My thoughts on the craft, the process and the subjects
This is the ink of the last panel on page 2. It’s the first time all four characters appear in the same frame. I thought it would be a good time to use a kind of “the knights of the round table” perspective to show them as a group.
These are the rest of the supporting characters in my short fluids-related crime story. I enjoyed developing them and making concept drawings early on. However, simplifying those for this inking stage, so that the characters would hopefully be recognizable and easy enough to draw multiple times from various angles was not trivial. In fact, I had to come back to these panels and tweak them quite a bit as I progressed further into the book.
Here is the ink of the first panel on the second page of my fluids comic book. The second page was easier to conceptualize than the first one, since it was a straightforward introduction of the supporting characters. Among them, I had a clearest vision of this one, Trevis, and as a consequence, he changed the least from the initial character design stage.
This is the ink of the last two panels on the first page of my fluids comic book. The first closeup of one of the main characters required quite a bit of thinking through in order to simplify the original character design. Professionals like Victoria Ying say that by the end of the inking process one becomes very good at drawing the main characters, because they appear so often. I am certainly looking forward to that, but in the meantime, I was quite glad to simply finish the first page.
Here is the ink of the third panel of my fluids comic book. When I was laying out this panel, I made a decision to use a 3D model for the backgrounds, and now that I am several pages into inking, I am certainly glad that I did so. Considering that the story takes place in the same room full of small details, maintaining consistency of the set without the ability to simply re-position the camera would have been impossible.
Fiction:
I’ve been postponing reading Asimov’s books, and this one demonstrated that I was wrong. It is a classic for a reason. Amazing prose and very cool characters.
Non-fiction:
It’s interesting to listen to a personal opinion on the nature and meaning of life of a historian and philosopher written at the end of his long life, spent documenting experiences of other people. It is also curios that the manuscript of this book was actually lost and published only after Durant’s death. Also amazing how demonstrably misled even such educated and academically-minded person could be about topics that are only marginally beyond his field of study. I suppose, it’s an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
I liked the idea of interconnectedness of the psychological balance and physical wellness. One example that I particularly liked was on the undeniable effectiveness of placebo (as well as its opposite, the nocebo) in various medical trials. This book has about the maximum amount of woo-woo that I can tolerate without immediately becoming too skeptical to continue listening. What also helps is that the author has a traditional scientific background, which add certain structure to the presentation of the ideas.
I was a bit skeptical about this book because of a somewhat cheesy title, but I was pleasantly surprised. It is largely about the nature of self-sabotage and ways of avoiding it. One message that resonated particularly well was the necessity to normalize the new psychological state, e.g., feeling happy, in order to shift the baseline towards it. I will certainly consider Weist’s follow-up books as future reads.
I came across referenced to this book before, but this is the first time I listened to the entire thing. It was reviewed in the “Perpetual Chess” podcast that I sometimes listen to while walking the dog. It’s a very structured, for a popular science book, overview of study and teaching methodologies. The main takeaways for me were that Spacing and interleaving of practice constitute desirable difficulties. Also, tat generative self-quizzing is more effective than multiple-choice type or re-reading of the material.
I heard about this autobiography any time in the podcasts that I follow, most notably “The Tim Ferris Show”, but finally I decided to listen to it. It’s an excellent book indeed. Very entertaining, insightful and inspiring. It is also another example of the benefit of the audio format, where the author and the reader is the same person. It also helps that he is a good actor.
Some thoughts about the conventional concept of a career, and how outdate it is in the modern world. There is an attempt to hammer in this point with some statistics, but the rigor of the statistical analysis is a bit suspect, and I think the point is clear enough without all the surrounding fuss. The stories are entertaining, but there author is trying a bit too hard to deliver the point that diversity is paramount when considering the variety of jobs and occupations in the modern world.
Well, Brianna Weist has certainly been the author of the year for me. I re-listened to “The Mountain is You” and liked this book too. It is clearly a compilation of blog posts, which is actually quite inspiring.
My app shows that finished listening to this book to the end, but at the time of this writing, I have no recollection of what I learned from it. I should definitely be more diligent with taking notes, but it probably says something about the book too.
This is excellent. I found this summary of thoughts about the creative process very relatable, despite the author’s background in music production, which is quite foreign to me.
I remember that I enjoyed it, although struggle to recall what specifically I learned.
That was a very nice read (listen). I enjoyed the overview of the author’s personal journey to “amateur buddhism”. It inspired me to read a couple more books on Buddhism immediately afterwards.
