reading – Page 5 – Philoquialisms

Biblio tech

I’ve been spending most of my time this past week reading; I tore through an entire book yesterday, stopping only to go to Fercott and play games for an hour and a half (Lamb by Christopher Moore, which was very good), and this weekend I read both collected volumes of Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 800+ pages of manga that completely entranced me the whole way through. I currently have a pair of teetering stacks on my sofa, waiting to be read.

And they’re all from the library.

I think that, at least here in the US, there is a common… not disrespect, necessarily, but intentional devaluing of the services that libraries provide, particularly among those that consider themselves “middle class.” Even I have gone in and out of heavy usage periods with local libraries, and the general not-really-logic over the years has often been something like:

I have a job that makes pretty decent money.
Books are really nice objects.
I know the library has most of the books I want, but not all of them…
…and I can afford to buy books.
And then they’re mine. Mine! For all eternity.
So I should buy my books.

Up until that last point, there’s really nothing particularly flawed with that reasoning. But that last step is not all that far removed from the old “then a miracle occurs” comic strip. While it’s absolutely true that any reasonable rate of book collection is unlikely to bankrupt someone of even modest means, it’s also almost always unnecessary.

The big reason is utility: if you buy a book, read it once, then put it on a shelf, what exactly is that book doing for you the other 99.995% of its lifetime? Nothing, really. And don’t get me wrong, a lot of the books on the shelves of a modern library don’t get checked out very often… but that’s still a lot more utility than the ones sitting dusty in the far corner of your bedroom.

There are others, too; inter-library loan, or things like the Cardinal system here in North Carolina, can get you the books that your local library doesn’t have. And libraries have a ton of other things besides, DVDs and CDs and paintings and public computers and sometimes even board games and video games. But I think that libraries also often have a whiff of the desperate, the needy, the plebeian, that a certain middle class mentality frowns upon. “That’s nice,” it proposes, “but not for me. It’s for other, less well-to-do people, and students.”

Well… no. You pay for your local library with taxes. You should use the hell out of your local library.

I’ve made it an intentional habit that, whenever I put a book on hold (which is often) and go into the library to pick it up, I also browse the New Book shelf and the science fiction section. Librarians will almost always have some books on those little display rack things, and I end up picking up one or two or five of those because they look interesting; the last time I went to the library I picked up my one on-hold book and nine others I had never even heard of. And you know what? Some of my best recent reads came from that sort of random browsing. I just finished a book called The Comedown that was a solid bit of modern literary fiction… and a book I would have never read “on my own,” because it’s in a genre I pay basically no attention to. But it was on the New Book rack, I took a chance on it, and that chance paid off.

That’s not to say that I never buy books any more. There are a couple of authors (Scalzi, Stross) whose books I still preorder as sort of a vestigial “I really like them and want to support them” thing. And sometimes someone recommends a book to me, I poke around on Cardinal and see no live copies, and so I pick up one used on Amazon for $5. But I try to keep that all to a minimum; my house is already way too cluttered with board games to make a whole bunch of room for more books, and the vast majority of what I want can be found at the library anyhow. I was the first person to get Stephen King’s most recent book (The Outsider, which was quite a delightful read) at the local library, and I got it maybe a week after it came out. Not exactly long-delayed gratification.

Now, I know I’m a partisan. I was on the Board for the local library until politics drove me off, after all! But even if you’re not as passionate about libraries as I am, the next time you think about placing an order on Amazon for a book you’re likely to only read once, think: couldn’t I just pick this up from the library?

And maybe you’ll find some other life-changing book waiting for you on one of those little racks when you do.

Weekly status update [0030/????]

A busier week than usual, that’s for sure.

