VS Notes

Weekly Wonders #2

Welcome to the second edition of Vi's Weekly Wonders

Your weekly dose of living the good, cultured, entertained and enthralled life!

I had an amazing week working on what I love (web-tech, design & writing), enjoying beautiful sun & snowy peak vistas, going between the two small towns I live in and getting a visit from beloved family members.

In this weeks edition I've gathered calendar differences; good advice on doing life right, starting with the basics; interesting books I've finished, started and am thinking about; discourses producing movies; lots of video game thoughts & more Linux shenanigans. It's a long one, I hope you enjoy it! Feel free to skip around to what interests you.

The Basics of Life

Since the Orthodox country I live in still uses the Julian Calendar as opposed to the Gregorian one which is used by most countries around the world and is more accurate. The biggest divergence today is for holidays and the weird overlap and doubling that I get to enjoy from my weird life.

Since Christmas is 2 weeks apart, with ours being on January 7th, which you'll already know from last time. But we also have a thing called Old New Years which falls on January the 14th. We used to have New Nears then but we follow the international calendar for that, but people still celebrate the old one out of tradition and a good excuse to eat, drink and make a bonfire in the winter (something everyone needs more of). So I skipped a the bonfire (I don't like the cold or the smoke) but enjoyed the other two benefits.

The point of this story is that since I still have lots of merriment after New Years, I have to begin my actual resolutions at least 2 weeks later than most of the world, which is why I'm focusing on planning for the year ahead, figuring out what I want to prioritize and improve and whatever else we try this time of year.

I tried giving up alcohol for half of last year, and other than the occasional drink at social events which are torture sober (weddings), I mostly managed it. I kept it up since I truly had no desire to drink for most of that time, but I developed persistent anger for the first time in my life and increased anxiety (which is already high enough). So I got back to moderate (mostly social) drinking and I'm happier than ever. Which is exactly what this GQ guide also recommends, along with plenty of smaller reminders to remedy your days.

I think the smallest nudge in the right direction (gotten from the intro of the book Nudge which is a fine premise, but horribly extended and misused throughout the surprisingly bad book) or gentlest reminder can lift you out of a bad situation surprisingly well. So I hope this helps someone, cause I have been helped in this way many times and I understand how much we all need it.

Through The History of Cretins

I finished the Diadochi Wars, a book that I went to right after Soldier, Priest & God. My review and full thoughts on this journey through ancient Macedonia as well as my own country's muddied reckoning of it will come later this week. I learned a lot from these books, but the way the Diadochi Wars was written could occasionally be hard to follow. It was mostly a collection of citations from ancient histories, most of which lived 200 to 400 years after the events themselves, often including multiple accounts of the same events written in language that isn't too enjoyable or approachable. But I'm glad I read it, the time period is wild and it filled in my head cannon of why the romans conquered the previously strongest military in the world so seemingly easily. Balkanization was a thing in the Balkans way before we coined the word.

Needing a break from ancient history and craving some thoughts on our own wicked time and how we got here, I turned to 3 books in the early mornings and late nights I do my reading, I landed on 3 books that are surprisingly connected to each other, on a simple whim. First, even before finishing the Diadochi War, I started reading At The Existentialist Cafe, an approachable romp through Sartre, Beauvoir & the broader existentialist philosophy. I did start reading this book on a park bench in Ada, Belgrade this summer and although I truly enjoyed it, I somehow abandoned it for reasons that I can only guess were related to starting it on my IPhone. Not a place I've ever actually dedicated to reading, as opposed to my previous Note 10+.

After the Diadochi, I opened up I Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism, an amazingly written treatise, whose every sentence is a joy. I wish more authors took such careful sentence construction in mind and placed so much trust in the reader to follow along a seemingly challenging but rewarding path.

The last night of the week, for some reason I found myself searching for another book I could read and landed on Becoming Steve. I have way too many thoughts on the guy, with the Walter Isaacson Biography and Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh being among my favorite books. This one seems promising, two chapters in, with plenty of details I don't remember and scenes I don't know about.

In addition, in the middle of the week I started flipped through The Game Console coffee table book and got about 35% in. Seeing these systems this way has brought up some new inspiration in me. It's a lovely book.

Filmed Opinions

I've never had anyone to watch My Dinner With Andre with, a movie I stumbled upon from a Community omage and found absolutely delightful. It's a movie so perfectly tailored to it's tiny budget, that anything more would have detracted from it. When the narrator gets roped into seeing an old friend he'd prefer not to, we as the audience share his thought process and just as the narrator would have liked to, my cousin (who put the movie on with his girlfriend based on my wonderful words for the movie) gave up 20 minutes in and never reached the triumphant turnaround. Preventing the organic conversation from flowing and saving the night. No lessons learned.

Together we watched Catch Me If You Can (a great movie in need of an editor), Dead Poets Society (my pretentious ass loves waxing poetic about our societal cling towards systematization & the need for creativity and custom tailored education on an individual basis), Boyz n the Hood (we all grew up with GTA San Andreas & similar stories, going back to the inspirations has been amazing and rewarding seeing the parallels to our own environment), Bottle Rocket (first time watch and wonderful story & cinematography) plus Welcome to Collinwood, which really got me thinking how the fuck did this movie get made, with so many famous actors and it's apparently a remake. I'll come back to this one.

The Wonders of Play

I'm a big proponent of video games, a huge ludo-narrative head. So this year I plan on actually playing through video games I enjoy, fully. This has been a strangely hard resolution to follow after university and I desperately need it. Good video games fuel my soul, enrich my life and better my days and I am less me without them. So far I'm starting the year off right with:

Linux Shenanigans

So I'm keeping up my Linux Guy cred by messing around with every computer I own. I have a living room PC which is exclusively used for media consumption and I wanted to set it up as an emulation machine. It would be an amazing place to play retro games. So I got Batocera on a flash drive, found it pretty amazing, installed it and wiped my Linux Mini installation. Apparently wile Batocera isn't meant to be a full Linux distro, it's hard to dual boot it.

The good part is that my Linux Mini wasn't receiving updates for a while, which I had a hard time fixing, so this accident led me to going with Lubuntu, which is awesome, other than the start screen & logo combo. I do love it when I jam myself into doing what I should and this all turned out well. I've been setting up retroarch and trying to make it as batocera like as possible and it's going slow. It's quite buggy and a bit of a hassle to set up, especially since the system is low spec. But it'll be great once set up properly.

I now have 1 more computer, the gaming desktop I used in middle to high school which is sitting unused since the screen it was attached to stopped registering video input. A perfect place for another Bazzite installation, once I decide the best physical setup. \

This has been a long post, thank you for reading this long. I'll be writing more throughout the week, I hope you enjoy it!