001: Brevity is the soul of wit.

Hello, world!

The phrase of the week is brevity is the soul of wit. On a Chicago Fire episode I saw this week, Chief Boden used this expression when advising a firefighter on what to say when questioned by the police. I thought this was an interesting application of a well-known phrase.

🥺 Can’t Let It Go

The NPR Politics podcast does a segment called “Can’t Let It Go” where the hosts share the thing from the week that they keep thinking about. This week my “can’t let it go” is Roy Tang’s My 2026 Checklist post. I love the idea of a low-key TODO list for the year and I love that this is a thing that works well across many years. The structure and vibe of Roy’s list inspired me to take a similar approach to my planning for 2026. That means two things for me:

📋 tracking some TODOs semi-publicly using the TODO functionality in sourcehut
🤞 planning a “2026 TODO List” post for brie.dev

Publishing weeknotes consistently is on my 2026 TODO list and if you’re reading this, I am two for two.

📻 Radio

I found myself listening to the radio a lot this week. Since making a concerted effort to listen to more new music is one of my 2026 goals, I have been in pursuit of sources of new music. While on that search I discovered a super cool site that makes it easy to listen to one of a number of curated radio stations and scrobble the songs you hear: ScrobbleRadio.

🔖 Cool Bookmarks

Databases in 2025: A Year in Review
html.earth: Markdown to HTML Converter & Site Generator
- Who needs another static site generator? I know but no npm required!
One year of keeping a tada list - by Aditya Bhargava
Open Slopware
Pandoc in the browser
Relaxing Clock
🌟 The Four “C”s: Consume, Create, Cavort, Commune
- I think a lot about balancing consume and create but I often found myself thinking about ways to extend the framework. I found the extension in this article to be particularly inspiring.

✍️ Media Notes

📖 I read…

I read Animal Farm this week. It got a solid 4.25 star rating from me; read more about why in my review. I started my next book, Lonesome Dove, this week and am greatly looking forward to it.

🎧 I listened…

I listened to a lot of old favorites this week, mostly Hans Zimmer and Rage Against the Machine.

🙌 I uninstalled Spotify from my phone this week. That’s part of my ongoing campaign to gradually get rid of Spotify, mentioned a bit in my 2025 reflection post. I’m using Apple Music in place of Spotify. I rely on Spotify because of how many things integrate nicely with it. I’m looking forward to exploring alternatives during 2026. I would like to downgrade to a free Spotify account with an acceptable degree of inconvenience. Next up: exporting playlists.

🎮 I played…

I enjoyed a bit more Spirit City: Lofi Sessions while I wrote this week. The table in the Kitchen DLC is my new favorite spot in the game. On Android, I’ve been playing Ingress and using Agent Stats to track my progression, as usual.

📺 I watched…

I continued my exploration of the One Chicago Universe as I concluded season 7 of Chicago P.D. and continued with season 2 of Chicago Fire. I’m sure Atli Örvarsson’s music is exactly what the show’s producers want but it’s laughably over-dramatic at times. I rewatched John Oliver’s assessment of Law and Order after watching enough of the One Chicago universe to notice trends and patterns.