I spent a non-trivial amount of time this week playing Burnout Paradise Remastered on my PS4. I spent something like 60-70 hours in the game back on the PS3, and it was a delight to play it again… although I don’t plan on doing nearly everything there is to do in the game like I did back then. Racing games generally leave me cold, but there’s something about Paradise that makes it a delight to play. Except for the fact that it plays “Paradise City” every time it boots up. Ugh. I have to mute the TV each time I start the game.
We had a board game night Tuesday at Fercott. We played the second edition of London; previously, I enthused about the game, and I still think it’s really good, but I also think that you probably shouldn’t play it with more than three people, and really two is best. There’s too much “luck of the draw” for the result to be very stable at four. (I’m not just saying this because I got crushed… but I got crushed.)
I spent much of Wednesday up in the hills and mountains with a friend; we went to Wiseman’s View. A non-trivial amount of the trip’s time was spent on the barely-maintained gravel road leading to the View, and we were the only people there, which was a bit surprising; the day was beautiful, if warm, and the sight down into the gorge utterly stunning. I had a really good time. It was nice actually getting out in the woods and into the sun; as I lose weight, my desire to take up hiking is beginning to grow again. Perhaps next season.
I went to the library Thursday to get a single book I had on hold and ended up with ten, which went into a stack with a bunch of other books I’m behind on reading (mostly thanks to Burnout Paradise Remastered). I’m almost done with one today, though, and plan on tearing through much of the rest in short order. Libraries are awesome and people don’t use them nearly enough.
The programming urge has been growing steadily stronger, so I finally steeled myself and bugged Donald X. Vaccarino (of Dominion fame) to release a game he wrote for himself as open source. He actually went for it, to my mild surprise. It’s written in Object Pascal with some very old DOS graphics and mouse tech; my current plan is to basically rewrite it 1:1 in C so that it’ll actually be maintainable into the foreseeable future. Once I get that done I’ll look into actual improvements to the game itself. I haven’t actually started coding on it yet; I plan to begin with some of the tools he wrote to mess with the data files, so as to get my feet wet again. But I am excited!
I watched the first episode of Jack Ryan, mostly to get the Twitch bits. It was… fine? I mean, I love Wendell Pierce to bits, and after seeing A Quiet Place I’m down with John Krasinski in serious roles, but it sure feels not nearly enough removed from the torture porn of 24 for my liking. I may watch another episode or two… or I may not, given how little TV I’ve managed these last couple of months. We’ll see.

So, yeah, lots of stuff going on this past week, including some things I hadn’t done in ages. I look forward to working on the game, reading these books, and, y’know, in general continuing to chip away at the infinite rock face of “things I want to do.” As one does.

Weekly status update [0029/????]

Let’s get right into it.

As mentioned before, my shoulder was acting up all week. Fortunately it seems almost completely better now. I’m still going to take it easy for another day or two, minimizing my time at the computer and with a controller, because boy howdy did it suck for a while there.
Due to the aforementioned shoulder issues, I ended up spending most of the week reading rather than playing games. I finished Christopher Moore’s Secondhand Souls, which was good but not as good (or captivating) as A Dirty Job, a book I read in a single sitting a week or two ago. Then I picked up Golden Witchbreed by Mary Gentle and read it from cover-to-cover in a single day. I’m currently working on its sequel, which seems like it will also be excellent.
One of my old coworkers moved out of town this week to go back home to his family (and a job much closer to home). We spent basically the entire weekend playing board games; Saturday was just the two of us, with his son joining on Sunday after he flew in. It was a good time. The two new-to-me games that we played were Cinque Terre, which was fine if rather slight, and Keltis: Das Kartenspiel. On the face of it, the latter game is pretty ridiculous: it’s a card game adaptation of a board game (Keltis) which itself is an adaptation of a card game (Lost Cities). Instead of being a third-generation blurry photocopy, though, it’s actually a pretty fascinating tactical game on its own, and the fact that it supports more than two players means that it could potentially hit the table more often than Lost Cities in some gaming groups. I need more time with it to establish a firmer opinion, but I liked the game of it we played.
The big thing that happened this past week was my coming along to my old work’s Summer Outing as an old friend’s “+1” on Friday. The weather was stunningly nice, hovering around 80°F and with low humidity; we were at a combination pavilion-greens-lakeshore thing, and the water in the pool was just the right level of cool to feel infinitely refreshing. It was nice to see a bunch of old faces again, including the kitchen staff, who I miss dearly. I had a really good time… and a much better one than the last time we were at the same venue, four years ago, when I jumped into the pool with my phone, destroyed it, and then got paged by work and had to spend the rest of the trip furiously fixing remote issues rather than having a good time.
I also managed to have a few games hit the table while on said outing. The only new one was Lost Cities: Rivals, yet another game in the Lost Cities/Keltis franchise. It was… fascinating, with a bidding mechanic that is wholly new to the series, and I didn’t really wrap my head around it by the end of the game. I still managed to win, somehow, but we also weren’t playing by the rules entirely (it was a first game and I was rushing, as we had to leave soon). I look forward to playing it a little more deliberately… and correctly… in the future.
I didn’t get burned at all despite spending a lot of the day in the sun! Woot! That… might be a first?

