This Saturday is Free Comic Book Day

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Andy

Around the beginning of March I innocently clicked on a related YouTube video and discovered a friendly little channel (okay, it has almost 111,000 subscribers) that reignited a recurring interest of mine–in a big way. The channel was NerdSync, and the interest, as you may have wildly guessed from the post title, was comics.

I’ll save my history with comics for another time. I’ll just say that this time around I’m trying to get a little more involved in the community side of comics. Things like finding other fans to talk with, listening to comics podcasts, and supporting local comics stores, if I can convince myself to spend money. I might even go to a convention. You can see some of my developments in my recent tweets.

So even though the term “free comics day” had floated by me in previous years, I didn’t pay any attention until this year when NerdSync brought it back into view. The host, Scott Niswander, spent this week’s podcast episode interviewing the founder of Free Comic Book Day, Joe Field. It’s an interesting interview that covers the history and purpose of the day and the benefits of comics in general.

One point they made that I hadn’t thought about is that reading comics is a very active process that uses both sides of your brain. I thought back to my comic reading experiences and noticed that the activity of interpreting the text and images by each other and stringing the panels into a coherent narrative really is work sometimes. But it’s fun work. If you’re interested in the dynamics of comics as an art form and medium of communication, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is a good place to start.

Back on the topic of the post, Free Comic Book Day is an industry-wide promotional event that takes place each year on the first Saturday in May. It sometimes coincides with the release of a comic book movie. This year it’s Avengers: Age of Ultron. Basically you can walk into any participating comics store and pick up some of a selection of free comics. Some stores have other events going on the same day. Half Price Books is also participating, though I’m not sure if their free comics selection will be the same as in a regular comics store (also at HPB you have to buy something to get a free comic).

The FCBD website gives more details, including a list of the official free comics with descriptions and some previews, a search engine for finding participating stores near you, and a set of brief articles that survey the comics industry for people who are new to it.

Now don’t tell Joe Field I said this, but if you aren’t ready to brave an actual comics store, there are other ways to read comics for free. If you aren’t even sure comics is a medium that would interest you, by far the easiest way to check it out is by reading some webcomics. You can also sign up at comiXology and read some of their free comics. ComiXology sells digital versions of print comics by the major publishers. And the next time you’re at your local public library, take a look at their graphic novel section. If it’s anything like the libraries near me, it’ll offer an interesting variety of genres that will give you a good idea of what’s out there.

Posted in Comics, Life updates | 2 Comments

Home makeover, Thinkulum edition

Posted on April 24, 2015 by Andy

You may be wondering what my excuse is this time. I have a semi-good one, I promise. The past few months I’ve been plowing through the gargantuan housekeeping project of purging my possessions and reorganizing my apartment. The clutter was getting too hard to live in.

Here’s what my place looked like a couple of years ago. Prepare to be horrified. It still looked about the same when I started cleaning up–the mess had just moved around.

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My goal was to open up floor space by getting rid of things, using more vertical space, and giving everything a home. I’d say it worked pretty well!

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The biggest task was dealing with my books. Weeding my book collection involved a lot of nuanced, intuitive decisions that balanced various factors. To help myself make the tougher decisions, I paid attention to the questions I found myself asking and made a sort of flowchart, which I’ve posted here. Maybe you can adapt it for your own purging projects. In the end I took about twenty storage boxes to Half Price Books.

I planned my new furniture arrangement by cutting out bits of graph paper to represent the furniture and placing them on a graph paper map of my apartment. The next time I rearrange, I’ll use home design software, like Sweet Home 3D.

But that probably won’t be until I the next time I move. Nearer term phases of this housekeeping project will involve replacing the storage boxes in my closet with nicer containers, scanning and purging my papers, and decorating.

Looking back at this whole process shows me something I hadn’t really believed, that a simple decision (and a lot of work) can make a substantial difference in one’s way of life. Normally I think of people’s life patterns as consequences of their fairly stubborn strengths and weaknesses, so changing an external factor, such as moving to a new city, won’t typically solve their problems, unless they’re moving out of an abusive environment. But this project has turned my apartment from a frustrating, depressing place to live into one that can inspire me with few obstacles. It’s been several weeks since the majority of the project has been completed, and my apartment has stayed in its new orderly state, so I have hope that it will continue.

