Update for 8/27/2017

Blog

Thanks to some feedback from my sister, I’m experimenting with adding moods to my updates (so you can cut to the feeling), with an icon for each section that carries enough of a mood to warrant one. I’ll start with emoji since they’re easy, but they have a somewhat limited range of emotions, so I’ll look around for other icon sets and maybe draw my own if I can’t find what I want.

Eclipse

🙂

This update is already long enough, and the eclipse will take a little more time to write about, so I’m going to post this part separately sometime within the next day. It’ll have pictures!

Sleep

🤔

My sleep was fairly decent last week, but I still wasn’t really keeping track of it, which would probably help, so I’ll try that this week. I even have an app for it.

Work

🙂

With some work outside regular hours, including some on the bus to and from the eclipse, I’m keeping up with my schedule for this extra large ebook load, and since I’m almost done with all the hard parts, I’m not expecting any trouble finishing them on time. It’s reminding me that being organized and planning ahead can greatly reduce the stress of life, as long as you know enough for a reliable plan, since some processes are less predictable than others.

Project generator

😐

This one is still getting pushed to the sidelines, but I did organize the contents of my example READMEs into one document so I could easily refer to them, and I’ve gotten a few sections into writing mine. But still it’s going too slowly, and I feel it whenever I think about how far I have to go in getting ready for grad school, so I’m thinking more about how to reduce the time I waste.

Beliefs report

😐

I added some headings to the prolegomena and a note on some statements of belief I’ll use to compare my views to evangelicalism’s, and now I’m revising the bibliology section.

Futurism

😎

Last week’s interesting topic was blockchain, the technology behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. It kept coming up in my futurism listening and reading, and I was annoyed that I only had the vaguest idea of what it was, so I watched some YouTube videos about it and was relieved that it was easy to grasp and even rather inspiring (short intro, long intro, survey of applications, a vision of decentralized society, startup city examples). I’ve also imported my podcast subscriptions into my feed reader so I can manage my listening better.

Media

Books

Iron Sunrise

😐

Just before my trip I thought I might want some longer listening than podcast episodes, so I returned to my SFF novels and picked up where I left off on one of Charles Stross’s visions of the future. Iron Sunrise is the sequel to Singularity Sky, in which a superintelligent AI called the Eschaton has mysteriously arisen from human technology and left Earth but secretly meddles in human affairs to preserve its own existence. Accelerando is still my favorite Stross novel, but this series is interesting enough.

Experimental literature

🤓

For my bus rides I thought, correctly, that I might need some offline activities to keep myself occupied, so I came back to a project from a few months ago, cataloguing the authors in The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, which will become a collection of links on the wiki at some point, and I managed to get through several chapters. It was kinda fun, and I’d like to say working on it got me back into experimental fiction, but we visited a used bookstore on Sunday (along with an indie comic store that I loved), and I found a couple of experimental novels I’ve had in mind to read, but I put them back on the shelf because I knew it’ll still be a while before I have time and mental space for reading that kind of book.

TV

🙂

I’m continuing my quest to follow the Netflix Marvel shows, so now that The Defenders is out, I’m plodding through it. I noticed one of its audio tracks is English with audio description, and that’s always intrigued me, so instead of going back to listen to a little of it afterward like I’ve done before, I’ve decided to watch the whole thing with description, along with subtitles, because with those off I felt like I was missing something, maybe because I usually have them on so I understand every line but also because I seemed to want both an auditory and visual representation of everything that was happening. What I like about audio description is the elegant way it keeps up with the action while fitting itself between the lines of dialogue, but what I’ve also noticed this time is that it heightens my awareness that the show is scripted, especially when it describes an action that takes place right after. It also gets me to notice things I would’ve missed and gives me words for objects and actions I couldn’t have easily named.

Computer

🙄

Friday after work I was greeted by a message on my desktop computer telling me my hard drive is failing, so now I’m in the middle of resolving the issue. If the disk really is about to die, I have online backups of the files I care about, but hopefully I can copy them directly from the old drive before it gives out entirely. The good thing is these days I do most of my computer stuff on my Surface.

Worship team

😒

Saturday our worship ministry had a lunch meeting, where we had a nice time getting to know each other a bit, since we hadn’t really done that since the merge many months ago, and then our worship minister laid out his plans for the future, now that he’s spent all this time observing. The ministry’s membership is growing, which is good after struggling for so long, and he’s reorganizing the teams and creating a regular schedule so everyone has a more equal chance to serve, which is sort of a relief to me, though I’d mostly gotten used to playing back-to-back weekends. However, he also spoke at length about the ways he wants us to grow in skill–some of them specific and some to be determined–and it left me feeling simultaneously anxious and rebellious because (1) I’m not willing to give much more time to music ministry when I have all this other stuff going on and (2) I’m allergic to expectations and pressure. But improving is a good idea in general, and giving things a chance is important to me, so we’ll see where this goes.

Stay tuned for my story of the eclipse! 🙂