VIII IX MMXXVI
Been a while since I had anything to share.
Today was another Super Sunday. Did a ton of chores. I actually just got finished with everything and it’s 8:45 PM as I type this sentence.
My wife and I got to watch some YouTube videos for breakfast and lunch, which is something that we like to do on Sundays. Today they happened to also be worth sharing.
One video was about how many Americans are almost allergic to the word “socialism”, how that’s hypocritical because their federal and state governments do run a lot of publicly-funded programs, and how many socially democratic programs that exist in countries across Europe are not only not communist (they don’t affect the free market whatsoever), but also cost far less than the privately-run ones.
Another video was about how society, especially with regards to the arts and the media, is fully and intentionally embracing ugliness, very visibly so in fashion and physical appearance. I personally call this “aesthetic terrorism”. There’s also an important section in that video about how this is, in part, a backlash to an older trend that deceptively internalized the idea in most people’s minds that “beauty” and “sex appeal” are one and the same concept (which, spoiler alert, they’re not). Honestly, I wish everyone would watch this video. It was very eye-opening, even philosophically.
I bought the next book that I will read once I’m done with Man’s Search For Meaning, because I expect to finish it this week. It’s The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware. I swear I’m not in any morbid mood. I just had these two books on my list for so many years. Now’s the time to read them.
Meanwhile, I’ve been doing something that I have not done in many years, which is tinker with JavaScript for fun. I’m not a programmer, but I love playing with this language. It’s simple and it allows me to get immediate feedback.
I have some old projects that I archived, which I’m planning to bring back and upload to Neocities. The one that I’m currently working on though has a useful purpose, which is to help me practice Latvian verb conjugation, which I greatly struggle with. I think I’m pretty much finished with the basic functionality, which just checks if I correctly conjugated a verb. I now just need to add a few more.
Some other JavaScript projects that are on my mind to bring back or start are:
* A Bible verse memorization tool, where I have to type it out correctly.
* A “tic-tac-toe” game that I once made.
* A “connect four” game that I would like to make.
* Maybe a “checkers” game?
* A game for memorizing all the municipalities of Latvia that I once made.
* A tool similar to the Latvian verb conjugation one, but for correctly translating words that have the same root but different prefixes (something that confuses me a lot in this language).
* Obviously also a tool for Latvian noun declination practice.
Sometime this week I also want to publish a new recipe that I finished taking pictures for, and maybe plan to try out a new one. I also want to make some changes to my diet by introducing three recipes that have a lot more vegetables (a food group I’m not very fond of): minestrone soup, harusame, and scrambled tofu.
I also have been slowly working on an idea for a short story that I’d like to teach to the children of my church, which is a bit like a parable.
Finally, I have been saving money for my wife and I to maybe go on a trip to Italy next year (a dream destination of ours), to celebrate our ten-year anniversary. I was thinking of maybe starting to practice Italian, so that by the time we go, if we do, I can get around without doing the whole “I’m a tourist and can only communicate in English” spiel.
This is all that I’d like to do, but I won’t pressure myself to get any of it done. These are all optional little projects. That’s how I like to live my life actually: to have enough free time to try out lots of different small projects.