Ordering my apartment has also helped me order my project work. My books were the catalyst. People own books for different reasons. Mine are mainly tools for my projects. While I was sorting through my hundreds of books to decide which ones to keep, I was faced with a fundamental truth about my projects: I have unlimited project ideas and only limited time. Often when I come up with an idea, I imagine myself blissfully working on it with loads of uninterrupted time sometime in the unspecified but relatively near future. Well, I don’t have overlapping futures in which to actually do that for every idea. While I’m better at working through my projects than I was, if I want any chance of completing all the ones I care most about, I’ll need to tighten things up more.

So I cycled through another iteration of my overall project strategy. To make sure I knew which projects I really care about, I started a list of my top 40 projects. I assumed each one would take a year, and I made a conservative estimate of my lifespan. So far I’ve filled in almost 30, and I’ve covered most of my main topics, so the prioritizing is going well so far.

I also came up with a better project workflow. Organizing my apartment helped me identify the typical contexts in which I work on my projects, and that led me to think about them in terms of an assembly line. For example, I usually do some work in my car during lunch, and there it’s easy to read or write when I only have to consult my head. Taking notes on books is harder. So when I get to a notetaking phase, I move the project to my computer at home. To get through the projects faster, I’m trying to limit myself to one at a time per context.

My transformative housekeeping project has made this winter a good one, despite the bone-chilling cold. But the next time I get wrapped up in a long project, I don’t want to neglect the website like I did this time. I’d like to post at least once a week. Fortunately, my current writing practices are making this more likely. So I’ll see you in a few days on a completely different topic!

Posted in Books, Housekeeping, Life updates, Projects | 2 Comments

Food Matters

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Andy

The project for the past couple of weeks has been nutrition and cooking. A few weeks ago I went in for a physical, and I brought up the subject of my cholesterol, which regularly comes back high in my bloodwork. My doctor gave me his latest general diet recommendation, which is a low-carb diet. I was kind of surprised when he listed some examples–Atkins and the Paleo diet stood out to me–because I considered these to be fad diets, and I’d always been skeptical of such things. But I like my doctor, and I’d been wanting some kind of change in my diet since at least the beginning of the year, so I put myself on it immediately.

It lasted two days until I ran across T. Collin Campbell’s The Low-Carb Fraud and my skepticism returned. The book was short, so I read the whole thing that day. It reminded me that like many important issues, nutrition is complex and controversial, and it wasn’t something I was going to resolve in a few days.

So instead of drastically changing my lifestyle on shaky premises, I decided to make some less disputable changes that were more modest: I’d limit my consumption of sugar and bad fats, which I learned were saturated and trans fat. I’ve also tacked sodium onto the list, but I’m less concerned about that.

Although I ended up deciding against a low-carb diet for the time being, even seriously considering it was enough to shock me out of my complacency and fling nutrition to the top of my project list, especially since it involves controversy, which usually piques my interest.

The diet I settled on was a whole food, plant-heavy diet along the lines of Michael Pollan’s work, another favorite of my doctor’s. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Mark Bittman has hoisted the same banner and has come out with the Food Matters Cookbook. I have his How to Cook Everything, and for the most part I like his style and approach to cooking. He’s down to earth, inviting, and instructive, and he tries to keep things simple. So I was glad he’s on Team Pollan. I’m not sure what else to call it yet.

My main goal at this point is to see if this diet will reduce my LDL. I’ll have another blood test in a few weeks to see where things are.

I’ve had many thoughts about cooking and nutrition during this experiment, but this much has taken me long enough to write, so I’ll end it there for now.

Posted in Cooking, Nutrition, Projects | 6 Comments

Project scheduling and mnemonics

Posted on November 12, 2014 by Andy

So, it’s been three months. I’ve been working on stuff, but I got thrown off of posting by changing my project schedule to the week-oriented approach I mentioned in the last post. That quickly melted into no real schedule, which isn’t any more satisfying than the daily rotation I was on before. So I’m going to try the weekly schedule again but be more disciplined about it this time, with actual goals and assessments.

After I posted the first stage of my math relearning project, I returned to the memory project I started a few years ago. I read another book, Mnemonology: Mnemonics for the 21st Century, and analyzed the research presented in it. Next I’ll import it into a database and run some queries to see what I can learn. Then I’ll come up with some recommendations for studying and put them in an essay.

But all of that’s on hold while I work on this week’s project, which I’ll tell you about in the next post.

Posted in Memory, Productivity, Site updates | 4 Comments

Almost ready to count!

Posted on August 10, 2014 by Andy

After many weeks of thinking and writing, at last I have posted the first major chunk of my math relearning project. The result: I now know what a number is. I still need to write about place value and some fundamental math concepts, but after that I’ll learn how to count. (That’s why I couldn’t tell you how many weeks it’s been.)

