weekly notes 002
this week's been too hot too lonely too little sleep too much news about the shitty job market making me question whether it was a mistake to leave my shitty job last month (it wasn't).
updates
- way, way too much added sugar in my diet. in summer 2023 i went off it cold turkey, felt like death for two weeks, and then felt amazing for the next almost-one year before a chaotic work schedule pushed me back into a crappy diet. i need to try that again, now that i know it works and how much good it did me (and how getting bubble tea once a month with my friends felt like an actual treat).
- finished the capybara plushie i've been working on for (checks notes) two months
- watched this video on how ai is now doing job interviews autonomously. creepy. bad. creepy, man. it's not the first time i worry about letting news like this turn me into a luddite instead of keeping an open mind and a healthy interest in emerging tech. then other times i think about how if i'd stayed at my job in academia after chatgpt took off, i might have skipped luddite and gone straight to terrorist. i still teach grad courses part-time but i have enough freedom to run my classes that i haven't had to sneak 'mention dua lipa' in assignment texts yet. i wonder if by the spring semester sam altman will figure out the em-dash thing, because the students haven't yet.
- started learning morse code a couple of days ago, mostly got the alphabet down and i'll continue with spaced repetition. i'm using an app for now but i might get a keyer when i get good enough.
media
- the old guard 2 came out and it was. fine. it reminded me of one lettedboxd review i read for something else a while back that went 'took of half a star because it's half a movie'. it went the way of pacific rim where the first movie did something new and memorable and the sequel sort of happened i guess. in terms of acting everyone was in a mass market paperback you buy at the train station before a long ride because they're out of sudoku, and veronica ngo was in a 600-page psychological thriller nominated for 23 awards.
- me being nostalgic and it being july 20 and eight years since chester bennington passed away, i ended up having this compilation of a thousand suns live performances playing in the background all morning. i try not to get sad on july 20 but it rarely works.