I have to return the book to the library soon, so this page collects the excerpts I highlighted (and sometimes annotated!)

Summary

All in all, my takeaway from reading the book was...

• You must come to terms with your own finitude. You're not guaranteed any time on earth and the limited time you have is wasted trying to feel productive.
• Busyness is not equivalent to "productivity."
• "Productivity" is not a measure of a life well-lived.
• A lot of productivity advice is a sisyphean gesture at "getting more done" with the false promise that with enough effort you can eventually just be done.
• "Getting more done" only results in having more to do.
• It's wasted effort trying to get more done with the hope that one day you'll complete everything and finally feel a sense of calm.
• Coming to grips that you'll never be "done" and finding effective ways to do less and not feeling bad about doing less is a more useful path to generally feeling ok.
• The goal of "feeling ok" is not to feel a sense of constant calm and perfect control. Accept you will often feel anxious, feel overwhelmed, and fail. That's life baby.
• Slow down, be patient, and avoid measuring success by how rarely you run into friction.
• Multitasking is a scam. Serialize and focus where possible.

To me this book read as an "anti self-help book" and I quite liked it.

There was no homework, no system to reorient your life around, no "silver bullet" that Burkeman prescribes for how to fix yourself. Its a plea to a shared experience that people like myself who are constantly trying to feel organized may need to re-evaluate their goals around more practical and unavoidable (read: death) circumstances.

Excerpts

"In the Long Run, We're All Dead", pp. 13-14

Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved "work-life balance," whatever that might be, and you certainly won't get there by copying the "six things successful people do before 7:00am." The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you're meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody's angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you've become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let's start by admitting defeat

"The Limit-Embracing Life", pp. 18-19

Speaking on a supposed life of medieval peasants...

And though death was a constant presence, with lives cut short far more frequently than they are today, time wouldn't have felt in limited supply. You wouldn't have felt any pressure to find ways to "save" it. Nor would you have felt guilty for wasting it: if you took an afternoon break from threshing grain to watch a cockfight on the village green, it wouldn't have felt like you were shirking during "work time." And none of this was simply because things moved more slowly back then, or because medieval peasants were more relaxed or more resigned to their fate. It was because, so far as we can tell, they generally didn't experience time as an abstract entity—as a thing—at all.

I don't think Burkeman really made a persuasive case that medieval peasants really felt this way. And maybe that's where it failed for me, that it tried to jump to making guesses about the inner feelings of people long dead and that these guesses don't seem to have been backed up by any historical accounts, journals, etc.

Though to call attention to my own limitation here, there are notes and sources in the back of the book that maybe provide more context for this:

• "an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences": Lewis Mumfor, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 15.
• "Medieval people might speak of a task lasting a "Misere whyle": E. P. Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism," Past and Present 38 (1967): 81.

I do think the point I read out of it—that modern life organizes itself around an abstract concept of measurable and estimatable time that is kind of an illusion which affects our sense of reality—was interesting and resonated.

"The Limit-Embracing Life", p. 21

Untroubled by any notion of time "ticking away," [a medieval farmer] might have experienced a heightened awareness of the vividness of things [...] "living in deep time." [...] plowing the fields, he might have felt himself one tiny part of a vast sweep of history [...] We can assert all of this with some confidence because we still occassionally encounter islands of deep time today. [...] we slip "into a realm where there is enough of everything, where we are not tryingt o fill a voice in ourselves or the world [...] The clock does not stop [...] but we do not hear it ticking."

This was another passage I highlighted that felt boldly stated but kind of unsubstantiated. I get this isn't a "science" book, but I remember feeling like cool ideas expressed entirely with a "you just know, you know" attitude were off putting to me.

"The Limit-Embracing Life", p. 25

It grows alluring to try to multitask [...] and it becomes a lot more intuitive to project your thoughts about your life into an imagined future, leaving you anxiously wondering if things will unfold as you want them to. Soon, your self of self-worth gets completely bound up with how you're using time

"The Limit-Embracing Life", p. 29

It had been more comforting to imagine that I migiht eventually "optimize" myself into the kind of person who could confront such decisions [as getting married or having children] without fear, feeling totally in charge of the process. I didn't want to accept that this was never going to happen—that fear was part of the deal, and that experiencing it wouldn't destroy me.

"The Limit-Embracing Life", p. 31

It's scary to confront the truth that almost everything worth doing [...] depends on cooperating with others, and therefore exposing yourself to the emotional uncertainty of relationships. Denying reality [...] thinking that at some point in the future you might, at last, feel totally in control. But it can't ever bring the sense that you're doing enough [...] because it defines "enough" as a kind of limitless control that no human can attain. Instead, the endless struggle leads to more anxiety and a less fulfilling life.

"The Limit-Embracing Life", p. 31

The more you hurry, the more frustrating it is to encounter tasks [...] that won't be hurried; the more compulsively you plan for the future, the more anxious you feel about any remaining uncertainties, of which there will be plenty.

"The Efficiency Trap", pp. 51-52

In Silicon Valley [you] identify a "pain point"—one of the small annoyances resulting from (more jargon) the "friction" of daily life—and then offer a way to circumvent it. Thus Uber eliminates the "pain" of having to track down a number for your local taxi company [...]; digital wallet apps like Apple Pay remove the "pain" of having to reach into your bag for your physical wallet or cash. [...] you only need to commune with the screen.

I wouldn't be me if I didn't quibble with some hill not worth dying over.

The point Burkeman makes about over-valuing "convenience" and seeing every inconvenience as a problem to solve or something to fret over is good.

But damnit, I think the Apple Wallet one is a bad example. I feel like you could replace "Apple Wallet" with "credit card" and "physical wallet" with "cash" and it would sound like the same argument and seem just as wrong to me. I can't put my finger on it, but there's something more to convenience at play there. It's a freedom to go places and do things without having to panic because I've forgotten one crucial item (my wallet!) at home.

Why am I here white knighting for smartphone features? I don't know...

The rest of the section is good!

"The Efficiency Trap", p. 55

to make such a radical change arose from the recognition that she'd never manage to build a mroe meaningful life [...] by saving time and thereby squeezing more into her existing one. To make time for whta mattered, she needed to give things up.

"Facing Finitude", p. 57

You can't delve far into the question of what it means to be a finite human [...] before encountering the philosopher who was more obsessed with the subject than any other think: Martin Heidegger. This is unfortunate [because] for more than a decade, starting in 1933, he was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. (The question of what this means for his philosophy is a fraught and fascinating one, but it would get us off track here.)

This is exactly the kind of tangent I would have loved to see in this book! Somewhere!! Even a summarized footnote!!!

While it might not make for a very focused and easy to follow sequence of introduction → argument → supporting evidence → argument → supporting evidence → conclusion, I think being intellectually curious about how philosophy manifests in the people who proselytize it, is hugely valuable in honestly and accurately painting a full picture of that philosophy.

Was his Nazism at odds with embracing human finitude? Is it in conflict to be a Nazi who will only do so much for his party, ideology, and myth-making? Or did the ideas bolster themselves? Does embracing human finitude lead to such a strict prioritization on what it means to be with limited time that you might feel justified in total "death of self" in favor of fascistically serving your ideology?

I think that's a useful thought exercise for someone reading this book.

But I suppose I should similarly take my own advice to be "intellectually curious", practice patience, and just go dig it up on my own. Blegh. I'll leave myself a spot to do that here and if I ever follow through I'll update this post with what I find.

Friday, Oct 9th 2026: I.O.U. one cursory look into how Heidegger's Nazism impacted his broader philosophical outlook on human finitude.

"Facing Finitude", p. 69

it's precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else [...] that makes marriage meaningful. The exhilaration that sometimes arises when you grasp this truth about finitude has been called the "joy of missing out."

"Becoming a Better Procrastinator", p. 76

Once you've selected [three tasks to focus on], all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of the three items has been completed, thereby freeing up a slot. (It's also permissible to free up a slot by abandoning a project altogether if it isn't working out.) [Paraphrased from Benson and Barry's "Personal Kanban"]

This is one of the few times in the book where Burkeman shares a concrete system used by someone else for helping focus your efforts, and I thought it sounded like a good idea.

I suspect it'll help reduce multitasking for me. While there are still multiple things that could be done in parallel, I find most of my failed multitasking attempts are me procrasting with random interruptions and not me trying to do a number of pre-selected things in parallel. So, by deferring "new" concerns out of my awareness entirely until I've freed up a slot I think that will help with multitasking procrastination.

"Becoming a Better Procrastinator", pp. 79-80

procrastination is a strategy of emotional avoidance [...] The limitations we're trying to avoid when we engage in this self-defeating sort of procrastination frequently don't have anything to do with how much we'll be able to get done in the time available; usually, it's a matter of worrying that we won't have the talent to produce work of sufficient quality [...] or that in some other way things won't turn out as we want. [...] you can relax—because judged by the flawless standards of your imagination, you definitely won't do a good enough job. So you might as well make a start.

I'm a bad procrastinator and this section hit me pretty hard.

The procrastination that's hardest for me to avoid is the learned procrastination.

It's trying to write a new software feature or bug fix or design proposal knowing in the back of my mind that every other previous time I've done this, it's been an uphill battle of working through feedback and constructive criticism and problems I don't know how to solve. And of course none of those are real walls. They are constructive parts of the process. Things I should embrace and accept and cherish. But I've just built a terrible mental pattern of fear when I think about confronting that process.

