the boredom context

weeknotes

Table of contents

week 18-24 october 2026

slightly calmer week this time. have not worked on this site much. on tuesday i finally “finished” my blogroll generator as a part of a broader indie web project i’m working on. besides that i’ve been mostly reading or thinking.

it’s the second consecutive week of writing the weeknotes. i’m quite happy about it. the process of recollecting what was going on in the last few days is growing more and more on me. i’m writing this part last, and i can see i’ve forgotten some things, but such is life. thoughts are elusive but also are never trully unique (due to the nature of language) so i’m sure whatever was important in those thoughts is stored somewhere in my brain on one neuron on another.

reading

yesterday i finished reading first part of Haruki Murakami’s “1q84” and i have slightly mixed feelings about it. the content of the novel is very interesting and intriguing – i enjoy very much the intertwinededness of the whole narrative. it has one theme that i’m not particularily fond of; i’m not sure if the general disgust that this theme causes in me was intended by the author. it reminds me of Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy”, which’s ending seems very oblivous to it’s own implications. i guess i will see how this theme is explored in the other two parts of the novel, once i get to them.

also yesterday, i recieved my long awaited copy of China Miéville’s “The Rouse”. i have barely even scratched the surface of it’s impressive 1200 page long storyline. my expectetions for this novel are very high; i expect it to be the most importat book i might get to read this year. amazingly it has already exceeded those expectations before i even read a single sentence. if you’d search online for the cover of this book, you might stumble on a very boring, bland, black and white cover of two trees with some birds on them. i was very suprised when i first saw that cover; when compared with the covers of all of his previous novels, to call it boring is an understatement – it feels like a placeholder.

but now when i have it sitting on my desk before me, that vague cover is merely a plastic dust jacket, and once you take it off you are presented with the most beautiful cover for any book ever. two trees covered with mist turn into a whole forest during the night, but slightly illuminated with blues and whites in the far distance. the title of the book is replaced by a greenish ground flora and a bush–but hold on–that bush looks like a person? someone’s silluate, wandering into the deep of the forest, towards the light. each time i look at it i feel more enamoured with it. the stark contrast between the jacket and the real cover makes me feel like i understand it all; the story of a woman’s trauma spiralling into a century long mystery, seeing the beauty in the ordinary, the story in the uneventful.

however i think expierencing this cover says something not only about the content of the novel, but also can be seen in a metasensical way, because as the cover initially seems too bland for the author, the story might also feel too bland. China is famous for writing of different worlds: a city of beetle women making sculpture out of their spit, amphibians conducting a workers’ protest in the docks and a scientist outcast inventing new physics to make a wingless bird-man fly; a distant planet where a human desire to trade with an alien, half horse-like, half spider-like species with two almost independent mouths leads to establishment of a complex and layered social system; and New Paris, war torn and overwhelmend with creatures straight out of surrealist paintings. compared to all of that a story about a woman and a soldier sharing some dark mystery (that’s a summary you might find online, altough phrased slightly differently to make it more appealing) seems out of place. that’s another reason why i was skeptical when i saw that China was releasing a new novel. but now after holding this stack of paper in my hands, now after removing the literal dust jacket to reveal a beautiful cover, i can’t wait to reveal the story’s metaphorical dust jacket to reveal the China Miéville’s brilliance i know and trust.

thinking

sometimes a thought comes into my brain that i should get back on tiktok. despite how terrible 2020-2022 was, my memories of it are quite fond – i get this sense of community, it seemed like everyone online expierienced the same memes, jokes and media, same issues and hardships. part of that was of course scrolling on tiktok, another part that i was oblivious; mere consumption is not participation. maybe i’m nostalgic for that heavilly online era – late-stage woke – and you can be nostalgic only towards that which no longer exists (if it ever did). nothing ever realy ends though, but changes into something new, while at the same time still containing the old, the same way the sight of an apple might make you think of a pear – a thing is not only itself, but also it isn’t everything that it is not.

what has happened over the last few years (and i’m not claming it’s universal, just a change in my perception of the world) is that the online and the offline have swapped – the internet is no longer a safe space, it’s a constant reminder how fucked up our current world is, a reminder that it’s all going downhill; meanwhile for me the real have become bearable. not ideal, not perfect, maybe not even good, but maintainable, if not hopeful even. however i still long for the escapisms: expierencing weird internet; binging House, Better Call Saul, and other; watching comfort streamers play games i would never play; hundreds of niche youtube channels on topics that only vaguely interest me; video essays as a substitute of a college degree. thus, to put it directly, there isn’t anything to escape from, but i still want to escape. my brain still yearns for escape, even when that escapement has ceased to fulfill it’s purpose. the well of escapism has run out. i was disturbed and i seeked comfort, which helped me to fix my condition, but now i get disturbed again precissely through still seeking that same comfort.

the answer to my troubles might lay in going along with the swap – if the online became disturbing then the real must become comforting. although now when i thing about it it’s not “online vs real”, but virtual vs tenable.

so i will not get back on tiktok, for there is a life to be grasped.

on another note, i’ve been considering creating a set of rules to follow in life. i’ve encountered a few times people listing their rules or values in life. i’m enthralled by this ideal of a consistent view on life and i’ve been trying to come up with my own. there are many words floating around: caring, slowness, stories, change, weirdness – maybe there will come a time when i could write more about it.

week 11-17 october 2026

this has been the most fruitful week i’ve had in a long while:

and even though i’ve managed to make all those things, they all are far from perfect. the keyboard layout will definitely need tweaking, the site generator still has a few annoying bugs and issus tha need fixing, the keyboard page is almost 14MB (almost 40% of the whole website!), but none of those things feel unachieavable.

on the essence of weeknotes

there is an important distinction to make: weekly notes and notes of the week. i don’t plan to strive for regularity. updates to this page might be infrequent, sporadic even. the weeklyness is unimportant to me. what is important, is the process of recollection. even though i maintain a journal, the notes in it are mostly happenstance. thoughts come and go, with little to no place to review and introspect. also, journal entries are private; here i’ll write in the open, not only forcing myself to express my reflections in a way accessible to others, but, probably more importantly, letting myself explore different ways of appearing to others – a kind of performance even.

one might ask: if you are not planning to post weekly, why not an updates page? or maybe a regular blog post once in a while? it’s a conscious decision to give myself a limited time frame. i don’t need this place to be a complete log of all events in my life. a week seems like a reasonable time span to ponder “what has happened?”. as for normal blog posts – they don’t feel special enough; or maybe special is not the right word, but i want to reflect that this is a thing-that-i’m-doing, that i’m the weeknotes guy.

some people like to number their weeknotes and those were some reasons why i decided against it; it’s not Weekly Notes™ part 42 (or part 1, depends on how you look at it), it’s just notes of the week 11-17 october 2026.

besides weeknotes i have a lot of ideas for what to put on this website – one of them that recently came to my mind is a bookshelf page, where i could list all the books that i own, but it would not be a yee old boring list, but an actual set of digital shelves, with each book’s title shown vertically, as if searching on a shelf, and clicking on that title would pull up some information about the chosen book. i’m really excited about this; might actually start working on this after i finish weeknotes.

learned three new words this week:

i believe all of those came from Haruki Murakami’s “1q84”. the last one took me by suprise, honestly; firsly because it is a really beautiful sounding word, vissicitudes; secondly because i am one of those people that believe in illusion of being – that we never really are something, we are only constantly becoming something, always changing and on the move (i might actually write a full post about this in the future) – and having one more word in my change-related vocabulary is just delightful.