Weeknotes 2025W47

Pretty uneventful week followed by a very fun and restorative weekend. This week, I got back into playing No Man’s Sky after not touching it for years. What a lovely game. It’s still absolutely massive but it feels more polished. I really like the “relaxed” version they added. It removes most of the tedium of gathering basic resources to fuel critical systems so you can just explore.

My task manager I’ve been using for while (Tweek) recently announced they were increasing their prices so I’m switching back to Todoist. Tweek and Todoist are now very similarly priced but Todoist has way more useful features. I appreciated the simplicity of Tweek but a non-simple price doesn’t make sense for me.

A friend visited from Seattle and we had so much fun hosting. We mostly took her around some of our favorite places around Eugene and explored a bunch of new ones. Bao Bao House in Eugene is absolutely incredible—I’m going to be thinking about that meal for a while. On Sunday, a bar in Florence was celebrating 55 years since the (in)famous exploding whale but it was a pretty small event. Instead, we visited a lighthouse and had clam chowder.

Links

• Why I’m Learning Sumerian, and What It Taught Me About Hard Work, Burnout, and the Joy of Doing Useless Things by Ed Nite.

  Because the point isn’t to master Sumerian. It’s remembering that not every pursuit needs external justification.

• The Complete Guide to Secure Communications with the One Time Pad Cipher by Dirk Rijmenants. If properly applied, you can make completely safe encrypted messages with pen and paper.
• The Exploding Whale. Way more resources and information than you want about a quirky bit of Oregon history (and more).
• The (lazy) Git UI You Didn’t Know You Need by Bartek Płotka. I’ve been using lazygit for a while and absolutely love it. I do pretty basic git transactions but it lg makes it so much easier.
• Your URL Is Your State by Ahmad Alfy. I appreciate when sites store state in the URL. I find it particularly helpful for job boards—I can click a link and it’s automatically filtered to my area and sorted by date.
• Little Character font by Astrid Bin. A cool font with a story.
• public.monster by Dmytri Kleiner. Web hosting ’90s style.