Maybe it's time to come back? ...

Preface: I hate to finish off the #100days challenge with a note of melancholy (pun intended) but this is, at its heart, a log of my thoughts. And this is how I'm feeling right now. Sometimes I just have to say that it'll be better tomorrow. Especially at nighttime, and especially when I am burned out. This is one of those nights. This always happens at the end of a long grind. (I think I'm much more suited to a quarter system, i.e. schedule with fall, winter, and spring courses, as well as a...

It's been a third of a year. Yet I don't really remember it. There's a delicate balance to be achieved between keeping myself sane with routines and making memories and remembering my own life. Too much routine, and time becomes a blur; too little and I become depressed. I am, after all, a creature of habit. The problem is that my life is passing me by, and I don't feel like I have anything to show for it. I guess that's why I take on so many projects and responsibilities - if I'm going to be i...

In the long run, I'm thinking that I care more about my own happiness than anything else. Having fun, hanging out with friends, focusing on myself. I care about knowledge, not because of some mysterious drive, but because it makes me happy to understand the world better. I try to socialize a lot, not because it makes me more intelligent, but because it makes me happy to be around others. I take walks in nature, usually, not because they make my focus deeper, but because the peace makes me happy...

I need to spend more time on myself. I think that's the only way I can make it through when I feel exhausted like I do right now. Social interaction is my fuel, I guess. -branches ...

I always hate waking up early the night before, since I want to stay up late. Once I'm up, though, I'm happy, and that carries on throughout the day. It is the opposite with waking up late; I'm happy at night, and then unhappy when I get up. There's got to be a happy medium, but I'm still trying to identify it. -branches ...

My feelings about my life vary during the day. In the mornings, I don't feel like doing anything; over lunch, I'm excited; in the evening, I'm content, and at night, I'm unhappy again. This is a cycle that I have to keep in mind whenever I want to complain about having too much to do, but it's also making it difficult for me to identify whether I am burned out or just suffering from nighttime blues. Regardless, I don't feel like doing anything most of the time. -branches ...

I got injured this week, and it's forcing me to learn to relax and slow down. I'm off of most of my responsibilities, and I've had to start stretching, rolling it out, etc. I've still gone to a few practices, just to show I'm committed, but I'm off my normal schedule in general But this has actually been a blessing in disguise. Having to stop using my lower body has meant I do setter exercises during volleyball practice; now I've been offered the position of setter on my volleyball team. Keepi...

I've been tracking my time for two weeks now, and I'm happy about it. Being able to see (semi-accurate) quantifications of how I actually spend my time is great! It's also very useful for me to think about how I could improve my habits. Changing my time habits is something that I think this will help a lot with. Being able to look and see that, 'well, over the past 14 days, I have racked up 13 hours of time spent in what I would call a 'wasted' way, such as looking at trends on twitter' is hop...

It frustrates me that my last week(ish) in the #100days challenge is coming at a bad time in terms of motivation for me. I have a break coming up, and 'm burning out on, well, doing things. #100days is fun stuff for me, but I'm finding myself without the motivation to actually get up and get it done. I'm constantly having to make up days. Maybe with habits it's better to let missed time go, right? I'm trying to minimize friction, and the knowledge that it will be a lot of work once I start wil...

Exactly what the title said. I had a very minimalist, pure gray-and-white phone setup for a few weeks. It was nice initially, but eventually made me want to stop using my phone. I've realized that, while useful in a lot of cases - such as a room organization philosophy - minimalism is actually not very friendly. I wouldn't want to spend my life in a modern, minimalist house, nor would I really want to use an app that was pure minimalism. I guess this is a good design philosophy: minimal doesn't...

I've got stuff constantly on my schedule, things that need to be completed, but none of it really feels fulfilling to me. I don't know why I do it - I guess it's fun - but all this stuff is just exhausting. I feel like I don't have any time to think - everything's just happening to me, and I'm just going along with it. -branches ...

It's a simple, obvious thing, but I find myself not doing it, a lot: setting a goal for what I want to get done before I start doing. For example, trying to figure out a notes system. Rather than setting out the things that I want the system to do, and then either researching or building my own system, I have just read and read and read about different systems, none of which are particularly helpful when I don't know what I'm trying to do with the system. Now that I'm thinking about it, I'm ...

I've been feeling a lot more anger than normal this week. My expectations of the world - that things shouldn't suck - obviously show my immaturity, and these expectations are causing me problems, I guess. Everything just seems to be going so fucking wrong. Schedules aren't matching up, I'm having to make decisions I don't want to make, I'm being bogged down by meaningless bullshit, I'm not getting what I expected out of my school. Two of my classes are absolute shit, and every single thing the ...

I'm running out of steam in these last few days of daily writing. I'm still having thoughts, coming up with ideas in the same way - what's changed is the amount of time I have to write. I've had to make up for missed days twice just this week; though this is probably an unnaturally difficult week for me, I still don't feel like things are where they should be. I know it sounds stupid, but needing to add 15 minutes to the end of my night is sometimes just too much. This is something that I've don...

