This piece was done with marker on paper. I was maybe going to use it as preliminary work for a painting but ultimately decided against it.
Today was good. The weather was ideal and I spent most of the day editing the new novel. Then my dad and I went out for tacos and I was interviewed for a friend's podcast. The podcast was low key. I just answered a couple of questions about the informal economy and Rstory.
Turning forty tomorrow, I've been reflecting on the past and listening to other people's experiences of reaching this age. A common theme that's emerged from this is the idea of failing to live up to expectations about what one should have accomplished by forty. Some people told me they wished they'd accomplished more. I don't share their regret.
Much of my twenties and thirties was spend dealing with chronic illness. Despite this, perhaps motivated by it in some strange way, I painted hundreds of pictures and wrote several books. Now I feel as if I've done about the right amount of stuff for my age. While I may regret some things I've done, I don't regret not doing more.
I have no grand plans for the next year beyond publishing the novel I've just finished and probably also writing another novel. Maybe I'll paint more. Or figure out how to more effectively market Rstory. Time will tell.
At the coffee shop today, a friend was wondering what AI project they should do for a class they were taking. An object classifier was what we came up with. But the chat brought up the last machine learning project I did, which used k-means clustering to sort visually similar documents into groups. I was trying to make declassified CIA documents easier for computers to organize. In the end, my code worked fine but the results proved too ambiguous to be useful.
I spent dozens of hours on that project with no useful result. Sure, having tens of thousands of MK-ULTRA documents converted from government issued TIFFs to convenient PNGs will be nice if it ever comes up. And my python skills benefited from the experience. But the project yielded little for how much work it was. I've done many projects like this over the years. I'd like to think I'm getting better at avoiding them, but who knows.
There's something I enjoy about binging on tedious work to obscure ends. It's engaging and relaxing at the same time. The trick I'm still learning is how to steer clear of dead ends before beginning such a binge. This past year, my slow learning in this respect resulted in several dead end writing projects. Hard to say what the year to come will bring.