Despite the frustrating health issues, it was a nice week, with more board gaming than I’ve done in the last few months, and a lot of time spent with people I like. What more can one ask for?

Weekly status update [0027/????]

A week past the six-month mark, and… well, other than that particular milestone, it’s been a pretty bog-standard sort of thing.

I’ve been having fun writing my Guide to the Cardpocalypse, and plan on writing the first one that actually covers games tomorrow or Monday–it’s going to be on trick-takers–so if you have Opinions you want to Express, now’s the time.
A lot of reading this week, but not of the book variety. Instead I read through a couple of very good Let’s Play threads. For those unfamiliar, a Let’s Play is a playthrough of a particular game–in this case, early Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest games, along with the original Master of Orion–done by someone who is usually very familiar with that game. They show off the inner workings, interesting strategies, and hidden bits. Most modern Let’s Plays are done in video on YouTube; some huge Internet personalities like PewDiePie (ugh) got their start in the format. But the original form was a combination of text and screenshots in a forum (most famously the Something Awful forum, which I won’t link for… pretty much the same reasons I didn’t link PewDiePie above), and that’s the format I like the most. It’s easy to pick up and put down, and I read way faster than I watch video, even at 1.5x speed. If this sounds at all interesting to you, check out the Let’s Play Archive and find some game you’ve always been interested in.
Also actually playing games on my own, mostly Let It Die, where I continue to delay my storming of the endgame for no good reason other than that I’m scared, but also some Dead Cells now that it’s out on consoles. Yeah, that means I bought the game twice, which is dumb, but I really like playing it on my big TV with my PS4 controller.
Had dinner with friends not once but twice over the week, which was nice. Particularly since one of the meals was with someone who moved to Europe in the last few months–it was nice to catch up–and the other was with someone who is moving away soon; another opportunity to socialize with people before they leave is always nice.
One of those dinners ended up being not-the-best for my diet, though, so I’ve been playing it tighter for the rest of the week. I’ve (sadly) gotten used to going to bed hungry, but it’s necessary to help get my “desire to eat everything under the eaves” under control, which (like all addictions) has a nasty habit of springing up with just the slightest provocation. I’m actually genuinely curious at this point as to how much I weigh now; I don’t know how much I had gotten up to, but I have a rough idea. I’m not going to seek out a scale, though. Regular weighing has been one of several things that has completely ruined my self-control due to over-correction.
Other than some more time with Picross 3D Round 2, I didn’t do much in the way of puzzles… but I did finally get a lead on getting a bunch of back issues of a particular Turkish puzzle magazine that comes very highly recommended. (Don’t look at me like that. I already have a ton of Japanese puzzle magazines; why not Turkish too?) I’m waiting to hear back from the publisher/editor. The magazines themselves will be dirt cheap. It’s gonna be the shipping that’s killer.

The weather’s been uncommonly pleasant here in North Carolina, not but not crazily so, although the off-and-on rain makes it hard to enjoy. I’ll take it, though, along with the lassitude of my current lifestyle. It’s been a very different August than my last twenty or so, that’s for sure. And that’s a good thing.

Twenty-six weeks and what do you get?

…half a year older, for sure; thankfully not deeper in debt.

(A quick note: I added a widget to the side that lets you subscribe to the blog via eMail; put in your address and you’ll get a message whenever I write a new article. Several people have asked how to follow along a bit easier. Hopefully that helps.)