I've started giving myself incentives to get myself to do things I don't want to do, and as it turns out it's really effective! Each night I give myself some time to watch YouTube videos while I get ready for bed. It makes me excited to go to bed, and it makes me happy and helps me release the stress of the day. I've been in bed before 11 for the past three nights, once even before 10:30 because of it. That's something that was previously an extremely rare occurance! I've also scheduled in so...

Last week, though it was similar in schedule to pretty much every other routine week I've had, was a lot more fun than others. It's because I had something coming up to look forward to. I went up to the mountains for the weekend and skiied(if that's how you spell it) for a total of 13 hours! During the whole week leading up to the event, I was excited, which made my week a lot better. I think if I apply that philosophy of giving myself things to look forward to elsewhere, I can get significant q...

I can't decide the purpose of books in my world. Do I read for learning only? Do I read for enjoyment? These questions will dictate the way that I treat reading. Taking notes slows me down significantly; if I'm reading for efficiency, that's bad and I need to improve my system, but if I'm reading for learning and enjoyment, it doesn't really matter that I go slowly. The main problem with trying to maximise for enjoyment and learning is that I run out of 'book inertia' - I get tired of reading t...

A teacher once posed the question, "is it your actions or your thoughts that dictate who you are?" I would immediately respond with an emphatic "thoughts!", envisioning a situation in which a 'good' person is forced - literally forced - to do bad things. Obviously the answer is more complex than that, but it took me a long time to realize that and I'm sure there are many things I'll continue to discover. He wouldn't pose a question that has an obvious answer; it's not fun that way. Thoughts ...

After listening to a few podcasts, I've been turned onto the idea of taking notes during conversations - aka "quick jots." (that's a name I've just invented because it sounds fun and fits the idea.) I wouldn't be taking notes during, well, normal conversations, since that would be impractical and wouldn't have a lot of use; rather, I'd be jotting things down during more 'intellectual' conversations. Maybe I could imagine it as a sort of meeting notes-type thing, though it would definitely be a ...

It is a habit of mine to compare myself with others. It is an especially unfortunate one when I combine it with my ambition. I really, really like being good at things. I am a generalist by nature, and I strive for high-quality results in everything I do; writing, music, math, standardized tests, sports, and on, and on. And I am pretty good at most of them, I'd say - the problem comes along when others are better than me at those things. I feel simultaneously secure and fragile in my ego. On...

My day themes for now are: Sunday: Building day (my yearly theme is building) Monday: Math day Tuesday: ??? Wednesday: Family day (Friendsday?) (spending quality time with family) Thursday: ??? Friday: Projects Day (catching up on projects) Saturday: Reflection + Planning day (looking forwards and backwards, also quantified self, check-in on projects) I'm still working on Tuesday and Thursday. I'm pretty busy those days so I don't know if I need to do them. Honestly not sure what I'm doi...

I'm going to give a TEDx Talk! I'm going to change the content of and rewrite my let's change how we think about teaching ""essay" from two months ago. Luckily the talk that I give has to be short, so I can focus on the content rather than the form that it comes in. -branches ...

A friend and I set up a mediaWiki instance on his server today. We're calling it a 'collaborative thinking space': a place for info, thoughts, concepts, and facts we talk about during our conversations. We don't have any rules on it yet - we don't think we'll need them - so it'll be interesting to see where this goes. Will a uniform format emerge? Will we make an index? How will we approach the writing? Will connections be like a decentralized network or a distributed one? I'm also generally ex...

I'm thinking 'year of building'. I feel like I have a chance this year to create frameworks and bases for my future life, since I'm still half-quarantined and have some spare time on my hands. "building" things, like skills, habits, techniques, and even relationships I think is a good focus. Once I have this base for myself, I'll be able to focus on the things that matter, not the things that I don't want to focus on. *(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, I don't blame you. Here's an e...

Humans really like categorization. I see it everywhere in my life, on such a scale that it's practically unnoticeable. And for good reason, too: humans need it to process the world in all of its complexity. The sheer volume of information in the form of sensory input along with thoughts swirling around our conscious and unconscious minds makes it so that we are forced to heavily compartamentalize and categorization; without doing these things, it would be impossible to focus on any one thing at ...

TL;DR I sectioned off different parts of my room in order to increase focus and help organization. I put masking tape all over my room today. "Why?" is a reasonable question to ask, especially when I deliberately give no context for a lackluster comedic effect. The reasoning comes from various different sources: "Spaceship You" by video creator and podcaster CGP Grey, Deep Work by Cal Newport, some articles I read online, the Cortex Podcast (also from CGP Grey), and also my own mind... but ba...

I'm not religious in the way that the term is normally used; I don't follow any mainstream religion, dedicate myself to some higher entity or so on. (this one may have inferred from reading past posts.) I've seen, however, the way that things that wouldn't be necessarily defined as religion can easily take on the role of one. Take, for example, conspiracy theoricists: some people are willing to commit insane acts (such as bring a rifle to a pizzaria thinking that there is child trafficking in th...

