I’ve never been an anime/manga person/otaku (minus watching Akira and Ghibli films), but strange things happen during finals season, and one of the strange things that happened during my last finals season of my undergrad career was my introduction to Studio Gainax, and subsequent Gainax trip. And because I love reviewing things, here’s some thoughts on:

Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt

Somehow, this anime was my introduction to Gainax as a studio, discrete from the background radiation of entertainment: specifically, it started with (SPOILER ALERT)this AMV(END SPOILER ALERT) in which the music and visuals just fit so perfectly (better than the original music video) that I had to look up the anime backing it, and was surprised that it was a Japanese animation, since the style seems derived from western schools of art.

It didn’t help that it was available in full on youtube, so I went through the entire series in a few days (which wasn’t hard, it is only 11 episodes long). It started out as a pretty standard monster-a-week show, with more fanservice than your typical western animation; then it started taking increasingly absurd turns, but it settled down and turned back into your usual rough and tumble action anime for the grand finale. Well, as much as a wacky concept like P&SG could be expected to settle down. Throw in a few eyebrow raising twists, and there you have P&SG.

Overall, the animation was pretty good, and the absurdity of it all didn’t quite reach escape velocity (this being a good thing). But really, the absurdity of finals season was the perfect backdrop, and who knows if I would’ve enjoyed it some other time? Plus, apparently P&SG is one of the more wackier anime, so it’s all downhill from here, right? Right?

FLCL

So after watching P&SG, I decided to check out the Gainax TVTropes page, and found that not only were there other Gainax shows (surprise!), but more of them were also available online. And after the gentle mindfuck and silliness that was P&SG, I decided I needed even more in my life and heard FLCL would give me the requisite strange, so I decided that I’d check it out.

I will admit that yes, if I had not read the accompanying summaries attached to the show online, then I would’ve been lost for at least a while. It might also have helped that I probably read the Wikipedia summary of the show once in the depths of my past…

So, it was wacky, it was fun, and OMG CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT (vs. P&SG, which was just fun and wacky). And unable to outstay it’s welcome at only 6 episodes: for my story-holic mind, it hit that sweet spot, that just right density of immersion that seems to be frequented by short stories and novellas.

But really, there are giant robot battles and a coming of age story and guitars involved: what could go wrong?

Houkago No Pleiades

After being pleasantly surprised at how short FLCL was, I decided to check out some more OVAs by Gainax: Wish upon the Peliades was short (4 episodes!) and also available online.

Well, it turned out to be too short: instead of being the usual half hour, each episode was around 5 minutes long. This meant that the magical girl premise of HnP wasn’t really fleshed out, and it wasn’t really anything special, without real resolution or a reveal that it was something artsy-fartsy that could lack the requisite resolution. I haven’t seen any other magical girl animes, but I imagine this would fit in the usual fare (minus the compression). However, the entire thing is only 20 minutes long, so it’s not such a big deal to just turn your brain off and watch for a bit.

As it stands, I’m not sure if Subaru (HnP was a collaboration between Gainax and Subaru (the car maker)) was trying to do this as a marketing effort to otakus (what? why?), or as a throw back to the days of patronage.

Also, while we’re talking about Subaru: who the HELL doesn’t put cruise control on their cars? Backstory: my family got a Subaru recently, and (surprise!) it doesn’t have cruise control. Cruise control is merely the most basic drive by wire automation, and not only does it abstract away the acceleration mechanics into velocity control, it also serves as a small fuel efficiency booster. However, it’s useful as a market segmentation tool, so I guess you got me there, Subaru.

Anyways…

Gurren Lagann

So after being disappointed by HnP, I decided to check out something a little longer. Evangelion seemed like an obvious choice: it’s a flagship anime, something even I’ve heard about. However, I couldn’t find it legally online, so I moved on to another long format and popular anime from Gainax that was: Gurren Lagann (I know, death to dubs. Doesn’t matter, got story).

