theTangentSpace

Weekly digest 29

It's starting to feel a lot like summer. There are only three weeks left of the school year. Exams are all over. Just marking and report-writing to get through and I am done.

Happenings

• I'm back to some form of bullet journaling for the first time in ages. I'm not using it as a "productivity" solution — it's not a planner/tracker/calendar/timeblocker or anything like that. I'm using a pocket notebook for daily braindumps. That's pretty much it (incidentally, this is closer to the original method than most high-productivity implementations). I probably won't even do weeklies/monthlies and migrations. The simplicity of having only daily logs is quite appealing. Plus, these weeknotes are in-theory a time I could be reflecting on my week.
• For a few weeks now I've been inserting a little "quiet time" into my evenings. 15 minutes or so for reflection, journaling, and meditation. I'm not feeling any major benefits immediately but have a feeling there will be a compounding effect in the long term.
• Attended the year 11 prom (the suit did fit! This marks the end of my diet). It was pretty nice to socialise with the teachers and see off a really lovely cohort of kids, though the DJ was someone I went to school with and the music choices were what was popular when we were coming of age. Bonkers, anyone?
• Trying to set up some way of using my phone as a webcam for my Pocket Reform using OBS, but so far OBS is not playing ball with the Pocket.
• I have a couple of weeks to learn PyGyat, a Python preprocessor that replaces all the language's keywords with gen-alpha brainrot slang. My year 7s have been trying to teach me to speak "brainrot" all year, so my plan is to surprise them in the last week by showing that I have "learned to code in their language". I need some fun ideas for little mathematical algorithms that a 12 year old could understand to show them. So far I have just done Euclid's algorithm, slightly verbosely in order to showcase the amusing syntax:

bop highest_common_factor(a, b):
  let him cook Aura:
    chat is this real a sigma b:
      a = a fanum tax b
    yo chat b sigma a:
      b = b fanum tax a
    only in ohio:
      just put the fries in the bag bro
  its giving a

• Some road/gas works on my street seem to have messed up my broadband connection. I'm having to post this via mobileb hotspot.

Links

• Computer Control by Alan Jacobs. This is a piece he wrote in 2002, reposted on his current blog (I'm not sure when, but he linked to it recently from his micro.blog). Jacobs is a great writer. Section 2 is in the "Midadventures of a normie installing Linux", a genre that persists to this day on YouTube, but this is Linux in 2002. Ouch.
• I've been enjoying Tracy Durnell's Mindset Of More series from earlier this year.
• The Problem With Video Essays by PhilosophyTube.

Reading

Back into some Ted Chiang with Stories Of Your Life and Others, as well as picking up Republic again after a bit of a break (some parts of this book really drag).

Playing

With a sick child asleep in my arms, I've found some time to play a little more Sekiro this week. It's so hard. But it is starting to click, I've made more progress in the last few days than I have since starting the game weeks ago. This video is a nice exploration of the psychological experience of playing Sekiro.