Project Hail Mary<\/h3>\n\n\n\n![\"book:](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260327_135605154_HDR-scaled-e1775325528932-700x922.jpg\")
<\/a>Project Hail Mary<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nKirk wanted to see the new movie Project Hail Mary<\/em>, based on the book of the same name<\/a> by Andy Weir, so we made plans to see that with friends last weekend. My friend said I should read the book before we saw the movie and loaned me her copy two days beforehand, so I locked in and started reading, finishing it about an hour before we left for the theater. I still got it! I enjoyed the book, but I definitely think the movie made me appreciate the book more. I’m not saying the movie is “better” than the book, but it gave more dimension to the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\nProject Hail Mary<\/em> is written from the first-person perspective of the protagonist, Ryland Grace, erstwhile middle school science teacher who ends up on a space ship to Tau Ceti in humanity’s only hope for figuring out how they can stop a certain space-traveling organism, called “astrophage,” from eating the sun and dooming humanity. Grace’s internal monologue is very snappy and has a tone of “science: it’s cool *sunglasses emoji*.” This is fine and I did like the book but his point of view can get a little stale in my opinion. The best part of the book is when he encounters an alien and they start trying to figure out each other’s languages. If this book were just for me, that would have been like 80 percent of the story but it’s not (anyway that’s what Native Tongue<\/a> is for). The alien, who Grace nicknames “Rocky” because he’s basically made of rocks, speaks in a language made of whistling noises, which the movie brought to life in a way that my imagination had not. I’m not always good at picturing the things that I read, so it was cool to read the book and immediately see a very beautiful and faithful deception of it on screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\nStill on that Snow Queen Cycle<\/h3>\n\n\n\n![\"book](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260402_213252020_HDR-scaled-e1775326773947-700x849.jpg\")
<\/a>World’s End<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nWorld’s End<\/a> is the second book in Joan D. Vinge’s Snow Queen Cycle<\/em>. This story features one a character that was not especially prominent in The Snow Queen<\/em>, BZ Gundhalinu, and follows his misadventures after leaving the planet Tiamat. BZ’s shithead brothers squandered all of their family wealth then went to a planet called World’s End to hunt for treasure in an area with a reputation for making people insane. BZ, dutiful brother that he is, goes in to find them. At first, I wasn’t really sure what this book had to do with the previous installment other than having a character in the same universe going about his business. However, as the plot progressed, I realized that the purpose of this book in the series is to show how sibyls, a type of oracle that actually connects to a giant galactic computer to answer questions, work in more detail (Moon, the main character in the last book, is a sibyl). I mean, the point of the book is also to entertain us and make us think but, although I really loved The Snow Queen<\/em>, I thought World’s End<\/em> was just okay. Still, I’m interested to see what happens in the next book, which returns focus to Moon on Tiamat. <\/p>\n\n\n\nThe law of conservation of (book) mass<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
On Saturday I made a fun trip to Beers Books downtown to sell a significant pile of books after clearing out my shelves, which I mentioned in my last post. I was delighted to get $90 of store credit, which I promptly converted into a stack of books to take home. I need more time in the day to read! Everything is interesting! As much as I like reading ebooks because they are convenient and easy to hold, I really love browsing the bookstore in person and finding stuff I never would have known about otherwise. <\/p>\n\n\n
\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260404_164742405_HDR-scaled-e1775354468448-700x696.jpg\")
<\/a>new book pile<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nMeanwhile, on the internet<\/h3>\n\n\n\n\n- The world energy shock is coming<\/a> via The New Statesman. The world is about to drastically change. From the article, “Since local storage facilities for oil and gas have filled up behind the Strait of Hormuz, several production sites have had to stop production \u2013 they are ‘shut in’. Supply is not just slowed but simply not there. And you cannot switch oilfields or refineries back on overnight \u2013 it can take weeks or months to do so. Moreover, production and transport infrastructure has been damaged. And as fertiliser is produced with gas, and sulphur and helium are by-products of oil and gas production, these chemicals are no longer produced either.”<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- 5m tonnes of CO2 emitted in just 14 days of US war on Iran, analysis finds<\/a> via The Guardian. I saw this article shortly after posting last time about my environmental concerns regarding the war on Iran. We’re ruining the environment at top speed and for what?<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- The People Falsely Accused of Using AI<\/a> via New York Magazine. People who speak English as a second language and autistic people are being accused of using chatbots to craft their communication, which sucks. One bit of the article made me, maybe not laugh, but sigh laughingly: “The particular snarl we\u2019re in is new. But some people have been accused of sounding robotic for most of their lives.” Who among us has not been accused of roboticism or being a “walking dictionary”?<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Wikipedia Bans AI-Generated Content<\/a> via 404 Media. Love to see it! From the article: “The new policy, which was accepted in an overwhelming 40 to 2 vote among editors, allows editors to use LLMs to suggest basic copyedits to their own writing, which can be incorporated into the article or rewritten after human review if the LLM doesn\u2019t generate entirely new content on its own.”<\/li>\n\n\n\n
