Ascendance of a Bookworm

I’ve been thinking a lot about life and what I want to do, but I haven’t really gotten anywhere. The whole world seems to be in flux anyway. So it’s a perfect time be confused along with everyone else. I’m finding that I need to strap down everything I can to stay sane. But even as I strap things down more things fly away. I have 3 big tentpole creative projects that I hardly ever work on, but that take up a significant chunk of my mental energy.

The world is impressively messy right now. I must admit that I’ve mostly turned inward. My focus over the last few months has been on a project that I don’t really want to talk about until I have something to show. Hopefully the first small piece will be ready to present soon. I’ve enjoyed over a year of taking the bus to work now. The difference between busing and driving is incredible.

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.

One of the very first things I created on this site was my list of lists. At the time I had intended for it to be kept up to date as I found new stuff and my tastes changed. What I’ve found is that much of my personality was cemented in place in high school and college. I’ve made very few changes. More recently though I’ve found that my tastes are changing.

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.

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.

The long weekend stretched into a long week. I wrote about half of this a week ago but never finished. Changes to my routine, even good ones like an extra day off, always seem to mess me up. My sleep schedule is no longer a schedule at all. My mom went out of town on vacation this week. So I walked one of her dogs, Lily, for a few days. She’s a bit afraid of everything, and a lot afraid of me, but I managed to get her to walk for me!

No post last week. My friend was very sick. He seems to be better now though! These past two weeks have been very very busy for me. I had a lot of fun, but also a lot of stress and even fear. I’m going to focus on the good times here, although some of those were stressful in their own way. One of my friends had a birthday this weekend. We went out to a bar at peak times for the first time in years.

Airsonic + beets My airsonic + beets journey continues. It turns out there’s no really good way to merge singletons into an album in beets aside from re-importing (references here and here). So the tracks I imported with the -s flag have been an enormous pain the ass. In addition I somehow did something, I don’t know what, that wiped all the track data for the Umurangi Generation and Umurangi Generation Macro soundtracks.