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So I had a pretty crazy start for 2026. There was an ice storm that caused me to be without power for three weeks in below freezing whether and I had to travel with my cats to a friends so we could keep warm. Then after that, my shitty job decided to harass me and threaten to fire me and I had to defend myself legally accusing them of building a pretextual case against me (aka making up reasons to fire me). I managed to get a severance agreement instead so I was able to have some money while unemployed and also qualify for unemployment benefits. If they fired me like they wanted to, I would not have been able to get unemployment benefits. Then I was unemployed for FIVE MONTHS. Because the job market is trash. But I managed to get a job. I feel like I'm starting to get more secure so that's how I'm at the point where I have the bandwidth to update this blog again.

Now that that's all over and I'm somewhat stable I've been reading a lot of sci-fi books! I want to make a link soon for the books I've read and a little blurb of my impressions of them but I'll just list a few in here for now.

Books I've read in 2026:

• Blindsight by Peter Watts
• The Last Hour of Gann by R. Lee Smith
• Strange Love by Ann Aguirre
• Love Code by Ann Aguirre
• Renegade Love by Ann Aguirre
• Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon
• Barbarian Alien by Ruby Dixon
• Barbarian Lover by Ruby Dixon
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick
• The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Axrel by Olivia Riley
• Xora by Olivia Riley
• The Longing of Lone Wolves by Lana Pecherczyk

I've been kind of oscillating between hard sci-fi and scifi erotica lol so far my absolute favorite this year is The Last Hour of Gann though, that book was a whole experience.

These are mostly all in my Calibre library too! I've been exploring a lot of Calibre's functionality this year as well as De-Amazon'd my Kindle (you can look into doing that here: KindleModding)

I've also been tinkering with a lot of Homelab stuff (aka making a laptop with a broken screen into a server that can host various websites and programs locally) I'll probably do an update explaining all of that later on though. It's been a lot of fun, I didn't know I would find something like that enjoyable. But having projects to work on like that really helped keep me sane during the five months of unemployment.

I'll post another update here soon, inshallah!