Hello world!

I’ll address the title of this week’s note right up top: I biked along a body of called “Misery Bay” near Lake Erie this week. I had a wonderful ride but the expression “misery loves company” has been stuck in my head all week as a result. That’s all.

I mentioned the beauty of my favorite of all the adjacent states, West Virginia, last week. I’m proud to highlight the natural wonders of my native Pennsylvania this week. From my part of PA, I can easily drive to the shores of one of the Great Lakes: Erie.

The scenery along the trail through Presque Isle State Park on Lake Erie was absolutely gorgeous. The snow and fog heightened the Halloween-in-March vibes. I did look into why that body of water is called Misery Bay and it totally makes sense.

As a kid, I visited Lake Erie and learned about the history of the region — with a heavy focus on the War of 1812 more than once. That made everything I read about along the route feel a bit familiar.

🔖 My Favorite Stuff from the Internet This Week

Avoiding a Culture of Emergencies - Stay SaaSy
The ‘Paperwork Flood’: How I Drowned a Bureaucrat before dinner.
- A commendable approach to a frustrating situation.
Cookies Save Editor
- I intermittently play Cookie Clicker. I found this excellent site while looking for tooling this week.
curl > /dev/sda
- This is my favorite kind of article.

🧰 Tools

Intervals.icu
- I’ve imported all my .gpx files into intervals.icu for analysis. I like Smashrun and trends.bike but I’m always looking for something that provides in-depth analysis across an array of sports. The big event I am training for this season is Pedal PGH in August. I’m excited to experiment with this site for managing my training.
pgs.sh - Deploy static sites with a single command. rsync and you’re live.
- I finally gave this a try this week and: I love it. It’s just as easy as it sets out to be.
Wallper - Live Wallpapers for Your Mac

🐾 Movement

The bike ride I mentioned above was one of the highlights of my week.

Monday: 🏖️ Biking, Beaches and Snow: Presque Isle 🚲 | 🚲 13 mile ride
Thursday: ⛅ Lunch Walk | 👣 ~1.8 mile walk
Saturday: 🔰 Ingress and Hills 🐾 | 👣 4 mile walk
Sunday: ⛅ Ingress, lunch + Montour 🐾 | 👣 10 mile walk

📖 Reading

Lessons from Cats for Surviving Fascism by Stewart Reynolds (Read on 2026-03-24)
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (Started on 2026-03-28)

I started reading the next book club selection. I’ve wanted to read Barbara Kingsolver for a long time — mostly due to curiosity given the longevity of her name in the zeitgeist. Prior to starting this book, I know nothing about her writing. I’m excited to see what there is to explore. The first few chapters of Demon Copperhead tell the reader quite a lot about the world in which the story is set. I expect this to be a bit of a “life is tough” book where some characters wind up in seemingly inescapably terrible situations. I expect it to be the type of sad book that ultimately feels hopeful because there’s of the “there’s nowhere to go but up” vibes.

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

🔰 Ingress

I am continuing to play Ingress while it’s enjoyable. I reflected this week on my favorite and least favorite changes to the game and their impacts over time:

🌟 favorite change: the addition of Machina
😿 least favorite: completely nerfing capsules

🎧 Music

🆕 1001 Albums

I am 18 albums into my 1001 Albums journey so far. I posted a bit about it on Mastodon this week. My absolute favorite album of the experiment was this week: Forever Changes by Love.