Had my first physical therapy the other day. My SO drove me there, and the therapist was kind enough to let her tag along the exercises. We did a straightforward 20 minute stationary bicycle ride with intervals where my heart rate went through the roof in no time while hers was mildly raised. Mine did not go down much, hers went back down in no time. While my heart was racing I wasn’t out of breath, completely able to just chat while my heart was consistently over 150 bpm, which is also not what normal looks like. It was incredibly validating to see those completely different heart rates between her and I, doing the same exercise, finally having some proof that I’m not imagining things, and that I’m not okay.
I’m quite busy after winning a contract to write transport justice policy for the second largest city in the country, due end of Q1. Career wise it’s a fantastic step that finally allows me to work on the topic of my thesis and academic paper, time management wise it’s a challenge. Teaching myself Magic the Gathering. There is a parallel universe where teenage me did not have bad first impressions of fantasy novels & card games. It feels like I missed out because Magic is already more fun than I ever had being peer pressured into collecting soccer cards back then. Or that one time a classmate tried to teach me YuGi-Oh and proceeded to trample all over me in my first games. There’s also a Harry Potter TTRPG that I am planning on running. The idea that we came up with is that there’s a magical European Union that was created to ensure there would never again be another Voldemort, which is an endlessly entertaining idea to work out the (geopolitical) consequences of.
Can I, for once, judge a book by its cover? Judge an engineer by their Medium profile pic? This whole thing is fast approaching Satanic Panic levels of dumb.
It's now been three months post-'rona infection and my health is still garbage from time to time. Went for a bit of a walk on Saturday after an exhaustive Friday, and as a result it's taken me the entire Sunday and Monday to recover. It felt like I had ran a marathon instead of a half hour stroll around the park. It's genuinely demotivating, as I haven't done any form of exercise in the past months and it seems that my intuition that I can't handle more than a ~20 minute bike ride per day was right. There may very well be a compounding factor at play here (stress, weight loss) but I can't shake the feeling that I have not felt healthy this entire year to date.
Got my booster yesterday, and got lucky again with effectively no side-effects! My arm wasn't even sore. My Christmas holiday was great, two weeks to decompress from the past months of hard work. The only downside is that the SO and I got a good ol' flu for a few days. This weekend the SO and I did our Yearly Review, which were a bit more depressing for both of us than we'd expected. Last year felt like 50% lockdown/waiting for vaccines, 40% stress and 10% fun. Despite (or because of?) that conclusion, we did both find a lot of things we want to work on for next year. I got both of us a Theme System Journal which we've now filled with our themes and which I will use as a place to keep my weekly review and expand it with more concrete goals. I've picked the Year of Reinforcement as a theme; I want to strengthen the bonds between myself and the people around me, become stronger/healthier physically, and try to read more. Professionally, I now know clearly how I want to grow to a new level, and I want to do more to strenghten my professional network, to make time for meetings and get-togethers. So I'm cautiously optimistic for 2022, although I can't deny that there's still a bit of "it can't be worse than last year, right? riiight??!?!
Finally, I've made it to Christmas in one piece. Finished my final work deadline yesterday, so in my mind I can already start to relax. I'm taking two weeks off, which I now do every year around Christmas. It's a great way to bookend a year, as we always try to visit a lot of friends and family during the break. The SO and I made some plans for the future the other day. We've already discussed before that we want to buy our own home sometime, but we decided to actually start searching for real in the new year, instead of some abstract time in the future. Talking about a house meant we talked about registered partnership and/or taking a knee...so that may also be a thing in the next few years. :)
You know what really sucks? Not being able to run because you want to vomit after half a mile. I had some weird lactose overload thing and it made my stomach overly sensitive for a few weeks. Now that I have my first shot though, I finally feel sorta okay going to a swimming pool again, so I'm thinking of starting that in a week or two. The mobility app I have helped build finally got released to the app stores! It's a soft-launch, later this year we hope to be feature complete and buy billboards 'n stuff. Most of the work is done by the rest of the team, but it's cool to be involved in a project like this. Feels like working in a startup, but without all the downsides of that.
