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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.

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.

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.

I got my covid vaccine booster on Friday. Pretty much lost Saturday due to side effects, but as of today I’m feeling much better! Destiny 2 I’ve been playing catch up on the season content and a lot of Crucible (the PVP mode). I definitely think the new skill based matchmaking has helped make the experience better for me. I’m pretty bad, but I’m no longer consistently getting blown out every game.

Lately my YouTube feed has been flooded with Tiago Forte and his book, Building a Second Brain, which I might get soon but I haven’t read yet.* I’ve been interested in the idea of creating a knowledge base for a long time but I never found quite what I was looking for in terms of software. I really wanted a non-hierarchical system like MediaWiki, but with a more easily maintainable storage mechanism than a relational database.