I’ve decided that rotating through my subject areas one per day wasn’t satisfying enough, so now I’m trying a week per area. At the end of each week I decide whether to continue with that area or switch to another. So far it’s mostly been math every week, but I’ve also been reading about Eastern Orthodoxy. I don’t know if or what I’ll write about that or when. The problems with one area per day were that I couldn’t get much done in one day, and some days I’d have other things to do, so I’d have to wait a week to get back to that subject.

I’m hoping the rest of this math project won’t take so long. I think the reasons this first section did are that I was analyzing concepts I normally take for granted, I was translating the methods for teaching children into the underlying concepts those lessons implied, I was reorganizing the material I read to create a new synthesis, which always takes forever, and I wasn’t thinking much about how I could do all that in shorter iterations. But hopefully for the rest of the project the analysis will become more straightforward as the topics progress.

This week I’m going to try to tie up the loose ends on some of my other projects, so I’ll be doing my daily subject rotation again.

Posted in Math relearning, Productivity, Site updates | Leave a comment

Some rethinking, a trip to Chicago, and a workshop

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Andy

Last week I added a chapter to my Pychyl summary, posted my first chunk of epistemology notes, posted some of my drawing exercises to DeviantArt, and began reviewing my project choices.

The epistemology notes are for the book’s introduction, and I’d written them ages ago when my agenda for the project was different, so I wanted to revise them first, but I only got halfway through and decided to just post what I had. So I’ll finish those revisions and then continue adding chapters.

I haven’t felt very enthusiastic about my drawing exercises, so I surveyed my project ideas for the arts, asked myself some evaluative questions, and was reminded that one of my wishes is to contribute insights to my fields of interest. So I’ll probably prioritize projects that express my own ideas rather than summarizing others’. I don’t know if I have much that’s truly worthwhile to contribute at this point, but I’ll let other people decide that.

Along those lines, the procrastination book is going to take too long if I keep going at this rate, so I’d like to try something different, highlighting the parts of the book that stood out to me rather than summarizing everything in it.

Last Tuesday I took the day off of work to hang out with a friend from out of town who had a long layover in Chicago. He was pretty tired, so we didn’t do much, which gave the day a nicely laid back feel. We had lunch scheduled with some local Debian users, so we headed downtown and wandered around the office building we’d be eating in. At one point we descended a moving escalator to the second level of the basement, only to find that there was construction blocking the up escalator, and the only other place to go was through a security door into the office area. So we had fun running up the down escalator toward freedom. It was harder than I expected. After an animated lunch conversation with interesting people, we headed back to the airport, where we found a very cushiony bench to wait on next to the security line. One thing I’ve noticed about pursuing all my areas of interest at once is that it seems to give me a lot more to talk about. It’s nice to find conversation partners who can engage with me on more than one of them. Especially when I have six hours to kill with them! Not that we only talked about the things I’m doing, of course.

On Saturday I attended a workshop for the Immanuel mentor team. One of our trainers is being ordained this week, so the head of the training program was in town and wanted to make good use of her time here. I’m glad, because not only is it always good to see her, the workshop clarified some key themes of Immanuel prayer for me. One facet of integrating the dissociated parts of ourselves is verbalizing those parts together and sitting with the conflict to see what arises from it. In Immanuel we start by establishing a loving connection with the Lord, and we return to it often throughout the session, but at times it serves the recipient to let them experience the pain they’ve been avoiding. It’s part of sharing the truth about ourselves with the Lord so he can address and heal it. I came away from the workshop with a renewed sense of the value of this kind of prayer.

Posted in Immanuel prayer, Life updates, Projects, Site updates | Leave a comment

Accelerating

Posted on June 8, 2014 by Andy

I haven’t gotten as much done in the last week as I wanted, mostly because I’ve been trying to finish a freelance project and because my sleep schedule is still wobbling, which leads to naps, which throws off my productivity. But I did post my first few notes on Timothy Pychyl’s procrastination book. This is a practice I hope to continue, releasing my projects as very rough works-in-progress and then growing and refining them over time. That way they’ll at least have some presence in the world in case I have to put them on hold or drop them. They’d still have some potential for helping people, and maybe I’d be more likely to pick them up again.

As for other projects, I’ve pretty much decided how to organize my epistemology notes, and I’m getting there with my math notes. In my math reading I’ve nearly made it to addition! That’ll be this week. I’m having to skip around in my book because it isn’t organized the way my project will be. In the realm of people projects, I’m sprucing up my social media profiles, and last week it was YouTube and Google+. And I’ve been continuing my basic drawing exercises, exploring ways to draw circles.

