Update for 1/8/2017

Posted on January 8, 2017 by Andy

Project updates

  • Project map – I haven’t worked on it constantly, but I can tell it’ll take a long time to think through these issues, so I’m going to move the project purposely to the background to keep from putting off everything else forever.
  • Projects – Even though I’m still in the middle of the project map, I’ve learned enough to help me plan this year’s projects. In addition to career stuff, mainly math relearning, at this point I want to focus on inputs and outputs, in the form of knowledge representation (mainly as an aid to notetaking) and communication, mainly through improving my writing, mainly through learning about fiction, though I want to sneak in some visual communication if I can find the time, mainly through learning about diagramming. Entertainment-wise, I want to focus on experimental and weird fiction and comics.
  • Bookmarks – I’ve been putting this off because programming takes more work for me to get into than a reading or writing project, but I’m determined to finish this in the next month! Desynced bookmarks are just too annoying.
  • Math relearning – This is next in line after the bookmark reboot.
  • Nostalgia box – The stuff I mailed from home arrived, so I took the opportunity to collect other things from around the apartment that might go into the nostalgia box, and the next step is to pick things out for this year’s set and put them in the folders.
  • Map magnets – Doing the nostalgia box on my intended schedule will mean spending more time in my creativity corner, which will mean staring at my blank mini freezer door, which will mean wanting something there, so it’s a good thing I’ve had an idea for it–magnetic tiles that I can use to create maps. Ideally I’d like to draw my own, but to start with I’ll prototype the idea with a printout of someone’s painted or recreated tiles from Mighty Empires.
  • Devotions – I haven’t been keeping up with my Daily Office readings, and I think the best solution is to approximate the lectionary readings with a playlist using an audio Bible I haven’t listened to yet. So I’ll try to get that set up in the next week or two alongside my bookmark reboot.
  • Housekeeping – The water leak in my ceiling has become a problem again, and on Friday it apparently leaked through a screw hole above my fire alarm, because when I came home, there was a big wet spot on the carpet under it, and someone (hopefully from maintenance) had entered my apartment to remove the batteries, I assume because it was making a racket, so I submitted another work order about the leak and bought another fire alarm. The possibility of another maintenance visit motivates me to make my apartment more presentable sooner.
  • Media
    • Books – When I decorate my apartment, which will be after I move, I want a Steampunk/Surrealist/curiosities theme, and over Christmas I decided part of it would be a shelf of old books, which honestly I thought would never be one of my collections, since till now I’ve always thought of books as storage for information rather than objects in themselves. But I do like the old book ambience, so in addition to the box I got from my mom (see below), I’m going to try to find some early editions of real books, mostly around the Victorian era (to fit the Steampunk theme), but ones I would actually want to read or at least flip through. The first book, which I ordered from eBay last week at a surprisingly reasonable price, will be a 1911 edition of Treasure Island illustrated by N. C. Wyeth, because I grew up listening to an abridged version of that book (a recording I will find again someday! but which for now is a mystery) and because I want to collect some Brandywine art.

      From my mom, a box made of fake old books. I haven’t decided yet what to put in it.

      A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

    • Movies – On Thursday Tim and I made last minute plans to see Rogue One, which we both enjoyed. I’ve seen a tweet or two saying it felt like a Star Wars movie, and I’m not enough of a fan to have a sense of what that should be, but one thing I liked was that the main battle felt complex enough to be satisfying yet clear enough for me to follow, which I’m not able to do with most battles. As I keep telling people, I’m glad Disney bought Lucasfilm, since they’re good at consistently telling good stories, whereas George Lucas apparently isn’t, and I’m glad they have the ambition to release a new one every year, though I hope that doesn’t mean forever, since I think that would get tiresome.
    • TV – I finally finished Luke Cage, and I thought it set things up nicely for a next season by creating problems that feel like they have a solution. If I were following the order of my interruptions, I’d return to Arrow/Flash, but I’ve had these Sarah Jane Adventures discs sitting around forever, so I’m going to finish watching those first, then maybe put some movies next in my queue to watch here and there while I’m waiting to get back to Doctor Who.
  • Socializing – I’m going to try to socialize more this year, and I kicked it off today by going to my church’s birthday party for everyone, where we sat at tables based on our birthday month and ate a Korean New Year’s soup called ddukgook, which contained interesting rice cake discs that had the consistency of gummy bears. I didn’t socialize all that much, but I did meet one of our church’s missionaries.
Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Devotions, Housekeeping, Map magnets, Math relearning, Movies, Nostalgia box, People, Programming, Project updates, Projects, TV | 2 Comments

