I’m not organised enough for New Year’s Resolutions, but I do have the vague goals of both writing more often and writing more casually this year. I keep re-learning, and forgetting, how much I rely on writing things out to make sense of them, and how easy it is for chunks of time to vanish unremembered when they aren’t documented.
The specificity of Weeknotes didn’t work out for me consistently when I tried it before, so this time I’m going to try a monthly recap instead.
Fun
I’ve returned to Merge and Blade – an autobattler where you build your army using match-3 mechanics – after leaving it for a few weeks when I became repeatedly stuck on the last chapter of the campaign. After finally finishing the campaign, I’m now trying out the roguelike and roguelite modes, though I do keep mixing the two up.
I started playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on New Year’s Eve, and I’ve now reached the quest to raise the island rating high enough for K.K Slider to visit. This is tricky for me as I have very little spacial-planning ability, so I can’t map out what the parts of my island contain relative to each other. I would really appreciate a zoomed-out top-down view here! So far I’ve been having a pretty good time, though I was expecting the villagers to be a little more independent and for my character to have a bit less power over their lives. I wanted to be part of the community, not its god!
In terms of offline activities, I’ve found that doing puzzles in the Murdle book is an enjoyable way to unwind before going to bed. It’s nice to spend time in a logical system where all of the rules and pieces of information needed are contained within the problem, and there is no second-guessing or ambiguity. I’m currently on the third difficulty tier of puzzles, where there are 4 variables and 4 factors for each variable. For me these are actually easier than the second (Medium) difficulty of puzzle, though I do like that the author tried something new with having one source of information be a liar in the medium-tier puzzles.
I also bought these albums in January:
Totorro – Home Alone
Totorro are probably the happiest math-rock band in existence. Something about their sound is incredibly friendly and cheerful; the audio equivalent of a sunny day.
Unwritten Law – The Hum
I love their earlier albums Elva (2002) and Here’s To The Mourning (2005) but I haven’t listened to any more recent ones. I wasn’t sure if the nearly 20-year gap since HTTM would mean hearing a very different band. Luckily for me, this wasn’t the case – The Hum shows off an evolved version of the band rather than an entirely different version.
Elephant Gym – world
This album is more jazz-influenced than my usual taste, and than the previous Elephant Gym albums I’ve heard, but I have enjoyed listening to it. Its a generally calm and intricate album, which makes the moments of high-energy like the chorus of “Happy Prince” stand out even more sharply.
standards – Fruit Galaxy
standards play an energetic, complicated flavour of instrumental rock that they have christened “fruit-rock”. Its surprising how many different layers their songs can have given that the band consists of just a guitarist and a drummer; I looked up a couple of their music videos to see what the guitarist was doing and …. he might as well be a magician!.
Work
I finished a project that I’ve been working on intermittently for a few months, which was tricky in two ways. One way is that it covered every visit a member of staff had carried out for multiple years and so expanded beyond the original categories and variable that I expected to need. More importantly, if I misrepresented or mislabelled the data, the potential consequences for that member of staff would be quite signficant. So for me this was a test of how well I could consistently be meticulous, rather than just meticulous-in-short-bursts. This actually went well, aside from one part where I added some classifications to visists on the day before I had a week of leave but did not write down my exact train of thought before going on leave! When I came back from leave, I couldn’t be 100% sure of the logic that I had used and the decisions I’d made, and therefore couldn’t be completely sure that I had done the right thing. So I redid that work, making sure to write my decisions down this time.
In the moment, re-doing my work was really annoying. But now that the project is finished, I’m proud that I consistently did the right thing, and that as a result I can be 100% confident that my data is right and that it fairly represents the member of staff.
I was then brought into another project, about reorganising 4 caseloads of patients into 8 smaller caseloads, on the 29th. I immediately derailed it, both by asking a lot of questions and by being the first person to spot that the all-important document which would map postcodes to our service zones was full of duplicate postcodes and errors which made it unusable! The original plan set by the people who created the project was to start moving patients’ care schedules and caseloads on Feb 3rd. Without a reliable postcode document, there isn’t a way to do that safely, so I imagine we will need to wait for a confirmed repaired document before anything can go ahead.
Other Things
My aunt once again had mysterious phone issues that made her phone unreliable, so she asked me to help her set up a new phone and log her in to all of her apps etc. While I was there, she mentioned that she would like to stop using Meta services due to the recent changes, but as at the moment nearly 100% of her communication goes through WhatsApp or Messenger, the idea of changing that is daunting.
She asked me what social media I use, given that I got rid of my Facebook account years ago and have never had a WhatsApp or Instagram profile. I got to use a sentence that I didn’t expect to need in real-life: “so, have you heard of the Fediverse?”. My aunt found the concept of “if the service you’re using gets taken over by an idiot, you can move somewhere else without losing all of your friends/posts/followers” very appealing. As my aunt is very non-technical, I wasn’t expecting her to be intrigued by the Fediverse; this conversation went well because I knew why she was concerned about staying on Meta services and could explain exactly how decentralised options allow people to work around that specific concern.