Nix McRetro!

My First Rally - Trans Rights (Project 491)

Yesterday, I attended my very first protest rally. It appears that the Liberal National Party of Queensland is following the playbook of the orange idiot in the states. As much as I hate linking to a News Corp Australia website… this article made my decision to attend the National Day of Action in my state. Peter Dutton has hinted he supports US President Donald Trump’s moves to stop trans people…

Ahhhhh yes, now where was I? I've corrected my spiralling debt thanks to an early release of superannuation due to financial hardship. Taking away from future me isn't too bad - especially as future me shouldn't really exist. The fact that present day me exists is surprising to… me. For now I'm past that.

I've hit a bit of a problem with the ever-fast-approaching start of university. I can't handle groups of people. Groups of people I don't know anyway.

I have trialled visiting a gender therapy group repeatedly and either break down and fail to leave or get to the group, enter the building and… panic. I then escape the situation. Fear extinction will be difficult to achieve - especially in such a short time before university starts.

Doing nothing now will likely result in me deferring until 2025. In an effort to mitigate this I tried to restart antidepressants. I picked out the least side effect riddled one. In my case, that would be duloxetine (Cymbalta), an SNRI.

And no. I can't even. Unrelenting bruxism 24/7. At the lowest dose. Every damn time. Something is not quite right with my serotonin-based systems. Great. That's why I've had no luck with antidepressants or first-line anxiolytics for the past decade. So where to from here?

My anxiety seems to fuel my depression and seems to be specific to interacting with groups of people. Of course there are the drugs that no one wants to prescribe because they are bad for you. Mainly drugs in the barbiturate and benzodiazepine-classes. I would argue that killing myself is also bad for me. I would rather feel better some of the time than none of the time. They are not available to me, so…

I'm trialing buproprion (Zyban, Wellbutrin) which is an NDRI. No bruxism. Doesn't touch serotonin and might be good for moderate anxious depression. There's a honeymoon period of two weeks where everything feels magical - as it is pretty much a stimulant. Now I wait for the down-regulation of receptors to see if it has any lasting effect.

In other news I've scraped the top end of the healthy BMI range. BMI isn't the absolute best measure but it does tell me that I am healthier at a BMI of 24.8 than a BMI of 34.8. I'll probably start to cycle my weight around to see if any fat redistribution happens.

What an excellent segue into the medication side of things for being a transgender woman. I've been monitoring a few things over the past month or so.

Progesterone is expensive and I am poor. So I have been trying to see how equivalent the compounded version of progesterone is to Prometrium (progesterone with an oil-based carrier, expensive). And at 400 mg/day split twice a day and measured in the trough, I ended up with slightly better numbers on paper using compounded.

However, there is one unexpected, positive side effect that I appreciate. When taking the oil-based Prometrium (200 mg with food), I get a nice little high. A similar feeling to 4-5 mg of diazepam. I was not getting this when I was on finasteride. My best guess is that the finasteride was interfering with metabolism to the several neurosteroids - allopregnanolone and friends.

For a few hours each day, at a big hit to my wallet, I can leave my anxiety behind and actually get things done. It's a very desirable side effect for me. For now I am not taking any progesterone to retest my baseline - it should be very low but not quite zero.

One of the reasons for retesting my baseline is a pretty big confounding factor - I am now on modified release (or sustained release) compounded progesterone which could have messed with testing. To try and counter this over a one week period I increased my dose to 800 mg/day. Nothing. No positive mental side effects at all. No negative ones either.

I'm also checking serum DHT, which isn't very useful as most of the testosterone to DHT conversion is done intracellularly at the target site - the hair follicle. I suppose I'm looking for shifts of various precursor hormones when on progesterone vs when not on progesterone. I'll do another post when I have additional data.

It was also neat to see what my estradiol levels were so soon after a new set of pellets were implanted. I scored just over 1500 pmol/L around one week after implant. This was ~700 pmol/L with the existing pellets prior to the newest set. After another three weeks, it was round 1200 pmol/L. Anything above 400 pmol/L is just gravy.

See what the bupropion made me do? This post is massive. Oh well, until next time! 🥰

I touched on progesterone (P4) in my last transgender update post. I am not quite sure if progesterone is working in the way I want it to. My biggest annoyance with it is feeling like my brain is on fire just before trying to sleep.

