Week Notes 01

02 Mar, 2025

📝 February 24 - March 2 2025

I've been contemplating whether I could write my own Week Notes section, mainly inspired by Jedda's. Not everything needs to be its own blog post, so this could be a nice way to consolidate everything and add a nice way for me to reflect and take note of things that happen across the week.

🌱 Highlights of the Week

• Supposedly 1st Supervisor x Supervisee Meeting

  • I was very anxious about our first group supervisee and supervisor meeting on Wednesday. Our supervisor, Dr E., didn't show up when the time came, which I, and, some other friends thought was off-character. We went into spirals of guessing what happened, and frantically checking his Microsoft Teams status, emailing him after 15 minutes, and waiting for him on the Zoom waiting page.

    Turns out... he left the email to reschedule the meeting in his outbox, as there was a sudden departmental meeting (he has shared his disdain for those in several lectures haha) and apologized ferociously after an hour or so when he left that meeting. It was funny looking back, but I did, for a moment, feel kind of anxious about the possibility of something bad actually happening to him that could lead me to switch supervisors. It has now been rescheduled to next Wednesday, so we'll see how that goes.

    This did allow me to speak with S from class and chat a little about what her tentative thesis topic is - we're actually pretty adjacent to one another, which I guess is not too surprising since we have the same supervisor and were in the same elective he thought previously. I'm kind of excited to see how our ideas grow from here.

• 3rd Group Data Analytics Assignment Meeting
  • We made some progress on our R assignment this week. The campus library discussion rooms and tutorial rooms were fully booked, and the cafe was too noisy, so we decided to go across the university and work on the assignment at Zus. Their Vietnamese Latte is surprisingly pretty good, and I might try that out since I've been sticking to the Iced Spanish Latte (which is my usual drink if I go there).
• Indulged!
  • My partner and I went to Hokkaido Sushi on Friday before we worked on some work and uni stuff. It was a great lunch after trying to eat as cleanly as I could after my stomach bug last weekend. This was their beef Yakiniku! Not pictured is A's Miso Ramen.
  • 

🎬 Watched

• I watched an episode of What We Do in the Shadows, I have a few other episodes left from the first season. I had 0 idea this one existed until my friend YH asked me to check it out. I was slow to warm to it, but I've been starting to like it a lot! The latest episode I watched had the main characters face the Vampire Council due to their "accidental" killing of the Baron in the last episode. I thought it was so fun to see all the Council members and that one lady bringing them around.

• I watched two episodes of Modern Family with A during dinner on Thursday. The whole plot with Luke having a good business idea and Claire being the person who agreed with him (and letting him drop out of college) was pretty funny. Always sad to see Phil down, though.

• I caught up with the latest episode of the 2nd season of the Fragrance of the First Flower. We're beginning to see some hesitation with Yi-Ming and her relationship with Ting Ting after her ex-husband's visitation. I can understand that Yi-Ming is guilty of changing her son's environment, but, I do feel that she does have some issues expressing assurance to Ting Ting, which seems to be a pattern from the 1st season. I'm also pretty confident that the new singer character in Ting Ting's life is going to be the start of a jealous plotline - it'd be interesting to see how that goes!

• Watched the latest episode of Severance Season 2 today. I've been seeing Tumblr Gifs of Gemma and thought it would mainly be a flashback type of episode going over how she 'died'. This episode did that but added so much context and information on what in the world Lumon is doing to her down there. We learn that Irving must've been to the same place that she's at and that they're testing their limits on perhaps how many innies they can make within one person before things break. I was confused at first with why Gemma was being made to enter multiple rooms, but that one room where she was forced to write Christmas cards spelt it out to me. I've been reading theories on why Lumon is doing this, and, I think right now I'm buying that they're probably trying to make a product to sell the idea that you can severe yourself and skip all the unpleasant stuff (writing 101 Christmas postcards, going to the dentist, etc.).

  Also- what in the world was Devon thinking? If she had made that call, it would've been game over for Mark and the team. I'm so glad they didn't go that route. I do hope to see Milchick or Ms. Cobel's characters have their own episodes, and perhaps one of them (or more?) could help the team. That would be an interesting dynamic.

🎮 Played

I didn't play much this week, but I did grind a little bit in Pokemon Yellow (to prepare for the next gym, I need my Pokemon to be ~level 50) and most of them are around ~level 30 now. Luckily, my emulator has a speed-up option, and, that has helped so much.

📖 Read

• Started Howling Dark by Christopher Ruocchio! The start of the book had a time jump and I felt like I was missing a whole novella of what happened, but I'm trying to trust the author that this will have some sort of payoff as we go. I'm surprised Valka is still here though. I thought she would just be a short fling of Hadrian's.
• I am starting a re-read of Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (after like 6 years I have completely forgotten everything except the very basics of logotherapy). Dr. E talked about this book when I was first pitching my thesis topic. He mentioned that there was a quote: "Suffering ceases to be suffering the moment it is given meaning" that could potentially be a way to link socially-prescribed perfectionism with meaning. I've only started it recently, so not much to say here.

🎧 Listened To

• 恬恬一下仔 by Shallow Levée
• Guess featuring billie eilish
• Abracadabra by Lady Gaga
  • How did I just learn that Lady Gaga released a new song that's like a return to her Bad Romance/Born This Way era? I felt so nostalgic listening to this, and it's a bop!

🔗 Noteworthy Links

• Urgencies are yappy little dogs - annie's blog
• Brandon Sanderson — Building a Fiction Empire, $40M+ Kickstarter Campaigns, and Unbreakable Habits
  • Insightful look into some of Sanderson's background into becoming how successful he is today. I wouldn't say I'm the biggest Sanderson fan (I think sometimes he emphasizes worldbuilding too much at the expense of character-building) but I've been catching up on his Stormlight Archive series, and his books do have great magic systems. One thing that stood out to me from this podcast episode is his transparency in being entrepreneurial in nature - which I think helps give context to some of his decisions with the Kickstarters and his company.
• I got my grandma to play D&D with me - YouTube
• on "small but certain happiness" | tala's blog
• ⭐️ killing the group chat (again) | yours, tiramisu

[27/100] for #100DaysToOffload

#100DaysToOffload #weeknotes