My last day of work was February 2nd, 2018. This past Friday marks twenty-six weeks since then, fully half a year of retirement. It’s kind of crazy to think about; I remember when I was in my late twenties and thinking, “huh, maybe I can pull this off sometime in my mid-forties if I work really hard at it.” Working in tech let me pull that off seven or eight years before my original plans, and for that I will always be grateful.

It doesn’t feel like it’s been six months, but it doesn’t feel like it’s only been a couple of weeks either. If I had to put a number on how long it feels, I’d say something like three months… but I’m not sure that that perception of time is really any different from when I was working. I was at my last job for just a bit over five years but it felt like three at most.

Let’s answer the most obvious question first, because it’s also the easiest: No, I don’t regret retiring. Do I have any concrete regrets at all? Sure. I miss the social aspects of my workplace, playing board games at lunch and chatting with people in the halls. I miss the food team and the delicious free food (although my waistline is rather happier now). But I honestly hadn’t been all that happy with my day-to-day job for a couple of years when I left, and there’s no question that I enjoy what I’m doing now–even if, to the outside world, it might look like a fat lot of nothing–quite a bit more.

The money situation requires a Magic 8-Ball response: Ask again later. The market volatility this year has completely swamped any attempt I could make at understanding whether my rate of spending is sustainable or not in the long term. That rate of spending has actually been surprisingly constant over the year, which I discovered almost by accident last week when messing around with graphs in Gnucash; it’s quite a bit higher than I would like–looks like it’s likely to be somewhere around $36,000 for the year, when I’m aiming for something more like $30,000–but there is still a ton of superfluous spending in there, if it turns out I have to buckle down and Get Serious about my money habits. And assuming my spending increases at the same rate as the value of my investments (a pretty ridiculous assumption, seeing as the trend is downwards, not upwards) I still have somewhere around twenty years before I have to touch the first penny of my retirement, at which point I’ll be in my late fifties. Yeah. It’ll almost certainly be fine, but still: ask again later.

As for longer-term plans, well, I said I’d give myself a year before I started worrying about that sort of thing, so get back to me in six months.

From one perspective, these twenty-six weeks have been profoundly unproductive. Other than this blog, I haven’t written anything of note; other than a few tiny patches and tinkerings, I haven’t written any code either. But that’s at least partly by design; I don’t want to force myself into those things if I’m not really feeling it, and in both cases I can feel the desire to “do something” percolating more and more inside me. I suspect it won’t be more than a couple of weeks before I sit down and write something, be it code or prose. I’m going to let it happen naturally.

From another perspective, though, it’s actually been quite productive. Changing the way that I type–something I do a lot of, even if it’s not writing prose–has been a huge undertaking; I remember that first weekend, typing at 5wpm and thinking it was the worst idea I had ever had in my life. But now I’m back to something like 75% of my old typing speed, which puts me in the top 1% or so of typists in the world, and that is Plenty Sufficient for my needs. It’s also way less strain on my hands, something I need to be careful with if I want to be able to do this for the next thirty-plus years. It’s the sort of “short term pain, long term gain” thing that I couldn’t really justify back when my livelihood at least partly depended on how fast I could bang on the keyboard, and my life will be better now indefinitely into the future for it.

There’s the other stuff too. I’ve read a bunch of books I hadn’t gotten around to, played a bunch of games I never finished, completed a couple of puzzle books that have been lingering near my chair for years… basically doing things I always pushed off because I didn’t have the time. My backlog of media is effectively infinite, so it’s hard to say that I made progress on those fronts, and it still grows at a rate greater than my ability to consume it, but there’s no question that I did something there. And that’s satisfying.

Another thing that retirement has made easier is taking control of my weight. There’s no question that I’m addicted to food, and being alone at my house allows me to highly regulate the food I come in contact with; the ever-present snacks at my old work place were a serious impediment to my diet, and although I overcame that for a while it is always easier to just eat all the things. I still have quite a way to go, but the combination of calorie restriction and keto is doing its job. (It’s also making me pretty grumpy some days, but you can’t have it all, at least if you want to drop a bunch of pounds in time for the holidays.)