Rewind to late February 2024, for almost three weeks my progesterone dose was doubled to 400 mg of oral, micronised, compounded progesterone – 200 mg twice a day. That’s up from the 200 mg once at night.

I had also ceased finasteride. And finasteride interferes with the progesterone (oral) pathway conversion to neurosteroids such as allopregnanolone. This is because finasteride blocks *most* of the activity (~70%) of the 5-alpha reductase (5AR) enzyme. In turn, reducing levels of allopregnanolone – or at least slowing their conversion to neurosteroids.

My sleep quality has been pretty broken for a while now. Look at those orange blocks. And here I was looking forward to some of the benefits from progesterone. Anxiolytic? Yes please! Sleep improving? Definitely!

Instead I get this whole brain fire thing and feel like I’ve taken an anxiogenic. That got me thinking, brain on fire? Throw in some formication and it’s what feels like a glutamate rebound or surge. Excitotoxicity perhaps?

I’ve experienced similar feelings while withdrawing from pregabalin (decreases glutamate levels) and trusty old diazepam (increases GABA levels). Definitely that same feeling though. It appears that taking what I would consider a small dose (2 mg) of diazepam negates the insomnia pretty well. Even though diazepam isn’t a terribly good choice for sleep. It takes me from being a wired insomniac to sleeping beauty in about an hour.

Another interesting side effect I am seeing a lot more of is dissociation. Ordinarily, I would only experience this while in high stress, high anxiety situations but recently I’m noting it a lot more just doing chores around the house – which is a little concerning.

Regardless, it seems that something is messing with my GABAergic system and metabolites of progesterone fit the bill. Armed with my two-thirds of a biomedical science degree I went digging for more information on the metabolites. Up above is an image from my last health blog post. Note the action of finasteride on progesterone – blocking allopregnanolone (THP) and isopregnanolone.

I wonder if moving to a more potent 5AR blocker, such as dutasteride, would reduce the side effects of a higher dose of progesterone? A question for my endocrinologist I suppose. I restarted my finasteride to at least partially block some of the following progesterone metabolites. Let’s look at the metabolites a little closer and how they act.

Allopregnanolone (Tetrahydroprogesterone or THP) Positive allosteric modulator 9 hours

Pregnanolone Positive allosteric modulator 1 – 3.5 hours

Isopregnanolone Negative allosteric modulator 14 hours Targets allopregnanolone only

Epipregnanolone Negative allosteric modulator Half-life unknown

Alright, so a bunch of neurosteroids are doing a bunch of things. A few are being blocked, but also produce negative side effects when they weren’t blocked. Hormones are messy. Where does that leave me? I guess I am left questioning whether I should be taking progesterone at all. At minimum a dose reduction is definitely called for. I will probably return back to 200 mg and see what symptoms, if any, follow.

My search revealed some interesting data with overlap in symptoms shared with premenstrual syndrome (PMS) and premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) in cisgender women. 

PMDD is believed to be caused by fluctuations in gonadal sex hormones or variations in sensitivity to sex hormones.

If sensitivity to level shifts is reason for the negative side effects, then single or even twice daily doses are probably not enough to smooth out the levels of neurosteroids for me, allowing me enter a withdrawal state, perhaps? Brain on fire? This paper offers some great insight into the mechanisms behind it all with some interesting side notes on SSRIs.

Interestingly, SSRIs increase allopregnanolone levels in the brain, rapidly and at low doses, as demonstrated in rodents as well as in patients with depression.

Could this be one of the reasons why I can’t tolerate SSRI/SNRIs? At the very least, it’s some food for thought. Worth noting that the original study has been questioned a little further along in the paper. Let’s circle back to those progesterone levels again. From Wikipedia

Progesterone levels tend to be less than 2 ng/mL prior to ovulation and greater than 5 ng/mL after ovulation.

What were my most recent levels again? 9.1 nmol/L or should I say 2.6 ng/mL (freedom units). That’s at 200 mg once daily at night, measured in the trough. I really need to ask myself, do I want to have symptoms of PMS/PMDD? Is that even a question that needs to be asked?