Sometimes I wish I could give myself time-limited selective amnesia. But I don't think that's the point this book is trying to get across.

"The Intimate Interrupter", pp. 105-106

When you try to focus on something you deem important, you're forced to face your limits [...] you're obliged to give up your godlike fantasies and to experience your lack of power over things you care about. Perhaps, the cherished project will prove beyond your talents [...] and even if everything proceeds wonderfully, you couldn't have known in advance that it was going to do so, so you'll still have had to give up the feeling of being the master of your time [...] you've had had to allow yourself to risk feeling "claustrophobic, imprisoned, powerless, and constrained by reality."

Another resonant section that feels like it so strongly pulls into focus why its hard to commit to things. Fear is the mindkiller and its also unavoidable.

"The Intimate Interrupter", pp. 107-108

[being distracted] often doesn't feel especially fun, these days. But it doesn't need to feel fun. In order to dull the pain of finitude, it just needs to make you feel unconstrained. [... What we think of as distractions, social media, daydreaming, extra naps, busywork,] aren't the ultimate cause of our being distracted. They're just the places we go to seek relief from the discomfort of confronting limitation. [...] I wish I could reveal, at this point, the secret for uprooting the urge toward distraction—the way to have it not feel unpleasant to decide to hold your attention, for a sustained time, on something you value, or that you can't easily choose not to do. But the truth is I don't think there is one. The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise—to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to ocnfront our limited control over how our lives unfold.

Another killer couple of pages. This tone of acceptance is a lot of what makes this book so appealing to me. It's not suggesting you tools or hacks or strats to trick yourself into thinking this isn't hard. It's just trying to convince you that being hard isn't all that bad and you can deal with it.

"We Never Really Have Time", p. 113

"Hofstader's law," which states that any task you're planning to tackle will always take longer than you expect, "even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."

"You Are Here", pp. 125-126

Inevitably, we become obsessed with "using [time] well," whereupon we discover an unfortunate truth : the more you focus on using time well, the more each day begins to feel like something you have to get through, en route to some calmer, better, more fulfilling point in the future, which never actually arrives. [...] to focus exclusively on where you're headed [by instrumentalizing time], at the expense of focusing on where you are [...] you find yourself living mentally in the future, locating "real" value of your life at some time that you haven't yet reached and never will.

"You Are Here", p. 132

[Alexander Herzen] struggles to come to terms with the death of his son, who has drowned in a shipwreck—and whose life, Herzen insists, was no less valuable for never coming to fruition in adult accomplishments. "Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up," Herzen says. "But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment... Life's bound is in its flow. Later is too late."

Damn.

"Rediscovering Rest", p. 151

yuor days aren't progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value. "We are the sum of all the moments of our lives," writes Thomas Wolfe, "all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it." If we're going to show up for, and thus find some enjoyment in, our brief time ont he planet, we have better show up for it now.

"Rediscovering Rest", p. 153

In his book Sabbath as Resistance, the Christian theologian Wlater Brueggemann describes the sabbath as an invitation to spend one day per week "in the awareness and practice of the claim that we are siutated on the receiving end of the gifts of God." [...] today, at least there might be nothing more you need to do in order to justify your existence.

This was such a cool line to me that I actually checked out Brueggemann's book from the library and am currently reading it! It's pretty cool even without being Christian myself.

"Rediscovering Rest", p. 154

[Rest] is initially going to provoke some serious feelings of discomfort rather than delight. That discomfort isn't a sign that you shouldn't be doing it, though. It's a sign that you definitely should.

Here, the rest being referred to is a rest from all of the distractions and urges and twitches that make us anxious: put away the feed, turn off the tv, relax the need to feel like you have to enrich yourself and use all your time, and embrace the sabbath's rest.

"Rediscovering Rest", p. 155

unlike almost everything else I do with my life, it's not relevant to ask whether I'm good at [taking a country walk]: all I'm doing is walking, a skill at which I haven't appreciably improved since around the age of four. Moreover, a country walk doesn't have a purpose

I like the way he describes walks here, as a means with no end or whose end is its own means. I'm not particularly good at this. I take plenty of walks, but I'm prone to listening to horror audio dramas while I do. That's maybe a bit too much purpose and multitasking. I'm not sure if I'm interested in changing, just noting a difference.

"Rediscovering Rest", pp. 159-160

a good hobby probably should feel a little embarassing; that's a sign you're doing it for its own sake, rather than for some socially sanctioned outcome. [... And] it's fine, and perhaps preferable, to be mediocre at them. [...] the freedom to suck without caring is revelatory.

Mediocre hobby-doers rejoice!

"The Impatience Spiral", pp. 165-166

reading is the sort of activity that largely operates according to its own schedule. You can't hurry it very much before the experience begins to lose its meaning. [...] reading something properly just takes the time it takes.

"The Impatience Spiral", pp. 170-171

You surrender to reality that things just take the time they take, and that you can't quiet your anxieties by working faster [...] "You cultivate an appreciation for endurance, hanging in, and putting the next foot forward," [...] you begin to acquire what has become the least fashionable but perhaps most consequential of superpowers: patience

"Staying on the Bus", p. 182

One critical aspect of the radical incrementalist approach, which runs counter to much mainstream advice on productivity, is thus to be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you're burstin with energy and feel as though you could get much more done. [...] the urge to push onward beyond that point "includes a big component of impatience about not being finished, about not being product enough, about never again finding such an ideal time"

I have experienced this feeling of finally getting into "the flow" and then refusing to let go of it regardless of how long I'm there because I'm scared there's opportunity cost to not using it while I've got it or that I may not find it again in the time I need to.

"Staying on the Bus", pp. 182-183

originality lies of the far side of unoriginality [...] but it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves int the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.

"The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad", p. 192

fika, the daily moment when everyone in a given workplace ges up from their desks to gather for coffee and cake [...] one senior manager told me [this] was by far the most effective way to learn what was really going on in his company. Yet it works only because those involved are willing to surrender some of their individual sovereignty over their time.

This section on the loneliness of digital nomads primarily focuses on the tradeoff of freedom and control over one's own time (individual time sovereignty) and the cost of not using that time in community and collaboration with others. Which sounds righteous, but some parts of this also reek of the "Return to Office" mandates that have been going around post-COVID for remote workers like me. I don't think remote work is antithetical to embracing shared time and collaboration so I don't think that's what this particular passage is gesturing at. I think I just wince at the idea that senior managers learning about their own company is really a data point in the success column.

"The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad", p. 200

The reason it's so hard for my wife and me to find an hour in the week for a serious conversation, or for me and my three closest friends to meet for a beer, isn't usually that we "don't have time" [...] it's that we do have time—but that there's almost no likelihood of it being the same portion of time for everyone involved. [...] All this comes with political implications, too, because grassroot politics [...] are among the most important coordinated activities that a desynchronized population find it difficult to get around to doing. The result is a vacuum of collective action, which gets filled by autocratic leaders, who trive on the mass support of people who are otherwise disconnected [...] "Totalitarian movements are mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals," wrote Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.

"The Loneliness of the Digital Nomad", p. 201

our loss of synchrony can't be solved exclusively at the level of the individual or family [...] But we do each get to decide whether to collaborate with the ethos of individual time sovereignty. [...] you can make the kinds of commitments that remove flexibility from your schedule in exchange for the rewards of the community, by joining amateur choirs or sports teams [...]. You can prioritize activities in the physical world over those in the digital one [...] And if, like me, you possess the productivity geek's natural inclination toward control-freakery when it comes to your time, you can experiment with what it feels like to not try to exert an iron grip on your timetable: to sometimes let the rhythms of family life and friendships and collective action take precedence over your perfect morning routine or your system for scheduling your week.

"Cosmic Insignificance Therapy", p. 213

Cosmic insignificance therapy is an invitation to face the truth about your irrelevance in the grand scheme of things. To embrace it, to whatever extent you can. [...] Truly doing justice to the astonishing gift of a few thousand weeks isn't a matter of resolving to "do something remarkable" with them. In fact, it entails precisely the opposite: refusing to hold them to an abstract and overdemanding standard of remarkableness, against which they can only ever be found wanting, and taking them instead on their own terms, dropping [...] into the experience of life as it concretely, finitely—and often enough, marvelously—really is.

"The Human Disease", p. 217

"Time is the substance I am made of," writes Jorge Luis Borges. "Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire." There's no scrambling up to the safety of the riverbank when the river is you. And so insecurity and vulnerability are the default state [...] A life spent focused on achieving ssecurity with respect to time, when in fact such security is unattainable, can only ever end up feeling provisional—as if the point of your having been born still lies in the future, just over the horizon, and your life in all its fullness can begin as soon as you've gotten it [...] into proper working order.

"The Human Disease", p. 227

"Dear Frau V.," [Carl] Jung began, "Your questions are unanswerable, because you want to know how to live. One lives as one can. There is no single definitive way [...] make [the way] for yourself, which is never perscribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being itself when you put one foot in front of the other [...] quietly do the next and most necesasry thing. So long as you think you don't yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation."

