of my fellow bloggers. My silly ass decided to subscribe to every single participant’s RSS feed. Now, I’ve spent months weeding them out to just those that I’m actually interested in. But I’ve found a ton of new content thanks to that mass subscribe.

I’ve been working on making it so I can self host my own music library over the last few months. This has entailed buying some music from Bandcamp and pulling in some tracks from a seafaring friend. Do I feel guilty for sailing the seven seas? A little, but most of the stuff I’ve downloaded that way is stuff that I’ve bought before. Sometimes twice. I’m mostly re-downloading this stuff so I can guarantee everything is the same quality. A lot of my older purchased stuff is from the late 90s and early 2000s when ripping was new, meaning it was all of dubious quality.

With my recent unemployment, I’m returning to a blog post idea I had a few months ago. I wrote this idea down and just didn’t know how it fit, as it was during the time when I started to think more carefully about my health and getting older. Life happens, we all know this. Good things, bad things, and all the things in between. All of those things add up to make life what it is.

So, I’ve been working on my music collection and it is really coming along. I’ve downloaded a metric shit ton of music in the last month. My biggest problem remains, however. Metadata is crap. Even though now all of my files are meticulously named and organized, the so-called metadata search only works about 80% of the time. Why it is so hard, I’m not sure. These people have databases, right? All my folders have album.nfo files in them already, so the metadata shouldn’t even need to be looked up. It’s just an odd thing.

I’ve changed the naming scheme a little. I stole the idea from Justin Vollmer. Yoink.

Programming

I have started yet another project. I’m calling it Checkbox, and it’s a todo list application that will one day replace TickTick for me.

It is written in Rust (btw) and GTK4. I’m learning Rust rabidly, but I still suck at it. So there’s a lot of error codes coming my way that I then have to go look up or ask Claude. It’s been enormously fun.

My favorite television show of all time is The West Wing. Aaron Sorkin is awesome, and most of his stuff is just good. The West Wing is my favorite for many reasons, but I loved it because it dealt with human problems in at least somewhat realistic ways. The good guys didn’t always win. So much of TV drama ignores the human condition, which just makes things seem so unrealistic to me.

Happy Thanksgiving!

It is important to say thanks. So, I’m just going to say thank you. Thank you to my family for putting up with me. Thank you to my buddies who have been with me through it all. Thanks to all of those people who have supported me throughout the years. And finally, thank you for reading this.

First off, Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends. Second, yes, this post is being written on turkey day, despite being time stamped the day before. I’m not cheating, I’m adapting. Or so I tell myself.

I spent most of today cooking for family. We did Thanksgiving meal really odd this year. We had so many things we wanted, we started cooking on Sunday. We’ve been eating stuff all week. All we have left to cook is the bird itself and some potatoes. So we’ve had part of the dinner already, and then leftovers, and then we’ll cook some more and then have more left overs. It was good in that we didn’t have to do everything all at once, but it also feels very odd. Every day this week has felt like Thanksgiving.