Some updates
I’ve temporarily disabled the emails on the contact page as they cost too much money relative to their usage (it’s around $5 going down the drain every month). I’ve become really busy lately, barely keeping up with both my work and my reading.
I quit Honkai Impact 3 a while ago, by the way, wanted to write a post about it but only managed to get halfway through before becoming overrun with deadlines as I expected. Great game, mind you, but the daily logins would have disrupted my work cycle to no end and driven me nuts.
Book time
I stumbled upon this book recently: Mythos, by Stephen Fry, and it’s been a wonderful delight to read. Here is my favourite line so far, from the foreword:
There is much to love about Greek mythology. The courage, determination, and unfettered abundance of curiosity the Ancient Greeks had towards answering life’s biggest questions is nothing short of inspiring. Perhaps their attitudes are not new to me, given how ubiquitously they have influenced philosophy as we know it (epistemology, ontology, you name it) and who can forget Nietzsche rambling yet again about Dionysus for the umpteenth time? (I’m just joking, he has a point—the Ancient Greeks had a point).
There is comfort from familiarity; perhaps I like their ideas precisely because they are familiar, or maybe they are familiar because I liked them to begin with and read about their philosophy before their history like any good scholar would do: reading things out of context and interpreting them as I deem fit (please don’t do this).
Personal life
Not the most usual of my topics as I try to avoid making this blog too much about my life and more about my thoughts (although one could argue from my post history that if this were the goal then I’ve already failed, or argue that there is little point differentiating between the two).
Recently I’ve found myself in a leadership position for a certificate I’ve been doing and it’s been a very interesting series of somersaults for my poor, unprepared brain. It’s one thing to work with others, but having all the pressure and responsibility of leading them is a curious… yet somehow thrilling challenge. The stakes are not too high, for it is but a certificate I can always try for again in future, but where’s the fun if we don’t take it seriously enough to at least be reasonably concerned about failure?
What I’ve been struggling the most with, ironically, hasn’t been too much of our face-to-face meetings, but rather the texts… oh boy, the texts… I’m beginning to wonder if the emoji was the cruellest invention of text-based conversations. Using them too little, using them too much… but that’s not all, which one do I use? They all mean so many different things. Is that smiley face good? Or are they being sarcastic? Panic! I’ve practiced masking in real life for many, many years and I’m still not great at it. The one-dimensional challenge of words on a screen, then, would have ideally been a separate difficulty setting of its own, and defniitely not a customary part of socialising.
Granted, many people also struggle interpreting texts, but I drive conversations into dead ends pretty quickly most of the time. In real life, I know to stop when I see people squirm uncomfortably in their seat and lean away from me. Online, all I see is Helvetica and Sans.