Week In Review 2026-06-13
This weekly update covers Sunday 06-07-26 through Saturday 06-13-26 (an icon Glossary, if needed).
LIFE
- 🈁 A week of accomplishments and seeing things to the end. It's a satisfying and rare feeling to have.
- 📕 Inspired by finalizing my mother’s burial last weekend, I finished the “She wasn’t a good mother, but she really loved you” post that I had started writing in May 2025. A year's worth of rough drafts were turned into a pretty decent write-up about my mother's life, along with my feelings for her that remain as complicated as ever.
- 📜 Streamlining and refining things here and there, including a swap of smart plugs after my set from Tapo died all at once last week. The $8 smart plugs from IKEA do the job without fuss.
- ❤️🩹 Sleeping earlier than usual as L. made changes to her schedule that affected mine as well. We went on our first night swimming expedition of the summer on Wednesday 06-10, though the water wasn’t as warm as I had hoped. My other referral for a vein specialist came through, leading me to send that doctor pictures of my lower legs for analysis, and to buy a second pair of compression socks that I’ll likely wear at home while working. Yeah, it’s come to that.
EXPLORE
- 🎨 My long-overdue post about my mother, as mentioned above. I am happy with the result, though I will confess that the process of gathering a year's worth of thoughts into a cohesive whole cashed out my writing creativity for the week.
- 🔬 Installed an update beta of Aphera 1.0 (macOS), and I like it well enough that ON1 Photo RAW has been put on the back burner. Removed Tapo (iOS) and Google Nest (ios) due to permanent hardware and software changes, respectively. I also have gone all-in on the Apple Passwords (macOS & iOS) app, and will likely ditch Bitwarden (macOS & iOS) next week. Speaking of all-in, I will likely install a Developer Beta of iOS 27 in the next couple of weeks (more on below).
- 🪟 The hot and humid weather earlier this week curtailed a fair amount of outside activities. I worked at Living Room on Thursday 06-12, then spent a couple hours at Side Project Cellar afterwards.
MEDIA
- 📰 Love Language, Harper’s Magazine. Esperanto has fascinated me for many years, but more in theory than reality. Any concerns I had about what Esperanto communities would be like were quickly answered in this piece, and by the end, I started to wonder if Esperanto were an example of a Hopepunk community come to life.
- 📰 Why Texas Tech QB Brendan Sorsby’s win in court could erase once uncrossable red line, The Athletic (free NYT article). And now for something completely depressing. Football is in its off-season now, but once the World Cup ends in mid-July, bored sportswriters will refocus on both the college and the pro levels. The story of Texas Tech reinstating its QB, who admitted to betting on teams he had played on prior to transferring to TTU, will become the defining story in 2026 college football, and I’m already dreading the bad-faith arguments that support him playing instead of, oh, banning him from the college game. The arguments out now (free NYT link here) are bad enough already.
- 🎬 #620 - Sweating the Details, Upgrade. I watched the WWDC 26 rollout of iOS 27, and macOS 27 Golden Gate (among others). I think they’re…fine? It appears there will be plenty of focus on cleaning up messy details that were overlooked with last year’s Liquid Glass rollout, and I’m okay with a refined user experience over adding things I could care less about. Unfortunately, the other big focus for WWDC 26 will be adding Siri AI across the board, which…meh.
- 🎬 Flow State Ep. 329: Boards of Canada, Flow State. A companion piece for my listening last week to Inferno, the latest from BoC. This 100+ minute mix covers the band’s history, from their earliest EP’s in the mid-1990s to today.
WORK
- 🏥 In news that absolutely shocked me, our ticket count broke under 100 around 3:30 PM on Friday 06-12! I was able to catch up on months-old requests for BCA and shared Haiku/Canto installations, so a fair amount of progress has been made! On the flip side, though, the VoIP rollout continues to be the hottest of messes, thanks to the Too Many Cooks principle (which, as far as I can tell, won’t be turning into this version of "Too Many Cooks,” though I will keep my eyes open for anyone wielding a machete.)
OTHER
- 🗣️ I finally saw Plan 9 From Outer Space (well, the RiffTrax version) a couple weeks ago. After many years of MST3K, RiffTrax, Son of Svengoolie, and similar shows, I may have become inured to whatever impact the original movie may have had upon me. I could see the makings of a better film within it, rather than the trainwreck on display, and to be fair, even calling it a “trainwreck” is a bit too harsh. It’s bad, but not epically bad and incompetent in the way that Manos, The Hands Of Fate or The Guy From Harlem are.
NEXT
- 🔮 This month, both L. & I will tour the Ebsworth House, which we’ve been relatively close to for about 10 years now but have yet to see.
PICTURE
- 📸 A test of Caira while I was walking around Resurrection Cemetery last weekend with my mother’s ashes, as I wanted her to symbolically say goodbye to her former in-laws. I was tripped up by looking for my grandfather’s old grave marker, which was in the classic military design, instead of the unified design he and his wife now share. Turns out I walked past their graves at least three times without knowing it, and unfortunately, that will have to do. At least this particular tombstone will serve as a way finder for future visits.