Clocking in at 27 episodes, it was pretty long, and took almost 2 days of straight watching to finish. It wasn’t just my story-holism that kept me going: it starts out as a straightforward rough n’ tumble giant mecha anime, and then all of a sudden starts deconstructing itself. And then it reverts to a giant mecha anime again (notice a pattern?).

Really, it’s rocking fun (note: both this and FLCL have catchy soundtracks) with even more fanservice than P&SG, and a story line that settles comfortably into the full season, managing to be thought provoking (for a TV show: it seems that if books came after TV shows, they would be heralded as moving insanely fast, with writing styles mutating through stylistic space with frightening speed. And one person has complete creative control of the work?!). Plus, I now have an urge to yell “Just Who The Hell Do You Think I Am?!" at random times, so you should watch Gurren Lagann so you understand, or even yell along.

The... future?

So, my current Gainax trip ended a few weeks ago, but I’ve only cleared 4 items out of their warehouse: truly, the rate of production of entertainment is frightening, even when you winnow it down to the very best (ex. Hugo Awards count). However, I do plan on getting around to the indispensable Evangelion (eventually), and maybe another Gainax work (Diebuster? just for kicks?).

And speaking of anime, I forgot to count Studio Ghibli among their ranks: they’re accorded a spot in my mind at the same level as Pixar, truly, yet I haven’t watched half their works, so I’ll probably try catch up on that queue, too.

And then there’s things like Battlestar Galactica. Ho boy.

Ever since I’ve gotten back home and don’t have immediate concerns, I’ve been catching up on reading. Here are reviews on the first batch:

With A Little Help

A collection of short stories by Cory Doctorow.

I’ve read most of the stories already in here, but it was a blast reading through them again, and picking up those that I haven’t read yet. Some notes on selected stories:

I’ve read The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away (yes, based on the joco song) before, but it’s interesting to read it after learning that other people are also interested in collecting data on the self under the banner of quantified self, how we’re doing it outside of a monastery.

After reading The Right Book, it makes me wonder why no one has tried making something like The Story so Far yet: or, someone’s tried starting it, but it keeps getting buried before it reaches critical mass. Maybe we could just start it as a forum game, and keep going until it attains critical mass.

Human Readable conflicts me: on the one hand, I want the ant simulators to win, because you can’t always ask your machines to explain themselves, similar to how many machine learning algorithms are black boxes. On the other hand, giving up that control and understanding essentially means we give up the control to the “matrix”: even if there is no malignant consciousness, we give up the control to the aether. And we love control, myself included.

Pester Power ends with a magnificent line. I’m very sad to hear that /usr/bin/god was never completed. And Charlie Stross working on a book about spam? I’ll have to keep an eye out.

Epoch has another set of lines that tickle my geek nodes: “Later that night, she took me home and we spent the whole night hacking replacement parts for her collection of ancient stand-up video games.” The fact that Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth commissioned the story is also cool: when I get rich and famous, I’ll have to remember I can commission stories.

I will gripe that unordered collections have no business being flattened into a linear strictly-ordered collection, and that as an ebook we can do better. I’d love to see how people display and navigate through an unordered collection.

TLDR: THE STORIES ARE AWESOME READ THEM ALL

Postsingular

Honestly, this book kind of sucked: I only got halfway through it before the wooden dialog, random plotting, and soft scifi pseudo-science slew my desire to keep reading, and this is coming from someone that will plow through utter shit just to finish it. This either means I’m getting better at rejecting books that aren’t worth my time, or that the book is worse than utter shit. I’m not sure.

Context

The 2nd latest work from Cory Doctorow, which is merely a collection of blog posts put into book form. I say merely, partly because I’ve already read most of the material in one form or another, and also because as I’ve said before, unordered collections presented as ordered feel wrong.

