Hello world!
As you may already know, I love payphones. Each new payphone sighting is increasingly more exciting given how quickly these are going the way of the dodo. I spotted this payphone in Clinton County, Pennsylvania this weekend. Payphones at rest stops tend to be in pretty good condition by comparison to the ones one finds around town.
🔖 My Favorite Stuff from the Internet This Week
- Blog of the .Day: Explore the (indie) web, one blog at a time.
- A great addition to the sites you start your day with.
- TAI-DR. Too AI. Didn’t read.
- As an acronym, I think
AI;DRwon some time ago but this site is the best shareable I’ve seen yet.
- As an acronym, I think
- Senior Engineers Are the Next DRAM Shortage
- Bastien Piano Basics Website - Premium Books
- I used the Bastien series when first learning piano. I think I’d still recommend them though the right teacher makes all the difference!
🌱 Gardening
The oxeye sunflowers are continuing to look beautiful.
They’re the strongest bloomers at the moment. The compact coneflowers are going to seed. The tithonias are continuing to bloom though I am a bit behind on deadheading. Now that fall has begun, I am thankful for every single flower that’s left. The rate at which the leaves are falling has increased enough that I’ll be trading my watering can for a rake very soon.
🐦⬛ Birding
The latest episode of Let’s Learn Everything covered bird watching! Their coverage was enough to get me to finally give the Birda app a go. While I do like how it gamifies things, the push to go premium is hard to avoid in the app. I’ll give it a go and see if it’s worth using anyway. I finally spotted a blue jay deigning to dine in my yard.
🍿 Movies
As the third quarter of calendar 2026 comes to an end, I am confident that I’ll meet my “26 moves in 2026” goal. At the moment, I feel tempted to stick to only twenty six movies. I can tie my movie goal to the year each year and I’ll increasingly watch more movies (27 movies in 2027, etc). Is a little bit of fun with numbers worth setting a somewhat arbitrary ceiling on my potential for film enjoyment? That’s a good question. For now, I’ll stick with exactly 26 as the goal. I’ll evaluate what I’ll do beyond that in a few films.
-
The Weight, 2026 - ★★½ (Watched: 2026-09-22)
- This is one of the few movies I was really looking forward to in 2026. Ethan Hawke did a fantastic job. I was disappointed at how Russell Crowe’s character acted as a bookend, appearing to set up the plot and to help resolve the conflict while otherwise being fairly absent. I thought that the inclusion of Hawke’s character’s daughter felt a bit rushed. She should have either figured more prominently in the ending or been cut altogether. Aspects of the editing were super odd and I felt like I was watching someone’s first experiments with iMovie.
I have one movie left per calendar month: what will I watch in October?
🎧 Music
I listened to 1,018 tracks this week.
🦄 Unique tracks: 338 | Unique albums: 244 | Unique artists: 148
Top Artists
- Fall Out Boy (117 plays)
- Drake (77 plays)
- Earth, Wind & Fire (46 plays)
Top Albums
- Fall Out Boy - Infinity On High (91 plays)
- Kraftklub - Mit K (13 plays)
- Run The Jewels - RTJ4 (Deluxe Edition) (13 plays)
📘 Reading
I am continuing to work my way through Victor Hugo’s masterpiece. I find Hugo’s writing to be incredibly beautiful. It’s almost too bad that so many beautiful lines are thrown away on passages that don’t address the plot in the slightest. Hugo feels sympathetic to the poor where Dumas seeks to avoid them. I’d love to learn more about their relationship to one another and the times they lived through.
I spent a bit of time refining my ereading workflow this week. I anticipate writing about it on brie.dev again before next summer.
Social Reading
🙌 The list at brie.dev/books is up-to-date.
I keep track of my reading in various places across the Internet. I track every book I read as @bbrie on Hardcover and as brie on Rambling Readers. I also track each IRL Book Club pick.
🕹️ Gaming
🎮 PS5
I completed my competitive placement matches in Overwatch.
I also played my first few Overwatch Stadium matches. It’s an interesting format that offers some really cool upgrades when playing as Mercy. I’ll definitely put Stadium into my rotation in the future. It’s a good in-between game type for when I don’t quite feel ready for competitive but I want something more serious than what arcade has to offer.
🕵️ Ingress
I earned the final Apex medal on Sunday: yay! I wasn’t sure I’d manage the grinding necessary for 16,000 tokens but I did it!
♟️ Board Gaming
I played Monopoly for the first time in a very long time. I think this was the first time I played since learning the backstory of the game’s origins as a critique of capitalism. As a result, I have a new book on my TBR list:
This looks like a certain kind of fun non-fiction that I am rather partial to.
Thanks!
— Brie