Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2026 W06: Claire Ligne

February 2​–​8, 2026

Quick bits:

  • Here’s something that Dutch has that I miss when writing English: stress markers. To emphasize a word in English, you put it in italics. In Dutch, you use an acute accent: Ik móést wachten (I had to wait); Ik moest wáchten (I had to wait).

  • My 860-day Duolingo streak has ended.

  • A quote worth remembering: “Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.” — Carl Jung

  • Oh we’re doing quotes now? Here’s another one: “I think sometimes programmers forget that their primary job is to create a world where we need less programmers, not more.” — Jeff Atwood. Yep.

  • My Epstein number is at least 2. Hopefully a lot more than that.

  • In Gremlins news, my MacBook Air has resumed randomly restarting.1

  • WhatsApp has started suggesting I follow the police and a channel for Thermomix recipes.

  • Tarmak-4 is going well. I am looking forward to switching to Colemak proper soon. This will also fix the issues I had with accents on Tarmak; their key positions don’t move from QWERTY on the Tarmak implementation I’m using, while they do — as they should — on Colemak.

  • After accidentally breaking a supposed-to-be-immutable Atom feed ID on my web site, I’ve added a nanoc bake-tags command that calculates the Atom IDs (a tag: URI) and then writes them into each item’s metadata. They are no longer calculated dynamically.

Shower thoughts:

  • I grew up with the Franco-Belgian comics — not the Marvel ones — so I wonder: wouldn’t Claire Ligne be an excellent superhero name?!

  • You can’t deploy something if it hasn’t been ployed yet. (Please do use this as an excuse to not get any work done.)

The weather is getting me down. It has been freezing almost every day since the beginning of the year. Occasionally the temperature pops above zero, but that doesn’t make the ice disappear; the thawing and refreezing turns everything into a black-ice nightmare that makes getting around a true challenge.

On Monday, there was a large-scale public transportation strike in Berlin. The S-Bahn was the only form still running, and as I had to get around on Monday, I had no choice but to walk — a lot.

At least that one snowplow gave the whole situation a Fargo-like filmic feel.2

Apart from the aforementioned mental drain, I’ve been struggling physically too. While I’ve been feeling under the weather for weeks, the past few days were the worst. I suspect that the terrible Berlin air quality has something to do with that: lately, the air quality here has been “very poor” or “unhealthy” depending on the source of the information. Allegedly, Berlin is covered in smoke from wood- and coal-burning furnaces. So I’ve taken to wearing a N95 mask indoors. I think it makes a difference; when I remove the mask, I can smell and even taste the smoke. Yuck.

I might’ve figured out why I’m having such a hard time with my fiction writing. The answer is entirely obvious now that I’m paying attention to it: fiction writing is emotionally taxing, and that is exactly why I’ve been avoiding it.

So I’m procrastinating. I’ve begun updating my interactive fiction game engine. Not doing any real writing, mind you — just updating the game engine, soon with hot reloading support! And I’ve ported my manuscript generator to Ruby.

Perhaps my desire to explore other mediums (like radio plays) is an escape or distraction mechanism so that I don’t have to deal with the difficult work of writing. My desire to get a photo camera perhaps comes from that same desire to distract myself.

Still, I keep coming back to fiction writing because I enjoy it. I enjoy coming up with stories and characters and worlds. I can’t resist it, and the most interesting stories all have stakes for the characters, which inevitably means that writing stories is going to be emotionally taxing.

The question, then, is how I can deal with that.

Toots and skeets:

PSA: Did you know that it’s unsafe to put code diffs into your commit messages?

 — Michael Stapelberg. Yikes!

something I remember from the big tech layoffs of a couple years ago is seeing coworkers with excellent performance reviews - even some who had literally just been promoted - getting thrown overboard for completely opaque reasons and realizing that was part of the point

 — Micah

Links:

Tech links:

  1. It has, erm, restarted restarting, I suppose. ↩︎

  2. I’m so happy because Fargo is my favorite feel-good film. /s ↩︎

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