Update for 1/1/2017

Posted on January 1, 2017 by Andy

Happy New Year!

Life updates

  • Christmas – At the beginning of last week I was still on vacation.
    • Monday – The family had our annual breakfast at the House Cafe and then our annual tradition of going out to see a movie (see below).
    • Tuesday – I used the Google Cardboard camera app to take some 3D panoramas of the rooms in my parents’ house and some outside; my sister, dad, and I had my annual Schlotzsky’s lunch and our annual Half Price Books rounds for their after-Christmas 20% off sale; I raided my box of childhood things for artifacts to send home and made several significant finds; and we played the game I got Abbie for Christmas, CV, which she won.
    • Wednesday – I packed some boxes for shipping, with increasing tension as my time window narrowed; flew home; got picked up by Jeremy after waiting for him to get out of work and then telling him the wrong terminal; and had dinner with him at Red Robin, during which I observed the grating sensation that can happen when the chattering from one person’s pent-up work stress meets another’s travel fatigue.

Project updates

  • Project map – Whenever I think about projects I could be doing, I keep coming back to the need to put them in order, which leads me back to the project map, so this feels like my most important project right now, and I’ve been working on it in my head even though I haven’t written much more for it.
  • Housekeeping – Over my vacation I decided that moving to a bigger apartment would be one of my goals for 2017, and I learned last year that I have to think about that kind of project early or it won’t happen. That plan and coming home to my messy apartment reminded me that cleaning up the place needs to be another of my priorities right now, so I’ve done a bit of that to get started. Trying to put my vacation stuff away amid all the clutter reminded me of the ending moments of a losing Tetris game when I’m frantically moving pieces over to pile up on the sides so they don’t all pile up in the middle.
  • Nostalgia box – I decided a while back that part of cleaning up my apartment would be finishing some of the projects I have lying around, mostly putting together my nostalgia box, and it only took an evening after many months of procrastinating to finally accomplish that. I want to replace the folders’ month labels with more creative ones than the label machine printouts I made, but the box is complete enough to use the way I intended, so the next step is to populate the folders with some initial nostalgia items from my childhood and then start making more items, ideally one or so per month. I also want to write an article about the box for the wiki and maybe someday make a video.

    My newly completed nostalgia box hiding in my creativity corner.

    A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

  • Media
    • Movies – The movie we watched was Hidden Figures, about African-American (human) computers at NASA in the 1950s and ’60s, and I loved it. I felt a kinship with several of the characters, especially in Dorothy’s approach to the problem of the non-human computer.
    • Music – A while back a Twitch streamer friend of mine introduced me to a video game called Contradiction, where you watch videos of an investigation to solve a mystery, and after letting it sit in my wishlist for a few months, I finally bought it. The story interests me, but the real reason I bought it was for the atmospheric music, which I think will be a soundtrack to many things in my current crop of projects.
    • Books – That crop includes collecting experimental novels, inspired by my Christmas. I’m reading an extremely interesting one now that I got from my parents, which I’ll tell you about after I show it to certain people who might read this post, and I ordered another one that’s on its way (House of Leaves), and listening to Wallace’s Girl with Curious Hair has put me in the mood to try Infinite Jest, but that won’t be for a while because these books are all very long. In my superbooks article I’m going to add a reading list of the kinds of experimental fiction that interest me, since they’re scattered across genres and I’m only starting to explore this area.
  • Bookmarks – Rebooting my Firefox bookmarks wasn’t as important to me last week as I expected, but it’s still an annoying problem I want to take care of soon.
  • Math relearning – This project is still the gateway to a bunch of other things I want to do, so I haven’t forgotten about it, and I’m hoping to return to it within the next month or two.
Posted in Board games, Books, Holidays, Housekeeping, Life updates, Math relearning, Movies, Music, Nostalgia box, Programming, Project updates, Projects, VR | 4 Comments

