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Pretty Good Hat

We rewatched Severance s1 this week, ahead of the second season finally dropping next month. Remembering most of the twists let me watch the performances and art direction even more closely. What a banger show.

Mugs and plastic squirt bottles sit on a large rustic looking wooden table. In the background are a pair of very fancy looking espresso machine brewheads, built into a black countertop. The walls are cinderblock and decorated with shelves full of coffee and brewing equipment.

My wife got me a special Christmas gift: Espresso class at Anchorhead! This was so fun and educational for me. We started with a tasting exercise and then dug into the mechanics of espresso extraction, and I got to practice on the Big Kid Machine in the lab. I have lots to practice on my own (but not today; I am absolutely blitzed with caffeine). Gifts of neat experiences are the best!

I volunteered to do some copyediting of the web page for my kid’s school, and naturally the best way to do that was to spend a couple of hours learning how to use {rvest} and writing a short script to scrape the site into a set of Quarto files. I’m right on track to get started with the copyediting in early 2025, give or take.

Lowkey one of the best devices I’ve ever owned, my 10-year old Synology just keeps working, and Synology continues to keep it up to date and supported. It’s really impressive.

A screenshot showing information for a Synology device. It shows the model number of DS213j.

My little Shiny app to visualize my last.fm data continues to tick along. This graphic shows the top artists of my year not in my top all-time played list. My favorite new album of 2024 is at the top of this list: Nick Cave’s WILD GOD is a tremendous, moving record.

If you’re still scrobbling, you can see your own data at deardestiny.shinyapps.io/tuner.

A graphic list of my ‘new top artists’ in 2024. The background is bright yellow, and the list starts with Nick Cave’s new album WILD GOD. Also on the list are TV on the Radio, Jackie West, The Cure and feeble little horse. The list includes small thumbnails of each album cover.

December 22; the longest night of the year is behind us. I have a warm coffee, I’ve worked out and made myself breakfast, and I’m finished with work for a long rest.

I started playing Balatro and, alas, it’s such a good game! I don’t care much either way about poker, and Balatro adds a fun, challenging layer of modifiers and risk that makes it awfully hard to to put down.

A Balatro screenshot. I have drawn a straight flush (diamonds) from several face-down cards.

I didn’t know that Lucinda Williams had a couple of rollicking cover albums, of The Beatles and Tom Petty. Man, I’m a cryer for Wildflowers.

Lucinda Williams poses like Tom Petty on his album cover for Full Moon Fever. She stands with a guitar over her shoulder, leaning forward like daring you to listen. Maybe a little smug? The photo of her is is monochrome and is shaded pink, yellow and green from top to bottom.