Well, we’re coming up on March: one full year of social distancing. I haven’t eaten at a restaurant or even gotten takeout in a full year. I haven’t seen the vast majority of my friends face-to-face, and those I have have been wearing masks.
Almost a whole year of staying inside, but I that also mans I’ll be hitting a lot of one year milestones coming up soon, too. This is the eleventh article in this series, for example!
So, of course, things have been quiet around here, but I’m having a good time. I hope things are going well for you, too.
Music
Here’s this month’s installment of the playlist! I hope you enjoy it. Here’s the article, and here’s the playlist on Spotify:
Life
Well, things are going just fine here! I have honestly been playing so many video games, which, you know, is fine — I have a Rocket League club with some friends, and we’ve been playing quite a lot. I also go an incredibly good deal on Borderlands 3, which I’ve been slowly working my way through. I honestly didn’t expect to like it as much as I do!
I’ve adjusted a lot of my routines. One “life hack” I stumbled upon is that I now keep my phone in the other room at night, and have a physical alarm wake me up in the morning. This forces me to actually get up at the time that I want to be getting up, which means I have more time in the morning… and though I’m technically getting less sleep than I used to, I feel great, because I just always feel better when I have a more consistent sleep schedule.
I have done barely any textbook reading, which is a bit of a departure from the norm, but that’s almost entirely because I’ve been reading so many articles, some of which cover subjects related to the small stack of textbooks I want to be working through. Every morning, I’ll get up, work through my RSS feeds a bit, then get up and get ready for my day, which is a routine I’m really proud of.
Programming
This month, I finally converted my silly scripts which I use to interface with git into something more public and manageable, and also wrote some new ones, too. The biggest, most exciting one here is my git stick command, which allows me to just say git stick n and stick my changes on a commit n commits ago without having to invoke a tedious series of commands. You can check out the repository here.
I spent some of my personal code-writing time this month working on a bot framework for JQBX. I ultimately ended up turning off the bot, since, well, lots of bots in one room can be sort of annoying, but it was a fun project while I had it running. It was also cool to work on it as a logical extension of the bot framework I’ve been working on for Discord — many of the same commands the Discord bot has translated directly to JQBX, so all I had to do was plug it in and it just worked!
I also wrote a quick script to generate the template for my music article, and I can’t believe I’d been doing it by hand this entire time! It’s really nice to just put in the track ID and just be able to sit down and write.
Reading
As I mentioned last month, I was compelled by Robin Hobb’s Liveship Traders Trilogy to just barrel right on through to the second book in the series, The Mad Ship which I finished earlier this month. It was fun and great fantasy, but the thing that sticks out the most are the characters which make up the story. There’s an extremely large cast throughout this book, and all of their journeys are gripping, though some of them radically evolve, while others remain almost steadfast in their personalities.
This trilogy, though, might as well be categorized as one really long book — so, of course, I had to move right into Ship of Destiny, which I’m still working on. After that, I’ll almost certainly take a break from Hobb’s work for a bit… but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I get wrapped up by her next trilogy!
Some other stats
This month,
- I typed 820,000 keys and clicked 132,499 times.
- I listened to 1,915 songs.
- Only 4 albums escaped from the Album Gauntlet — wow!
- I wrote 21,617 words in my personal journal.
That’s it! Thanks for reading. Feel free to get in touch with me any time at joewoods@fastmail.com.