The essays themselves are wonderful, and a good thing about them being short, page-long essays is that I can’t really spoiler them, so I’ll just ramble a bit:

If I ever become a parent, I hope to be as good as integrating technology into family time as Cory is in Jack and the Interstalk (corrected for technological advancement).

Beyond Censorware brought to the fore that old dream that I could lead some class in primary or secondary education, because it’s too often that kids don’t meet good technologists until what I would argue is much too late. Of course, the fact that I’m a few nines high with regards to technology means I’ve traded off some social acumen, and it seems like being somewhat normal is a good thing for primary/secondary school teachers. Also, there’s the fact that if we treat money as whuffie (another Cory concept), then we don’t value teachers very much, and we get job destroyers off destroying jobs instead of teaching the next generation how to replace themselves with shell scripts.

When I’m Dead details how to handle deceased dude’s digital data. I once thought about creating a “dead-man’s” switch for myself/as a service so my encrypted digital data wouldn’t die with me, so it was instructive to hear Doctorow talk about why he wouldn’t use one (trust), and his solution (split the key, keep it with two other trusted people). Doctorow’s solution would work especially well with myself: I have several groups of friends that are widely physically and socially disparate from each other (6 steps non-withstanding). However, having friends maintain awareness of the key shards is problem-prone, whereas Doctorow has one closely trusted party (wife) and someone he pays to care (lawyer). I suppose this means I need to get married and get a lawyer, or get married twice on opposite ends of the globe.

The sentiments in Reports of Blogging’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated are obviously shared by myself.

It’s interesting to note that Doctorow thinks Search Is Too Important to Leave to One Company, since when I read that title I immediately think of DuckDuckGo.

Personal Data is as Hot as Nuclear Waste reiterates in my mind that we need to encrypt everything (shame on myself for not encrypting my mail! shame on myself for not encrypting my hard drives!), and with the increased capabilities of data mining, we need to add more obscurity just to keep the amount of anonymity level.

Memento Mori is an interesting look at how we fetishize old objects: aside from a straightforward fascination, they also act as ways to keep us honest about the promises of technology. I’m somewhat young (perhaps too young) to remember these past revolutions that promised the world and failed to deliver, but I’ll keep in mind curating my own memonto mori collection.

Cory also talks about sex in his books, writing for YA, his writing process/tools, email (both the problem of spam and how he controls his inbox), re-iterates the thesis that scifi is really about the present, fandom, r-reproduction, licensing, publishing MVPs, CC, Net Neutrality (since the book was published in late 2011, there’s nothing on the new challenges to the internet), the evils of DRM, why 3d movies are a gimmick, phishing, piracy (media piracy in particular), why we need statistical literacy, and 3d printing.

TLDR: I’ve you’re an avid reader of Doctorow’s blog, you might be familiar with the material, but it’s fun to go back and read this collection of “greatest hits”. If you don’t follow Doctorow, then these essays are fun, bite sized thoughts wrapped up in a nice box, which I highly recommend.

What’s next? Maybe Anathem, or the latest from Cory Doctorow (The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow), something by Charlie Stross, or something be Vernor Vinge. In other words, ALL THE SCIENCE FICTION.

Okay, I’ve put this off long enough. I’ve been meaning to post something about this for a semester and a half now, so I should just shove this out the door.

If you’re interning in the valley, bikes are cool: the culture is bike friendly, and you’re likely not getting paid enough in a short time to justify getting a car. And, need I point out that walking everywhere sucks? So by process of elimination, bikes are cool.

For some reason, I opted for a folding bike, for some reason I can’t remember now. I got a Miami model from Citizen Bikes, both of which worked out. However, I could have just as easily gotten a normal bike for cheaper on craigslist, and the folding feature of the bike really only saved me once or twice on the train (you can board the Caltrain with a folding bike, even if all the bike slots are taken). Also, folders are not very fast, even when you try to pedal at top speed at the highest gear. There’s definitely a convenience-speed tradeoff there.

