Weeknotes 2026 W35: More rain

This is one of these weeks where not much interesting has happened. Quite some energy has gone into projects at work — projects that are so interesting that they take up mental space even in my free time. It’s a privilege to be working on projects that I voluntarily think about in my spare time, but I’d very much like to be able to switch off, too.

Fortunately, this is a very long weekend. I had Friday off (my employer gives everyone all Fridays off in August), and coming Monday is a bank holiday.

Quick bits

• I have turned the severe alerts off on my iPhone. Only emergency alerts are still enabled. Oh, how I’d wish for severe alerts to simply be notifications.

• More rain. I love it.

• My viewings this week have not yielded anything compelling yet. I’ve decided to strictly look for unfurnished flats. I care a lot about my living space, and I cannot deal with generic rental furniture. I can’t!

  I do slightly envy my coworkers who don’t give a damn. Not caring would certainly make my life easier.

• I placed another IKEA order because there is, erm, critical infrastructure missing in my house: lamps! The days are getting shorter, and I need decent lighting.

• One Nanoc bug fix is coming up. Probably today. Maybe tomorrow.

• I’ve poured some of my free time and free energy into fiction writing again. I’m attempting to write a micro-budget short film, which is certainly challenging. Perhaps more challenging than I’m capable of. We’ll see!

Years of week­notes

After well over four years of writing week­notes , I am finally starting to figure out why I’m writing them. I’ve always had this vague feeling that they were useful in some way, but I think I can, at long last, attempt to put into words why:

• It’s helpful for sorting my thoughts. Writing is thinking and all that. It creates some semblance of order in that ADHD brain of mine.¹¹1 I have apparently never written in my week­notes about the ADHD diagnosis I got at the beginning of this year. 

• It is a way for me to reflect by re-reading older week­notes. I can answer the question “what was on my mind twelve months ago” quite easily. I can now write yearly retrospectives, which I find fascinating — every year I’ve grown and achieved so much more than I thought was possible.

I have three rules for writing week­notes:

• I get something out every single week. Even if it’s just a hundred words! Or even just fifty! And even then, there is room for exceptions; only once did I skip my week­notes, for a good reason. Also, sometimes I just don’t have much time and energy for week­notes. Sometimes that energy goes elsewhere, and that’s just fine. Last week, I spent several hours on writing week­notes; this week, maybe about an hour.

• I write in public. This helps with accountability. Probably. I don’t really know. And even though it is public, I really only write for myself; I have no audience in mind.

• I will stop as soon as it feels like a drag.

The structure of a week­notes entry is not fixed. My first entries were entirely free-form, and structure only started to emerge over time. I’ve settled into a bit of a pattern,²²2 Intro (sometimes), quick bits, shower thoughts (occasionally), detailed topics (typically), entertainment (often), and links (virtually always).  but even that is flexible. Who knows what my week­notes will look like twelve months from now?

Speaking of, two patterns have started to become more prominent lately:

• I’ve been marking up redacted names³³3 I’m redacting names because these are my week­notes, and I care about the privacy of others.  with an initial and a two-em dash — or rather, two regular em dashes, because a two-em dash is not commonly supported. In code, it looks like <span class="pn">A&mdash;&mdash;</span> (which turns into A——). I saw this approach used in an M. R. James book, and the Chicago Manual of Style recommends it too.⁴⁴4 The Chicago Manual of Style, 17th ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), § 6.93. 

• I’ve been interconnecting notes much more. I have dedicated pages for Kaweco Classic Sport and German language and Acting, for example. A link to a topic note creates opportunity to rediscover what I wrote about the topic earlier. It’s also just fun — remember when web sites had pages with links to other pages with links to other pages?

I’d like to keep my week­notes in physical form at some point. Perhaps print a one-off book for the first five years, as an offline backup of sorts?

Entertainment

• Doki Doki Literature Club Plus!⁵⁵5 Doki Doki Literature Club Plus! (Team Salvato, 2021), published by Serenity Forge.  is so disturbing that I will not continue with it.

Links

• Why Are Germans Obsessed With This Soda Mix? (My Name Is Andong): Oh! That clears up my confusion around Paulaner Spezi.

• How Belgium’s Greatest Inventor Planned To Amplify Music... With Steam (The Tim Traveller): Toot toot!

• Breaking in to buildings with boobs (Katie PF): I don’t have boobs, but I also have some experience making my way into buildings with no authorisation.

Tech links:

• distributed identity (jyn): One more way in which Git is such a pain.