Update for 1/1/2017

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.
This entry was posted in Board games, Books, Holidays, Housekeeping, Life updates, Math relearning, Movies, Music, Nostalgia box, Programming, Project updates, Projects, VR. Bookmark the permalink.

4 Responses to Update for 1/1/2017

  1. Linda W. says:

    Happy New Year, Andy!

  2. Benjamin Wolfe says:

    Hi Andy! Thought of you today and your Thinkulum site. I’ve meant to visit many times. Reading it is oddly calming, which reminds me of what people who watched the Truman Show said in that movie. πŸ™‚

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