Weeknotes: 2025-W12

Published: 24 March, 2025, updated: 24 March, 2025

Summary

Continued playing Wanderstop through to completion, and then started on Assassin’s Creed Shadows. Over at Ebanista, had a great foundational woodworking workshop on material layout and preparation (also covering considerations in selection and material properties on design).

Photos

(Based more on time of processing than time of taking…)

Caustics and waves

I hope he knows the way

What was it I was trying to show here again?

Enjoying

Reading:
- Mort (Discworld #4) by Terry Pratchett (★★★☆☆)
  - For whatever reason, I just didn’t get into it as a whole (not matching my distant memory of my previous read), although still enjoyable.
- Celestial Magic by Iris Beaglehole
Watching:
- La Dolce Villa (★★★☆☆)
  - Sometimes you just feel like escaping to a fairly straightforward cozy story set in the beautiful small-town Italian countryside, and that’s what you get with La Dolce Villa. (part of my attempt to watch more movies)
- 📺🏃 Invincible season 2 (★★★☆☆)
  - Overall, to me it doesn’t end up as a coherent story that provides enough real progress or resolution, although other fans seem to love it.
- 📺🏃 Fallen season 1
  - Took a chance. Not looking like it’ll pay off, though…
- 📺📅 Reacher season 3
Playing:
- Wanderstop (★★★★☆)
  - This games mix of whimsy, understanding of full burn-out, and playful needling of the world view that those experiencing burn-out develop struck exactly right to me.
- Assassin’s Creed Shadows
  - Just started. So far, seems pretty solid, but Assassin’s Creed games often peter out in the mid-game…

Newly discovered

Infrared video

For some reason, I hadn’t really thought about looking for infrared video before happening across this video - which was the entrance to a bit of a rabbit hole for me…

Highlights

Reaching 95%-ile isn’t very impressive because it’s not that hard to do. […] The “one weird trick” is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate.

In most real life activities, there’s almost no one who puts in a level of delib[e]rate practice equivalent to someone who goes down to their local table tennis club and practices two hours a week, let alone someone like a top pro, who might seriously train for four hours a day.

[…] people not understanding how to spot and fix their mistakes […] [is] the most likely explanation for most players. Most players who express frustration that they’re stuck at a rank up to maybe 95%-ile or 99%-ile don’t seem to realize that they could drastically improve by observing their own gameplay or having someone else look at their gameplay.

– “95%-ile isn’t that good” - Dan Luu

I think there’s some meta-skill around learning how to improve that is very different from the learning many people experience during school, and which often gets them very far in their careers. There’s an inflexibility that sets in around doing things that you’re not good at already, that you haven’t “learned enough about”, and so forth.

Do it enough, and you can develop this confidence that you can relatively quickly learn enough of most things to be better than most people who do it so long as you’re willing to do it poorly for a while.