Hello, world!
The title of this week’s post comes from the litany against fear in Frank Herbert’s Dune. The state of mind cultivated by that phrase feels increasingly necessary in these trying and terrifying times.
On a more personal level: I had a pretty good week in terms of reading, gaming and listening to the latest musical releases. (I 💯 completed Virtual Cottage — and got a bunch of Steam achievements.)
🌟 My Favorite Stuff from the Internet This Week
- Documentation is more than you think
- tuyuritio/astro-theme-thought-lite: A modern Astro theme, focused on content creation.
- I browse through Astro’s free themes more often than I care to admit. This is an example of some of the pretty things you can do with Astro.
- The Steam Machine Has Been Delayed Because Stupid Little Babies Can’t Stop Using AI To Write Their Emails
- I hereby pardon all junior engineers
- Issue 2: WTF Can Artists Do During a Fascist Takeover?! — U.S. Department of Arts and Culture
- Browse No More | Paul Stamatiou
- Funnily enough, I stumbled upon this while sorting through old bookmarks. I subscribed to this blog long ago and this was the first post I happened upon when I resubscribed.
At the beginning of last week’s note, I mentioned that I’m finding ways to write more frequently. In that spirit, I joined write.as this week given their anniversary sale: Celebrating 11 Years on the Web! 🥳 — Write.as Deals. I’ll have the Pro Plan through 2031: I’m excited to see what I’ll publish — though I do some of the writing under a pen name. I am using the @brie@writing.exchange Mastodon account exclusively for writing exercises and writing-adjacent stuff. I don’t really need another blog or another Mastodon account but write.as has been on my mental “try-me” list for a while. I keep a curated list of things I want to try on my public bookmarks site. As of this writing, there are 87 links there: I hope you find something cool!
✍️ Media Notes
📖 Reading
I finished reading Lonesome Dove for book club last week. I’m still blown away by how incredible it was. If you’ve ever considered reading it: do yourself a favor and read it. It’s definitely an instant “best book ever”, it deserves it’s epic status, IMO.
Books Read: 1
- There There by Tommy Orange (Finished on 2026-02-08)
I read There There in a few sittings this week. I prefer to wait a while to give a book my true rating but it gets a preliminary four 🌟 rating. The next book I’ll read is the latest selection for book club: Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi. You can see every book we’ve read: IRL Book Club.
🔗 Social Reading
Status updates from 🐈⬛ brie.dev (ramblingreaders.org)
- 🐈⬛ brie.dev started reading The Water Knife: A novel by Paolo Bacigalupi
- 🐈⬛ brie.dev finished reading There There by Tommy Orange
- 🐈⬛ brie.dev started reading There There by Tommy Orange
🎧 Music
🆕 New Releases
My favorite new releases this week were:
- Tenterhooks by Silversun Pickups
- A great rock album: a bit softer than my usual style but very good. It’s the band’s seventh album but they are a total new discovery to me. I enjoyed this album enough that I’m curious to explore their earlier work.
- The Fall-Off by J. Cole
- I’ve been wondering if this album would ever drop for years! I think it was worth the wait. It’s also far too soon to judge it. I’ll need to listen a few more times. Seeing J. Cole and Drake perform in Pittsburgh is solidly in my A-tier concert experience list.
📊 Scrobbling Stats
I’ve been looking into different ways to visualize scrobbling data. This collage from tapmusic is this week’s winner:
Top Artists
- J. Cole (30 plays)
- Bad Bunny (27 plays)
- Eric Bibb (27 plays)
- Silversun Pickups (21 plays)
- Mastodon (18 plays)
🔗 Social Listening
I scrobble my music:
Sporadically, I write song reviews:
📯 Mastodon
Plop posted:
🤭 Quite a few people enjoyed this collection of photos of Plop yawning!
🏆 Steam Achievements
Steam Achievements - bbbbbbbbrie at
achieved.by.brie.lol
This was a pretty epic week in terms of Steam achievements. I got 9 achievements across 3 games and 💯 completed 1 game.
- Epistory
- Spirit City: Lofi Sessions
- Virtual Cottage
🎙️ Podcast Stats (AntennaPod)
This snippet demonstrates how to parse AntennaPod’s SQLite database for weeknotes.
0 results🤭 The query works.
Take care!
— Brie