129 - What's Vince been up to?
Hey there, ! How've you been? How are you holding up? Doing well?
As I said before - trying a few more personal 'things I've done recently' posts, to mix it up a bit.
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I've just come out of a pretty intense project for work - jumping straight into a new one as well. Hoping to get back to writing up a backlog as I've got some other longer pieces - both fiction and non-fiction - that I want to write. In addition, I'm traveling soon, so I want to make sure I can just smash these out quickly :) Maybe more simple updates?
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I went to a speed-dating event two weeks ago - we've given up on apps. Modern love is just difficult, y'know? It was a very new thing and it was a bunch of fun - and was a lot easier to get across who I am in person rather than pixels on a screen. I'll let you know how things progress :)
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We've had a few more quotes for the house, so we're getting closer and closer to choosing and making a decision on the people we want to come and do our renovations. Hoping it can be finished by mid-year - but we'll see!
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I went out to an orchestral EDM event (Synthony) a few weeks back - it was a lot of fun! I thought I wouldn't know many dancey pieces, but hearing some orchestral strings as part of them was AWESOME. Where else can you hear Avicii next to Vivaldi next to Sandstorm? Highly recommended when it comes back next year.
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I bought an art piece that I got framed - I'll be writing a bit more about it next week; it's the first ever piece I've bought, and it meant a lot to me.
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I watched the Godfather and Godfather 2 again - 50th anniversary and I'd want to watch it in a theatre, but I watched it at home. Much cozier :) It still SLAPS so if you haven't watched it put aside some time for it!
I've got a busy March and April coming up - weddings, trips, leave, work - it's all happening! Where does the time go...?
Chat soon :)
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✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Unpolished Gem - by Alice Pung. It's a memoir of a Australian-born Chinese-Cambodian girl growing up in Footscray in the 90's. It was hard to get into for me, because it was such a different Asian experience, but she writes so raw, so clear and so beautifully. She shares the jarring sensation of being Asian in Australia, the tribulations of being a girl in a patriarchal Asian culture, and the joys and sorrows of family, love and loss. I really enjoyed this book - it reminded me that there are so many different diasporic stories that I don't know about. Highly recommended!
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The Last Shadow - by Orson Scott Card. This book is the finale of his two most decorated series (Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow), bringing together the weird, wonderful alien worlds Ender found, with the super-intelligent secret descendants of Bean (from Ender's Shadow). It has a few weird concepts (instantaneous travel in the universe just by thinking about it - more like DBZ than science fiction) but it tells a really good, practical story with characters that feel, well, Orson-ian (in that, they are mouthpieces for whatever idea he's trying to discuss rather than having well defined character development). However, the ideas are fun, interesting, and surprisingly well-written. Recommended if you're into sci-fi (though you'll have to read all the other books to understand anything!).
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Here comes the world's first TikTok war - not a war on TikTok, but the documentation of war on TikTok. In previous times, information about these wars have been gatekept and filtered through the lens of the media, but now we have raw, unedited footage of shit happening. What do we do with all this primary source material?
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When I'm sad my computer sends me a cat - can someone build this for me?
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Rotator - I'm really bad at rotating shapes in my head, but this game is super fun (even though I'm shit at it)! You have to work out which two shapes are the same - but they're all rotated differently. It's just not how my brain works...D: