Hitting the end of the year and have entirely failed with interesting updates. So, a quick sitrep:

• Finished the year with paintings in 3 shows over 6-ish weeks. Very uneven annual spread which I will attempt to rectify next year. Should be re-showing the coyote show at a cool place TBA around March.

• Finished the last taught module of my MFA. Mid-January starts a roughly 6-month period where I come up with a thesis, research it and eventually create a public-facing outcome. Wish me luck. I might actually try and record some of that, because planning an actual event is kind of interesting?

• I just took possession of keys to get me into an artist studio building for a dedicated oil-painting space - even though I don't use white spirit, I was concerned the paint fumes in general might lead to a brain tumor. I specifically wanted to move into one for a couple reasons that aren't hypochondria related, though: 1. Find more folks to just know and learn from (and this building is in an area with a bunch of other art studio groups, too), and 2. Be able to do Open Studios events. I figure I'll commit to having a space for a year and re-evaluate if it was worth it.

• Secondary benefits to the studio is it's about a 25 minute walk from my house, which feels like an ideal little commute / getting out of the house ritual.

• I've found myself on TWO committees now.

• Committee 1 I was somewhat voluntold into by way of being the one person in the room who knows how to use Canva and Wordpress. Yes, it's the Ikebana International Northern California board for graphics and web.

• Committee 2 is a bit more fun. Coyote Town is a small group of artist ladies (now including me) facilitating a monthly First Fridays and art gallery in Bernal Heights. We just took down our third show, featuring almost entirely hyper-local artists!

• On various trips and visits with the not-Americans this year, we've been floating the idea of moving back home (or somewhere else not in the USA). Still very TBD on that front. As much as I dislike the USA, the actual business of picking up your life and starding over (again) just isn't a lot of fun. I like my friends, I like my house, I like my routine. I constantly worry that we're just boiling frogs who won't know to leave until it's too late, though, but I'm ever aware of the good fortune I have to even have the option to consider. Currently it's "we'll see how the midterms go", but there's always another "we'll see".

• I always read everyone elses weeknotes, still. I did myself a favour a couple months ago, and cleaned up my feedreader so it's almost only humans with blogs that I have to catch up on. I highly recommend a spring-clean of the RSS if you want to rekindle a small-internet vibe in your life, now that you can't just follow everyone you've ever met on a single social network feed.

• Tom: I also am a bran flake lover and I had totally forgotten that fact about myself until you brought it up, but I have to suffer raisin bran because it's hard to get it plain here. I did discover I can buy weetabix locally recently, and that has been very welcome. It's the small things.

• Earlier this year, I had a somewhat bleeding-edge (and eye-bleedingly-expensive) medical procedure for my arthritic hips (caused by congenital hip dysplasia) that involved taking goop from my abdomincal adipose fat and bone-marrow and spinning out my stem cells and some other useful cells, then reinjecting said goop into the joints of my hips and into the femural heads of the bones, with the goal of regrowing cartilage. This all happens while you're awake and it was a treat to watch and learn about. I'm not totally sure if it's worked, because the differences are subtle, but I have been able to get back to walking a good 10 miles on pavement without having to have a lie-down-day on painkillers the next day again! Unfortunately, the procedure also came with physio recommendations so now I have a gym membership and I have to lift heavy things. A true travesty.

• I watched quite a few films and have been reading a decent number of books (I have a storygraph now - fberriman). I finally ditched amazon and kindle for a kobo, and that's helped reinspire my interest in epubs in general.

• Alex and I are going to New Zealand for Christmas and NYE. Send your recommendations on a postcard.

Jessica Mathews / Fortune:
A look at military tech startup Shield AI, recently valued at $5.6B, and its new CEO Gary Steele, who aims to grow annual revenue from $300M to $1B by 2028  —  The X-BAT will be flown using Shield AI's autonomous software, Hivemind.COURTESLY OF SHIELD AI  —  There are plenty …

My thanks to Finalist for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. Finalist is a remarkable, ambitious, and novel app for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac from indie developer Slaven Radic. It’s a planner — a digital take on traditional paper planners. Its motto: “Most productivity apps help you organize tasks. Finalist helps you finish them.”

One aspect of Finalist that makes it different from most to-do/task apps is that instead of setting due dates for tasks, you add tasks to specific days. This really resonates with me. With most apps in this domain, the top-level items are tasks, and tasks have (optional) due dates. With Finalist, the top-level items are days, and days have tasks and events. This might sound like I’m splitting semantic hairs but it gives Finalist a very different feel, one that’s more natural to me. If you’ve got unfinished items from yesterday, Finalist lets you move them all forward to today with one tap. Or, move some forward, and leave others behind. Or, just leave them all behind and move on. Up to you. I like that.

Finalist integrates with the system in all the ways you’d hope, including with the system calendar APIs and the Reminders app. So events in your system calendar and items from Reminders show up on your days in Finalist. Finalist lets you create events (calendar items), reminders (to-dos that are synced with Reminders), tasks (to-dos that exist only in Finalist), journal entries (like notes to yourself), and section headers if you have a busy day and need to group certain items together. Oh, and “habits”, too — recurring to-dos for habits you want to build or break. It sounds like a lot, but it all fits together neatly, covering the gamut of stuff you’d track in a daily paper planner. And everything in Finalist syncs between platforms (iPhone, iPad, Mac) with iCloud. There’s no account to create — it just uses iCloud, which is private and simple.

It’s not minimalist, but it’s not complicated. I’ve had a lot of fun learning to use Finalist just by exploring it. It’s thoughtful and intuitive. Like any civilized app, Finalist’s tags allow you to include spaces and capital letters in tag names, and don’t start with a stupid # character. And, design-wise, Finalist is very handsome — it offers customizable color themes and makes terrific use of the typographic features of the San Francisco system font.

Subscriptions cost $5/month or $30/year. A lifetime license costs just $60. It supports Family Sharing too.

I’m kind of blown away by how robust and thoughtful Finalist is. It’s not a web app with iOS and Mac clients. It’s a suite of native apps designed with care for Apple’s platforms. Auteur software, with a distinctive brand and vision, while remaining idiomatically native. Bravo to Slaven Radic. I strongly encourage you to check it out.

Ryan Gould / Bloomberg:
Private equity firms led by Permira and Warburg Pincus agree to buy Clearwater Analytics, in a deal valuing the financial software maker at $8.4B including debt  —  A group of private equity firms led by Permira and Warburg Pincus has agreed to acquire Clearwater Analytics Holdings Inc …

Ionut Arghire / SecurityWeek:
Echo, which uses AI agents to build Docker images that eliminate vulnerabilities at the source, raised a $35M Series A, bringing its total funding to $50M  —  Echo today announced raising $35 million in a Series A funding round that brings the total raised by the company to $50 million.