Update for 12/25/2016

Posted on December 27, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Christmas – Once I got to Texas Sunday night, most of my time was spent sitting around the house and conversing, interrupted by airports, restaurants, and decorating.
    • Projects – Now that Christmas is over, I can tell you about these. One was a journal of relationship questions called Between Me and You (the brother edition) that Abbie gave me last year at Christmas to fill out and give back to her this year, and I answered them on the computer (a lot of work! half of which I did on the plane ride from North Carolina) and then wrote the answers into the journal by hand. The other project was this year’s creative Christmas present labels, for which I stayed up super late a couple of nights to paint a portrait (example) of each person with coffee (which at first, because I’d made it so concentrated, people guessed was things like maple syrup and chocolate sauce) on watercolor paper (translucent Yupo paper so I could just trace photos I printed from Facebook, after desaturating and posterizing them in GIMP). Each year I try to pick a theme that fits whatever I’m into at the time that other people can also appreciate, and this year thinking about coffee reminded me of Giulia Bernulia’s coffee paintings on Instagram.
    • Presents – I got a bunch of books on creative topics, a bar of scented soap from Kimberly’s trip to India, a sloth t-shirt from Abbie (kind of an inside joke), a lamp to represent my mom’s current Narnia theme, and a Google Cardboard viewer (a DODOcase SMARTvr) to whet my appetite for whatever full VR headset I’ll get myself at the end of my Common Core math studies. I gave my mom a couple of fiction ebooks, my dad a CD of Chocktaw hymns, Michael a book on team problem solving, Abbie the board game CV, and Kimberly the book Hillbilly Elegy, which I’ve also been wanting to read in connection with the election.
  • Media
    • Movies – On Monday I went with my mom to see Doctor Strange, which was the first 3D feature film she’s seen, and we both liked it and thought the 3D was a good idea.
    • Music – While we were driving through a Christmas lights neighborhood, I rode in Kimberly’s car, where she was playing Hamilton, so I’ve finally listened to some of that soundtrack. I was avoiding it for some reason, partly because it was getting so much hype that I felt I needed some amount of ceremony to listen to it myself. I’m looking forward to listening to the rest of it and then eventually listening more closely to pick up some composition and improvisation pointers.
  • Bookmarks – Once I get back to Chicago, I think getting the reboot of my Firefox bookmarks out of the way will be my main project.
  • Project map – Finishing my project map will be my next main project.
  • Dusk – I managed to take some more dusk pictures here in Texas last week.

    A nostalgic #dusk scene from my childhood.

    A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

    Another #watertower friend, this one in Texas.

    A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

Posted in Dusk, Holidays, Movies, Music, Project updates, Projects, VR | 4 Comments