A couple of social issues have caught my attention in the last couple of weeks. I don’t know if I’ll post to the wiki about them, but I wanted to at least write a few thoughts here.

The first issue was the #YesAllWomen hashtag from a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t read many of the tweets, but I read a few good articles about it (by Rob Fee, Zaron Burnett III, and Phil Plait). I’ve been encouraged over the past couple of years that the issue of sexual assault has been getting more attention, and it’s very important for people to tell their stories so others will know the problems are real. But these days when people (I’ll call them the advocates) speak out about social problems, what draws my attention is the negative reactions of other people, in this case men, and then the advocates’ reactions against those reactions. I think some bridging would help. If the advocates asked what legitimate concerns could be behind their audience’s reactions, such as a fear of rejection, they could nuance their message and maybe broaden it. In this case one helpful direction would be, alongside the stories of harassment, to talk about the men they appreciate and why, and they could take it further by talking about how they’d like to be treated (especially by male strangers). That would make the safer men around them feel better (and maybe more cooperative) and also give the repentant ones new behavior to aim for. Maybe some advocates are already doing this.

The other issue was the problems of YouTube celebrity (Charlie McDonald’s video is a good starting point, and TheThirdPew’s is also good). Several threads weave through the issue, including the theme of sexual abuse, but what I’ve been thinking about most is the false intimacy some fans feel with the YouTubers they follow, a problem fans of Hollywood stars face but which is made worse on YouTube because the video creators are often speaking informally and sharing parts of their lives on camera. I asked myself what motivates viewers to look for this intimacy or to idolize their chosen celebrities and how those motivations could be reshaped or redirected. Maybe they’re looking for more stable or fulfilling or easier relationships or to raise their self-image by associating with someone they see as higher quality. I wondered if it would help for someone to offer guidance on building real life relationships. But chances are these fans already have a few friendships in person, and it could be worthwhile to build their appreciation for those relationships, such as by writing living eulogies. This is an idea I’ve had before, but I didn’t realize it was an established genre until I searched for it this weekend. I may write about it on the wiki sometime.

On Friday I attended my coworker Brooke’s wedding. It was elegant in the sense of accomplishing its purpose with a minimum of excess. The ceremony was held in a small, picturesque chapel surrounded by farmland, and both the wedding and the reception were short and simple. I imagine the cost was modest, but I suspect they’re making up for it on their overseas honeymoon. As someone who has a low tolerance for ceremonies, I appreciated it. I also enjoyed the feeling of nostalgia I got from sitting in the old-fashioned chapel and seeing the kind of art on the walls my grandparents might have owned.

Posted in Life updates, Projects, Site updates, Social issues, Thought, Weddings, Wiki | Leave a comment

The hive is alive

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Andy

It might not look like it, but I’ve actually been a busy bee around this place. When I actually faced the fact that I now had a wiki waiting to be filled, I felt a bit intimidated and knew I had to get more organized or I’d put off doing anything. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to prioritize my projects because I never can, so I decided to take a clue from Barbara Sher and rotate through them rapidly, picking a project for each area of interest and assigning an area or two to each day of the week: religion and the website on Sunday, philosophy on Monday, social science on Tuesday, arts on Wednesday, STEM on Thursday, people on Friday, and life maintenance on Saturday. I’m holding this schedule loosely, since life will interfere with it often and I’ll also want or need to work on some projects more than one day a week.

The first set of projects was to update the section introductions I carried over from a much older version of the site. So far I’ve done philosophy, social science, the arts, the blog (which has some more details on why I added a wiki), and life maintenance. I’m working on STEM, and I haven’t touched religion, weirdness, or the general site intro yet. Sometime I want to rewrite them all, but for now I just needed to stop them from being so out of date.

For the rest of my projects, to make sure I’m spending my time on things I really care about, I’m partly guiding myself with the question of what I would work on if I only had six months to live and partly with the question of what I need to do to prepare for later projects. So for religion I’m mainly finishing God’s Words in Human Words by Kenton Sparks and reading Paul and the Faithfulness of God by NT Wright for a discussion group; for philosophy I’m reading Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction by Robert Audi; for social science, Solving the Puzzle of Procrastination by Thomas Pychyl; for the arts, I’m doing various drawing exercises, which I will post on DeviantArt; for STEM, reading Math Matters by Suzanne Chapin and Art Johnson. So far I’ve been refreshing myself on my previous work on those projects, reorganizing it for my current work, reading, writing a tiny bit, and being sidetracked by life, but I’m hoping to start posting my notes and reflections on some of these books in the next couple of weeks. My people Fridays are mainly for catching up on emails and other social media, visiting people, generally hanging out, etc.; and my life maintenance Saturdays are for taking care of life maintenance tasks that I can put off till then.