The author was featured i “10% Happier” as Dan Harris’ mentor/teacher, so I decided to take a look (listen) at his work. It was quite nice. My favourite part is the anecdote about locking the keys in the car immediately after a mindfullness retreat and being Ok with it.
This is another reference from “10% Happier”. For what it worth, my app shows that I abandoned it at 52%.
A cool concept, but the author’s tangents about how amazing and non-conformist he is detracts from the experience quite a bit. If anything, it indirectly confirms the idea of the inherent value of formal education.
A biography of Napoleon. One of my favourite books this year.
I’ve been listening to an audiobook called “Make It Stick” by Peter C. Brown et al. In the past, I’ve come across to references to this work on educational methodologies and underlying psychological principles in my work as a university professor. I even recorded a video note to my students on the so-called curve of forgetting (see below). This time, I stumbled upon a review of this book in the “Perpetual Chess” podcast and decided to listen to the entire thing. It certainly doesn’t disappoint in terms of the academic soundness of the presented ideas and a good mix of psychological principles and practical takeaways. As I listen to it, I am constantly tempted to ask my daughter to listen to some parts that relate to study skills in the hopes that she would be able to use these techniques for herself. I actually did so the other day and, in the spirit of what is argued in the book, even asked her to summarize what she learned in her own words. I probably used up quite a bit of my parenting credit with her, as she obliged. I am not sure if that was in any way productive, but for what it’s worth, here is my own summary of that part (advice for students) that we listened to together:
One thing I noticed as a result of this exercise is that my “spaced repetition” video needs a footnote that it is not re-reading of the material that is beneficial, but self-quizzing of it.
Continuing our family tradition of reading physical, hardcopy books before bed, we started reading the original Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Those were my favourite reads when I was growing up, and the one-volume collection of “all four novels and fifty-six adventure” was the first book that my wife and I bought for ourselves when we were graduate students. It took me some time to find this massive tome in the bookcase, and we started from the beginning – “A Study in Scarlet.”
Both my daughter and I enjoyed the description of how Dr. Watson got introduced to Sherlock Holmes’ extraordinary deductive abilities. There is one episode early in the book, though, where Holmes describes his approach to accumulating knowledge, with which I don’t completely agree (in my defence, neither does Dr. Watson, i.e., presumably, Doyle himself). There, Watson is astonished that Holmes didn’t know about the heliocentric model of the solar system, and that he was intent on forgetting it as soon as possible after learning about it. Here is how Holmes justified it:
” “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance , therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.” “
This is a compelling argument, but I suspect that the assumption about the rigidity of the boundaries of one’s brain-attic is wrong, particularly in the modern times. Perhaps, another, more up-to-date analogy is with the contents of the Photos app on a smartphone. Certainly, you could max out the memory if you take a ton of useless pictures and videos, but you can also upgrade your cloud storage or even the phone itself. And the AI-based search algorithms continually improve, to the point that the suggested compilations of “memories” rival those put together by humans. So the danger of not being able to retrieve useful information is not particularly great. Also, even without computer-augmented mental abilities, collecting broad information trains memory, if nothing else. Improved memory, in turn, increases our capacity to accumulate more information and, possibly, convert it to knowledge.
Incidentally, I’ve learned that Doyle himself was quite a bit more of a renaissance man than his most famous character, although even Holmes was an amateur violinist. In addition to being world-famous as a writer, Doyle had a successful medical carrier and was an accomplished athlete (footballer, golfer, boxer, skier and one of the first bodybuilding enthusiasts) and an amateur, but serious and successful, architect. I don’t think that this impressive lists of pursuits and accomplishments would have been possible if he had limited his interests and studies to medicine, which was his intended profession early on.
In defense of Sherlock Holmes’ approach, I think thatbeing selective about what to learn and what to ignore probably protected him from falling victim to the Dunning-Krueger effect. That’s a cognitive bias, where we overestimate or abilities due to limited competence in a particular domain. In other words, we often theorize or even act without knowing enough to even realize that we don’t know enough about what we are doing. For example, like me talking about cognitive psychology because of my interest in it but without any systematic knowledge of the field.
In the spirit of keeping a tradition of publishing a list of books that I’ve read outside of work in the past year, here is the list for 2023. I believe in active reading, that is, taking notes on what I learn in the process, even if that relates to the writing style, the genre, the authors, etc. I am not always diligent with the note-taking, but I am always glad when I am in the retrospect.
Note: The links below are affiliate links, so if you follow them to Amazon and buy something, I might get paid some money.
Fiction:
I really like the high-tech thriller genre and also find the bio of Suarez inspiring. He is a tech consultant turned author. Makes me wonder whether I need permission to do the same. Maybe, the first thing I need is discipline to write more regularly.