Looking at the levels on Table 1 in this paper give an idea where my levels line up. If you factor in the short half-life of most of the metabolites, once daily dosing is probably a bad idea. Ideally, I should look into getting the dose split to 100 mg twice daily.

Of course I have to be mindful of negative risk such as the androgen backdoor pathway. This has the potential to generate unwanted androgens like DHT – which will affect the hair on my head. That’s why the finasteride is here to stay until most means of testosterone generation is removed from my system…

It’s not all bad though. Finasteride competes with progesterone for the 5AR enzyme – which results in even less 5AR being available for testosterone -> DHT conversion. Another point worth considering is that progesterone has a positive effect on bone-building cells (osteoblasts). This can help with avoiding or reducing effects of osteoporosis.

Touching on side effects I’ve noticed, Progesterone should increase libido. Which is something I do not want due to past trauma. However, I wonder if the finasteride side effects are at play here. Again, I don’t consider them negative side effects either.

Other oddities I’ve also noticed my facial hair has become darker at the higher progesterone dosing at 400 mg. My upper lip now has dark black hairs, that’s new and unwanted. It might be useful for IPL treatment. But now there’s shadow on my upper lip I never had before. It isn’t just the thinning of skin either. The hairs are black instead of blonde.

One big uncertainty is that I’m not sure what my levels of estradiol will be at the next blood test. Are the 200 mg of pellets doing their job properly? Or did they fail? Does the dose need to be increased?

For now, I’ve been supplementing the implant with the remainder of my 2 mg estradiol pills while the pellets stabilise. One pill gives me ~85 pmol/L in estradiol levels. I’ve only just ran out of those so now I’m adding in some of the estradiol gel (Sandrena branded). These gave ~200 pmol/L estradiol per dose according to my most recent blood tests. In theory with one a day, I should be guaranteed to be in the late follicular phase – regardless of the implant levels.

Anyway, that was one heck of an info dump. I think that sums everything up that has been on my mind lately.

TL;DR 400 mg oral progesterone makes my brain go on fire. Progesterone metabolite levels shifting around are very activating for me. I will now target cisgender progesterone levels in the late follicular phase. Hormones are complicated. One size fits most seems to be at play when it comes to progesterone. Nothing like some trial and error! 🙃

Flicky! Ohhh that little cicada was such a survivor. Resting and laying eggs for almost every day for ten days while in captivity. Sadly she succumbed to time on 8th March 2023.

All these events all happened just about one year ago. You can view the videos below or on either my Super Nature World playlist or my Shane McRetro playlist. It doesn’t all end here though as Flicky’s children eventually hatch. 🪲

Flicky lives on through her children. My next steps were doing the best I could to make sure her young hatched and could be then be released back into the wild! 🥲

A few milestones have been achieved this month. I’ve reached my third month of gender affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) and was able to get an estradiol implant (200mg, compounded). I kicked pregabalin as it wasn’t helping with my anxiety symptoms – but was helping with sleep… I also ceased indometacin successfully. Hemicrania continua is not being so continua now.

My phosphates, calcium and ALT levels. Ahhh yes. Let’s start with the ALT. My ALT was easy to fix, cease indometacin. I also took some milk thistle to help keep the old liver in tip top shape – with interesting consequences. I’ll circle back to this one later!

Phosphates and calcium, I do wonder if this is actually a bad thing to have lower numbers on these. A ionised calcium test was ordered and found to be in range, but so were my other calcium stats – this time. I’d only changed my calcium vitamin to a non-plant-based formula as I don’t get much calcium from milk. i.e. I don’t drink milk. End result – calcium levels are OK for now.

Now phosphates are in everything, it should be difficult to ingest this in low amounts. Thankfully, I have a good history owing to low blood iron and phosphate levels were ordered as a complementary test most of the time. Using this data we can see that I tend to be on the lower side of things. But since starting GAHT, record new lows. Some potential answers could be here and here.

My theory is either my spirulina (cyanobacteria) infused multivitamin is causing lowered calcium and phosphate levels leading to improved bone density. This could perhaps explain the historically lower phosphate levels as I’ve taken this particular multivitamin for a few years now. Then we have this (potato) gem from the second article.

Estrogen therapy (ET) is associated with lower serum calcium and phosphorus concentrations and is known to increase bone mineral density (BMD).

