Week Notes 34

This post is 33 of 34 in the series week notes.

General #

Reading #

I’m still reading Sed Nur Fragmento by Trevor Steele. It is so good. As I mentioned last week, it really leans in to the Esperanto literature trope of hyper-focussing on language. For example, there is a scene where an indigenous person from the South Pacific is possessed by a demon. To highlight the fact that something super-natural is happening, Steele has the demon speak to the main character, Maklin, in Russian. That scene was so creepy, for reasons above and beyond language, that I got a bit nervous walking up to the bedroom with the lights off.

After finishing War and Peace on the Kobo, I essentially haven’t used it at all. I was thinking of various possible follow-up books to read after War and Peace. Immediately, my mind went to re-reading Anna Karenina. After a bit of pondering, I realized that I wanted more long, beautiful, reflective prose. I love Tolstoy’s omniscient, omnipresent, omnibenevolant narration. A sort of holistic approach to narration that doesn’t leave any stone unturned.

So, like, maybe I want to read In Search of Lost Time by Proust? It’s certainly a long read. I picked it up from the library to check it out and got through the first twenty pages, which are a long and somewhat obsessive reflection on going to sleep and waking up. I might stick with it, I’m not sure yet.

Writing #

Playing #

This week, I’m writing up a multiple choice test for my course. Typically, I don’t give multiple choice tests, so this is new for me. Immediately, my mind goes to to making a ~~smoldering heap of scripts~~
software package for assembling multiple choice tests. Something to do versioning, answer key scrambling, question selection, etc. It would be sweet to be able to say: “Give a test and solution key with 30 questions, with this coverage, and scramble all the answers.”

I think that this is such a Linux user problem to have: “I’m doing something for the very first time, and I immediately want to generalize it and code it in a bunch of fancy ways.”

Moving #

Links #

Dividing responsibilities at home • Otherwise: A thoughtful write-up about dividing child care responsibilities.
- Introduced me to the term “watch team backup” — a great little bit of language about confirming things.
🗓️ Weeknote 2025-W42: Zak has a rad vegetable garden. It is cool to see a New Zealander gardening, because the growing season there is opposite the growing season in North America.
[1912.03115] W. P. Thurston and French mathematics by François Laudenbach and Athanase Papadopoulos
AP Calculus Multiple Choice Questions Collection 1969-1998

Published: Oct 14, 2025 @ 12:00.

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