Ben Crowder / Blog

Weeknotes #11

  • Another week with hardly any writing to show for it. Ordinarily I would try to muscle through it regardless of my mood, but with the job hunt and other family things going on, it has to be on the back burner. Soon, though, I expect things to settle down enough that I can get back to both the novel and the story. (And this evening I saw the first sliver of movement in that direction. Hard to tell if it’ll stick, but it was something.)
  • Decided on procedural textures for my semester project. I’ve done some preliminary thinking about which textures and algorithms I want to implement/explore. The presentation got bumped to next week.
  • This week has seen many hours of responding to recruiters and taking assessments and brushing up on data structures and algorithms. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy the latter. (Talking with recruiters is fine, too.)
  • A wildfire chewed up our local mountain earlier this week, with a few nearby houses evacuated for a night and essence of smoke diffused everywhere. A stark reminder of how much worse it was in Oregon and California.
  • Nonfiction reading: when my brain has trouble getting into writing mode, it also struggles to get into reading-medieval-history mode. Since books about the recent past are easier reading, I’ve started Jason Schreier’s Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, about the development of several video games. A much better fit for right now.
  • I completely forgot to mention that on Sundays I’ve been reading Bruce C. Hafen’s A Disciple’s Life, a biography of Neal A. Maxwell. It’s delightful.
  • Fiction reading: I finished The Black Company and very much liked it. Looking forward to reading the rest of the series at some point. I’m not much of a series binge-reader, though, so it’ll be drawn out over time. (At some point I need to make a list of all the series I’ve started and intend to continue with.)
  • I ended up losing interest in Pact and abandoned it. Extremely long serials feel like they might not be a good fit for me at the moment. (That said, I still want to try Twig, Ward, Mother of Learning, and The Wandering Inn at some point.)
  • Two-thirds through We Are Legion. Things are getting more interesting than I expected. Good stuff.