puzzles – Page 6 – Philoquialisms

Half-remembered creaks

Sorry for the lack of updates. I made it back to Baton Rouge safe and sound after a very, very long day of driving Saturday, and I’ve been choosing to spend my time elsewhere rather than staying at the computer so much.

Normally, when I come back home–and while I do think of Louisiana as “back home”, I think of my house in Lenoir as home, which is an interesting distinction I hadn’t really realized I made until recently–I try to pack in as many restaurants and as many visits with old friends as possible. Not so much this time around. I haven’t even made it to my favorite restaurant in the world; quelle horreur! Normally it’s the first stop when my mother picks me up from the airport, before we even go home to drop off the luggage.

Part of it is that I really want to take it easier than I usually do. Now that I’m retired, I suspect I’ll be coming back home twice a year rather than just once, and those stays are likely to be longer. So there’s less of a need to pack it all in, to make the experience the most time-efficient thing possible, to ensure maximum value.

Part of it is that I’ve also decided to take a more passive role this time; normally I do a lot of coordination to make visits and meals and all that jazz happen. I’m not doing that this year. I’ve let everyone know that I’m in town and available for meals; if they choose not to follow up on that, well, I’m just as content eating at home and solving some puzzles or watching a movie with Mom. I hung out with one of my old friends all day Monday, and will be doing so again this coming Saturday, interspersed with the usual family visits. If people really want to see me, they can put in some minimal effort to make it happen. I’m not going to force the issue.

So far it’s been an extremely pleasant trip. My timing was always meant to make sure I caught the tail end of the cool season, when it’s not too wet yet but the days aren’t face-meltingly hot either. It worked perfectly. I spent most of yesterday reading on a swing on the porch, a cool breeze sweeping through the whole time, and today is genuinely chilly. A month from now and Louisiana is going to be hot and sticky. No thanks.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a book to read.

Weekly status update [0008/????]

I’m writing this right before crashing out early for tomorrow’s trip; I plan on getting up at 5:30am and hitting the road by 6am so that I can get into Baton Rouge at something resembling a reasonable hour. We’ll see how well I manage.

In preparation for the aforementioned trip, I picked up a Samsung Chromebook 3 from Amazon this week. My full assessment will have to wait until I’m back, but so far I’m pretty impressed. It even natively supports Colemak, which came as a pleasant surprise.
Speaking of which, my wrists are behaving quite a bit better… or, at least, they were, until I was lazy last night and didn’t put them on before going to bed. Sigh. I plan on wearing them for at least most of the day tomorrow, which should help some, but I’ve got to stop doing that. It’s not doing me any favors.
Not a lot of gaming this week, other than the usual little stabs at the various free-to-play games you’ve gotta do every day to keep up with the grind.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I had a couple of old coworkers/friends over on a whim yesterday afternoon, and we had a blast playing video pinball (both Pinball FX 3 and The Pinball Arcade) along with the perennial Towerfall Ascension.
I went to a farewell dinner for one of my old teammates; they’re moving to Raleigh, which makes me sad to see them go, but I suspect they’re going to be a lot happier there from a social perspective. It’s rather too quiet here for most people.
(Re)read some more of the Culture series, watched a few more episodes of The Punisher, solved more puzzles. Steady state, in other words.

Now to try and get some sleep. I usually have a lot of trouble sleeping the night before traveling, but I hope that won’t be the case this evening, particularly given how much less stressed I am about this trip than, uh, any other one in living memory. I guess it’s time to find out!

Weekly status update [0007/????]

This post is a day late and, given taxes and the recent stock market behavior, decidedly more than a dollar short. It was an intentionally light week, though, so I’ll keep it brief-ish.

Mostly, I read. I finished rereading Excession at 2am this morning. I think it’s still the Culture novel I’m most impressed with, although The Player of Games will always be my sentimental favorite.
When I wasn’t reading I was doing puzzles. I’ve started working on a magazine full of multi-Sudoku, which adds a lot of variety to what can become a very samey solve process with regular Sudoku. I also (after several years) finished the last interesting and doable puzzle in a particular issue of Nikoli Puzzle Communication; there are some puzzles left in the magazine, but they’re either Japanese word puzzles, have rules too inscrutable for me to decipher, or are Number Links, one of the very few puzzle types I just can’t stand.
Speaking of puzzles, I picked up Everett Kaser’s newest game, Mycroft’s Map, which I helped beta-test. It’s as good as all of his other games. I need to write an article about them someday…
I finished the fourth season of Transparent, which was good but not amazing; I’d be perfectly content if they never produce another episode of the show. I also caught up on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, which went back on the air a month or so ago. I need to watch The Punisher so I can watch season two of Jessica Jones, but I can’t quite bring myself to be excited about the first show. Sigh.
We played Power Grid at Fercott Fermentables on Tuesday. It was good.
I had dinner out a couple of times during the week, once at someone’s house, once at a nearby restaurant; in both cases, it was a good catching-up session with old friends and coworkers.

Now to curl up with Inversions, the next book in the series. Reading: it’s awesome.

Butterfly in my eye

I just finished reading the first book of my retirement, Version Control by Dexter Palmer. It was complicated. Very good, but complicated, a mix of literary and science fiction that took me a while to find the rhythm of; once I did, though, it made me stay up until 2am last night and then power through the rest today.

