Christmas labels
😐
Still working on it. Even though I didn’t finish last week, I was pleased with my progress compared to some other weeks, given how much I’ve struggled to do anything productive lately. As usual I’m hopeful that I can finish in the next couple of weeks.
The next project will be miscellaneous life maintenance. The current Thinkulum project month of November starts on the same day as the calendar month. Unfortunately the next actual project won’t start till I’m done with the Christmas labels. When that happens, my next project will be catching up on some life maintenance. Getting my life more organized should improve my mood and motivation.
Fiction
🙂
To continue October’s cosmic horror theme, I started listening to The Outside by Ada Hoffmann. I found it a while back from a Reddit thread on stories that are reminiscent of H. R. Giger. I was slowed down by other listening I did last week, but I’ll finish it in the next week or two, and I’ll say more about it then.
Video games
🙂
Friday night I started playing Call of Cthulhu. My impression so far is I wouldn’t give the dialogue system any awards for logic, but the game has some nice atmosphere. It’s also pretty easy, which is just my speed right now, since I’m very uninvested in games. It’s not a terribly long game, but to go with this post’s theme of October bleeding into November, it’ll take me a while to finish it.
Politics
😎
To stay grounded as the election comes up, I’m listening to some political podcasts. Last week I learned that my guilty pleasure political blog is even less reputable than I thought (though I don’t think it’s as bad as the criticisms suggest), so I’m shifting my focus to mainstream sources. Here’s a helpful chart from Ad Fontes Media you may have seen floating around, and here’s another chart plus a searchable database from AllSides. I don’t know how many I’ll listen to regularly after election season recedes, but here’s what I have now if you want to follow along. Some of them I picked up from the Ad Fontes chart, and some I encountered randomly on social media. I’ve grouped them roughly by bias.
Left:
- The Daily (New York Times)
- Intercepted (The Intercept)
- Letters and Politics (KPFA) – Left, I think?
- The NPR Politics Podcast
- Opening Arguments – Left, I think?
- Pod Save America (Crooked Media)
- Politics and More (The New Yorker)
- Post Reports (Washington Post)
- The Ticket (The Atlantic)
- Trumpcast (Slate)
Center:
- The Argument (New York Times)
- FiveThirtyEight Politics
Right:
- The Dispatch Podcast – I picked this one up from an Atlantic profile.
Honorable mentions:
These are less focused on US politics, but I listened to some good episodes from them.
- Politics Weekly (The Guardian): “Are the signs really pointing to a Biden win?“
- More or Less: Behind the Stats (BBC): “US election: facts or fiction“
- Fresh Air (NPR): “The Pro-Trump Militia Group Preparing For Civil War“
