Extended essay

It was honestly quite challenging to write up my extended essay. I really tried to stick to rapid protytping, but it took a lot of time just to get the overall structure right. With 10 or so main ideas, how do I chain them together such that they make sense? Do all of them make the cut?

Putting it all together was also more creatively challenging and inspiring than I thought. It’s kind of like doing exercises in textbooks which seem superficially tedious but fundamentally essential. Trying to write formally the moment the idea strikes is perhaps unreasonable, but going forward I would try to sum up what I’ve been doing as formally as possible on a monthly basis. A rough sketch isn’t good enough.

Walking around

It’s rather amazing how many people you can bump into just walking around Oxford. Couples dating on benches, college puffers eating icecream at G&Ds, old and young touring colleges. It reinforces your feelings of sonder. Everyone’s doing their own little thing.

Film reviews?

Inspired by various friends of mine who write film reviews of their own, it’s gotten me interested as well. Over the vac, I wrote a review of Perfect Days, a movie about a public toilet cleaner in Tokyo. I watched it in The Ultimate Picture Palace, Oxford’s only independent cinema. Other than the poor ventalation and having to tilt up my head to see the screen, it was fine. It’s the only independent cinema after all!