2018 Retrospective

Monday, December 31, 2018

Tag: retrospective

My first complete year living in San Francisco felt much more eventful than the six in Palo Alto. The constant pull of the city meant less downtime for side-projects but I think the tradeoff was well worth it. The following is a bunch of stuff I read, watched, listened to or attended in 2018.

Non-fiction

Kinda jumped all over the place this year, my goal for 2019 is to form a discipline writing more notes and summaries.

Fiction

Liu Cixin’s trilogy blew my mind, I wish more people were talking about it in depth. Diamond Age was also an exciting thought experiment around the effects of nano-scale 3D printing.

Articles

Stewart Brand’s concept of Pace Layering and Dan Wang’s thoughts on process knowledge helped enlighten my generally optimistic view of the world. Dan’s back catalog is full of insight and I’ve finally just started digging into Farnam Street.

Conversations

Stumbled on Tyler Cowen for the first time and went pretty deep into his back catalog. Same for Joe Rogan who I had resisted listening to for a while for no particular reason. The rabbit holes here are deep, you have been warned.

Presentations

I’ve been a Long Now member for a couple years now and finally living in the city eliminated any excuses not to attend the monthly Seminars on Long-Term Thinking. Snagging a front row seat thirty minutes ahead of the event was so fun as the cast of characters who I really admire file into the SF Jazz auditorium.

The Interval talks are hard to get into but I usually catch the livestream. They tend to be more intimate with a free-form Q&A.

Events

Quite possibly the highlight of my year. To prepare I found three Whole Earth catalogs and started tweeting excerpts.

Movies & TV

Didn’t watch many movies or TV due to the lack of television but I did enjoy a few things on my phone.

Music

Albums on repeat, some new to 2018 and some not.