Weeknotes 2026 W29: Vertical knolling

I’ve fallen ill! Some sort of cold, or the flu, or maybe even COVID. Who knows. Eurgh.

That this happened is not a surprise. The stress around moving and around the issues with my rental place has been high, and I’m surprised that I didn’t crash earlier.

But as a result, this week’s week­notes will be more terse than usual.

Quick bits

• Karl Marx came up in a conversation this week, and I was reminded that I used to confuse Karl May and Karl Marx. As a kid, I had a Karl May book that I never read, because the typography and printing quality were just awful.¹¹1 I can’t believe I was a typography nerd before I even hit the age of ten.  This week I learned how racist Karl May’s writing was, and how Hitler was especially fond of him.²²2 Hitler must have had a higher-quality print than what I had!  I can’t believe I had one of Hitler’s favourite books in my personal collection!

• Virtually every single piece of software that I wrote, I’ve written for myself. But for the game I’ve been prototyping, that’ll be different; it wouldn’t be a game that I actively play. It’s a strange and unfamiliar feeling. Is that simply what game dev is like? My solitaire game I play because it’s fun and I can casually play a game once in a while, but that’s simply not the case for what I am working on now.

• I am closing in on five years of writing week­notes. I’m thinking of doing a retrospective on this whole project. Questions to answer: Why do I still do it? What do I get out of it? What’s my process? You know what — ask me anything.

Bits about settling in in London:

• Most of my boxes have been unpacked. I was in urgent need of storage — the flat comes with nothing but a crappy wardrobe — and so I went to IKEA and got the classic IVAR. Crude, but effective. Most of my stuff is now neatly arranged — vertical knolling!³³3 I worry that the Internet has turned knolling (which I learnt about from J—— a few years ago) into an aesthetic practice. I am much more drawn to its original the purpose of creating order and clarity. 

  But oof, I am again running out of space. The wardrobe is too small, and my office needs dedicated storage space too.

• I’ve set up my home office, at least. It’s great to use my ultra-wide display on my standing desk, and to sit in my fancy comfortable desk chair.

• Dishwashers are great! It cleans my dishes better than I could do them myself. Some of my mugs and my V60 coffee dripper have had unremovable stains for a long time, but my dishwasher took care of them with no issues.

Entertainment

• I picked up the Tanith Lee collection on Humble Bundle and began with Night’s Master.⁴⁴4 Tanith Lee, Night’s Master (DAW Books, Inc., 1978).  Wow, what writing! I’m deeply into it.

Links

• Maybe You Have SDAM? (Maarten Serneels): I definitely don’t, but it’s so interesting to learn about other people’s experiences.

Tech links:

• Reinventing Entropy | Compression is Intelligence Part 1 (3Blue1Brown / Grant Sanderson)

• Detecting Full Table Scans With SQLite (Aaron Patterson)