I will stop cutting my pants into shorts, I will address the issues I cannot ignore (2026-W1)

As I wrote last week, I’m switching up how I number my week notes: I’m now using the year and week numbers, so this is week-notes/2026/W1. It will cover the last few days of 2025 and the first week of 2026. I’m late posting this (I backdated it), but I’m planning to get these up Sunday nights or Mondays.

Doing

I had some kind of stomach bug or food poisoning on New Year’s Eve, so nothing too eventful to mention there. I’m not generally one for New Year’s Resolutions, but I do have the goal of taking up journaling as regular practice, ideally before bed, for two reasons: it will hopefully replace my doomscrolling and help me process my day so I can sleep with a clear head. I’ve bought a Rhodia Webnotebook¹ and Pilot Kakuno in service of this. I was previously journaling in a Moleskine,² but I have just about filled that up, and a new year felt like a good opportunity to start fresh.

Otherwise, Joe and I continued work this week on our basement organizing project. We’ve dealt with most of the shame pile by now, which is a weight off my mind; there’s a separate, smaller shame pile on our basement workbench that we still have left to deal with, and I’d like to eventually organize parts of the garage, but the basement is navigable and we can access critical items, i.e. the electrical panel and furnace, without climbing over piles of shit. I’ll count that as a win.

I’ve also been dealing with the headache of what I’m going to informally dub my Problem PC. Back in 2018, my sister asked me to build her a computer; within a few years, she found she really wasn’t using it and gave it to me. I turned it into my Plex server for a while (and then later moved that to a Docker container on my NAS), but now it just lives under my TV and is used to watch YouTube, primarily, and stream games via Steam Link. It’s become something of a ship of Theseus — I’ve replaced the motherboard (broken, I think, by my sister’s boyfriend when he tried to do some work on it), the power supply (died), and the RAM (upgraded my main PC and reused the old sticks). I found a good deal on a CPU upgrade for it (2200G → 5600G), and somehow in the process of replacing that, I’ve lost all video from the motherboard. I’ve tried the new CPU, old CPU, and an old graphics card. I have a new motherboard on the way that I’m hoping fixes things, and I’ve ordered a new case. The previous one was a pain in the ass to work with and I’m pretty sure has been shorting the board over time (hence all the issues). Amazon lied and said it would all be here Sunday (on me for ordering from them³), so updates to come next week I guess.

Reading

I read Villette one night before bed. I wish I’d done more, but I did get through over 30 pages, which is a lot for a dense book like this one.⁴ I’m at the end of Volume II now, around page 330 (of almost 500). Finishing seems achievable, and I really want to start reading before bed (on nights that I don’t have much to write in my diary).

Watching

I’m still watching Community and am less than thrilled with it. I know there’s a season that gets ridiculous (not in a good way) and abandons (what little existent) character arcs then eventually gets retconned as a “gas leak.” Well, I haven’t been paying attention to season and episode numbers, and I took a step back and thought that I must be at the gas leak season because the show has gotten stupid. Reader, I was at the end of season two; the gas leak season is four. I’m still going, mostly because I think I want to see just how bad the gas leak season actually is, but I’ve lost a lot of steam.

Playing

I picked Final Fantasy XIV back up and am playing through Shadowbringers. I think I’m a bit over halfway through the main expansion. I’m enjoying it, but for years I’ve read people claiming it’s a phenomenal story, and so far it has not lived to that hype. It’s not bad, and there’s certainly much (much) worse in FFXIV, but nothing in it has blown me away. I still like the characters in FFXIV a lot (with the exception of Thancred), but the overarching stories don’t do much for me.

Gameplay-wise, I feel like I am at a point where I mostly know my rotation and can faithfully follow it. I’m familiar enough with the mechanics and the flow of fights that I don’t get the anxiety I once did entering a dungeon. Some of the hyper-specific fight mechanics still trip me up, which I think is mostly that I’ve taken such long breaks away from the game, but all around, I’m feeling more confident as a player. The exception to this is the 24-person raids (I finished the Ivalice content this week) which are super chaotic and complicated.

Listening

This week I decided to try something new and create a themed playlist for the new year!

I realized midway through that I fucked up the numbering, but as Death Cab says, I will have no self-imposed penance for problems with easy solutions (white out).

1. “Last Year” by Joanna Gruesome
2. “A Year Without Regret” by The Middle Ones
3. “every day is another” by good flying birds
4. “Things to Do” by Alex G
5. “Modern World” by Wolf Parade
6. “Heaven Knows” by Rise Against
7. “Swimming Pool” by The Front Bottoms
8. “Horses Jumping” by Slow Club
9. “My Year in Lists” by Los Campesinos!
10. “This Year” by Defiance, Ohio
11. “The New Year” by Death Cab for Cutie
12. “begin again” by Purity Ring
13. “Dunno” by Mac Miller

I’ve linked to Bandcamp where possible, but a few of these artists aren’t available there. I would love a platform-agnostic way to share this playlist. It would be cool if I could just give a link to download the MP3s in a zip file, but I have a feeling that would run afoul of dumb shit like copyright laws. Maybe if you’re a real one (send me an email) we can work something out.