Week 48, 2024

It has been quite a while since I wrote my last weeknotes.

It was partly a forced hiatus: I'm about to leave on vacations this next Monday, and these last weeks have been filled with many activities — some the usual business, some totally different endeavors I was involved with. Every day was full and I barely had time to do much beyond work. The upside on this is that the projects have been quite enjoyable, and made me learn different (and interesting) things, what is quite appealing for a self-proclaimed lifelong learner like myself.

The learning was so much that I insisted with my boss to present the results of the work so far before my vacations. To me it would be a chance to validate progress and collect feedbacks and improvement opportunities. He was very supportive of this idea, and last Friday I met online with him, our manager and part of the team who helped me gather data so far. I loved it, it was a great way to learn in public: I validated what I've done is in the right path, wrote some notes to act when I return and now can rest at ease.

But partly, the absence of weeknotes was also caused by something I've come to realize quite recently: I don't have that much going on with me these last weeks, besides the usual work vs home routine, so some weeks with no notes were just me pondering about what could be shared — and coming to the conclusion that there was nothing worth sharing.

Now, many people's weeknotes follow a defined list of topics, such as what I learned, what I'm grateful for and so on, and so forth — and maybe if I adopted a structured list of topics, I would have produced weeknotes during this hiatus. But I prefer to fill my notes with a consciousness stream, and to share cool things that happened, or that I read, or watched, among other things, so I believe it's natural that sometimes there's just... nothing 😅

My reading stalled after I beat my 20 books read goal for 2024. I'm still going through The Overstory by Richard Powers, and finding some parts of it very interesting, whereas others so filled with names of trees and biology that make me want to skip it altogether. I'm finishing the second last chapter but dragging through.

I had expectations of finishing up to 5 more books until 2025 arrives, but now I'm not so sure about that anymore. We'll see what I'll be able to do. One thing I'm almost certain, though, is I will not read anything by Richard Powers anytime soon. He's a fine writer, it's just I've not been able to fully enjoy his writing as I thought I would.

I have binge watched a lot of One Piece lately. This was a way I found to disconnect from all of the work activities I mentioned above, but when I came to think of it, it was a lot of watching, considering my regular standards.

Since November 10, I've gone through 121 episodes, meaning I've spent something between 44 and 48 hours watching. I've gone through the whole Water 7 arc — one my son always told me is a masterpiece, and one of the coolest plots in the anime (what now, past it, I have to agree). I have also finished the Ennies Lobby arc, and now I'm in the middle of the Post-Ennies Lobby one.

I really enjoy Luffy and the crew, and One Piece is and will always be one of my favorite animes.

But while at the subject, I have to say that I had a very nice surprise coming across Tokyo Revengers, mentioned in an Instagram post from one of the Japanese teaching accounts I follow there. It is a thriller and science fiction anime,* which *follows Takemichi Hanagaki, a downhearted man who discovers he can time travel to his middle school days, where he attempts to save his ex-girlfriend and change the course of his life by infiltrating and altering the violent fate of a notorious gang. The opening music, Cry Baby, has a catchy tune, so much so that I listened to it on repeat sometime, a real earworm.

After pondering what to use once Omnivore shuts down, and mentioning I was going to use Raindrop, I found some downsides which made me give up on it as a RIL replacement. So I decided to get back to Readwise Reader. Neither free, nor the most affordable tool (I'm always on the hope they'll adopt regional pricing, someday), but one that I used before and helped me resurface notes and knowledge.

Talking about knowledge resurfacing and idea combining, I had the nicest surprise to find out about Sublime while browsing the thread discussing Omnivore replacements in their Discord. Sublime is what its creator, Sari Azout, defines as an inspiration engine for ideas. Sounds quite poetic, but imagine saving documents, book passages, images, quotes and videos, among other content, highlighting passages and being able to import from Kindle and Readwise and then have the ability to run smart queries on your content and the content of other users (if they decide to make it public, as you can define what or not to share with everyone). It really makes my mind flow with ideas — which I just need to find the time to turn into useful output, like more posts in this blog about things that I'm interested in.

It's a little difficult to explain Sublime in a few words, so luckily there's this very complete YouTube video of an online workshop Sari promoted some months ago where she talks about how she builds her personal knowledge management, about her creation and her motivations, and demonstrates how it all works.

I just loved the tool so much and it worked so well for me as nothing did before, that I got myself a lifetime account. Honestly it replaced doomscrolling with jumping into impressive and surprising rabbit holes. If you happen to watch it and get interested, I have 5 invites to try the tool (which is invite-only right now).