Update for 2/26/2017

Posted on February 27, 2017 by Andy

Life updates

  • Jury duty – A few weeks ago I got a jury summons, and Monday night the website told me my number was up, so Tuesday I went down to the courthouse to see if I’d be called in for jury selection, and for about the first 40 minutes or so I watched the intro video, read the courthouse’s informative pamphlet, and read a bit of Political Ideologies to pass the time. Then my number was called for the second group, which turned out to be a murder trial, and I was the fifth juror sent up to the jury box, where the judge and the defense attorney asked me a few questions (in front of everyone, which was a little nerve-wracking), but the prosecutor moved to dismiss me without asking a single thing, so feeling slightly rejected, I made my way back to the jury lounge, where we were released for lunch, during which I took the opportunity to flee the building and get lunch from Chipotle, and after which I worked on my code console until they told us a little early that the courtrooms didn’t need any more jurors and we were all dismissed. I have mixed feelings about my experience, since the trial I was being considered for did sound interesting, but I expected that peering through a murky cloud of conflicting evidence to decide another person’s fate would be the kind of stressful burden I’m often grateful to leave to other people. Jury selection itself was stressful and left me wondering if we’d really found the best way to do it, partly because I ended up feeling like I was on trial to determine my fairness of mind (with two prosecutors and no attorney for my defense), but it also gave me a valuable image for looking at my life, since in the back of my mind I feel like I’m almost always on trial, being evaluated by the rest of the human race, not to mention myself and God, on criteria I have no hope of meeting, even when I’m clear on what they are.
  • Livestreams – Sunday my online friend Davgov taught me how to play the video game Terraria during his stream (and did a very nice job of it), and we voice chatted over Discord, so my voice has now gone out over Twitch. Unfortunately he didn’t have his stream archiving enabled, so you can’t watch the replay, but we’ll probably stream it again sometime. It was a nice way to dip my toe into streaming, so maybe I’ll procrastinate less on my own streams now.

Project updates

  • Code console – I’ve set up the Sphinx documentation skeleton, and now I’m looking at recommendations for documenting Python code so I can do it the right way from the start and not have to write a bunch of it later, which I can say from past documentation experience would lead to procrastinating and dragging my feet the whole way through the writing. I’m also planning to start a wiki article to help other programmers who are getting started on distributing their code, which I’ll post as a seed article this week.
  • Knowledge representation – I’ve gotten into a good rhythm of tackling a couple of chapters most days, skimming each chapter and noting the software it mentions so I can post links to them later and choose some for experimentation. The book is bringing up topics I’m looking forward to digging into, like qualitative modeling, which is exciting not only because it’s the kind of thing I think about already but also because the field needs lots more research, so it could give me something to pursue in grad school and afterward. Since the aspect of KR I most care about right now is the data structures involved in each method, after posting links and choosing software I’m planning to revisit Data Structures and Algorithms in Java and this time finish it (or maybe take a course for credit?) so I can ground myself in the basics better.
  • Creativity
    • Nostalgia box – The February folder had my childhood experimental literature projects and handmade books, with things like a split-page book, a branching plot book, and a puzzle book, and it was nice to realize that by now I’ve collected pretty much all my original inspirations for these projects, such as Graham Oakley’s Magical Changes and The Animated Thumbtack Railroad Dollhouse & All-around Surprise Book, Evening Edition, so I can study them to continue the experiments. Coming up with a simple project for this month has been a challenge, but I think I have something, so I should be able to do that this week. My musical accompaniment has consisted of my contemplative dusk playlist, my new Arnold Schoenberg Pandora station, and songs I extracted from the Little Thinker episode on outer space that I grew up listening to and bought in MP3 a couple of years ago. I’ve also bought the book Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko to explore some general creativity techniques to help me with these kinds of project ideas, though that’s just an excuse to get around to the topic of creativity, which I’ve been putting off for years–not that I’ll necessarily read it anytime soon, but at least it’s available.
    • Drawing – True confession time: Even though I want to work on creative writing this year, Instagram has been pulling me towards drawing too, specifically beginace inspiring me to learn perspective drawing, which seems to fit the way I think better than other approaches–treating everything as a 3D object to model rather than a 2D shape to trace–so earlier in the year I bought Scott Robertson’s How to Draw, which I’ll probably supplement with his How to Render because shading always vexes me, though that book is really overkill for my needs. I’ve also discovered bullet journaling via boho.berry, and although I probably wouldn’t use the system for everyday task management, I’m intrigued by the other creative visual ways people use these journals.
  • Media
    • Books – I’m in the middle of a book I recommend to all computer science or mathematically minded people, Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions, and I’ll write about it more next week. After I’m done with that one, today’s sermon made me think I should listen to spiritual books for Lent, so I’m thinking of returning to The Divine Conspiracy, which I’ve started a couple of times without finishing.
    • TV – I’m back to Arrow and The Flash, alternating one episode of each so I can watch them in broadcast order. I’m in mid-s3 in Arrow and mid-s1 in The Flash, and both of them are kind of exciting right now.
    • Web series – I made some progress cataloguing some creepy Internet fiction in my bookmarks, which will ultimately make it into a wiki article. I know you’re all looking forward to that.
Posted in Books, Coding project generator, Drawing, Jury duty, Knowledge representation, Life updates, Livestreams, Nostalgia box, Project updates, TV, Video games, Weird stuff | 4 Comments