In some ways this was always something of an experiment. You can plan and plan, hypothesize that “it’s going to work out,” but until you actually do the thing it’s almost impossible to know whether or not such a long-term life shift is actually going to work out. And it’s still very much early days yet; I won’t presume to know that my first six months are indicative of the next six, much less the (hopefully) long life ahead of me. But: so far, so good. So very, very good.

Thanks for coming along on this ride with me. If you have any questions or topics you’d like me to address, whether briefly in replies or via longer-form posts, just let me know. Thankfully I get enough comments to know I’m not just screaming into the void, but I’m happy to hear feedback of all types.

See you here again in six months! (Also on Friday or Saturday, for the weekly rundown. But also in six months.)

Weekly status update [0026/????]

Half a year in. Woof. Let’s jump right in.

I made up for lost time on reading this past week; the first book (Ninth City Burning) was fun but slight. The second, A Dirty Job, was so good that I read the whole thing in a single sitting, something I hadn’t done in ages. Christopher Moore is always at least interesting and funny, but A Dirty Job was also very engaging, as evidenced by the fact that I couldn’t put it down. Good stuff.
As mentioned here previously, we had a game night Tuesday that led to me starting a new series of articles about card games. I’ll be writing another one up soon on card-playing etiquette before we jump into the games proper. I’m still looking for feedback on what games you think should be part of the Guide to the Cardpocalypse.
I actually watched the tiniest bit of television this week, a single episode of Jessica Jones. It was better than the first, which was good. I have a lot of catching up to do with the Marvel Netflix series, not to mention everything else… but honestly I’d generally much rather read, play games, watch other people play games, or do puzzles.
Speaking of puzzles, while I didn’t do a whole lot in any magazines, I picked my Nintendo 3DS back up and did a bunch more of Picross 3D: Round 2. It’s an excellent game, really hampered only by the clawlike way you have to hold the 3DS to be able to hit all the buttons; my hands actually cramp up after solving a puzzle or two, an issue I don’t have with any other puzzle games. I’m close to the end, though, so I’m likely going to try and muddle through in the coming week or two.
I broke my diet somewhat for the first time since I started; I just really really needed some General Tso’s chicken on Thursday, and topped it off with jalapeño poppers. It was delicious, and I suspect that one moment of weakness will help make the next several months easier. I’m not really craving anything right now the way I was before… other than the always-persistent Ghost of Carbs Past moaning in the back of my head, but I’ve gotten good at ignoring that particular bugaboo.

Half a year. I’m definitely going to write something up this coming week about what it’s been like so far, but just in case you were worried: still not bored.

Weekly status update [0025/????]

A pleasantly quiet week, punctuated with some quiet pleasantness.

As mentioned in my rant earlier this week, I finished up Final Fantasy XIII after years of having it hang over my head. I then immediately started playing it again from the start. I’ll probably write a “Here’s a Thing” about it soonish, but: it’s a lot better than people think. Except for the trophies. Damn the trophies.
We had the first extended game night in ages at Fercott Fermentables on Tuesday. We played Power Grid at Jase’s request; despite him having never played the game, he won on the first tiebreaker, with Chad in second. Power Grid is a stone cold classic board game, and I enjoy it every time I play, although in this particular game I knew I was going to lose and lose badly about halfway through. Good times, though, with great company and a good atmosphere.
I have a big stack of books from the library but haven’t made a huge dent in them yet due to playing too many video games instead. I did finally read/look at/gape at Banksy’s Wall and Piece, which Chad kindly loaned me. It’s a gorgeous piece of art full of gorgeous (and sad, and clever, and all other sorts of things) pieces of art. One of my favorite touches: a lot of the pieces have either how long it took to paint them–sometimes crazy short amounts of time–or how long they lasted before getting painted over or removed.
The diet continues to go well, inasmuch as I’m pretty sure I’m still losing weight and I’m definitely still managing keto. I intentionally didn’t weigh myself when I started and still haven’t, due to my tendency to obsess over slight variations in the short-term numbers when long-term trends are the important part, but the key “clothes fit better” index is going strong.
Speaking of personal health, neither my back nor my wrists have been acting up recently, which is a very pleasant state of affairs. I suspect the former is at least partly due to the continued weight loss; not sure about the wrists, but I’m not gonna knock it either.