- Thirst Traps Over Think Tanks: Dems Want Hotter Candidates<\/a> on the Ballot via The Bulwark. Democrats are so fucking stupid. Zohran Mandani didn’t become the mayor of New York because he’s hot, it’s because he actually stands for something and cares about people! Saying we need to elect hot people feels like the Democrats finding more stupid ways to promote Gavin Newsom for 2028 who will probably win because he looks like a TV president. God, I hope I’m wrong though.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
Media<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I found a series of albums called the Top 100 best techno<\/a> (volumes 1 to 18, lol) and I haven’t listened to all 18 yet (because 1,800 songs is a lot), but I have very much enjoyed what I’ve listened to so far. It made me think about what kinds of music people get nostalgic for. Lots of people feel sentimental about the music of their teen years. I had recently been reflecting on that and realizing that the music from when I was 17<\/a>, did not fucking speak to me. At the time, I instead developed what I would now acknowledge as an autistic special interest in new wave<\/a>, which was not au courant <\/em>when I was in high school in the very early 2000s. Later, in college, thanks in no small part to high-speed internet access and peer-to-peer file sharing (also lol), I started listening to a lot of electronic music, and this <\/em>is the stuff I associate with youth. I was feeling very good bopping along to these albums recently and I’m really glad I found them! A lot of electronic music is not well-preserved because it didn’t always get published on a CD, so this has been a nice little treat for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\nRampant Consumerism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Now that the sun is out later in the evening, I decided to get a hat to wear to the pool for water aerobics class. I don’t really wear hats so I had to figure out a good one to get and, of course, settled on the classic Wikipedia Editor hat<\/a>. It feels very nerdy to wear but I also think it absolutely rules. It is the blue of an unclicked hyperlink! It’s ripe with possibility!<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Me](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260328_161709927_HDR-scaled-e1775325707839-700x826.jpg\")
<\/a>People need to know who they’re dealing with<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nComputer World<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
This week I finally learned what an AppImage<\/a> is. I’ve tried to download various programs for Linux and one way to do that is by using an AppImage. I thought this would be an executable installer like on Windows, but it’s actually far simpler than that. Despite this simplicity, I’ve been struggling with figuring out how to make them work. Thankfully, someone on the Linux Mint forums has explained this before<\/a> and said all you have to do is update the properties of the file so that it’s executable, then you double click the AppImage and the program opens. Now I know something! Thank you, Linux users for always answering questions online. They are doing the (non-denominational) lord’s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOn another topic, I’ve been concerned about the state of the internet, so this week I downloaded Wikipedia. Yes, that’s a thing you can do<\/a>. Wikipedia has archives available of just the articles (leaving out the user pages, talk pages, revision history, etc.) and you can view them on your computer through an offline browser. The most common is Kiwix<\/a>, and that’s what I’m using. This is theoretically a very easy process (and I know it is for some people because one friend told me it took hardly any effort), but I had a little bit of trouble that ended up having an easy fix. Once you download Kiwix, you can download Wikipedia (or other archives) through the program itself, but for some reason it was telling me I didn’t have enough space when I absolutely do have enough space. I was able to download a torrent of the Wikipedia archive from the Kiwix library<\/a>\u2014I downloaded English, Spanish, and Icelandic\u2014and then imported that into the Kiwix program and that worked just fine!<\/p>\n\n\n\nI am relieved that I’ll have access to information even if we end up subject to horrible age-verification laws that make it impossible to use the internet or if there are widespread power outages that make all the servers go down. I’m not even joking at this point, I think these are things that could really happen, so I’m making a point of downloading whatever important stuff I need from the internet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Top](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/IcelandicWikiKiwixHome-700x259.png\")
