Update for 5/13/2018

Life maintenance

😐

Last week’s tasks:

Electronics recycling – Done, except for a few things I have to take to other drop-off sites.
Budget – In progress.
Sorting housekeeping tasks – Done.

Posting those on the blog last week actually got me to do them. So I guess this weekly update thing is somewhat accomplishing its purpose.

This week’s tasks:

Budget
Discarding old medical equipment

Beliefs report

🤔

I finished Eternal Living, a collection of people’s reflections on Dallas Willard’s life. It was good, but I got kind of tired of the fawning. It turned up the dial on my skepticism, especially since I already disagreed with some of his ideas. So I found an article by someone else who had Willard criticisms, and I felt better. As with many things I both like and dislike, I found myself wondering what it would look like to adapt Willard’s views into a version I liked more.

Thinking

🙂

After the Willard book, I had a little crisis in which I didn’t know what kind of book to listen to next. I had a few options, but most of them didn’t feel quite right. I settled on something that would help me be less unintelligent, The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb.

When I first heard about The Black Swan, I thought it was a survey of the effects on society that large, surprising developments can have. But it’s really a book on rationality. It’s about how bad we are at taking these unpredictable events into account and how we can be better at it. Right up my alley.

Movies

🙂

I saw Infinity War. I liked it. I’m a big fan of crossovers, so I was glad to see the various teams converge. I was also glad the villain was an actual character and not a prop like in Justice League. There were some gaping holes in Thanos’ strategy that it would’ve been nice to address in some kind of debate, but that’s not really compatible with an action movie. That’s okay. It just means the audience gets to do it.

Side note, this was the first time I’d really noticed that a theater’s sound system makes an action movie tactile. You can feel things crashing around you. This seems like it should be obvious, but I’m a little slow catching on sometimes. Or maybe this sound system was just better.