13 Oct 2023

Weeknotes, revival

I used to write weeknotes—weekly recaps of Stuff—several years ago, with some regularity. Then I stopped. And now I’m trying again.

My reasons for doing this are:

  • Consolidating interesting links, things I find. I tend to yeet everything into the abyss of various ‘knowledge management systems’ (notion, raindrop, discord, my bookmarks) and forget about them, which result in not much knowledge management happening.
  • The act of writing forces me to reflect on and then write about stuff, instead of passively thinking about it. I plan on repeating myself on topics I already write about elsewhere on this website—e.g. recapping my media again, changelog, etc. Recapping a movie I watch a few days later in a weeknote will feel different than writing a quick review right after I finish it, so I want to see what comes out of repetition.
  • Expecting myself to write these will force me to reflect on other things I encounter that I want to include.
  • I want to write regularly.
  • I want to meet people who also enjoy these topics.

In the wise words of James Somers, whose blog post ‘More people should write’ I return to all the time:

You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live.

[…]

I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation.

Something different this time around versus a couple of years ago is that now I do a lot more of my website ‘in public.’ Before, I felt like I was always doing stuff by myself in the corner, and the number of people who knew about my website was countable on one hand. But I publicly post about it a lot more now, and I expect strangers whom I don’t know will see it as well as a lot more online friends. I think this will change how I approach things.

Anyway. That was a long explanation. Here’s a recap of ‘recently.’

Projects

These days, I am working on a new homepage redesign. I started this, sort of, months ago back in July, and stopped one day.

A drawing of a room with a chair, media console, and a gallery wall of framed images. Images of movie posters, game screenshots, books, and album covers are interspersed throughout the drawing, such as in photo frames. The whole drawing is framed as a software window, with popups on top highlighting a song as well as chat bubbles introducing the page.

To summarize this: I initially wanted to create an isometric illustration with images dynamically inserted on top—those are items from my media diary. My goal was to play around with CSS transforms and integrate art with these images. I’ve had a lot of fun with it. Now, I’m trying to pull it all together into a new homepage because I’m tired of my current one.

This is nowhere near complete yet. Really, I would call this a proof of concept that I must now turn into an actual completed work. I’m hoping to finish it before the end of the month.

I also streamed myself working on this with some friends in Discord last week. I want to do this more—coworking, parallel play, etc. vibes.

after that: tunglr

After, I’d like to start working on a new Tumblr theme. I mentioned this in my last blog post, and it turns out Tumblr updated its documentation that same day, so now seems like a good time to revisit this. I’ve also said this for like, the past three years, so we’ll see.

media

  • I watched Fantastic Mr. Fox and rewatched The Grand Budapest Hotel. They are delightful and I’m planning on continuing with the rest of Wes Anderson’s movies this month.
  • I borrowed Dune from the library, but ended up not reading it because I got fully swept up in reading Boruto for the first time (weird! ended up skimming much of it!) and rereading Naruto. Naruto has a lot of nostalgic value for me, and I have endless complaints about it, but also, it’s Naruto. Then I reread a few cases from Detective Conan, which was a lot of fun.
  • Last month, I read The Sympathizer, which is still floating around in my mind. So much of history is very, very sad. Part of the book satirizes Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War (e.g. Apocalypse Now), and now I want to watch them for better context. The writing was also very good—reading this right after Project Hail Mary was jarring—and it’s been a long time since I’ve read anything challenging.

I was perusing random Are.na boards and there’s so much stuff to discover.