Update for 2/19/2017

Posted on February 19, 2017 by Andy

Life updates

  • Work – Most of last week was taken up with finishing a work project that kept me there late a couple of days and had me working on the weekend. I did manage to work a little on my personal projects though, as you will see below.
  • Jury duty – I got a jury duty notice a few weeks ago, which means Monday evening I have to check the website to see if they’re calling me in; and if so, I have to show up the next day to see if they’ll need me; and if they do, I’m not sure what to expect, because it’ll be my first jury duty ever. But I’ve just watched Making a Murderer, so I’m prepared to think about a trial, at least more than I normally would be.

Project updates

  • Productivity – The Rotating Priorities Board has actually been helping me. I’m finding myself thinking about my most important projects much more, spending my spare moments on them, and trying to work on each of them a bit each day. I’m thinking of adding more projects to it, but I need to make sure I don’t overload myself.
  • Code console – I’ve been researching Sphinx (a Python documentation formatter) to decide on my default documentation setup.
  • Knowledge representation – I’ve been skimming The Handbook of Knowledge Representation collecting the names of software for each of the KR methods so I can find links for the wiki and decide on a tool to experiment with for each method.
  • Nostalgia box – I finished writing my fictional letters for January, a fun exercise I recommend, and this week I’ll open February’s folder.
  • Media
    • Books – Last week I listened to Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and I enjoyed it and will probably listen to the rest of the series at some point, though in many ways it just followed the formula for this kind of story. I suppose it’s the variations that make the story worthwhile, such as the interesting mechanic in the story’s premise, and the writing, which I thought was good. I always wonder, though, why SFF writers make the point that the (real) world is an extraordinary place when it lacks the things that make their story worlds extraordinary.
    • TV – Making a Murderer was stressful but good, though I knew I was only feeling and concluding what the documentarians intended, but I didn’t mind too much. I read some articles afterward to get updates and other people’s take on the case, which I think is really how you have to approach a documentary. I’ll spoil that my favorite person in the show was Dean Strang because he looks at his job philosophically, the way I would, and I appreciated his comments on justice. The series certainly left me with strong feelings about the presumption of innocence and all the issues that arise from it.
Posted in Books, Coding project generator, Jury duty, Knowledge representation, Life updates, Nostalgia box, Productivity, Project updates, TV, Work | 1 Comment

Update for 2/12/2017

Posted on February 13, 2017 by Andy

Project updates

  • Productivity – After spending too much time on Saturday getting distracted while shopping, as I often do, I’ve started experimenting with the exercise of asking myself, “Is this what I’m doing now?” to use my time more efficiently. But the shopping was worthwhile, because I bought materials to make myself a Rotating Priorities Board (from Barbara Sher’s book Refuse to Choose) to remind myself of my main projects, which for now are the code console, which will let me easily create future programming projects, and knowledge representation, which applies to a lot of my other projects, both technical and creative.

    My new project board to remind me of my priorities.

