{"id":1151,"date":"2019-03-13T13:19:46","date_gmt":"2019-03-13T18:19:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/?p=1151"},"modified":"2019-03-16T18:03:57","modified_gmt":"2019-03-16T23:03:57","slug":"update-for-3-10-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2019\/03\/13\/update-for-3-10-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Update for 3\/10\/2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Music<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude0e<\/p>\n<p>Tuesday I took the afternoon off from work, took a long nap, and then headed out to see Jacob Collier in concert.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Jacob Collier trials 1 and 2 passed: the Chicago traffic gauntlet and getting into the concert hall. Now to stand around for an hour till the concert starts.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/thinkulum\/status\/1103103489683664896?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">March 5, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>I came in with only vague expectations, but he met and exceeded them. He was creative, energetic, and uplifting, and he got the audience singing. For &#8220;In My Room,&#8221; he even had us sit on the floor (the lower level had no chairs) and sing along while the band sat on the edge of the stage, like we were at a big campfire. Like this but in Chicago:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">NEW ORLEANS warmth!!! <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/soZ5M4VGAQ\">pic.twitter.com\/soZ5M4VGAQ<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Jacob Collier (@jacobcollier) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/jacobcollier\/status\/1104889403607080968?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">March 10, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>When I think &#8220;live version&#8221; of a song, I think of just a messier rendition of the studio recording. But that wouldn&#8217;t do for Jacob Collier. No, his live versions are completely different arrangements. For example, here&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NSbxiFjA1ZQ\">the album version<\/a> of &#8220;In the Real Early Morning.&#8221; And here&#8217;s someone&#8217;s video of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=YJdJ33wQnqI\">the live version<\/a>. I wouldn&#8217;t be surprised if he improvised it on the spot. Here are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=--bpRn9yFI4\">some other clips<\/a> to give you the flavor of the rest of the show.<\/p>\n<p>It was a good experience, and Lincoln Hall did a good job of advertising their other artists. I&#8217;m thinking of looking them up to see who might bring me back.<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t really do anything else for my birthday, which was on Thursday, except for getting a bunch of nice birthday messages (thank you!). But I&#8217;m considering the concert my celebration, and it was plenty!<\/p>\n<h2>Thinking<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n<p>To get me through the drive to the concert, I started the audiobook of Nicholas Nassim Taleb&#8217;s <em>Antifragile<\/em>. Antifragility is the property of benefiting from disorder, as opposed to being damaged by it (fragility) or simply being resistant to it (robustness). I finished the book on Saturday.<\/p>\n<p>It was good, but I wouldn&#8217;t say great. I enjoyed his opinionated, gratuitously insulting style in <em>Black Swan<\/em>, but in <em>Antifragile<\/em> it seemed extra gratuitous, and I got tired of it quickly. And a lot of his supporting examples sounded like matters of personal preference. A lot of others were based merely on his rules of thumb, which doesn&#8217;t count as evidence. But the general idea of antifragility seems like an important one, so I&#8217;d like to look into it further.<\/p>\n<p>Despite his snark and combativeness, I did find some personal qualities to admire. He comes across as having a strong sense of ethics. Practicing what you preach (having &#8220;skin in the game&#8221;) is a key part of his message, he feels it his duty to call out fraud, and he values helping the weak. With all that, I felt more inspired to act with integrity and generosity.<\/p>\n<h2>Spirituality<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not doing a great job at keeping up with the liturgical year like I intended, so I&#8217;m downgrading that project to my usual level of inattention. Maybe I&#8217;ll try again next year.<\/p>\n<p>Lent crept up on me, and I didn&#8217;t realize it was Ash Wednesday till my coworker walked in with ashes on his forehead. I hadn&#8217;t planned any Lent practices, but I decided it&#8217;d be a good time to listen to the audio Bible my brother gave me for Christmas, <em>The Message Remix<\/em>. It&#8217;s <em>The Message<\/em> read by Kelly Ryan Dolan but with certain sections read by different Christian celebrities. I requested that version so the reading would have some variety.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m going to try my high intensity listening pace with this Bible. That amounts to two hours a day, spread over my commutes and meals plus a little extra. At 2x speed <em>The Message Remix<\/em> is about 40 hours, so it should take me three weeks to get through it. That fits into Lent nicely.