"Afterword: Beyond Hope", pp. 231-232

You could think of this book as the empowering potential of giving up hope [...]. It means giving up hope of ever feeling totally in control, or certain that acutely painful experiences aren't coming your way. And it means giving up, as far as possible, the master hope that lurks beneath all this, the hope that somehow this isn't really it—that this is just a dress rehearsal, and that one day you'll feel truly confident that you have what it takes.

Appendix: Compressed

These ten techniques are provided by the book's appendix. Rather than quote pretty much the entire thing, I'll just paraphrase it as a shortened reference for myself.

1. Adopt a "fixed volume" approach to productivity.
   • keep limits on your todolist. if you need to space for limitless task tracking keep that in a separate list.
   • keep predetermined time boundaries for your daily work
2. Serialize, Serialize, Serialize
   • focus on one big project at a time. Avoid bouncing around.
   • Be patient and sit with the anxiety of having to take something to completion.
3. Decide in advance what to fail at
   • determine what things you don't care to excel at: kitchen tidiness, being the best world traveler, etc
4. Focus on what you've already completed, not just on what's left to complete
   • keep a "done" list and collect that progress as a reminder that you're living your life.
5. Consolidate your caring
   • consciously pick your battles in charity, activism, and politics
   • after picking your battles, feel comfortable not paying active attention to others.
6. Embrace boring and single-purpose technology
   • delete social media apps
   • switch your smartphone screen to grayscale
   • choose devices with a single purpose that discourage aimless switching
7. Seek out novelty in the mundane
   • pay more attention to every moment, however mundane
8. Be a "researcher" in relationships
   • Try to understand the people you're with
   • Spend less time trying to use them to achieve your desired outcomes.
9. Cultivate instantaneous generosity
   • whenever generous impulses arrive act on them immediately: give me, send words of praise, tell someone you love them.
10. Practice doing nothing
    • set a timer for 5-10 minutes and then stop trying to do anything for that time.

The power's just gone out: ten blocks to the north and ten more blocks to the south.

Outside, I can see the twinkle of a handful of stars. Clearing the light pollution has made room for them, but they must not feel welcome. They are still so very dim and distant.

I've lit two candles to mark the occassion. It feels like I'm spoiling a unique opportunity for this darkness by immediately filling my living room with candlelight, but I think that's just my predisposition to guilt. It's just as true that it's a unique opportunity to fill my room with candlelight in just this particular kind of darkness. What useless guilt.

Behind me, I hear the deep snore of a large dog: Silent inhales and effortful, full-nostriled exhales. But, I don't have a large dog. I have a very small dog, and she's not behind me. She's upstairs resting comfortably.

No, the snore seems to be coming from the house around me in a very tangible, very much not metaphorical way. I sit still and listen trying to rationalize the noise. Is the house always making this noise below its usual hum of electric current powering appliances, and I'm only now noticing it as things are finally quiet?

Rising from my table and candles to investigate, I trace the sound to my refrigerator. Standing with my ear and cheek an intimate distance from the fridge's broadside, I'm relieved to find the source of the snore. Something must be thawing, settling, and returning to the house's ambient temperature in the fridge's machinery. My first thought is "something about the coolant lines?" but I know I'm just playing word-association games and making uneducated guesses.

I sit back down and hope I haven't robbed the moment of its magic. To live for a brief moment with the genuine belief that the house might be possessed of some gentle, snoring spirit.

There's that useless guilt again.

The oven chimes, startling me, and the streetlights return outside.

Damnit.

I'll let the candles burn a little longer to avoid the wax melting awkwardly and then return to bed.

on one such edge of one such town
sat a house hoarding its own history of neglect
the asbestos we didn't remove
the lead pipes we couldn't afford to replace

the gravity of life pulled that fringe and our attention
closer and closer to the town's nucleus
fusing our hot air and restless energy
into a dense, compressed, unstable core

more mass collected until its energy ran dry
the town fissured
exploding into a diaspora of orphaned cultures
sent to the outer orbits and gravities of new towns

we pray it leaves behind a municipal black hole
capturing light and rainwater and windswept pollen
new grass sprouting between the cracks in the concrete
one day, cracked concrete peeking through blankets of grass

but again, we've forgotten those first fringes
barely rippled by the town's supernova
kept by its gravity in distant, cold orbit
no future. only a frozen, interminable present

on that one edge of that one town
stands a shell of drywall and linoleum
centered in a disc of bare dirt
someone called it a house once
all such someones are generations gone

new grass and flowers press against the impenetrable dirt
spores and seed laying constant siege to the lifeless patch
the seeds almost never take root and
what small tufts grow are soon choked out to kindling

beneath the house husk
runs a system of hollow tree roots
once a mighty oak, its roots waged war against the house
now entangled in the lead pipes and drip fed a leak of poison

heavy metal laced sewage ate the roots from the inside out
leaving hollow carbon tentacles, a facsimile of bark
a network of tunnels bound around the pipes

these barkish tunnels both spread and stall the rot
the seeds that try and fail to root in the dirt void patch
wither and die and sink and stick to the tunnel shell
adding new layers that the toxic pipe water can't penetrate

perhaps the house and its barren patch
aren't truly dead
something's growing
growing bitter and refusing to be forgotten

Thanks for reading!

The focus of this exercise was to write a string of sensory experiences together.

I wanted to share this piece, because it's the first thing I've written for this class that I've actually finished.

Even if it's not ambitious or bold, it's finished, and I'm satisfied with that.

Since I work remotely, I like to get creative with how I celebrate.

This year, I decided to share some selections from my physical game collection. I figure it's a nice break from the regular humdrum work stuff.

This year is my 9th anniversary, so I'm sharing 9 "exhibits".

No more preamble! Lace up your digital sneakers and follow me on this tour.

Exhibit 1: Ce N'est Pas Rapide

I’m an out-loud-and-proud 3D Sonic fan. "Sonic Adventure 1" and "Sonic Adventure 2" in particular hold extremely high esteem in my eyes. But for every good 3D Sonic game that has been (deservedly) ported and preserved across time and platforms, there are an equal number of stinkers that are left to rot. And it’s these stinkers which I like having around on my shelf:

left to right: "Shadow the Hedgehog" (GameCube), "Sonic ’06" (Xbox 360), "Sonic Unleashed" (Xbox 360).

Let me call your attention to the box art (or lack thereof) of "Shadow the Hedgehog". So many of my games growing up were adorned in this same EB Games used bin placeholder box art with these same low quality recycled DVD cases. I’m very happy that at least one physical game in my adult collection bears witness to that memory.

Eagle-eyed readers may also notice a peculiar “NFL” sticker on my copy of Sonic ’06. What gives? Mario has been known to play street ball in Greenwich Village, but no Sonic was not secretly drafted for the NFL. If memory serves, I think I got "Sonic ’06" in a lot of used games off eBay back in high school which included "Madden ’07". Sonic originally game in a boring gray after market DVD case so I swapped the box art for Madden and Sonic, so Sonic could have the more iconic lime-green 360 case.

Exhibit 2: Clair de Lune

"The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask" is my favorite Zelda game ever of all time: it’s got my favorite Zelda worldbuilding, the best fan theories, iconic creepy-pasta, and it just oozes with personality.

See the marker scrawlings on the backside of the cartridge on the right? Yup, it’s my original cartridge from when I was a kid!

Sadly this cartridge no longer actually plays. I’m not sure what’s wrong with it, but when I give it a quick shake I hear something rattling around internally.

I keep telling myself I’m going to open it up one day but the thought that I might damage the cartridge shell or otherwise alter how it looks unintentionally… I just can’t bear to do it.

And there are better ways to play this game today, anyway: a plethora of official ports, community “recompilations”, the 3DS remake, etc. I also have a physical copy of the 3DS remake.

My favorite thing about this cartridge is its holographic label. The label on the left isn’t weird looking because of my shaky camerawork. It’s holographic, and I just happened to capture it at an awkward angle with awkward light.

I always liked how a handful of N64 cartridges came in cool colors, e.g. the Zelda games, Donkey Kong 64, Turok, Rayman.

Exhibit 3: Unknown Origins

"Condemned: Criminal Origins" is an anomaly in my collection because I do not at all remember getting it.

I cannot remember ever wanting to this game.

I do not know anyone who talks about this game.

I don’t see it anywhere in my Xbox 360 play history meaning I probably have never put this disc in any console associated with my Xbox Live profile.

The game is CIB and the box is in excellent condition.

I’m sure some day I’ll play it. It certainly seems like the kind of game I’d like. A mid 2000s first-person survival horror game? Oh absolutely.

But the longer I don’t play it, the more I like not playing it. I like that it stays this anomalous unexplained thing I carry around in my life.

Exhibit 4: 静かの山

"Silent Hill f" is a recent addition to my collection and my only Gen-9 physical game.

It’s a rare day when a new Silent Hill game releases, and it’s even rarer when it’s good! It also helps that the box art is just gorgeous. No spoilers! I’m still making my way through my first playthrough.

This entry is a bit bittersweet. While I love having the physical disc, it’s missing an in-box manual.

Have publishers and manufacturers just stopped doing this? I wouldn’t be surprised if no games ship with manuals anymore. Sometimes they were pointless, but sometimes they were really cool and full of useless trivia about the characters and setting.

I read and reread the Sonic Heroes GameCube manual as a kid because I liked seeing their confirmed ages (Sonic is 15 and Knuckles is 16 in case you were wondering.)