    A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

  • Nostalgia box – After worrying that I wouldn’t find a short, doable, yet imaginative project, I decided to pick the simplest exercise in my Book of Surrealist Games and do some automatic writing (basically writing whatever pops into your head without trying too hard to make sense, which for me eliminates the dread of the blank page), specifically a series of fictional letters, since January’s folder contained old letters. I’ve written one, which actually gave me an interesting idea for a fantasy concept, so the project is already accomplishing its intended purpose, and I’ll write a few more this week and then close January’s folder … just in time for February’s!
  • Books
    • To Your Scattered Bodies Go – I started listening to this after watching The OA because from the premise it seemed to be about the afterlife, and I wondered if it could be another therapy story. It didn’t turn out anything like that, but it was interesting enough that I’ll probably return to this series, especially since the first book left large unanswered questions.
    • S. – So far I’ve been reading S. casually, letting the things I didn’t understand wash over me, but that’s gotten tiresome and I’d like a better grasp on what’s going on, so I’ve started taking notes. The book comes with a bunch of loose postcards and photocopies and such inserted into the pages, and I’m joining in and adding my notes as extra inserts. Here are examples.

      Adding my own inserts to Abrams and Dorst’s S. Here’s a table of contents.

      A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

      More S. I’m starting to keep track of the layers of conversation in the margins.

      A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on

    • 500 Handmade Books, Vol. 2 – In addition to mystery, books seem to be my theme right now–books as artifacts and not just as containers for information the way I usually treat them. I expect several of my nostalgia box projects to be about making book-like pieces, so I picked up this one from Half Price Books that I’d seen on Amazon, a gallery of artist’s books, which are books made by artists to be works of art, so as I flip through it, I’ll be wearing goggles to protect my eyes from the explosion of creative design ideas.
  • Socializing – Sunday evening I launched out on my quest to expand my circle of geeky friends, sparked by my desire to go to C2E2 with other people, by attending a game night with a local meetup group. I was somehow not nervous about going, maybe because I was basically familiar with this kind of event and I assumed the people would be friendly, and it turned out really well, even the Ultimate Werewolf game we all played toward the end that I initially resisted because I’m terrible at bluffing games. It was a fun night, and they’ll see me again!
Posted in Board games, Books, General, Nostalgia box, People, Productivity, Project updates | Leave a comment