<\/p>\n<p>The quickest I&#8217;ve gotten through an audio Bible in the past is 90 days. Here are <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2011\/05\/18\/90-days-through-the-bible\/\">some reflections<\/a> from one of those listens. I&#8217;m curious to see how my impressions this time compare.<\/p>\n<h2>Software development<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n<p>I finished <em>Refactoring Databases<\/em>. I love databases as a programming tool, but I don&#8217;t know enough about them to evaluate this book fairly, so I&#8217;m taking other people&#8217;s word for it that it&#8217;s great. If nothing else, this one and the other books in the evolutionary distributed software architecture family give me a starting point for learning more about these topics.<\/p>\n<h2>Coding project generator<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n<p>Not only did I put this project on hold to get through <em>House of Leaves<\/em>, I&#8217;ve taken it off this month&#8217;s agenda altogether in favor of a different project, which I&#8217;ll tell you about in the Fiction section. And then I have another project in mind for April, so I&#8217;m planning to get back to the project generator in May.<\/p>\n<h2>Fiction<\/h2>\n<h3><em>House of Leaves<\/em><\/h3>\n<p>\ud83d\ude0e<\/p>\n<p>Last week I pushed myself through reading the 700-page novel <em>House of Leaves<\/em>. It&#8217;s a classic of the found footage horror genre. I read it for a challenge posed by a YouTuber named Nick Nocturne, a lead-up to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=kfVztT3UeYw\">the first in his series of videos<\/a> analyzing the book. It&#8217;s definitely an R-rated book, but if you don&#8217;t mind that and you like having your mind twisted in metafictional knots, it&#8217;s a good one. According to Nick, it has inspired and shaped a lot of creative work in the genre.<\/p>\n<p>If this had been an audiobook, reading it in nine days would&#8217;ve been no problem. But print reading is difficult for me because I&#8217;m so easily sidetracked, and I slow way down when I&#8217;m bored. But I remembered I have a trick&#8211;I time each page with the stopwatch on my phone, and that keeps me focused enough to maintain a nice pace. After a while of that at the beginning, I realized the story was carrying me along on its own, so then I read normally, and I only had to use the trick a couple of times after that.<\/p>\n<p>The other trouble was setting aside the time to read. I haven&#8217;t really solved that yet. But somehow despite days of very little reading mixed with a few multi-hour sessions, I got through the whole thing by Saturday evening.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">The real miracle is that I finished the book! Thanks for the chance to prove to myself I can still read long things. Now to find out all the meanings and connections I missed. \ud83d\ude04 <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/HouseOfLeavesChallenge?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#HouseOfLeavesChallenge<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/AfBzu3P55Y\">pic.twitter.com\/AfBzu3P55Y<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/thinkulum\/status\/1104561481532751872?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">March 10, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>The dark ambient music from <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pandora.com\/station\/5028921403958737\">my Pandora station<\/a> was a fitting backdrop to the novel. I ended up mostly listening to a playlist on my phone that was derived from the station.<\/p>\n<h3>Experimental literature<\/h3>\n<p>\ud83d\ude0e<\/p>\n<p>That leads me to my project for the rest of this month. Nick has been very involved in the <em>House of Leaves<\/em> Challenge, retweeting the participants and putting their book photos in his video. He even retweeted my link to my dark ambient station.<\/p>\n<p>So I was thinking my fellow <em>House of Leaves<\/em> readers might like some pointers to more experimental literature, and this would be a perfect opportunity to finish a project I started two years ago to collect such a list. My starting point is <em>The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature<\/em>. It should be easy enough to finish the project in the next couple of weeks. I don&#8217;t know how much attention it&#8217;ll get, but it&#8217;ll at least be worth it for my own reading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Music \ud83d\ude0e Tuesday I took the afternoon off from work, took a long nap, and then headed out to see Jacob Collier in concert. Jacob Collier trials 1 and 2 passed: the Chicago traffic gauntlet and getting into the concert &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2019\/03\/13\/update-for-3-10-2019\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[160,194,186,125,193,22,179,167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coding-project-generator","category-experimental-literature","category-fiction","category-music","category-software-development","category-spirituality","category-thinking","category-weeknotes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1151"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1155,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1151\/revisions\/1155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}