Weekly

This past weekend we went to Matsuricon. We had an excellent time! We got to see ProZD review Ohio foods in person! The AMV competition entrants were great. The dealers hall had a lot to offer. I’m old now. I’ve felt this for a while. My joints hurt in the morning. I’ve got a handful of mild chronic illnesses to manage. I struggle with staying up late. But my girlfriend and I still had a place at Matsuricon.

I just closed all 228 of my open mobile tabs. I went through each and every one first, putting the ones worth saving in appropriate places in my notes, TODO lists, to read lists, and wish lists. My open tabs had become a sort of an awkward unstructured TODO list of their own. I had tabs open for things I wanted to buy, articles I wanted to read, websites people had shown me on Discord, articles that bloggers had referenced.

I took a break from blogging this summer. It was somewhat intentional as I had nothing to write. The format I had here was boring me and I couldn’t figure out what else to write. Still, I feel better when I’m writing. So not writing at all has probably done more harm than good. My departure from the blog started out as an experiment with morning pages - a meditative practice where you write from stream of consciousness for 3 pages each morning.

As winter comes to a close I’m prepping for a busy April. We’ve got multiple trips out of town planned. The Columbus Crew season is in full swing. The weather is nice enough that I can start working in the garage again! I’ve got a library hold placed on Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act that should be ready soon and I’ve been working my way through my first read of Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way.

This weekend was huge! I feel like the year is really getting started :) On Friday my girlfriend and I went to The Arnold Fitness Expo. We took the bus because I like to take the bus to the convention center. Unfortunately it was raining quite hard and we got soaked getting to the bus stop. Despite never really drying out, we had a great time! The highlight of the event was getting to see a bunch of World Chase Tag matches live.

I’ve been leaving a note at the end of a lot of my writing to “do the thing I want to do, not the thing that is easy.” I think I’ve actually been managing to do that a little. I may not be able to keep it up all the time (or at all!) but it really does feel good when I can do it. Above anything else, Obsidian has helped me to succeed in this area.

My girlfriend and I went to Ohayocon this weekend. It was great! Really good to be back at a con after so much time. This was our first con since the lockdown. We decided to ease our way in and did Saturday only. We attended panels on zine making, slice of life anime, and traveling to Japan. The slice of life anime panel gave me a kick in the pants to start watching Super Cub and reconsider Kaguya-sama (although calling this slice of life is a stretch).

I got sick on December 19th and didn’t stop. I’m now on my final dose of some antibiotic I’ve never heard of following shock wave lithotripsy. I’m incredibly lucky it was just a kidney stone (and food poisoning before that). But it did pretty much destroy any plans I had for the end of 2022 and the beginning of 2023. During my sick time I did a lot of vegging. I had filed vacation for the final two weeks of the year anyway.

So I got another phone. Because of this I’ve updated and added to my articles about phone setup: Termux and git hugo rsync I’ve also purchased a few peripherals to try to make up for the sad state of modern phone features. I got a case, a usb-c u-bend, a headphone jack usb-c splitter, and a small bluetooth keyboard. So far I have only tested the keyboard, which failed spectacularly. Whenever it times out to save battery, it fails to reconnect and has to be setup from scratch.

Haibane Renmei is an anime I return to again and again. There’s an idea introduced in the first few episodes that resonates with me far outside the bounds of the show: The main characters are restricted to only own items that are used. I never finished the show. So I never learned why this limitation is placed on the Haibane. The more important thing for me is that this limitation sounds like an interesting guideline for myself.