{"id":866,"date":"2017-11-05T15:58:25","date_gmt":"2017-11-05T21:58:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/?p=866"},"modified":"2017-11-05T16:19:34","modified_gmt":"2017-11-05T22:19:34","slug":"update-for-1152017-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2017\/11\/05\/update-for-1152017-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Update for 11\/5\/2017"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Life management<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude15<\/p>\n<p>Well, thanks to my continuing irregular sleep and poor time management, my life is feeling even more stalled. But I&#8217;m still experimenting to find solutions.<\/p>\n<h2>Project generator<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude15<\/p>\n<p>I progressed about a millimeter.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes when my online friends tell me they&#8217;re procrastinating on something, I tell them to stream it. My thought is that if it&#8217;s not too distracting, streaming can be motivating and focusing. You have an audience that at least somewhat expects you to work on the thing you&#8217;ve announced as the purpose of the stream.<\/p>\n<p>Accountability is mostly what these update posts are for, but clearly they&#8217;re not enough. I need scheduled events that I can organize my life around. In high school I always took a study hall for this reason. At home I&#8217;d procrastinate on homework, but my mind saw study hall as a box of time meant for work, and there I got things done.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m thinking maybe I should take my own advice and finally get around to streaming. Sigh, I guess I&#8217;ll look into that this week. It&#8217;s kind of scary though.<\/p>\n<h2>Beliefs report<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t have much time during lunch last week, so instead of trying to shove writing into those few minutes, I read a manga instead (see below).<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m thinking that either I need to fix my lunch practices or pick a different time to do this project. Maybe I should alternate between this and the project generator.<\/p>\n<h2>Movies<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude44<\/p>\n<p>Movies have been coming out that I want to see, mainly <em>Blade Runner 2049<\/em> and <em>Thor: Ragnarok<\/em>. But I haven&#8217;t gotten around to them.<\/p>\n<h2>Books<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83e\udd14<\/p>\n<p>What I have done is listen to things. I&#8217;ve concluded that audiobooks are about the only thing I can reliably complete in life.<\/p>\n<p>Halloween morning was gloomy and overcast, so on my way to work I listened to &#8220;The Raven&#8221; by Edgar Allen Poe. It&#8217;d been forever since I&#8217;d read it, and I remembered barely anything. It surprised me by summoning tears somewhere in the middle, thinking about the narrator wrestling with his grief over Lenore.<\/p>\n<p>Reading about &#8220;The Raven&#8221; led me to &#8220;The Imp of the Perverse,&#8221; so I listened to that at lunch. That one was interesting because I first heard that concept from C. S. Lewis, and I wondered if Lewis had picked it up from Poe. It also reminded me that a lot of observation and psychologizing and philosophizing goes into quality fiction. It doesn&#8217;t just report a stream of imaginary events.<\/p>\n<p>That night I finished Peter Clines&#8217; <em>The Fold<\/em>, the sci fi horror I started the week before. I was pleased it went the general direction I was hoping. It&#8217;d be nice if he continued the series, but he&#8217;d have to really vary the pattern after this book. It wasn&#8217;t a copy of the first one, but without a change in the overall scenario the commonalities could get monotonous.<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;m on <em>Consider Phlebas<\/em> by Iain M. Banks, another one that Audible has enabled me to get around to. It&#8217;s the start of a sci fi series (The Culture) that encompasses some of the technology Isaac Arthur talks about. I was ignorant of the premise going in, but it turns out to be relevant to my interests&#8211;a conflict between pro-machine and pro-organism viewpoints. Should we let life find its own balance, or do we want AIs to impose order?<\/p>\n<p>Some articles and conversations have nudged me into starting to read Junji Ito&#8217;s work. He writes horror manga. I feel a kinship with his imagination. So I continued Halloween by picking up <em>Gyo Vol. 1<\/em> from the library. It was a page turner, and I finished it before I got around to putting it in Goodreads. Vol. 2 isn&#8217;t anywhere nearby, so it&#8217;s either interlibrary loan or buying it from ComiXology.<\/p>\n<h2>Christmas<\/h2>\n<p>\ud83d\ude10<\/p>\n<p>Our family&#8217;s scramble to update our Christmas lists has begun, so this weekend I&#8217;m researching my upcoming projects to see what resources would make good additions to my wish list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Life management \ud83d\ude15 Well, thanks to my continuing irregular sleep and poor time management, my life is feeling even more stalled. But I&#8217;m still experimenting to find solutions. Project generator \ud83d\ude15 I progressed about a millimeter. Sometimes when my online &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/2017\/11\/05\/update-for-1152017-2\/\">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":[163,89,160,91,174,122,167],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beliefs-report","category-books","category-coding-project-generator","category-holidays","category-life-management","category-movies","category-weeknotes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866","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=866"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":869,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/866\/revisions\/869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thinkulum.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}