Recent books and media

Recent

"Gods behaving badly". Sitting on my to-buy pile for ages because I saw a good rec online. Greek gods in much reduced circumstances in the modern world. Felt more mainstream than fantasy. Fairly well done, but didn't add much over other similar books.

"Watership Down" Reading along with rmc's readthrough. I realised that when I said "I'd read it", everyone didn't automatically interpret that as "...every couple of years and love every chapter of it" (despite the flaws).

"Walking Dead #1" from humble bundle. Modern comic about classic zombie apocalypse. Good, but I need to decide if I can be bothered to read further.

"The Wicked and The Divine" about twelve gods who incarnate in the bodies of twelve people who die after two years, but live the high life in the meantime. I love the finger-clicking. Got the first volume and read the first two issues, definitely going further.

"Almighty Johnsons series #2", about Norse gods reborn in New Zealand. All the usual problems I'd expect from mainstream media, but less so than many, and funny and engaging. I only just realised how much of an innuendo the title is.

"West Wing" Finally saw series #3 thanks to ghoti.

"Misfits" UK TV show about young offenders in a community service program who get superpowers. I want to watch it in order so I bought the box set, but aren't really excited about each individual episode.

Upcoming

Hope to see "Big Hero 6" with Liv at the weekend if I have the dates right.

Legend of Korra season #2. I'm assured this gets more Korra-y and less love-triangle-y later on, so after not being sure after season #1 I bought the next one.

More "Sandman", the fifth absolute volume! Liv and I got this for Xmas and have been reading another chapter when we've had time, which has been not nearly enough. But we've been good about neither putting it off too much, not binging too much!

"Two serpents rise". I need to re-buy this!

"Foxglove summer" I said I'd wait for the paperback because I really really wanted to read it, but didn't need to read it right now and hate cluttering my shelves up with hardbacks. But now I'm regretting it, but the paperback is that much closer...

Maximum number of triangles

In Ingress, you get points for linking portals together to form triangles covering an area of the city. You contribute to your overall faction's score (ie. satisfaction but no personal benefit) according to total size, but get points for the number of triangles.

I brought this question to mathsjam, given a certain amount of resources invested in creating the links, what's the maximum number of triangles? If you ignore triangles composed of smaller triangles, someone helpfully figured out the only thing to look at is, if you make as many triangles as possible from N portals, the thing that determines how many is just, how many points are on the border, and how many are inside? So N points in a rough polygon suck for this. But N points where three of them form a triangle round all the others give you the most points for the number of portals you use.

The other question is, if you count triangles inside other triangles, what do you get? It's a common Ingress tip that if you make a small number of fields, don't bother making individual fields, wait until you find three points with another inside the triangle, and then you can get four fields from four portals (if you join all the possible links, but it only counts if you make one of the interior links last, which must be from the edge into the middle not the reverse iirc). If you're making a larger contiguous set of fields, I think it's worth creating "four portal four fields" when you can, but since you'd get three of them anyway, it's less important. And I think (not sure) things are rarely arranged so you can get multiple "four portals four fields" unless the portals are really dense (?)

This week

This week, things have been turning out pretty well, but have been difficult due to containing a lot of short-term deadlines and talking to people.

And due to having scheduled lots of stuff outside work I feel like I'm letting stuff I said I'd do slip, and I'm not quite sure when I will have time for that, which both makes me feel stressed, but also leads to things not getting done...

And I keep having temporary angst-flares, like I'm stressed for an hour but able to put it on the back burner until it evaporates again, not go into a spiral. Which I think means I'm handling things well, but I don't know for certain.

In brighter news, lots of things are still objectively going well. I'm re-establishing a pattern of getting to work by 9.15. And often leaving promptly, not the last second. I'm eating breakfast and doing other morning stuff every day. Lots of things I used to put off like doing washing are now easy to slot in when I have a few hours. I've mostly established a pattern of jogging at lunchtime which gives me more time in the evenings.

And significantly, now when I DO have an evening free, I can usually sensible tell if I'm tired to do much, in which case do low-decision stuff like housework, or if I want to catch up on things I said I'd do in which case I actually do, I don't just put it off to the last minute and do the things I absolutely need to. That's a pretty big win, because it means in order to get things done, I mostly only need to schedule free time, not to deal with a bunch of other impediments too.

But OTOH, I feel I levelled up in competence and time management -- at the same time as scheduling myself for doing more things. And I'm worried that's a pattern, I need to get ahead of the treadmill, and either level up faster or declare time-bankruptcy on some of the things I said I'd do, so I don't constantly level up to the point where I nearly have time to meet all my commitments, but never more than that. (As people say when they have their first child "I wish I'd known before I COULD make that much time for something in my life..." And again for their second child...)