everyone is disguised just a little bit (WN39)

Doing

I added a “bookshelf” (reading tracker) to this site! It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time,¹ but I finally felt I had the time, understanding of Hugo templates, and workflow with Obsidian to make it happen. It’s pretty empty right now and therefore I appear as a rube who has read only one and half books, but luckily I was able to add a miniscule disclaimer to the bottom of the page that defends my reputation (reproduced below).²

I started tracking the books I’ve read in November of 2025. I have read way more than this! It is important to me to establish this credibility because I have half of an English degree and teach English as a day job!

I did a few other little tweaks here and there around the site. Maybe when I have time I’ll do a proper little write-up of the aberrant and unsound process by which I created the bookshelf.

Otherwise, this week was Thanksgiving.³ Joe and I went to his family for it, which was mostly fine. No major drama, but it’s only there that I feel completely anti-social and unable to make conversation. After we got back, it was nice to have some downtime around the house to rest and relax — being sick for something like the last month has left me without a good night’s rest in some time. I’m on the upswing, though, and I was able to resume my Sunday Runday routine with a friend (though our runs have moved to an indoor track what with the cold weather).

I’m almost done with my college course, and I’m still waiting to hear back on the logistics behind my move to the high school. I’m planning to (as much as is possible for me) coast through the next few weeks of teaching middle school and instead focus on preparing for the change, but I’ve realized that I am in some ways a phenomenally impatient person: once I set my mind to doing something — like changing jobs — I hate waiting for it to happen, but I also don’t want to phone things in entirely for the month or two that I have left. It’s the being caught between things that frustrates me; when I do something, I jump in with my whole heart. I just want to take that plunge.

Reading

I re-read Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, which is the last text for my college course. I first read this nine years ago when I took the class; I remember enjoying it and finding the twist novel. This time around, I flew through and was surprised by how much of it I remembered — in my head, it was a lot longer and more complicated. It’s a book I would have considered for my middle school curriculum if I was staying at the grade level.

I haven’t touched Villette much this week what with the travel and trying to burn through American Born Chinese. I am resolved to finish it before the end of the year.

Playing

I’ve gone back to Final Fantasy Tactics. I’m still really enjoying it, though the long breaks I’ve taken have left me a little lost when it comes to all the different factions and individuals vying for power in the game’s plot. I really like a lot of the major characters (Delita, mostly, and Agrias), and so I’m choosing to focus more on their individual, emotional journeys rather than all the intricate political machinations. I’m keeping up with the broad strokes of the story just fine, but it seems like a notable change from the me of 15 years ago that read the entire Mass Effect codex, and I’m not sure what to attribute that to. The lore of Tactics is much drier, I suppose, and I think my priorities have changed along with the time I have to actually sit down and play games — now that my play sessions are fewer and farther between, I’m not really eager to spend them reading a damn book off the screen.⁴

Listening

I listened to Apologies to the Queen Mary several times over on Saturday night; I’d listened to it before and frequently returned to songs like “I’ll Believe in Anything” and “Grounds for Divorce,” but the rest of it got lost in the mix. It’s worth listening to full through as a complete album, but previously overlooked tracks like “Modern World” and “It’s a Curse” are really hitting right now.

I’ve been playing with Symfonium for my mobile listening. I am having issues with Plexamp scrobbling my plays, and I like that Symfonium is open source and platform agnostic. Symfonium isn’t quite as pretty as Plexamp (though it is very customizable), and it seems to dump all the scrobbles with the timestamp of when I came back online, but these are minor pain points so far. I still wish there was a version for the desktop, but maybe there are other options I haven’t explored yet.

Since my plays aren’t tracking correctly, this is based on specious data, but here’s my ten for the week — I’m still waiting on my notebook to come in to start doing these on paper.

1. “Fancy Claps” by Wolf Parade
2. “Modern World” by Wolf Parade
3. “Adult Acne Stigmata” by Los Campesinos!
4. “Be Nice to Me” by The Front Bottoms
5. “It’s Thunder and It’s Lightning” by We Were Promised Jetpacks
6. “I Think It Would be Great” by Best Friends Forever
7. “Champagne Girls I Have Known” by Johnny Foreigner
8. “international thirst champion” by Kitty
9. “hand crushed by a mallet” by 100 gecs
10. “getting it on” by SALES

Update (2025/12/1) - It looks like I might have resolved my syncing issues. I was originally using eavesdrop.fm to sync Plex data to ListenBrainz (I don’t really use or check last.fm anymore). Because I’m dealing with remote access issues with my Plex server, eavesdrop.fm wasn’t picking up the plays, as it requires a persistent connection to the server. I’ve removed the eavesdrop webhook and am now using ListenBrainz’s automatic last.fm import tool.