Captain’s Log, 2025.10

Esme the cat and Rosie the plant on the windowsill — Esme and Rosie.

So…yeah. This month was a tough one.

The day job got busy.

I’m nearing the release of a pretty enormous major version rewrite at the Day Job, moving our older, self-hosted services onto AWS so we can scale up to bigger data sets. I’ve been at it for a while and feel like I’ve taken too long (I haven’t actually, that’s just lizard brain, but the fucker is convincing.) Anyway, that took up a lot of the air this month.

The burnout kinda kicked my ass.

The headaches, mood swings, and sudden fatigue are back! Yay! I spent a lot of time sleeping and spacing out to shows. This probably has much to do with point #1, above.

The Great British Bake-off. Disappointed that Ian didn’t make it to the finale, but enjoyed rooting for him.
Star Trek: Brave New Worlds S1. Really liked that one, the best since Deep Space 9 for me. Especially liked the Alien tribute episode (E5 maybe?).
…and Murderbot, that was fun
…and The China Syndrome,
…and Initial D: Third Stage, I love this show.

A lot of time spacing to shows. But I did manage to get out and get a little fresh air too.

Met @kenna for lunch at Village Whiskey and a lovely couple of hours working from Rittenhouse Square.
Celebrated a friend’s birthday party in the city. Finally made it to Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens and Rosy’s Taco Bar and Marsha’s, a fun night!
I bought a rosemary plant. A terrible idea for my little apartment but she was so cute, and it’s stews and soups season. I named her “Rosie” of course, and now I have someone to talk to when Esme is sleeping.

Sorted out my Neovim setup.

One of the things I was able to do in low-energy mode was to futz around with my Neovim setup and try to get it working more closely to the way I’d like.

I had been using LazyVim, working my way through LazyVim for the Ambitious Developer, and it worked but it never felt comfortable, like a scratchy sweater that doesn’t fit quite right.
I had a go at building up my own config from scratch. That was a no-go. I’m sure I could have muddled something out eventually, but there were just too many moving parts to consider, with varying degrees of documentation. Even if I got them all installed and working individually, there was still the task of making them all work together.
But AstroNvim was just right. The out of the box configuration was solid and sensible, with good on-boarding. Thanks to the AstroCommunity adding Rust support was as simple as dropping { import = 'astrocommunity.pack.rust' } into the provided community.lua script. This is better than VS Code extensions. I am sick of GUIs. This is going to be a theme.

I kept flailing at the writing.

Instead of trying to push forward I stepped back and tried to identify where the friction is getting me stuck and address that instead. The biggest problem is that I keep catching myself trying to write for other people instead of myself, and getting stuck in “blogger voice”. Ick. I’ll keep working on it. Hopefully it worked and you’re reading this on World Wide Web.

What if housecats but humans w/towering alien benevolent — My October “writing”.

Insights & Advice

Follow inspiration when it comes. Not a new one, but I had forgotten. It’s always fun to have an idea and chase it around, it seems like the energy will never run out so long as the inspiration is flowing. Take advantage of that! There is always time to scribble something down and toss it into the inbox.

Random Links

Wired, The Long Boom. “The peak of human civilization.” (Agent Smith) 😂 😭
I absolutely fucking adore Atkinson Hyperlegible.
Dispatches from Elsewhere :exploding_head: Love this one, and it’s set in Philadelphia (and very well)!
The only thing I added to the default AstroNvim setup, other than language support, was leap.nvim for their “jump to visible match” feature. I love this and can no longer live without it.