The now page

My now page, inspired by D Sivers - what I’m up to now.

August/September 2024

End of July and August have been very much a lot about sport: Olympics, Paralympics, Athletics events. I’ve had a great time watching sport, the kind of sport which is less mainstream (and that I like the most).

German learning continues well, I’ve also signed up to a couple of Meetups for conversation, and I found the Seedlang app, kinda like Duolinguo but much more effective and useful IMHO.

June/July 2024

German learning

I’m well into working towards a B1 level, I’ve started taking conversation lessons and having great fun with them. I’ve started reading simple books without the frustrating need to check every other word, speaking flows quite nicely despite the many mistakes and rules I still need to solidify, and I’m learning a lot about culture/history too. Really happy with the progress, I am to be (about) finished with the B1 by end of year and jump onto B2.

Movies, shows, podcasts, books

I’m being a bit slow with my book-reading this year and in fact I’m quite sure I won’t hit the goodreads goal (35). Not a problem, I’m reading a lot of papers and articles so there’s enough good info flowing in outside of books. Podcasts remain a favourite activity for a walk at the park, check out the list I maintain. For movies and shows, while waiting for a bunch of things to release new seasons (Cobra Kai, Stranger Things and I lost track of others) I’m watching Fallout on Prime - popular dystopic vibes (I should investigate the growth of popualrity of these) but really good and quite layered.

Update: Fallout really is awesome, I’ll try writing something about it.

I’ve also finished the Russian empire season on Empire, amazing walks with it.

Reading

This year I’m doing the Footnotes/Tangents readalong of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, going well so far and loving the read. It’s likely a text I’d have felt intimidated (due to size) to read otherwise.

Going around

I’ve been to Italy, but also to Dublin and York. I’ve got loads of pics from both places and a bunch of history learnings - hopefully I’ll manage to write something about them and maybe create some data cards.

AwareEU

This second half of the year, I’m doing data cards for an Italian project aimed at raising awareness about the EU Cohesion funds - financing that the Union gives to countries in order to level up regions, sustain development, help out with the building of infrastructure. The project is AwareEU and I’m doing 10 data vizzes for it, as well as a workshop around them (which I did in June). So regular data cards will likely take the back seat for a while as my time really is limited!