Estrogen and progesterone are very good at not causing osteoporosis. Menopause is a great example of what happens when hormones are absent and why hormone replacement therapy exists for older assigned female at birth (AFAB) people. This puts my mind at ease and we’ll be rechecking in three months.

Oh iron, sweet, sweet iron. I mean each blood test takes five vials of blood? I’ve given up on blood donations so we can rule that one out and it’s nothing cancer-related so… diet? To keep my ferritin (iron stores) up I’ll be taking 210 mg of elemental iron every other morning one hour before food. This maximises absorption as hepcidin, the enzyme that tells the iron to stay or go, is still sleepy.

Of course vitamin C can override this too if daily dosing was needed. As my levels haven’t reached critical yet, and I don’t enjoy the undesirable GI side effects of iron therapy, every other day gives me roughly half the issues! 😅

Onto hormones! Errrrr… why did prolactin double and zip outside the reference range in the space of two months. The GP wasn’t sure why and the endocrinologist said it’s not an issue unless it’s triple that number. I had a peek into some literature and pregnant women can have this level between 1000 and 8000 mIU/L. Remembering that pregnant women are not going to have those levels forever.

So what caused mine to spike? I believe it might have been the milk thistle I was taking to fix that pesky liver up from the indometacin damage. Information here, here and here. This has been ceased now so it should drop back within the reference range next blood test. Hold up, I was just reading this again.

In animals, milk thistle has been shown to stimulate bone mineralization. However, how it affects humans is currently unknown.

Hmmm, I wonder if my calcium and phosphate levels will also increase on next blood test without milk thistle supplementation. Something to look forward to as I was only on milk thistle for two weeks.

Ahh yes traditional sex hormones. One of the more interesting to look analyse. Keep in mind that all my blood tests are done in the trough – which should indicate the lowest concentrations.

On 6 mg oral estradiol valerate (2 mg thrice daily) and estradiol gel (Sandrena brand estradiol 0.1% gel 1g sachets twice daily) I scored a lovely 764 pmol/L. Previously with pill therapy (6 mg) it came in at 364 pmol/L. So a decent jump for just a bit of gel. Good result, so good in fact, I now I have two pellet implants (100mg each) in my left buttock for 200 mg of estradiol. It will be interesting to see how that stabilises over the next three months as they can fluctuate a bit early on.

On the progesterone (P4) front, folks tend to take it after being on estradiol for around 12 months. My endocrinologist doesn’t see any issue with starting it earlier. In AFAB puberty, estradiol peaks before progesterone even appears on the scene. Then again I am not exactly AFAB, so past performance may not be indicative of future performance.

For me, I see progesterone a counterweight against what is intended to be high-dose estrogen. With progesterone in the mix my skin is less dry which was one of my biggest gripes about estrogen monotherapy.

At least one of the metabolites produced, allopregnanolone, is a neurosteroid that acts on the GABAnergic system when taken orally – in a good way, I think. Interestingly enough in a similar way to alcohol, benzodiazepines and even to a lesser degree, pregabalin. Lesser degree in that pregabalin doesn’t touch the GABA receptors themselves, and instead mess with other systems that have a flow on effect to the GABAnergic system.

Oh I could ramble on for days about this sort of thing. Let’s look at the level itself. 9.1 nmol/L. Alright, that’s in the trough still so that’s quite good. Last dose would have been 12 hours ago. It puts me somewhere between pre-ovulation and mid-cycle. I have since doubled the dose on my endocrinologists recommendation.

There are other routes of administration (ROA) for progesterone, butt (ha!), my current compounded powder (200mg twice daily) is not compatible. I would need to purchase the non-compounded version to do that, and it’s not on my radar at this point in time as it is quite expensive.

Converting my 9.1 nmol/L to a US-friendly unit of 2.6 ng/mL helps locate where I am on these charts, you can see where I fit in. You’ll also maybe note that progesterone via the rectal ROA results in markedly different levels of progesterone, allopregnanolone and pregnanolone.

Which leads us onto finasteride which is a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor (5ARI). It stops this particular enzyme (5-alpha reductase) from doing what it wants to do. This is primarily used to stop testosterone (T) conversion to Dihydrotestosterone (DHT).