Update for 2/5/2017

Posted on February 8, 2017 by Andy

Project updates

  • Book feedback – [moved from last week’s update because it belongs here] I spent the first three days of last week on this, and then I delivered what I had to my friend, which he said he’d be happy with, though ideally I wanted to get through the whole book. But I’m glad I had a deadline, because otherwise I’d put everything else off for weeks and weeks until I was done.
  • Tea – I usually dislike tea, but a couple of months ago I decided since I was opening my mind to coffee, I might as well open it to tea as well, so I bought a couple of boxes, and then I was given some for Christmas, and last week I was running out of interesting things to drink, so I decided to break open the chai I bought and give it a try. The box recommended steeping the bag for 4-6 minutes, and since my complaint with tea is always that I can’t taste anything, I left it in for 6, and it turned out really well for both the chai and the tea my parents gave me, so that’s my new tea-making practice.
  • Nostalgia box – Even though it’s February, I did my January folder last week, and to go along with the epistolary novel I’m reading now (S. by Abrams and Dorst), it contained letters and notes and a story from my friend Calla (with a few notes of mine mixed in), which I read with tea and Lauridsen’s Lux Æturna. I grew up with Calla in junior high and high school band, and the letters reminded me of the fun we had, and also the many arguments (mostly religious, all of which I’m sure I instigated), but even on our debates we drew silly faces, and some of the letters were very kind and sweet, and most importantly, they were loaded with the random creativity that motivated me to include them in the first place. They also left me with questions, so I may be writing a follow-up Facebook message soon, and I might also look for some more fictional or non-fictional books of letters to read. In the meantime, my next step is to come up with something to leave in the folder for next year, which might involve making several things and picking one or more, since this project is new and I don’t know what I’m doing yet.
  • Computer – I have several hardware needs right now–a power cord that’s wearing out, an overburdened computer that could use some RAM, and a secret plan to try some livestreaming that would work better with two monitors, which would be possible with an adapter–so on Saturday I made a trip to Fry’s and got what I needed, and I’ll put some of that in place this week.
  • Code console – The livestreaming idea is partly to interact with my online friends differently and partly to motivate myself to get moving on my programming projects, so I might be getting back to the code console this week or next week, depending on how long it takes me to set everything up. If I stream, I’ll announce it on Twitter when I’m about to go live, or you can follow me on Twitch and get an automatic notification when I go live.
  • Media
    • Books
      • Lost Boy, Lost Girl – I finished this fairly short supernatural mystery by Peter Straub, and I liked it, but not as much as I’d hoped, mostly because the tone wasn’t nearly creepy enough, and although for some books I could blame the reader, who I liked in this case, I think for his book it was really the writing, which I also liked, just more for its psychological than its horror aspects. My discontent has gotten me thinking about the nature of narration and tone, which is good for my plans to write, but it also means I’ll have to rethink how I search to find the kind of menacing novel I’m looking for, something like the effect Lovecraft was aiming for, but less eldritch and more creepypasta.
      • Labyrinths – This Jorge Luis Borges collection arrived in the mail last week, and I finally gave myself permission to read “The Garden of Forking Paths,” an early example (or at least discussion) of hypertext fiction. I read another story before I ordered the book to make sure I wanted to commit myself, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the stories, which I think generally fit into the experimental category, but I’ll probably read them one at a time here and there. I like that Borges only wrote short stories, since I feel it gives me permission not to write anything longer than I think I could manage.
    • TV – Last week my boss suggested that since season 2 was coming up, now would be a good time to watch Making a Murderer if we hadn’t already, so since I was done with another season of The Sara Jane Adventures, I decided to interrupt myself yet again for this show, a documentary that investigates the convoluted case of a possibly innocent man accused of murder. I never thought I’d binge watch a documentary, and for the first couple of episodes I thought I was safe and spaced them out over a few days … but then the infuriating episode 3 happened, and thankfully the next episode ended on a hopeful enough note that I could make myself stop and go to bed (and yes, for me that counts as binge watching). Those two episodes pushed my buttons hard enough that I was halfway contemplating a career in law, but no, for me the better path would be to create a lawyerbot to fight corruption as my surrogate. It’s a good time for me to think about the justice system, though, because I possibly have jury duty coming up in a couple of weeks.
  • Narratology – I’m getting impatient to learn about storytelling because it’ll help in so many of my creative projects, so I’m going to start slipping this in where I can, starting with notes on Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s Story Structure Architect.

Life updates

  • Work
    • Security – Last week our company’s security settings were upgraded, and not only do our passwords need to be longer, but we get only five chances to enter them correctly within 30 minutes or we get locked out of our account for that long. I don’t mind the longer passwords, but for several days I kept getting mysteriously locked out by something happening in the background, and it took almost a week of finding possible sources and disabling wifis before I finally eliminated the problem. It was very frustrating, and I was tempted to start addressing the IT people as Mordac and copying files to my less-secure personal tablet to work on during my lockouts.
    • PyCon – Last week was budget week for my boss, and he got approval to take our little department to PyCon in May, which will be my first developer convention and my first trip to the West Coast, so I’m looking forward to it.
Posted in Books, Conferences, Hardware, Narratology, Nostalgia box, Programming, Tea, TV, Work | 9 Comments

Update for 1/29/2017

Posted on February 2, 2017 by Andy

This week I blame naps and procrastination because I felt I had too many thoughts to collect.