Update for 12/18/2016

Posted on December 21, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Christmas – Last week pretty much all my projects were preempted by preparing for my Christmas travel, with the main goal of reducing my stress, and my planning ended up being worth all the hours it took. This weekend made up part one of my vacation, centered around my friend Jason’s wedding in North Carolina.
    • Friday – I was originally planning to save money by taking public transportation from home to the airport, but as the desperation mounted, I decided I didn’t mind paying for peace of mind, so I took a limo from one of the few airport shuttle services that got good ratings on Yelp. My trip had a layover in Charlotte, which was only a two-hour drive from my destination, but I didn’t want to pay twice for that leg of the journey if I didn’t have to, and I wasn’t looking forward to driving so much in an unfamiliar, mountainous area in the dark, so I decided to stick to my flight unless it was delayed, which it wasn’t … until we had to wait for the plane to be de-iced, so I spent the whole flight worrying that we’d arrive too late to rent a car and the rest of the weekend would be very annoying and inconvenient, though I’d prepared for that possibility by packing food, and also Jason wanted to give me a ride from the airport so we’d have more time to talk before he was swamped by other guests, but what, did he think this trip was about him?? Fortunately the car rental places stayed open for us, and I’d packed light so I wouldn’t have to wait for checked luggage, so I picked up the car I’d reserved, a Chevy Impala, spent a while figuring out how to drive it, and made my way to the inn, where Jason welcomed me and gave me a tour before heading to bed. The place I stayed, which also hosted the wedding, was a nice bed and breakfast run by Restoring the Foundations ministry called Echo Mountain Inn, and I recommend it if you’re ever in the Asheville, NC area, especially if you need surprisingly fast Internet.

      Echo Mountain Inn, where I stayed this weekend for my friend’s wedding, which was held in the dining area.

      A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

      One of the Christmas village displays at the inn.

      A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

    • Saturday – Saturday I had breakfast in the dining room, and while I waited for that room to get converted into a wedding sanctuary, I found that I felt so much better after getting past the previous day’s travel that I decided to make extra sightseeing plans for the next day. The wedding and the reception were both short and sweet, which I’ll talk more about below, and I helped decorate the car, which was a little hard to do in the rain, since it made the writing run, and I had to keep toweling off the windows so the foam sticker stars would stick. After the bride and groom drove off, I helped clean up, took a nap, had dinner with the best man at an Italian place downtown, stopped by Jump Off Rock for about a minute to enjoy the view in the dark while being buffeted by wind and rain, and went to bed “early” (early for me anyway).
    • Sunday – I left the inn about an hour later than I meant to, though it was about the time I’d normally set out, and I drove a couple of hours through sprinkling rain and some very interesting small towns to a place I visited as a child on at least one family vacation, Grandfather Mountain, but the most interesting part of the park, the Mile-High Bridge, was closed that day, so I walked through the nature museum and ate lunch in the parking lot while listening to music and the start of PathFinder by Angie Sage. My next stop was Ridgecrest an hour back down the road, but really I was headed for a lodge nearby that I grew up visiting because my grandparents used to run it in the summer. After that it was back to the airport to return my car and wait around for my delayed flight (mechanical issue) to the next city over, which I again could have reached by car in a couple of hours, and to worry about catching my connecting flight to Dallas, but by speedwalking to my gate across the Charlotte airport, I made it just as they were announcing the final boarding call, and with no more travel plans to weigh down my mind, I had a pleasant and productive final flight, during which I got a lot done on one of my Christmas projects. At the airport my dad picked me up, and then I was home, the end of an overall great weekend.

      This deer tried to block my path up Grandfather Mountain. Its last mistake. (Jk)

      A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

      My lunch companion in the Mildred’s Grill parking lot at Grandfather Mountain.

      A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

      The lodge my grandparents ran in the summer. I grew up visiting this place.

      A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

Life updates

  • Wedding – The wedding was small with only about a hundred people attending, I suspect comprising family, people from their ministry, and a handful of other friends; the wedding party consisted of the bride, the groom, the maid of honor, and the best man; and the ceremony lasted maybe an hour at most, with some heartfelt vows that I think Jason and Abigail had written themselves, a brief message, some prayers, and a short communion service that Jason conducted for the two of them. Then the wedding hall was converted into a reception hall, and we ate some delicious hors d’oeuvres (“ors devors,” as I call them), including an interesting kale and pineapple salad, and the best man delivered a fitting toast. It was nice to see Jason’s family again, and it was an elegant wedding, in the sense that it didn’t waste time, words, or space but accomplished a lot.
Posted in Holidays, Travel, Weddings | 2 Comments