My aquarium seems to be working. Did a quick test and my CO2 levels are the lowest category possible, but most plants I have should not require it. Currently I have a very simple setup, at least compared to some of the mindboggling creations over at /r/aquascaping that I gawk at. But my setup is working, and my two Amano shrimp seem content. Want to keep this tank for a bit before I start thinking about something bigger/better - I first need to make more mistakes before I can do advanced stuff, I think. We visited the Waterloopbos the other day! Did a double-date thing with an ex-coworker of mine. Had a great afternoon of walking around, looking at the 30+ now-ruined flow dynamics experiments and birds and plants that my friend and his gf were good at identifying. The forest is (by Dutch standards) actually lively and diverse in nature due to most of it being underwater or near water.
I'm here, checking in every day for as long as I can remember, but I don't often reply. Chat is nice and low-key. I feel like I've found maybe one twentieth the number of good articles the past year, so I don't have as much to share or read or say, which is a bummer. Things are bland. Or heart-breaking. Or both. We still have a long way to go until normal people can get a shot, and the next months are not going to be nice so I'm dreading that. I got myself undeep nasal antigen tests and have rarely felt more conflicted about spending money on my personal health.
Someone joked on Twitter that the Low Lands need a new name now we're the per capita champion of corona cases. We're back in soft-lockdown because our government refuses to learn from its mistakes and waited until the very last moment to maximize lockdown length, it almost seems. At least we're doing just fine. SO got a new job in September, back then it was a temporary thing until the end of the year, but now they're certain they can give her a year contract so that's dope. My academic paper has been accepted recently, is already published online in Open Access format even though I still need to proof it. I'm taking a well-needed week off next week to dive into that and finally enjoy my PC again. I don't know how other people do it but after 8 to 10 hours of screen-based desk work and Teams calls I simply don't want to sit another minute behind the same screen. So I've been reading more books lately, getting more mileage out of my iPad consuming them contents, and have been cooking more from a phenomenal book on Indian vegetarian cuisine. Yesterday we made samosa's for the first time, which was great.
Might be more effective to help figure out how to best re-use masks:
After two trains, two buses and a big long sleepover ferry we made it to jolly ol' Scotland! We're a bit tired - both not used to sleeping on some serious waves means we didn't get a good night in - but got into our Airbnb with only minor hassle, had phenomenal nachos & cider around the corner and made some simple dinner for ourselves. Best of all the weather's not too bad! I've been enjoying shouting my curated interests into the void on Twitter lately, so I'm gonna be adding (mobility-related) things to this thread along the way for those interested.
I made this the other day! It's a polar space-time diagram, visualizing a train route's timetable throughout 24 hours of a weekday. The inside of the donut is one end station at s = 0km, and the train moves from station to station (the grey rings at 10, 21,... km) towards the other end station (at 50km), where it turns around and goes the other way. Outbound trains in red, inbound in blue. There's one train that goes end to end each half hour, and another train that goes halfway and back again every twenty minutes, creating this braided inner donut look. Made it by mangling a timetable in Excel, loading it into Python with Pandas and visualizing it with Matplotlib which can do weirdass plots like this because ofc it can. cc kleinbl00 can I order this as a GMT clock kthxbaii Other creative project of mine is that I'm learning Reaper and making electronic music with fortnightly private lessons. My track so far is still unquestioningly in the ass-sucking phase, but I feel like I'm really quick at picking up the ropes.
Just had a wonderful chat with c_hawkthorne whohappened to be in the area! Hope you have good travels back, and apologies for the rain.
