So, The Untethered Soul overall didn’t turn out as bad as I thought it would when the chakra stuff first came up. But I’m not particularly going to recommend it, either. In the way of some self-help books, it tended to be repetitive, making a few points several times over from just very slightly different angles. And it didn’t do much to present practical advice or exercises like most books on mindfulness do, but a sort of mindfulness end goal that… honestly I’m not sure is a particularly good one for everybody.
I found myself questioning the premise that the “observer” self — the self that is aware of sensations, thoughts, feelings, as opposed to the noisy commentator that we don’t want to dominate everything when practicing mindfulness, is the “real” or “true” one. I thought about how several psychology models and religions believe in multi-part selves in one way or another — none of them consider any part “false.”
Moving on…
Figured Stones: Exploring the Lithic Imaginary is a short book, but also my second DNF of the year. It describes… figured stones, which seem to be small rocks with interesting shapes and patterns and textures eroded by natural processes (and in some cases, enhanced by human artists?) Supposedly a “masterpiece of natural philosophy”, I found it light on introduction and explanation, and just… poetic and fanciful in a way that didn’t really grab me, for the most part. There was some stuff about erosion, water and time that… let’s say had a nice flow to it. But it didn’t tickle my sense of wonder like reviewers suggested it might.
Next up was a book by a senior colleague of mine. I’ll remain vague to preserve anonymity, but it was intended for a particular specialized segment of an industry, which has been relying on habits formed when the science was in its infancy. I was not in the target audience, and I did a lot of skimming because I was only going to get the vaguest of general ideas from it anyway.
Now I’m reading Ice Massacre by Tiana Warner. A desperate group of North Pacific islanders (I don’t think the island exists in our world, but it’s apparently south of the Aleutians but not part of North America), whose fishing industry is under siege by human-eating mermaids, trains a group of teen girls to seek out and massacre the “sea demons” with the assumption that they won’t be seduced the way male fishermen and warriors were. But of course the protagonist is going to discover that she’s not heterosexual. It’s been pretty good so far.
I’ve been playing Guild Wars 2 a bit more lately; I decided to reroll my Scrapper who didn’t get that much playtime and start up a greatsword-wielding Reaper. It’s gone quite well; she’s easily one of my top characters for soloing either lots of trash mobs or the tougher champions. She’s been downed zero times so far.
There’s been an update to Soulstone Survivors, with two new titans and a bunch of classes getting their weapon #5. I haven’t found it in me to be that excited about it though — I’m losing my enthusiasm for the game. I’ve had a good run with it, I guess. But I feel like the introduction of the relatively overpowered Blacksmith, capable of going much further into Titan Hunt than anyone else but only with specific, limited types of builds and yet without any real motive to push further, signaled a sort of end. The new weapon skills that I’ve tried so far don’t feel like they are different enough to make them exciting.
My spouse is on a road trip to visit her family for our young nephew’s birthday. I’m gonna hang out with my parents a little bit (tomorrow night at least), might go to the frame shop Saturday to get this cool Egyptian-style mermaid print framed, and otherwise will try to get myself back into a solid music-making habit. I let the momentum go a bit, though I do have a solid foundation for launching into the 4th track.
Bitwig 6.0 released, and… I’m not even going to do the update until after I have finished this album, I think. There are no features I’m excited about, and I don’t want to risk disrupting things — especially now that I’m actually working on something where I do want to revisit “finished” project files to reuse and reinterpret pieces of them.
My K-Accumulator is, if the tracking is correct, somewhere between the UK and US right now. The sooner it arrives, the better. Fancyyy posted another video where it’s all just no-commentary knob tweaking and self-patching. A lot of it feels like there’s so much going on that it’s hard to follow, but there are some amazing gorgeous tones as well as a lot of chaos and complexity — and incredible potential. I’m still hoping they publish a real manual soon, but there will be no substitute for getting my hands on it and exploring.