Update for 12/11/2016

Posted on December 12, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Christmas
    • Projects – I’m trying to remember that I have time to work on these over my vacation, so I don’t have to stress myself out trying to finish them before I leave, especially since traveling makes me tense enough. But I did make a key decision on one of these projects that removed a major roadblock, and now the rest of the way looks clear and navigable. On the other project I just have to push myself through it.
    • Travel – The weather is turning this year’s Christmas vacation into an exercise in worry management, and it’s reminding me that one of my main coping mechanisms is contingency planning. My first stop is my friend’s wedding in North Carolina, and I have a pretty tight window for getting there, so if there’s too much snow and my flight gets canceled, either I’ll have a tighter window, or I’ll be late, or I’ll have to miss it and fly straight to Texas. If I do make it to NC, I was thinking of doing some sightseeing after the wedding because it’s near some places I grew up visiting, but the mountain driving and forecast of rain are making me think I’ll spare myself the stress and just hang out at the inn, and anyway I was always there during summer rather than winter, so it wouldn’t be the same. Once I’m in Texas, things should be easier, and my weather app says the temperatures will be much warmer than I was expecting, so that’s a relief.
  • Bookmarks – This one is plodding a bit, and I’m thinking I should leave it till I get to Texas or even till I get back, since it takes more concentration and time than I can really spare right now.
  • Project map – I’d like to say I’m ready to post, but I still have stuff to think through, especially the differences between what I need from this map and what my site visitors need. I might wait till January to finish this one.
  • Coffee – I’ve been on a leisurely stroll through varieties of instant–so far Café Bustelo and Starbucks VIA Columbian, Italian, Mocha, Caramel, and Pumpkin Spice–and next is Mount Hagen, which I found at Whole Foods, where I also found an intriguing Ekobrew reusable Keurig container that lets you use your own coffee, so if that’s compatible with our machine it work, I’ll be trying that too.
  • Books – I finished The Long Earth, which is the good kind of science fiction where they propose a concept and then explore its consequences for society, all while following the characters through some kind of adventure, and it set up the next book in the series really well, so I’ll probably get to that in the nearish future. But next I’m listening to David Foster Wallace’s Girl with Curious Hair, if I don’t get bored and drop it. I’ve been curious about DFW for several years, I’ve been kind of in the mood for literary fiction lately, which is highly unusual, so it seemed like a good time for it.

Life updates

  • Christmas party – Our superdepartment had its Christmas party last Wednesday, complete with our annual Christmas Olympics, a series of silly games (this year from Minute to Win It) that we compete in as four large teams for silly trophies, which was almost traumatizing for me the first time we held it because I hate those kinds of games, but once I knew what to expect after the first year, I could disengage enough from the experience to stay calm, and this year I was so detached I sort of regretted the decision, so maybe I’ll let myself participate more next year, especially since one of this year’s games was the kind of object sorting I would do for fun anyway, so I guess not all the games are evil.
Posted in Books, Coffee, Coping, Holidays, Life updates, Party games, People, Programming, Project updates, Projects, Travel | 1 Comment

Update for 12/4/2016

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Bookmarks – I didn’t work much on the desynced bookmarks situation, but I did think through it enough to start dreading it, since writing a script to merge them was going to take a fair amount of work. Fortunately I’ve come up with a quicker solution to try, and I might be able to wrap it up this week.
  • Project map – My map of all my projects feels like my most important project right now, since it will help me coordinate all my projects better in the future, so this is the one I’ve put the most work into lately. It’s taking shape slowly, like a growing plant, but I do want to move on, and I think with another week or so of work I can call it good enough.
  • Christmas – The project map may feel like the most important, but my Christmas gifts won’t buy or make themselves! I made decent progress on my Christmas stuff last week, and I’ll keep working on it this week.

