Crunch time (Learning Things: May 29, 2023)

Thank you to everyone who reached out last week about my digital garden blog post series! I've had some great conversations with folks about it, and I'm glad it's a topic that's resonating with other people, too.

So what's up with me this week? My wife and I going to Iceland to visit a friend this week (a long-delayed trip that we were supposed to go on in 2021, which we had to cancel because of the Delta variant.) I'm super excited about that (it'll be the first international trip we've gone on since our honeymoon), though it also means that the last week or so has been a massive crunch time.

I don't have much progress to report on my various personal projects this week; I've gotta deliver a big work project before going out of town, so all of my energy has gone into that. (Almost to the finish line there, though!) But I do have a few small updates:

Paranormal research

Back in 2021, I bought a few books about Icelandic folklore, which I just remembered that I owned this week. So I'm reading them, starting with a short one, Icelandic Folk Legends by Alda Sigmundsdottir. It's been interesting so far; check out my in-progress notes about it in my digital garden if you're curious about the highlights so far.

DIY paranormal gear / tech stuff

I made no progress on the biodata sonification device this week. I swear, I have like 1-1.5 hours worth of work left on assembling it, but other priorities keep nosing their way ahead in line.

But if you're hoping for an update on the tech stuff I was griping about last week: My Framework laptop is currently charging, turning on, booting, and everything. I'm planning to bring it on vacation with me. Something's still funky with its RTC battery, though: it's lost about 24 hours of time since I fiddled with it last week, so we'll see if it's still working when I leave. Last time I went on vacation, it was working fine until right before I left, when it decided to stop booting again. So we shall see.

I've been too fried to do much of anything after work this week, but I have been watching a lot of YouTube videos featuring an Australian man yelling while taking apart old mp3 players and headphones. So that sort of counts a tiny bit toward my goal of learning more about how to DIY and modify electronic devices.

Art and paranormal investigation

Sadly, nothing to report here, either. Though I have been thinking a lot about electronic music and nostalgia, and asking myself why I feel so compelled to listen to the Grandbrothers remix of Erik Satie's Gnoissiene No. 1 while attempting automatic drawing. My thoughts are still percolating there, but it's been an interesting question for me to mull over. I've always liked the magpie aspect of electronic music, how so many artists collect little gems and samples to play with in their songs, and what it means to build one piece of art from another. But I've never thought about it from a more paranormal or weird perspective.

But yeah. No automatic drawing experiments this week. I haven't even done much regular art. (Usually I draw or design something daily.) My eyes have been tired from looking at a screen for too long, so my drawing sessions have been replaced by playing solitaire. A deck of cards is far more forgiving on the eyes than the iPad screen.

Tangentially related: if you're curious, today's art is a sketch I did of some flowers I saw in Central Park a month or two ago.

Writing

Gosh, it feels bad to have to write updates that are just "I made no progress this week." But I suppose that's why I'm doing these weekly update blog posts—accountability and all. Anyway, work has taken priority over writing this week, but I'm looking forward to diving back into writing when I get back from vacation.

Outro

I've got a bunch of blog posts loaded up to publish over the next week or so! I'm planning to talk mostly about the weird history and hauntings of the Luxor hotel in Las Vegas, a pyramid-shaped monstrosity (I say that with love; I'm a sucker for tacky things) that I stayed at in 1995 and have a lot of nostalgia toward.