Update for 1/22/2017

It’s Thursday, a record for lateness on one of these weekly updates. For the newcomers, the date in the title really just tells you which week I’m updating for rather than the exact day I’m posting it. Ideally I post the entry on Sunday, but in any case it covers the previous Monday through that day as “last week” and reports my plans for the upcoming week.

Project updates

• Project map – I’ve decided to separate the map from the wiki guide, since they really have different goals, and separating them should help me think about each of them. The map is a higher priority for me, and my latest thought on it is that most of my projects are aimed at achieving some kind of enlightenment (more than just learning things), which feels like a significant insight.
• Python console – This is the programming template project I mentioned before, and I started it a long time ago, but now I’m revising it to conform to my new programming project structure; and before I return to my other programming projects, I want to get it to the point of being able to create projects with the structure I’ve established so far, since I’ll be updating the structure as I work on them, and I want to record in the template what I’ve done so far.
• Life maintenance
  • Housekeeping – The maintenance guy has fixed the ceiling, and from my conversation with him, he seems intent on finding and fixing the source of the leak, so that’s good news, though it could be annoying for a while.
  • Cooking – I did some, which always feels newsworthy–chicken tikka masala this time. Lately I’ve been cooking in stages over multiple days, so one day I cook the meat, another day mix the spices, etc.
• Nostalgia box – Before the end of the month I’d like to start using this, so I’ll need to sort through my old things, pick out stuff to put in the folders, spend some time with January’s thing, and replace it with a thing for next January.
• Media
  • Movies
    • The Revenant – I watched this at the beginning of last week, and while the cinematography and some of the music were beautiful and profound and the performances were impressive, the story was straightforward and simple and didn’t give me much to chew on.
    • Silence – I saw this with Tim on Sunday and found it much more satisfying, both beautiful and roiling with ideas. It was a grueling experience, however, watching almost three hours of continuous social and personal crisis. But it illustrated one way I’ve found that history can interest me, where I wonder how a situation got from one state to another, in this case how Japan stopped persecuting Christians, and in researching the answer I was helped by having watched this short, amusing history of Japan a while back (warning: strong language).
  • TV – My coworkers apparently want to talk about The OA, so I’m trying to finish that up this week.
  • Comics – On Monday I found out that a fan convention, C2E2, is happening in April, and it will include celebrities I’d like to see, so since I know about it before the day before, I’m starting to make plans to finally go to one of these things, which will involve finding existing or new friends who want to go, since it’s lonely and annoying to go to events by myself, so I might join one or two comic-related groups I found on meetup.com.
  • Books
    • Treasure Island – My N. C. Wyeth illustrated Treasure Island arrived, so my old book collection has begun! Back then publishers communicated a book’s publication information differently, and it seems the printing date is on the title page (in Roman numerals–thanks, publisher), which makes this one a 1924 printing.
    • Experimental literature – I’ve been having fun collecting web links based on the chapters in the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature to post in an article on the wiki and to form the basis for a reading list. I’m collecting them as Firefox bookmarks, and at some point I’ll write a program that will convert them to a wiki article, and then I can post it. These link collections are easy to do and feel useful, so you’ll probably see several more of them this year.
    • Book feedback – A friend asked for feedback on a nonfiction book he’d like to release soon, so I’m going to try to spend most of this week on that.