Project updates

  • Nostalgia box – This seems to have been my major project last week, spending a few hours sorting through the old stuff I brought from my parents’ house and picking out things to put in each month’s folder. Each month I’ll open the matching folder, spend some time with what I put in there, and replace it with something else for the next year, probably something I make; and most months I’ll keep you posted about what I “find.” I’ll do January’s folder this week.
  • Code console – This is the new name for what I called my Python console last time (my code manager that creates projects from templates), named more generically now since I want it to apply to other languages too. I want to focus on this project after the book feedback and nostalgia box because it’s the gateway to a bunch of other programming projects on my agenda.
  • Media
    • Books
      • Area X – I finished this last week (awkwardly, since I waited too long to listen to the last 15 minutes and had to reborrow it), and my reaction to the series is ambivalent. I liked the philosophizing about knowledge and some of the character explorations, but the storytelling seemed to keep the mysteries even more confusing than the story required them to be. I think I’d appreciate the series more on a second reading, but I don’t know if I’ll get around to it. As for the audiobook narration, I had the same problem with Carolyn McCormick I had during The Hunger Games where half her sentences sound like pronouncements, I liked Bronson Pinchot for the most part and wouldn’t have recognized his voice at all if I hadn’t seen his name, and I’ll have to hear Xe Sands in something else before I decide if I like her style.
      • Little House in the Big Woods – The Little House books had been crossing my mind lately as a depiction of life’s rhythms back in pioneer days, and I wanted to explore the rhythm idea and see if I could adapt it for my life, so I listened to the first book last week. I’d read some of that series when I was young, and it was interesting to come back to it as an adult and ask my grown-up questions about it to get an idea of its context, and I could see some of why the books are so popular. They’re an interesting and cozy window onto a healthy family living in a very different, simpler time. I might come back to it in a while and listen to the rest of the series.
      • Experimental literature – I collected a few more links for my list. But this is on hold till I get through the code console.
    • TV – I finished The OA, and it impressed me how seriously it took its very unusual subject matter. It got me thinking about my profound questions (such as, what do I mean by a profound question?) and about the times the profundities break through the banalities of life and make you rethink everything. It also reminded me of a genre I call therapy stories, which offer fairly direct opinions on the meaning of life and how it works, movies such as What Dreams May Come (which is also a book) and books like The Shack (which is about to be a movie). Maybe I’ll start a page on the wiki to collect a list of these.
  • Firefox – As an example of the way I get completely sidetracked from my plans, on Saturday I opened Firefox and was greeted by a message from the developer of one of the Firefox add-ons I have installed (Tab Groups), saying he’s quitting his add-on development because major upcoming changes in Firefox would severely restrict what his add-ons could do and would require him to rewrite them in any case. This news pushed my buttons, so instead of the three other things I’d planned to do, I spent the next couple of hours reading about these changes and people’s reactions to them. But the time wasn’t completely wasted, because it made me aware of important issues to take into account when I eventually create the add-ons I have in mind and when I study Firefox for its add-on architecture.
Posted in Books, Nostalgia box, Programming, Project updates, TV | Leave a comment

Update for 1/22/2017

Posted on January 26, 2017 by Andy

It’s Thursday, a record for lateness on one of these weekly updates. For the newcomers, the date in the title really just tells you which week I’m updating for rather than the exact day I’m posting it. Ideally I post the entry on Sunday, but in any case it covers the previous Monday through that day as “last week” and reports my plans for the upcoming week.

Project updates

  • Project map – I’ve decided to separate the map from the wiki guide, since they really have different goals, and separating them should help me think about each of them. The map is a higher priority for me, and my latest thought on it is that most of my projects are aimed at achieving some kind of enlightenment (more than just learning things), which feels like a significant insight.
  • Python console – This is the programming template project I mentioned before, and I started it a long time ago, but now I’m revising it to conform to my new programming project structure; and before I return to my other programming projects, I want to get it to the point of being able to create projects with the structure I’ve established so far, since I’ll be updating the structure as I work on them, and I want to record in the template what I’ve done so far.
  • Life maintenance
    • Housekeeping – The maintenance guy has fixed the ceiling, and from my conversation with him, he seems intent on finding and fixing the source of the leak, so that’s good news, though it could be annoying for a while.
    • Cooking – I did some, which always feels newsworthy–chicken tikka masala this time. Lately I’ve been cooking in stages over multiple days, so one day I cook the meat, another day mix the spices, etc.
  • Nostalgia box – Before the end of the month I’d like to start using this, so I’ll need to sort through my old things, pick out stuff to put in the folders, spend some time with January’s thing, and replace it with a thing for next January.
  • Media
    • Movies
      • The Revenant – I watched this at the beginning of last week, and while the cinematography and some of the music were beautiful and profound and the performances were impressive, the story was straightforward and simple and didn’t give me much to chew on.
      • Silence – I saw this with Tim on Sunday and found it much more satisfying, both beautiful and roiling with ideas. It was a grueling experience, however, watching almost three hours of continuous social and personal crisis. But it illustrated one way I’ve found that history can interest me, where I wonder how a situation got from one state to another, in this case how Japan stopped persecuting Christians, and in researching the answer I was helped by having watched this short, amusing history of Japan a while back (warning: strong language).
    • TV – My coworkers apparently want to talk about The OA, so I’m trying to finish that up this week.
    • Comics – On Monday I found out that a fan convention, C2E2, is happening in April, and it will include celebrities I’d like to see, so since I know about it before the day before, I’m starting to make plans to finally go to one of these things, which will involve finding existing or new friends who want to go, since it’s lonely and annoying to go to events by myself, so I might join one or two comic-related groups I found on meetup.com.
    • Books
      • Treasure Island – My N. C. Wyeth illustrated Treasure Island arrived, so my old book collection has begun! Back then publishers communicated a book’s publication information differently, and it seems the printing date is on the title page (in Roman numerals–thanks, publisher), which makes this one a 1924 printing.
      • Experimental literature – I’ve been having fun collecting web links based on the chapters in the Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature to post in an article on the wiki and to form the basis for a reading list. I’m collecting them as Firefox bookmarks, and at some point I’ll write a program that will convert them to a wiki article, and then I can post it. These link collections are easy to do and feel useful, so you’ll probably see several more of them this year.
      • Book feedback – A friend asked for feedback on a nonfiction book he’d like to release soon, so I’m going to try to spend most of this week on that.
Posted in Books, Comics, Cooking, Housekeeping, Movies, Nostalgia box, Programming, Project updates, Projects, TV | 2 Comments