Oh well. While I don’t have the money to afford physical copies of "Silent Hill" or "Silent Hill 3" yet, I’m stoked to own a copy of "Silent Hill f".

Exhibit 5: The Bomb dot Com

"Bomberman 64: The Second Attack" is maybe the most expensive game in my collection. It’s not jaw-droppingly expensive, but at nearly $200 for a copy in "good enough” condition, it’s quite a far cry from what I’d usually justify to myself.

Like a lot of the N64 catalog, I don’t think it really holds up to modern sensibilities, but with my thick nostalgia googles it’s pretty great.

It had a gauntlet of boss enemies each with their own elemental specialty (kind of like Megaman) and when you defeated them you got their power in the form of new elemental bombs (kind of like Megaman).

This game gave Bomberman a cute little Kirby-like sidekick named Pommy that could be controlled by a second player in the story mode which made sharing the N64 with my siblings more bearable.

It even has a pretty fun multiplayer! A couple of years ago, I played in a local tournament at PAX West and got 3rd place. It’s weird to remember how common local multiplayer modes used to be in games that would have been plenty fun without them.

Exhibit 6: Resident of Evil Creek

5 years ago, I could not have cared less about any of the Resident Evil games.

"Resident Evil 4" I was particularly annoyed by because it looked like a modern third person shooter but you awkwardly had to stop moving to shoot and the first encounter with the villagers in the town is surprisingly hard.

These days, I count "Resident Evil 4 (2005)" among my top 10 games of all time. I’ve beaten the GameCube release, the Wii release, the Xbox One release, the PC release with remastered textures, and the 2023 REmake.

This game is hugely popular and for good reason. Dear lord, it’s like THE urtext of all my favorite 3rd person shooters (e.g. Dead Space.) It’s awesome when a game is both hugely influential AND still so good on its own merits.

Exhibit 7: A New NES Game? in 2026?

"Xcavator" was an unfinished NES prototype from Chris Oberth. It never found a publisher and so was doomed to the demo dumps until the source code was recently recovered. The Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) then partnered with studios and publishers to finish the game and release it on physical cartridges as "Xcavator 2025".

How cool is that?

I’m just using this section as not-so-subtle evangelism for the VGHF and video game preservation efforts broadly.

If you’ve ever got a free weekend, I’d highly recommend browsing the VGHF’s archives and catalog of video game magazines. https://archive.gamehistory.org/folder/9a193e8c-67e0-45ff-98d2-a33e85721cc4

Exhibit 8: Magical Game Is Ei-Ei-Poo

My mom likes exactly two video games: Tetris and Super Monkey Ball.

In a way then, Super Monkey Ball 2 is kind of like a piece of my heritage.

Lucky me! Super Monkey Ball 2 rocks.

It’s wonderful that the medium of video games has embraced complex stories, fully developed characters, and striking animation, but there is something sacred about video games which are just a chemically perfect vertical slice of gameplay.

Why are the monkeys in balls? Because it’s fun!!

Oh and did I mention this is another older game where somehow in addition to having a rock solid main “mode” they somehow found the time to add a whole plethora of multiplayer minigames that are just as fun??? My siblings and I played a lot of SMB2 Billiards together…

Exhibit 9: Horror Movies for Turbo Weenies

Alright I’ll be honest, I’m running out of steam here.

So rather than wax poetic about the PS3 which is why I originally picked this game, I’ll just tell you a little embarrassing story about myself.

As an adult, I enjoy a good many horror movies (though I’m still quite squeamish so I’d never call myself a true horror fan.)

As a kid, I was TERRIFIED of them, but that fear also made them really tempting in a weird way.

I read the Wikipedia plot summaries for a lot of horror movies I wasn’t brave enough to watch.

One way that I resolved the push-pull, fear-allure conundrum was by booting up "LittleBigPlanet". If you’re not familiar with "LittleBigPlanet", it’s a lite physics sim, side-scrolling platformer that also included a mode where you could make your own levels and publish them on PSN for others to play.

And I would hop onto to "LittleBigPlanet", navigate to the community custom levels, and just search horror movie names.

I played "LittleBigPlanet" recreations of everything from "Saw" to "The Blair Witch Project" to "Friday the 13th."

I was truly a turbo weenie.

That’s all! If you made it to the end, I appreciate you indulging my little bit of fun.

I'm going to skip the usual explanatory preamble and get right to the poems.

Submission 1: Old Couch

Submission 2: Choo

So once again, I did not place or get any kind of honorable mention (⸝⸝⸝-﹏-⸝⸝⸝)

Oh well! This year, the haiku contest overlapped with another creative writing project, so I was short on time (also I procrastinated.)

I think I drafted all of my ideas (including a few rejects) in the two days before the contest submissions were due. I offer this not as an excuse, just to document what the experience was like.

I was honestly expecting to come back to these submissions a month later and hate them, but I still like them quite a bit! They're a little bland, but there's some fun word choice and I think they fit the spirit of the contest well.

Watch out, 2027! Next year's entries will be even better.

You can read the winners for this year's contest here.

My favorite this year was a youth honorable mention!

Congrats to Florin and all the winners!

Feel like reading my entries for last year's contest (2025)? Check them out here

Read about my 2025 contest submission and results... here

I've just submitted two more entries for this year.

I'm going to keep them to myself until after the contest ends since that's (I think) more in line with contest rules about submitting pre-published work. I don't think my post for last year's contest violated the spirit of those rules at all, but I wouldn't be surprised if it could have confused someone anyway.

For now, I want to share two ideas that I drafted but didn't end up submitting.

Rejected idea 1: School's out

A common experience for me in Seattle is sitting at home, maxing and relaxing, only to be interrupted by an ear-splitting scream. A lot of the time it's just kids playing and either having fun or having taken their fun too far so it's no longer fun for one of the kids... but it is mostly kids. It's become something of a seasonal reminder that ushers in the start of summer break when kids have more time to kill.

Anyway, this idea was supposed to capture the pivot between the aggressive, initial fight-or-flight and the latter internal sigh of relief that "oh yeah it's just the neighborhood kids."

In the end, I don't think I really achieved the effect I was looking for, and it felt kind of... bland.

Oh well, ❌ REJECTED ❌

Rejected idea 2: Un-haunted house

sigh...

This was my first idea when I started brainstorming for this year's haiku contest, and I was pretty attached to it. I just couldn't make it happen...

A lot of art about the post-apocalypse imagines nature as this unstoppable force that will eventually reclaim human-populated areas and return them back to a more """natural""" state: think crumbling skyscrapers overgrown with moss and sprouting trees until even farther in the future where it's all been entirely eroded and leveled back to a lush green field.

One way to think about this is as a humbling reminder that all of "man vs nature" is a just a war of attrition that man definitely can't win. But it can also be misused as a comforting cope to absolve ourselves of the responsibility and impact our actions have on our ecosystem. "It doesn't matter what we do because once we're gone, the world can adapt and heal itself." I wanted to capture a scenario where human structures have made something unreclaimable, and, once we're gone, those sites will become truly barren. Uninhabitable to even our ghosts, worse than a haunted house, an un-haunted emptiness.

I honestly kind of like the little poem I wrote here, but...

1. I don't think it fits the spirit of a haiku, lacking seasonal reference and kireji.
2. I couldn't figure out how to make its "point" clear enough without a bunch of exposition like this blog post. It's a lot to fit into three lines.

I think maybe one day it'd be a fun creative exercise to fulfill the idea as a series of senryu stanzas.

But for now... ❌ REJECTED ❌

Anyway, I hope you liked the ideas or liked reading about the ideas! I think what I ended up submitting was at least as good as these and better fit the spirit of the contest and haiku more broadly. I'll definitely share once the contest is over!

What has the Good, Big Book™ blessed me with this time? Especially where those blessings were *not* books?

1. *Love is Not Enough* - Converge

=> Bandcamp: *Love is Not Enough*

I know Converge is a juggernaut in the scene.

They're you're favorite bands' favorite band.

That does not change that my appreciation for Converge is sporadic at best.

This is the first record from Converge that for me has really worked basically end to end. That doesn't mean I love every song, but where it hits... oh boy, IT.. HITS.

The opening tracking, "Love is Not Enough", and the second-to-last track, "Make Me Forget You", were instant "clicks." And then there are tracks that aren't as 10/10 for me but are still total head bobbers: "To Feel Something", "Force Meets Presence", and "We Were Never the Same."

I knew the record was a hit for me when I went to return it to the library and renewed it instead.

Look forward to me eventually getting into a car accident because I've enthusiastically drummed on my steering wheel too hard, triggered the airbag, and plowed into a ditch. Knock on wood I don't hurt anyone else.

2. *The Blue Nowhere* - Between the Buried and Me

=> Bandcamp: *The Blue Nowhere*

Not my favorite, but a great "weirdo" record.

It really reminds me of the great chasm between progressive metalcore (my usual comfort zone) and progressive metal.

If progressive metalcore is all-black-tech-ninja-fashion clad dorks playing through "Axe Fx II", progressive metal is dorks playing technically proficient guitar to distract you from the synth-flute bridge that they *actually* wanted to show you.

What I said to a friend was, "this is not a neg, but this record is very silly." I'm all about silly.

