Hello, world!
The title for this week’s post is inspired by something I posted on Mastodon earlier this year. It makes me smile; I don’t intend to suggest a deeper meaning.
If you follow Plop on Mastodon, you already know that I started posting pics of him at plop.brie.lol. Since his OMG.LOL account will expire some day(use his referral code to extend it), I am moving towards a POSSE approach for his photos. I really like the Astro starter I am using for Plop’s photo site.
❄️ Today was the snowiest day here in Pittsburgh since Snowmageddon 2010. That’s perfect weather for opening up a bunch of tabs to check out all these cool links from the week!
🌟 My Favorite Stuff from the Internet This Week
Given everything going on, this was an important and somewhat helpful article to find this week: How To Help if You are Outside Minnesota.
Here are a few other articles this week that I read and think are totally worthwhile:
- 👉 Come back | everything changes
- Please read this one! I’ve reflected on this piece often since reading it. You won’t find anything new or groundbreaking but I think you’ll find a very helpful way to think about the power of habits. The piece is so short you won’t even need to scroll so if it’s a bust, it won’t cost you much time. OK, that’s my pitch.
- Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots
- I found this surprisingly inspiring: I felt hopeful after reading this. Given the title, I expected to feel doomy and gloomy.
- Curiosity is the first-step in problem solving. | Irrational Exuberance
🧰 Tools
These are the things that I gave a go that are worth mentioning:
- mult1v4c/hestia-core: A grid-based, modular dashboard built entirely from HTML, CSS, and JS with the ability to create your custom API integrations.
- looks beautiful, not meant to be exposed publicly
- sqshq/sampler: Tool for shell commands execution, visualization and alerting. Configured with a simple YAML file.
- This looks nice! I don’t know if I will use it beyond the experimentation phase.
If you’ve ready my writing elsewhere, you know I really like to write about my reading workflow. This week, I found this nice Ruby script for parsing reading data:
It fluctuates but I spend about as much time reading as I spend working on refining all the different aspects of my reading workflow. I’m starting to plan a follow-up to OK, Reader.
✍️ Media Notes
♟️ Board Gaming
I played “boop.” at Four Horsemen this week.
📖 Reading
I’ve been continuing to read _Part II` of Lonesome Dove.
🕵️ Ingress Stats
I gained 45,136 AP this week. This week, Virtual NL New Year Tour 2026 started, bringing 2X AP through February 2nd. I have a lot of Apex Boosts so I’m up to 4X AP!
🎙️ Podcast Stats (AntennaPod)
This week, my podcast listening was focused on this subset of my “must listen” podcasts:
| Podcast | Minutes Listened |
|---|---|
| Grumpy Old Geeks | 137 |
| My Brother, My Brother And Me | 90 |
| Lateral with Tom Scott | 50 |
🎬 Movies
I am tracking movies on Letterboxd (and Trakt) this year. I’m also reviewing movies like The Phantom of the Opera, 2004. (Watched: 2026-01-25)
I first fell in love with a stage production of the Phantom of the Opera as a child. When this movie was originally released I saw it and enjoyed it. I think I wanted to like it more than I actually liked it. On a rewatch, it’s fine. The swishing camera scenes felt a bit out of place. The pacing makes the movie very difficult to follow if you do not already know the story.
I found this assessment of the movie to be interesting:
🎧 Music
The top artists across the 171 tracks I scrobbled this week are:
- Bad Bunny (27 plays)
- Emmy Rossum (15 plays)
- Sister Rosetta Tharpe (8 plays)
- AC/DC (7 plays)
- Andrew Lloyd Webber (7 plays)
- Robert Johnson (6 plays)
- Gerard Butler (6 plays)
- Basil Poledouris (5 plays)
- Muddy Waters (4 plays)
- Willie Dixon (4 plays)
I scrobble my music online:
Take care!
— Brie