lots of being a nerd about digital note taking in this one, sorry but actually not sorry at all.

Didn’t have the energy for a note last week (turns out newborns like waking up a lot and having a bit of a shout) but will give it a go…

Celebrating 10 million jabs

Unfamiliar degree

Denis Defreyne’s weeknotes for October 26​–​November 1, 2026

Over much of the last few weeks, I’ve been navigating the governance and assurance processes as we try to get permission to test a hypothesis.

Attention Conservation Notice: I have the plague, so this is Minimum Viable Weeknotes

Museums, archaeology, and whatever else

A week with my head full of mucus...

the audacity, the block and less computer

TOC * The World * My Week * On The Blog * Media Diet and Reviews * Reading * Watching * Gaming * Links of Interest * Looking Forward It is a new month! This weekend is Undas - a time when traditionally, Filipino families go to the cemeteries to visit their departed loved ones. As you can imagine, the cemeteries are very crowded on these days. Lots of people also travel home to the provinces. But for our household I think it has been quite a few years since we observed this tradition on the date. ### The World RIP Sir Patrick Stewart, a great loss to the world. On Oct. 30, 2026, 10:34 p.m. I wrote: > My favorite Picard quote: "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness, that is life." > > #rip Sir Patrick Stewart, a great loss The far-right seems to be losing steam in recent elections. Lula won in Brazil and Bolsonaro's son fled to the US claiming he was cheated (typical). The 12-year reign of Serbian authoritarian Vucic was ended by the student movement in their recent elections. In Israel, Netanyahu failed to win a parliamentary majority and now their government is in the air, depending on what coalitions form. (He also claims cheating of course!). US midterms are coming this week; we'll see if the trend holds. Seems likely, including the claims of cheating! The Peso broke 64 per USD sometime last week, a historic low. It was still in the 40's during PNoy's time! ### My Week Google Fit says I walked 70,304 steps from last Sunday to yesterday. I am track to beat last year's step count in mid-November! Got my 4Q haircut this past week, a bit late. Had to buy printer ink early this week. My dad still likes having me print things out like his credit card bills; looks like we end up buying a new cartridge around once a year. Wandered out to the mall last Friday mostly just to get out of the house, but also to check out the new wing of Trinoma that opened that day, _The Exchange_. It's not too impressive, a bit small and most shops are not yet open. But the important thing is that it makes it easier to cross directly from SM North and into Trinoma again! This new wing of Trinoma is planned to connect to the new MRT-7 line (planned to open in 2027) and to the Grand Unified Station (planned to open in 2028). We'll see if those promised schedules actually hold! (I am not optimistic.) Whenever I wander the malls, as always I am Tempted by Capitalism that makes me want to buy stuff I don't need. This time it's more Transformers! ### On The Blog * Wrote some notes about patching my server. * Wrote my set recap for the MTG Hobbit set. * Wrote a book review! ### Media Diet and Reviews #### Reading * Books: Finished Exit Strategy by Martha Wells! Review linked above. * Comics: Started reading the 1988 original run of Excalibur! I'm hoping to finish the 125-issue run before Marvel Unlimited gets sunsetted in about a month as I am not yet sure if the new app will be available where I am. * Feed reader backlog: Feed reader is at 397 unread items as of this writing, around the same as last week, just barely keeping up. #### Watching * Ongoing: **Ranma 1/2 S3** (caught up), **Scrubs S2** (a bit behind), **A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms** (so very behind), **VisionQuest** (so very behind) * Finished: **Matlock S2** * Binged: **The Diplomat S4** * Movies: Sadly nothing this week. #### Gaming * Multiplayer games: * **Magic Arena** : Trad draft is hard so I have run out of resources and need to grind standard a bit again I guess. New set is coming in a couple of weeks! * **Marvel Snap** : Not really playing this a lot, mostly just hoping draft comes back. * Single-player games: * Ongoing: * **Final Fantasy Resonance** on Steam Deck. Currently in chapter 4! * **Super Mario Galaxy 2** on the Nintendo Switch. Currently at around 106 stars I think. * **Tales of Xillia 2** on RPCS3. Currently in chapter 9? ### Links of Interest I haven't been sharing a lot of stuff lately. I think part of it is because I don't want to be sharing too much negativity or GenAI things, which seems to be a lot of what I am reading online these days. Hopefully I can share more links soon. * links 🔗 Manifestos, Fear, and ‘Loser Thinking’: Inside Proton’s AI Reckoning (Article requires a sign-in.) > Our reporting also paints a picture of Proton that is likely very different to the public’s perception of a company with a goal of carefully protecting privacy: one that in reality is barreling ahead with AI as quickly as possible so it can achieve the explicit goal of more annual revenue. Geez, Proton's C-suite sound terrible I think I only have a couple accounts still using Proton, I should get around to migrating them. ### Looking Forward Nothing scheduled for this coming week, but trivia team might be doing a quiz night?

