Photographed above is Dames Point Bridge in Jacksonville, Florida.
Hello, world!
I am continuously tweaking my toolbox for all things weeknotes. The most recent tweaks have yielded an experimental new section that highlights photographs I’ve uploaded to Wikimedia Commons in a given week. I’m excited because this lets me highlight a certain type of photography and it will (hopefully) incentivize me to contribute to Wikimedia Commons a bit more consistently.
I also switched to using my Koito instance as the source for my music listening stats instead of last.fm. I scrobble music listening directly from Pano Scrobbler on my phone to the ListenBrainz-like endpoint on my Koito instance. With that done, I no longer rely on last.fm for anything critical. I’ll continue scrobbling there for the foreseeable future since the social aspect is nice and I don’t mind it for redundancy.
I chose “keen as mustard” as this week’s title because that’s how excited I am about so many of the stuff I have in this week’s post. The expression is new to me and caught my eye because I was not immediately sure if being as keen as mustard meant that one’s excitement was extreme or tepid.
🔖 My Favorite Stuff from the Internet This Week
- Stump
- Smartphones, online music streaming and traffic fatalities
- How to run a small social network site for your friends
- KoDashboard
- The two kinds of error
- A Playboy Interview With Miles Davis
🐘 Mastodon Posts
I posted a bit on Mastodon a bit this week from my current main account:
- On getting my 8BitDo controller working as a page turner for my e-reader
- I have a remote control for my PocketBook! I shared the little bit of Lua I wrote to get the keybindings working with KOReader. I did this to improve my setup for reading before bed. This controller is a bit big so I bought an 8Bit Micro controller that I’ll aim to get set up this coming week.
- It fluctuates but I would estimate that I spend about as much time refining my reading tooling and workflow as I do actually reading. I am planning a follow-up to OK, Reader to capture how much things have changed and improved since I wrote that post last spring.
- On LLMs needlessly assign genders to people
🐾 Movement
I took a few walks that did not wind up on Strava. My favorite of those was a ~three mile jaunt around Columbia, South Carolina. The photos I mentioned above were taken during that walk. Keep scrolling to see the photos.
🌱 Gardening 2026
The daffodil blades are emerging. That is not a reliable indicator of the last frost but this March has continued to be mild enough that it might be time to start the seedlings. I plan to start the seeds in a few stages to distribute my effort and when flowers bloom once summer arrives.
📖 Reading
I read two short books this week:
- Shane by Jack Schaefer (Finished on 2026-03-09)
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Finished on 2026-03-10)
Both of those books are classics I had been wanting to read for some time. While I am so glad I read them both, I preferred Shane. I think that the ambiguous nature of the book’s ending is one of those things that has been spoiled pretty widely — most notably in The Negotiator. Knowing the broad strokes of the ending did not ruin my enjoyment of the book.
I also started my next book this week. It’s not a classic in the same way but it’s another entry from my “I really want to read this one pile”:
- Babel, or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang
🔗 Social Reading
I keep track of my reading in various places across the Internet:
- /books on brie.dev — this is on a delay, at the present moment
- Read books for @bbrie | Hardcover
- Read books for 🐈⬛ brie.dev | Rambling Readers
- IRL Book Club Picks
🎮 Gaming
🍜 Steam
I did no gaming on Steam this week. My Steam gameplay decreases as the average temperature increases.
🕹️ Steam Playtime
No playtime recorded this week.
🏆 Steam Achievements
No achievements unlocked this week. See all Steam achievements on achieved.by.brie.lol.
🔰 Ingress
I unlocked the silver Reclaimer medal in Ingress this week!
This is the week that Ingress published “Pausing OPR and Retiring Overclock” where we got two days notice about some pretty significant and frustrating changes to the game. The medal is Ingress news I can be excited about.
✨ I am slowly working on a self-hosted tool folks can use to solve many of the problems solved by agent-stats.com.
🎧 Music
Let’s take a look at the 604 tracks I listened to this week.
- Unique tracks: 462 | Unique albums: 334 | Unique artists: 161
Top Artists
- The Cure (33 plays)
- Bad Bunny (31 plays)
- Kendrick Lamar (29 plays)
- Drake (27 plays)
- Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass (26 plays)
- Stevie Wonder (22 plays)
- Thelonious Monk (22 plays)
- Traffic (21 plays)
- Bob Marley & The Wailers (20 plays)
- EARTHGANG (18 plays)
Top Albums
- The Cure - Disintegration (28 plays)
- Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass - Whipped Cream & Other Delights (26 plays)
- Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life (22 plays)
- Thelonious Monk - Underground (22 plays)
- Traffic - John Barleycorn Must Die (21 plays)
- Bob Marley & The Wailers - Catch A Fire (20 plays)
- EARTHGANG - PERFECT FANTASY (18 plays)
- A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory (14 plays)
- Beth Orton - Central Reservation (12 plays)
- Kendrick Lamar - GNX (12 plays)
Top Tracks
- Pictures of You (5 plays)
- Lovesong (5 plays)
- Where the Wild Things Are (5 plays)
- Lullaby (4 plays)
- Fast Car (4 plays)
- BAILE INoLVIDABLE (4 plays)
- Thelonious (4 plays)
- Ugly Beauty (4 plays)
- Raise Four (4 plays)
- Boo Boo’s Birthday (Take 11) (4 plays)
🔗 Social Listening
I scrobble my music to my Koito instance at heard.by.brie.lol — as well as to bbbbbbbbrie on last.fm, bbrie on libre.fm, and briealeida on ListenBrainz.
Sporadically, I write song reviews on Crucial Tracks and album reviews on record.club.
📸 Photography
🧺 Olympia Cotton Mills
A few of my photographs this week featured a gorgeous building I encountered in Columbia, South Carolina. This former textile mill is now an apartment building providing housing for the University of South Carolina.
Olympia Cotton Mills, east wing, March 2026.jpg
A photo featuring the east wing of the Olympia Cotton Mills building, taken on a clear day in March 2026.
Brielikecheese — Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Olympia Cotton Mills Entrance Sign
A photo featuring the “Olympia Cotton Mills” text on the exterior of the building in Columbia, South Carolina
Brielikecheese — Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Olympia Cotton Mills, door and signage
A closer look at an entrance to Olympia Cotton Mills
Brielikecheese — Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Olympia Cotton Mills, clock tower
A look at an entrance to Olympia Cotton Mills
Brielikecheese — Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Clock tower at Olympia Mill
A photo of a clock tower at Olympia Mill in Columbia, South Carolina. Taken in early spring 2026 on a clear day.
Brielikecheese — Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
🧪 This is an experimental approach to incorporating the content I contribute to Wikimedia Commons: we’ll see whether or how I continue this in the future.
Thanks!
— Brie