159 - Life Continues On
Hey there, ! Life goes on, and continues to provide - an update from Vince's life :)
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Renovations - the bathroom is going in, the kitchens are getting there. Tiles bought, getting through bathroom vanities / showers / toilets - all of it. It's getting more complete - things are actually going up (like cabinets!) and looking good(ish). Next steps will be picking out furnishings and painting - any advice?
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Exercise - as part of the Three Big Pillars of Adult Health (Eat right, Sleep right, Exercise ight), I've started doing more regular exercise again. It's starting with the gym, and I've gone at least 3 times in the last week, so we're taking that as an encouraging sign that I still have the discipline to do this!
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Sharing Stories - I was invited to to an event for Sharing Stories Foundation as part of work - they are a First Nations educational not-for-profit that helps indigenous communities preserve their culture by supporting them to share their language, culture, art and stories for school-level educational content, with profits from those sales going back to those communities. They recently launched Jajoo Warrnga, a digital portal for schools to use to explore these stories. It was one of the first events I had been to where a Welcome to Country was so heartfelt and actually real - elders from each of the communities who had contributed to the stories were literally on the tables there with us! I enjoyed it a lot - especially seeing the performances at the end - I felt like I hadn't seen an event so purposeful so impactful for a really long time.
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A busy run to the end of the year - I'm tired, and there's still 3 months left til the end of the year. I don't know if it's just me, or new responsibilities, or my health, or allergies or whatever, but I'm needing to make sure I'm keeping up with the conscious resting, because that's the only way I can give myself the right amount of rest.
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Updates on hobbies!
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Lockpicking: I'm still stuck. The Lockwood Assa Abloy 110/40 has 4 security spool pins and it's crazy how just a small little pin can make a lock so secure! My hands are sore from continuously trying to pick this one - I think it's because I just can't sense the security pins yet. More practice needed.
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Space Godfather: 6 chapters down, so so SO many more to go. The outline continues to be refined every time I write another chapter - fleshing out ideas every time I invent new technologies and characters and families.
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AI Art: how did the first experiment go last week? I'm going to try using different AI art technologies with posts, and see how they go. Maybe some StableDiffusion, maybe some Midjourney, maybe some more DALL-E!
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Chat soon :)
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✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Project Hail Mary - by Andy Weir (also the author of The Martian). This was a curious book - I enjoyed the story, the form and the ideas that came from it, but I didn't like how he wrote it. The dialogue was a bit YA-ey, and there was a lot of stuff that was hand-waved away (which I thought was a little weird considering how good The Martian was at this!) and without spoiling anything, it had a kind of weird ending as well. However, it passed the space vibe check well, which was the enjoyable part, so that's the basis of my recommendation!
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Wisdom and Light - I feel like this one wasn't that great but I still wanted to share - this event was not super interesting, but I loved seeing the calligraphy - it's definitely something I want to learn one day. It's the story of a Buddhist monk who grew up and set up a whole bunch of temples around the world, and then invented a 'one-stroke calligraphy' style. There's an immersive room (like LUME) but it's literally just one room, and the story felt a bit cultish. Recommended if you have nothing else you want to do on a weekday night (though I think it's over already)!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Harrison Bergeron - a short story by Kurt Vonnegut about trying to make everyone average. If you're beautiful, you wear a mask. If you're strong, you get clamped to a ball and chain. Everything so that your natural strengths are reduced to average. What happens? A fantastic short read.
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Neom - the Line in the Sand - a crazy idea of building a self-sustaining, mirrored, enclosed city that's built in a line across the dessert in the Gulf of Aqaba, designed to house 9 million people. It looks like something out of a 1930's view of what people living in 2000 would be like. It's a crazy idea to me, but I love to hear crazy ideas because there's at least some sort of vision that's moving us forward as a society. What do you reckon?
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The Splintered Mind: Review Drift - an interesting piece about what this author coins 'Review Drift' - the tendency for products to be optimised for when reviews are more likely to be provided for a product (i.e. as soon as you get it) versus long term reviews (i.e. when you've used it for a while and can provide some information on longevity).