Take 5, D.

Weekly Update 2026-02-01: The Elliott Wave Theory Edition

What happened during the week of January 26th - February 1st, 2026:

🏖️ Winter Storm Fern did her worst, but I'm still here. As of this publishing, I am 11 days away from enjoying significantly warmer weather over a long weekend in San Diego. Most of the trip's itinerary has been planned, minus some specific meetup details that will be finalized soon. I'm happy with the general layout of what L. and I will do over our long weekend, as well as how quickly these plans fell together. I kinda wish more of our vacations could be planned out like this one.

🇰🇬 Thanks to a recommendation from The Brooks Review last November, I've had my eyes on Kyrgies slippers for a while. Once a sale came up on certain styles, including the Bishkek Kicks featured in the review, I decided to pull the trigger. The new slippers (which are the same color as in the review) are warm and snug, and work well when worn with wool socks of medium thickness. Fortunately for me, that's the majority of my sock collection, which has really been put to the test with the recent cold weather.

⛽️ When I was snowbound last week, I tackled my printed photography collection in order to make sense of it. Thanks to my revived interest in film photography, my collection is growing for the first time in over 20 years. A Rubbermaid tote sits in my office closet, filled with photo albums from the 80s and 90s, along with numerous rolls of film taken by me and L. up to the early 2000s. To this collection, I am adding the rolls of film taken last year. When I first started to organize the tote's contents, my goal was to see just how many pictures existed, and in what proportions of ownership (answers: too many, and about 85% of them are mine). Sorting through the photos led to other thoughts of gear organization, so now I have a travel case for my Canon rangefinder. Photography is far too susceptible to the Diderot Effect, so in response to adding equipment, I pared down some other photography accessories, including getting rid of my large Sony backpack that was overkill when I bought it years ago. Perhaps a future owner will have more pressing needs to use it for their gear storage, rather than hope to acquire enough gear to justify its purchase as I did.

🏘️ I have been drowning in meetings at work this week, and even though some of them are productive, they are still taking up a massive amount of time and mental energy. The good news is that my boss and his boss openly acknowledge that our collective team has been given far too many tasks and projects which overwhelm our capabilities. The bad news is that as of now, there's no real way to address these situations, leading me to believe that the only way out is through, and that our collective team is unfortunately setting precedents for future scenarios to repeat what's happening now. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Items Of Note From Last Week:

Outbound Actions

Internal Obligations

Media

More Info About The Media Selections From This Week:

I enjoyed more media this week than in weeks past, possibly to make up for lost time after the one-two punch of a funeral and being snowbound. Both Solo Solo Travel and Solo Travel Japan embarked on winter cruises on ferries, which for me are more preferable than the excessive overabundance offered on actual cruise ships. The Panstar Miracle offers a fair amount of features I'd normally associate with a cruise ship, but not at levels that seem tacky to me. Meanwhile, the intra-country travel to Hokkaido is a bit more downscale than the ferry to South Korea, but there are still enough amenities offered onboard to make the 40-hour journey pleasant. I'd still get bored with eating and drinking as distractions, as that's one thing the Japanese ferries share with cruise ships. You could also, if you were in Japan, ride on a luxury train through various regions of the country, dining on local food and drink while enjoying the views. ITSUKA JAPAN made her way to the snowy Niigata region (home of great skiing and great rice) to do just that, and if you are a fan of snowy landscapes, you'll be in for a treat.

A couple new podcasts landed this week that I'm trying out to see if I'll enjoy listening to more than one episode. Patrick Wyman, no stranger to podcasts himself, shows up on a Defector (RIP to Dan McQuade) podcast called The Distraction, and he immediately begins ripping on the workout techniques being shown by various high-ranking or notable MAGA supporters. Being convinced that you are right about everything makes you a poor subject for fitness training, so the poor form shown by these folks comes downstream from their attitude. May they give themselves critical injuries sooner rather than later! And now for a jarring shift in tone, the other new podcast was an offshoot of Metalabel, New Creative Era. This episode looks at whether creative retreats to smaller, closed-off communities is a form of withdrawal into the self, similar to how EST and other communes of the 1970s reacted to the "togetherness" vibes of the Sixties. I'm not sure yet what I think of this podcast, so I may need to give it a few more episodes. This isn't a worry I have about Defector, given that I've been supporting them since the beginning. I just prefer to read their articles, rather than listen to them.

Terry Godier's article asks a simple question: why do RSS readers look like email clients? His presentation is unique, and he offers up some other options for presenting the feeds. The last quote, "We should be more conscious of which arguments we're immersing ourselves in, hour after hour, day after day," leads perfectly into the 404 Media article and podcast that dives deep into the seeming AI psychosis of the adult site ManyVids. This site was founded by a former sex worker, who had been a champion of promoting the site as a valued resource for the sex work community, but sometime last summer, MV started talking about AI more and more and its performers less and less, going to the point of calling sex work "exploitative" and how its performers need rescuing. It's a fascinating and scary look at someone who appears to have fallen deep into a hole normally reserved for psychoactive drug users.

The film articles from 35mmc and Shoot It With Film looked at a new film camera(!) and lessons learned from going back to film from digital, respectively. The new Lomography MC-A is marketed at folks who want to make the switch back to film, and there's some clever technology mixed in with retro aesthetics. It's not a camera I'd buy new, as I have some ideas as to what my next film camera will be, but it's an intriguing piece of gear. Meanwhile, the Shoot It With Film article will go into my photography bookmark app, as there's a lot of good advice I'll have to keep in mind going forward (such as shooting for shadows in film, rather than the highlights in digital).

My final bits of media are music-related. The Earth Now webcam feed and the RA Live podcast both featured music that I would call "textured:" not necessarily ambient nor subtle, but more along the lines of various noises and sounds that can be pleasing at one point and menacing in another. The RA Live podcast could be snuck into the webcam feed, and I'm not sure anyone would have noticed the difference from what came beforehand. Strangely enough, I find the music from both sources to be relaxing and engaging enough to keep a part of my mind occupied while I handle other tasks.

Picture time!

Let's try a new feature to reward folks who've made it this far in the blog entry. Last December, I went by myself to the Cherokee Street Print Fair, browsed some art on display, and bought a print of a Yellow-shafted Flicker for L. as a Christmas gift. During my time walking the street, I popped into 'Ssippi to have a glass of orange wine (yes, I'm that kind of guy) and relax in a quiet corner. I knew I was in the right place when upon entering, the extended version of Grace Jones' bossanova cover of "La Vie En Rose" started up.

I'm still learning how to describe orange wines, so in lieu of actual words, here's how the glass looks when backlit on a wintery day.

#Documentation #Jobs #Life #WeeklyNotes