Weeknotes: October 20th - October 26th 2025
Disclaimer: This is a new format for the weekly report (now titled Weeknotes) and it is best viewed through the link (rather than email). It should be noted that these notes are always a snapshot of the week itself and lack the fullness of life - as is the case with any personal blogging.
✨ Happenings
- With our municipal election on Monday, Taylor and I headed down to the voting station at 10 AM to ensure we did not have to wait too long in line and that proved to be a good decision (given the lines being reportedly quite long). I am wishing for the best for our newly-elected mayor, councilors, and school board trustees in their term to come. Calgary has a lot of challenges and we are rooting for our leadership to demonstrate competence and compassion!
- As we continued day camps over the work week, it has grown more apparent that the provincial government will be ordering teachers back to work. This is a flagrant attack on organized labour and I would expect nothing less from this government of incompetent and uncompassionate thieves, liars, and thugs. Fuck Danielle Smith and Fuck the United Conservatives. Those bastards can eat shit for all I care.
- This week, we got a new dishwasher installed (courtesy of the kind gift from Jan, James, and Judy). The amount of time this will save will be game-changing!
- I spent time on Saturday morning laying out the new bullet journals' future log, monthly spread, and daily rapid-journaling section. I used a lot of examples for Reddit's r/ basicbulletjournals for guidance. After bullet journaling since March every day, I am glad that I will be able to start fresh in a new bullet journal next week, but I will miss my sage green one with the goldfinch on it.
- I wrote a blog post on learning to play Europa Universalis 4 after spending the last few weeks getting my ass handed to me by the game. It took awhile to actually finish this personal challenge, but I am glad that I did it!
📗 Reading
- Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown - Finished Reading
Great book! I liked the sections on emotions like humility, contentment, and tranquility. But the section on foreboding joy was especially relevant to myself, as I find myself constantly scanning for disaster on the horizon whenever I feel too content or joyful. Foreboding joy is that feeling you get when you experiencing a joyful moment and you feel as "a quiver, a shudder of vulnerability" by recognizing that the moment is too good to be true and could be blindsided by tragedy at any moment. Brené Brown recommends that this should be resisted and addressed by recognizing gratitude for the moment of joy itself. Easier said than done, but certainly preferable.
- Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It by Kaitlyn Tiffany - Started Reading
I have never learned this much about One Direction, but more broadly, this book is about the concept of fangirls and online fandoms generally, so there is naturally a lot of references to early 2010s Tumblr.
- What We Can Know by Ian McEwan - Started Reading
Started reading the first few chapters and it seems to be a slow start with an intriguing premise. Essentially, this is a literary thriller based in 2119, in a future ravaged by climate breakdown. It follows an academic researching a famed poet's dinner party and the search for a lost and legendary poem delivered that night back in 2014.
🎮 Playing
- Lies of P
I started playing Lies of P this week on the Playstation 5 and I am really loving it. I haven't played a souls-like in quite some time, but I have had enough time away from the greatest game ever made to enjoy the game mechanics and world-building here. You basically play as Timothée Chalamet-like Pinocchio in a Victorian world that fully embraced that era's automata and now you, Pinocchio, have to kick ass and save the city.
- Europa Universalis 4
Continued to play EU4 on my Malacca run, until it all fell apart due to my unbridled greed and aggression. Afterwards, I started a Korea run and got demolished by Japan, Russia, and China. Seems lore-friendly enough.
- Escape the Backrooms
This is a survival horror online coop game and it's been fun in its first few levels of tense puzzles. That being said, the audio was difficult to get sorted initially and it had a lot of stability issues, but nonetheless, we will have to keep on plodding along with this one.
🎵 Listening
- Human Happens / Paint Me A Picture by Magdalena Bay (Singles)
If these songs (along with their prior two tracks) are any indication of the quality of Magdalena Bay's next album, we are in for an absolute treat!
- Deseo, carne y voluntad by Candelabro (Album)
I don't know how I stumbled on this Chilean indie rock band earlier this year on RYM (maybe I was looking up art rock in different languages) but I really enjoyed Candelabro's 2023 Ahora o nunca. The release of Deseo, carne y voluntad has been even better, but I am still taking it in. Currently, my favourite tracks are "Pecado" and "Prisión de carne".
🔗 Links
A Guardian article detailing the surge on renewable energy globally. The most interesting tidbit here is the growth in China which "added more renewable energy generation than the rest of the world combined" with the US increasing its coal generation. Talk about the sick man of the West.
A video essay produced by Sarah Davis Baker (I have linked a few of her video essays before here) on human-made closed-systems with subjects ranging from the Biosphere 2 project, generation ships, longtermism, and the bunkers being constructed by billionaires.
📷 Photos
