![\"Catsby,](\"b9ce3b257828.png\")
TL;DR: A few weeks of catch-up. First tattoo (Catsby in a vine of purple flowers). The backyard pond is done, and the raccoons and crows have already moved in. Built out the rest of the me-to-markdown family and an orchestrator that fans them out in one fetch — this post is the first dogfooded weeknote drafted from its output. The AI-coding bookmark pile this period was mostly variations on being tired.
I got my first tattoo on May 1st — a portrait of Catsby (orange and white cat, green bowtie, surrounded by a vine of purple flowers and green leaves) by Katy Bisby.
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I was more worried about the social interactions than the pain, which turned out to be misallocated worry. Once Katy started, I was unexpectedly relaxed — at one point she was grinding away at my arm with color and shading and I was happily reading a book on my phone.
\nI'm already thinking about a second one for Puck, who we lost back in 2015.
\nAlso, randomly, Dr. Bronner's unscented \"magic balm\" unmistakably smells like barbecue. I am delicious.
\n![\"A](\"53d2c6abaa51.png\")
The backyard pond finished construction by April 28. The fountain and debris skimmer pull about 80 watts per Home Assistant. Slate trim, river rocks, a little waterfall at the back. All very heavy. My back hurts.
\n![\"A](\"a71330f803a1.jpg\")
Wildlife showed up immediately. A raccoon tried to run off with a fountain pump on night one. By May 12, Minnaloushe spotted a crow checking out the water from the kitchen window:
\n![\"Minnaloushe,](\"ea6e616fe0ea.jpg\")
I might need to point a trail camera at this thing: every morning I get up to find something's been messed with — fountain knocked over, power cords dragged around. Lesson learned: I could not bribe crows into the backyard with peanuts for years, but a little water and they're suddenly regulars.
\nDrafting weeknotes has always been a \"where did the week even go?\" problem for me — my own signal is scattered across Mastodon, bookmarks, commits, listening history, podcasts. So, I've long wanted to build some little tools that go out and pull all that stuff together for me.
\nSo I built that - a bunch of basic, single-serving CLI commands as static go binaries that each hits up an API on a service I use and spits out markdown listing stuff I posted & collected:
\nI'd had mastodon-to-markdown and linkding-to-markdown kicking around for a while as one-off scrapers. But, this week I built out the rest of the family and an orchestrator that ties them together - specifically so a weeknotes post like this one could start from a real export instead of me trying to remember.
I'm sure some folks think this is cheating / evil / abhorrent. But, it's kinda neat to have a robot go out and fetch all my stuff and get me past the blank page.
\nMost of my bookmarks for this period were all circling the same worries:
\nNetHack 5.0.0 shipped with 3,100+ fixes and changes. The world keeps turning.
\nFinished Harrow the Ninth. Author pulled off one of the most pivotal moments in the whole book with a dad joke. Respect. 💀
\nEtaoin shrdlu. My laptop keyboard's smudgiest keys spell out etaoin shrdlu. Of course they do.
\nThe Explorers (1985) rewatch. I learned that Robert Picardo — The Doctor from Voyager — was the alien Wak. And Starkiller from the drive-in movie-within-the-movie. Forty years late to this fact and delighted.
\n![\"Screenshot](\"b3eb56684d58.png\")
![\"A](\"be0cd05d8fd6.png\")
Lady Gaga MAYHEM marathon on May 12 — back-to-back MAYHEM plus the deluxe Fame Monster. The rest of the period was the usual gothic / darkwave / post-punk rotation (TR/ST, Marnie, CHVRCHES, Susanne Sundfør, Twin Tribes, Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie, Bauhaus).\n
Max Headroom in your terminal. Ben Brown shipped headroom — an animated Max in your terminal window. I contributed npx @benbrown/headroom as the even-faster invocation, for when your friend leaves their laptop unlocked.\n![\"MAx](\"c2a183914641.png\")
Murderbot S1 recut to 3h28m as one film by mathowie — answer to a question no one asked, but the answer is \"VERY entertaining.\" Added to my list.
\nCYBERDECKCLUB at Media Archaeology Lab — Wednesdays at 1pm, bring your deck in progress. Not local to me but I am cheering this on.\n![\"CYBERDECKCLUB\"](\"406fc7e517b3.jpeg\")
A YouTube essay I want to write about properly someday: Matthew Foster's How America Experienced Classic Doctor Who — a fourteen-minute argument that PBS-era American Whoovians were watching a fundamentally different show than the British were. Not a kid's show; a cult show, kin to Monty Python and The Prisoner. Air times were 10 PM Sunday or weekend nights; the audience was college students and 20-somethings; serials were broadcast in nearly-random order across PBS affiliates, sometimes with Howard Da Silva narration added for American audiences. The thing being optimized for was Doctor dialogue, not plot or canon. \"We didn't care what the Doctor and companions did but what they said and how they said it.\" A different theory of what the show is.
\nBattleTech Centers — the $3M arcade experiment that more or less invented esports.
\nThe synth behind one of Industrial's greatest albums.
\nALL Q'BERT VOICES — 16-second masterpiece.
\nAlso for the embedded-systems pile: a GRUB-style bootloader for retro systems and an Amiga 1200 Kickstart 3.2.3 upgrade.
\nThe Kmart October 1989 in-store tape uploaded to Internet Archive by someone who worked there 1989–1999 and kept it for 35 years.
\nConway's Game of Life on a grid of illuminated momentary switches — physical-build inspiration.\n![\"Game](\"9c7cef482b4d.jpeg\")
Atari Computer Camps and its sibling piece on when Atari met Club Med — three-summer experiments with kids and computers (and adults and BASIC) that ended when Atari collapsed.\n![\"Atari](\"41343a23415f.jpeg\")