Update for 1/15/2017

Posted on January 18, 2017 by Andy

Project updates

    • Projects – I’m still feeling dissatisfied with my productivity, especially the sense that I haven’t made much of anything that would really interest other people, so I’m going to carve out some time to think about that this week and do some planning.
    • Bookmarks – I made a miniscule amount of progress on this one, with the main result that I’ve decided to create a template project as I write my other programs to keep a record of my solutions to general problems so they don’t slow me down in the future.
    • Map magnets – I made a prototype magnet set to test my idea, and you can see the result below.

    • Media – My key word right now is mystery, by which I don’t mean an unsolved crime but something closer to a transcendent puzzle.
      • Books – On the experimental fiction side of things, the book of mystery I’ve been reading since Christmas is S. by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst, a book made to look like it was printed in 1949 and in which half the story is told as a conversation handwritten in the margins about the intrigues of the book and its author and translator, and the conversation spills out into numerous loose-leaf inserts, which make it necessary to keep the book in its slipcase. I’m hoping to read a lot more of this kind of book this year, and to help me plan out my reading list, I’ve bought The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature, which will guide the bibliography for my wiki that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. On the creepy fiction side of things, I’ve been listening to Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, which certainly fits my definition of mystery and is a very philosophical and psychological series, which is the kind of story I look for, though many times I’ve wondered if the plot is going anywhere, but then it rewards my waiting by lurching in a more definite direction, leaving me partly satisfied but still confused though intrigued.
      • TV – My Sara Jane Adventures viewing has been interrupted by The OA, a Netflix series my boss recommended to me, and it is both mysterious and rather heavy in its themes, which is also what I’m into right now.
      • Comics – I want to get back into reading comics this year, and I kicked it off by finally finishing my José Luis García-López collection (Adventures of Superman) after a little over a year. Now I’m on the much shorter Super Human Resources Vol 1, which I bought last year at Free Comic Book Day.
      • Livestreams – Last week was an annual event called Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ), a video game speedrunning marathon to benefit the Prevent Cancer Foundation (over $2 million raised over the course of the week), and I tuned in to the livestream for a few of the runs and interviews, which you can watch in the playlist on their YouTube channel. Even though I’ve only played one of the games I watched, it was interesting to hear the different kinds of issues and strategies that come up in speedrunning them. I especially recommend the mind-boggling Portal run, performed by a robot called TASBot that makes an appearance each year.

Life updates

    • Housekeeping – I’ve cleaned up a bit more. The maintenance guy has replaced the cracked part of the ceiling, but he still has to cover the patch, and while that’s exposed, the water pours out the side when the leak happens. I’ve written to the managers about it, so now I’m just waiting.
    • Socializing – Sunday I had lunch at Zoup! with my friends Linda and the Keevers, where we talked about books, as usual, and Pokémon. It had been a while since we’d all gotten together, so I was glad we could.
Posted in Bookmarks, Books, Comics, Housekeeping, Life updates, Livestreams, Map magnets, People, Project updates, Projects, TV, Video games | 4 Comments

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