Great for fans of conspiracy theories. That’s all I am going to say to avoid spoilers.
A biotech-themed thriller. I’ve been struggling a bit to get though it, for some reason, but I do like it in general.
Non-fiction:
This year, non-fiction audiobooks have largely replaced for me podcasts, which I usually listen to while walking the dog.
Something about the benefits of vulnerability. I remember that it did resonate, but don’t recall in what way exactly. The unrealistic expectations that the society puts on us – something along these lines.
I came across this book by browsing Daniel Pink’s website. It explores the analogy between innovations in social groups and organizations and phase transitions in physical systems. Dynamic equilibrium of strong bonds and entropy – need separation of the phases, but also an easy flow of information between them. Analogy with franchises and original films. One of the core messages: Equally love your soldiers (who are running the franchises) and artists (who are creating the original ideas).
A reminder of the gap between the events that happen around us and our reactions to them. Critique of the “positive thinking” approach.
A neat discussion of our relation to the older generation. We think in terms of “us vs. them” and fear losing individuality, but our past experience points to the opposite – we gain individuality as we age.
Short, but sweet. I liked the concept of classifying the regrets into one of the four main categories: foundational, boldness, ethics, connection. Anticipating a future regret can be productive, if it would fall into one f these categories. If not, it’s better to be a “satisfiser” and make a quick decision.
Thinking is for doing, feeling is for thinking. When dealing with a regret, self-disclose, exercise self-compassion (think what you would say to a friend in a similar situation) and use self-distancing (talk to yourself in a third person).
The concept of jumping to the “second curve” of once life trajectory, once the performance starts to decline.
Utilize the accumulated crystallized intelligence once the fluid intelligence begins to fade.
Need of shedding the attachment to success, which is rooted in the fear of failure, in order make jumping onto the second curve easier. Good read.
Values and virtues are not the same. Values are what you believe, and virtues are what you do. If you don’t do what you believe, you won’t become what you’d like to be.
This book was good, if a bit short. I like the idea of optimizing the personal well-being on the timescale of the day, instead of the lifestyle. This approach can probably create problems related to planning and discipline if applied beyond reason, but it certainly help with small decisions, which accumulate for a larger affect. Tom Rath also wrote “Eat, sleep move” (which I haven’t read). He refers to it in this book, and the title is self-explanatory – prioritize healthy eating, exercise and sleep on the daily basis. Over-arching thesis of the book, though is that applying effort and resources to increase well-being of other people is more beneficial for you than directly aiming at maximizing your own happiness.
Another Navy SEAL – inspired read. This one is a memoir, which is a bit of a different read for me. It’s is difficult to fill Jocko Williks’ shoes in this genre, though. I dropped the book at the third chapter – the bogus claims and inconsistencies are too difficult to ignore. Paraphrasing Thoreau, what the author doesn’t say shouts so loudly in my ears, I cannot hear what he is saying. In retrospect, I rarely have such negative impressions of books as of this one.
Good summary of the common human manipulation techniques and an insight into why they don’t work in the long run.
In the modern society, playfulness is almost automatically associated with something opposite of a serious endeavour, but this is a mistake. Playfulness has serious consequences on our health and productivity, both individually and in groups. It is obviously important for children in terms of teaching them the value of risk-taking, social interactions, etc., but it is also important for adults in terms of stress management, promoting creativity and developing social skills. This book is preaching to the converted, but I enjoyed it.
This book points out the importance of altered states of consciousness for peak performance, particularly by groups of people. I find the attempts to support the arguments by numbers laughable – they would be ridiculously easy to pick apart by any critic with a functioning pre-frontal cortex. Incidentally, it is over-riding the activity of this part of the brain that is apparently needed for transcending the individuality and achieving the extasis – tapping into the hive mind. I am admittedly not a fan of the hive model of the future humankind. It is certainly fascinating what can be achieved by a hive mentality, but somehow the prospect of forgoing the free will completely while keeping the creativity doesn’t sit well with me. According to the authors, forward-thinking individuals are taking the excursions over the artificial fences erected by the society (the “pales” of the Church, the Body and the State) to take advantage of the altered states of consciousness. Perhaps, they are right, and we just don’t notice it, just like we don’t want to admit that we are becoming cyborgs by wearing eyeglasses, prosthetic devices or wearable electronics. For what it’s worth, I also do drink coffee every day, and it probably does something to my consciousness (hopefully, good things mostly).