However, it did get me where I needed to go, and it didn’t break the bank. So a note to you prospective valley interns, give some thought about getting a bike.

After I finished Accelerando (yes! it’s free (as in beer)!) I could not stop the thought that sums it all up from cycling over and over through my mind.

That was a mindfuck through my eyesockets.

And it was awesome. Now, we happen to be on the internet: there’s nigh infinite amount of mindfuckery at our disposal, but this was a cream of the crop mindfuck, the fine aged mindfuck grown in rustic rolling hills of Cthulu’s domain, uncorked in the presence of distinguished guests you actually like.

Truly, it’s been a while since I’ve read a visionary piece that’s also not totally mushy sci-fi, possibly not since reading some Cory Doctorow (especially his story “0wnz0red”), and boy, is it a heady drink. The term future-shock gets bandied about in the story, but they forget to break the fourth wall and address the reader, who is almost certainly future-shocked from being thrown into an unremembered past at hundreds of years per hour, all without leaving the same room.

It’s not just a mindfuck: it’s also managed to change my mind about what I should be doing in the near future (which puts it on par with HPMOR). Robots are still cool, but metacorticies? Might want to get that out of the way first.

Also, Accelerando includes galaxy-wide civilizations that run timing attacks on the substrate of the universe. Really, how awesome is that?

Enough with the gushing praise: what about the story? As a vision of the technical singularity, it takes the stance that one can indeed see past the intelligence explosion (contrary to other singularity theories), but only by following non-uploaded humans skirting past the growing Matrioshka brain. It is somewhat strange, since it posits uploads running the show (starting with lobsters) until they self-modify into something entirely non-human, supposing that uploads are easy to modify. However, knowing that we are godshatter, it can’t possibly be that easy, so the Less Wrong FAI vision seems more likely. But no one ever ask for likelihood with their mindfuck, did they?

I’d also like to compare Accelerando to The Forever War, another fairly hard sci-fi book (maybe 8 on the mohs scale?) that I recently read (during fall semester). I believe The Forever War was written before computing systems became fixtures in everyday life and uploads were an actual distinct possibility, Haldeman putting a clone hive-mind in control of humankind instead of Matrioska brains the size of the solar system. However, The Forever War boils down to an old fashioned love story, whereas Accelerando defenestrates that trope post-haste and instead shoves unalloyed future into your face.

And having read more works by Charlie Stross, I can say that he’s going to jostle with Cory Doctorow in my pantheon of sci-fi authors. Or maybe head higher.

I highly recommend you go get this vision of the future. Happy mindfucking!

Note: Stross doesn’t think the scenarios he details in Accelerando are very likely. However, it’s a good ride.

If you are not already acquainted with the works of Edward Tufte, you ought go fix that, especially if you happen to be a younger me that could use a badassery-boost later in life. Basically, Tufte encourages thought about data display beyond the usual “plot and run away” touted by most anyone, chides those that try deceiving with displays, and fires the imagination with wondrous examples.

However, Tufte writes for data mongers that are crafting displays for a popular audience. What if your audience is scientific, sophisticated, and yet still looking for that “interocular impact”? Then, as an Amazon reviewer once pointed out to me, maybe Visualizing Data by William Cleveland could help you.

Certainly, the target audience of Visualizing Data is related to the scientific community, eschewing any amount of glitz for effective visualization techniques (as does Tufte) with a solid grounding in math (nevermind). Instead of searching for visualization techniques that are only suited for a few scenarios (such as Minard’s Napolean chart), Cleveland takes a clinical approach of developing a few nearly orthogonal techniques and extending them into ever-increasing dimensions (the loess is a particularly intruiging example).

With the troop further into the book and into higher dimensions, also comes different ways of looking at the data, such as stereographic techniques for viewing 3d data which is interesting in itself. Notably, Cleveland also develops methods for finding subtle dependencies in the data in these higher dimensions, bypassing the intuitive but flawed solution of merely dishing out 2 two-dimensional plots.

