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I put together a short write-up on my mostly successful attempt at taking part in both the looptober and Weird Web October challenges at the same time this year.
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talking about the one job i enjoyed in my former career
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On the last day of every month, I post a brief “rewind” that summarizes what I added to my website that month (blog posts, thoughts on books added to my library section, interesting external links, etc.). Here’s my October 2025 rewind:
October was super busy for me, so I wasn’t able to write as much as I wanted to. I also wasn’t able to get in as much reading as I wanted, but did manage to finish Old Man’s War by John Scalzi and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – I recommend both!
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Just a bit of a diary about the previous week. Mostly playing random itch games and reading some things.
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wonderwander - This is gorgeously mindful! I’:e opened some of the small tales and will be reading through them as the come up in my tabs. (My style of browsing is I open a bunch of tabs and then close them with a hotkey, which then pulls up another tab, at which time I usually decide whenter to dive in, bookmark, or close.)
emma - I am there with Book of Hours; it just sits in the steam library and I stare at it like “I already do this w/ the Internet and already cry at how little I contribute even though I am giving connecting people my all.” Devotion systems feed me.
stefan - Loop 4 hit me where Ripley by Lorn hits me; the dawn coming in after long night. It’s a fantastic feeling and I love when a song brings ne there. Hits like a greeting card from morning mist.
st3phvee - Cozyreads! I remember this one Libby app book club book called Five Wounds that hit an interesting threshold between Old Man’s War and Mexican Gothic, for me. Having “no time for all the things” is such a pain neuron in my body. I cry for 5 minutes in the morning that have have only sixteen hours until I need to have my heart scrub toxins from my brains for another eight hours I’ll never get back. At least my dreams have started to be (if not good at least) on my side; or I am proud how this year my life was able to get it’s dreams and me on speaking terms. Rest up!
cypress - Your intentions will come; keep asking yourself what energizes you, what feels clear, and what feels fuzzy. When one thing feels clear and fuzzy and energizes you, you know the thing you’re looking at is what motivates you. This knowledge will move you into the community spaces you already have with your kids and are only learning how to spill into the rest of you (new!) community. Hearts!
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As for me, someone posted about the hiring arms race. So I wrote a peppy reply to that.
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I saw a few people also doing a wrap up for October, so I thought I’d give it a shot as well!! mostly just summarizing website work + irl things going on + some goals i have
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Monthly wrap-ups are fun! An easy way to keep on top of them is to make a standard template you can copy and paste into each wrap-up post, and then gradually add to the post as the month goes on. I usually only have to add in a few lines of text to mine by the time the end of the month actually arrives. 
Also, I hear you on the frustration of not being able to walk outside when it gets too cold… I live in Canada, and my city does a terrible job of clearing the sidewalks, so it’s usually not even safe to walk outside during winter. One thing I did to help a bit with that was to buy a cheap walking treadmill. They’re super small, easy to stand up against a wall when you’re done. Max speed can go up to a very light jog. I just throw on a podcast or watch something on my computer and stroll away for 45 mins to an hour. It’s not the same as walking outside, of course, but it’s better than nothing!
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New post about a book I’ve been reading
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fellow canadian haha, i’m in ontario so it’s already Arriving and chilly enough to need my gloves. a desk treadmill has been on my wishlist though to get one for home! it’d definitely help, but i’ve been supplementing it with going up and down our stairs which already nukes me after 5 minutes 
that’s a good idea though!! i have it in my obsidian as well so i can probably turn it into template to reuse there. it’s more of an issue of remembering + what to put in as content LOL
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Ooof, I know your pain! I actually dread this time of year … every November / December, I tell myself I’m going to make peace with winter by taking up snowshoeing or cross country skiing, but I’m always beyond desperate to feel the sun again by the time spring comes.
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My latest blog post, in which I voice my reservations about Affinity’s new freemium model…
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this really just amounts to me thinking out loud, but maybe you’re thinking it too
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This reminds me of something a friend told me recently about how when she first met her boyfriend she felt like a “loser” because he had all kinds of hobbies that had nothing to do with his work. I think piano was one of them.
It’s interesting how society encourages us to define our identity in terms of hobby-shaped interests. In a different generation, your identity was your family (son of so-and-so, wife of so-and-so, etc.) and/or your profession, so I think there is a natural instinct to view hobbies (which include both a community element like a family, and a skill element like a profession) as the culturally progressive/modern replacement.
But like, we can probably push back on this idea that having a unique hobby and being good at it is a prerequisite for a good/meaningful life, in the same way that past generations pushed back on family and career success as the core of identity, right?
Hobbies might be one tool we can use to search for “me” but I don’t think they are the ultimate goal of that search, just one way of engaging in it. “I” should be something deeper/more fundamental than like, the amount of time × money I spend on my houseplants.
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Hoping I’m not the only one who has felt this conflict between feeling happy for someone vs. envy at their good fortune… And feeling guilty about the fact that the envy makes my congratulations less “pure”
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i think i’m manly in the “what are my day to day activities so i can keep myself busy and my brain doesn’t fall over on itself thinking about useless things” part of forming my identity. i agree with you who i am is more than my hobbies
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I am beginning to think that having an area of your life where you are pretty good at something (and worked for those skills) might be a prerequisite for a meaningful life. Which goes beyond hobbies while precluding a lot of hobbies that involve just purchasing things.
I’ve worked a lot of jobs with kids and older adults and people from all walks of life, and the people who seemed happiest felt really happy about being good at something - sometimes it was work but usually something else. I think just sticking with any thing long enough to experience a sense of mastery is important. But yeah - in culture right now having hobbies means something about having your life together enough to afford the time/money/energy to put it in a bucket and give yourself an identity.
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The Weekly Wrap Up is posted! Links this week include 2 links to sites with heaps of old time radio shows and a story about the Parallel Parking Championship. I went with a friend to a dog rescue fundraiser and played bingo and I talk a little bit about food benefits and what I did to try and help out. Plus, as usual, I listened to, read and watched things.
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