Howdy!
Woosh, there goes the first month of 2022. It’s another month that simultaneously felt extremely long but also incredibly short.
I got back into work mode after my long vacation in the beginning of this month, and I worked from home for most of it, staying safe from the most recent COVID variant. I listened to a ton of music and podcasts this month: partially because I was working from home, but also because I picked up some AirPods.
I was really surprised by how much these AirPods have impacted the way I listen to audio in my daily life. I still don’t really do the types of activities that really facilitate listening to podcasts that often, but I have now been taking a little bit more time to explore the medium a bit more.
I finally had the opportunity to listen to Finding Desperado, the sequel to arguably the best podcast of all time, Finding Drago. Finding Desperado was still rip-roaringly hilarious, but it had extremely big shoes to fill, so it doesn’t quite do the first series justice. Also, the ending is just a little bit disappointing, though the journey is extremely entertaining.
I’ve also been tearing through the backlog of No Such Thing as a Fish, and both listening to the British History Podcast again and staying up to date with Radiolab again.
It’s not all good news to report this month, though: a ton of my habits are slowly being repaired after falling into complete and total disarray. I woke up one day this week at around 2 a.m., realizing that I had totally neglected to write my 750 words on 750Words for the day. As is typical when I have a long streak on there that I break, I haven’t returned to it since. I just haven’t been keeping up with my flashcard and workout habits as much as I would have liked, but it’s something I’m spending a lot of attention on again, so I’m hoping that setting a bunch of alerts and forcing myself to not ignore them will help me make sure this stuff actually gets done.
Music
Wow, this is a long one!
This month, the playlist kicks off with a more electronic, groovy vibe, shifting into a kind of math zone, then going into a harder guitar rock, eventually slowing down to a few more downtempo, emotional tracks.
Programming
I did do a fair amount of programming outside of work this month. After a bit of experimentation, Next.js and Amplify have really sped up my ability to iterate on ideas. I spent a bit of time working on a rewritten Editorland, but I set it down before finishing it and haven’t yet picked it up again, unfortunately.
I wrote an RSS feed processor that currently only works with Feedbin. Basically, it shows you entries from your RSS feeds, and you mark them if you’d like to keep them as unread. This is a bit of the opposite workflow from expected, and it’s helped me to spend less time staring at my feed readers. You can check it out online here, and the source code is here.
In addition to that, I’ve also started working on a v2 for my IWYM terminal-based chat app; I made a really quick RSS parser to look for terms mentioned in HN comments; and I fixed a tiny bug in an open source game online. 😄
Video games
Not a whole lot to report here, though I have been playing quite a few video games. I beat Katamari Damacy again, again in the "Reroll" flavor. I’ve also been playing Fallout 3 again, and a bit of Fortnite in the mix as well.
Reading
Early this month, I finally finished The Alchemist by Iain M. Banks. What a fantastic novel. Reading this one really felt like my first approaches to the Culture series — there’s just enough work involved in truly figuring out what’s going on to make it immensely gripping. And, of course, the space opera aspects of the novel are so entertaining that it’s a hard book to put down.
Next, I read Autonomous by Annalee Newitz. I try really hard not to be negative, so I won’t dwell on this one too long, only to mention that I really wasn’t a fan. I didn’t think any of the character’s motivations made sense, and the entire setting tended to fall apart if you thought about it beyond what the book was directly feeding you. That being said, I appreciated a lot of the sentiments that the book served up, though I wish they ran a bit deeper, and the scenes of community really did inspire me to spend more time working on things that I think are cool.
I also should mention that I reread Maus I and II. It’s still incredibly good and incredibly important.
I’m currently working on Infomocracy by Malka Older — more to come when I finish it!
failbetter
This month, failbetter published:
I should also mention that failbetter now has a new Editorial Assistant, so it’s been great working with her: showing her the ropes of how we do things, but also helping her get more experience in a real-world, digital work environment.
Stats
- I typed 720,000 keys and clicked 155,277 times.
- I listened to 1,482 songs.
- 8 albums escaped from the Album Gauntlet.
