[Newsletter] Habits
🌞 Hello!
Welcome to my newsletter project, Little Rays of Light!
This is my attempt at keeping a record of thoughts and ideas during my last year as a PhD student. I envision that a lot of the writing will be self-reflective and stream of consciousness, but I also hope it might be useful for anyone interested in the work that I’m doing, or studying outside of their country of origin, or generally just interested in catching up (hi irl friends!).
I’m hoping to update this space every 2-3 weeks, and to have ongoing sections so I can also keep track of the things I’m interested in. I’m trying to be hopeful that I can keep this newsletter alive for a year, but maybe let’s keep our fingers crossed that I can even make it to a second issue.
If you have any questions or would like to know about specific areas where I may have expertise, feel free to contact me. I’d love to hear from you.
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▶️ Habits
I am terrible at maintaining habits. If allowed to take my final form, it would be a blob on the bed, shoveling sour cream and cheddar chips into my gaping maw while using the remnants of my opposable thumbs to play through endless iterations of Hades 2 on the SteamDeck. Sadly, it turns out that being a human requires more than just potato chips and naps, no matter how tempting it sounds.
One of the things I struggle with figuring out the past few years is how to maintain a regular writing habit. As someone who went through formal schooling as a writer, most of my training had been in shortform writing: poetry, essay, the short story. In terms of muscles, I suppose these were genres that I was comfortable writing in, and I had a pretty good understanding of how they work, stretch, and contain ideas. Longform writing, on the other hand, eluded me. I could never remember what I wanted to write, chasing the ideas across pages, running out of energy (especially in my ahem old age) or patience. I hated revisiting my writing, or working through revisions. I was a one-and-done writer for a good chunk of my professional life, and now that I’m confronted with the prospect of having to read through my work again, all I could do was nitpick through the words and hate myself for doing so. The pandemic and post-pandemic rhythms of the world also reduced my attention span significantly, and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to sit through a TV show or read a book again.
So you can imagine that the next challenge for me is really writing long prose - you know, like a freaking dissertation. And honestly, I have no idea how I’m doing it - all I know is that the more I force myself to sit in front of my writing screen and do something, whether it’s reading an article or picking at my chapter outlines, or taking down notes and ideas. Sometimes it’s just a dozen words on a page; other days it’s like a frenzy of typing, chasing down the ideas as they bubble up in my head. It’s hard to live in one’s head for long periods of time - especially if you don’t like what’s in there sometimes. But then again, even though thinking is hard, refining one’s way of thinking feels like a worthwhile thing to do. After all, if what separates man and machine these days is a kind of consciousness, it seems like a fine line to maintain in the first place.
(This is also me justifying my pace to myself - I’m due to turn over a chapter at the end of this month and let me tell you, I have absolutely no idea where it wants to go and time is slipping away…)
Media Updates
📚 I stopped midway through A Sleight of Shadows, sadly, because it seems like such a pale sequel compared to the firecracker prose of the first book. Not sure if I want to pick it back up or if I want to just DNF it. I feel kinda bad, especially since I know that the first book was meant to be a standalone anyway, and it doesn’t feel like the second book added much to the first one. Instead, I pretty much inhaled Robert Jackson Bennett’s The Tainted Cup, and I have to say: I enjoyed this weird speculative mystery story so much! The worldbuilding is fantastic and unique and strays so far away from the usual dark and gritty aesthetic of many secondary world novels that it’s such a marvel to immerse myself in it. The murder mystery is nothing to sneer at either. I definitely had my suspicions but I’m glad that I was surprised at the outcome. It’s also nice to have a older female main character being all smart and cranky and kick-ass. I’m looking forward to diving into the second book, A Drop of Corruption, and hoping that there are more titles in this series in the future.
🎲 The new Magic: the Gathering set is out and I’m really excited about it. Edge of Eternities is their first set that takes place in outer space (unless you count the Unfinity comedy set) and I’m super hyped about this! We got the two Commander decks and so far they’ve been really great to play with. There are multiple play patterns that you can expect with either one, and even though neither color combinations are my top choices in Constructed formats, I do like that the decks are designed in such a way that they signal their strategies pretty well. Also, I really enjoyed the online content generated for this set in particular: aside from all the gameplay videos I really like Rhystic Studies’ video analysis on the narrative expansions and scalar explorations in the set, and I think his understanding of science fiction and how it opens up the universe of both the game and one’s understanding of self is one of the more awe-inspiring descriptions I’ve heard in awhile.
📺 We started watching the newest season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and so far I’m enjoying myself except for one little thing: this whole “who will Spock romance this season?” is kind of becoming annoying. Like, look I understand that Spock’s One True Love is (James T. Kirk) logic and rationality, and I get that this is a prequel where we see how Spock’s half-human, half-Vulcan nature influences decisions that make him the First Officer that he becomes in TOS, but come on. Is Ethan Peck a handsome, charming man? Yes. Would I like to see more of his abs? Certainly. Can he stop making out with every female officer on the bridge crew? YES PLEASE STOP THIS.