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Pretty Good Hat

A lot of things are kind of garbage right now, but I have this espresso pretty dialed in, and it tastes like graham crackers and dark chocolate. That’s delightful.

Enduring my first bad cold for a while (not covid, fortunately, because In This House We Test) and mostly staying away from the family, so I’m eating the last crumby bits of Ruffles out of the bag by myself, and pouting.

I started playing Caves of Qud this weekend. It feels like a retro-throwback Rogue combined with an amazing amount of procedurally generated complexity and narrative depth. I keep dying. I’ll make another run.

Light shines on a hardwood floor in my living room. The photo shows my legs in light red colored pants with my Steam Deck on my lap. The Deck is showing the Caves of Qud opening screen. On the arm of the bright red-orange chair is a cup of coffee. Out of focus in the background, my black dog lies in her bed.

I’m made bereft and numb at seeing the first executive orders that would deny my daughter’s identity, to punish her and chase her from the world. I don’t think I ever get over the way so many Americans chose meanness and cruelty over letting people be. Take care and look for peace, friends.

Media diet this week. I’ve been reading:

  • I finished The Tainted Cup, and thought it was fun and interesting. I’ll definitely read more in the series.
  • Listening to Circe. It’s excellent and the audiobook reading is perfect.
  • Started reading Metal from Heaven

And some TV:

  • Season 2 of Severance is here. I re-watched Season 1 a couple of weeks ago and was struck by how tight it was, how specific and articulated its vision and its characters are. The first episode of Season 2 hit all the notes I would have wanted: It surprised me and promises so much.
  • We finished the final season of Loudermilk. It walks a fine line between jokey and sincere, and I think ends as a really moving story about found family and addiction, while managing to frequently be really, really funny.
  • American Primeval is very violent depiction of a violent era in the American West, and centers on the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It’s well done; I don’t know if I’d recommend it.

And some music I’ve liked:

I made some updates to my RideShare app (which produces nice, shareable images of Peloton rides) that I’m really happy with: More flexible output image sizing and the ability to select from the image types that the Peloton API provides for more interesting visuals. I wrote this up over at the data blog.

Infographic card for a 30 minute Peloton Sweat Steady ride with instructor Jess King. There is a photo of her standing in a pink top and leggings with her hand on her right hip. The graphic shows my heart rate through the ride; I’m in the red for about half of it.

Phase one after a really hard spin:

Lo, I am a being of pure heat, deeply calm and still after furious expression of will and strength.

Phase two: why does my house have all these staaaairrrs and why don’t we have any baaaggeells

Closing Tabs, part 4 – The final chapter (for now): Here ends my selective curation from among the four hundred tabs that have lived in Safari on my phone for the past two to three years. I skipped legions of old GitHub pages; and I closed without close review a pretty good-sized catalog of then-cutting-edge Covid resources, the re-scanning of which gave me a weird sense of unresolved trauma and a pit in my stomach.

For my troubles, here’s the last half dozen or so links that, for one reason or another, I thought I’d share.