Life updates

  • Funeral – I attended Ray’s funeral on Saturday, which I thought I was running late to, but it turned out they had a viewing first, so I ended up being early to the service itself. It was a church I’ve visited quite a few times, and the funeral was like a regular Sunday morning service, with a full sanctuary and a full liturgy, which I expected. I felt inspired by the eulogies and the homily, partly because the people speaking were thoughtful and reflective and partly because that’s the way Ray was, and they motivated me to return to some of my devotional practices, so since this came up at an Anglican church, I thought I’d try following the church year somewhat, and I’ve bought a couple of books to help me begin working through it: Welcome to the Church Year by Vicki Black and The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime by Phyllis Tickle.
Posted in Books, Death, Devotions, Holidays, Life updates, Programming, Project updates, Projects | Leave a comment

Update for 11/27/2016

Posted on November 29, 2016 by Andy

Life updates

  • Thanksgiving – On Wednesday I made a very stressful drive down through hours and hours of rain to my sister’s place, and what a relief to finally get there and see her and my brother. Thursday we went over to her friends’ house for Thanksgiving dinner, where their sister’s family was also visiting, and I learned that the sister’s husband works in AI, a surprising and welcome coincidence. Friday we watched a movie (more on that below) and took a walk through some nearby woods, where my hurting leg reminded me that I’m old and haven’t exercised in a while. Saturday we took our brother to the airport, and Sunday I had a much easier drive back, which included an interesting detour around some traffic through some US Routes that Google Maps told me would save seven minutes.
  • Ray – I visited Ray after my Remicade treatment on Monday at the same hospital, and I met his brother, who gave me an update. It turned out Ray’s condition was very bad in spite of some improvements, and he died Thanksgiving morning. I’m going to his memorial service on Saturday.

Project updates

  • Project map – I’m thinking through my topics of interest and arriving at a helpful broad analysis of my project ideas. I don’t like the ramble that’s in the wiki article right now, so I’ll replace it soon with the much briefer set of lists I’ve come up with so far.
  • Bookmarks – I’m starting to work on a program to merge the Firefox bookmarks from my three computers, and then I’ll export them as a set of web pages for my own reference, and I’ll delete most of them from Firefox and basically start over so I can sync the files normally and work from a more current organizational scheme.
  • Media
    • Books – 14 was good and left me wanting more, which there is, sort of, in the form of a side-quel, The Fold, but I won’t get around to it until I convince myself to subscribe to Audible, because that’s the only convenient place the audiobook is available. The Stand became available, so I started that on the Thanksgiving drive down, but I wasn’t in the mood for horror on the drive back, so I started The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, which pushes several of my interest buttons and which is worth reading without any spoilers.
    • Movies – Over Thanksgiving my siblings and I went to see Loving, which is about the Supreme Court case that established interracial marriage as constitutional. I was struck by how normal and caring and gentle the couple was, and I hoped the real people were like that and I wasn’t just being manipulated into liking them. The movies my family sees together are usually historical or historical fiction, and while I used to think these were the most boring genres, over the past few years I’ve given them a chance and found that an open mind can go a long way to making life more enjoyable.
  • Christmas – I have a few, rather involved things to do to prepare for Christmas, so I’m going try to get a good start on them this week. I don’t know if decorating will be one of them, since I’d have to clean up a lot first.
Posted in Books, Death, Exercise, Holidays, Housekeeping, Life updates, Movies, Programming, Project updates, Projects | 2 Comments