All in all, a pleasant week, with the sadly-too-rare pleasure of an excellent board game evening in the middle. I… should really try and do something to make those happen more often, but I’m not sure what. Now, though, it’s time to get back to reading on this quiet Saturday, which is actually a whole lot like what I would have been doing on most Saturdays before retirement anyhow. Funny how that works.

Weekly status update [0024/????]

Hey, look, I’m actually writing this on Friday for a change!

I finally, finally finished up Diablo III‘s Platinum trophy on my PS4. I promptly uninstalled the game afterwards. I need to write a post at some point about how unhealthy “trophy culture” is, particularly because just about every game has one or two absolutely idiotic trophies that make what is otherwise a delightful experience miserable. For Diablo III, that was the “do 500 bounties” trophy: it was a tremendous amount of boring busywork. Fortunately…
…I did many of said bounties while watching Twitch. I still watch Landail on the regs, and I’ve also started watching quite a bit of Sinatar, who mostly plays old PC RPGs, for much the same reason: a chill pace and a sense of actual community in chat.
With Diablo III done, I picked Shining in the Darkness back up again with some more seriousness. I’ve made quite a bit more progress in the game, and am still very much enjoying the act of mapping the game on actual graphing paper. There’s something deeply satisfying about looking at the stack of maps I’ve drawn that staring at a map on GameFAQs just doesn’t match.
I’ve been reading a lot too. In fact, the only thing I picked up on Prime Day was a shiny new Kindle Paperwhite. I’m not a huge fan of it being touch-only, but I can’t deny that it is a lot easier to read thanks to the LCD backlighting. Getting all of my books onto it was a hassle, since they’re spread across my Amazon account and my computer (yes, before you tech people ask, I use Calibre), but I got everything back up and running the way I like it. That said, my current efforts are geared towards a fat stack of books I checked out from the library, including a whole lot of Christopher Moore that I missed out on in the last fifteen years or so.
I went to a dinner thing Thursday night. The company was good and I got to play board games for the first time in something like a month, which was a pleasure, even if they were all very casual games. The Mind continues to be fascinating, and I got to play CrossTalk for the first time, which plays a lot like the old TV show Password, with the key twist being that the other team guesses when your team captain gives clues. This makes the game a fascinating game of chicken on the part of the captains. It was a lot of fun and way more interesting than even I had suspected it would be, and that was without the advanced “gamers’ rules”.
The dentist was was fine. Expensive, but fine.

It was a pretty good week, on the balance; I cleared a couple of irritating things off of my plate and got to play board games with people, so, y’know: pretty peak retirement living.

Weekly status update [0023/????]

I almost completely missed that yesterday was Friday the 13th. Thanks, Reddit!

Finished reading The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. Like many Stephenson novels, it picks up a lot in the rear half, and I went from struggling to read more than twenty or so pages of it at a time to tearing through the last couple of hundred pages in a day. It’s Stephenson Ending Ratio is only about a 0.3 or so as well, which is a pleasant surprise; it’s still too abrupt, but it actually answered most of my questions. I suspect Nicole Gailland (the co-author) had something to do with that.
I also finally finished Minitel: Welcome to the Internet, which was a fascinating look into a bit of technology I knew nothing about. The idea that France was effectively connected to its own private Internet in the mid-’80s is kind of amazing. It was a very slow read due to the huge numbers of footnotes–I have to read them immediately, and flipping back and forth in the book is so slow–but Minitel was one of the better Platform Studies books. Next up is the one on the Super Nintendo. I expect to be at least mildly disappointed, as I am Error (the one for the NES) is maybe my favorite volume of the series, so I’m going in with too-high expectations. Further news as events warrant.
Played way, way too much Diablo III. I have all but one trophy for it now on the PS4, and that trophy requires a lot of boring grinding. I’ve been doing said grinding while watching people on Twitch, so it’s not all a waste of my time, but it’s moments like this that I regret ever hunting down trophies and achievements.
Actually did some puzzles again for the first time in ages. It was mostly multi-sudoku, but I also did two Trigons. Fair warning: even “easy” Trigons are hard, and the really hard ones are damn-near impossible. It’s not uncommon for single puzzles to take me upwards of two hours of continuous solving. Said solution is all the sweeter for the result, though.
Went through another fairly lengthy fast (no zero-calorie days, thank goodness). I think it helped with once again recalibrating my satiety. I will say that the rotisserie chicken I had from Walmart today for breakfast-and-lunch was one of the tastiest things I’ve had… but I know it’s because as of this morning just about anything was going to be delicious.
Not a whole lot of social interaction outside of Twitch, unfortunately. My semi-regular online gaming partner has been busy with other things, we haven’t had a board game night in ages… I should probably figure out something I can do to see actual humans on a semi-regular basis. Probably.

