Excited to see that Perrserker has arrived in Pokemon TCG Pocket! The full art featuring a Viking Ship is incredible. Looking forward to collecting these digital ones along with my complete set.
My cousin Quinn @quinntchrest and I taking in our first game at the new St. Thomas Anderson Arena tonight!
The print copies of the Yearly Thing arrived from Lulu! I’m very happy with how the formatting worked with Vellum and the production from Lulu is terrific. It is really cool to explore the year of the Weekly Thing like this. You can buy your own on Lulu.
We enjoyed watching Finch tonight. The story was surprisingly touching given that it is just one character, Finch, with a dog and a robot (two robots actually). 🍿
We had a great time at the TCG only Minnesota Card Show at Canterbury today.
- I got the five remaining cards I needed for the illustration set I was collecting.
- I traded for a great set of Eevee evolution promo cards.
- Tyler was on a mission and got a Bubble Mew!
Candlelight vigil in our neighborhood. 🕯️
We went to Yum! Kitchen to celebrate twenty years of this being one of our regular restaurants. I noted our first visit on my blog in January 2006. Mazie is still off in Barcelona but we made sure to recognize this milestone.
Orka Bar
We were watching Shark Tank one night and Orka Bar was one of the products. I thought it sounded good and the reaction on the show was that these were incredible. I placed an order while the show was on, like many thousands of others did apparently. It took a couple of months for them to work through the backlog of orders but today we got our order!
The product is a high-protein ice cream treat that actually tastes good. I tried it and it really is very tasty. The main ingredients are egg whites and cream with whey protein. It has a thin chocolate shell. It tasted really good. My biggest challenge was the chocolate shell is so thin that it cracks a lot and was a touch messy.
They are expensive and being a frozen item hard to ship. They sent it with dry ice and a styrofoam cooler. If these start appearing in the frozen aisle of our grocery store though I will probably get them on a semi-regular basis.
Amazon Spending
Peter Rukavina posted a graph of his Amazon spending and I couldn’t resist taking a look at my data. You can easily request this from Amazon in the “Privacy Center”. A quick pivot table later and I had this graph. I’m omitting the actual scale on purpose — the shape does enough to tell the story.
I’m not that clear on what happened in 2015 that drove a big jump that stayed that way. My family comments that I purchase a lot from Amazon and I thought they were overstating it, but maybe not.
Honestly I was truly surprised at the frequency and amounts.
POAP 7554247 at Yearly Thing 2025.
I made a book — Yearly Thing 2025
For a couple of years now I’ve been wondering if there was a book version of the Weekly Thing. I had in my mind the idea of an almanac. Something that captured some period of time and put information in a different format. This year this idea surfaced again and unlike the last couple of times I could not shake it. It seemed this thing needed to happen! And here it is, the Yearly Thing 2025: Agents, Attention, Artifacts.
The Yearly Thing 2025 places all 324 links that I commented on across 31 issues of the Weekly Thing in 2025 into one volume. It is organized into 10 topic focused chapters:
- The AI Revolution
- The Craft of Software
- Privacy, Security and Encryption
- Cryptocurrency and Web3
- The Apple Ecosystem
- The Open Web and Blogging
- Attention, Algorithms and Digital Life
- Leadership and Building Products
- Health, Connection and Society
- Tools, Productivity and Delights
There is also an Introduction, Weekly Thing Index, and an Afterword.
This repackaging of the Weekly Thing gives an opportunity to see topics in a different light. The eBook version maintains all the hyperlinks so you can go to articles and navigate as you like. The printed book references the issue each item was in, which you can then easily scan a QR code to go to via the Weekly Thing Index if you wish to.
I hope this is a way for people to go back to topics and reflect on them more. Make some notes in the margin on the print. All while supporting the Weekly Thing Supporting Membership program — with all proceeds from the sale of the Yearly Thing 2025 supporting great digital non-profits.
- The paperback is available for $30 on Lulu.
- The eBook is available for $20 on Gumroad. The eBook will give you an archive that you will find formats for Apple Books, Kindle, Nook, Android, etc.
- Purchasers of the printed book that would like the eBook as well can contact me and I will get you the eBook files.
- Anyone that purchases the Yearly Thing 2025 in the first 2 months will receive a special Yearly Thing 2025 POAP to collect!
This may be the first of many Yearly Things that you can collect over time. 🤔
Tyler and I made our way out to Chaska to check out The Forge. This was on our list of card shops to explore. Unfortunately the Pokemon inventory was nearly non-existent. They had a ton of other gaming stuff though. They only had a couple dozen cards but I did find two to add to my binder.
I just finished up this Weekly Thing adjacent project that I started over Christmas. Just a bit more to finalize distribution! I’m looking forward to sharing this. All the proceeds will be going to the Weekly Thing Supporting Membership program. 🙌
We watched Knives Out tonight, again. Tyler hadn’t seen it and now that there are two sequels we’re going to watch those together. I didn’t remember that much after seven years so was still fun to watch again. 🍿
Tammy and I saw Marty Supreme at the Edina 4 theatre this afternoon. Fantastic performance from Timothée Chalamet. The story is “loosely based” on the life of Marty Reisman.
World Snow Celebration
It was a very cold morning but we made it out to see the World Snow Celebration and the snow sculptures. Teams were working towards the deadline of completing their sculptures. They were amazing. We also did the Peoples Choice votes. I voted for Team Falcon of Mongolia and Tammy went for Team Warm Your Cold Brits.
Stillwater.
Delicious Gingerbread Latte and breakfast at Mon Petit Cheri in Stillwater.
