Skip to main content

Pretty Good Hat

I played through Herdling this weekend and exuberantly recommend it. It’s a short, beautiful journey with a growing group of rescued furry beasts, and it’s long enough to make you feel connected to each and every one of them without wearing out its welcome. The mechanics are just right, and it’s punctuated with exhilarating moments and peaceful campfire rests.

At campfires, some of the Calicorns wait away from the fire, providing gentle signals that they need something from the player — one would wait near firewood to make sure I found it, another always wanted a few rounds of fetch with a toy it found, and others need cleaning, a pet, or a bite of fruit before they’re ready for bed. I got invested in making sure they were all taken care of.

The game is mostly about pathfinding, with increasing danger from the environment as you progress. The intensity is really satisfying, with risks and reveals that contribute to the sense of being part of something grand and mysterious. It’s a lovingly crafted adventure.

A small group of semi-magical beasts running across a large meadow, with high mountains in the background.

Fierce snowy wind blows across a group of creatures hunkered together against the cold.

A young person in a colorful hoodie surrounded by large, furry creatures, some of which have colorful ornaments on big twisting horns.

I spent most of last week back in Flagstaff, my first trip there since we moved more than a year ago. I have so many thoughts and feelings about visiting that town — where I lived for nearly twenty years. I went for a lot of photo walks and revisited some favorite places, including this lovely corner that holds a lot of memories. Pizzicletta has expanded to a small empire but this original location is special (and next door to my favorite bike shop, too).

A low white building on a street corner at dusk. It is lit by small pools of warm light in which diners can be seen on patio tables.

A low white brick building with shades over patio tables and windows. A narrow window has a sign reading “gelato”.

A nighttime photo showing a small paper cup with two big scoops of gelato stacked in it, one probably chocolate and one a lighter color (it’s olive oil, and delicious). Behind the steel counter where the cup sits is a stylish vertical sign announcing gelato. Further behind is a window revealing a cozy dining room.

My family was skeptical of my breakfast plan, but steel cut oats with mango, chunks of Canadian bacon, some dots of habanero sauce and a sprinkle of chunky sea salt was really delicious.

A white porcelain bowl of steel cut oats, topped with bright orange chunks of mango and cubes of pink ham. A bit of bright green basil pokes into the frame of the photo.

It would be cool if Discord had a public client API so I could read through just a list of new posts in subscribed channels.

Huh. It would be cool if Discord was basically web forums with RSS. “Look at what they took from us etc.”

I’ve been trying to clean up and organize my old catalogs of photo files from across a couple of iPhoto and Lightroom catalogs, and every time I begin, I just get absolutely stranded in memory.

I’m having a great time using Journelly. It’s an org-mode based journaling tool built for iOS, which ticks some big nerd boxes for me. Journelly stamps metadata into the header of each entry, like weather and location, and then the app nicely renders that info on display in the app. And creating new entries is as frictionless as making a new note in Drafts or another editor – but with the bonus of living in a tidy, appealing timeline that Álvaro Ramírez calls “tweeting, but for your eyes only.” (By comparison, most of my time-and-place notes that I put in Drafts never make it out of the inbox, not since my long-ago slow blog over at my tilde.) Since Journelly’s data is stored in org-mode, it’s interoperable with emacs (see nice write-ups and usage notes by Mike, Jack, and Ellane1. Journelly’s developer also runs the new blog platform lmno and builds some other cool org-based tools.

An iOS screenshot from the Journelly app. Its title is at the top of the screen and the app is displaying an entry from May 26, 2025, showing two small, thin-crust pizzas on a cutting board.

Using the iPhone-based Journal app in recent iOS versions hasn’t stuck for me, despite being well-built and elegant, and of course it’s tightly integrated with the operating system. But I think I’m somewhat deterred by the fact that it only lives on the phone. I’m attracted to Journelly in part because it overcomes this limitation. I’m not doing it yet, but it’s easy to point the iOS app’s storage to an iCloud location and access it from anywhere you can run emacs, which opens up new ways to write and edit posts, but also to eventually publish or convert into a book or archive via Pandoc — so many possibilities.

Instant writing, with a powerful engine under the hood for a ton of flexibility, make Journelly a very neat little tool, one I’m happy to continue adventuring with.

  1. BTW, Ellane’s site looks like a treasure of plain text writing and organizing! There’s so much to go exploring over there. ↩︎

I’m spending more time tooling around Flickr lately, and realized quite suddenly just how much of my history is there. Different homes, at least two careers, friends and family and a whole lot of just life is in pictures that I shared there.