For assigned male at birth (AMAB) people, DHT gives you the gift of male pattern baldness provided you have the correct set of genes. As a transgender woman, I don’t really want to be bald if I can avoid it. So I started taking finasteride early on. However progesterone and finasteride both inhibit the 5-alpha reductase enzyme. And the finasteride, as it turns out affects a little more than just the 5AR enzyme.

Remember our little friend allopregnanolone from earlier? Blocked. What about isopregnanolone. Blocked. Finasteride is really quite a dirty drug with lots of off-target activity.

I’ve deemed it as unnecessary for the same reason I don’t take any testosterone blockers, such as cyproterone acetate or spironolactone. We’re going for estrogen dominance here. Women do have testosterone, but it isn’t the dominant sex hormone.

It is unclear if there is any added benefit to taking one of these medicines once your testosterone levels have been reduced into the female range through the use of other blockers.

The science behind it all is always a work in progress. But for now let’s keep that key phrase – estrogen dominance; the female hormone range, at the front of our minds.

If the presence of DHT makes male pattern baldness progress… what happens once I cease finasteride, will it also resume? Well, that’s where the next set of blood results come in.

Oh there it is, estrogen dominance achieved! Testosterone levels in AFAB have a reference range of less than 2.0 nmol/L (pre-menopause). And there I am sitting pretty at 1.1 nmol/L. My sex hormone binding globulin (SHBG) is heading up and up. I can’t find the document I had, I am sure it said above 115 nmol/L can result in estrogens being bound. In lieu of that article, from Wikipedia.

The relative binding affinity of various sex steroids for SHBG is dihydrotestosterone (DHT) > testosterone > androstenediol > estradiol > estrone. DHT binds to SHBG with about 5 times the affinity of testosterone and about 20 times the affinity of estradiol.

So having a high SHBG level is a good thing, the higher the better. Bind all the sex hormones so they can’t be used – male ones are lost first, then the female ones. That means goodbye any DHT generated by the mere 1.1 nmol/L of T.

The calculated free testosterone being below 25 pmol/L is also a great sign things are heading in the right direction. This is why testosterone blocking isn’t required for me. I really do enjoy delving into this sort of data and getting a better understanding of what it all means. So that’s it for now. I look forward to my next set of results sometime in May. 🙃

We had a giant blue tongue turn up randomly on the lawn. No doubt here for the snails and slugs I keep finding at night. I picked up a tray of beef dog food with minimal grain content and he hasn’t shown up since! 😭

Stumpie continues to appear intermittently. He’s doing quite well, but I’ve seen a lot of newly made Stumpie-class lizards. Whether it is infighting between lizard factions, attacks from birds, or the lawn mower I wish them a speedy recovery!

But what to do with the dog food? Well since Bluey hasn’t shown up, I thought maybe the bar-sided skinks would like a taste. And yes, they really do. The one I had captured earlier must have been a baby because this one living inside the walls is huge!

In other nature related news, I’ve got blue banded bees! They are the most goofy looking bees I’ve ever seen.

There’s at least two that frequent the purple flowers here. I love them. Especially in slow motion! I did capture some video so they’ll end up on Super Nature World at some point. Stay tuned! ✅

Technically I’m still the same, but my hammock is weirdly outdoors. For the first time in years I have an outdoor area. I’m no longer trapped in a box. I hate apartments. At the same time, urban sprawl isn’t good from an environmental standpoint either. Maybe the answer lies in population reduction? I’m doing my part!

We’ve got cicadas out here in the wastelands. The floury baker cicadas are still about, the one above was intercepted from a noisy miner (Manorina melanocephala) but had catastrophic wing damage at the joint. He was laid to rest that same afternoon. Just because something can suffer, doesn’t mean it should. Rest easy little one.

We’ve also held our first barbecue without incident. My diet remains mostly vegan, thanks to reduced pressure on rent. The only big exception is salmon which will probably be replaced eventually again.

The garden though, and being able to have plants outdoors in the sunlight. What a game changer. I’ve made an active decision to let dandelions take over the buffalo grass. They mow down quite well.

Looks better than any buffalo grass I’ve ever seen. Function over form I say. When they are at full growth, they provide pollen for the bees (native and European), harbour lots of little bug jumpers, which in turn feed the lizards that roam the grass. A little sad when a common blackbird (Turdus merula) snaps up a few, but as long as I can keep the bugs plentiful the lizards should thrive.

