Hello, world!

As Peter Drucker famously never said: “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. I heard that quote again this week and I found myself reflecting on it. The quote has not changed but I have, you know? The phrase is catchy enough but it lends itself to a defeatist interpretation without deeper engagement. Andi Roberts has a really good medium-length read that I appreciated: Culture eats strategy for breakfast: What the famous quote gets wrong (and right).

🎧 Extricating myself from Spotify

I stopped using Spotify for podcasts last year. In 2026, I am continuing my journey of extricating myself enough to see if I can stop paying for Spotify Premium. This week, I exported all my playlists with both Exportify and Tune My Music. I imported some of the playlists to Apple Music and stored them all as CSVs in a few git repos including:

• 🎧 my public playlists on source.tube

Now that I am happy with these playlist exports, I am ready to delete all of the playlists in my Spotify account. Spotify is no longer the authoritative source for my playlists and I want to be free of the digital clutter.

🌟 My Favorite Stuff from the Internet This Week

TWIL about The Fun Scale. I am very much a Type 2 Fun kind of person. I don’t have as much of that type of fun in the winter but I really appreciate having this scale. It’s a useful framework for talking about types of activities and exploring risk tolerances.

Here are a few other articles this week that I read and think are totally worthwhile:

• Software as Fast Fashion
  • The article is even better than the title.
• A Vanity VNC server (or Joke over RFB) - ache
  • I shared the author’s memories of VNC and really enjoyed this journey. I was sold on this piece far before I knew it had anything to do with Nyan Cat.
• “Link In Bio” is a slow knife - Anil Dash
  • Anil strikes a chord with this article.
• Limits and specifications for Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn
• 20th #Wikipedia editing anniversary
  • I don’t do enough editing of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects to need a full “Wikimedia Wrapped” (yet) but it’s cool to read analysis from folks who do.

✍️ Media Notes

I want to bring monthly media diet posts back. I’m learning from what didn’t work when I tried in 2025 and learning from what is working so far about weeknotes. As a result, weeknotes are mini media diet posts that get me thinking critically about what I’ve consumed as the month goes by. That’s better than making it a big thing that I do twelve times a year. I refined the scripts I use to generate this info a bit this week and I’m happy with the results so far. I will write more in the colophon eventually.

📖 Reading

♣️ Book Club

I read Part I of Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry for book club this week and it was amazing. This is a bucket list book so I was super excited this was the pick. I’m really excited about how engaging the story and characters are so far.

I am now using a KoShelf instance to bring the notes and highlights from KOReader on my PocketBook to book club discussions.

🩳 Novellas and Short Stories

I re-read Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis this week. Reading the preface paid off: learning that Kafka used a word closer to “transformation” than the biological interpretation associated with “metamorphosis” helps when reading and analyzing the book. I don’t know whether I’ll read the other stories in the collection.

I like finding short books I can read in a weekend. Samantha Harvey’s award-winning Orbital fit the bill beautifully.

🕹️ Gaming

🛡️ Ingress

I made good progress during the current +Gamma Anomaly Season in Ingress.

🎮 Steam

🏆 Achievements

Earned in Human Resource Machine:

• Career Milestone 1

🎧 Listening

🎵 Music

A look at my top albums shows what my week in music looked like:

• Bad Bunny - Un Verano Sin Ti (32 plays)
• Eldbjørg Hemsing - Colors of Bach (26 plays)
• Emmy Rossum - The Phantom of the Opera (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (24 plays)
• Bad Bunny - DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (20 plays)
• Bad Bunny - X 100PRE (17 plays)
• Vienna Philharmonic - Sommernachtskonzert 2025 / Summer Night Concert 2025 (16 plays)
• A$AP Rocky - Don’t Be Dumb (15 plays)
• Gerard Butler - The Phantom of the Opera (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (15 plays)
• Dillon Francis - Moombahton Mix (Continuous Mix) (14 plays)
• Koni - Mashups Remixes Of Hits (13 plays)

I’ve been listening through Bad Bunny’s discography ahead of the Super Bowl.

🎙️ Podcasts

Generated thanks to the SQLite export from AntennaPod, here’s an overview of my podcast listening this week:

🌞 Everything Else

I’ve continued to use my new sun lamp fairly consistently as I write in the mornings. I decided get back to poetry recitation this year. I’m focusing on an excerpt from Emily Dickinson’s “A Day”. I posted this emoji-fied version on Mastodon to help:

🌞 I’ll tell you how the sun rose, —

🎀 A ribbon at a time.

🔮 The steeples swam in amethyst,

🐿️ The news like squirrels ran.

👒 The hills untied their bonnets,

🐦‍⬛ The bobolinks begun.

🗣️ Then I said softly to myself,

☀️ “That must have been the sun!”

Bobolinks are beautiful songbirds.

— Brie