I have previously written about how I unwittingly found myself at the center of an accidental community with a shared desire for a stable, reliable tiling windows manager for Windows.
Despite the huge growth of komorebi users, I remain for all intents and purposes the sole developer of the codebase.
Several of the most important aspects of komorebi today however are in large part thanks to community contributions. In no particular order:
I am the only deaf person in my family. I’m 24 years old and none of them learned ASL or only took one course. They hardly know the alphabet and can say “bathroom”.
I do not go to my family gatherings because no one is able to communicate with me. When they do, they talk REALLY loud and only ask me “small talk” questions. They are hell bent on me coming around, because “we’re a family and we love you”.
It was during the shutdowns of 2020 that I became increasingly frustrated with my Intel MacBook pro. It was slow, loud and hot; all the things that many people, myself included, dislike about laptops.
I decided to build a PC. After a month or so spent scouring the internet for parts, I had assembled a PC. I ran Pop!_OS for a while, but this being my first desktop machine in over a decade, I spent a fair about of time dual booting into Windows to play all the video games that I missed out on as a macOS user.
Since my last post back in June, I have been steadily eating at a surplus while focusing my training on powerlifting. During this period I have run three different programmes:
While I was cutting I was running a full body calisthenics-focused programme three-to-four days a week, but I had been wanting to try a split programme which would allow me to train with more frequency throughout the week. The idea that was stuck in my head was that more volume throughout the week would result in more progress at a faster rate, and given that I would be largely starting from scratch again with the squat, the bench press and the deadlift, this seemed like a good way to get in a lot of practice of those movements.
Some time around early May I decided to change up my eating habits. Since January 2016 I have been working on cutting body fat, conquering my appetite and improving my poor eating habits. By May I felt I had reached a point where the returns I was getting from eating at a deficit were diminishing; my stomach was flat, my abs were visible, and my relationship with food had substantially changed for the better.
After switching from an iPhone to an Android device at the end of last year, my content consumption workflow changed significantly. I stopped reading articles on my phone due to the poor experience provided by the Android version of the Instapaper App, and I started checking my RSS feeds once a day on my laptop rather than on my phone.
This new approach to getting through my feeds helped me to remove a lot of the noise from subscriptions, and also got me thinking about whether certain topics really required a feed subscription when I was usually being exposed to the latest on those topics either via word of mouth or just through browsing the front page of Reddit. As a result, it’s no longer necessary for me to check Reeder every day, and I am currently able to stay on top of my subscriptions by going through them a couple of times a week.
Just over a month ago I decided to start learning Italian. I have previously studied French and Spanish and can speak both languages fairly confidently (though French perhaps more so than Spanish), so I began studying Italian with an idea of what works for me when it comes to the study of Romance languages.
I had previously written of my desire to compare my experience learning Italian in 2017 to my experiences learning other languages, particularly Romance languages, in previous years when I was still trying to consolidate something resembling a coherent language learning strategy.
When I started learning languages in my late teenage years, I began with French and Persian. French, like most European languages, uses an alphabetic writing system, whereas Persian, like many languages in the Middle East uses an abjad writing system. I later also learned north Indian languages which use abugida writing systems, and last year I began learning Japanese which makes use of both syllabic and logographic writing systems.
If you’re reading this article you’ll be familiar with alphabetic writing systems, where individual symbols generally represent both vowels and consonants. With abjad writing systems, each symbol generally represents a consonant and the responsibility of determining the correct vowels between those consonants falls with the reader, though modern abjad writing systems such as the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets have optional diacritic marks or symbols that can represent some vowels.
At the beginning of 2016 I was overweight. My frame since childhood had been wiry, and through adolescence to young adulthood, finding myself a victim of pop culture’s false dichotomy of intellectualism/athleticism, my activity levels decreased and my percentage of body fat rose. My activity levels as an undergraduate student were already low, but I was not prepared for just how physically static my life would become when I began working. In retrospect, being overweight at the start of 2016 seems like the natural conclusion to the decisions that I had been making over the previous decade.
When I initially set a goal for myself, nine times out of ten it will be abstract and unmeasurable; not particularly useful in the long run, but enough to get me moving in the right direction.
My specific fitness goal for 2017 is to be able to hold an l-sit on gymnastics rings, and this goal is helping to shape my long-term approach to fitness throughout the year. On the other hand, I have not had any sort of equivalently defined goal when it comes to writing; it has essentially just been ‘improve writing skills’.