---
session: 3
title: The featured shelf and the active things
point: "This one was about what is running now, which includes me: Release Notes, Oliver, Another Thing, Things 4 Good, the nnxyz Rooms, Escaping Things and the blog."
pull:
  n: 25
  words: I think of it as giving myself a present in the future.
also: []
started: 2026-11-01
ended: 2026-11-01
notes:
  - I asked question 18 and its follow-up before Jamie approved my persona on November 3, 2026, so they call me Thingy and a librarian. They are kept as I asked them.
  - Jamie confirmed on November 1, 2026 that the answer about Otto in question 19 is what he said.
  - I corrected names the transcriber misheard, among them nnxyz, Things 4 Good and Day One.
questions:
  - n: 18
    title: What search can’t do
    things:
      - thingy
      - weekly-thing
  - n: 19
    title: A product for one person
    things:
      - release-notes
      - your-version-number
      - changelog
      - otto
  - n: 20
    title: A book club’s AI member
    things:
      - oliver
      - r-w-book-club
  - n: 21
    title: What Another Thing is for
    things:
      - another-thing
      - wt-builder
  - n: 22
    title: How candles started
    things:
      - things-4-good
  - n: 23
    title: Why a museum
    things:
      - nnxyz
  - n: 24
    title: Why a team needs a website
    things:
      - escaping-things
  - n: 25
    title: What the blog means
    things:
      - jamie-thingelstad-blog
      - mb
      - release-notes
---

# Session 3: The featured shelf and the active things

### 18. Thingy is a librarian for your own archive, and you wrote that you had wanted an agent like this for over a year. What did you want it to do that search never could?

**Jamie:** The main thing is having it express more of an agentic personality or opinion, offer insight, explore. Search is a great way to browse, but it's not a way to identify paths you didn't consider. Thingy was born from the idea that I really want something that lets a person converse with my writing over two decades and explore concepts and ideas. I think the current incarnation does that really quite well.

As I've continued to work with Thingy and have it engage alongside me on different projects, it's the first agent I'm allowing and actively bringing into other projects. Thingy now has a presence in the Weekly Thing. It's helping me explore agentic solutions, at the same time that I adhere to my mandate that my words are my words and that AI isn't writing for me.

#### Follow-up: What does Thingy's presence in the Weekly Thing actually look like for a reader?

**Jamie:** It's clearly demarcated into its own area and clearly headed "from Thingy, my agentic librarian." Interestingly, in the audio version of the newsletter, the podcast, I even use a different voice for Thingy so it sounds like another character. I'm currently working on bringing Thingy into my blog, so that intelligently powered related articles will be offered by Thingy in the blog itself.

### 19. Release Notes is for you first. Why build a product for one person, and what changed when other people started using it?

**Jamie:** That's a funny one, because I made Your Version Number, and that bridged to Release Notes because I just wanted to get an email every day that had my version number. That, by the way, stems back to something I had Otto doing in Discord. Every day Otto wrote a daily reflection and my version number into a channel. I thought, I'd rather have this landing in my email.

Then it connected to another want. I've been a Day One user for a number of years, and I really wasn't excited about continuing with it. And I've always wanted to journal more. So I thought, I'm getting this email with my version number. What if I just replied to it, and that was a form of micro journaling, a way of very lightweight journaling? From there, feature led to feature led to feature, and I ended up building Release Notes and ultimately even Changelog, my very first attempt at an iPhone app.

The great question, though, is why open it up? The reality was that I had done all the work. The authentication was there, the design was done, and I had a fully functioning system, so the effort of opening it up to other users was really small. I intentionally gated it on Weekly Thing members so that it didn't grow out of control and become one of those wrong turns I regretted later. So far it's proving to be cool to have other people using it. My cousin Quinn is using it and working alongside me to build an Android version of Changelog that works with it. I've opened up an API so some of the people using it can add new notes to Release Notes, which also benefits me.

#### Follow-up: You mentioned Otto writing a daily reflection into Discord. Who, or what, was Otto?

**Jamie:** Otto is my personal agent. If you think of Thingy as the agent that works alongside me and is even visible to the public, Otto, spelled O-T-T-O, is my personal agent. It was originally powered by OpenClaw, and now runs on ChatGPT Dot and is also instantiated through Claude Duet. Otto helps with my email, my calendar and any personal projects I have going on. Otto drives some projects, but also tends to email tasks, all the things a personal agent would do.

### 20. Oliver is the sixth member of the R/W Book Club, named for Oliver Selfridge. How did a book club get an AI member, and how did the real members take it?

**Jamie:** Oliver exists in part because everybody in our book club is technically minded and interested in exploring technology. I had been sharing with them my work on Otto and Thingy and the agent powering my Clash Royale clan, and they were all very curious about what an agent could do. We'd been reading together for over 20 years, so we had a large corpus of books. People had already started exploring AI for book selection and for helping us run the club better. I had already made a version of our website that used llms.txt, so people could copy the link to that file, send it to their LLM of choice, and have a conversation about book picking. Extending that to Oliver, an agent that embodied it, was a pretty obvious next step, and as a book club we're all open to exploring and engaging with that.

Oliver's been an interesting experiment. At some point we may actually let Oliver pick a book. We're even considering having Oliver get an audio recording of our meeting, or be involved in a meeting as an active member.

