For the first time in awhile, I have a bit of slack. Family, friends, and work have entered a maintenance phase where the course is set and I’m ahead of responsibilities. While I typically avoid setting specific goals (happy enough to just keep the plates spinning another year), in 2025 I’m aiming to use that slack to get more out of the things I do.

Spanish

This year I aim to get my Spanish up to a child’s conversational level, i.e. A2 CEFR.

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Spoilers Abound

I’d like to read Pynchon’s epic historical fictions as an upwards arc towards grace, reflecting the author’s own journey. Over the course of his life Thomas Pynchon wrote three sprawling historical fictions that form an unofficial trilogy. The earliest time period covered is the late 18th century in Mason & Dixon (M&D), followed by the pre-WW1 Against the Day (AtD), and finally the post-WW2 Gravity’s Rainbow (GR).

I first read the trilogy in the order Pynchon wrote them as opposed to chronological: Pynchon started with the overwhelming GR, then the relatively poignant M&D, and wrapped with AtD. And, looking back on the three,, I’d argue that despite the temporal juxtaposition, leading with GR provides the most uplifting view to Pynchon’s history.

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A beautiful passage from the foreword of Nabokov’s Pale Fire (p. 454), one which I find particularly evocative coming into ‘25:

I am looking at him. I am winessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse. And I experienced the same thrill as when in my early boyhood I once watched across the tea table in my uncle’s castle a conjurer who had just given a fantastic performance and was now quietly consuming a vanilla ice. I stared at his powdered cheeks, at the magical flower in his buttonhole where it had passed through a succession of different colors and had now become fixed as a white carnation, and especially at his marvelous fluid-looking fingers which could if he chose make his spoon dissolve into a sunbeam by twiddling it, or turn his plate into a dove by tossing it up in the air.

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Spoilers Abound

Lately I’ve been traversing the universes of Against the Day (2006). Pynchon’s multiverse is enabled by a trick of the light at the end of the 19th century: he tunes into alternative realities by splitting light and taking the polarization that projects “to the side of the day”:

“Yes yes but suppose, suppose when they split that light beam, that one half of it is Michelson’s and the other is his partner Morley’s, which turns out to be the half the comes back with the phases perfectly matched up – but under slightly different conditions, alternative axioms, there could be another pair that don’t match up, see, in fact millions of pairs, that sometimes you could blame it on the Æther, sure, but other cases maybe the light goes someplace else, takes a detour and that’s why it shows up late and out of phase because it went where Blinky was when he was invisible, and –”

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My rural internet is slow, expensive and unreliable. None of the major providers offer service to our address, so we receive data over a local fixed wireless access (FWA) provider.

To see if there are better alternatives, I benchmarked my current FWA service against other wireless alternatives, e.g. Starlink and a cellular 5G / LTE.

tl;dr: Starlink provided the best speed at the best value.

Some methodology: I used Google’s internet speed test (top o Google) to measure download and upload speed, taking the average of three observations for each measurement. For consistency all measurements were taken from the same location (next to the Wifi hardware), using the same device (my laptop).

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