<\/a>Icelandic Wikipedia homepage in Kiwix<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nMoving It<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I know the sticker updates are important to all, so here are the last two weeks’ worth of stickers. As for the exercise itself, I started going to the aqua jogging class and it’s a lot of fun. Running laps (and doing other exercises) in the lazy river is ultimately pretty enjoyable as exercise goes. I am also proud to report that I did a set of five bench presses at 135 pounds this week. When I started in December, I wasn’t really sure about this plan to focus on upper body strength because that’s not usually what I’ve done, but I have to say it is paying off. Shocking that regular training will do that (sarcasm!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n![\"stickers](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260323_142925129_HDR-scaled-e1775325120677-700x1235.jpg\")
<\/a>Stickers for the third week of March<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"stickers](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260329_183033004_HDR-scaled-e1775326001557-700x1112.jpg\")
<\/a>stickers for the last week of march<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nKitchen Witchery<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I had a lot of energy in the kitchen recently, which is nice because I like being able to make stuff! A few weeks ago I had the most disappointing so-called pasta primavera at a restaurant and felt that I had to make a better one out of spite. I used this NY Times recipe<\/a> but substituted tortellini for the regular noodles because there are no rules in this life (No Rules!<\/a>). I also made a black bean skillet bake (recipe from The Bean Book<\/a>), to which I added some sweet potato. We ate that with chips kind of like deconstructed nachos.<\/p>\n\n\n\nI’ve been trying to make more snacks so I have reasonable thinks to munch on. I did a batch of golden chocolate chip muffins<\/a> (the “golden” here refers to them being whole wheat) and replaced some of the chocolate chips with cherry jammy bits<\/a>, and those turned out really good. I tried a granola bar recipe<\/a>; it’s really a nut bar but I just think “nut bar” does not convey the idea of a snack in the way I would like. In any case, I used a mixture of peanuts, macadamia, hazelnut, and pistachio because I had little bits of the last three to use up. They came out tasty but I think I needed to bake it a little longer to get true bar-shaped cohesion. Most of it fell apart, so I mixed all the the rest with the chocolate and cooled that, then snapped it into chunks, which worked just fine. For treats, I made oatmeal cream pie bars<\/a> because I was browsing my blog looking for receipts on some topic, saw it, and was like “wow I gotta make that again,” so I did! Finally, I made this strawberry vanilla bean soda<\/a>. I saw the recipe on instagram and thought that it sounded good and that Kirk would really like it as a person who drinks soda often and who loves strawberry. He said it was very good, so yay. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260322_195049236_HDR-scaled-e1775325008747-700x659.jpg\")
<\/a>tortellini primavera<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260329_191631176_HDR-scaled-e1775326266593-700x571.jpg\")
<\/a>cheesy black bean bake<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260329_123934585_HDR-700x527.jpg\")
<\/a>chocolate nut bars(ish)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"the](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260329_124423470_HDR-scaled-e1775325865815-700x741.jpg\")
<\/a>one big granola bar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260323_163419095_HDR-scaled-e1775325189978-700x380.jpg\")
<\/a>chocolate chip and jammy bits muffins<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"a](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260324_210123743_HDR-scaled-e1775325465414-700x516.jpg\")
<\/a>oatmeal cream pie cake<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"two](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260331_195220751_HDR-scaled-e1775326419172-700x627.jpg\")
<\/a>strawberry vanilla soda<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\nCat Therapy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Fritz](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260331_110601457_HDR-scaled-e1775326333364-700x484.jpg\")
<\/a>neighborhood watch<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260402_163203964_HDR-scaled-e1775326699931-700x547.jpg\")
<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"Fritz](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260401_152057184_HDR-scaled-e1775326535189-700x583.jpg\")
<\/a>Fritz chilling in my sweatshirt<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n![\"fritz](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260402_075734576_HDR-scaled-e1775326609937-700x1095.jpg\")
<\/a>this fucking guy<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hello, friends and enemies. I hope everyone is out there finding ways to be whimsical and get offline now and again. Though you should get online long enough to read my blog (obviously). Where else are you going to get this specific combination of book commentary plus notes on what I’ve figured out about using…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[248],"tags":[141,284,245,247,249,455,409,246,463,433],"class_list":["post-5201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-update","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-baking","tag-books","tag-cats","tag-cooking","tag-linux","tag-mr-fritz","tag-music","tag-stickers","tag-wikipedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3ni6N-1lT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5201"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5233,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5201\/revisions\/5233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"book:](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/IMG_20260327_135605154_HDR-scaled-e1775325528932.jpg\")