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. - John Donne It’s been a few crazy weeks for me lately. Now that the dust has settled again somewhat, I’ve noticed I’m immediately back in a reflexive mood that earlier weeks didn’t really allow me to have. Which in my case means I’ve read three books in a single week and have been thinking out loud about them with my SO, bless her patient heart. One of my realizations is that I now know precisely which two factors stress me the fuck out. I don’t get phased by having a lot of work in front of me. Gimme a good axe and I’ll chop through it no problem. It’s having a lot of responsibility that gets me. There’s a large overlap between work to do and responsibility, but for me the difference is whether I’m the one who needs to figure out how to solve for x or not. Whether it’s my call or not to make. The second factor is that if I’m responsible, I need to have some idea of how to connect the dots. Some vague (but not too vague) path from here to there. Doesn’t mean I need to have done it before - I can learn on the job - but if I don’t know how the hell I am going to solve something and it’s my responsibility to do so? That’s when I become waayyy too stressed out. Which has happened numerous times in the past weeks. What’s also happened is that I’ve found my Get Out of Jail Free card, which is to ask for help with finding that path. It sounds simple, because that’s what it is for seemingly everyone else, but for me it’s not in my nature to do so. I’ve always solved things alone. I’ve always felt like an island, especially in my at times incredibly lonely teens. To relinquish my responsibility, my independence even in the slightest thus feels like defeat. It’s an admission of dependency that surely resembles a failure on my part to be the strong island I want to think I am. Even though it really isn’t. I’m not here to fix the world on my own - I am part of the continent. Part of a network of colleagues who really can and do help me out when I need them. Supported by my SO, my friends, my family. Who are really there when I need them, if only I can muster the courage to just ask. So that’s my goal for the foreseeable future. To keep asking.No man is an island entire of itself; every man
Oof, I've not been reading a lot lately. Most compelling read was David Wallace-Well's The Uninhabitable Earth, which you should not read if you're the kind of person who gets depressed easily by gazing into the abyss. I'm trying to not let it gaze into me. I am also positively surprised by David Epstein's Range. goobster, this is that book that the Atlantic article from recently was taken from. Epstein argues that our view of linear (hyper-)specialization in careers and in life is wrong. The book is a bit all over the place and isn't always succesful in mimicking Dan Ariely's writing style, but in general I like it. It is a book that really resonates with what's been on my mind lately, that's for sure. blackbootz I think you too might find this very useful to read sometime this year, if only because he has good things to say about Econ majors.
Ups and downs. Mostly ups. Things have never been stranger. As they say, a smooth sea never made a skilled sailors. Something really cool: I'm unofficially spearheading our efforts to export our sustainable transport knowledge across borders. Three weeks ago, we were notified of a tender to do a study into early EV adopters and where / how they will charge... in Cape Verde. We had less than a week to apply, and in that time I wrote 90% of the offer, got a Portuguese transport company along for the ride and fixed most of the required documents. Last Friday I heard we won the tender! So I get to fly out not once, but twice to Cape fuckin' Verde in the next three months along with the owner of our company. And the advice we'll give them by the end, if they like it, will pretty much decide their steps forward. They intend to start building charging infrastructure next year. So it's a good opportunity for us as a company to show what we're worth, and if it's a success story there are many sunny Medditeranean islands where similar EV solutions are possible. The only downside is that as it stands now, I'll go there first week of June, which means I'll be back for two days from visiting Seattle before flying out again. And the weekend after I have a trip planned with my girlfriend to Cologne. So aaahHHHH LOGISTICS, but also fuck yeah LIFE. Today I had a really cool meeting about my academic paper. Which yes, is still a thing, but no, it's not moving fast at all. But I feel like I have found a small group of people who are just as passionate about equitable transportation as I am, and they want my help to figure out how to bring it into practice and make the world better in as much places as possible. They're practical, networked and smart people, and I'm the academic in this equation. With only my master thesis and not-published paper. I have no idea where this will lead but I'm already invigorated. The rest of my work is busy AF. That new colleague that was supposed to start May 1st? He bailed out two hours before signing his contract and meeting us. Which is not only incredibly rude, it's also frustrating as all hell - I have all these cool new avenues to explore and a bunch of projects to offload and I can't offload them until there's someone to offload them to. And there's now a lot on my plate, enough for me to work much more than I want to. Did 5 days of work in 4 last week and it feels too much like a grind. I can't complain too much though, as most of the work is interesting or engaging, but there's just so much of it.
Pass me a fancy drink 'cuz I feel like waxing poetically. I think life is like knitting a scarf. There are a bunch of threads (people, things to do) that come together in places. Some threads have extraordinary colors or are made from an unusual fabric. Some are always there, providing consistency and stability to life. Others zig zag around. All enter and exit, some more frequent than others. But they all contribute to how life/the scarf feels. They form the texture. Which is all to say that I am very happy with the threads that form my life right now. There has been a lot of changes in the past year, and I feel like pretty much all are for the better. I spent the weekend hanging out with my rowing club friends from college - one of them is leaving the country to do a PhD in Canada, so we wanted to have One Last Evening Like Back Then. We're still good friends (I went to Greece with them) and I had a good evening (which meant getting shitfaced and going out to party), but part of me was also glad that I decided to leave that city behind to pursue my masters'. Going back there reminded me of how life was back then, but it was just as much a reminder of how much I've changed in the past years. I liked my scarf back then, but I like it better now.