Update for 11/20/2016

Posted on November 21, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • Project map – I’ve made progress in sorting out my projects, and I’ll post a streamlined version of my article sometime soon.
  • Bookmarks – The election and creepy fiction articles are coming, but to make those easier, I want to collect the links in my Firefox bookmarks and write a script to transform them into the wiki markup. But I have a little electronic housekeeping to do first, because my bookmark situation is a little chaotic right now because the file is too large to sync easily with my usual method (Xmarks), so now my bookmarks are desynced across computers, and to fix it I’ve been wanting to archive most of my bookmarks and start over. Now that I have significant bookmarking projects to start, I’ve decided to do the archiving first, so that’s in process.
  • Movies – Wednesday my boss invited me to see Arrival with some people from work, so I went with them that night, and I felt that I would’ve made the movie similarly if it were up to me, so I really liked it, and now I’m reading the rest of Chiang’s story and mentally comparing it to the movie, which is turning out to be an interesting method of reading. Sunday Tim and I went to see Fantastic Beasts, which I liked pretty well, especially the mesmerizing cloud effects in certain parts I won’t spoil for you.

Life updates

  • Memorial service – A couple of weeks ago a friend from church asked me if I’d play the piano for her father’s memorial service this past Saturday, and I agreed, though I’m not going to do this on a regular basis, so don’t get any ideas! I was a little anxious because I didn’t get around to practicing as much as I wanted, but it turned out fine, and I even was able to assemble a prelude from a great book of lead sheets I found last week, The Hymn Fake Book, which I could get in Kindle format. As I usually find at memorial services, the stories from the people there made me wish I’d known him–a kind, generous, knowledgeable, and productive man–and they gave me some ideals to strive for.
  • Thanksgiving – I’ll be making a long drive for Thanksgiving to visit my sister, where my brother will also be. Our parents are snubbing us. I’m looking forward to it (the visit, not the snubbing).
Posted in Death, Freelancing, Holidays, Housekeeping, Life updates, Movies, Project updates, Projects | 6 Comments

Update for 11/13/2016

Posted on November 14, 2016 by Andy

For those of you who were disappointed by the shortness of last week’s update, I think you’ll be happier this week.

Project updates

  • Ulcerative colitis – I went for my first Remicade treatment on Monday, and my next one for this initial period is in a week. I haven’t seen any improvement yet, but like with Humira, it can take a while to see results.
  • NaNoWriMo – I’ve decided (1) NaNoWriMo doesn’t fit the project I’m using it for, (2) it’s too late to switch projects and hit the official word count, (3) I don’t want to put off my current project anyway, and (4) I’ve been a little distracted by current events; so I’m ditching NNWM this year. The issues with my current project are that (1) I’m writing a project map that I want to be fairly concise; and (2) since I decided to do NNWM at the last minute, I’m doing my planning while I’m writing; but (1) the emphasis of NNWM is on verbosity, and (2) you’re supposed to plan your novel beforehand. I’m updating the wiki article I’m writing with the parts I added last week, but from now on instead of trying to write constantly, I’ll take more time to think, and I’ll revise to cut out unhelpful content as I go. Dropping NNWM will also give me more mental space to write for my offline project, which I didn’t really want to include in the word count and which has an actual external deadline.
  • Media
    • Books – The two books I’ve been reading (‘Salem’s Lot in audio, Less Than Zero in print) are both due on Monday, so this weekend I scrambled to finish them. ‘Salem’s Lot, along with the TV show Luke Cage, makes me feel like being more involved in my community, something I’ve done much less of in recent, well, years, and it reminds me that the arts aren’t just idle entertainment but can shape your life. Next books: 14 by Peter Cline and The Bug by Ellen Ullman, which was forcibly loaned to me by my coworker months ago, so since I’m into reading print books right now, I guess I should read it before I move on to another library book.
    • Movies – I want to see Doctor Strange and Arrival. I know practically nothing about either, but the little revealed in the trailers seems right up my alley–Arrival in linguisticness and Doctor Strange in weirdness. I was going to say Arrival‘s premise reminds me of “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, one of my favorite SF writers, but then I found out that’s what it’s based on! I guess I should finish reading it.
    • Web video – I’ve been continuing to explore the Internet’s weird media, mostly the ones Night Mind highlights but starting to broaden my net, and the catch is scattered enough that I’m creating a wiki page where I’ll collect links to the ones that interest me, once I figure out what to call this category. These series roughly fall into the horror genre, but not all horror appeals to me, so maybe think of these as some combination of the X-Files and Blair Witch.
  • Politics – Like most of the country I was stunned by last week’s election results, and like half of it I was chagrined, but my initial shock has worn off, and now after some initial posts on Twitter and Facebook to get my basic thoughts out in the open, I’m mostly just collecting viewpoints to try to understand the issues, which I admit is fun for me, though in a serious and somewhat obsessive way, given the intensity of the debates, the complexity of the issues, and the real problems minorities are facing. I’m trying to use this election as a way to get back into the topic of politics, and links on these issues are going into another wiki article, which I wanted to do for Brexit but got distracted from, but I was less involved in Brexit. My overall theme is still the need to listen.