This all boils down to Cleveland’s main mission of battling “rote data analysis”, the application of statistical techniques without applied critical thought. The bulk of the book is taken with application of the various tools developed to real-world data sets, augmenting the case studies with comments on how to go about the analysis effectively. He also compares and contrasts his results with previous studies done on the very same data sets by people likely to have used rote data analysis, as a non-too-subtle indication of the sort of fate awaiting those using least-squares without thinking. Overall, the style is instructive and helpful, and quite the pedagogical win.

However, I should note thta I said earlier that Tufte was meant for data mongers creating displays for the general public, this implies that Cleveland is not so suited to the same. Indeed, tools such as the q-q, r-f, or m-d plots are not standard in the public visual literacy, such that I had to read the explanation of q-q plots a second time before grasping what was going on. To generalize, you would use Cleveland’s methods to convince your colleagues, and Tufte-like displays to convince everyone else.

While I borrowed this book as part of my “read all the books in the library” campaign, I may be compelled to buy this book anyways. If you’re in the business of playing with data (not necessarily machine learning domains, because trying to display hundreds of dimensions just will not work), then I highly recommend checking this book out.

Another week, another meta-review.

• No, I'm not going to do a meta-meta post.

• A Year in Review

  I have qualms about using lists as a lazy shortcut for miles of prose: however, I am a programmer, and as such will take lazy shortcuts whenever (including now). Thinking back to the writing of the post, I mostly pulled the events populating the list previous blog posts, which is biased: it does get most of the major events, though. I don't think breaking up the year-end review and the resolutions was a good idea (could be interesting interplay between the two), but honestly, I did want to fill up some more posts. I was also probably sleepy.

• Resolutions

  Short list, which is good (few resolutions to keep track of) and bad (I was probably sleepy when I wrote them), or maybe really bad (I only gave the list a few minutes of thought). Oh well, it's not like a binding list of promises: also, I would like to do these things.

• Semester in Review

  Exposition, exposition, exposition about academics and class reviews that would be much better put on culpa.

• The Craft

  This was written in the full swing of my work on Pensievr, which also explains why it was 3 lines. If I kept writing, then my dad probably would have woken up and found me still writing.

• Late for a Job?

  This one was borne out of the fact I was mostly done with Pensievr at some ungodly hour of the morning (similar to the last post) and something that had been on my mind. It's strange, writing down thought processes that flash through your mind in what feels like half a second...

• Winter Break Movie Reviews

  I had a draft sitting around, and I don't plan on watching more movies. The reviews aren't worthy of being called movie critiques, but that also wasn't the point. However, it also constricts the population to whom the writing is interesting.

Overall: Still not writing fast enough. Not much to say about that: I might be getting faster, though, mostly by relying on a stream of consciousness style of writing. I’m also still writing around midnight: I’ve only managed to publish one of these posts before midnight. I should fix that sometime.

What did I watch? Why? All these and more will be answered forthwith!

Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol

I know, I know, I’m giving money to the Scientologists, I’m sorry about that. However, I think I deserved a pass if not on the fact I just enabled the immaterial spirit of Ron L Hubbard to chuckle a little louder with the sound of Xenu’s coffers filling, but for the fact I had the gumption to watch a mindless action flick at all. It was the first movie I watched during break, during my Bastion/LIMBO spree, and if the family wanted to spend time staring at a screen together instead of separately, then by golly we would stare at something with explosions!

And many explosions were had, including a narrow miss when I found out the antagonist of the movie was a villain that believed that nuclear war was good for humankind. That’s sort of a new high in anti-moral ambiguity right there, but what can you do? It’s about as close as you can get to a universal antagonist, given that one person’s terrorist turns out to be another’s freedom fighter (see Rambo 3 vs. US after 9/11).

