The follow-up

When Linkin Park released their second album Meteora, they had a quote on their site that went along the lines of

Musicians have their entire lives to come up with a debut album, and only a very short time afterward to release a follow-up.

Tea's follow-up

Tea Rukavina presented her second collection of poetry named Plagijat (would translate to plagiarism in English). Tea's idea is that her work is plagiarism of what the Universe tells her, and that's like, deep, bro. The presentation was held by Tea, Silvija Benković Peratova (who mentored Tea in poetry), Ana Šesto (who did the retro industrial cover photo for Plagijat), and had a guest appearance from Alba&Leo.

Tea talked a lot about her experience while writing poetry, the random spurs of inspiration that are common to both science and art (and probably the thousands of other disciplines), the process of turning your notes into a book, and finally releasing the book to the world. On a couple of occasions, she made me think of the quote from Linkin Park.

Once you make a name for yourself, living up to the standards that come with it is not easy or simple. Take, for example, Wait But Why. I recently read two of their articles about Elon Musk and Tesla Motors, and I highly recommend both of them. Wait But Why will have a hard time following up on that, pretty much like anyone who does the quality work.

I would also like to add that this post is my second one on this blog. Bloggers, just like the musicians and the poetry writers, also have an entire lifetime to come up with the first post, and only a short time afterward for a follow-up.

Ph.D. done

In other news, I defended my Ph.D. in computer science on June 8th, at Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, University of Zagreb. The defense itself had just the right amount of epic and stress from my point of view, while the rest of the story went like PHD Comics predicted.