Weeknotes 2025W16

Besides more job searching, the sun came out and I spent most of the week on the porch with the dogs. I’ve really been enjoying the library lately. One of the great things about going to a physical library is you can browse and let books find you. While I was in Morocco, I had to depend on newsletters and social media to recommend books to me and hope that they sounded interesting. Now, I can visit the library and peruse until I find something that intrigues me.

The first book I read was Huddud’s House by Fadi Azzam. This was longlisted for the international prize for Arabic fiction and that drew me in. It’s a story about love, friendship, and dissent in a war-torn Damascus right at the beginning of the Arab Spring. Really good book.

Helen taught me two things that I will never forget in my life—that reading is not an added or marginal task, and that any day that passes by in peace, without pain, and with a little bit of joy, knowledge, and experience, is a good day.

Yesterday, I finished A Stranger in the Citadel by Tobias S. Buckell. This one is part fantasy and part sci-fi that I found really interesting. In a post-apocalyptic world, literacy is banned because the gods provide everything if only humans didn’t read. The heroine’s whole worldview gets shaken as she realizes that her whole life has been built on lies and dictatorship. Also really good.

It wasn’t spell-casting, but he was creating a way for his thoughts to be shared with a stranger who could then decode his symbols to hear his thoughts, and wasn’t that a magic all by itself?

Links

• This page is a truly naked, brutalist html quine. by Leon Bambrick. This is a cool way to “break the rules” and “make the internal external.” It looks brutal while still looking really nice.
• Illuminati Hotties: Tiny Desk Concert by NPR. Yes, I watched this at least five times.
• No Web Without Women by Selman Design. Showcases technological advances done by women over the course of history.
• Neobrutalism: Definition and Best Practices by Hayat Sheikh. A great overview and practical tips for designing neobrutal websites (kind of like this one right now!). I really like the bold colors of this design style.
• Lessons From the Staj by Emilie Barnes. Emilie is a good friend and we were in the same Peace Corps cohort together. We also ran the multimedia committee together with one other volunteer. This piece nicely puts into words how I feel about all of my new friends I met in Morocco.

  The diversity of America is one of its greatest, and often overlooked, strengths.

• What We Heard at our Town Hall by Orrin Luc at National Peace Corps Association. After DOGE visited Peace Corps headquarters, people in the community gathered to reflect and express concerns. The thing that resonated most with me was the Third Goal at risk:

  Peace Corps’ Third Goal—bringing global understanding back home—was a recurring theme. Volunteers return with hard-earned knowledge, empathy, and perspective. Without new generations of RPCVs, our communities risk losing this vital cross-cultural insight.