No calendar this month, and I’m guessing probably no calendars til January next year. I don’t think I’m going to keep to a regular schedule, and not having to also wrangle the calendar is probably going to make these a bit easier to write regularly (or, at least, I hope that’s the case).
Also hi, hope everyone is doing well. All the stuff I should have said before just launching into it.
So, update on everything. First, and most importantly:
PhD game is up and running! Come check it out – we have a scavenger hunt running at the moment. Remember to join the Discord; that’s where you’ll actually have the opportunity to join all the juicy parts of the game – getting rewards for the puzzles, talking to the NPCs, and all of that good stuff.
As for the personal projects, most of them remain on hold.
DR remains approximately where it is, but needs a bit of tweaking. I have realised the solution to a couple of worldbuilding things that have been bugging me. It’ll be an interesting set of changes to make, since it won’t affect the overarching plot at all (at least, I don’t currently think it will), but it will involve going in and rethreading some details through. I’ll keep working on that in the background a little, but anything substantial is definitely going to have to wait.
The thing I will be trying to start up, though, is WMWAC. I thought for a while that streaming would be the easier way to do that, but I’m quickly realising that anything with a regular schedule isn’t going to work out. So I’m going back to pre-recorded for now. Next episode will be a few weeks out because I’ll have to record it a bit piecemeal and then edit it together, but I desperately need something to work on that isn’t just more PhD always and forever, and the video editing is a nice change from working on words always and forever.
If you haven’t caught up on that, here’s the link to the playlist:
I’ve got a couple shorter projects on the backburner as well, but I’ll talk more about them when I have fewer large projects on the go.
TBR Project
I have been continuing with my TBR pile reduction project, though! Honestly, the fact it’s going so well is probably an indication that I’m not doing enough of my uni readings.
Start of year count: 262
Current count: 298
Books read: 30
… wow, OK, so I said it was going well but I have apparently bought way more books than I anticipated. Oof. The things I admit online.
Anyway, this update’s Book Of Note… I’m a bit torn about. I’m going to take the thought-provoking (and slightly more respectable) choice and talk about Empires of the Word, by Nicholas Ostler. It’s non-fiction, a history of the world told in the movement and spread of language. There are some ways of presenting things that I think might have not aged so well? I’ve just read the section on the spread of Spanish through South America and Ostler is clearly aware of the effect of colonialism on the cultures there, and is emphasising the extractive nature of colonial occupation there, but it’s definitely one of those books that surfaces every so often to say “colonialism bad btw” and then sinks back down to discussing the language changes in a vacuum. Or, perhaps that’s a bit unfair – more that occasionally he’ll touch on language as a tool of identity forming and meaning-making, but due to the extremely broad view the book takes, language is often presented as a kind of nebulous proxy for the decisions of Society in aggregate, and the forces and pressures from various groups inside those languages don’t really get a lot of attention. This is less of an issue in the early chapters discussing ancient languages where the evidence is more sparse, but the closer the book gets to the modern day, the more obvious it is that the broad view is losing important details. Again, given the scope of the book and how complex the situations are, it’s not unexpected and it’s definitely understandable. But it’s definitely something worth taking into account when reading.
But please also understand that the books that I’m currently most invested in is the Chainsaw Man manga. I might have to start a collection of reaction images from panels of that manga, because Aki makes so many relatable expressions. I’m only just finished vol 1, but I’m looking forward to overtaking the anime and seeing what all that Ending Discourse was about.
Whimsy and Metaphor 