Week of 2025-10-06

I've been enticed by the concept of weekly journals for about a year now, but I've consistently failed to make the time for them. Here's an itemized list of why I think they're interesting:

My working memory has more holes than swiss cheese; maybe regularly revisiting my week will help me plug a few.

I'd like to write more to help me build my writing skills.

As I get older, I'm either dying or thriving by my weekly habits. Anchoring my Monday is attractive.

I'd like to show off things that I've thought about, pursued, and maybe/maybe not finished.

My social circle is small, so maybe I can build out my social circle by being open about life and my interests.

My plan is to just touch on items of interest, because at this point, tracking my day-to-day activities just isn't on the table. Without further ado, let's get to the week.

Ludum Dare 58

Monday was the final day for Ludum Dare 58, so I spent most of the day cleaning up and tuning systems. We weren't terribly inspired by the theme this time (Collector), but my team's objective was to let our musician/audio guy take a stab at coding for the first time.

Overall, we accomplished that goal! It's not our most polished entry, but the learning opportunity was the prize we had our eyes on anyway. If you want to try it, you can play it below, but this is your warning that the gameplay is... opaque.

Fall begins in Portland

It's cold, it's grey, it's rainy. I've been waiting all year for this! A rainy evening train ride to-and-from The World of Hans Zimmer at the MODA Center set the stage, and a long-overdue visit to a corn maze really sealed the deal.

You can just do things

When somebody reminds me, anyways. I wrote the second part of my Tangled-to-Railway deployment guide , thanks to a poke from Dan Abramov.

After writing the first part, I had gotten hung up on the fact that I couldn't get the Nix-packaged Railway CLI to function the way I would expect it to. What I really wanted to do was be able to explain why it didn't work, but alas, I'm not much of a Nix or Rust expert, and I ran out of time.

I'm happy to have written something at all, and even more so for folks to (seemingly) find it useful. It has me thinking about writing more guides, but more on that another time.

Deploying Statusphere to Railway from Tangled - graham.systems

Part 1: Local machine to Railway

Deploying Statusphere to Railway from Tangled - graham.systems

Part 2: Automating your deployments

Reading?

I finished my second book this year, Storm Front by Jim Butcher. It's the first book in the Dresden Files series. I won't say that it was good, but I am happy that I've doubled my reading goal for the year.

... My goal was one book, to be clear. Let's just say that I had very little confidence that I would do any reading, so October has been a great month so far.

★★ review Storm Front (The Dresden Files, Book 1) (2000)

Yeah, it's a bit of a period piece. I completely understand why folks say you should skip the first one. Jim Butcher can't really decide what's important: Is it building an interesting world where magic is prevalent, but just out of sight? Is it living in the shoes of a mage whose life unravels more every hour? Or, is it describing the physical attributes of every woman Dresden meets in, frankly, unnecessary detail? There are a handful of cool moments, but I get the feeling that this book suffers from an existential desire to sell more books. Will I be reading more? Yeah, probably. I watched the TV show as a kid, so I'm attached to Dresden anyway -- and now I'm curious how he evolves over time, along with Butcher's writing.

LISP and Atproto

I spent some time building a KOReader plugin in Fennel , a LISP that compiles to Lua. The goal was to sync my reading progress to Paperbnd , but sadly, my LISP-writing ability is not high enough to carry my attention span into finishing this iteration.

I still want the progress syncing plugin, so I'll take another stab at this with Lua and Claude.

What's next?

This week, I'm going to try contributing to Tangled by fixing a form-reset bug I encountered while putting together my tutorial last week. I've never contributed code to an OSS project before, so I'm hoping this will help normalize the process for me.

I'll also take a second attempt at my KOReader plugin. I'm rummaging around in the dark because there aren't any guides for building KOReader plugins, and the lexicons for Popfeed don't seem to be published, so... we'll just see how this goes.

Alright, we're losing steam, so we need to wrap. Have a great week!