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I mean I can do so a little, and I don't dislike it, but when push comes to shove my laziness wins out and all too often I order food instead. But because I don't really cook, and lack some of the instincts around quantity and time and combinations that let proper chefs just wing it, I can't really just wing it, and recipes are helpful

Side projects aren't really a think I finish per se, because the fun part is just thinking about them and implementing the first 80% - then comes the dreaded bugs period where I have to confront the fact that quickly and shoddily written code does not necessarily correspond 100% with the platonic ideas in my mind, and I will basically always pivot to doing something else.

Put a lil' game in it!

Playing around with implementing the ideas for Motli and realized: a good tile-based word game is most of the time built on 3 core underlying sets of data:

I mean maybe not all but I think they should come quick eventually

Rating books is of course a fool's game, when it is impossible to compare works of art to eachother let alone to a numerical scale, and perhaps in this case I am a bit unfair to Wolf Hall. It is, technically speaking, a quite good book, it's characters deep and compelling, its drama riveting, and it undoubtedly takes much technical skill to do this with what might otherwise be a tired court drama from Olden Times. But: I was expecting Greatness, for reasons outside of the book's control, and found instead basically competent entertainment. Do authors have to say something interesting and unique to be considered great? Maybe not? Does this have something interesting to say? Maybe a bit? Anyways, I was compelled but not overwhelmed, and so this was underwhelming.

A solid ending(?) to the Southern Reach trilogy, still less impressive and overwhelming than the first, but a good novel on its own and enough to make you think that it was probably, in the end, worth writing more books.

I thought this basically an interesting collection of anecdotes with great quotations from other works, but a weak overarching theme. I went into the book thinking that tourism has an inherent tension between problematic exploitation and earnest exploration and sharing of aspects of the human condition, and that is about how I felt after finishing it. Maybe I wanted something prescriptive, maybe I wanted some lesson to be learned from that, but I think mainly I wanted some stronger thesis to be argued for and analyzed. Instead the anecdotes, quotes, and bits of life story are weakly tied together and presented all in a bit of a directionless jumble.

There is a certain kind of machining, where two complementary pieces of metal can be cut and shaped so perfectly, with nanometers of precision, so that despite having wild and wavy manifolds of contact when placed together the seam between the two pieces is perfect and undetectable. Extremely satisfying content to watch. And that is what John Milton's writing is like, I think. Precise, correct, fit together so smoothly as to not make comprehensible how it is accomplished or where the bits came from. He is a masterful writer.

For a bit there at the beginning I thought this might just be a worthy follow up to The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid. It is of course a logical follow up, with nearly flawless prose and a nice reinterpretation of what on the surface level represents you know, the correct modern thought about gender dynamics etc, telling the side of the that wasn't told and now society at large has some of the tools (feminism) to understand that side of the story. But as time went on, I think it ended up dropping the ball a bit - well-written but just not that meaningful or resonant.