alex

Oh...

I read Factfulness by Hans Rosling, a look at biases people have towards global development.

Good nice to hear that on most measures of poverty there has been strong improvement and a minority of people globally live in extreme poverty now. Makes one optimistic for the future.

Watched Cinema Paradiso which is a love letter to early cinema.

It centers on a particular Italian man and the local cinema he loved in his youth. He befriends the projectionist and eventually gets to work in it himself. I liked how the village changed with the eras.

I read Red Moon by Kim Stanley Robinson. A story set on the moon in the year 2047.

A lot of the story had to do with the future of the Chinese state and it was a bit of a thriller as the main characters were on the run. Lots of cool depictions of bases on the moon.

I read Monkey King, aka. Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en another classic of Chinese literature.

Sadly the translation I had was very abridged and the story suffered from it. It was nice to learn about Chinese mysticism although the humour was very crude.

I read The English Language by Robert Burchfield, a summary of the history of English and the attempts to record grammars and vocabulary in dictionaries.

It was a little bit dated being from 1985 and opinionated so it was amusing to see ways language has changed since then.

I read The Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong a classic of Chinese literature.

Even though I was reading an abridged version the number of characters, battles and cities was mind boggling.

I liked seeing mythologised characters from another culture's tales.

I came across an interesting site for a multi-layer dictionary.

You can read its definitions only knowing the words that have been defined so far (it starts with pictures).

It would be great to have this for other languages!
learnthesewordsfirst.com

I rewatched the Lord of the Rings trilogy extended edition and found it very nostalgic.
It really feels like an epic with the pacing and all the little details. The cgi still holds up and could be argued as being better with its merging of practical effects.

I read Making Money by Terry Pratchett, a Discworld novel set in the industrialisation of Ankh-Morpork.
It was a bit slow going at first but built up pace towards a hectic conclusion like all good Discworld books. In it it is revealed what is even worse than being a vampire...

I read A Little History of Economics by Niall Kishtainy which was mostly a mention of various famous economists, many which I hadn't heard of before.
There was some good stuff in it about various economic theories but I got the impression that it is an incomplete science.

I read There is no Anti-memetics Division by qntm, a story about paranormal entities and the organisation that combats them.
It was more action packed than I expected for something SCP related and the story certainly goes places. I do find qntm likes having the heroes lose a lot.

I finally finished reading Fundamentals of Physics by Halliday, Resnick and Walker which is my old university physics textbook. Not sure which edition as I got it back in 2007.
It was nice to have a refresher of physics concepts and the book acts as a good summary of topics.

我在学中文。中文比日本语容易。

I've started learning Chinese and I'm finding it a lot easier than Japanese.

Is it really such a fondly remembered film for you? I guess it's like me and Lord of the Rings then :P

Eh, I'm glad I watched it to see what it was about but found it to be pretty goofy. I'd be interested to read the book to see what was changed but I don't think I'll bother with any of the other films.

Looking back through my journal it is pretty clear when I started journaling every day. Also that my output for NaNoWriMo was really something :)

Watched Jurassic Park and found it to be a series of set pieces interspersed with lines that have been memed massively.
The cgi still holds up although the computer interfaces seem very filmy and dated.

Christmas was nice. My aunts came to visit and I got some good presents: Lancer rulebook, There is no Anti-Memetics Division and some books of piano sheet music.

Advent of Code has been ramping up in difficulty. I can solve part 1 of both day 5 and 6 but their second parts are really hard. I might be reaching the point where I'll have to give up...

Day 4 of Advent of Code was really fun as it involved what was pretty much a Cellular Automata.

I was so confident in my solution to part 2 that I didn't even try with the example data and got it to work *and* get the right answer on the first try :D

I completed the 3rd day of Advent of Code. It seemed really easy :?

I'm sure it'll get more difficult from here...

I did day 2 of Advent of Code. I'm not too familiar with python so I've been exploring what can be done with the language. Second part has a rather *unique* way of getting the answer :P

I might be a day behind but I completed the first day of Advent of Code.

My solution for the second part of the puzzle was as dumb as it was possible to be but it got the correct answer so it's fine :)

I mentioned it in my blog post but over November I did something kinda like NaNoWriMo where I wrote as much as I could about anything at all.

I managed to write a whopping 116K words, double the required! Which while mostly being journaling I did do a few thousand fiction notes.

2025 Review As it is nearing the end of the year I thought it would be nice to write about what I've been up to this year. This is mostly a list of thin...

For the first time in over a year I have written something for my blog :D

It's a review of the year and the things I've managed to get up to. Places visited and lots of new habits formed.

tangentialtopics.blogspot.com/2025/12/2025...

Watched the film The Goonies. It was pretty goofy. I thought it must've been an early Stephen Spielberg but no it came out after Temple of Doom.

I read Hail Mary by Andy Weir, very much like The Martian where a plucky astronaut has to solve his problems out in space.

I thought the conceit of the main character suffering memory loss worked well and the science was plausible sounding, very nice end :)

awesome :D