Get Cosmic

Get Cosmic

10 June, 2019

4 minute read

Update

I don’t have very much time to write a long blog post today, but I figured something would be better than nothing! Not much is new for me between the daily grind of work and trying to find the time to work on various personal projects. My little brother just graduated high school, congrats Dakota!👨‍🎓 I spent some time at Three Rivers Arts Festival down in the city yesterday with the fam and today I’m running a bunch of errands to make sure my car is in tip-top shape to get to work every day #adulting.

Dev Work

Since I have little time today to actually settle down and work on one thing, I’ll probably be doing a lot of random things. I think it would be cool to add what I’ve recently listened to on Spotify to my site using Spotify’s API. I read Josh Spicer’s post about doing something similar last week and it would give me a chance to learn more about working with some AWS services along with their API. I think I could have that working by tonight but we’ll see 🤷‍♂️ I’ve also continued working on my girlfriend’s website using Gatsby. I’ve been reading up on and using Storybook to create UI components and Jest for testing out components on her site. I plan to write a tutorial for both soon! This week I plan to continue working on the design for PlayRight and learn more about animations in Adobe XD. You can check out my current prototype here and the GitHub repo here. If you’re looking into learning more about XD or other Adobe products, I would highly recommend Dansky’s YouTube channel.

Reading

  • Books

    • I’ve continued reading Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer. I think the introduction does a good job introducing metaphysics as a whole, but there are a lot of buzzwords and mentions of other philosophers’ ideas that can make things confusing pretty quickly. One of my favorite aphorisms in the book is “On Philosophy and the Intellect” where Schopenhauer writes: > “The two main requirements for philosophizing are: firstly, to have the courage not to keep any question back; and secondly, to attain a clear consciousness of anything that goes without saying so as to comprehend it as a problem. Finally, the mind must, if it is really to philosophize, also be truly disengaged: it must prosecute no particular goal or aim, and thus be free from the enticement of will, but devote itself undividedly to the instruction which the perceptible world and its own consciousness imparts to it.”

    He goes on:

    “What light is to the outer physical world intellect is to the inner world of consciousness. For intellect is related to will, and thus also to the organism, which is nothing other than will regarded objectively, in approximately the same way as light is to a combustible body and the oxygen in combination with which it ignites. And as light is the purer the less it is involved with the smoke of the burning body, so also is intellect the purer the more completely it is separated from the will which engendered it. In a bolder metaphor one could even say: Life is known to be a process of combustion; intellect is the light produced by this process.”

Quote I’m digging…

“Just that you do the right thing. The rest doesn’t matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored. Dying…or busy with other assignments. Because dying, too, is one of our assignments in life. There as well:”To do what needs doing." Look inward. Don’t let the true nature of anything elude you. Before long, all existing things will be transformed, to rise like smoke (assuming all things become one), or be dispersed in fragments…to move from one unselfish act to another with God in mind. Only there, delight and stillness…when jarred, unavoidably, by circumstances, revert at once to yourself, and don’t lose the rhythm more than you can help. You’ll have a better grasp of the harmony if you keep going back to it.” ~ Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Listening To