On Living in the Present, or Please Do Not Get A Medieval Blade In Your Eye --- After a month of waiting my Nerdiest Thing Ever finally arrived. It's a custom-made D&D dice box with a quote that I personally care about and that totally fits the nature of the game, since throwing the dice by definition will end my doubts. Not long after its arrival, I tried again to search the web for the source of the quote and I think I may have found a source? Wittgenstein said in his book On Certainty that “a doubt without an end is not even a doubt.” I can see myself misremembering / paraphrasing / butchering that quote into mine. Speaking of nerdy things: a friend of a friend was doing one of those historical reenactments, and somehow he got stabbed by a fucking sword in his eye. It went partly into his skull, so not only will he be half-blind, he also has difficulties talking and may never recover fully. Dude's the same age as me, and just like that, his life got upended. I also read Paul Kalanithi's When Breath becomes Air this week. It's a posthumous memoir. Paul was on his way to become one of the best neurosurgeons, when he was suddenly diagnosed with cancer. The book feels unfinished because that's what it is, and that's what his life was. Yet he found the strength to remain hopeful - not for a cure, but "for days of meaning". It's made me contemplate on my own frailty and mortality. About the ol' "live each day like it's your last" adagium. After all, who knows what could happen. But on the other hand, should I really change my approach to life? I spend a lot of time contemplating my future, and mulling over the past, and I wonder if it gets in the way of the present too much. I know I can't do anything about things like cancer and swords to the eye. But I can work on those days of meaning. And maybe the way to do that is to let those plans and those reflections go for a while. To let go of my doubts about my future, and my doubts over my past actions. Maybe that's why that quote resonates so much with me.
FTFY. I dunno. I hate Facebook and ads enough to keep me off there. But maybe I'm missing out... I do like to take artsy pics from time to time.It doesn't always accurately represent the conditioning or other barriers to entry for harder hikes and climbs. ... it is a great social media platform and tool for finding places to go or possibly even meeting people.
Personally, I've never found a way to 'be' creative. I really like The Oatmeal's take on creativity: when you read, do new things, explore, or whatever, you inhale. Creative outbursts are exhalations. You can't have too much of the one without a sufficient amount of the other. So I get inspiration from the things around me that I find interesting. More often than not, it is by being able to combine a bunch of disparate thoughts with something challenging that drives me to actually make something. My first article, for example, was a combination of a few articles I've read here mixed with my own thoughts and the challenge of writing for a larger audience. Another interpretation of your question is about what inspires hope in life, in the motivational sense. That is a much harder question - it's not one that I am good at articulating, let alone write a one-paragraph answer to. The first thing that comes to mind is to have something to work towards that you care about. Life is about the journey, but without a destination you won't get very far.
Just came back from my first time bouldering. It's fun, but I also feel like I used up a month's worth of grip and arm strength. Cool place though! I also had a wine tasting with a bunch of my colleagues last Friday. The dude who gave it made a good point - if you just pay a bit more attention to what you taste and smell and spend some time learning various grape types, it'll be a much nicer experience drinking it. I got myself a Merlot and a Sauvignon Blanc for starters (and because the D&D GM that will host a campaign at our place also likes wine). Any wine drinkers here? I also got my Aeron yesterday. It is quite the upgrade from the €35 Ikea Bäckkillór I'll tell you that.
