58 lines
7.3 KiB
Markdown
58 lines
7.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: no more conversations about what breakfast club character you'd be (WN36)
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date: 2025-11-09
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tags:
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- week-notes
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- meta
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draft: false
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url: week-notes/36
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cover: https://cdn.cassie.ink/images/2025/wn/36.jpg
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---
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## Doing
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I'm sick *again* (still?). As I wrote last week, I've had a lingering cough for going on two weeks. I visited urgent care and received a non-specific diagnosis, but they gave me an inhaler and said to come back if I wasn't better in a week or two. On Wednesday or Thursday, I came down with a regular cold. It's manageable, and I'm hoping it knocks whatever the cough was out of my system, but it feels like I can't catch a break. Joe has been sick too, so we've been barely making it by; the house is messy and there are a lot of projects that I'd like to get to, but neither of us have felt up it.
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I've also been drowning in work. Last weekend and early this week, I finally caught up on grading for my middle schoolers and filed report cards. I'm at last in a good place there, but I have a *ton* of grading to catch up on for my college course now. That grading luckily goes pretty quick — I only have eleven students in the class — but it's been weighing on the back of my mind anytime I have a free moment. We are winding down with the class now — we only have I think four more sessions — and I'm thinking a lot about whether I would teach it again. It's only offered in the fall, so I have time to think about it, but it's hard to say what my life is going to look like a year from now. I have enjoyed teaching the class and working with older students, but it's also an added workload that I just don't need. The extra money is nice, but I'm not sure it's worth the time and energy I'm putting in.
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My birthday is coming up next week and Joe asked if there was anything I'd like to do. I had a big party last year to celebrate turning 30 and had a really nice time[^2], but 31 doesn't feel like such a big deal.
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On a meta-level, I had some weirdness with this site deploying; right now, everything is on [32bitcafe's Gitea instance](https://git.32bit.cafe/cassie/cassiedotink), which then mirrors to a Github repo. That Github repo is attached to Cloudflare Pages, which builds, deploys, and serves the website for me. Some media (images, mostly) is hosted on a bunny.net storage zone. It ended up being a minor problem with 32bitcafe, which they resolved quickly after I pointed it out. Broadly, though, I'd like to cut out my dependency on Github and maybe even Cloudflare. [Naty has success pushing from a repo to bunny](https://burgeonlab.com/blog/hosting-static-sites-with-github-pages-or-bunny-net/), but I just haven't had the time to sit down and hash it out. Maybe other my winter break in a few weeks. I do think I need to stop trying to use Obsidian Sync *and* the obsidian-git plugin at the same time and focus just on the latter. I'm still happy with Sync for other vaults that don't become websites[^3], but I've had a lot of conflicts between the two, especially on mobile.
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I also had a dream that I was doing an *Avatar: The Last Airbender* rewatch podcast. I don't know realistically that that's something I'd actually want to do, but it probably says something that podcasting is still in my subconscious. I did briefly think that, once my college class ends, I could use that block of time to podcast instead... We'll see.
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## Reading
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I've read a bit more of *Villette* this week. It's still quite slow-going — I maybe only read fifteen pages — but it's not a thrilling, plot-heavy book, so it almost feels like small weekly check-ins on Lucy Snowe. I'd like to develop the habit of reading a few pages while I eat my breakfast in the morning and then a few more before I go to bed. The former is doable, but with the latter, I usually nod off too quickly for it to really be worthwhile.
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## Watching
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I finished off *Weeds* and moved on to rewatching *Orange is the New Black*. I really loved the first two seasons of *OitNB* when they first came out (and I think I intend to only rewatch them, as I didn't like the prison riot turn or what happened after that). I'm enjoying it on the rewatch, but I'm not as taken with it as I was back then. I think it felt really revolutionary and fresh at the time, but ten plus years on, it doesn't feel like such a big thing to have queer women and women of color on the screen. I'm happy for that, of course! I'm still early in season one, so I haven't gotten to any of the big storytelling swings and maybe my opinion will change then. I also remember a lot more of the jokes than I expected, so there's a bit less novelty this time around, too.
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## Playing
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I started *Pokémon Legends ZA* using the virtual game card borrowing from Joe's system. I'm tepid on it; it's definitely miles ahead of *Scarlet* and *Violet*, which I thought had some good ideas but was executed so poorly that it turned me off of Pokémon, I think, in a pretty big way. But I loved *Legends Arceus* so, so much and I'm disappointed that this game isn't hitting the same notes for me. [Brendon Bigley wrote a bit about going into *ZA* after loving *Arceus*:](https://wavelengths.online/posts/why-pokemon-legends-works)
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> Having now spent around 15 hours running around Pokémon’s version of Paris, I’m starting to better understand what makes a Legends game in comparison to the mainline entries: It’s not an exploration of the history of the pokémon world, it’s an exploration of a specific time and place in the Pokémon world. A fulcrum point in their society.
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I suppose then that maybe the issue isn't the game itself but rather my hopes and expectations for it. But *Arceus* had such a strong, refreshing vibe that *ZA* so far hasn't surfaced for me. There's some vague techno-futurism, but it's otherwise just a (lovingly realized, detailed, well-executed — words I can't use to describe any other recent Pokémon games) city in the Pokémon universe. We'll see if it eventually sinks its claws into me.
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## Listening
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I listened through to *Infra* by Max Richter for the first time in probably close to ten years. This album was once the background when I'd write (mostly Star Wars fanfiction). I was looking for something low-key to have on while grading, but I found a sense memory in it and added to my vault of unpublishable personal writing.[^1]
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Here's my top ten songs from the week (based somewhat on plays, with edits):
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1. "Moody Orange" by Rainbow Kitten Surprise
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2. "Infra 5" by Max Richter
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3. "Cold Love" by Rainbow Kitten Surprise
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4. "The Sea is a Good Place to Think of the Future" by Los Campesinos!
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5. "Bubble in My Bloodstream" by Martha
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6. "Love Machine" by Being Dead
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7. "Pure Particles" by The Bug Club
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8. "Tenuousness" by Andrew Bird
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9. "Breakin' the Law" by The New Pornographers
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10. "We Are All Accelerated Readers" by Los Campesinos!
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I'm listening to Rainbow Kitten Surprise's new album (*bones*) at the time of writing, but I want to sit with it longer before typing up any thoughts.
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[^1]: this is becoming a running joke for me on my shitty little blog. to be clear, I think often about publishing on this blog the more creative (mostly creative non-fiction) writing that I do instead of banal accountings of everything I did and watched and played and listened to each week, but sharing my writing — especially publicly — is perhaps my primary phobia
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[^2]: this was the first birthday party I'd ever had
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[^3]: I have one for work and one for writing
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