Update 1: work.
My scientific advisor fucked up the communication and as a result I had a month of work with tight deadline, actually the tightest I ever had relative to amount of work.
This led to a pile of messy code I'll have to sort out at some point, but it's okay because now everything is in source control and I won't irreversibly break anything. Which happened a few times before. Shame I wasnt using git before. Better late than never, I guess.
Now I'll need to submit literature review draft by January, duh. A lot of work but at least I know what to do and a third of it I did in advance back in September.