Recently

Welcome to my monthly update! I'm going to try to do these once a month. I've got one down and this one too - so far, so good.

Productivity

This was a pretty quiet month productivity wise. Just a chiller one at work, and some super wack google nonsense. Their AI filter randomly decided to shut down the onepodshop ads again. I'm getting pretty fed up with their silly monopoly. Also, llamalife lost it's free tier, which is too bad but I understand they have a business to run.

Books

This was more of a middling month of reading. I got a lot of bits and pieces here and there but only finished one book. I once this month found myself stranded without internet or device and had to read to pass the time, and I kind of liked the vibe.

Five Lectures On Psychoanalysis by Sigmond Freud

In an English class (Intro to Expository Prose) at SFU, I remember my professor saying that of all the essays he's read, he ranked Freud very highly - claiming that Freud, regardless of whether his theories are sound or not, had written his favorite essay. This came as a bit of surprise to me as I hadn't ever really heard of Freud as some great essayist, in fact I even took an "intro to psychology" class and not once did they mention Freud's skill with the quill. I made a mental note of this at the time to check out some of his works from his own mouth.

Anyways I finally got around to reading a book about him, called Five Lecture on Psychoanalysis, whose first chapter you can freely read on the internet archive

To be one hundred percent honest, I don't think it's the best essay I've ever read or anything, but it's surprisingly coherent. It's easy to follow, has some funny jokes, and kind of goes against the idea that Freud was some stuck up academic or some woo-woo dream interpreter.

Note also that these lectures are from a Freud prior to the Oedipal complex, and instead offer a very first glimpse into the idea of psychology. It's really quite amusing how excited Freud is at the notion that you can cure illness simply by speaking about it. Also as the "father of psychology" he outright claims that he is absolutely not the father of psychology, that he learned these methods from other doctors while he was working in the hospital himself.

The five lectures of the book are supposed to introduce the layman to the (then new)
field of psychoanalysis. In it he lays out the problem: people are suffering from a disease only described as "hysteria" - a disease with no known medicine or medical procedure to cure it. Then he presents some experimental data about various hysteria cases he observed while working with another doctor, Josef Breuer. These studies were published in a paper called "Studies on Hysteria". Encouraged by these findings Freud came up with a theory about hysteria: that it is caused by repression and if we bring that repression to light we can begin to cure it.

Since repressions are, well repressed, you cannot simply ask the patient to surface their deepest repressions. The next sections are Freud's various attempts to unearth these repressions. They span from hypnosis, repetition, making them tired, and finally to free-association and dream analysis. You get the impression that Freud really was shooting in the dark so to speak, and seeing him describe his attempts, both failed and successful, are really quite amusing. Also he draws some funny and vivid analogies about his theory of mind, like describing the repression as a rude interrupting student at a lecture who needs to be kicked out of the room, but who keeps trying to come back in even though we locked the doors.

In the final lecture, Freud describes how he believes all repressions are erotic in nature, and this is about the time my attention really started to trail off. For as good of a writer Freud is, I think just binging 100 pages of a subject I only have a passing interest in kind of dry.

Other

• Tried foundry for Ethereum Smart Contract development for the first time. It's great!
• Found some good deals on vps hosting over at low end box
• Discovered a cool math youtube channel specifically loved weird math tools like the Steinhaus Longimeter
• TRPC continues to enthrall me. Maybe I should port the crossword stuff to it.

Addendum

I feel like to actually update my "books" section, I need some sort of an admin panel. Doing through the source code just feels like a hassle.