Last week: a houseboat trip, impending launch at Chronicle, a blog transition plan & personal fitness progress.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post.

What’s been happening

• We went to Vembanad kayal and stayed in a houseboat over the weekend. It has become a lot more commercial compared to the last time I went, and the water quality is a lot worse. But it’s nice to get out of the city once in a while. I’m a bit tired today: it’s around a 4 hour drive one way: we left Saturday morning and came back today. Sooraj & Lekshmi are good company, and here are some photos I took:

• We’re soft-launching this week at Chronicle, and it’s been a happy rush to get everything sorted. I worked on a couple of features since I joined, one of which didn’t quite make the cut for the launch date. The other one did: and it’ll be the first thing you see when you sign up: the onboarding 🙂

• I’ve been slowly planning out how to move this blog away from WordPress.com before it comes up for renewal. I think I’m going to stick with WordPress (just because moving away is going to be a pain) but I’ll probably move this to an AWS Lightsail instance. I’ll stick with Jetpack for subscriptions, but probably switch to a Tailwind-based theme. This will probably be my weekend project when I can spare some time.

• I really liked this video about photography and its views on editing. I think its particularly relevant now that artists can now create pretty much any photo they can dream of: so what’s the relevance of an authentic photo? This pretty much mirrors what happened to painting once you had a medium that was better than it at realism: painting was liberated from “just depicting facts” and instead could be art.

• I’ve been talking to a couple of friends about (re)learning some of the foundations of mathematics that I didn’t pick up enough in school and college, but it seems like such an uphill slog. I do wish there were friendly courses around that taught mathematics like all the zillions out there that taught programming: or better yet, used programming to teach mathematics.

• I played a little bit more of the Oblivion remaster after work this week, but the going was slow. I just escaped from the prison, killed a few bandits & completed a delve. Progress is slow, it’s kinda hard to devote the time required for a game like Oblivion now.

• I’m on a keto diet, and lost about 6 kilos over the last 3 months or so. It’s made me a lot healthier, and closer to my ideal bodyweight, but better yet, it’s made my gut fat come down quite a lot. I’ll do a bit more cutting, and then switch to a more balanced diet. I haven’t managed to restart workouts properly, but I want to add in some light yoga soon.

Links of the Week

• This collection of stills from Ghibli movies is super nice.

• Really liked this One Raga to a Disco Beat cover by Glass Beams.

• I’ve already linked to one of Cody’s photography video this week, but here’s another brilliant one where he dissects how amateur photographers can improve based on their sample photos.

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