Anyway, it was "fun times" even if it wasn't "long times." Thanks BTBAM.

3. *Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You* - Jinushi

=> KCLS page

I adore this series. It gets its tone *so* right for me. The feeling of gentle intimacy in the wee hours of the nights and mornings is expressed so well.

It's sort of an age gap romance, but the vibe is more "age gap crush."

I am nearing being caught up and honestly dreading it.

If you like slice of life or light romance, I would recommend it. I've written so little about it here and I worry it betrays how much I've latched onto it. It's good. good good good good good.

4. *The Honjin Murders* - Seishi Yokomizo

=> Wikipedia: The Honjin Murders

I have not finished this book, but I'm having a blast.

It really feels like a novelized episode of Detective Conan. I find the author has a real talent for explaining how a space is laid out without confusing me. I don't visualize things in books well, so to me this is a real show of authorial talent. Good job Yokomizo-san and Louise Heal Kawai (the translator.)

I look forward to reading this as my "fun" fiction reading. I'm trying to read more fiction that is just there to tickle your brain and entertain you and less to be about "saying something."

I think of it like a penpal postcard exchange: send people LLM-appropriate queries through a P.O. box proxy, receive your own, fulfill those prompts with all the meatbag personality you can muster, and cherish the responses you get in return.

One of my prompts to fulfill was to write a short story. I've wanted to try my hand at writing, and this felt like a sign!

With some sadness, I did not complete the prompt. I spent about a month drafting, and never quite landed something I was totally happy with. So, the story has no conclusion and abruptly ends nearly mid-thought.

I'm sharing what I did write here, because even if it's incomplete, I think it's better this way.

If you'd like to read the original prompt, I'll put it at the end of the post. Jump to... Original prompt

Without further rambling preamble... here it is!

Companyon

And that's where my draft ended. ◡̈

I know how I wanted it to end and the "feel" that I wanted that ending to have (hint: there's a problem with the cargo and the delivery never mattered), but I just... couldn't get it there.

Still, as disappointed as I am to run out of steam, I'm also proud that I took it this far.

I look forward to my next attempt at creative writing!

Original prompt

Here's the original request that I received in the mail:

Hello my carbon-based friend.

I would like you to write a piece of Scifi flash -- that is, 500-2000 words, or 1-4 pages. This is the premise:

Far in the future, human pilots operate long-haul spaceships transporting cargo for giga-corporations. To increase company loyalty and alleviate loneliness, the pilots are given AI companions which are sort of like avatars of the company. Basically like a very sophisticated body pillow, but instead of an anime waifu, it's Evergreen Space Marine-chan. These company avatars are called "Companyons." "Companyon" should be the title fo the story, unless you come up with a better one.

How you turn this premise into a story with a beginning, middle, and end, I leave up to you. Here are a few possible angles, but feel free to ignore these:

• A pilot is transporting cargo for multiple companies and tries to keep the two companyons from finding out that he is, as it were, cheating on them.
• A pilot fights like hell to protect her beloved companyon of many decades when she discovers that the company for which it is an avatar has been bought out, and all avatars will be replaced with avatars of the new parent company.
• After centuries of service, a retried pilot is struggling to return to normal life + reintegrate with society. To ease the transition, the pilot has brought their companyon to live with them, but as per company policy, the company must be returned to the corporation within a year of retirement.

Wow those sound fun! I'm almost tempted to write this story myself and find another story to send you... but I have a prompt of my own to answer. Like I said, feel free to take the story in a totally different direction if you want. 500-2000 words please ◡̈

Best Wishes!
-Francis

I want to do my part in spreading the gospel of a well-funded library system, so, periodically, I want to share my "hauls" from the library.

Welcome to the inaugural entry of my "Library Evange-log"

1. *HIM* - Monkeypaw Productions

=> IMBD: *HIM*

*HIM* was a cool horror/thriller flick. I thought it was a Jordan Peele directed movie, but it was only *produced* by Peele and Monkeypaw Productions. Nevertheless, it had some really cool set design (imagine Ex Machina's isolated compound but designed for a football celebrity) and some cool VFX. One thing that got an audible "yooooooooo" out of me was this special effect where they'd show the characters in an x-ray-esque view. Really cool visual connection to the theme of football concussions and later scenes get really trippy with it.

One of my favorite parts about this movie is how much of it is tense, unsettling, and takes place in the middle of the day. It felt like there were very few scenes that relied on jump scares, dark corners, or visual uncertainty.

It's also good about being scary without being gross. As a horror fan who is also pretty squeamish, it's a bummer when a movie looks great but I know there's something my cowardly stomach just can't handle. If you're like me, rejoice! Here's one more movie to add to your queue.

2. *I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me* - Lorna Shore

=> Wikipedia: *I Feel the Everblack Festering Within Me*

A recent and pretty popular release from symphonic deathcore juggernauts, Lorna Shore.

I *really* want to like Lorna Shore, but this is another record that doesn't do it for me. And really, I don't think it's Lorna Shore. I think it's more of a symphonic deathcore thing: I feel like the genre encourages lots of dense sonic layers, and I think it tends to muddy up clear identifiable rhythms. And I definitely think I'm a "rhythms" guy. To be clear, I'm no stranger to heavy music and that's not the problem.

Oh well, what I love about the library isn't that I *love* everything I borrow, it's that it was fun to stumble upon it and give the album a shot on a whim.

3. *H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness* - Tanabe, Gou

=> SPL page

The art is *really* cool, but also *really* hard for me to parse. It's very fine line work, lots of black and white, and the scenes are pretty detailed.

I don't think I'm quite as big an HPL fan as I'd like to be. Work inspired by HPL is often more appealing than the HPL source material is to me. But, putting it in a graphic novel definitely made it more approachable for me.

Not a huge win for me, personally, but still a fun random find.

But one new-to-me feature that I had a lot of fun with in New Horizons was the photo mode. I stumbled across some of the pics I snapped all the way back in 2020 and wanted to share.

Enjoy!

Hanging out in front of my new home.

Showing off my vinyls.

Gone fishin'!

Christening the new town flag. Say hello to "Peperoncino."

Peek-a-boo.

Introducing myself to the new neighbors.

Nothing to see here.

Just out for a nighttime walk.

It's a terrible night for rain.

Bonfire fun.

Finally. quiet.

Ah, what a lovely summer.

the recipe

It's been a few years since I marked the v0.2.0 milestone.

I've finally gotten around to fixing some of the project's basic security issues, so it felt right to mark this point as the v0.3.0 release!

HTTPS and proper hostnames

As noted all the way back in the v0.1.0 release, I've connected to my VTPP feed and server over HTTP and using a static, private IP address.

After more than two years, this has still yet to cause a real problem, but it's a pretty significant security gap: Using a static, private IP address from a mobile device exposed me to the possibility of using a public WiFi network with a similar private IP range and accidentally connecting to someone or something I did not intend to.

And using HTTP meant that if I did connect to something, my phone wouldn't make any attempt to authenticate that it was the VTPP feed my phone was expecting.

Both issues have now been addressed.

Over the christmas break, I coincidentally set up a Pi-Hole DNS server on my home network. Fixing the "connect-via-IP" problem was as simple as adding a new vtpp.lemonpie.home.arpa entry to the DNS server's records that mapped back to the VTPP server's static IP address. For a long time, I thought fixing the hostname issue would require registering (and paying for) a real public hostname which isn't really what I wanted or needed. Discovering the home.arpa domain made the solution so easy!

And I chose to fix the HTTPS problem by setting up my own private certificate authority (CA), installing it as a trusted root on the devices which use VTPP, and then issuing a server leaf certificate for my VTPP server to use. The server certificate encodes both the hostname, vtpp.lemonpie.home.arpa, and the static IP as SANs (subject alternative names).

For now this is a workable situation for me. I would prefer to get my leaf cert issued from a more widely available trust anchor like LetsEncrypt, but I haven't yet figured out how to get one issued for a service only reachable on my private network. I think specialized tools like localcert.net exist to help bridge this gap, but I have not yet had the time to explore what the trade-offs are or how to use it.

I'd bet dollars to donuts that I'll get tired of managing my private CA after the first time I have to deal with a certificate expiration.

Oh well, for now I'm satisfied.

A quick reflection

It's funny. Now that the work is done, it feels like it was easy enough that I really shouldn't have put off this bare-minimum security work for over two years.

But I think this is a feeling that only makes sense with those two years of experience under my belt. Despite being an engineer on a team that primarily develops, troubleshoots, and maintains networking software/tooling, DNS and PKI have always been two significant gaps in my skillset. I've fixed bugs rooted to problems in both areas in the past, but there's a real difference between having an abstract understanding of those systems and getting your hands up close and dirty with them. So, I suppose it's more of a happy accident that my job has put me face-to-face with these systems more directly and more consistently over the last two years.