Overall, a nice balance between tension, comedy, and angst, with a finishing garnish of romance as anti-angst. Also, I enjoyed appropriate broken-leg physics.

Hugo

I didn’t know much about this movie going into the theater, and midway through the movie I realized Hugo was a love letter to film history. Midway through the movie was also the point at which lots of exposition on ancient film history started beginning. Coincidence?

The atmosphere and ambiance were excellent, swapping effortessly from what I presume to be stereotypical early 20th century France to the inner workings of a clock tower. And the clocks are gorgeous things: I’m sure they faked the shots (that’s the nature of film) but they still appeared real on film. And really, that’s what Hugo is showcasing and reminiscing over, that sort of movie magic that touched the ages from that first “oncoming train video”, up to viewing some epic in 3d.

I used to dislike movie portrayals of children: they would make stereotypical mistakes, or act in other ways that jerked my empathy chain, some of the same neurons lighting up as if I had made the same mistake. However, I think I’ve finally grown out of that. That said, I will say strong female characters are pretty cool in my book, and the plucky heroine fits that model fairly well, exuding believable infectious enthusiasm (perhaps, one day I will write a book that will have cool and strong female characters).

Overall, first half struck a pretty good balance between tension (action?) and introspective scenes, especially for a child’s movie, and the classical happy ending that had me aww’ing.

Hard Boiled

While hanging out with a friend before he left the area, we decided to watch a campy movie, pulling a random movie called “Hard Boiled” from among a bunch of foreign language films. We didn’t know at the time its action sequences were highly when it was released, but so it goes…

We ended up keeping a running commentary in the style of MST3K, uncovering a small translation slip ups and irregularities. With a heaping of gratuitous, over the top violence, and a baby salvation scene or two, this movie was sure a home run.

This semester is the first time I felt really panicked about my academics. Well, maybe there was that one time I actually failed a class back in high school, but it was over by the time I realized it, so there wasn’t much to be panicked about.

The reason? I tried to not care as much about my grade, since grades aren’t what drive either what I end up doing in life, and because optimizing for grades usually excludes optimizing for happiness. Overall, I think this is a good strategy, but I didn’t know how to control it my first time out, and as a result my grades suffered much more than I intended, meaning my stellar GPA is more mediocre now. I can try not to care, but I’ve been optimizing for it for so long that it still stings.

An retrospective of my classes:

• AI - pretty much worthless on the subject of AI. I learned much, much more about the philosophical side of AI from Less Wrong, and the coding material wasn't very dense. Lisp would have been interesting to learn, if I didn't already study it in high school.
• Robotics - Mediocre topics (lots of low-level, entry-level robotics routines) and the class used a mediocre platform. It turns out (surprise!) that hardware is hard, especially when you're using a bluetooth link. I think we should have had on board Arduino boards to do the logic, which would have bypassed the bluetooth latency and probably made much more responsive robots. And, oh god Matlab: it's really too bad me and my partner never got the Python package for the iRobot Create off the ground.
• OS - Oh god why, that was pretty painful. But now I've hacked on the linux kernel!
• Logic Design - It turns out I just don't care about really low-level hardware that much, although doing FPGAs could prove helpful in my later endeavors. It could have really used a lab where we could use FPGAs hands on. This class was also a source of great discomfort through finals, since I thought I was going to fail this one. Yup.
• Vision - Great professor, interesting topics: first half of the course went somewhat slowly while building up the requisite background. The second half of the course that blasted through various 3d depth recovery techniques more than made up for it, though.

Outside of classes, I did Maker Faire and attended an Ignite event. However, that’s all I did: once I started dying in Logic Design (and OS), I stopped doing things outside of class. For instance, there was the Biotechnology Crash Course at Genspace which I think is just awesome in theory but I couldn’t do because I was freaking out about academics. Also, I didn’t make it over to NYC Resistor or A1L all semester, which is not cool.

