aesmael

Making note of things I have done, to remind myself they have been done. Otherwise it is too easy to forget, too easy to spiral down into believing I don't do anything and beating myself up over it.

So. I have been up to plenty, despite not having much to show for it. Various bouts of practising my drawing with exercises from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, getting familiar with the command prompt via exercises from the appendix of Learn Python 3 The Hard Way, and batches of podcast episodes being downloaded and metadata updated to compile into a playlist for my phone. A lot of activities that are of the 'keep plugging away and eventually see results' sort.

The playlist is a bit more mammoth than I had anticipated. I have probably mentioned that my routine in constructing those is to manually compile playlists to listen through my subscriptions in chronological order, as not all their RSS feeds extend back far enough to work neatly with a proper podcast player. I'm currently listening my way through 2009 and thanks to a few mishaps with some becoming unavailable by the time I reached them in my listening order, and some shenanigans with how far back some archives extend, my scheme ends up trying to span the entire year of 2009 in just two playlists. I only realised this after loading onto my phone a list spanning January to August and finding the rug pulled out from under me for what was expected to be an August - September list, now extended through to the first days of January 2010, adding about 2.5 times as much work as I'd got done, just as I got to the part where I would have been sorting the downloaded files into their play order.

I am actually worried I will not be able to fit the full playlist onto my phone when it is done, coming as it does on the heels of another quite massive playlist. Especially as several months back I actually outpaced the playlists I had loaded for the first time since beginning this project many years ago and turned to loading some audio books and dramas to fill the gap while I got the list loaded; I've decided to intersperse these playlists with more such dramatics. Not even bothering to try sourcing those until I have the podcasts themselves down and sorted. I suspect that I may have to break it into two chunks, with the first being what I'd downloaded before that rug-pull and treated as essentially a continuation of the playlist I'm currently listening to, and then the second to follow as the 'real new' playlist when I get past the current one and can delete it off my phone.

With my normal procedure of keeping three of those on the go - one for current, one to have ready to flow into when that one ends, and the third as backup in case I get through two playlists without making a new one ready - I will have a long while at this before I can be done and coast awhile again. Once I do I intend to get a bit more proactive and pull down the archives in advance. Too often, and especially of late, have I come to fetch episodes only to find the archive truncated, reorganised, or even the site entirely gone. I would rather guard against that by backing it all up locally if I can manage the hard drive space to hold them all.

Perhaps the curse of journalling so infrequently is my inability to remember what I have and have not recorded in the past.

For a while I've thought it could be fun to engage in solo-RP activities and turn the result into a story. And for a long time I believed the way to go would be to learn web formatting & styling so I could present the narrative as a 3/4 page column and the underlying dice rolls pegged alongside in a slide-in and slide-out 1/4 page column. The existence of the Beaker Browser project encouraged me to think this was a viable project especially as it could be hosted locally and I wouldn't have to worry about where and how to put this for people to read. But, with Beaker being shuttered I am at a bit of a loss.

I have also been wondering if I might do better to use a specialised document format. HTML is easy enough but maybe if I have any particular styling requirements it would be better to present in PDF, and maybe even style the document using LaTeX. The trouble with this is

• The web isn't set up well to flow between such documents
• I don't have anywhere to host them
• I don't even have enough local storage to install LyX to do that editing

1. Thank You Thursdays: Your (Notice I Didn't Say Female) Brain [via gentle_gamer. Comments to the post made me warier of this video. Did she have that brain cut in half to illustrate her point? Am pretty sure most brains I have seen are in a single piece unless cut. Much of her described experience of having a stroke is not unfamiliar to me, if to a greater degree. Not, I stress, identical, but apparently similar to something which can be accessible to me. If I were to release certain brakes, if I could remember how. I have a lot of hostility to the frame in which she presents her thesis, despite finding much recognition or even agreement in the details.
   
   I dislike the way people jumped on ropty's comment ("Non-gendered? Dividing the world into two parts, one is linear, unemotional, calculating and the other about feeling, emotions, timeless oneness. Gee, that sounds rather gendered to me.") because this is a thing which is done, this is a way in which brain functioning is presented and those traits are very gendered in this society. Also that my readings of other writings on neurobiology suggest this is a highly oversimplified perspective on human brain hemisphere functioning, though as this was a talk for a lay audience that may have been deliberate. And it still seems to me her described experiences are very 'on point' even if I am not so fond of her presentation of them.
   
   I wonder if making such experience accessible at will would have the effect on the world Dr Taylor describes.]
2. Video: Blaser tournament unwisely fits Japanese robots with lasers -- PEW PEW [via soltice. If we intercut this with some footage of people we could make a movie of it.]
3. New Hubble Images Reveal Plethora of Interacting Galaxies [via soltice. Pretty!]
4. Young feminists just want to "go wild and pole dance" [via gentle_gamer.]
5. How To Sing Like A Planet [via gentle_gamer. Wherever there be medium and motion, music. The article makes me angry, with it's talk of 'merely' as if scientific explanation of such magnificent happenings cannot be also magnificent, wondrous or beautiful themselves. I lost a lot of esteem for the writer's prior musings when I read that part.]
6. Atheism is a condom for your mind [via soltice. The part I disagree with is the phrasing suggestive that removing religious belief is a part and precursor to mental hygiene and health -- I would place taking care of the mind first, and if that leads to the removal of religion then so be it. Someone eventually said so too.]
7. Equality Through Intimidation? The Houston HRC Dinner Protest [via gentle_gamer.]
8. Comical Surroundings [via soltice. This is interesting but I think I would not like my furniture to be displaying always the same images and words. After so many repetitions reading, wearying.]
9. Modular, shape-shifting robots get right back up to creep you out [via soltice. Shiny! Still a ways to go before they are as capable as the version seen in Terminator 2 though.]
10. Australia to Remove Antigay Discrimination From 100 Laws [via soltice. An improvement, but not enough.]
11. Maintaining Moore's law with new memristor circuits [via soltice. Fascinating (a thing said when {in this case} interested but uneducated in a subject).]

1. Vaccination doesn't cause autism volume what-are-we-up-to-now? [And yet we see how well the continued lack of evidence substantiating a connection is received. *sigh*]

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

For one of my classes I am tasked with the creation of a bibliography, an extensive document serving as a directory of books, serials and web resources pertaining to a particular subject. More complicated than something for which a simple catalogue search would suffice.

The library whose resources I have chosen to create the bibliography for (it has to be for and using the resources of a particular library) is the Seattle Public Library. The subject I have nominated to cite is resources for building writing and artistic skills.

My actual intention behind this is to create a resource index for aDE, material we can use to study and learn from. Currently the area of material I am investigating is very broad and not especially well defined. It would be helpful if people would nominate particular areas of interest for skill development, or resources they have found useful in the past.

People who are not members of aDE are welcome to participate too. They are certainly welcome to make use of the bibliography once it is done.