Update for 11/5/2017

Life management

😕

Well, thanks to my continuing irregular sleep and poor time management, my life is feeling even more stalled. But I’m still experimenting to find solutions.

Project generator

😕

I progressed about a millimeter.

Sometimes when my online friends tell me they’re procrastinating on something, I tell them to stream it. My thought is that if it’s not too distracting, streaming can be motivating and focusing. You have an audience that at least somewhat expects you to work on the thing you’ve announced as the purpose of the stream.

Accountability is mostly what these update posts are for, but clearly they’re not enough. I need scheduled events that I can organize my life around. In high school I always took a study hall for this reason. At home I’d procrastinate on homework, but my mind saw study hall as a box of time meant for work, and there I got things done.

So I’m thinking maybe I should take my own advice and finally get around to streaming. Sigh, I guess I’ll look into that this week. It’s kind of scary though.

Beliefs report

🤔

I didn’t have much time during lunch last week, so instead of trying to shove writing into those few minutes, I read a manga instead (see below).

I’m thinking that either I need to fix my lunch practices or pick a different time to do this project. Maybe I should alternate between this and the project generator.

Movies

🙄

Movies have been coming out that I want to see, mainly Blade Runner 2049 and Thor: Ragnarok. But I haven’t gotten around to them.

Books

🤔

What I have done is listen to things. I’ve concluded that audiobooks are about the only thing I can reliably complete in life.

Halloween morning was gloomy and overcast, so on my way to work I listened to “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe. It’d been forever since I’d read it, and I remembered barely anything. It surprised me by summoning tears somewhere in the middle, thinking about the narrator wrestling with his grief over Lenore.

Reading about “The Raven” led me to “The Imp of the Perverse,” so I listened to that at lunch. That one was interesting because I first heard that concept from C. S. Lewis, and I wondered if Lewis had picked it up from Poe. It also reminded me that a lot of observation and psychologizing and philosophizing goes into quality fiction. It doesn’t just report a stream of imaginary events.

That night I finished Peter Clines’ The Fold, the sci fi horror I started the week before. I was pleased it went the general direction I was hoping. It’d be nice if he continued the series, but he’d have to really vary the pattern after this book. It wasn’t a copy of the first one, but without a change in the overall scenario the commonalities could get monotonous.

Now I’m on Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks, another one that Audible has enabled me to get around to. It’s the start of a sci fi series (The Culture) that encompasses some of the technology Isaac Arthur talks about. I was ignorant of the premise going in, but it turns out to be relevant to my interests–a conflict between pro-machine and pro-organism viewpoints. Should we let life find its own balance, or do we want AIs to impose order?

Some articles and conversations have nudged me into starting to read Junji Ito’s work. He writes horror manga. I feel a kinship with his imagination. So I continued Halloween by picking up Gyo Vol. 1 from the library. It was a page turner, and I finished it before I got around to putting it in Goodreads. Vol. 2 isn’t anywhere nearby, so it’s either interlibrary loan or buying it from ComiXology.

Christmas

😐

Our family’s scramble to update our Christmas lists has begun, so this weekend I’m researching my upcoming projects to see what resources would make good additions to my wish list.