Apr 2018

Apr 15, 2018
#JustPlay

Early this year Samuel Goodwin (who I first met when he gave us some help with our iOS app, back in the long-ago days when I was getting started with Objective C) posted a challenge: to record and publish a minute of musical performance, once a day for thirty days. A month ago we started, and Samuel has been posting daily roundups: today is the last day of that challenge, and I have an unbroken thirty-day streak. (In fact I have 32 videos including one blooper, which puzzles me. I guess I lost count somewhere and doubled up.) [652 words]

Jan 2018

Jan 2, 2018
2017: Year in Review

This is the fifth in a series of yearly summaries (along with my reading list, almost the only thing that makes it to this blog these days). Previous installments: 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013. This year I used a quantified-self tool to get a stochastic picture of my daily activities, but as an exercise in humility I’m going to write this entry without looking at its data, then write a follow-up after I’ve had a look at what I was really busy with this year. So in terms of unreliable, sucked-from-the-thumb impressions… [1980 words]

Dec 29, 2017
2017 reading record

This is the third year running I’ve kept track of my reading. Earlier editions: 2016, 2015. Like last year, I used a little custom-built iOS app which is very low-friction, so I probably caught just about everything. If you can think of anything to do with this data, it’s on github. This year the data is less rich than last year, though, because LibraryThing’s REST API no longer returns responses when queried by title. That’s also why the entries below are not linked: I don’t have any automated way to get those URLs any more, and I’m far too lazy to do them all by hand. I added little manicles to any I think deserve special attention. [2001 words]

Oct 31, 2017
Winter Tide (subverting a Mythos)

Ruthanna Emrys’s novel Winter Tide builds on and challenges Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos” in ways I find very exciting. This is not a review of Winter Tide (I’m not sure if I liked it as a novel, and I doubt my opinion should be relevant to anyone else), but I want to write about what it does with its Mythos source material and why I’m excited by it. In doing so I’ll describe some details of the plot and absolutely all of the setting: if you care about spoilers you may want to stop reading at this point. [1047 words]

Jan 5, 2017
2016: Year in Review

This is the fourth in a series of yearly summaries (along with my reading list, almost the only thing that makes it to this blog these days). Previous installments: 2015, 2014, 2013. [1811 words]