{"id":693,"date":"2017-01-18T01:24:37","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T07:24:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/?p=693"},"modified":"2017-01-18T01:24:37","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T07:24:37","slug":"update-for-1152017","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2017\/01\/18\/update-for-1152017\/","title":{"rendered":"Update for 1\/15\/2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Project updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Projects<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;m still feeling dissatisfied with my productivity, especially the sense that I haven&#8217;t made much of anything that would really interest other people, so I&#8217;m going to carve out some time to think about that this week and do some planning.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Bookmarks<\/strong> &#8211; I made a miniscule amount of progress on this one, with the main result that I&#8217;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&#8217;t slow me down in the future.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Map magnets<\/strong> &#8211; I made a prototype magnet set to test my idea, and you can see the result below.<br \/>\n<blockquote class=\"instagram-media\" style=\"background: #FFF; border: 0; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: calc(100% - 2px);\" data-instgrm-captioned=\"\" data-instgrm-version=\"7\">\n<div style=\"padding: 8px;\">\n<div style=\"background: #F8F8F8; line-height: 0; margin-top: 40px; padding: 50.0% 0; text-align: center; width: 100%;\"><\/div>\n<p style=\"margin: 8px 0 0 0; padding: 0 4px;\"><a style=\"color: #000; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/BPZXp3wBucK\/\" target=\"_blank\">A test set of map tile fridge magnets I made by printing and cutting the image at http:\/\/www.zerotwentythree.com\/2009\/11\/might-empires.html. The individual hexagons were too small for my magnets, so I cut them in hexagonal clusters.<\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #c9c8cd; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px; margin-bottom: 0; margin-top: 8px; overflow: hidden; padding: 8px 0 7px; text-align: center; text-overflow: ellipsis; white-space: nowrap;\">A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on <time style=\"font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;\" datetime=\"2017-01-18T06:54:52+00:00\">Jan 17, 2017 at 10:54pm PST<\/time><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.instagram.com\/en_US\/embeds.js\" async=\"\" defer=\"defer\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"instagram-media\" style=\"background: #FFF; border: 0; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: 0 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.5),0 1px 10px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.15); margin: 1px; max-width: 658px; padding: 0; width: calc(100% - 2px);\" data-instgrm-captioned=\"\" data-instgrm-version=\"7\">\n<div style=\"padding: 8px;\">\n<div style=\"background: #F8F8F8; line-height: 0; margin-top: 40px; padding: 50.0% 0; text-align: center; width: 100%;\"><\/div>\n<p><a style=\"color: #000; font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: 17px; text-decoration: none; word-wrap: break-word;\" href=\"https:\/\/www.instagram.com\/p\/BPZXy5ahb9l\/\" target=\"_blank\">Here are the tiles arranged into a map. I felt kind of restricted as I was placing them because they only really fit together a few ways, but the set I design myself will give me more freedom.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>A photo posted by Andy Culbertson (@thinkulum) on <time style=\"font-family: Arial,sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 17px;\" datetime=\"2017-01-18T06:56:06+00:00\">Jan 17, 2017 at 10:56pm PST<\/time>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.instagram.com\/en_US\/embeds.js\" async=\"\" defer=\"defer\"><\/script><\/li>\n<li><strong>Media<\/strong> &#8211; My key word right now is <em>mystery<\/em>, by which I don&#8217;t mean an unsolved crime but something closer to a transcendent puzzle.\n<ul>\n<li><em><strong>Books<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; On the experimental fiction side of things, the book of mystery I&#8217;ve been reading since Christmas is <em>S.<\/em> 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&#8217;m hoping to read a lot more of this kind of book this year, and to help me plan out my reading list, I&#8217;ve bought <em>The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature<\/em>, which will guide the bibliography for my wiki that I mentioned a couple of weeks ago. On the creepy fiction side of things, I&#8217;ve been listening to Jeff Vandermeer&#8217;s <em>Southern Reach<\/em> 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&#8217;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.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>TV<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; My <em>Sara Jane Adventures<\/em> viewing has been interrupted by <em>The OA<\/em>, a Netflix series my boss recommended to me, and it is both mysterious and rather heavy in its themes, which is also what I&#8217;m into right now.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Comics<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; I want to get back into reading comics this year, and I kicked it off by finally finishing my Jos\u00e9 Luis Garc\u00eda-L\u00f3pez collection (<em>Adventures of Superman<\/em>) after a little over a year. Now I&#8217;m on the much shorter <em>Super Human Resources Vol 1<\/em>, which I bought last year at Free Comic Book Day.<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Livestreams<\/strong><\/em> &#8211; 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 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/playlist?list=PLz8YL4HVC87WpMJWk99B0L8z7WhTFkSKS\">playlist<\/a> on their YouTube channel. Even though I&#8217;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 <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/Ukq29ePnTqI?list=PLz8YL4HVC87WpMJWk99B0L8z7WhTFkSKS&amp;t=3673\"><em>Portal<\/em> run<\/a>, performed by a robot called <a href=\"http:\/\/tasvideos.org\/TASBot.html\">TASBot<\/a> that makes an appearance each year.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Life updates<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Housekeeping<\/strong> &#8211; I&#8217;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&#8217;s exposed, the water pours out the side when the leak happens. I&#8217;ve written to the managers about it, so now I&#8217;m just waiting.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Socializing<\/strong> &#8211; Sunday I had lunch at <em>Zoup!<\/em> with my friends Linda and the Keevers, where we talked about books, as usual, and <em>Pok\u00e9mon<\/em>. It had been a while since we&#8217;d all gotten together, so I was glad we could.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Project updates Projects &#8211; I&#8217;m still feeling dissatisfied with my productivity, especially the sense that I haven&#8217;t made much of anything that would really interest other people, so I&#8217;m going to carve out some time to think about that this &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2017\/01\/18\/update-for-1152017\/\">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":[153,89,90,88,58,154,152,36,105,54,115,109],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookmarks","category-books","category-comics","category-housekeeping","category-life_updates","category-livestreams","category-map-magnets","category-people","category-project-updates","category-projects","category-tv","category-video-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693","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=693"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":695,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/693\/revisions\/695"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}