February 21, 2021

2021.02.21
Did my usual 4-hour weekend facetime w/ my superniece Cora. Last week we started in with "ScratchJr", a beginner's programming kit that runs on tablets and I think phones and stuff, and this week she showed me some cool little scenes she did. She hasn't really gotten into the programming part yet (mostly she just has characters walk right for a bit) but she's doing some creative stuff with it!

It was interesting seeing her visibly soak in my praise for what she'd done. I need to find that balance of praising her legitimately cool things done so far with places where I'd like to see her push into with the tool-kit. How to get to "That's so cool, and..." and not "That's so cool, but".

I've been thinking lately about my relative emotional flatness. On a semi-tangent, one friend mentioned I was "mild-mannered" and while I appreciate the Clark Kent reference, it did make me wonder how I come across. Sometimes it gets on Melissa's nerves, or makes her worried, because I really am against letting emotions snowball so they start taking on a life of their own - when they become self-sustaining and you lose that connection with happenings in the outside world, it feels like they lack accountability, somehow, subject mostly to their own sometimes opaque logic.

At its worst, I worry I basically prefer to have two emotions, at varying degrees of intensity: satisfaction (I like this/love this/am proud of this) and annoyance (I would prefer this was otherwise.)
Ugh, couldn't embed it but this video on renovations for my alma mater Euclid High School was quite the trip down memory lane. Impressed at how many good programs they had. I didn't do any Votech, and missed out on doing any arts except band (and some drama) but it seems like they were doing a lot of great stuff, and were keeping a high quality college-prep/AP program.
A microphone on Mars is great, but if, for a fee, Nasa made it possible for people to blast their favorite beat on the planet, via a loudspeaker , it could pay for the entire mission.
j0hnk50, /r/Showerthoughts

Everything happens so much
@Horse_ebooks

They say "Life is just one damn thing after another," is a gross understatement. The damn things overlap.