Life updates

  • Work – At the end of last week the warehouse had a big order they needed help with, so some of us from my department went down Friday morning to pack books. This is the kind of help I’m reluctant to give, but it felt natural to join in when someone else said they’d go, and it ended up being a lot of fun.
  • Hospital visitation – Last week I learned that after some surgery, a friend of mine, Ray, is in a coma, or something like it, and when I told Jeremy about it, he volunteered to go with me to visit him in the hospital, since he’s also met him, so we did that on Friday after work and then had dinner. We met Ray’s parents in the room, and at his mother’s suggestion I talked to him a little and held his hand, and she told us that he seemed to respond to music at one point by moving his head back and forth, so I’m deciding not to believe he’s gone yet. This is the kind of community involvement I had in mind, though in Ray’s case I probably would have visited even without the encouragement of Stephen King and Marvel. I wouldn’t have visited without the election, however, because the only way I knew about his condition was a Facebook post I saw while I was scrolling through for political posts.
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Update for 11/6/2016

Posted on November 7, 2016 by Andy

Project updates

  • NaNoWriMo – After trying this for a few days, it’s clear that 50,000 words isn’t going to work for me, since it would take two to three hours a day, and I can only work on my projects for about an hour at the best of times, so I’m setting a goal of 15,000 words. I’ve written about 2,200 words, and I’ve posted what I have so far, part of my project map, which I started writing a few months ago.
  • Ulcerative colitis – I’m posting this from the hospital with an IV delivering my first Remicade treatment, which will take a couple of hours. I’ll have another one in two weeks, another six weeks after that, and then every eight weeks. To be honest it feels a little silly to go through so much rigamarole for this condition, but maybe I’ll feel differently if it actually works.
  • Media
    • Books – I’m about halfway through ‘Salem’s Lot, and I like it as much as I did The Shining. When I was growing up, I was afraid and suspicious of all horror writers because I assumed they reveled in evil, but now I see that those who are like Stephen King use their story’s horrific situation as an extreme test, as my boss put it, to reveal aspects of human nature. After this book, the next few in my Dark Tower project are The Stand, “The Mist,” and then the first Dark Tower book, though I’ll probably listen to other things in between. I’m grateful to the producers of the Dark Tower movie for moving its release from February to the summer so I have more time to catch up. 😉
    • TV
      • Marble Hornets – I finished Marble Hornets, and despite some awkward acting at times (along with some that’s great) and some boring scenes of exploring ruined buildings, I loved it and found myself wanting to watch it just for the atmosphere. I love it even more after staying up way too late to binge watch Night Mind’s analysis, which revealed a lot more than I caught when I watched, and I will definitely be studying their storytelling techniques. I was a little chagrined but also intrigued to learn that some of the MH story played out in real life among its creators–a cautionary tale, but it won’t keep me from following their future work.
      • Alan Resnick – My next stops in my journey through Night Mind’s videos were two works by comedian and performance artist Alan Resnick–alantutorial and Unedited Footage of a Bear, both of which are brilliant, but especially alantutorial, which starts out hilarious and becomes more disturbing as the series progresses, though the paranormal elements I vaguely expected never showed up, which reminds me that the real world can be horrific enough.
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