Weeknotes (through Jan. 30, 2026)

• I've been playing Magic: The Gathering for the past week. Maybe two. I kinda lost track of time.

  Started out by watching my buddies Prince and Xander play Commander. I took a crack at it, but had no idea what I was doing.

  I jumped into MTG: Arena after that. It was a good place to start learning the cards and mechanics.

  I've since moved back to Commander. I made an initial deck ("mono white") and got my ass kicked. I've put together a new deck that's blue/black with Yuriko as the commander. We'll see how it goes.

• Shout out to Prince and Xander for being super patient with me as I learn how to play, btw.

• As part of the Magic rabbit hole, I've started working on a webpage/site/app to help me keep track of everything in a game. The basic idea is to load a deck and then keep track of which cards are in my hand, on the battlefield, etc... It'll track when I do things so I can keep up with all the actions I need to take (e.g. drawing a card after combat if I did damage to a player).

  Phase two will be setting it up to help me make decisions about what to do. I'm researching how to make a Rules Engine for that.

• I played my sax for the first time in forever. I was on a discord voice channel when folks started breaking out guitar. Figured I might as well join with the only instrument I can play.

  I played like 10 notes for the bit. I muted after than and noodled around for 20 minutes. My lip hurts now. But, in a good way.

  I put the horn on a stand instead of back in the case. That way, it's at least out and I see it.

  I also realized I could just practice fingerings when I'm watching videos or whatever.

Thursday, Jan. 29, 2026

• Played some Magic with my Yuriko Ninja deck. Didn't win, but I learned a lot and have tweaks to make to it. I think it's got a chance.

Friday, Jan. 30, 2026

• Welp. The moth is basically over. Good news is that it felt like a month. I'm still appreciating the fact that I can feel time again now that I'm off lithium.

• I've started work on my Magic: The Gathering Tools Site. This is the first thing I've really put on the new al9000.com domain.

  I really like the way the name sounds. Way less formal than just my name (especially with the middle initial). It also feels less braggy when linking to it. Like, it's more about whatever's on the page than splitting focus to me based on the domain name.

• Working on the mtg tools has been fun. It's giving me a chance to play around with bitty a lot. I ended up making a test suite for one of the tools. The plan is to integrate the structure directly into bitty to provide a built-in test runner.

  I'm really liking that idea and it'll help encourage a nice separation of concerns between data and layout.