Posts about mental health, medicine, biochemistry, and tech by humble catgirl
Problem Presentation Recently, I tried out some networking shenanigans. I was attempting to isolate the route across a commercial VPN with a SOCKS5 server. Programs elsewhere on the LAN would be configured to pass through that proxy when I desired to move traffic out the VPN. qBittorrent (5.1.2) was one such program, marked to proxy announces and peer connections. Unfortunately, this use of a…
overall, this was a pain in the fucking ass. the first 6 hours were pleasant enough, but still, it took far more planning and configuration than i expected. in total, i spent around 16 18 hours to: instantiate and configure infrastructure (aws resources +permissions, e-mail sending, block storage, dns records, etc.) prepare the OS configure the ansible playbook which would install synapse,…
today, i want to talk about my battle with seasonal depression. my most recent foray into antidepressant treatment this winter has been a fun one. my regimen is a culmination of things from last year that worked, and surprisingly, when it comes to the additions, there was little fuss and churn. i attribute this to two things – one, i’ve got the money to liberally fuck around and find out, and…
[ optional precursor : poast abt my process for choosing this phone complete w/ angry rants and delusional desires ] prelude what ur in for: dis be a review of da fone i wound up with this purchase cycle. it’ll focus heavily on the software side of things, given that’s my wheelhouse. why i wrote it: i’ve been meaning to conjure up something about android software for a long time, being very…
a couple days ago my SMS chats were delayed. this happened regardless of sender, carrier, etc. the delay ranged from 10-30 minutes. particularly frustrating because TFA on all the things 😩 eventually i got annoyed enough to troubleshoot it yesterday and found that i am yet again the cause of wanting to defenestrate a computer ☺️ ⋟ this was an issue reported back as early as november for all…
one day i got hyperfixated for a few hours tweaking firefox, looking at addons, reading about vulnerabilities, removing addons with sketchy permissions, and opting out ( mirror ) of advertising personalization. this is something i’d wanted to look into for awhile and then, with the stims flowing, i went down that rabbit hole finally 😵 i’d used ublock origin for years, but knew it wasn’t quite all…
what makes a good smartphone? how do they spark joy? i’ve watched the smartphone market for the last year, hoping something might catch my eye as my device’s lifespan dwindles alongside my confidence in technology. behold! markets evolve toward peak nonsense as i cry in anguish. for i, but a simple denizen of the vast net, am met with the realisation that my place is not to be found among others.…
In my travels learning as much as I reasonably could to optimize my gender transition, I came upon a doctor named Will Powers infamous in certain trans circles for his unorthodox style. Dr. Powers takes it upon himself to do better than others who follow the ancient gender affirming treatment standards. He has some interesting ideas, makes himself available for questions on his sub-Reddit , and…
[ NOTE : This essay was updated March 24th, 2021 with newer research, clarifications, style changes, and such. See footnote references inline for largest points on the former.] When I was first considering medical transition, I hung out in a number of communities trying to make sense of the current state of trans research. It’s pretty abysmal. There are few large, well designed studies exploring…
I’ve been using IRC since about age 11. When Discord got popular a few years ago, I took a hiatus for awhile, but inevitably returned. The quality of life differences are pretty remarkable, and I wanted to preserve some semblence of that. The most common feature I found myself missing was easily uploading images. I spent some time hacking away to reproduce this nicety and am pretty pleased with…