The start of rainy season is a perfect time to discover a leak, yes? Just checking. Deeper into autumn, now, I am also seeing just how many leaves our various trees hold; they hold a lot of leaves! There’s so much raking to do. It’s a brisk, windy and grey morning.

This week’s soup: Potato-forward, topped with roast chicken and chile crisp. Solid.

I didn’t capture a lot for notes, this week. I’m tired, working on focus and calm. I’m dismayed that a campaign run on meanness, anger and fear could win the way it did; I’m furious at the centrist reaction that this just shows how polarized we are as a nation. We’re not polarized when a candidate can demagogue against kids who need gender-affirming care; we’re broken.

gaming

I bounced off of Ashen a few years ago, but picked it up again this week when it re-appeared on Game Pass. I’m terrible at it, still, but am kind of grateful for its vibe of hopeful, slow progress. It’s a very good pastime to recline in a big chair with the Steam Deck.

work

I appreciate this post by Michael Lopp on using Monday to set the tone for the week. I’ve been practicing many of these and think his reminder to consider metrics is really useful. I’m not as good at this in particular – should spend some time on that one.

weekend

I’m hoping today to get out for a good walk and find some photos. We’ll see how that goes.

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.

My Friday “day off” turned into a “well, I’ll work about half of it” day. But I got enough downtime after mid-day to end my work week pretty relaxed and on a positive note, having learned enough to solve an interesting problem and make mild progress on a couple of things. Among my weekend tasks so far is reaching out to the public radio station in my old town to cancel my monthly donation; it’s clipping one more tether to that place I lived for nearly 20 years, and it has me feeling kind of moody.

This week, Annie Mueller posted this beautiful piece. In reflecting on changing her blog platform, not only has she written something really moving about why she writes and shares online; she overcame the friction that the whole endeavor had got wrapped up in for her. When I think about why I continue to care about Writing On The Internet, I’m often torn between liking the systems, the machinery, and the actual things I’m saying, such that I think there’s much that I don’t actually put to paper because the tools aren’t satisfying, or the output doesn’t look the way I imagine it might.¹ I really love how Annie found the right landing place for her own why and how.

• 💉 I got my flu and COVID boosters yesterday. So far, I’m a little tired and achey, but not feeling the side effects too badly, which is a nice change. The prior COVID vaccs have really flattened me hard for about thirty-six hours.

• 📼 I rewatched Edge of Tomorrow in some evening downtime this week. You know what? It’s a really good, well-executed sci-fi banger and more people should be really into it. Also, Bill Paxton in this movie is amazing.

• 🕹️ Most of the gaming I normally do has felt really heavy lately, a combination of limited time to really get into anything, an absolutely wrecked attention span, and general dissatisfaction with … everything? I picked up Inertial Drift and it’s hitting the spot: It’s a fun and well-designed racer with cool twin-stick controls, easy to pick up and put down. It’s a perfect Steam Deck recliner, too.

• 📖 Molly White wrote a good article about POSSE publishing to own one’s online presences. She links to her software implementation, too! But, usefully, her writeup focuses on the reasons to do this, too.

🍁 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.

It was a pretty full week. Work is happening, five days out of seven, at least, and a few of the “things to do before the end of the year” items are starting to feel a little bit tightly compressed into the time we have left in 2024. Signs of autumn are intensifying, too! It’s cooler, rainy and gray; I’m taking my vitamin D.

• 💿 I went to the dentist this week. I had to have an old filling drilled out and replaced. I have much anxiety about dental work, and for the first time brought along my own big headphones. I listened to Nick Cave’s new album, The Wild God. It’s a beautiful, remarkable piece of music, and I utterly zoned into it through the dental work.
• Driving around this week, it felt like my neighborhood, like landmarks are becoming familiar and comfortable. It’s a really nice feeling. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve barely touched the surface in terms of actually checking out shops and destinations, but as I make a mental map of this new town it’s soothing for it to begin to feel familiar in its big and smaller shapes.
• This article about the fish shell by Julia Evans captures so much of what’s great about it. Fish is so smart with completion suggestions and history! Unlike Julia, I’ve tinkered with a bunch of plugins and other configuration, but she makes me wonder if I could strip a bunch of that out and run it more simply.
• I got into a bit more solid routine on the bike this week, combined with hitting all my scheduled strength workouts on time. That feels good! I’m working intentionally against the inertia I often feel when the work day is done, or in the morning before getting to my desk. It has been really tough, the past … several months? … to feel motivated to focus on it. So I’ll take this small couple-week stretch.

media this week

• We’re watching The Big Door Prize (Apple TV+) season 2. This show deserves so much more love and attention. It’s thoughtful, sweet, and funny. I just learned that it didn’t get renewed for a third season, which is a shame.
• I enjoyed Rebel Ridge (Netflix). Pretty good action thriller about civil forfeiture and race, with some truly menacing corrupt cop performances.

🍅 garden haul this week

• A whole bunch of cherry tomatoes!
• Once again, the starlings wrecked the ripening figs before we could get to them.
• We made a cake out of a bunch of the pears we’ve harvested
• Another couple pounds of grapes in the freezer
• Radishes and greens are ready: Lots of kale and spinach in our future

(Don’t call it a weeknote? Maybe it’s a weeknote?)

It’s beginning to feel like autumn and I’m reflecting on passing through a full season here in our new home. I’m excited to see colors change and to feel the mood of the city change to fall and wintertime. This sense of transition is strengthened by school starting for our kiddo – new school, new town – a very big milestone, that one. (Parents, please note the New School Year Drop-Off and Pick-Up Rules.)

Here are a few items:

• RIP, Steve Silberman
• I’m trying out Reeder. I like the change-up in interface. I’m not sure about the “no unread” tracking, though I appreciate the intent and the way it allows for technical simplification.
• I’m kind of restless with my various blogs and web sites. Longing for a little more camaraderie in it all, maybe?
• We watched The Bear season 3 this week; I can’t believe they ended the season that way! I think it made a very successful season feel a lot less satisfying than I would have liked.
• First visits with new dermatologist and new dentist this week, and I got to keep all my weird moles and all my teeth. Parking in this city is something else, though.

I’ve set my sights on making a cappuccino at home that approaches the quality of Anchorhead’s, which has a deep, sweet, flavor. Fortunately I like the practice, because it’s going to take some time.