After we’ve made hundreds of candles for the Candle Fundraiser it is fun to casually pour a bunch of individual scents to try out. Ten scents poured tonight for the 2025 Scent Survey.

Dozens of handmade candles with wooden wicks in purple and green containers labeled Things 4 Good, arranged on an apple-print tablecloth.

“Oh, I know I have that Pokémon card in here somewhere. Just let me look in this pile.” 😳😆 at MN Poke Pulls TCG.

I don’t know when or what app did this but I finally purged a bunch of Twitter “profile” values from my Contacts database. Little housecleaning. Related.

MnTech Elevate was hosted in the Delta Sky360° Club at U.S. Bank Stadium and we got to take tours of the stadium including the locker room, going onto the field, seeing the Gjallarhorn, and the nicest couches you could watch a football game from.

Minnesota Vikings locker room with wood-paneled lockers bearing player nameplates and a Legends Start Here mural aboveMinnesota Vikings locker room ceiling with a large Viking horn sculpture and Legends Start Here mural with team logo on the wall belowMan in a navy vest taking a selfie on the field at U.S. Bank Stadium, home of the Minnesota Vikings, with other visitors behind himMinnesota Vikings logo painted on the turf at U.S. Bank Stadium with the empty field and goalposts in the background.Purple player benches on the sideline of U.S. Bank Stadium field with Minnesota Vikings branding visible in the stands behindGjallarhorn suspended by ropes inside U.S. Bank Stadium overlooking the Minnesota Vikings football field and purple seating bowlLuxury suite seating with dark leather couches and glass railings overlooking the Vikings field at U.S. Bank StadiumHundreds of miniature football helmets from various college and pro teams mounted in a grid on a white wall at U.S. Bank Stadium

We had a great TeamSPS presence at MnTech Elevate tonight celebrating the local technology community and recognizing Tekne award winners! 🏆

Group of about 13 colleagues posing together at MnTech Elevate event inside a stadium venue with Vikings field visible in background

Selfie with Joel Crandall, CEO of MnTech, moments before we kick off the very first MnTech Elevate event!

Two men smiling for a selfie inside US Bank Stadium at the MnTech Elevate event, one wearing a Vikings jersey and blazer

Paragraph has now merged with Mirror and I decided to set up cross-posting to give it a try. Paragraph will pull posts from my RSS feed to show on my publication there as well.

Farewell Ponder and Weekly Thing Forum

In September 2023, I introduced the Weekly Thing Forum with the hope of creating a space for readers of the Weekly Thing to connect with each other and continue topics that may have started in the Weekly Thing. The Forum itself is hosted on Ponder, which aligns closely with the ethos of the IndieWeb and the Weekly Thing. Recently, Good Enough, the makers of Ponder, announced that Ponder is being shut down. With that, the Weekly Thing Forum is also going to come to an end.

In the two years of the Forum, we had 86 people join and 107 discussions. We shared some exclusive POAPs, experimented with some different things, and did many other things. I briefly considered finding a new home for the Forum, but nothing made much sense. If folks really have an itch for that, there is the (very quiet) Weekly Thing subreddit at r/WeeklyThing.

I want to thank the gang at Good Enough for taking a run at something like Ponder. I also applaud that they gave everyone the ability to download a usable HTML archive of any groups on Ponder, as well as to delete their group’s data. They kept their focus on those core values even when things weren’t going the way they wanted, and I applaud that.

I will bring back the “Reply All” section whenever it makes sense. That will bring conversations that arrive in my mailbox from issues back into the newsletter at times. As a final nod and Thank You to Ponder, I decided to create a Farewell Ponder POAP and share it with users of the service. If you would like one, send me an email and I’ll get you a claim code!

Burning this many wooden wick candles at once is actually pretty noisy — so much crackle! 😮