Lameazoid.com - Weekly Wrap Up (2026.07.25)

These are starting to get long, its almost like I should just blog smaller posts more.

I have not been following it but I caught the end of the World Cup last weekend while at my parent’s house for a visit. I don’t understand fútbol at all. I mean I do, I get the gist, but like, they added 20 minutes because no one had scored? Then randomly added another 5 minutes? Maybe because the refs kept eating up the clock looking at injuries? Anyway, it was kind of exciting at the end, at least.

In other “fun” times this week, I ended up having a car issue… again… on my weekly work trip. I am starting to be glad they are going to eventually provide me with a company car, but then also I can afford the maintenance I have been ignoring partly BECAUSE I have been able to drive my own car and get mileage.

I kind of lucked out on this one. I decided to take an alternative route that was less interstate and more, I dunno, populated, because I wanted to go by the Ollie’s that was on that route. It wasn’t a much longer overall trip really. I made it to the Ollie’s, and found what I was hoping to find (Leader Laser Prime), but passed because it wasn’t the price I was hoping to find (closer to $20-$25). I also went over to the Five Below in the same little strip mall.

After leaving there, my car was making an awful grindy noise. I made it like a half mile then pulled off and checked. The front passenger tire was completely flat. I assumed I had hit a nail or something. I started to put the donut on but there was a tire place literally on the corner of the dumpy parking lot I was in, so I just limped it over there.

Not a nail, it had worn out on the inside and just blown. I knew I was probably close to needing new tires. He also said that two others were just as bad. The fourth was new, I replaced it a year or so ago after sliding on some ice and hitting a curb and fucking it up.

So, $600 plus later, I had 3 new tires. The car felt weird and floaty when I first started driving it because the new non worn down tires. But I got used to it. I am also really REALLY glad I was over in this random ass shopping trip and not going down the interstate out in the middle of nowhere and likely still in the construction zone when the tire went out. Which is where I would have been if I had opted to just, go home.

I want to side note here a bit, I bitch about my finances some, and sometimes it feels a bit tight, but part of that bitching is because I limit my frivolous spending quite a bit, especially based on household needs. I can throw down $600 in an emergency for new tires, BECAUSE, I do things like, decide I want to wait and pay $5-$10 less for Leader Laser Prime.

Music

The side trip wasn’t a total wash. Some Five Below stores have been getting vinyl records, which is why I went in to this one. Mine don’t seem to have them yet, I have been checking. They were $10 each, not “$5 and below”, but I bought The Weeknd’s Dawn FM and this fancy looking Mandalorian Season 2 album.

I kind of debated the Mando one, but the record having the picture on it is very cool. I didn’t debate Dawn FM. It was one I knew was in these assortments and one I wanted to get. I have the deluxe version digitally, and I really enjoy the album as a whole, and the vinyl version is something I wanted. I know I can throw it on from time to time and enjoy it all the way.

Tops for the Week

Top Artists

Daft Punk — 16 scrobbles
TOMORA, AURORA, Tom Rowlands — 8 scrobbles
Aurora — 7 scrobbles
The Wailers — 5 scrobbles
Steve Hunter — 4 scrobbles

Top Tracks

Meteorites by Lights — 2 scrobbles
Opps (Busan Car Chase Film Version) by Vince Staples, Yugen Blakrok & Ludwig Göransson — 2 scrobbles
I DRINK THE LIGHT by TOMORA, AURORA, Tom Rowlands — 1 scrobbles
HAVE YOU SEEN ME DANCE ALONE? by TOMORA, AURORA, Tom Rowlands — 1 scrobbles
MY BABY by TOMORA, AURORA, Tom Rowlands — 1 scrobbles

Top Albums

Discovery by Daft Punk — 14 scrobbles
COME CLOSER by TOMORA, AURORA, Tom Rowlands — 8 scrobbles
Catch A Fire (Deluxe Edition) by The Wailers — 5 scrobbles
All My Demons Greeting Me As A Friend (Deluxe) by Aurora — 3 scrobbles
Little Machines by Lights — 2 scrobbles

TV and Movies

I finally watched Project Hail Mary, twice even. We watched it at home Saturday night, then at my suggestion, after the World Cup game, my parents (and aunt and uncle) watched it, and having suggested it, I felt vaguely obligated to watch it again. Which was fine, I had not quite planned to stay that late but I lived… somehow.

That’s a bad joke.

Anyway, I enjoyed it quite a bit. It starts off a lot slow, but gets better once… the plot becomes more rocky. instead of a rocky start is has a rocky end. Something like that.

