Productivity
😐
I decided on some next steps in my productivity system update. The productivity framework I was writing was good as a modeling exercise but troublesome as a planning exercise. So I’ve put that on hold, and this week I’ll start working through the areas of my system that feel like obvious priorities. There are some improvements I can make on the side as they come up, but others will take more extended effort, and those will be my focus. The first one is reworking my task management procedure so I’m not fighting it every time.
Movies
😐
The Amazing Spider-Man is a less-endearing origin story that nevertheless has a different kind of appeal. I’d decided that as a purported Spider-Man fan, I should stop neglecting the Andrew Garfield movies, so I put them in my Netflix DVD queue and watched the first one at the beginning of the week.
The negatives: The Tobey Maguire version is my baseline, and this Garfield one felt much less like a bright, packaged comic book, which made it less immediately inviting to me. Yet the plot was very similar to the first Maguire movie, so it ended up feeling derivative and also more rushed.
The positives: I was glad to see a Gwen Stacy story for a change. And the movie’s less polished style made it feel more authentic in some ways. This Peter Parker was less like an archetype and more like an actual high school student who had real conflicts with his family and seemed generally lost. It pulled on different heart strings from the Maguire version, and I gave it a 4/5.
Music
🤔
My latest music mystery gives me food for thought. I was building up my playlist of space ambient, drawing from YouTube mixes by JediMaster, and I recalled one song that stood out. So I listened to them on 10x speed until I found it, an island of melody amid slow waves of spacey chords and noise.
The sound of the synth lead was nostalgic for me, like it came straight out of the kids’ albums I grew up on in the ’80s. And the simple step-down of the melody brought up images of a mother in a quiet moment with her infant, tender and comforting. But like much of my favorite music, I found as I listened throughout the day that it could amplify any sadness I was feeling too—if there’s comfort and hope, there must be a reason it’s needed, and sometimes that context is at the fore.
I also found that the song was a music writing prompt for me. I wasn’t really satisfied with what the composer did with it, so I wondered what I would do instead. Maybe I’ll explore that at some point.
