It's the kind of week where the thermostat and my browser tabs are both fighting for my attention. We got hit by this enormous cold front rolling through starting yesterday (everyone's calling it Winter Storm Elliott) and half the country's flights are getting cancelled while I'm sitting here in three layers trying to keep my hands warm enough to type properly. My office, a converted closet that I generously call a "home office" and nobody else does, has exactly one radiator and it is not doing its job today.
I want to talk about something small and kind of dumb instead of the giant stuff everyone else online is chewing on right now. Yes, I saw the Twitter poll. Yes, something like 57% of the seventeen-plus million people who voted apparently want Musk to step down as head of the company he just spent 44 billion dollars buying. I have opinions about it, sure, but I'm tired of writing about Twitter this month and I'd bet every other tech blog in my RSS reader has already said everything there is to say about it two or three times over already. So let's not do that here.
What's actually got my attention tonight is that the Steam Winter Sale opened up today, and my wishlist has ballooned into something genuinely embarrassing. Forty-one items last I checked, most of which I will not buy, three or four of which I will absolutely buy at 2am while telling myself it's "for later." Discount percentages ticking down on my screen while the actual outdoor temperature does the same thing feels like a strange split-screen kind of evening. Half my brain is doing math on whether a fourteen dollar indie roguelike is worth it, the other half keeps glancing at the weather app.
A small complaint, since I'm apparently in the mood for one: Steam's discovery queue during a big sale is close to unusable once your wishlist gets past a certain size. It just recycles the same handful of bundle pages back at you no matter how many times you hit refresh. Curation at that scale is a genuinely hard problem, I get it. Doesn't make it less annoying at eleven at night.
Space heater update, since a couple of you have actually asked about this in old posts (hi, yes, I know you're reading): the little 1500 watt ceramic one I bought two winters ago is still going strong, still trips the breaker the moment I run it alongside the desktop and a monitor, and I still have not gotten around to fixing the wiring issue that causes that. One of these years I'll deal with it properly instead of just unplugging the monitor for twenty minutes.
The cancellation numbers floating around today are rough, several thousand flights scrubbed nationwide with plenty more expected as the storm keeps pushing east over the next couple of days. I've got family flying out on the 23rd and I already told them to just assume it gets delayed or worse. Better to expect the bad outcome here than get blindsided at the gate. My own travel isn't until after New Year's, so for now I'm mostly watching from the sidelines with a mug of tea that's gone lukewarm twice already because I keep forgetting about it mid-sentence.
If your wishlist looks anything like mine, the sale runs through early January, so there's no real reason to buy everything tonight even though every instinct in my body says otherwise. I already caved on one game a friend's been bugging me about for months and I'm going to call that a win for self-control, considering.
Stay warm out there, wherever "out there" happens to be for you tonight. My radiator situation has not improved even slightly in the time it took to write this post, which honestly tells you everything about my priorities this evening.