I was familiar with the main ideas in this book, as they’ve been re-told by other authors, but the writing is very good. It shows why Kahneman is a Nobel laureate.
I liked the idea of the importance of introducing names to concepts that would otherwise be collections of properties and facts, e.g., “System 1” and “System 2” of the fast and slow thinking, respectively. It is easier for people to relate to agents, i.e. characters with names and assumed traits and personalities, than to sets of properties. It is also important for the names to me short, because the more information we need to keep in our short-term memory while pronouncing the name the less is our capacity for thinking.
An excellent summary of the author’s experience with reviewing the vast literature on the finite nature of human life and its relationship with time. For me, one of the practical takeaways is limiting the number of the “on the go” projects to a maximum of three for any given day in order to avoid the feeling of overwhelm.
An entertaining discussion of the common key messages from the significant philosophical and religious works of the past, including the limitations of the specific ideas. I liked the discussion of the stoics in particular, with an added twist of the balance between striving to improve your external conditions and to accept them, while focussing on managing your internal reactions.
A nice collection of rule-of-thumb principles for improving physical quality of life based on a wide, if not scientifically rigorous, literature survey. Useful takeways for me personally: tackle all three components listed in the title of the book simultaneously, because they are closely related and avoid long periods of inactivity during the day.
Upon listening to this book, I found many examples of ikigai in my own various activities. Building gunpla is a particularly good example – you start small and don’t expect any particular success or recognition for your efforts. It is truly an autotelic activity.
This isn’t rally a book, but rather a collection of recordings, probably lectures, by Csikszentmihalyi himself. It is different from his book “Flow: The psychology of optimal experience“, which one of my all-time favourite reads, but it covers the same concepts. It certainly hasn’t been a waste of time to listen to it. Csikszentmihalyi is a great speaker, and listening to this book confirmed to me that it is great to listen to the author reading their own works, whenever there is an opportunity. You receive a clear sense of what the intended emphasis is, and this added emotional content makes the material easier to internalise, if nothing else.
I am glad I picked up an audio version, because this book is huge! I like Isaacson’s biographies, and this one did not disappoint. Musk is a polarising character, but the book itself made me think about some questions, on which I would typically fall into one of the two distinct camps, without much consideration. Those are “Does it actually take a somewhat sociopathic individual to inflict a major change on the society?” and “Is it ok to be a jerk in some areas of your life if you are doing wonderful things in another?” Upon consideration, I think my personal answers to these questions are “Very likely” and “No”.
I liked this summary of the positive psychology milestones.
I didn’t write any notes on this book as I was listening to it, and now I am struggling to recall what I’ve learned from it. This observation is probably saying something about the book by itself.
I’ve been a huge fan of Arnold since my teen years, and this book is my favourite of the year. I really enjoyed that it was read by Arnold himself, and it did’t disappoint in terms of the content as well. I found the autobiographical take interesting and Schwarzenegger’s approach to the various challenges that he faced throughout his life quite motivating. There are certain parallels with Jocko Willink’s no-nonsense ability to focus and a good balance between privacy and vulnerability. I will seriously consider re-listening to this book in the future.
I came back to this series on Stoics and the cardinal virtues after a break (it gets repetitive after a while), and found that I missed it and Holiday’s style of presenting it.
This book is, technically, the first one in the series on the four cardinal virtues (courage, temperance, justice and wisdom), but I listened to it after the “Discipline is destiny”, mostly for the sake of completeness. I am ready for another break from the Stoics now.
I noticed some time ago that photography, which started for me as a hobby, rapidly lost it’s appeal when I began treating it as a business. This phenomenon is not unique to me, of course. Many photographers say that becoming a pro is a sure way to kill a perfectly fine hobby. It is not surprising either, since any job, no matter how fun it is, has some dreadful elements, buy definition of a job. These are things like deadlines and, more generally, the obligation to meet external expectations.
The good news is that, according to Csikszentmihalyi, it is totally in my power to maintain flow, or at least maximize the amount of time spent in the flow state. After all, the attention split between the conflicting objectives happens entirely in my head. The trick, for the lack of a better word, is to convince myself to take interest in what needs to be done and to apply mental energy in order to increase the complexity of the activity at hand. For example, if a business-related task requires attention, it would be wise to make that the focus of the activity and strive to become really good at it. Conversely, it helps to recognize that the necessary attribute of an autotelic activity is that it needs to be done without any expectation of an external reward or future utility. It is certainly easier said than done, at least for me personally, but it does help to be reminded that “wasting time” on fun things is, upon consideration, not wasteful at all. In fact, it is often the best possible thing I can do.