Dividing up my time this way has put me on friendlier terms with time in general. Each day I know I have things to look forward to because I’ve scheduled activities I deeply care about, and that motivates me to impose more structure on my life so I’ll have the time and energy to do them. I’m getting to bed earlier (a major predictor of how well I’ll use my time overall), arriving places on time more often, and using my free time better. I’ll write about this more on the wiki sometime.

Ways to keep up with my site: If you want to see what changed between versions of a wiki article, click the “View history” link at the top of the page, select the radio buttons next to the versions you want to compare, and click the “Compare selected revisions” button. If you want a feed for changes to an article, go to the “View history” page for the article and you’ll see the Atom link in the sidebar; or for changes to the whole wiki, click on the “Recent changes” link in the sidebar and grab the Atom link on that page. If you want a feed for the blog, click the “Subscribe in a reader” link on this page; or to get an email when I post to the blog, put your email address in the form under that link.

Other worthwhile things that’ve been going on: On May 16 I drove down to Champaign to hang out with my family over the weekend and watch my brother graduate with his PhD in educational research methods. The next weekend I helped two different friends move. And last week I attended a worship team meeting and a churchwide barbecue for our music minister, who we’re having to let go after 19 years because we no longer have the money to pay him. It softens the blow to know that he and his family will still be around as long as they can, and I was happy to see them at church today.

Posted in Life updates, Projects, Site updates, Wiki | 2 Comments

Andypedia

Posted on May 7, 2014 by Andy

If you are a frequent visitor of my website (and who isn’t?), you may be have loaded it in the past few minutes and found yourself feeling surprised, confused, perhaps even alarmed, flabbergasted, and other such emotions. This is because instead of the familiar, comforting blog you’re used to seeing, you were confronted with what looks like a heavily vandalized Wikipedia.

Rest assured, what you’re seeing is the same Thinkulum you know and love. Only highly different! Behold, I have created a wiki! My site now consists of two parts, this blog and that wiki. The blog will be for current events like a newspaper, and the wiki will be for time-independent content like a library. Unlike most wikis, however, all the content will be written by me. The contents of the wiki are what I consider the site to be about, so the wiki will be the new home page. And despite the title of this post, I’m not actually calling it Andypedia. I’m not even calling it the Wikulum, as my boss suggested. For now it’s just the plain old Thinkulum wiki.

Why am I splitting my site in half like this? I’ll have a wiki article for that. For now I’ll say that MediaWiki’s features fit the way I want to write better than WordPress does. And maybe this change, along with some others I’ve been making, will free my mind to write more often.

True to the nature of wikis in general, it will always be a work in progress. For now I’ve moved the essays and structural pages from the blog to the wiki, and I’m hoping to start writing stubs for other articles soon. I also really need to update my old content. In the meantime, feel free to poke around!

Posted in Site updates | 2 Comments

A done cake with freedom frosting

Posted on October 27, 2013 by Andy

Today marks the end of a long series of projects that have occupied me since at least January, projects I took on to help out other people. They were all worthwhile, but they did keep me from most of my own projects, and I’ve been eager to get back to those, which is a great motivator! It’s been a very productive year. The last of these was a planning guide for our church’s Blue Christmas service, which I’ve coordinated for the past several years and am finally able to hand off to other people. Very late last night I finished the guide. And I’m free.

I feel less liberated than I expected, partly because I still have some projects for other people to do, including Blue Christmas itself, though I won’t need to put off my own projects for them. And I think partly I’m so used to feeling these projects hanging over me that it’ll take me a while to notice they’re gone. And then partly the next projects I have lined up will also be a lot of work and not all that fun.

Still, my personal goals will begin advancing again, and that’s a good thing. I feel a little uneasy rejoicing that this list is done and I can do my own thing now, as if my days of helping people are over, but I feel slightly better knowing that my personal goals are also aimed at benefiting others at least as a side effect.

My first two projects: cleaning up my increasingly cramped and cluttered apartment and restructuring my website.

Posted in Life updates, Productivity, Projects, Stephen Ministry | 1 Comment