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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I play guitar casually since a little before COVID. Becoming more fluent with it every time I play is an amazing feeling.

    Getting into a groove, putting my own spin/expressing myself with songs I like, and jamming with friends are experiences that are unmatched in enjoyment for me.

    Making up my own silly songs on the fly is fun too.

    Learning to play is the best thing I ever did. I had to get over the idea that it would be hard work to get good, or the idea that I’d never be as good as someone who started as a kid, or that I’d ever even be technically good, at all. Letting go of that stuff allowed me to enjoy each moment playing, and just have fun.




  • Me too! I prune my yard of invasives and let the natives grow, cataloging with iNaturalist as I see new species. My yard was a dirt slope last summer, this summer it is full of a wonderful variety of plants! My crotchety gardener mother and aunt keep trying to offer me non-natives to transplant – I tell them I’ve got plants growing already but thank you – they say, “yeah, weeds.”

    Funnily enough, my yard with milkweed, primrose, violets, tickseed flowers, black-eyed susans, a walnut sapling, pepperweed, and st johns wort (not actually native here but not as invasive as some other plants) looks better than theirs and probably requires way less maintenance.







  • At my work, we maintain computers for a bio lab that use Nvidia glasses to view stereo images of cryogenically frozen protein structures.

    Nvidia doesn’t support them anymore, and there was an email thread that was forwarded to us by the lab manager of some scientists discussing the issue. One of them suggested to the others that they could just cross their eyes and see the images that way instead of using the glasses. Funny stuff!







  • I enjoy these types of movies. The most recent one I watched was Terry Gilliams Days of Heaven. I saw it described as a visual poem (This is accurate) about a boy running from his past with his girlfriend and sister, arrives to work as a farmhand on a Texas farm during harvest season.

    I enjoy Tarkovskys films, those are generally quite slow but philosophically dense. Stalker, Solaris, and Andrei Rublev. I haven’t seen the rest.

    I also enjoy abstract documentaries. Baraka is a dialogue-less epic showcasing the alienness of human culture. Amazing visuals and music. Life changing for me. In this genre, I also love Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil – a directors reflections on memory and time. A more serious, focused documentary following several men responsible for the mass execution of communists in Indonesia in the 60s as they act out their atrocities for what they believe will be a great action movie, called The Act of Killing directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, is also powerful and surreal. These three films had a drastic effect on me personally are the greatest documentaries I’ve seen, though not much happens in them.

    More recent slow movies I’ve enjoyed: Past Lives, about childhood love. Scored by Daniel Rossen of the indie band Grizzly Bear, it is a beautiful and different outlook on love. Very touching. Not much happens.

    The other is The Brutalist, an epic about a Jewish architect escaping the Holocaust and moving to America, seeking the American dream. Haunting, looming.

    Edit: Richard Linklaters films generally have very loose plots. I’ve only seen School of Rock and Boyhood though. Love Boyhood.