J. Martin

May 29, 2022

On the Cutting Edge of Relaxation

The very moment an entirely reasonable deadline is attached to a task, my brain throws a switch and compels me to try and complete that task in half the allotted time or less. On the one hand, there’s a good rationale to go about it that way—Hofstadter’s Law, for example. Or the experience that it takes 50% of the total time spent on a task to finish its final 10%. But there also seem to be some highly irrational elements involved, perhaps of the “did you forget that your thesis defense is tomorrow?” nightmare variety. I don’t know. But I know I have to do something about it. Not only do I feel like being on the run all the time. I also play fewer games, watch fewer movies, and read fewer books than I want to. Not working on weekends always takes effort. My usual strategy is to schedule recreational tasks, try hard to fulfill them, and get better at it over time. Yeah, okay, that sort of defeats the purpose…I can see that! So wish me luck.

Most of that is related, as some might guess, to my freshly signed book contract with CRC-Press for Ludotronics, which I wrote about last week on between drafts. But not just that—there’s also my creative project I’m working on, for which I wrote another blog post on the Voidpunk Universe’s physics. Also, I published a new album on Flickr with 30 photographs from a city wall hiking tour in Xi’an, China, and one photo on Glass I took of a 1971 Sifang engine at the China Railway Museum, Beijing. Plus, Instagram entries at betweendrafts and voidpunkverse as usual.
 
Another thing you might have guessed already from the first paragraph is that I missed out on the opportunity to try out some games for a recommendation. But you might be interested in the entire remastered Bioshock Collection that is free at the Epic Games store right now until June 2! That should make up for it. (Mind, the Epic collection doesn’t include the classic versions like the remastered versions on GOG.)

No Sunday funnies today, sorry about that. But, after a very long time, a music recommendation: Isaac Stern’s absolutely fantastic 1971 performance of Sibelius’s violin concerto with the London SO under André Previn. Stern’s performance here is close, very close, to his previous recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy in 1969, which is my all-time-favorite studio recording of that concerto ever. Enjoy!

J.