Week 47, 2023
✱ Trying to take max advantage of my NBA League Pass subscription, I've watched at least two very nice basketball games this week. First, the duel between Raptors and Pistons last Sunday, when visitors won the game # 142-113 in an amazing presentation. Raptors are one of my favorite NBA teams, and this specific victory was not only amazing, but also a 44 assists franchise high, besides opening a large 39 point lead in the third quarter. Second, the Heats against Knicks in Madison Square Garden on Friday. Now, this game made me angry as a Heat fan: Miami led the whole. The w-h-o-l-e game. Just to completely throw away a 21 point lead it conquered during the third quarter. I couldn't believe my eyes as that advantage shrank by the minute... it was almost as if Miami was mimicking Botafogo, the Brazilian soccer team that led the Brasileiro Championship during almost all rounds until recently losing its 13 point lead completely and mixing with other 5 teams in an open ended decision for this year's soccer title 4 rounds from the end. Impressive, except that I don't care about Botafogo, whereas Heat losses make me sad.
✱ In preparation for me soon starting to read Julia, by American writer Sandra Newman, I'm rereading 1984 by George Orwell. “Julia” is a retelling of 1984, approved by George Orwell's estate, where the title character, Julia Worthing, is a mechanic who fixes the novel-writing machines in the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. A model citizen who believes in nothing and doesn't care about politics at all, her world becomes harder to live in when she becomes intrigued by a colleague from the Records Department named Winston Smith, with whom she commits sexcrime. I didn't know Sandra Newman, but if the New York Times' and The Guardian's reviews of her book can tell me anything, the story is highly readable, innovative, powerful, effective and entertaining. If it lives to the hype, and I'm pretty excited for it to do so, I'll read other books from the author — like The Country of Ice Cream Star, a post-apocalyptic literary epic in the tradition of The Handmaid's Tale, or The Men, where all people with a Y chromosome mysteriously disappear from the face of the earth inexplicably —, both of which I've already added to my “Want to Read” list in Literal, just in case.
✱ Both my sons convinced me to watch How to Become a Mob Boss, a new Netflix documentary series in six chapters narrated by Peter Dinklage, in the same fashion of How to Become a Tyrant, that we've watched as well. I say that they convinced me because the tyrant's documentary, although interesting to a point, wasn't my favorite. And so far, the episodes about the mob bosses didn't convince me: I've watched the first four, from which the only I liked was the first episode, featuring Al Capone. The others were just average and the fourth episode even had me nodding off a couple of times. I know that the closing episode features Pablo Escobar, that I know to have an interesting story. Maybe it will be what saves the series for me. As I'll likely watch the remaining two parts this weekend, time will tell.
✱ This week I worked a lot with my notes. It's been sometime now that I'm experimenting with using Wordpress as my main content hub, and that includes publishing my notes — all written in Brazilian Portuguese, my mother language. As a means to keep these pieces of knowledge in progress interconnected, I've even added a custom feature to the blog posts, to display incoming and outcoming links, that is, posts that are linked from the current post and posts that link to the current post. This way I hope to promote better mobility between linked thoughts, and a better experience to whomever reads them. It's still a test, so I might change a piece here or there, but if anyone wants to give me feedback, it's always welcome 🤗
✱ I have recently signed up for Purely Mail as a paid email solution. As their name says, they only provide e-mail, IMAP and POP3, at a very affordable price: $10 a year, the same amount I pay for another excellent solution, Bitwarden, for password management — or even less, if you decide to use their advanced pricing and pay directly for resources used. And the best about it is that there are no hard limits on users, custom domains, storage, or anything else. It's been a couple of weeks I'm using Purely Mail now with accounts for two domains that I own, and I'm really satisfied. So much more that I wish I had known them before.