<\/a>Kirk wanted to see the new movie Project Hail Mary<\/em>, based on the book of the same name<\/a> by Andy Weir, so we made plans to see that with friends last weekend. My friend said I should read the book before we saw the movie and loaned me her copy two days beforehand, so I locked in and started reading, finishing it about an hour before we left for the theater. I still got it! I enjoyed the book, but I definitely think the movie made me appreciate the book more. I’m not saying the movie is “better” than the book, but it gave more dimension to the story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Project Hail Mary<\/em> is written from the first-person perspective of the protagonist, Ryland Grace, erstwhile middle school science teacher who ends up on a space ship to Tau Ceti in humanity’s only hope for figuring out how they can stop a certain space-traveling organism, called “astrophage,” from eating the sun and dooming humanity. Grace’s internal monologue is very snappy and has a tone of “science: it’s cool *sunglasses emoji*.” This is fine and I did like the book but his point of view can get a little stale in my opinion. The best part of the book is when he encounters an alien and they start trying to figure out each other’s languages. If this book were just for me, that would have been like 80 percent of the story but it’s not (anyway that’s what Native Tongue<\/a> is for). The alien, who Grace nicknames “Rocky” because he’s basically made of rocks, speaks in a language made of whistling noises, which the movie brought to life in a way that my imagination had not. I’m not always good at picturing the things that I read, so it was cool to read the book and immediately see a very beautiful and faithful deception of it on screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n World’s End<\/a> is the second book in Joan D. Vinge’s Snow Queen Cycle<\/em>. This story features one a character that was not especially prominent in The Snow Queen<\/em>, BZ Gundhalinu, and follows his misadventures after leaving the planet Tiamat. BZ’s shithead brothers squandered all of their family wealth then went to a planet called World’s End to hunt for treasure in an area with a reputation for making people insane. BZ, dutiful brother that he is, goes in to find them. At first, I wasn’t really sure what this book had to do with the previous installment other than having a character in the same universe going about his business. However, as the plot progressed, I realized that the purpose of this book in the series is to show how sibyls, a type of oracle that actually connects to a giant galactic computer to answer questions, work in more detail (Moon, the main character in the last book, is a sibyl). I mean, the point of the book is also to entertain us and make us think but, although I really loved The Snow Queen<\/em>, I thought World’s End<\/em> was just okay. Still, I’m interested to see what happens in the next book, which returns focus to Moon on Tiamat. <\/p>\n\n\n\n On Saturday I made a fun trip to Beers Books downtown to sell a significant pile of books after clearing out my shelves, which I mentioned in my last post. I was delighted to get $90 of store credit, which I promptly converted into a stack of books to take home. I need more time in the day to read! Everything is interesting! As much as I like reading ebooks because they are convenient and easy to hold, I really love browsing the bookstore in person and finding stuff I never would have known about otherwise. <\/p>\n\n\n I found a series of albums called the Top 100 best techno<\/a> (volumes 1 to 18, lol) and I haven’t listened to all 18 yet (because 1,800 songs is a lot), but I have very much enjoyed what I’ve listened to so far. It made me think about what kinds of music people get nostalgic for. Lots of people feel sentimental about the music of their teen years. I had recently been reflecting on that and realizing that the music from when I was 17<\/a>, did not fucking speak to me. At the time, I instead developed what I would now acknowledge as an autistic special interest in new wave<\/a>, which was not au courant <\/em>when I was in high school in the very early 2000s. Later, in college, thanks in no small part to high-speed internet access and peer-to-peer file sharing (also lol), I started listening to a lot of electronic music, and this <\/em>is the stuff I associate with youth. I was feeling very good bopping along to these albums recently and I’m really glad I found them! A lot of electronic music is not well-preserved because it didn’t always get published on a CD, so this has been a nice little treat for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Now that the sun is out later in the evening, I decided to get a hat to wear to the pool for water aerobics class. I don’t really wear hats so I had to figure out a good one to get and, of course, settled on the classic Wikipedia Editor hat<\/a>. It feels very nerdy to wear but I also think it absolutely rules. It is the blue of an unclicked hyperlink! It’s ripe with possibility!