This week I have learned: I didn’t have “get a group of Civil Servants playing Pass the Parcel” on my 2026 bingo card, but this is why prediction is a mug’s game.To explain …

A condensed post following a much-needed 10-day break. This involved hanging out with the kids at home, taking things deliberately slowly and escaping northwards to the shores of Loch Tay. Writing we...

My weekly journal-ish entry for week 43 of 2026.

My week notes for week 44 of 2026 #100daystooffload #WeekNote

Essential reading in the Berkhamsted Oxfam Books and Music store. As this is a milestone weeknote, I’m going to try and change these a little. For a long time I’ve been following the same pattern, …

Just another few months for this weeknote, the third one of 2026 Prologue Road Trip, starring Emma Appleton As always, this is an intentionally browseable set of weeknotes regarding things I “beheld” ...

• Work continues on closing all our open parentheses in the lead-up to the next Hanami release. • I started this week fixing a regression in our body params logging....

Olives, rain, and fascists season in athens. Dog sitting, souvlakis, books, friends, and a fun time downtown.

TOC * The World * My Week * On The Blog * Media Diet and Reviews * Reading * Watching * Gaming * Links of Interest * Looking Forward Sigh, time continues to advance! ### The World The US midterms are in less than 10 days! I say this with a mixture of dread and anticipation for the world. The cybersecurity industry has had quite a week: * Eight intermediate certificate authorities were compromised because of a massively bad practice: > The compromised eMudhra keys were defective at a level that’s challenging the imagination of many of the engineers studying the incident. A normal size for a NIST P-384 elliptic curve cryptography private key contains roughly 384 bits of entropy, a size allowing almost 2384, or a number with 116 digits, different possibilities. The private key sizes of the compromised keys ranged from 3 to 8 bits. Astonishingly, the private keys were 4, 56, 66, 115, 155, 156, 230, 237. Cue the many references to XKCD #221. This was a fail so bad, the provider just straight up quit the industry. * Almost immediately after that incident came out, two new critical PHP vulnerabilities were discovered that affected something like 70% of sites on the internet, forcing many systems to be temporarily taken offline for emergency patching. Legendary PC RPG maker Bioware has been shut down by EA. Unsurprising after the recent Saudi Arabia EA buyout, but still a sad moment considering Bioware's legacy. I played a lot of their games from the olden days, though during the past decade or so they haven't actually been very good. ### My Week Google Fit says I walked 65,942 steps from last Sunday to yesterday. Went out to the mall with my brother early in the week to watch a movie. I worry about so many things nowadays. I spent some time over two days trying to patch PHP on my server (see above). I did NOT have a lot of running PHP, but there was some, so better safe than sorry. I took some notes which I think will be helpful to reference in the future, so I'll write up a blog post this week. The parents celebrated their anniversary last week so we got together with the extended fam during the weekend to celebrate. Always a lot of fun when the grandkids get together. ### On The Blog * Wrote some more about SNES games. ### Media Diet and Reviews #### Reading * Books: Finally started a new book! It's **Exit Strategy** (fourth Murderbot book), which a friend lent me last month and I only finally picked up yesterday. It is rather short, but let's see if I actually get around to finishing it. * Comics: Finished reading the Claremont UXM run, and actually managed to catch up a bit with current comics, reading the recent **Queen in Black** event and also starting on DC's **Kingdom of Zod** crossover. * Feed reader backlog: Feed reader is at 401 unread items as of this writing, only a tiny bit up from last week. #### Watching * Ongoing: **Ranma 1/2 S3** , **Matlock S2** , **Scrubs S2** , **A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms** * Started: **VisionQuest** * Movies: Went to the cinema this week and watched Street Fighter (2026)! #### Gaming * Multiplayer games: * **Magic Arena** : Still drafting Reality Fracture, failing to get achievements. * **Marvel Snap** : Grand Arena is done (was bleah). Now there is Team Clash, which I am not too enamored with either. * Single-player games: * Ongoing: * **Super Mario Galaxy 2** on the Nintendo Switch. My rate of acquiring stars has slowed considerably because the remaining ones are super annoying! * **Tales of Xillia 2** on RPCS3. * Started: * Pulled the trigger on **Final Fantasy Resonance** on Steam at launch, mainly because I want to encourage SE to make more HD-2D Final Fantasy games. I have been playing it on Steam Deck, which is pretty sweet. * I also bought Undertale at a very cheap cost, which I have wanted to do for a while. Haven't started this yet, but I suspect it would be great on the Steam Deck too. ### Links of Interest Nothing this week, sadly. ### Looking Forward Huh, nothing scheduled for this coming week. I'll see if I can actually get something done.

Denis Defreyne’s weeknotes for October 19​–​25, 2026

Noxious chat