No spoilers.

It kind of did feel a lot like The Martian but different. Lone dude who doesn’t really know what he is doing but has plenty of ingenuity, stranded in space, that sort of deal. At one point my wife commented about “how does he not run out of fuel” and I just said the classic Harrison Ford line “It ain’t that kind of movie kid.” And then I had to explain the line to her.

That goofy gif up there also reminded me of something, i am watching this movie thinking, “man, one of those astronauts kind of looks like Milana Vayntrub, but like, slightly different.” But then the credits roll and…. Milana Vayntrub was the astronaut. PS, that is who is in the gif, because I’m into explaining my jokes, I guess.

In other TV watching activities, I ended up watching through and finishing season 2 of Ranma 1/2. I’m really enjoying it, I have… some working knowledge of Ranma, I was buying the comics for a while, back when I bought comics, and I’ve seen bits here and there of the show and movies. It’s fun watching the show that’s supposedly more “true to the manga” and getting that experience. This season felt like more one shot” stories than arcs. I want to say season 1 was basically like 3 or 4 major arcs, this one has been essentially one arc, and several one offs, and a follow up arc to the first. It’ll be interesting to see where things go after this. I believe that essentially all of the “major players” are now present (Ranma, Akane, Ryoga, Ukyo, Shampoo, Kuno, Mousse, Happosei, Cologne).

Projects

I did a bit of techy projects this week. Initially to help with the list of random links I’ve been generating for the bottom of these posts. The list is just, everything I tagged in FreshRSS for the week. That is why they aren’t really sorted. Occasionally, I get links from elsewhere though, so I wanted a way to injest those into the list. I used Claude for assistance and ideas here.

Specifically, I went with Wallabag, which I keep wanting to write as Wallabang, so if I do that, that’s why. It’s basically a self hosted Pocket/Instapaper clone. Setting it up with Docker was easy. Getting the share paths down was less easy. I also decided I may want to just, archive some things to it from FreshRSS as well. Step one was getting Wallabag set up, I started with the guide on their website but hit a snag right off, and Claude, which at this point is very familiar with how I have things set up, suggested just using their docker set up.

Once Wallabag was up and running, I needed a Firefox extension to connect to it, so I had to figure out the API keys and secrets, which were somehow trickier than they should have been for just being copy and paste job. The Firefox extension kept rejecting my user password for some reason, and then later, FreshRSS was doing the same, but the latter ended up being over a typo in the URL at least. Anyway, with the extension attached, I clipped a few random articles I had open. Next step was plugging it’s output feed into FreshRSS. The clipped articles showed up as expected.

Then I went ahead and tagged those articles for sharing here, and to the Microblog. The worry I have, is the URLs will point back to my internal Wallabag instance, I’m writing this part early while it’s fresh on my mind, so I won’t really know until the clipping script runs on Saturday. By the time I post this I will know, but as of “now” I do not. Time is funny like that a bit.

I don’t actually watch Dr. Who BTW, though I want to. This actually makes David Tennant a bit weird in my mind, because the two rolls I most know him for are Barty Crouch Jr in Harry Potter and Killgrave in Jessica Jones, both, kind of psychotic villains. I have the reverse problem with Bryan Cranston, having not watched Breaking Bad but being familiar with Malcolm in the Middle. I can’t take him seriously in villain roles in movies.

ANYWAY

After getting all this working, I went on a project side quest. When I first was figuring out how to use Docker, I set up FreshRSS and my WordPress Archive in one docker-compose, even though they didn’t really need to be that way. I had Claude help out with splitting them apart into separate containers and files. Didn’t lose any data either, which is nice.

In Memoriam

Well, I started it now. Actually I don’t really want this to be a regular thing, but here we are. Thursday morning when I loaded up Windows Weekly I learned that tech journalist John C Dvorak has passed away. I used to really follow Dvorak and enjoyed his snarky goofy way of pushing ideas.

I used to listen to the NoAgenda podcast and even was part of a small group of fans doing some side projects related to the show briefly. Though they sort of, brought everything in house and basically dumped on us and our efforts which soured things. Plus the show became like 75% donation call out nonsense and increasingly felt a little more “right wing lite” than just “crazy conspiracy ideas.” Frankly, way more because of Curry than Dvorak. So I stopped liatening, like 10+ years ago.

I always enjoyed Dvorak though, especially when he was a TWIT guest, though I think he and Leo Laporte had a bit of a falling out because Dvorak has not been on in a while. Still, sad news. He was fairly old, so, not entirely surprising. Time does that to ya.