<\/p>\n\n\n This week I finally learned what an AppImage<\/a> is. I’ve tried to download various programs for Linux and one way to do that is by using an AppImage. I thought this would be an executable installer like on Windows, but it’s actually far simpler than that. Despite this simplicity, I’ve been struggling with figuring out how to make them work. Thankfully, someone on the Linux Mint forums has explained this before<\/a> and said all you have to do is update the properties of the file so that it’s executable, then you double click the AppImage and the program opens. Now I know something! Thank you, Linux users for always answering questions online. They are doing the (non-denominational) lord’s work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On another topic, I’ve been concerned about the state of the internet, so this week I downloaded Wikipedia. Yes, that’s a thing you can do<\/a>. Wikipedia has archives available of just the articles (leaving out the user pages, talk pages, revision history, etc.) and you can view them on your computer through an offline browser. The most common is Kiwix<\/a>, and that’s what I’m using. This is theoretically a very easy process (and I know it is for some people because one friend told me it took hardly any effort), but I had a little bit of trouble that ended up having an easy fix. Once you download Kiwix, you can download Wikipedia (or other archives) through the program itself, but for some reason it was telling me I didn’t have enough space when I absolutely do have enough space. I was able to download a torrent of the Wikipedia archive from the Kiwix library<\/a>\u2014I downloaded English, Spanish, and Icelandic\u2014and then imported that into the Kiwix program and that worked just fine!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am relieved that I’ll have access to information even if we end up subject to horrible age-verification laws that make it impossible to use the internet or if there are widespread power outages that make all the servers go down. I’m not even joking at this point, I think these are things that could really happen, so I’m making a point of downloading whatever important stuff I need from the internet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I know the sticker updates are important to all, so here are the last two weeks’ worth of stickers. As for the exercise itself, I started going to the aqua jogging class and it’s a lot of fun. Running laps (and doing other exercises) in the lazy river is ultimately pretty enjoyable as exercise goes. I am also proud to report that I did a set of five bench presses at 135 pounds this week. When I started in December, I wasn’t really sure about this plan to focus on upper body strength because that’s not usually what I’ve done, but I have to say it is paying off. Shocking that regular training will do that (sarcasm!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n I had a lot of energy in the kitchen recently, which is nice because I like being able to make stuff! A few weeks ago I had the most disappointing so-called pasta primavera at a restaurant and felt that I had to make a better one out of spite. I used this NY Times recipe<\/a> but substituted tortellini for the regular noodles because there are no rules in this life (No Rules!<\/a>). I also made a black bean skillet bake (recipe from The Bean Book<\/a>), to which I added some sweet potato. We ate that with chips kind of like deconstructed nachos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been trying to make more snacks so I have reasonable thinks to munch on. I did a batch of golden chocolate chip muffins<\/a> (the “golden” here refers to them being whole wheat) and replaced some of the chocolate chips with cherry jammy bits<\/a>, and those turned out really good. I tried a granola bar recipe<\/a>; it’s really a nut bar but I just think “nut bar” does not convey the idea of a snack in the way I would like. In any case, I used a mixture of peanuts, macadamia, hazelnut, and pistachio because I had little bits of the last three to use up. They came out tasty but I think I needed to bake it a little longer to get true bar-shaped cohesion. Most of it fell apart, so I mixed all the the rest with the chocolate and cooled that, then snapped it into chunks, which worked just fine. For treats, I made oatmeal cream pie bars<\/a> because I was browsing my blog looking for receipts on some topic, saw it, and was like “wow I gotta make that again,” so I did! Finally, I made this strawberry vanilla bean soda<\/a>. I saw the recipe on instagram and thought that it sounded good and that Kirk would really like it as a person who drinks soda often and who loves strawberry. He said it was very good, so yay. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hello, friends and enemies. I hope everyone is out there finding ways to be whimsical and get offline now and again. Though you should get online long enough to read my blog (obviously). Where else are you going to get this specific combination of book commentary plus notes on what I’ve figured out about using…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[248],"tags":[141,284,245,247,249,455,409,246,463,433],"class_list":["post-5201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-update","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-baking","tag-books","tag-cats","tag-cooking","tag-linux","tag-mr-fritz","tag-music","tag-stickers","tag-wikipedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3ni6N-1lT","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5201"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5233,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5201\/revisions\/5233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Still on that Snow Queen Cycle<\/h3>\n\n\n
<\/a>The law of conservation of (book) mass<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Meanwhile, on the internet<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
\n
Media<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Rampant Consumerism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Computer World<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>Moving It<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a>Kitchen Witchery<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>Cat Therapy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
<\/a><\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<\/a><\/a>