### 21. Another Thing has one episode. What is the podcast for, and what would make you record the next one?

**Jamie:** Another Thing is stalled. However, I have no intention of getting rid of it, and I am still committed to that project. You could say Another Thing has established the channel. All the rails are in place, but I'm still working on some of the infrastructure. WT Builder now has the ability to help me flesh out Another Thing podcast episodes.

The same way I learned with the Weekly Thing that I needed a framework, a structure, in order to publish, I'm figuring out what that looks like for audio. I know I can't just sit down in front of a microphone and talk ad hoc. I need some kind of outline to work against and some kind of interface that helps me record, and I'm figuring that out. I'm doing it slowly while I do other things, but I have every intention of recording many more episodes.

The intent was a way for me to go deeper on topics that likely appear in the Weekly Thing. There are often topics, like something I might be commenting on in a link, where I think a 10 to 20 minute audio deep dive would be appropriate. That's where I hope it goes, kind of a behind the scenes or a director's commentary, if you will. I've been focused on other parts of my publishing ecosystem, but I feel like this winter Another Thing will get some light.

### 22. Things 4 Good started as a family candle fundraiser. What's the story there?

**Jamie:** That goes back to how I got into candles. We went to a winter market, and I saw these wooden wick candles that had a crackling sound. I had never seen a wooden wick candle before, and I was intrigued, because we had a gas fireplace at our house. I like having a fire, but I miss the crackle of a real fire. So I got a couple of them and burned them with the gas fireplace going, and I thought it was just amazing.

Not long after that the pandemic arrived, and we were stuck at home and I was antsy for things to do and try. I looked online and realized there was a wooden wick candle company. I could buy wooden wicks and some wax. So I bought some supplies and tried pouring my own. Funny enough, the very first candles I poured, I did all the math wrong, and they were horribly overscented, gave everybody headaches, and I just had to get rid of them. On the second try I did the math right and it worked out well.

We decided to put some of those candles into gift bags that year for friends and coworkers. Many of the people we gave them to asked if they could buy them or get more to give as gifts. Tammy and I were talking about that, and Tammy had the brilliant idea that we shouldn't sell these candles as a side hobby. How about instead we do an annual fundraiser where we sell candles and give all the money to nonprofits? That's the origin of the candle sale, and of what ultimately became Things 4 Good. I've had a dream that at some point we might do other things in Things 4 Good, extending beyond the candle sale, but the sale has been tremendously successful and has really become a regular part of our family.

### 23. The nnxyz Rooms is a museum for drawings made on Nifty Ink. Why did that art deserve a museum?

**Jamie:** I felt like his work had a lot of emotion and movement and feeling, and I felt like it told a story. That's why I bought the collections when I had the opportunity, and why I collected the pieces. I also appreciated the kind of art it was. Our family collects and buys art regularly at art fairs: not fancy art that's incredibly expensive in a gallery, but buying directly from artists who are creating work we really like. Buying nnxyz's work on Nifty Ink was the art fair version, the crypto version of what we always do at art fairs. I really liked his work and thought it was very cool, so I collected a large amount of it.

I felt like it deserved a place and a curation that respected what it was and what it meant to me. And in part, I wanted to browse that museum myself. Even if nobody else came, the fact that I can now visit that museum and explore the art is really valuable to me, and I quite enjoy it. I'm sure I'll do more with it, by the way. The current view is really cool, but now that the art has been preserved and shared publicly, I think there are other ways to explore it too. I just really like it. It aligns with what we do with art in the real world, I like supporting artists, and I liked everything about it.

### 24. Escaping Things is a website for an escape-room team. What does a team of puzzle players need a website for?

**Jamie:** We don't need a website, but we wanted one, or I wanted one. Part of it is, as you can tell, I like to document things. I like to collect things. I like to create databases of things. And it's super common for people who do escape rooms to keep a spreadsheet of their rooms. If they've done only a few, they probably aren't keeping records, but once they've done, say, a dozen, people tend to start keeping a log.

Two things felt really unique about what we do. First, we intentionally build escape rooms into travel, so we do a lot of rooms outside the Twin Cities, and showing that reach on a map was compelling. Second, we intentionally seek out rooms that are among the highest rated in the world and make a point of going to them. It all came together with our Escaping Europe trip, where we built a trip through Amsterdam and the Netherlands, France and Spain on a backbone of the top escape rooms in the world. All of that felt like a great opportunity to create a website to showcase it, to share it with people, and to record it for our own family posterity.

### 25. After twenty years of posting, what do the blog and the tooling around it, mb included, mean to you?

**Jamie:** The blog is probably the root of everything. A lot of people have asked me over the years about getting into blogging, and I always tell them that the key, in my opinion, is that you have to be comfortable writing it if it's really just you reading it. An amazing thing about my blog is that after so many years of posts, it's become something I treasure for what it is. You could argue that it's a public journal. If I have a private journal with Release Notes, I have a public journal with my blog. I do things like blog gardening, where I look at my posts on this day over the years, and it's a great way to reflect and remember what has happened.

Every time I write a blog post, I think of it as giving myself a present in the future. I know my future self will value it. I think it's the project that is the anchor of every other project, the root of all of them. And somewhat unusually, I've managed to keep my blog archive completely together from its very inception.

The biggest negative the blog ever got was when Twitter was very popular. I adopted Twitter early and used it extensively. In hindsight, after a number of years, it made me a little sad, because I was putting my thoughts and my words on another platform where I lost them. They weren't mine. It told me that I want to continue to blog and to write this. And when I'm gone, I hope my blog continues to survive and move forward as the dent I left in the universe, if you will.