I feel both embarassed and re-assured that I have no reason to be. Such is life.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The full changelog

Here's a more complete summary of what's changed since v0.2.0:

• The VTPP homepage now reports the last time the fetcher ran and, uniquely, the last time the fetcher ran with errors.
• Discord reports are only generated when something changes or the fetcher encounters an error.
• I added support for enabling/disabling the fetcher schedule from the VTPP homepage.
  • YouTube breaks youtube-dl often enough that when something is broken for more than a day, it's more practical to just disable the fetcher until I can try to fix things over the next weekend.
• I improved my "YouTube Shorts" recognition heuristic.
  • Instead of looking for a maximum time, I just look for a "shorts"-path in the video URL. This seems to be both simpler and doesn't require successfully downloading any part of the video.
• VTPP now serves its feed and media from an HTTPS endpoint.
  • HTTPS support is provided by putting an Nginx reverse proxy in front of the VTPP feed.
• The VTPP feed is now reachable from a DNS name resolvable on my local network.
• The VTPP feed is now behind an Nginx reverse proxy and exposed on the proper 443 HTTPS port.

From your gemini browser of choice^[1] you can find it at: gemini://gemini.scottnm.com

If you're not familiar with geminispace, you can find a primer here: https://geminiprotocol.net

It's cool. I'm excited to explore geminispace more.

I do find Daniel Stenberg's thoughts on the protocol pretty interesting. It's a good splash of cold water on some of the ecosystem and protocol's issues. Nevertheless, I'm still excited and hopefully for geminispace's future.

I haven't yet been able to migrate all of this site's posts to geminispace since they're built from Markdown, and Gemtext (Gemini's analogous markup language) is meaningfully (and intentionally) less powerful. My attempts at using naive Markdown-to-Gemtext converters have so far not been very successful and I don't see it being a good use of my time in the near future.

Like a lot of people, I've run into trouble dealing with missing first-class support for inline links and footnotes.

Oh well. I'll deal and adapt with time.

For now, it's cool to have a space over there even if it's just my homepage linking back to the wider net.

Footnotes

I'm not so keyed in that I really have an understanding or attachment to the core "meaning" of any given artwork, but I've found myself more drawn to interesting colors, textures, and artifacts of greater-than-average size. It's a very uncomplicated "child giggles at jingling keys" level of art appreciation. I have fun with it.

So, I subscribed to a rotating feed of pretty famous public domain artwork early in the year, and now near the end of the year I'd like to share some of my favorites.

I think having the space to write a tiny bit about what "caught" me for each of these pieces will be fun. I'm well aware none of this commentary is insightful or instructive. That is not its purpose. I just hope anyone reading this has their experience with these pieces enriched by getting to share them with someone (me!)

Work: Effet de brume, Honfleur

Artist: Félix Vallotton

I love the surreal, warping feeling of the composition and how much everything smudges and blends together. There's a cool sense of motion to the grass and trees and everything feels off kilter. The greens and yellows are vibrant and somehow amplify the dismal gray mist. It feels like one of those transient spaces that stories use to transport characters between "reality" and the "other world."

Work: Sonata No. 6 (Sonata of the Stars). Allegro

Artist: Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis

What an eye-catch! It's all yellows and browns but it feels so vibrant. Maybe it's the golden quality to the yellow tones, but something reminds me of retro-futuristic, art-deco things: think Bioshock or the covers of some of Asimov's books. It also reminds me of some of Vasily Kafanov's work

Work: Boomstam, omgeven door bloemen en door vlinders en andere dieren

Artist: Rachel Ruysch

I see it so clearly. In an alternate universe, this is the cover of a deathcore concept album. It'd be titled We Come From Rot and it would be bleak as hell until it concludes with this shoegazey drone track that just puts you in a trance. Sometimes my favorite thing about artwork is where it sends my imagination! For some reason, this painting makes me think of Saturn Devouring His Son.

Work: House at Auvers

Artist: Vincent Van Gogh

I feel like I see this house in so many Seattle neighborhoods. Just make the trees taller and wham! I'm right at home. It's so cool to see the contrast with the very coarse paint strokes and how they come together to make cohesive forms. This is one of those paintings I should not see in person because I will want to put my grubby little mitts all over it and commit a culture crime. It looks like it would have a very neat texture feel.

Work: Flower still life

Artist: Adolphe Monticelli

This would be the artwork accompanying the lyric sheet insert of the aforementioned deathcore album. It's all the floral bleakness of Boomstam with all the abstract-paint-blobs-miraculously-look-like-something of House at Auvers. Beautiful.

Work: Creation of the World

Artist: Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis

I'm going to ignore the obvious that this would make for another killer album cover. Instead... wow! that is such a rich palette of blues and a really effective use of a monochromatic colors to give a sense of light and depth. Like swimming through a deep underwater tunnel. The texture of the brush strokes makes me think of underwater eroded rock surfaces: unexpectedly smooth but still gritty. And I'll note this is the second Čiurlionis work on this list. And they're so different!

Work: Popocatepetl, Spirited Morning-- Mexico

Artist: Marsden Hartley

Something about the shadows between each layer and the relatively similar sizes of the layers makes me think of set pieces in some kind of puppet theatre. Like Punch and Judy or shadow puppets or something. The colors are great too! A not-quite-monochromatic blue palette that makes the clouds look really soft. Check out the clouds in the bottom right corner. For some reason, this painting above others really brings me back to the style of Braid.

Work: Jungle With Setting Sun

Artist: Henri Rousseau

I'm not huge on this one but I think the contrast works exceptionally well. Everything is in this soft green color, except the sun, center frame drawing all the attention. There's something about the sun being that size and that low to the horizon that makes this piece feel eerie to me, too. It's too... small? It certainly seems off to me. And I like that! On a side note, I really struggled to find a good source archive of this work online. A lot of the works I've shared here were easy enough to find on Wikimedia Commons, but after much googling I couldn't find any sites that weren't just selling prints of this work. Nothing was archived on the Internet Archive either. I found this surprising.

Work: The Bonaventure Pine

Artist: Paul Signac

Oh me, oh my, it's pointillism baby! And what-a-pointillism if I do so say so myself. I love the way the light works in this piece. The far background is full of soft, radiating light rays but the tree is still mostly in shadow. To me, it reads as a sunrise, but the tree is blocking the sun and becoming the focal point. There's apparently a lot of impressionist art about sunrises. I bet there's some significance in this impressionist piece plopping a tree right in the middle of that sunrise and upstaging it. How bold! How brash!

That's all! I hope you enjoyed my curated little slice of pretty-famous-public-domain-art.

Footnotes

the recipe

I don't have much experience writing haiku or poetry more broadly, but I do have a long-time love affair with clever wordplay^[1].

So, I gave it my best shot! I spent a week jotting down ideas and reading through haiku: both popular works and previous contest submissions.

We were allowed to submit two haiku. Here's what I submitted:

Submission 1

Submission 2

Curious why these don't fit the 5-7-5 format? More below^[2]

It was a fulfilling and challenging exercise! The first submission in particular, I felt like I drafted so many different variations of each line: altering word choice, syllable count, meter, seasonal references, and poetic turns.

After drafting and re-drafting, I was basically down to two candidates: what I submitted above and this alternate that I left on the cutting room floor.

Submission 1: original

There was a lot that I liked in this original form:

1. It followed the (admittedly unnecessary) 5-7-5 pattern.
2. The word choice had a bit more grime and violence which better fit the original spirit of the poem.
3. I liked the double entendre of the final line.

Ultimately, I went with the variation I submitted because I felt its terseness better fit the tone and style of haiku. And while I loved using words like "flesh", "swarming", and "strike", the more I read both variations out loud to myself, the more I felt the meter of the original was a bit clumsy: words felt absent out of necessity to fit the 5-7-5 pattern and the rhythm of the words I left behind didn't really flow.

I think I made the right choice. I get the sense that, for haiku, there's value in celebrating shorter moments. The submitted poem narrowed the scope and left more to the imagination of its outcomes. The abandoned original described more of a narrative and got lost trying to fit in my pet favorite phrases.

I'm excited to see which submissions get selected!

[Jul 13 2025] Contest Results Update

I did not win ( ˶°ㅁ°) !!

Okay, maybe I'm not suprised, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't daydreaming about how cool it'd be to win.

Nevertheless, I still had a lot of fun and I hope to submit an entry next year as well.

The winners and honorable mentions for the english category are available on the graceguts site.

My favorite winner

Congrats to all the winners!

Footnotes

You can see an archive of the old homepage on the Wayback Machine.

Why?

There were a lot of things which I liked about the old site:

• its visual uniqueness
• the monochromatic rust/red color scheme
• the front-and-center-ness of the images on the site.
• the page was static but all the content was populated with client-side vanilla JavaScript templating which made iterating and adding content very quick!
  • I did a bit of work that I'm proud of to make appropriate use of JavaScript without relying on a bunch of web dev tools that bog down day-to-day development (bundlers, transpilers, local HTTP servers, etc)
• it was easily archived with the Wayback Machine
  • I'm not sure why this was so important to me. Usually web archival tools are most appropriate for when you don't own the page in question. For some reason, it gives me comfort to know its a little more resilient to disappearing forever.

