Tag: personal

Recap | January 2025

12 February 2025 / Sinead

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.

Learning from a 12-year-old T-shirt

8 November 2023 / Sinead

A couple of days ago, I did my roughly-annual check of clothing to see what should be resold, put in a charity bag, or thrown away. Normally, this is a quick task, as I’m not someone who owns mountains of clothes *¹. (Also, I pretty much have the wardrobe of a cartoon character – whether I’m at home, at work, or socialising, I will be wearing the same type of outfit 95% of the time).

This time, the clothes-check was slower than usual, as I felt irrationally guilty about throwing away two specific long-lived items. Trying to figure out why I felt guilty led me down a wandering trail of thoughts, where I learned and reflected more than I expected to. So, in recognition of the thought-trip that followed this throwing-away, and partly inspired by Tom Scott’s “hoodie.mp4“, I’m going to preserve both the things and what I learnt from them digitally rather than physically.

The two specific things are: a) a Mass Effect t-shirt and b) a grey checked shirt.

Firstly, the checked shirt. I know that I bought it during one of the first times I visited my mum after she moved house, so my best guess is that its from 2013-2014.

I had worn it nearly to death; the fabric had become so thin and bobbly that the outside of the shirt looked like it should have been the inside. As it was teenager-sized (a rare perk of being a short adult), the sleeves weren’t long enough, so I could only ever wear it with the sleeves rolled up and buttoned. So it wasn’t even particularly practical – despite that, in previous clear-outs I had chosen to keep it in place of other shirts that were more useful.

Insomnia 69 Gaming Festival

4 September 2022 / Sinead

Last weekend, I was finally able to return to the Insomnia Gaming Festival, which I last attended in 2019. Given just how much had happened in the interim, I was curious about whether the festival would be how I remembered it, or whether it would have been forced to take a new form.

Friday

The first thing I noticed was about Insomnia was that the event seemed smaller this year. We arrived at the entrance hall only a few minutes before the 10:30am start time yet were still near the front of the line. Similarly, while we had previously queued in front of a large stage, this time we were presented with a corridor made of barriers and a single screen that played the same 2-minute intro video for the entire weekend. While the usual staples of playable games, tabletop games, merch stands and exhibitors were all present, there were less of them than in 2019. In fact, Friday was much quieter than I expected.

Initially, some of our group were disappointed by the smaller scale and lack of upcoming games or AAA games, given that at previous shows we had been able to play games like Marvel’s Spider-Man and The Division 2 before they were released. I wasn’t particularly annoyed, as the main reason why I go to Insomnia is to spend time with friends who I only physically see at Insomnia, but I definitely hadn’t found the festival as impressive as I had found it in 2018 or 2019. Fortunately, the Pub Quiz later provided some context that assuaged my worries and changed my view of the weekend.

What is a scientist?

30 January 2018 / Sinead

This post was inspired by my earlier rambling on whether I’m enough of a scientist for sci-comm. After publishing that post, I decided to step back and look again at what factors decide who a scientist is, and why the question matters to me.

I’ll begin with a logical starting point, the dictionary. The word “science” comes from the Latin word “scientia” meaning “knowledge”. So if science is fundamentally knowledge, is a knowledgeable person a scientist? That’s an easy statement to reject, as people can be knowledgeable about many other topics without knowing much science. Also, although the word science dates back to roughly the 12th century, the word scientist was only coined in 1833; for roughly 600 years, science knowledge existed without people being called scientists.

Dissociation and Gigs

18 November 2017 / Sinead

Gigs are a confusing place to be when you experience any form of dissociation. For me, there are two likely outcomes. Sometimes I feel the barriers between me and everything else reduce, so I feel closer to seeing the world as a typical person does. But sometimes I instead feel more aware of the dissonance between what I’m perceiving and what I’m experiencing, and so I notice those barriers more acutely.

This isn’t an aspect of dissociation that I’ve talked to anyone about before, but it’s been on my mind recently while I’ve tried to figure out which elements make the good outcome more likely.

My Diagnosis Experience, Part 2

5 February 2015 / Sinead

Some notes for this series; I’m not going to be using any identifying information, so I’ll be referring to each person involved by a letter+ number to tell them apart, as it does get rather confusing. The colour-coding is also just to keep track.
K1– university counsellor
K2– university wellbeing practitioner
L- one of my friends, who I needed to bring with me to some meetings.
C1– first mental health assessor at the community services.
C2– second assessor at the community services.
C3– final assessor at the community services.

Doctor’s Surgery

One of the services involved in my treatment was my GP’s surgery.I don’t have much to write about this part, as I chose to avoid them as much as possible. While they technically knew everything that was going on, because each other service wrote letters to the GP updating them with new developments, this didn’t have any practical use.