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This month has been surprisingly successful at times, but this is more of a "you tried" kind of thing rather than any actual real success. But it is something so let's talk about it.
Surprisingly this time I have made some positive progress toward getting a PhD position, but there is a bit of a caveat to that, which we will get to first.
First, the good news. I have actually managed to make a couple of applications. Three in fact, which makes it one of the most productive months in this time period. It's one every ten days, which is particularly interesting for me. Could it have been faster? Probably, but I don't know. It'd depend on how many I can find. Right now I am relying on a single source of postings but this is very much a "you need to look or them yourself" thing so I'm at a bit of a disadvantage here.
The bad news is of course that I either got the cold shoulder or just flat out rejected. So actually, no real progress has been made, just pretentions thereof.
I realised that for most of these, I don't really feel the motivation to move forward with some of these because they don't really push me forward. It's tangential to what I studied, relatively little cohesion to what to go forward, you know, that. I don't know what to do with that information though, other than knowing that I must press on to get things going.
Things are just hard man.
Also surprisingly successful, and this time there are results so it's not at all a bad month.
Programming wise, I finally completed hand operations for Ùzje mahjong. So it's now onto two things: round reconstruction, where I serialise and deserialise a game in progress, and hand patterns, the critical thing that is needed to win a game. Both will take some time as I don't really know how to approach this.
In addition, because this month's gemlog is a little bit later, I actually completed one more small project, which is to upgrade my automatic Wordle clone collector to also include some more games that I now play.
I love it because it means that I don't have to spam anyone with so many grids and also I get a neat record of things as time goes on. The original text-based results are also collected so if I want to do any more analysis I can do that. Having said that I don't know if my filesystem is tuned for so many tiny 100-byte files or if I should collect them into one big marked-up file for later parsing. Also why it ended up in my ~/Pictures folder rather than ~/Documents is another question.
I have also started writing something about things that have puzzled me for a while, especially those of a more political bent. Rather than dealing with single events, my main problem is that I can't seem to combine them together into some sort coherent whole – a quality of consonance that I deeply value – along with the professed "good qualities" the people around me say are and also some concepts that I find really compelling.
I don't know how to say this with any level of satisfaction, but please keep in mind that I most likely don't grow up in the same world you do, and therefore see events in a different way than you do; furthermore, I maintain the expression that my primary political affiliation is "straw-man" with a lot of peculiarities that don't generalise easily. In other words, I'm just another confused boy looking at the world funnily and also sighing a bit at things not going my way, essentially.
Over the next few months I'll get these out, mostly centring around the ideas of legibility, coherence and how the world loves words even though some people say they hate them. It's not a secret that I mostly know the world by how people call things, and I want to be able to see how far this can be pushed, because it is patently true that the universe is illiterate and doesn't care what labels you put things.
A few more increasing tensions with family. And the world has gotten mad around me too. What's happening on the other side of the Pacific is confusing and I don't care to get an evaluation yet on what's going on.
There's a typhoon that's coming at a very appropriate time. Even though it is irrational to sincerely believe this, I think it's a funny coincidence that an unpleasant person has arrived to meet with unpleasant weather. So as it is.
I learnt a little about early (European) music and it has resolved a small mystery that has always confused me: why are the note names for the longest notes in music called "short"? (The whole note is in British English the "semibrevis", i.e. "half short"; the double whole note "brevis", "short"; and the half note "minim", "smallest".) Turns out that they used to be named sensibly back when music notation was called "mensural notation" and then authors invented smaller and smaller notes but the performers can't cope so the long notes become inflated out of existence.
This reminds me of a contingent of fairly questionable people to be found on Twitter that like to extol the virtues of "traditional culture" (meaning culture roughly contemporaneous to the establishment of Westphalian sovereignty) and this disconnect has finally made me think a funny thought about them. That is, that they like to talk about classical music being this Great Thing but actually the very notes they write have already been perverted beyond recognition and they don't even notice. If I had no brain I would respond to them thus, but I think these people are better left alone honestly.
Anyway this was a bit late because I had a sudden collapse in motivation but I'm trying to get this done quickly now so I don't have to worry about it. See you next month.