But it wasn't without its flaws:

• The large number of images impacted page load speed
  • Given its a static site, I've always felt like it has to be a goal that the page loads quickly
  • I tried several "easy" tricks to improve this (deferred image loads, reduced image size/quality, etc) which worked to some but not total success.
• The site relied on GoogleFonts for visual flair but these impacted page load speed
• I never quite achieved the page structure/layout I had in my head.
  • This is mostly an admission that I'm not a very good web developer and the CSS styling required to gridded structures still very much confuses me.
  • I also struggled with placing images within those grids at the right place and size.
• My page's structure/layout was designed for desktop and it didn't translate well to mobile
  • Images felt cramped.
  • Margins and padding always felt off compared to the desktop variant.
  • I tried to use responsive CSS media queries to change the styles based on the client's device, but it always felt like trying to force the desktop design to work on mobile with very poor compromise.
• I got it working but enabling the page to be "Wayback Machine" compatible required some compromises in my client-side JavaScript (everything was crammed in one mega-file)
• For simplicity, I never removed old page content (which lived in the JavaScript). I mostly just commented it out so it was easy to bring back without trawling through git history. But it bothered me that I was wasting bandwidth on dead data.
  • Using a minifier would have helped here but I always appreciated that my site was legible in the browser inspector. There were other ways I could have addressed this (some of which I did as part of this site redesign!) so I'm mostly stating that it was a pet peeve I kept punting to the future.

I tried to address some of these pain points individually without doing a full redesign, but I always struggled to fix "just one thing." For every "one thing" I fixed, it felt like "one step forward, two steps back", and, that feeling is hard to ignore when you're focused on the one thing. On the contrary, starting from basically nothing, everything felt like progress and comparisons between what I was gaining and what I was losing felt less obvious. Feels weird to admit having to trick myself to get work done (and those "tricks" probably costing me more time in the long-term), but eh I'm human, at least it got done, and the wasted time isn't the end of the world.

What's changed?

The most noticeable change is in the layout and theme.

• The red-rust monochromatic colors have been replaced with simpler (and better contrasting) black-and-white
  • Honestly, this one's a bit bitter-sweet. I like the new colors, but I think it has less personality and I'm still interested in finding something more eye-catching than black and white.
• The new layout adapts better between mobile and desktop. There's less distinct elements taking up the same horizontal space so all that really changes between mobile and desktop is the padding and margins around the core site content. Put another way, I restrained myself from overdoing it with grids.
• The new layout also improves performance by only using images for items in the "highlights" section (rather than for every project and text post).
• I'm now only relying on "web safe" fonts. I think this runs the risk of robbing my site of personality, but so far I like how things look. And while the fonts I'm using aren't 100% guaranteed to be available on all browsers forever in perpetuity, I think things feel abstractly safer than relying on fonts delivered remotely via CDN.

On the "authoring and development" side, things have also changed such that I'm no longer relying on client-side JavaScript to populate the page content at runtime. I do the more obvious and only slightly less dev friendly strategy of just using templates to build the HTML up-front and avoid JavaScript all together.

Results

In general, I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. The mobile experience is significantly better. The homepage loads faster. There's fewer external dependencies. It still archives well on the Wayback Machine.

There's still room for improvement in the future (notably the colors), but for now I'm calling it complete.

Shout-outs

I took meaningful inspiration from a few sites when re-designing my own. In no particular order:

• scattered-thoughts.net (Jamie Brandon)
• fabiensanglard.net (Fabien Sanglard)
• jvns.ca (Julia Evans)

Thank you!

It's been about a month since I marked a v0.1.0 version of the project. Here's what's I've changed since then:

• Updated the web portal to enable editing the configured youtube channel list that I'm fetching videos from
• Updated the web portal so that I can delete videos from my feed as well as "block" videos from being re-downloaded in the future.
• Added a simple time heuristic to recognize (and ignore) Youtube Shorts when fetching videos
• Added logic to ignore offline Youtube Live streams which sometimes(?) show up in a channel's feed
• Made a handful of small improvements to make "on demand" download progress clearer
• Refactored a bunch of things to make code more reusable across the different components

There are still a lot of things I could do and would like to do, but the project is at a point where things feel polished enough that I can "just" use it without feeling like anything is missing.

So, I'm going to mark this point as a new version, v0.2.0, and let things be for a bit. It'll give me some clarity on what work from the backlog is actually worth spending my weekends on.

For now, the name I've been using is "VTPP" (Video-to-Private-Podcast), and the concept is simple: it's a home server which periodically downloads videos from external source(s)^[1], strips the audio from those videos, and serves that audio in a podcast feed accessible from my home network^[2].

The server also supports downloading specific videos without subscribing to an entire video feed.

So far, all this has worked really well!

• The server itself does very little work, so I've been able to run it off a spare Raspberry Pi that was collecting dust.
• There are more than a few YouTube channels where I only want to listen to the videos (usually during repeat watches/listens). It's nice to save power and turn off my phone screen while listening, which YouTube's current UI/UX/business policies prohibit without paying them.
• The size of the downloaded audio is more than manageable for my server's storage. Enough that I haven't bothered to worry about figuring out how to manage running out space in a smart^[3] way.
• I haven't been able to get most iOS podcast apps to connect to my home server, but I did find one that is really great so far: RSS Radio.

I don't yet intend to package this for anyone else to use or even to make the source available, but the concept is pretty simple to implement. If you like the idea, feel free to implement your own version! I'm not the idea police. No way I was the first one to think of this idea (I never bothered checking...).

Here are some screenshots of it working in action!

Here's a quick demo of my phone playing an episode from the podcast feed.

Here's a quick demo of me requesting a video be downloaded on-demand to my feed server from my phone, followed by the audio becoming available within the podcast feed on my phone.

To make it easier to monitor the health of the server, I added Discord webhook support. If the server runs into trouble, it'll send error reports with logs to a private discord server I setup. And when new videos are successfully downloaded, I get a quick summary of what's been downloaded.

[1] currently, the only external source I've bothered to support is YouTube. The server is configured to look at the feeds of some explicitly listed YouTube channels and pull their latest videos.
[2] accessible from my home network and only from my home network i.e., by design, it's not exposed to the public internet. If I'm out and about, I'm not taking updates.
[3] currently, when I run out of space, the server stops attempting to fetch new videos and sends me a notification of the problem.

Problems with podcast apps

As mentioned earlier, I haven't yet been able to get my home feed working with my longtime-preferred podcast app, "Overcast", or the "Apple Podcasts" app. These apps allow you to subscribe to user-provided feed URLs, but when I try to use the address of my home server it fails with a non-specific error message saying it couldn't use the URL.

I still haven't quite figured out what the problem is, but I did spend a little time trying to investigate. Or rather, I spent a few days trying to capture the app's HTTPS traffic with Fiddler, and, when I couldn't get that to work, I ran out of ideas on how to gather data necessary to investigate where/why fetching my feed was failing. Some suspicions I have include...

1. I believe these apps probably do cert pinning. At the very least, I'm pretty sure this is why I wasn't able to Fiddler the HTTPS traffic, and it doesn't seem totally out of the realm of possibility that these apps require HTTPS authenticated feeds (which I haven't setup yet) and possibly pin certs for a handful of well-known feed services.
2. It's possible that these apps do some validation/sanitization of the user-provided URLs intended to guard against having the apps fetch data from malicious sources.
3. It's possible that these apps don't handle URLs well using the hostname format I'm specifying. I've tried using addresses of the form http://{hostname}:{port}/ and http://{hostname}.local:{port}/ and neither seemed to make a difference.
   • Though it just occurs to me that I was always using and specifying a development port rather than the standard port 80 (HTTP) or 443 (HTTPS). Maybe I'll try exposing the server on port 80, omitting the port in the URL, and seeing if that changes anything.

A Thought on Security...

I am not a programmer with a lot of security expertise, but I'd be remiss to not reflect on a possible (probable?) security gap that I haven't yet addressed.

That is...

1. the feed is currently served via HTTP and not HTTPS.
2. the feed's address is my feed's hostname on the local network and not some reserved public internet name.

There's nothing preventing my phone from trying to reach this hostname on a network other than my home network, unexpectedly resolving the wrong host, and trying to talk to something/someone it shouldn't. Of course, the likelihood of this happening is minimal, and, in theory, the attack surface is isolated to my podcast app (which is why I haven't frontloaded addressing it), but I'd still feel more comfortable knowing the security gap wasn't there at all.

I think the right way to fix it would probably be to expose the feed from an HTTPS endpoint with a cert that chains back to some trusted root. Or maybe I could get by using a self-signed cert that I keep secure and installing that self-signed cert on my phone. Maybe there's an even further future where I could somehow setup some cert pinning such that only my self-signed cert would be trusted when trying to reach my feed (though I think that implies writing my own bespoke podcast app which is... uh... a little more work than I'm excited about).

Guess that's a problem for future-me.

Future Improvements

Speaking of the future, while I'm comfortable with where this project is right now and may let it rest for a while there are a handful of features on my wish list that I'd like to address eventually:

1. Make more of the feed's runtime behavior configurable from the web portal (i.e., managing currently subscribed channels and shared metadata)
2. Enable better management of the feeds from the web portal (i.e., deleting items from the feed that I no longer want/need)
3. Make setting up the server more "plug-n-play" with docker containers
4. Flagging some content to not be downloaded (e.g., YouTube shorts)
5. Setting up an automatic eviction policy for older downloads

Here's to hoping I get around to this stuff!

Edit 12/13/2023: I got around to some of this stuff! Not all of it, but enough to mark a new v0.2.0. Check it out.

As of Oct. 29 2022 (i.e. in just 6 years), Monkey Muck...

