Journal: January 2025

January 2025 journal

Monthly retrospective

I am continuing to read novels as planned.

• Small Things Like These
• Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
• Foster
• Out of My Mind (in progress)

I also watched the film adaptation of Foster, and enjoyed it. (Shed a little tear.)

I am gradually organizing my thoughts on Programming education in the AI era. Perhaps I can make a useful course.

The Yoon Suk Yeol insurrection crisis is still ongoing. No satisfying resolution this time either, and reckoning with pro-Japanese collaboration remains a distant prospect.

Journal

2025-01-26

I organized my thoughts on Programming education in the AI era.

2025-01-20

Reading Out of My Mind. It feels similar to Wonder.

2025-01-17

I finished Foster. In the final scene, the girl suddenly runs out and into Kinsella’s arms. Her biological father is hurrying after her; she sees him approaching, while Kinsella holds her with his back to her father. In this situation, it was ambiguous whom she was addressing as “Daddy.” After some searching, I found an explanation by the author herself.

Apparently, in the first edition, the sentence read:

“

‘Daddy,’ I keep calling him, keep warning him. ‘Daddy.’

But the author says she wants to change the book’s last sentence to:

“

Daddy, I warn him. I call him Daddy.

In the edition I read (the Amazon ebook), it had indeed changed along those lines, though the quotation marks were slightly different:

“

‘Daddy,’ I warn him, I call him. ‘Daddy.’

The three versions differ subtly, but the important point seems to be that all three leave “Daddy” ambiguously referring both to Kinsella and to her biological father. The author’s explanation:

“

…so for me when she sees her Daddy coming, it’s very natural for her to say ‘Daddy’ but because she’s in Kinsella’s arms she’s actually saying it to him. So even though she’s warning Kinsella that her father is coming to get her, what she’s doing in that moment is she’s calling Kinsella ‘Daddy’ which is something she’s wanted to do and couldn’t do until this moment and she didn’t plan it, and the moment enabled her to say something that she wanted to say even though she didn’t intend it.

2025-01-13

I finished Small Things Like These. Apparently, its film adaptation has just been released and is showing in Korea too. Cillian Murphy stars. Tomorrow I start Foster by the same author.

2025-01-09

I finally read George Orwell’s Animal Farm. A well-written fable without excess. Published in 1945. Some themes, such as controlling memory by manipulating records, resemble 1984.

2025-01-06

I started Small Things Like These. The protagonist is a father born in Ireland in 1946 who grew up in difficult circumstances and started a family. A quick search suggests it was a time of great economic hardship.

2025-01-03

The Corruption Investigation Office attempted to execute an arrest warrant against insurrection ringleader Yoon Suk Yeol, but failed.

I started Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities, published in 2016.