Books I've read in the past 64 days: Stein on Writing by Sol Stein. I'm pretty sure I blasted through this in less than 48 hours. Phenomenal book on how to #writebetterdammit. Even though the majority of the book is advice on writing fiction, there is a lot to learn when you want to write nonfiction, so it's an enjoyable and engaging read nonetheless. The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking by Oliver Burkeman. A fun and self-aware book on how to be happy. Burkeman dispels the common (read: American) approach to happiness and takes the reader through a bunch of different philosophical ideas from Alan Watts to the Stoics that go against the grain. The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker. At almost 37 hours, this is not a small book, but Pinker is forgiven for it because he covers such a large scope and depth. In a Tony Judt-esque fashion, Pinker explains the large and steady decline in violence through decades and millennia with a bucketload of insight, evidence and anecdotes to back it up. The only thing that bored me to tears were his methodological chapters where he explains how he got his data, but other than that I found it intriguing. Dollars and Sense by Dan Ariely. I then wanted something more fun-sized so I read Ariely's new book. If you're well-read in Freakonomics or behavioural economics, it's not very insightful but it was a fun read nonetheless. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark by Don Thompson. I'd put this in the same bucket as Narconomics which I read earlier last year: take a niche and explore/explain the economic forces that drive the behaviour that looks weird on the surface but makes sense once you have the full picture. Interesting, but sometimes Thompson loses pace. Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis by George Monbiot. This book is...basically a political pamphlet, and is researched like one. I liked his proposed ideas, but his argumentation is shoddy and easily shot-down. I found his proposal of a renewed Commons that is separate from government and market forces very intriguing. After those books, I semi-accidentally bought myself a trifecta of memoirs. The first was Paddle Your Own Canoe by Nick Offerman. Chapters alternated between "not so significant youth experiences" and "trying a little to hard to sound wise and insightful", so I didn't make it far before giving up. Autobiographies always focus too much on rosy and fuzzy childhood memories, but this was a bit too much for my liking. The second was Hitch-22: A Memoir by Hitchens. I also haven't finished this yet, but that's mostly because it is quite a long book and the audio recording makes it hard to listen to him for too long at a time. I like Hitchens and his writing, so I'll finish it one day. The third is Dawn of the New Everything by Jaron Lanier. This looked like a Jaron book on VR, but really is a Jaron memoir that has like four chapters about VR sprinkled in between. There are fascinating insights in there, but on the whole, they are few and far between when compared to his other books. I think he expanded too much on experiences that I could not relate to at all, and too little on the interesting anecdotes and stories he could've told. Today I started reading Orientalism, which has been high on my list for quite some time.
Slightly panicking. No wait: I have about a month to finish my thesis and I still have to make fixes to my code and still have to write like 50+ pages and also have to decide what to do with my life (or at least narrow my options down) and have to make a few dozen maps and graphs and it has to all be good and one of the workstations I use imploded and I got selected for the PhD but maybe this PhD topic is not as good as it seems or am I not as good as I think? so aaaAAAA PANIC. I think I'll survive, but I'm gonna need more coffee, bartender.
Had a great week - met AnSionnachRua in Amsterdam this Sunday! (First time I've ever met a Guinness World Record holder, too.) The weather was fantastic, so after lunch we walked to the Vondelpark and got ice cream. Hope you made it back safe 'n sound. Do you still have that picture we took? I bought a stupid-ass sweater that I think is funny. I already regret spending money on it. If someone can CRISPR my impulse-buying genes out, that'd be grreeaattt.
~General Question~ A friend of a good friend is going through a depression, and while that friend is getting help I don't know what I can do for my best friend. It's clearly not easy for him too. Any advice? ~Movies~ Go watch Blade Runner 2049 in theatres if you thought the original was cool, avoid the damn trailers, they promise a movie that doesn't really happen. I watched it earlier this Saturday: ~Work~ I'm slowly collecting job offers here and there. Partly because I don't really know what I want, partly so I can get multiple offers and use them as leverage in negotiations. Yesterday I had two job interviews. Man is it ever exhausting to have two hour-plus long, hyper-focused conversations where I need to make a great first impression. I think I did great though, I asked good questions and both companies definitely want to continue the conversation. One was for a GIS consultant position at an IT company, the other was for '(geo)data scientist & consultant in sustainable urban planning projects'. The former doesn't really do me much, the latter company and position almost seems made for me. But I'm not jumping at the first thing I love, I want to keep my cool and take my time deciding what I want to do. Especially since I also submitted my application for the PhD position I mentioned two weeks ago. While I made a pretty strong case for why I'm a good candidate, I have a lot of doubts about the position, both whether I even can do something like that and whether I want to do something like that.
The Dutch version of The Onion posted this today. Couldn't resist translating it: Yesterday, a 19 year old vlogger from America shot her boyfriend through an encyclopedia for a YouTube video. The world is shocked. How did a vlogger acquire an encyclopedia? "The encyclopedia was bought on an open and legal market, that's just how things go in America," according to our U.S. expert. "There's been a lot of criticism about the lack of background checks: the seller had no idea that she was a vlogger. If the seller had known that, suspicion would have been raised. I mean, what in the world does a vlogger need an encyclopedia for?" Was this event preventable? "That's difficult to say. The encylopedialobby is extremely powerful in the U.S. There are people who say: such a thick book, including cd-rom, that's asking for trouble. But there are also people who say: it is my foundational right to look up what rattlesnakes actually are. It's hard to prove them wrong."Bizarre: Vlogger has encyclopedia.