my voice moved hades so he extinguished the fire (week notes 15)
Doing
Joe and I ran a Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning. My time was not good (40:38), but there was wet, heavy snow coming down, so I was mostly focused on not eating shit. I think mid-November might be my 5K cutoff. We otherwise stayed home for the holiday and spent some much needed time relaxing together.
With the holiday season upon us, this is usually around the time that I take a big trip out to a nearby mall to get gifts for everyone. I want to commit this year to shopping mostly (entirely?) from local small businesses or buying handmade and secondhand goods. I’m happy to live in a town with a great Main Street, and I want to stop dumping my money into corporations.
I did order a bunch of rechargeable batteries from Amazon for Black Friday, but that was the extent of my shopping.
I miss podcasting again. I’ve run a few podcasts over the years, which all petered out for various reasons, but I’m feeling the itch again. I don’t know what I’d podcast about, though, which runs contrary to popular logic: you should have something to say, not just the desire to say things. I love audio production and the sound of my own voice, though.
Maybe I record audio versions of my blog posts and turn that into a podcast? I want to write more, after all. I don’t think my week notes would be conducive to an audio format, but maybe my longer form writing (what little of it exists).
I bought a camera (Panasonic Lumix G7) on a bit of a whim. I film a lot of videos for my school, so I guess there’s professional utility in using something other than my phone, but I also want to get better about taking pictures to preserve memories.
Watching
On Saturday, I felt sick and rotted on the couch and watched YouTube junkfood: mostly outsidexbox’s seven things videos and Macho Nacho console mod videos.
I don’t mod consoles. I like to tinker with electronics, but I’ve never soldered anything. Somehow, however, I find myself watching a lot of these sorts of videos. I think I admire the production value and Tito’s calm, measured approach.
I’m about done with Daria, but I haven’t watched the movies yet.
Reading
Into the Wild by John Krakauer. As a kid, the film adaptation was on frequent rotation in my house; my mom often fixated on one movie and watched it over and over, and she was a big fan of the soundtrack as well. I’ve always wanted to read the book since, and I’m trying again to commit to reading more now that the start of school year frenzy has died down for me. I’m enjoying following McCandless’s story and don’t think Krakauer too effusive (though his biases are clear), but some of the tangents feel extraneous.
Finished on November 28. A humanizing and sympathetic account of a controversial figure. A few meandering chapters, but there are — in McCandless’s case especially — wrong turns taken in pursuit of truth, meaning, and beauty.
I’ve ordered Charlotte Brontë’s Villette through my local bookstore as an upcoming read on the recommendation of a student’s parent. I’m also interested in getting my hands on The Dead Father by David Barthelme after reading an excerpt in Into the Wild.
Playing
Satisfactory. Just a few months before the pandemic, while I was in grad school, I fell deeply in love with Satisfactory and attempted in vain to explain to my literary and well-rounded colleagues that I was spending my free time balancing my iron production pipelines and converting from biomass energy to coal. I dipped my toe in a few more times after my mania but resolved to wait until 1.0 as many of my production lines would need to be seriously re-tooled. Joe suggested we start a co-op save this week and I am back and thriving.
We did get into a brief, heated conflict over manifold (my preference) versus balanced production, an argument all couples experience at some point in their relationship, I’m sure.
I played a little but more of Pokémon Crystal, but I’m at a point where I have to grind out levels to take on the next gym, which I’m supremely uninterested in doing. Maybe I’ll just hack my save.
Listening
I downloaded the Satisfactory soundtrack and have had that on in the background — it’s very good. Otherwise, I’m mostly still listening to Rainbow Kitten Surprise.