Weeknotes 2025W36

A long, busy last week pushed last week’s weeknotes to the back burner. We officially moved! I came home from Salem on Friday afternoon, packed up all of our stuff including a cat, and drove over on Sunday night. The Subaru was packed as tight as possible and we couldn’t fit our desks and chairs in so we loaded those into the truck for someone to drive over later.

I had Labor Day off so we used the day to rent a U-Haul truck and pick up some furniture that we found on Facebook Marketplace. We found an incredible mustard yellow pull-out couch for cheap. The thrift store had some dishes that we needed, including these plates that I couldn’t live without. The desks and chairs got delivered later in the week. There is almost no storage in our little apartment so we picked up one of those industrial wire racks to put extra kitchen, pantry, and utility stuff. It’s coming together and feeling more like a retro-industrial home each day.

To start getting acquainted with our new community, we went to the library and the Saturday market in walking distance to our apartment. The Saturday market was much bigger than I expected and had all kinds of things. The best thing that I bought was a board game from the person who designed it right here in Eugene. It’s called The Game of Real Life, a parody of that Game of Life. Instead of money being the goal, the player with the most happiness at the end wins. It also has elements of real life not present in the original like sex and drugs. It looks really fun and I can’t wait to play it.

Links

• I Miss Using Em Dashes by Michael Bassili. Me too. I still definitely use them in my personal writing but I have intentionally left them out of résumés and cover letters just to avoid the possibility of thinking that it wasn’t written by me, a human being.
• Pebble 2 Duo is in mass production! by Eric Migicovsky. I’m so excited to finally get this!
• Making a font of my handwriting by Chris Smith. This is an excellent idea although mine would either be unreadable or artificial.
• Poisoning Well by Heydon Pickering. The author created nonsense versions of all of their articles that only LLM crawlers will consume.

  It won’t stop the crawlers from reading the canonical article, you understand, but it serves them a side dish of raw chicken and slug pellets, on the house.

• Writing Arabic in English by Sheriff Elmetwally. A keyboard for writing Arabic phonetically using a QWERTY layout.
• MitchIvin XP by Mitch Ivin. Absolutely incredible, pixel-perfect rendition of Windows XP.