TL;DR: Grilled a whole turkey for Thanksgiving, fell deep into the smart litter box telemetry rabbit hole for Catsby's health monitoring, reinstalled Fortnite and got weirdly fascinated by their copyright mashup achievement, published my short story "Emerald Halo", and spent way too much mental energy worrying about ADHD and creative writing schedules.

Turkey Day Grilling

I grilled a turkey on Thanksgiving, for the fourth year in a row. Set up the charcoal grill outside, and even as it got dark and started misting rain, I kept at it. Something about standing out there in the damp Oregon evening, tending the fire, felt at least a bit restorative.

When we first moved from Michigan to Oregon, I was worried I'd be depressed by the rain. Turns out I like it being all damp and mossy for winter instead of snowy and dead. The "moisturizing season," as I told someone on Mastodon.

Eventually the turkey entered the building, though I still can't carve for crap. The rest went into the stock pot for Future Soups. (That sounds like a good band name, honestly.)

Writing and Creative Schedules

I published "Emerald Halo" to my blog this week—a short story I've had kicking around since 2020. Still getting up the gumption to get myself out to some writing groups, maybe take some creative writing classes at PCC. Until then, I think I might keep trying to post things I've managed to finish to my blog.

Next thing I'm eyeing up is a 9000 word story that I'm considering serializing, if only to break up the parts and play with serialized stories as a format on my blog.

I've been trying to carve out a mid-day hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays for creative writing. But today, I'm just not feeling it. Part of me fears if I skip it and don't make myself do it, I'll stop doing it altogether—as is my ADHD wont. Another part of me fears if I make myself do it, I'll burn out on it—as is my ADHD wont. 😬

Cat Poop Telemetry

In less appetizing news: Thanks to a trio of Petivity Smart Litter Box Monitor devices sheepishly acquired from Black Friday sales, we now have complete litter box telemetry coverage. I posted about how one of our litter boxes sends me a push notification when Catsby poops, which is useful under current circumstances. This is not the future I expected.

Along with this, there are a non-zero number of litter box pictures going around in texts between my wife and I right now. I promise I won't share those here (or anywhere).

Now I just need to figure out how to get the data out of the closed app before the Purina company abandons these gadgets. (See previous rants on Nest thermostats and solar inverters.)

Anyway, hope you enjoy some further cat pictures as a palate cleanser for the poop talk.

Fortnite Copyright Thunderdome

Oh no, I reinstalled Fortnite.

Wait... how the hell did they manage to license "Surfin' USA" by the Beach Boys as the drop-in music? I'm absolutely astonished on the regular at the copyright/trademark/brand mashup they've assembled. Like, do they pay for all of that? Do they get paid to include some of it? Do they just have a Thunderdome of lawyers bashing away at each other?

Where else can I blast Homer Simpson in his underwear with a shotgun, only for Marty McFly to shiv me in the back with a sword from Kill Bill? And then you can go watch King Kong, Godzilla, Hatsune Miku, Iron Man, Giant Homer Simpson, and Voltron beat up on another kaiju.

I ended up ponying up for the Battle Pass. By Tuesday I had, myself, become Marty McFly. I'm not particularly good at the game, but they do a good job at giving you stuff to do while running and hiding.

Music Stuff

For some reason, I was in a sudden intense mood to binge on Mother Mother albums. Really like them, though they seem like a band that should be problematic, but I just haven't heard why yet. A lot of bands I really like end up that way.

Another weird nostalgia moment: I had a distinct memory this week of listening to Aphex Twin on a really low bit rate RealAudio stream on terrible headphones in a university computer lab around the fall of 1995. Sounded like a transmission from space.

From a cool TikTok on Creating Unique '80s-Style Graphics with Fairlight CVI, I got Jean-Michel Jarre's "Zoolookologie" stuck in my head:

The band Brighter Than A Thousand Suns is pretty dang keen:

I haven't really bothered paying much attention to Sabrina Carpenter. But I've seen a bunch of TikToks using clips of "Manchild"—to the point that I've been going "heh, oh boy" all day as a lil verbal stim noise.

So I finally looked up the song on YouTube... I think this might be one of the absolute best music videos I've seen in a very long time. I would totally watch a whole season of TV based on this video.

Also saw Goldfrapp's "Alive" for the first time, thanks to victordancer on Twitch—aerobercizing vampires in 80s sparkly spandex? What in the Olivia Newton John is this?

Speaking of Twitch, I know the year-end "wrapped" things are all passe now, but peeking at my 2025 recap: I pretty much just watch DJs and maybe Tennocon for Warframe. Oh yeah, and Rifftrax. But I watch DJs almost every night?

Humble Bundle Image Comics

This looks like an enormously great collection of comics—all of Black Science and Saga and Sex Criminals and a pile of other stuff I've been meaning to read in the Humble Bundle Image Comics collection.

I will say the download experience is abysmal though. I tried bulk-downloading the PDF versions of everything—the site starts queuing up each individual item as a separate PDF, each of which (and there are 175 items) opens as a new tab in my browser. In case anyone else tries to download this and uses Firefox, there is a setting to disable this behavior.

Humble Bundle also offers BitTorrent as a download option—but each of the 175 items is a separate torrent.

Also, a bunch of the CBZ format versions are just 22 bytes? That seems... incorrect.

So yeah, tl;dr: looks like a great collection of comics but Humble Bundle has a completely abysmal UI for downloading them. I still bought the bundle, but I've seen pirated comic collections offer a way friendlier experience.

Squirrel!

Randomly: a napping squirrel on our deck, which felt like a gift.

Miscellanea