I finished reading The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson. It’s a sometimes harrowing adventure story about searching for peace and home, and while it wasn’t written specifically for this time we’re in, it has passages that hit home in the moment we’re navigating. The more I look at the things I highlighted, the more the through-lines of hope, finding who you are, and the power of truths shine out.

On happiness and struggle, a character says,

“Let me tell you something important. The real struggle on this earth is not between those who want peace and those who want war. It’s between those who want peace and those who want justice. If justice is what you want, then you may often be right, but you will rarely be happy.”

And on survival:

Her breath would come only in gasps, long stuttering things that burned her throat, but she took them, one after another, agreeing with each one to live a while longer.

I’m really grateful for this lovely and evocative novel.

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:

• The Weather Station, Humanhood
• Rosali, Bite Down: I really like this album
• MJ Lenderman, Manning Fireworks

It’s been a few weeks since I posted one of these, and this certainly feels like a weird moment to try to pick up the habit, again. But while I sit with some truths perhaps it helps to mark a few other more quotidian things, from this week and the handful prior.

this month in Destiny?

• After a couple of long sessions on opening weekend and then one final run at the boss the following week, I made it through the new dungeon with some pals. Since then, the grind of an hour here and there has been a nice diversion. The episodic story progression is a little thin right now, but the gameplay loops feel pretty solid.

R stuff

• I’m doing some real-work package development for the first time, building some tools to make it easier to jump-start Quarto notebooks and presentations. Having experimented with my own utility packages, I’m happy how much I could get done in just a couple of hours, thanks to {devtools} and {use this}.
• My Posit::conf talk from this year is online! I was lucky to be part of a session with some smart and thoughtful data folks, and I’m proud of contributing something I’m feel good about. You can find my talk in the full directory over at the Posit blog

reading

• The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett
• Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

other games

• Metaphor: reFantazio — I’ve never played a Persona/Persona-like, so this is a new experience for me. I’m enjoying the storytelling, combat and banger soundtrack!
• Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders — I had a great time with the downhill biker original, and this version of that game, but on skis, seems like a lot of fun. The demo is free on Steam and, so far, equally controller-breaking as the original.

misc

• Ever go to the record store in search of a particular album, but they don’t have it so you come home with four different albums instead? No? Just me?
• The weight of org-mode kind of accreted around my cognitive carapace once again, and so I’ve been trying out Obsidian. I may write up a little more later; I’m finding it to feel modern in ways that I like, flexible and effective at organizing some notes and to-dos while staying under the radar of my “constantly tinker” impulse.
• RIP Ward Christiensen, one of the founders of the BBS.
• RIP to Omnivore, too? Disappointing to see a solid read-later product go the way of AI huckster-chasing.

That’s what I have for now. it’s a rainy Seattle weekend and it’s nice to be inside and cozy — but still looking forward to a good walk, later.

There’s a bit of thick, sudden fog rolling through the neighborhood, quite unexpectedly changing the vibe of this still-early Sunday morning. I love anything that extends the hours of quiet, dark mornings with no obligations.

I fought with a mild cold all week. It wasn’t a bad one, but just enough to knock me out of my workout routine and restful sleep, and to cause me to clock out of work a little early one day. It’s improving quickly so I hope to get back to a bike ride and some weights today.

• 📼 Looking for thrillers and spooky movies, I watched Immaculate this week, and rewatched Train to Busan.
• 🕰️ I started experimenting with a pomodoro workflow using the cute Pomo Post app on my Playdate. It’s a fun way to prompt myself to focus.
• 📖 Picked up The Tainted Cup. So far it’s a fun Sherlock Holmes-style story with ominous monsters, biohacking and hints of plague.

🍁 I expect I’ll keep mentioning autumn in these roundups for the foreseeable future. Today being the autumn equinox? One hundred percent, talking about fall. We haven’t dipped below about 50º F yet, but it’s consistently cool enough that some of the neighborhood trees are already showing quite a bit of red or orange. I’m excited to see what our own trees do; they’re all still quite green.

📺 We’ve been watching Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, at suggestion of kiddo. It has some monster fights, but it’s mostly a really gentle, thoughtful story about an ageless mage re-tracing the steps she took on a ten-year journey with her adventuring companions who are now aged or passed.

🦵🏻 I had a pretty good spike of ankle pain this week from an injury a couple of years ago. Having old joints sucks, sometimes. It’s improved after a day, but persistently wondering how it’s going to feel day to day is pretty fatiguing.

I got a pretty good chicken sandwich this weekend!

☕️ I’ve become incrementally more insufferable about my espresso preparation, having adopted the Weiss Distribution Technique using this little wire tool. Verdict? I think it’s improving my coffee! More sip research sip is needed.

📚 I’m reading and really enjoying The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi by Shannon Chakraborty. So far it’s fun, interesting, and really engaging.

🎧 Don’t do the math, but Blues Traveler’s Four was released in September, 1994. It’s been reissued on vinyl for the first time in many years, and it’s a treat. (I bought this album originally on CD, from Hot Poop on Walla Walla’s main street.)

A couple more good things to read this week:

• I like this work in process from Hadley Wickham about R in Prod. The chapter outline suggests a lot of really good content to come.
• Dead Internet Souls by Vicki Boykis. Generative LLMs are filling the internet with garbage, resulting in the poignant shutdown of wordfreq. Vicki encourages us to continue to be live people on the world wide web, and I appreciate that. (Vicki is a brilliant machine learning and data engineer and you should be reading her!)

Happy week, gang.

Like so many others, my Kindle is now trying to sell me AI generated slop on the lock screen, such as this Southern Reach For Kids adventure. What utter valueless shit.

Libby now checks all libraries linked to an account with a single search!

I finished reading How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. What a fascinating novel: Told in interconnected short stories and read compellingly by more than a dozen performers, it’s the story of a global plague discovered in melting permafrost that ultimately spans beyond the entirety of human history. Despite that scope it’s intimate; each story is a vignette of loss, grief, love, loneliness and carrying on. Amid it all, Nagamatsu imagines what capitalism would be like in a world devastated by a new plague and climate change at the same time: an economy of death-related services, weird cryptocurrencies, and skyscrapers converted to cemeteries that tower over flooded cities and failed crops. It’s vividly realized in the details of everyday life in this hypermodern and changed world while tracking across centuries, and so compelling.

I’m happy to find that calibre worked overnight as I hoped: after a few days of tinkering with setting it up on my little Ubuntu NUC, it’s pulling a couple of news and reading sources into daily digests and sending them to my kindle via email. I wish that kindle were more flexible with ad hoc reading (and it’s one reason I’m thinking about a kobo), but this is a nice, effective step toward how I would like it to work.

I currently have open browser tabs to Instapaper, Calibre, and the reMarkable 2. I should probably go for a walk.