Not everything has been rosy though. My first plant casualty, lavender. I had high hopes for it, but since I don’t really know what I am doing it kind of died. Farewell lavender.

My native beehives have been doing well, attracting a few different species of native masked bee (Genus Hylaneus) as well as native wasps (possibly Genus Pison). Both are ridiculously tiny and harmless to us.

Then you’ve got the other bugs, like the pictured assassin bug nymph, Pristhesancus plagipennis. It’s ready to drink the brains of the next honeybee that lands nearby.

And now I’m back on the Apple Watch train with my shiny new Apple Watch SE 2. This time around I’ve picked out the smaller of the two and went with the 40mm. And I have to say, I do not miss the bulk of the 44mm. The Apple Watch is a great motivator to stay on track with new year health goals.

Wait that’s not the image I was looking for… that’s more dandelions!

Whoops, that’s another floury baker cicada. I think the several that were in this tree were eaten by the local bat population as they’ve been silent for a while now.

And that’s Stumpie. Tail growth is coming along well. If I find him running about while I’m mowing the lawn I’ll move him into a lizard hotel plastic tub until I’m done.

Don’t look at me like that Stumpie. We don’t want any repeats of how you got the name Stumpie after all!

Then we’ve got this little guy still rocking about, a bar-sided skink (Concinnia tenuis). After being trapped by a redback spider (Latrodectus hasselti). Luckily for the lizard I noticed…

And here’s the data I wanted to show. Weight loss is beginning again. You might notice a drop almost immediately after becoming unemployed, then a spike to >100 kg when I ran out of money thanks to Sydney’s rental market being unaffordable for a single person – let alone an unemployed single person.

Sure, I could have killed myself easily enough but chose to do the paradigm shift thing. Is it enough of a shift? That’s still an unknown at this point. At least for now, there are real life distractions everywhere which seems to leave very little time for uploading videos. Not such a bad thing I guess. That’s not to say I haven’t been recording new footage.

Better go and check the garden is still there and get my 30 minutes of exercise in. Target weight is set at 75 kg this time around. Roughly 20 kg of weight loss to go, and while transitioning. Should be one heck of a ride. 🤷‍♀️

CG-NAT defeated! The Cloudflare Argo Tunnel works and has done so for about a week. However, due to the way the tech behind it all works…

…I might have inadvertently locked myself out, with help from botnets spamming my WordPress login page of course! No problem, it gave me a week to mull over options and find a better solution.

After finding some time to look at the settings, I can see why I was locked out. Cloudflare’s Argo Tunnel, cloudflared, hooks into my local network. So all login requests were showing the origin as an address on my local network, localhost.

Enter Cloudflare Access (again)! Using a one-time pin through Cloudflare offers security far superior to my existing freemium WordPress plugin. Reduced server load and less attack vectors? Yes please! This user is most definitely back online!

Now that this mess is sorted out I can get back to finding cool lizards in my backyard. Ahhh, it does beg the question, should I even be self-hosting on 4G home internet? No, probably not. Latency is through the roof and CG-NAT is annoying. Oh well! 💁‍♀️

Big thanks to Tim Smith and Jeremy – without their guidance I’d probably still be reading the Cloudflare documentation! 😅

Here comes the downtime. As my NBN regresses to 4G home internet. Expect this site to be down for at least a few weeks while I get my head around consumer grade network address translation or CG-NAT for short.

Theoretically it should be as simple as pressing a few different buttons to what I normally press when installing ddclient on my server. But I can’t really test until the new network is up and running. I guess stay tuned and in the meantime enjoy this page as served by Cloudflare’s Always Online service. Until we next meet, be excellent to each other and to other creatures too! 🙃 🪲 🐌 🪳 🐟 🦎 🦗

A quick look at HTTP requests on really old browsers. HTTP/0.9, or just HTTP, was a very simple one-line protocol. Mozilla has a great write up on it. It was interesting to try and get a modern day CDN – Cloudflare in my case, to play nice with browsers such as NCSA Mosaic which are now almost older than time itself.

Aren’t cicadas neat? I’ve got videos queued up for both my Shane McRetro and Super Nature World channels over the coming weeks or even months. However, due to cashflow issues owing to long-term unemployment, I’ll soon be forced to move to a location with no internet.

