No new posts in August. I’m halfway done editing a piece on knowledge bases and second brains, a sort of sober companion to something I wrote nearly five years ago (opens in new tab). But editing is hard and writing is harder, and so here I am postless at the end of the month. Shouldn’t be too much longer though! In other news, I again thought about changing blog SSGs (although of course I didn’t actually change anything) and I also improved the test coverage in my R package (opens in new tab).
The countdown to the half marathon stands at three weeks, and I’ll start tapering soon. This month I’ve been incorporating more subthreshold work into my training, often substituted for Pfitz’s V̇O2 max runs, which mostly left me too banged up to make meaningful progress on subsequent days. On subthreshold days I’ve been working through the different time- and distance-based intervals in this Norwegian Singles calculator (opens in new tab) to dispel monotony. I’ve also tried to see how many squares on HealthFit (opens in new tab) I can fill in across the city grid, leading to more varied routes and a couple 5am encounters with curious local fauna.
On the film side, I’ve been catching up on the best (worst?) that 2025 has offered us thus far: Thunderbolts, F1, Even More Jurassic World, and so on. Nothing much to write about, although on the bright side I dipped into some highly enjoyable slightly older fare with Kazik Radwanski’s Matt and Mara (opens in new tab). A stellar-as-usual Deragh Campbell performance sits atop as uncomfortably specific a film as Radwanski’s ever made — recommended if you’re into Canadian literary mumblecore. Next month I’d like to close out Mia Hansen-Løve’s filmography; I’ve saved both her first and latest for just such an occasion.
My phone tells me I’m spending too much time reading Reddit. It’s the only social media-adjacent site I browse (not counting Hacker News, which I mostly use as a link aggregator) so perhaps my six hours of screen time could be excused, and doubly so given that I’ve been scouring r/AdvancedRunning (opens in new tab) for ideas lately. But on the whole it’s mostly wasted time — couldn’t tell you what my non-research-related browsing taught me, or what I internalized from that reading. It’s an idea I might want to work into that knowledge base post I’m trying to finish…