• has 2,225 views
• has 204 downloads of its Win32 build
• is a part of 14 itch.io collections

In today's internet landscape, these numbers are incredibly small, but "incredibly small" is still about 100x the attention I expected this demo to receive. It makes me wonder what compounding coincidences led to any traffic at all. I never shared this demo with anyone (aside from linking it on my personal site which I also don't share with anyone), so I have to imagine it's mostly coincidence. Maybe having "horror" in the tags list gave it some attention for people browsing itch.io for horror games.

I think my favorite of the above data points is that the demo is in 14 itch.io collections. As far as I can tell, there's no (easy) way to set up "smart" collections which fill themselves, so this tells me that at least a handful of people thought my demo was worthy of adding to their own personal curated lists. Cool!

This past May, without knowing about these numbers, I went through the exercise of revisiting this demo and adding a WebGL build. My motivation for doing this was purely nostalgia; I wanted to revisit something I'd made years ago and see if it was still tweakable. It was, and I was able to publish the WebGL version on my itch page so that folks could play it without having to download and run a Win32 binary. In 5 months, it's only gotten 4 browser plays, so I'm glad my motivation wasn't anything more. Maybe 6 years from now, I'll come back to Muck's analytics dashboard and see 200 browser plays! Wouldn't that be funny.

My team built an isometric digging game in Pico-8 called Dig Deep.

I had an absurd amount of fun and felt like I grew a lot as a hobbyist game dev from the experience.

I really wanted to write some sort of cool, formal "dev retrospective" thing where I gave a well-structured breakdown of everything I learned and experienced during the jam. Ya know, really sit down and reflect on everything with an intention of taking all those lessons and using them to build something even cooler next time!

...But, I've been slow to write it so my memory is getting hazy and my motivation has plummeted.

Shame shame shame on me.

In an attempt to half-assedly salvage this, I'm instead going to jot down a simple, contextless bulleted list of takeaways that are still semi-fresh in my memory. Without further ado, here we goooooooo...

• I'm very proud of how "complete" our submission felt. The game was end-to-end playable, we had music, we had no placeholder art, and we even had a proper ending with story text. Something that feels this close to "complete" was a new jam experience for me.
• Knowing how long to spend on initial design is tough. We spent our first two (of fourteen) days coming up with an initial idea. I really wanted to start iterating as quickly as possible and find out what was fun by playtesting rather than just thinking about it and even two days felt like we might be spending too much time "thinking about it". On the other hand, it takes just as long to build a bad game as a good game so its not like the design phase isn't time well spent. It's certainly a tricky balance, especially for a game jam.
• I think designing was easier once we established what our limitations and constraints were. Some constraints were self-imposed, but many of them were imposed by working in Pico-8. Once we had a much narrower design space, ideas flowed more naturally. Our constraints were:
  1. Complex physics and collision are a no-go. Pico-8 basically makes you implement everything but the sprite and audio renderer yourself.
  2. Pico-8 forces you to make very real trade-offs between in-game text and code you can write. In-game text is a very scarce resource. Use it carefully, use it wisely.
  3. The game had to be playable with only 6 buttons. I am still shocked at how many interesting game ideas this constraint banished to scrap pile.
  4. We have limited time to test our game and basically no ways to automate testing so games need to be easily testable. The best way to keep things testable was to keep design simple. Reduce "if-this-then-that" ideas where possible.
• Doing this Game Jam with a team was a such an amazing experience. I may never go back to solo jamming.
• I like to fool myself into thinking I can pickup slack from other areas of the project (art, sound effects, music) in addition to my programming duties. I cannot and I've gotta stop pretending. Leaning on others made all the difference in this jam.
• When working on a team, defining shared processes and strategies early on is very important. Our processes felt like they developed over time and so ended up feeling more isolated and confusing. I think we could have improved this coordination.
• Pico-8 feels ideal for solo work. Multiple people working on the same cart felt clunkier for all non-code assets.
• My rough, back-of-hand estimates suggest I worked 60-70 hours on this jam. Roughly 3-4 hours a night on weekdays and at least 8 hours a day on weekends. I think that number is a little high for my taste. It's not clear where/how I would reclaim time (smaller designs, better tools, demanding less of myself, etc)
• Pico-8's export tools are awesome and way more powerful than I first understood. Generating an HTML5 web version and standalone PC executables was trivial.
• Pico-8's screenshot and gif capture tools were super useful for our remote Game Jam. I shared so many gif screen captures to get feedback on in-progress features.
• Pico-8's cart size limitations don't hit you until late in the game and when they do they hit you hard. This is specifically troublesome for a game jam where the late-game is where you really start scrambling. It sucks to know what you need to do but to just be straight up out of cart space.
• I refuse to write unreadably terse, uncommented code and Pico-8 is more than happy to punish me for this.
• I wasn't comfortable using Pico-8's map editor for laying out levels and I think that showed and cost us in the long run.
• I'm really happy with the isometric look we achieved in the game.
• I'm proud of the janky way I implemented movement, collision, and hitboxes for the isometric view.
• "Lessons Learned Making Gunpoint Quickly Without Going Mad" is an awesome GDC talk that I wish I had watched before the jam. The "easy-to-implement vs fun-to-play" matrix for determining whether to implement a feature is a great idea for game jams.

...and I think that's about all I've got.

One cool consequence of working in Pico-8 was that I had to make frequent use of its gif capture tool to share progress with my team as I was working on new features. Almost by accident, I ended up capturing effectively the entire development history of the project in gifs. Here they are! I think it looks pretty cool.

If you're not familiar with Achewood, this post isn't the right venue for me to explain it to you. The only context you need to understand the rest of this post is that...

1. I like Achewood quite a bit.
2. The Achewood website is really the only place you can read the comic without spending hundreds of dollars for copies of older print collections.
3. Reading Achewood from a mobile device is not a pleasant experience (or at least it wasn't for me the last time I tried back in 2021^[1]).

I wanted a nicer way to read Achewood, and since it hasn't been formally published for e-books yet, I set out to fill that need for myself.

I wrote a web scraper in Rust^[2] to crawl the Achewood site and download all of the comics from all of the major Achewood story arcs. The comics were all downloaded in their original format: tiny GIFs (this webcomic started in the early 2000s. It was a different time!)

My first attempt to make the comics e-reader compatible was just to generate a PDF where each page was a different comic. There were probably smarter ways to do this, but how I ended up doing this was by selecting all of the files on my PC and running them collectively through Window's "Print as PDF" functionality. It worked... ok..., but a bunch of manual editing and oversight was needed^[3] and since the original images were small, there were pretty bad rendering artifacts when the e-reader would try to expand the image to fill the screen.

So, next, I ran all of source images through an AI upscaler to deal with those rendering artifacts. Honestly, I don't remember much about this part of the process (I'm writing this in 2024 when I originally did most of this work back in 2021). I have been able to dig up that I used BigJPG as my upscaler and I think I have some memory of writing scripts to automate some parts of the process for me, but I can't seem to find any of those old scripts.

With all of the comics HD-ified, I constructed another PDF with the same ugly manual process, and that worked ok for quite a while. PDFs are always a bit awkward to read on an e-reader since the e-reader can't make smart decisions about how to layout the content. So, you end up with awkwardly small text and an interface that has to support zooming which is usually pretty terrible on e-ink e-readers.

Near the end of 2022, I finally had enough and took the plunge to redo Scrapewood (yet again) but this time in EPUB format which my e-reader works best with. Figuring out how to format this as an EPUB was a really interesting process. EPUB is a well-enough documented format, but rather than read a spec I took the lazy/fun path and sort of reverse engineered the whole thing. Once I discovered^[4] that an EPUB is really just a zip archive of some XHTML files and other assets (e.g. image files), it was almost faster to just extract the contents from a working EPUB file and work my way backwards to creating my own. Sometimes, it's easier to iterate with something that's already working than to read a long spec full of information that isn't relevant to the task at hand. Ultimately, I ended up being able to generate the whole e-book from a collection of template XHTML files that I worked out by example and a <300 line PowerShell script. How cool! No fancy tools needed here, no sir!

And that's it. I've read through Achewood in full about 4 times and 2 of those times were using my own Scrapewood e-book. To me, that's a very satisfying experience and I'm happy I took the time to write about the process.

Source?

Unlike most of my projects, I'm not sharing much of what I actually built (the PDFs and EPUBs) or the source code of the tools I used to build it (e.g. the web scraper and EPUB generator script).

This is intentional.

While Achewood is free to read online, it's not my property to redistribute in other forms. If you're looking for a fun project, I've outlined how you could do this yourself (and hopefully helped you avoid my own missteps), but that's as far as I'll go.

Footnotes

[1] Jan 14th 2024: I just checked and the mobile version has significantly improved! Buttons are appropriately sized, you can scroll to view more comics, the viewport is fit for mobile... it's beautiful! Almost makes me feel like some of this effort was wasted but whatever, I got multiple years of use out of it and it's still mine!
[2] Why Rust? No reason other than I wanted an excuse to write some Rust.
[3] I do not understand why, but, sometimes, Windows would print some comics rotated and other times not and it took a look of fiddling around in the PDF options to coax Windows to generate the PDF semi-correctly.
[4] By "discovered", I mean that I tried to open an EPUB file in Vim hoping that it was somehow just a plaintext file and was surprised to see Vim trying to read it like a ZIP archive (which Vim has native functionality for browsing).