{"id":517,"date":"2016-04-17T22:46:50","date_gmt":"2016-04-18T03:46:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/?p=517"},"modified":"2016-04-18T08:13:22","modified_gmt":"2016-04-18T13:13:22","slug":"update-for-4172016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2016\/04\/17\/update-for-4172016\/","title":{"rendered":"Update for 4\/17\/2016"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On time! How did this happen?? It&#8217;s mainly because I used a little trick that&#8217;s helped me in other posts, writing no more than four (complicated) sentences per topic.<\/p>\n<h2>Project updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Math relearning<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;m now on Topic D, about a third of the way through pre-K Module 1. I&#8217;m still working out exactly what to create from these lessons apart from my random comments, but thanks to my random comments on the first lesson, I&#8217;m closer to knowing. I&#8217;ll post my comments and whatever else I come up with as I finish each module. Math relearning is my favorite project right now, partly because I have such good material to work with.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Daily routine<\/strong> &#8211; The simpler organization for my schedule was easier to think about, but it didn&#8217;t really get me to stick to it. I have a couple of ideas for this week. First, I want to keep a record of how I spend my time in the evenings to see what issues I need to address, such as naps, and whatever else I notice. And second, for at least a day or two I want to try moving my life maintenance (walk and devotions) to the morning so I&#8217;m less likely to skip it.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Diet<\/strong> &#8211; I did a few low-carb cooking experiments this week: (1) <a href=\"http:\/\/alldayidreamaboutfood.com\/2015\/01\/the-best-low-carb-hot-fudge-sauce.html\">hot fudge sauce<\/a> for my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.breyers.com\/product\/detail\/113878\/carbsmart-vanilla\">low-carb ice cream<\/a>, (2) <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dietdoctor.com\/recipes\/lchf-pancakes-with-berries-and-whipped-cream\">pancakes<\/a>, and (3) a beef broth sauce for a fajita steak and vegetable combination. They all worked out pretty well, except that for the hot fudge I had to use a lot of Truvia, which made it gritty, so I&#8217;ll keep experimenting. Because I&#8217;m still learning how to cook and eat low-carbishly, I have trouble socializing around food, which put me in a bad mood Thursday morning when I was feeling pressured to help out with a potluck at church, hosting a visiting choir. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/AbbieOnPaper\">My sister<\/a> was a good listener and made me feel better; and after some reassurances from the event organizer that they&#8217;d be okay, I ended up saying no.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Life updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Board games<\/strong> &#8211; At lunch on Wednesday a few of us playtested a game my coworker <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/lVlJW\">Matt<\/a> is creating. It&#8217;s tentatively called <i>Good, Fast, Cheap<\/i>, and that&#8217;s the idea. The players are building businesses and competing for contracts, but each development can only have <a href=\"https:\/\/support.office.com\/en-us\/article\/The-project-triangle-8c892e06-d761-4d40-8e1f-17b33fdcf810\">two of those three qualities<\/a>. I love that theme, and it makes me wonder what other aphorisms could be gamified.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Video games<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Minecraft<\/em> &#8211; After resisting and then contemplating it for months, my friend Jeremy finally bought the game two Saturdays ago, and Tuesday night I hung out at their apartment and taught their nine-year-old son some <i>Minecraft<\/i> basics. Yesterday I set up a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.minecraftmaps.com\/survival-maps\/skyblock\"><i>Skyblock<\/i><\/a> island on a <i>Minecraft<\/i> server so Jeremy and I could play it together, which we stayed up pretty late doing. I&#8217;ve only played <i>Minecraft<\/i> with someone else once before, and it&#8217;s fun enough that I&#8217;m still thinking of applying to <a href=\"\/blog\/2016\/04\/12\/update-for-4102016\/\">that other server<\/a>, though I don&#8217;t want to crowd my time with gaming.<\/li>\n<li><em>Super Mario<\/em> &#8211; Our family didn&#8217;t have consoles growing up, so I never played most classic video games. But this year I&#8217;ve been watching a lot of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Speedrun\">speedrunners<\/a> who play <i>Super Mario Bros. 1<\/i> and <i>Super Mario World<\/i>, so I&#8217;ve been wanting to try them, though not to speedrun, because <i>speed<\/i> and I don&#8217;t even belong in the same sentence. I don&#8217;t have consoles to play them on, but that&#8217;s okay because of <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Video_game_console_emulator\">emulators<\/a>, but I needed to own the game cartridges as basically licenses to play the games, and to my surprise I found them at a couple of Half Price Books in the area, so that was my Saturday afternoon. Late Saturday night I got the emulators set up, and so after 31 years, I&#8217;m finally ready to play these games that defined the childhood of everyone else in the entire world.<\/li>\n<li><em>Controller<\/em> &#8211; To make it easier to play Mario and other games, I decided to buy a controller for my PC. My main choices were between Logitech, which is what Jeremy uses, and Microsoft, which my online friend <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/GamingSpeedy\">Speedy<\/a> recommended; and I went with Logitech because (1) it was the cheaper option, (2) I&#8217;m not a serious gamer, and (3) it&#8217;s my first PC controller. After testing it on a few games, I reached some verdicts: <i>Final Fantasy VII<\/i> (on an emulator)&#8211;easier; <i>Stardew Valley<\/i>&#8211;easier; <i>The Talos Principle<\/i>&#8211;harder; <i>Rocket League<\/i>&#8211;harder, surprisingly, though this type of game is hard for me in any case, but I&#8217;ll try to get used to the controller because it seems like it should be the better input method.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>TV<\/strong> &#8211; I finished <i>Daredevil<\/i> season 2, and despite some unsatisfying dialogue I liked it, especially the last episode or two, which seemed to set things up interestingly for the next season or show. Now I&#8217;m back to <i>The Sarah Jane Adventures<\/i>, which feels like getting together with an old friend after a long absence. I also might be drifting into another, probably short, anime phase, a side effect of looking into these classic Japanese video games.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Freelancing<\/strong> &#8211; At the end of the week I got a request for a couple of short jobs from my old employer, so I&#8217;ll be doing that this week. They&#8217;re a kind of automated proofreading I&#8217;ve done many times before, so unless they have unusual complications, they should only take a day or two.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On time! How did this happen?? It&#8217;s mainly because I used a little trick that&#8217;s helped me in other posts, writing no more than four (complicated) sentences per topic. Project updates Math relearning &#8211; I&#8217;m now on Topic D, about &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2016\/04\/17\/update-for-4172016\/\">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":[102,46,117,112,107,110,58,100,36,105,115,109,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-517","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-board-games","category-cooking","category-daily-routine","category-diet","category-doctor-who","category-freelancing","category-life_updates","category-math-relearning","category-people","category-project-updates","category-tv","category-video-games","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517","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=517"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":523,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/517\/revisions\/523"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=517"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=517"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=517"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}