Got in a solid ride first thing this morning, plus some cool-down time and stretches. I’m sitting now with the endorphins and calm that come in after a hard workout, appreciating the quiet and still after furiously working in my body.

The view from my desk is pretty great, sometimes.

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.

Oh my gosh, the “crank to buy” mechanic in the Playdate catalog is delightful.

Making a big pot of soup and listening to John Prine on a Sunday night, things are alright.

I miss John Prine, though.

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.

Wow, nine years since I went out for this fun nighttime sky photography class at the foot of Mt Elden. These photos and short story still hold a ton of fond memories.

I mentioned The Big Door Prize in my weeks’ notes. We finished the season last night, and I would like many more people to watch this show, for all the reasons I previously mentioned and because it has a delightful set of John Prine Easter eggs that I want to appreciate together.

Enjoyed this nice early afternoon treat of cappuccino and pear cake – the pears from our tree.