Autumn Into Winter: Keeping the Machine Running While Living Inside It
This stretch—October through December—felt different from the summer. Less exploratory, more about consolidation. Fewer new threads spun up, more existing ones tightened, maintained, and brought to something that actually resembles closure.
On the personal maintenance front, a lot of quiet but important things happened. Medical appointments were booked, attended, and completed without drama. Paperwork moved. In the same vein, small cultural anchors were put in place: a ballet booked, exhibitions visited, a conscious effort to keep some beauty and curiosity in the calendar while everything else kept moving.
Food and making stayed present, but grounded. Wine was bottled, corks replaced, and Montmartre’s harvest became less of a postcard idea and more of a lived moment. It wasn’t about “projects” so much as keeping continuity with things that take time and repetition to mean anything.
Work-wise, this period was unmistakably about density. On the main activyy alone, the cadence was .. intense, but transforming into something structured and documented.
In parallel, PBN kept maturing rather than expanding. Ontologies were refined, visualised, cleaned. Deliverables were narrated properly, not just shipped. EVA was cleaned, documented, and published. Zenodo became a real distribution channel rather than a checkbox. Bots, explorers, articles, and sites were pushed into public existence with enough context to be usable by someone else. Less “look what we built”, more “here’s how this fits”.
On the hardware side, work with the W project went deep. This wasn’t a quarter of sketches—it was boards, adapters, piezos, FPGA layouts, schematics, pulser and AFE work, testing, fixes, and retesting. Code was exercised with real people, real setups, real constraints.
pic0rick followed a similar pattern: fewer changes, but the right ones. Markings fixed. Pinouts corrected. IOs remapped. The kind of work that only shows up when someone else uses the board and doesn’t have to ask questions.
Alongside all that, life continued to be lived deliberately. People were seen. Meals were shared. Games were played—sometimes complex, sometimes absurd. Trips happened: London, Marseille debates, seaside breaks. Family events anchored the calendar. Evenings filled with Werewolves, Faraway, MTG, Tiermondopoly. Advent of Code quietly started in December, because some rituals are worth keeping even when time is tight.
Reading and watching followed a similar arc: fewer items than in summer, but denser ones. Noon, Le Guin, overload and systems thinking echoed what was happening elsewhere. Films and series landed less as escapism and more as texture.
If the summer was about momentum, this season was about holding form. Making sure things didn’t sprawl, didn’t rot, didn’t stay half-said. It was about tending systems—technical, professional, personal—so they remain usable.