I don’t read nearly as much as I used to, though.

One reason is that I actually find it physically difficult; since I’ve developed allergies, my eyes water a lot, and extended reading sessions are a sure way to have me weeping constantly. I put up with it when the reading’s good, but if it’s merely “okay” it’s easy to make excuses and just do something else that won’t entail me wiping my eyes every few minutes.

Another is a sort of cyclical issue that I find myself dealing with at almost all times. Biorhythms are complete and total nonsense, but I find that my tastes for “things what I do with leisure time” follow these sort of boom-bust cycles that last days, weeks, or months. I’ll go three months without turning my PS4 on, then (like right now) find myself having to sleep with wrist braces because I’m spending so much time playing vidja. I won’t touch a puzzle book for a few weeks, then power through half of one in three days. And I’ve been in a long, long drought of can-be-arsed energy when it comes to reading fiction, particularly novels I haven’t read already.

That distinction is important. Right now I really, really want to reread the entire Culture series by Iain Banks for the… fourth? fifth? time, even though there’s a stack of unread novels sitting on my kitchen island. The only reason Version Control happened is because it’s a library book and I already had to renew it once. Now that I finished it, I may allow myself to dive back into that world of dry wit and unparalleled futuristic utopia as a bit of an escape. But it’ll only take me a couple of weeks to reread all nine books, and then I’ll be right back where I started.

I wonder if it’s at least partly a move away from passive entertainment. I don’t watch many movies or TV shows either, and limit myself to a single episode per day even when I’m in the middle of an excellent show, like The Expanse right now or Altered Carbon a couple of weeks ago. Reading is more pleasurable, the mindscape always more powerful and expressive than a moving picture, but it’s still linear consumption of someone else’s work.

I’m not sure. What I do know is that I want to write more, and to write well I need to read more, even if that means upsetting my own… mediarhythms, let’s say. We’ll see if forcibly pushing myself out of that lack of desire works, or if it just makes things worse.

Weekly status update [0001/????]

My first week of retirement draws to a close, and I’ve gotta say: it feels good. Real good.

Of course I miss the hell out of a lot of people; some have kept in touch, whether via email or Hangouts (and even a few via comments here on the blog–hi, Beth, Chris, and Derrick!), but we all know how much easier it is to just not communicate. Staying in contact with others is work, real work, and life in the modern era is easy to fill with so much other stuff that unnecessary communication falls by the wayside. As someone with free time now, it’s incumbent on me to keep those channels open as best I can. And I’m going to try.

Work, though? I’d be lying if I said I missed having a job. Maybe I will, as time goes on. Right now, not so much.

The only Real Adulting I did this week involved picking up some prescription glasses I procured on the cheap thanks to my ex-employer’s excellent benefits; I now have what amounts to eight different pairs of glasses with the same prescription. You know, Just In Case. In life as I did at work, I plan for catastrophic failure.

Definitely Not Adulting things I did this week:

Watched a non-trivial amount of serialized stuff via the magic of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Strong recommendations: Altered Carbon, The Americans, Transparent. Less strong, but still enjoyable as a not-quite-as-good Black Mirror: Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams. Altered Carbon is on Netflix and the others are on Prime Video if you want to follow along at home.
Played a tremendous amount of Let It Die, Suda51’s most recent weird-ass video game. It’s free-to-play, but in a way that you could easily never pay a penny and enjoy the game completely. I’m actually in danger of burning out on it due to putting so many hours in–I’m somewhere north of 70 right now and less than halfway through the game–so I’ve intentionally backed off some in the last few days to give the game some room to breathe.
Got back into solving pencil-and-paper puzzles. I have a Japanese sudoku magazine that has less than ten puzzles left before I’ve completed it from cover to cover. I can’t remember the last time I completed every single puzzle in a puzzle book. Of course the ones left are the hardest, but that’s part of the fun. After I finish it, I plan on moving onto Djape’s first Trigons book. Trigons are fascinating and pretty brutally hard, so I’m going to have my work cut out for me.
Ate a bunch of junk food that I shouldn’t have. Malt-o-Meal’s Chocolate Marshmallow Mateys are maybe the best sugar cereal I’ve ever had, and my newfound love for them terrifies me.

Things I didn’t do but plan on maybe kinda sorta looking at next week, you know, if I feel up to it or whatever:

Getting back into leisure programming. Probably something simple at first, like some code cleanup on Giles. Like many things in my life, I have lots of grandiose plans, but now I also have way less in the way of excuses to not actually execute on those.
I should probably, like, look at Rewind (AKA the novella I always talk about as being “actually pretty good”) or something? And, uh, think about how the hell I’m going to expand it to a novel? Yeah, this almost certainly isn’t happening next week, because it’s big and scary and I need to work up to it.

This entry is already too long, so I’ll leave you with a question: what would you, the reader, like to see here? I’ve tentatively settled on a few-times-a-week schedule, but I’m open to feedback as to what sorts of things I should be writing. Personal reviews of games and movies and stuff? Musings on game design? More slice-of-life bits? Feel free to either reply to this blog entry or send me Philback. There’s no point in writing this stuff if no one wants to read it; I already have entire novels that are never going to see the light of day and I’m not sure I need to add to that volume.