Best of 2024

Whatever I enjoyed in 2024

Art ¶

• dip pens
• learning a gothic calligraphy alphabet
• watercolors
• a month of ink drawings
• learning about art history

Various art related things discovered this year:

• Bernie Wrightson’s Frankenstein illustrations
• Gustave Doré and his wood engraving prints for Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy
• Franklin Booth’s pen and ink illustrations that resemble wood engravings
• Idyl (1975) by Jeffrey Catherine Jones
  • great art, also clever
• Lecture: Seen and Unseen—Japan’s Postwar Women Printmakers by Jeannie Kenmotsu, Ph.D., curator of Asian Art at the Portland Art Museum
• looking at a lot of Japanese woodblock prints
• Hiroshi Nagai
  • Induces a feeling of a similar vacuousness to Edward Hopper’s paintings
• Tom Lovell
  • It’s probably about the implied detail that I also enjoy in Sargent’s works—Saying a lot with very little.
• Saul Steinberg’s quirky drawings

Culinary Arts ¶

• pain-de-mie
  • this is great, but I had to stop as I couldn’t run enough to offset how much I enjoyed eating this bread
• pizza-dough
  • for cheat meals. I suppose I made well over a hundred of them this year
• tiramisu
  • made only a few times, but it’s so soft and melts in mouth

Reading ¶

I read a lot this year, a good amount of rereading though. I felt less guilt from the sunk cost and decided not to finish books. Of what I did finish, there wasn’t too much that stood out. Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” would be too obvious of a choice, so I’m going with these two instead:

• Learning by Heart (2008) - Corita Kent, Jan Steward
• The Soul of a New Machine (1981) - Tracy Kidder

Music ¶

• learning Travis picking and achieving a level of comfort with fingerpicking. (The pattern is PmiPmiP(m|a) which is nicely 8 notes long.)
• getting a microphone for the acoustic guitars
• discovering VCV Rack
• listening to albums from the “1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die” list
• most replayed songs
  • A Love International by Khruangbin
    • Playing along to it on the bass amounted to a lot of replays
  • Bien cordialement by The Toxic Avenger
    • I believe I first heard Getting Started from the same album which is how I discovered this one
  • The King of Rock ‘N’ Roll by Prefab Sprout
    • Prefab Sprout I discovered through the “1001 albums” list which has their Steve McQueen on there. The first 4–5 tracks there are good. This track is from a different album though.
• favorite album of the year
  • Imaginal Disk (2024) - Magdalena Bay
    • Cry for Me is probably the favorite track off it

Cinema ¶

• animation
  • Look Back (2024) - Kiyotaka Oshiyama
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion series (1995) - Hideaki Anno
• film
  • Dune: Part Two (2024) - Denis Villeneuve
  • Incendies (2010) - Denis Villeneuve

Fitness ¶

• running early in the morning when the sun is rising
  • It’s something that seems to give more energy than it consumes.
  • seeing stars in the morning, all the fog and mist on fields
  • early morning plunges in a cold pond water
• handstand push-ups
  • next would be a planche
• learning the technique for muscle-ups
  • the first one up from a hanging position is the most difficult, however, it can be skipped by doing a pullover and getting above the bar

Other ¶

• reducing the number of my digital notes from 2200 files by about 93%.
  • and reconstructing this website
• getting back into haskell
• doing The Elements of Computing Systems’ nand2tetris project
  • We did the logic gates part in university, but not the assembler nor the compiler
• getting an e-reader
• painting my walls matte white. They used to be pale yellow