Overall, it was a good semester: I’m still learning how to make time for other things, and not care quite so much about grades. And, I didn’t fail any of my classes (can’t forget about that)!

It’s about that time of year again, when our culture collectively reflects on the past year. Or gets raging drunk, but I’m not doing that this New Years Eve.

So, what happened?

• Got an internship at a "real" company, instead of applying for research positions like I had done the years previous. I started applying in earnest during winter break, getting my first phone interview ever in 2011 (this is surprising to me, from where I stand now). It turns out that I had to keep fishing for jobs until the beginning of summer break before I landed a job down in the valley, about which I should have a retrospective soon.
• We started kicking up the action at ADI, putting on the first Devfest and putting ourselves on the map as the tech kids on campus. Not much more to say about that, me thinks.
• I started Notesoble, and I'm still not done with even a draft or any sort of demo. I could litter this post with things I might have done during 2011, but this is somewhat near and dear to my heart, so I'll leave off the failures now.
• New laptop!
• Attended concerts in nice concert halls!
• Participated in less than all the hackathons, like HackNY and SVI Hackspace and SuperHappyDevHouse and Mozilla's World Series of Hack!
• Almost built a functioning reprap! (there are still some electronics problems)
• Makerfaire!
• Fearing for my life academically! (I'll post about this soon in my semester retrospective)

So that’s a year in a life, or at least the highlights reel. Could it have been better? Of course: until we have FAI, then there’s room to go upwards. But the year worked out to a net positive, and for that I am thankful.

My resolutions will come tomorrow.

If I don’t review, then there’s really no point in keeping up the writing: hence, a brief look back and attempt at picking apart my writing.

• The Reluctant Gamer

  A bit forced: the paragraph containing "all work and no play" could have been cut, but I wanted to include every phrase I thought might be included, instead of taking a butcher's knife to it. And the speculation over how hedeons work is pretty personal and mostly useless, since I haven't done the appropriate literature search. Overall, I'm okay with this post.

• Christmas

  I let my sensational side get away from me, because I really really really wanted to include the line "Wrong! I want to [learn something] so I can [do some surprisingly broad action]", akin to HPMOR. Lots of discursive lines of wandering thought, a bad appeal to science and a clumsy pointer to transhumanism; a closing line I'm not proud of. However, I'm not sure what else I would have filled into the slot, and it did seem the day to post it.

• Shopping

  I went shopping. I decided to post about it. Also, I just wrote the Christmas post, which was a bit long, so I didn't want to write too much, and instead weighed in on a tired topic, with an obvious ending. Of course, the internet is winning: it has already won.

• Intentionality

  I started freaking out because I couldn't control my own time allocation. Well, some portion of me started to freak out, and then I dumped this post promising further posts about how I was going to fix that, and then I went right back to playing Bastion, or going to sleep.

• Winter Break Game Reviews

  I finished the current crop of games I bought during the Steam holiday sales, and of course I had to write something about them, because it was easy writing fodder. Sometimes I digressed, but overall I think I stayed pretty close to the reviewing games core.

• The Middle

  An old post that has been sitting in my drafts folder as an outline for a few months. It sprang from some memories, and I realized halfway through that I was whining (maybe something deserving of #firstworldproblems), instead of writing something interesting. I didn't know where to go after that, so I wrapped up pretty abruptly. Maybe it could have been massaged into something given the theme, but not in the hour I gave it.

Overall: I’m not writing fast enough. The Game Reviews took an entire evening (partially because I was chatting for much of it, but nevermind), and even short posts take a long time. If I write faster, then I can either get more revisions in, or I can write for shorter periods of time so that I don’t push writing these off to the end of the night (that is obviously a bad thing to do). Also, interleaving posts instead of writing them all in one go each night could raise the quality of writing through imposed revisions. Given that I think I’m done with gaming for the rest of the year, I’ll be trying to write faster and in revisions this next week.