Reading
I had a pretty productive month, reading-wise. I now have a backlog of review materials.
- Books Finished: 6
- Highlights: Countdown City by Ben H. Winters, reread of The Turk by Tom Standage
- Books DNFed: 2
- Short Stories Read: 19
- Highlights: “The Bell Tower” by Herman Melville, reread of “The Sandman” by ETA Hoffmann
- Challenge Updates:
- FrankenSlam! – Read The Sorrows of Young Werther.
- 2018 Nonfiction Reading Challenge: Here Is Real Magic by Nate Staniforth, at 33% nonfiction.
- 2018 TBR Challenge – Read Countdown City by Ben H. Winters.
- Wild West Reading Challenge – Didn’t have a book planned for this challenge for January. I did end up reading The Huge Hunter; Or, The Steam Man of the Prairies by Edward Sylvester Ellis and DNFed a title I had on my initial list.
- Shelf Maintenance – I purchased no books in the month of January.
Other Things
Writing: Started off the month working on Abbott rewrites. Last two weeks I’ve been working on the automaton anthology I’m putting together.
Number of games of ultimate frisbee played: 15
Worked on learning how to paint better with watercolors:
I have a problem with starting off too dark. The palm tree came out okay, but isn’t very “sunlit.” The teal llama is…not good. The flowers are pretty simple and cartoony, but I did better at keeping my first layer light and adding darker, uh, highlights. There is a non-exact aspect to water colors that I also find befuddling.
CS50: My computer science class made me do a project in Scratch. Behold, Fluffy the Mind-Reading Squirrel! There was much cursing as I put this together due to how annoying I find Scratch. I still haven’t uploaded it for class. There are ways I could improve it (like a nonrandom guessing scheme), but it currently meets all the project criteria. [11pm Edit: The hoop-jumping required to submit the project was more than I could take and I dumped the class. I am beginning to realize just how good the online classes through the University of Michigan are.]
Simple Tricks & Nonsense 