Productivity
🤔
I started reorienting my mind toward project writing. Instead of flopping onto my bed after work every day and scrolling social media in a haze of fatigue, I decided midweek I would give myself a topic to think about on my way home and spend a small chunk of time writing first thing when I got there. It didn’t end up happening quite that way, since I was intent on catch-up blogging instead, but it did get my mind whirring in general, which you’ll hear about in the rest of this post. It helped that I also removed some of the more time-wasting apps from my phone. All the extra thinking wasn’t great for my sleep schedule, though.
Learning
🤓
On my memory project, I considered creating a conculture. I pondered how fleshing out my mnemonic system would ideally create not just a loose collection of techniques and images but an extensive and cohesive fictional culture. This would expand my mnemonic conlang idea into a conculture, mainly featuring folklore and memory-related cultural practices. I also spent some time marveling at how well this project brings together so many of my interests: learning, narrative, modeling, linguistics, productivity, music, and visual arts.
Modeling
🧐
I started thinking through ideas that might go into the next version of my modeling project overview. I might talk about the various modeling languages people encounter in their everyday lives, mainly natural language and math. And I’d probably talk about my wish for an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary field of modeling. My thoughts on disciplinarity were influenced by this blog post and this discussion with ChatGPT.
Literature
😎
I ventured further into some of my experimental literature topics. I explored how someone might create a shufflable narrative like Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1. I read a bit of the manual to Inform 7, a text adventure game engine, and had Claude try writing a game for it, which mostly worked. And I stumbled across the experimental music software Argeïphontes Lyre (via this video), which inspired me with its arcane textual elements. Maybe soon I’ll add some more to my page of experimental literature links.
Nature
😮
A couple of deer showed up at one of my very suburban parks. I wondered how they’d gotten there, since I think of this park is being bounded by roads and homes and a school, but looking at the map I saw it’s connected to some of my other usual parks by a creek, so hopefully some visitors at those got to see them too.
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Video
😌
I returned to my daily dinnertime TV. I’d stopped that and limited TV to weekends to spend less time on it, but my time management seemed better (?) now, and in the meantime I was spending dinnertime on YouTube and wasting my streaming subscription fees. So I’m seeing how it goes, and you may see a few more TV and movie reviews here.
That week I finished a satisfying last season of Jessica Jones, the show I was nostalgic for during my long break from Marvel TV a while back. At the time my nostalgia was mainly for the setting, but this time around I felt strangely absorbed in the characters’ emotions and had to remind myself their lives weren’t mine. Great storytelling and acting.
People
🙂
Saturday I attended a graduation pizza party. Jeremy and Heather’s son Westley was finishing high school. I hadn’t mingled with their circle in a while, so it was great to connect with both old and new acquaintances. I even got a walk in the woods out of it when I tagged along on their visit to one of my usual haunts, and it was equally great to have people to bond with over nature.
