more dispatches from staying-at-home

hobbies: "do hobbies suck?"

there have been times in my life when I would have had an opinion about this. I think from approx years 16-27 my opinion would have been "the hobbyist is right and the anti-hobbyist is wasting their life." Then from years 28-31 it would be "the anti-hobbyist is right and the hobbyist is an obnoxious tryhard." I think right now I am just really getting more and more comfortable with saying "both are ok", and furthermore, "both can be equally good." like, it's not like the anti-hobbyist is less capable but we say "it's ok" because we don't want to be ableist or something; they're just both actually ok ways to be.

speaking of hobbies, it would probably be fun (and useful) to order and cook a bunch of food from this list of farms in the bay area that are delivering during covid. bookmarking for when I get a minute.

speaking of covid, it's wild how articles seem to circulate in the Covidverse. this one, "the risks: know them, avoid them"... I haven't yet seen an article saying "actually it's wrong" (like happened with that biking article - here's what's wrong with it), it has a lot of coherent internal logic, and it seems to match what little I know about infectious diseases otherwise. I'm not qualified to say if it's "right" or not but the guy looks like a real professor of this stuff, and like I said, I haven't seen any posts about why this is wrong, so :shrug: works for me.

speaking of anxieties, this article about "parenting in an anxious age." one of the biggest challenges of my last ~5 years has been to manage my own anxiety while dealing with others. (this is not something I thought about much! I thought, I'm depressed, not anxious! but of course nothing is ever that simple...) I hope that, when I have kids, I will not pass on my anxieties to them, or make theirs worse. but I bet, the harder I try at that, the worse I'll do.

speaking of trying vs not, this feels kind of like the vipassana-ish vs non-dual traditions. (this post got me thinking about it; dunno if it's helpful.) maybe I should have started with something more non-dual; doing vipassana just gets me thinking and trying hard. the deconstructing yourself podcast has been interesting to me over the last yearish, in addition to other practices I've been working on.

speaking of something completely different, "best medium-hard SQL interview questions" - I'm not even interviewing and this was kinda interesting. like, it's easy to get from 0 to ok at sql, but I don't know what's the next step.

speaking of data scientists - "yes, they're all data scientists... but what kind of data scientists are they?" while dickering about what is and isn't data science is exactly what I got out of academia to try to avoid ("but why is it HCI??"), knowing what kind of job I do and don't want to do will be helpful. (still, this is all a little silly and I have to post the obligatory far side)

speaking of silly, I can't believe I hadn't seen the "Dmitri finds out" meme yet.