The rush is on to get as much video processed as possible and uploaded to YouTube. It also means that this website will temporarily cease to exist as it is self-hosted. New internet poses a bunch of potential issues too with CG-NAT. Perhaps Cloudflare’s Argo might be the answer to that? I’ll see if I can work out a temporary solution to at least put a maintenance/planned downtime notice up. Absolute worst case there is always archive.org. 🙃

Exactly one month ago, on the 18th October 2023, I came to the realisation that I am transgender. Two weeks later I had an appointment with an endocrinologist. And one week after that a prescription for estradiol valerate 6 mg a day. Thank you informed consent. 🙃

7th October 2023. Picture the date, picture the time. Walking along a major arterial road. Out of the corner of my eye, a monitor. E-waste? Maybe. Dumped? Definitely.

Oh my sweet WD Blue SA510 M.2 SATA 2280 blade drives. You are such trash. I had two of these for GeoCities, one master and one backup. However, since I took GeoCities offline I thought I’d erase and sell the drives. But look at what I found when looking at the drive stats with DriveDX. Yeahhh 824 TB of NAND writing (TLC and SLC). That doesn’t sound right. Those retired blocks are usually not a good sign either. Digging a little deeper we find…

A massive 1.8 TB of host writes, GeoCities dataset copied twice. 400 TBW is where WD expected the drive to fail according to the data sheet. Guess I better hook it into the old WD Dashboard and see what it says.

Oh, a new critical firmware update has appeared.

October 27, 2022 – Firmware v52020100 Addresses an issue in which a drive may not be recognized by the computer.

So firmware 52020100 should solve a pretty big issue, not being able to see the drive at all – this is what was installed on both my SA510s. Then there’s this new update:

May 25, 2023 – Firmware v52046100 Addresses an issue in which a drive may enter a read-only state.

Hmmm right, are you still trying to work out how your own tech works WD? I mean read-only is better and possibly explained by the excessive writes going on. Good thing there’s a five year warranty and I have consumer rights against dud hardware.

Through the motions we go. Updated firmware OK, but the drive health is still only 40%.

I guess you can’t bring back the drive from the brink. They’ve improved on the uptime before failure at least. Instead of 600 hours before failure it is now ten times that at 6586 hours. Still only 59 power cycles as the drive was just being used as to host GeoCities – lots of reading. Tech support was less than useful directing me to India who may not be aware of consumer rights. But you’ve gotta feel bad for the people buying lots of these based on the success of previous revision WDS100T2XXX working as expected. For now I’ll just use the other working drive as a throw about spare and wait for it to fail in a new quirky way. If anyone can do it WD flash division can! 💁‍♀️

For the past three years I’ve been vegan. A junk food vegan. Processed foods have always been my friend. They’re cheap, full of energy and bad for you? Meatloaf had it right when he said two out of three ain’t bad.

I’ve dusted off my old cognitive dissonance from storage. I guess once your eyes are opened to the ethical “problems” of a modern society it becomes difficult to close them again. Suffering does seem to be a keystone of our society.

A major issue I face is lack of funds. I continue to bleed money being well into month four with no income outside of government welfare. Every week that passes a chunk of my savings disappears forever because our welfare doesn’t even cover rent. Won’t someone think of the landlords?

Failure to stem this bleeding will likely result in homelessness. This is the cost of living and it’s too damn high. So for now, I return to being a carnivore. I’ll still buy vegetarian or vegan when I can justify the cost, and I’ll cut down on meals and make smaller portions. This can also help me to lose weight back to the healthy range again, maybe.

But unfortunately for salmon, they are a very healthy meal. We are making them better for the environment. For a 5kg fish, at around a 60% yield. That’s 3kg of edible flesh. With 115g meal servings, that works out to be one entire salmon slaughtered every 27 meals.

Onward to the decline. 🫠

Silos needed. I used to love Command & Conquer as a teenager. My Athlon 500 MHz sure did clock a few hours as did Andrew’s PC. Then came Red Alert 2 and the Yuri’s Revenge expansion. Such great game play.

A few months ago I decided I was finished with donating blood. A few factors decided into why I would no longer donate.