Weeknotes: 2025-W17

Published: 28 April, 2025, updated: 28 April, 2025

Summary

Basically a full week of being almost recovered from being sick (the last 5% that takes 50% of the time). Corrected my sleep pattern and caught up on the lost and low-quality sleep while sick, watched a lot of movies, and started the gentle preparation for getting back on track next week.

Photos

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

(Didn’t get out much this week…)

Multi-coloured cherry blossoms

Purple phlox perhaps

Forest flame

Enjoying

Reading:
- Rogue Protocol (The Murderbot Diaries #3) by Martha Wells (★★★★★)
- Exit Strategy (The Murderbot Diaries #4) by Martha Wells (★★★★★)
- Network Effect (The Murderbot Diaries #5) by Martha Wells
Watching:
- 🎥🏠 The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (★★★★☆)
  - Surprisingly fresh presentation of what could be some fairly formulaic components)
- 🎥🏠🔄 10 Things I Hate About You (★★★★☆)
  - another worthwhile rewatch
- 🎥🏠 Omni Loop (★★★★☆)
  - Solid and well-rounded, with a touch of whimsy facilitating a journey of self-reflection and acceptance.
- 🎥🏠 The Miseducation of Cameron Post (★★★★☆)
- 🎥🏠 Princess Cyd (★★★★☆)
  - Well-shot, understated, mostly-trope-avoiding, and ultimately good feeling coming of age and family bonding story.
- 🎥🏠 We Live In Time (★★★★☆)
  - The lead actors really carry this film, bringing their charm by association to characters and a story that otherwise might not been engaging enough. Enjoyable just to watch them at work.
- 🎥🏠🔄 (500) Days Of Summer (★★★★☆)
  - Worthwhile rewatch next to “We Live in Time” since they both do the non-linear relationship story that relies on their charismatic leads, but with very different beats, levity and messaging.
- 🎥🏠 My Old Ass (★★★☆☆)
  - Surprisingly enjoyable, and does a good job at setting up and selling its message
- 🎥🏠 Warm Bodies (★★★☆☆)
  - Good, but not quite as much as it’s been hyped. Worth the watch for sure, though.
- 🎥🏠 Flora and Son (★★★☆☆)
  - Novel coming-of-age and love story
- 🎥🏠 Discontinued (★★★☆☆)
  - Surprisingly well-constructed indie, using a fantasy layer to add an airiness and lightness to a dark subject and to show progress
- 🎥🏠 Fitting In (★★★☆☆)
  - A great performance within a complex topic, without getting too dark.
- 🎥🏠 My First Summer (★★★☆☆)
  - Really looking forward to Katie Found’s future project based on this debut.
- 🎥🏠 The Fallout (★★★☆☆)
- 🎥🏠 About Time (★★★☆☆)
- 🎥🏠 Begin Again (★★★☆☆)
- 🎥🏠 I Love You, Man (★★★☆☆)
- 🎥🏠 Crush (2022) (★★★☆☆)
  - Fun enough, but the main novelty of these being non-coming-out-related lesbian relationships doesn’t entirely cover up the execution flaws.
- 🎥🏠 Beautiful Creatures (2013) (★★★☆☆)
  - Not as bad as expected, but probably worth looking elsewhere before here
- 🎥🏠 Am I OK? (★★★☆☆)
  - Fun but ultimately nothing novel
- 📺🏃 The Wheel Of Time season 3
- 📺🏃 This Old House season 45
Playing:
- Cracking the Cryptic

Newly discovered

Daniel Steiner’s Map Explainers

Daniel Steiner’s YouTube channel often explains why cities (and other human-created structures) are the way they are, using their maps to highlight the patterns, shapes, and discontinuities that are evidence of their history and geography.

San Francisco and Seattle are the cities he’s covered that I have a passing familiarity with, but I didn’t stop there…

Highlights

Enter RSS: An opportunity to reclaim your attention through simple and open tech. Unfortunately, I’ve bailed on all of my attempts at using RSS readers up to this point because there’s simply too much content to sift through. But, I’m finally realizing what was right in front of my face: The experience of using an RSS reader is and should be characteristically different than using other forms of social media. …

We start by finding someone whose judgement we trust and subscribing to their feed, and then we find out who they trust and subscribe to their feed, and so on. Part of the judgement that we’re looking for in these trustees is not simply whether or not content is accurate but whether or not it is worth our attention. Over time, we can curate our little garden of content, make it diverse, and eliminate unnecessary noise. But, much like a real garden, pruning and weeding is essential and intentional.

– “Reading RSS content is a skilled activity”, David Oliver

I’m still in the phase of mostly bailing on my attempts to use RSS, although outside of entertainment/pseudo-edutainment on YouTube, thankfully I’ve discovered it’s rare these days that I feel I want to exchange my attention for someone’s else’s interests. If I want to learn about something, I’ll seek it out myself when I have the interest.

That said, I do enjoy the serendipitous discovery of new things to be interested in, even if only for a while. I think YouTube (when paired with proper curation) is pretty close to the best I’ve seen for that use case with higher-quality content.

My workflow is basically:

Look through my subscriptions feed, and then through the algorithmic feeds, and add anything I’m interested in into my “watch later” queue.
When wanting to watch something, I’ll watch the most interesting things in my queue.
If something sticks around in the “watch later” queue, I add it to a different topic-specific queue that I’ll “get around to when I’m interested” (which is pretty much never) - or, increasingly, I’ll just delete it.
If I like a video or set of videos enough, I’ll subscribe to the creator.
If I continuously don’t watch a creator’s videos, I’ll unsubscribe.
If I didn’t enjoy a video that I though I might like, I’ll remove it from my watch history.