I’m going to the dentist on Monday, which is the first big medical-y expense I’ll have had since I retired. I didn’t keep my dental insurance, so I’m… apprehensive about how expensive it’ll be. Guess we’ll find out! Other than that, though, I feel like things are going well overall. It’s as unexciting as always, but I’m still not bored, and won’t be for the foreseeable future. 23 weeks in: so far, so good.

Weekly status update [0022/????]

Just gonna jump right in.

My love affair with Planetside 2 is already over. Turned out that I was really good at gunning and really bad at the actual first-person shoot-people-with-guns bits… and while the former is useful some of the time, the latter is useful pretty much all of the time. After a bad night I realized that I just didn’t have it in me to “git gud” at the pew pews. It’s a shame, too, because I had finally convinced some friends to play with me… just in time to stop playing. Ah, well.
On the other hand, Dead Cells is really good, and actually runs fine on my ancient Linux desktop. If you like Souls-style combat, platformers, and roguelikes, check it out. It’s coming to consoles in a few months if you’d rather not futz with Steam.
I’m still slowly working my way through The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. It’s a bit of a slow read, like most Stephenson, although the story is captivating enough. It just sometimes requires more energy than I have available to put into the book. (It’s no Baroque Cycle, though; I remember being proud when I made it through more than 10 pages of those books in a single night. So dense. So dense.)
I haven’t had to use my wrist braces in a couple of weeks, which has been very nice. They’re still sitting next to my chair just in case.
I hadn’t tested my typing speed in ages, and I noticed that my mistake rate had dropped pretty significantly (of course, right now, I’m making tons of them… stupid observational effect), so I took another set of typing speed tests. I nailed 80wpm on this not-so-great Chromebook keyboard I’m typing on right now and 81wpm on my fancy mechanical keyboard, so I think it’s safe to say that I’m around that now with Colemak. That’s a ~10wpm difference from the last time I seriously tested myself, and it’s pretty much all down to error rate. It feels good to be back in the top 10% or so of typists with a whole new method, not gonna lie.
Saw two back-to-back laser light shows last night (Friday) with friends, one for Rush’s 2112 and one that had a bunch of random famous Led Zeppelin songs. The 2112 show was better, with tighter synchronization and (in my opinion) better music, but the Zep show was definitely more of a crowd-pleaser. I had never been to a laser light show before; it was quite a treat. Chad and I immediately started musing on what modern albums we would like to see given the laser treatment. We both landed on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy as a really strong candidate… as long as you cut out Kanye breathing into a mic for six minutes at the end of “Runaway.”
Keto still going strong; I haven’t had a single cheat day yet, which might be a record. The losses are a little harder to see at the moment, but I can feel it in my shirts and see it on my face when I look in the mirror, and I have a good five more months before my first obligatory cheat period (going home for the holidays), so there’s plenty of time for more improvement.
I just watched it this morning, but Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette on Netflix is… amazing and powerful and tough. Strong recommendation. It’s basically the only TV I’ve watched in the last couple of weeks.

Whew. That sure looks like a lot, given how little it actually feels like happened this week. That’s… good, I suppose?

Anyhow, just in case you were wondering or worried: still not bored!