I really enjoy the Apple News+ game, Quartiles. It’s fun and challenging and I’ve started to mix it into my daily morning routine.

Got the email that my latest journal article was accepted for publication. I’ll soon have one more entry on my Google Scholar profile.

I bought my first Retro 51 pen at Origami Ink in Asheville, an amazing pen shop that was destroyed in the Hurricane Helene flooding. So when I saw that Retro 51 was offering a special edition to support Origami Ink, it was an instant purchase. Amazing pen. Cool design. Great cause.

Just found out that my favorite pen store in Asheville, Origami Ink, was completely destroyed in the flood. I assumed that was the case because they were located in Biltmore Village, but the owners posted an update today confirming the sad news. Such nice people. I’m devastated for them.

It’s funny to see how a post shows up when crossposting. In Micro.Blog, it’s a link with some tiny thumbnails. In Bluesky, a link with all four images. In Threads, a link with a preview, but the featured image is my Micro.Blog fish avatar.

In general, I avoid Twitter and Facebook. But Twitter is still useful for live sports. And Facebook is useful for checking on people after natural disasters.

Really enjoyed The Armageddon Protocol by Dan Moren. 📚

Expected Helene to be bad, but we don’t normally get hit this hard in Columbia. Lots of trees down and power outages across South Carolina.

For several reasons, I decided to work from home today. I know that many (most?) people love it, but I really, really don’t enjoy working from home.

The NY Times on the White Sox' historically bad season:

Baseball is a cruel game. Other sports cap your suffering at a reasonable number. In the N.F.L., the most games you could ever lose in a season is 17. In the N.B.A., you could theoretically lose 82. (The record is 73.) But baseball’s season is relentless: 162 games long… If you lose your grip, as the White Sox did immediately… you can fall through an eternal void of losing. And every day, in the middle of that falling, reporters will stick microphones in your face to ask you how it feels to be plunging through the eternal void.