(Uh oh, [potential identifier]!) One thing that I've realized in my ever-continuing quest for knowledge is that there are many different types of information, some that I want to keep, some that should be discarded. For example, most news is not stuff that I want to keep tucked away for future use, whereas understanding I gain from reading books is. Also, I've discovered that talking to people about my ideas forces me to develop them, as does writing them down. This is not a very unique discov...

(Here's that post I've talked about for 60 days. A bit anticlimactic, no?) To be honest, I'm not 100% sure. I've liked the single-tab feel, but it's a little bit annoying. It has multiple UX improvements (e.g. more useful share options, search bar improvements) but also some UI and customizability things that I'm not that happy about. It may just be that I'm so used to Safari I don't like anything else. Focus feels, well, more focused, but it has multiple limitations that frustrate me ever-...

I'm going to do another filler post tonight. I wrote 8 pages of assignment and wrote the majority of and recorded a song over an 11-hour stretch of work today; I am fucking exhausted. And I probably will be tomorrow, too. Hope you had a better day than I did. -branches ...

Reading paper books and annotating with post-its is fun. It's slow, but fun. I am currently halfway through two books that I've wanted to read for a while, and I'm making steady progress. What remains to be seen will be (a) will it be effective for retaining and using knowledge? and (b) will its inefficiency be too big a tradeoff? I think that (a) will be a yes. (b) will need some thought to resolve; I'll have to figure out what my intentions for reading books are. Is leisure meant to be part ...

Here's #1, feel free to read it. They share a theme and some insight but otherwise Death (I) and Death (II) aren't very connected. Death fascinates me. It plays a major role in defining my personal philosophy, and its unanswered questions lie at the heart of the thoughts on meaninglessness that so permeate this blog. It's the great equalizer, an inevitability only comparable to suffering and (as the saying goes) taxes. It is explored in all major faiths, spiritualities, religions, and nothing, ...

"Just having a rough week. Once I get through these next few days I'll be good." "Yeah, I'm just a lot busier than usual. It's fine." "No, it's cool - I'm just tired." Home stretch. Two weeks till break.  Two more hours until the weekend. Life is passing me by. I live day-by-day, week-by-week, task-by-task. Everything is just a task or event, something else for me to get through in pursuit of the next restless break. It's not about me. It's about what's next. Just how things are, I gues...

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I hate going to bed. It's just a fact of life at my age, I guess. I have no idea what to do about it. I'm either unhappy every night I go to bed - feel like I don't have enough time to do what I want to - or wake up tired every day. It's mostly the latter at the moment. Part of the problem is that I'm taking too long to finish my work - I finished up at 9pm on the dot today, and got home at 10:20pm. I would love to have a long, leisurely wind-down period, but things just keep getting derailed. I...

I'm trying to use a day calendar + time blocking to manage my schedule. It isn't flexible. I planned to get out of a meeting at 8pm, do some work, wind down at 9:30 tonight, and be in bed by 10:30. I ended up getting out of a meeting late - it's 8:30 now - eating dinner late - it's 9 now - spending time with my family - whoops, now it's 9:45 and I don't feel like winding down. Life is not built around me, and no matter how I try I won't be able to shape it around me - so why try? I can keep tr...

Today I was shown a video about how 'life should be playful', like a song and not a journey. It said that there should be no end goal for us, that we should enjoy the present moment and be unafraid. This has me thinking way back, to Small Sacrifices, my first actual post here. While I believe that my writing and style (and ability to actually make sense) has improved significantly since I wrote that, the question I posed - what is more important, my service or my happiness? - remains unanswere...

What the title says. This is the first time since probably day 10 that I've had trouble finding something to write about, and I'm under a time crunch right now, so I don't have the time to simply sit around until something interesting comes to me. Rather than a normal post, here's some stuff I did: I cleaned my room a bit today. Very happy I did. I worked a bit on the accompaniment for a song I'm writing. I feel pretty good about it - the chorus is pretty much done. I did some math I spent a ...

I'm going through my extensive list of playlists (a total of 127 playlists are saved in my account, the vast majority of them created and curated by myself) and I'm reflecting on the idea of letting go. I still have my first real playlist. I can see the dates that I added songs, and they stretch all the way back to October of 2019. One thing that I have noticed is that music, more than almost anything else, invokes my memories extremely well. I have a few playlists that I listened to with my o...

This is long overdue, but I can't go back in time to do this. Better do it now. Nice blog ;) Your writing is not shit, it's often profound and extremely enjoyable to read. Thank you! Small guestbook responses like these are extremely encouraging - very high ROI*. I stumbled across your blog as I pressed the listed link after submitting number 20 odd of my hundred. I read the last post of the person on the list who posted just before me. I too love the anonymity - I wonder if one day I w...

I feel like I am drifting. My life is spiralling through space-time, back and fourth through externally-induced habits, routines, decisions, successes, failues, tasks. Everything is a task. I've divided everything into meaningless little bits of dust that come together to form a whole that is, unfortunately, the sum of its parts. Everything is a task for me to complete, even things that I've taken on as 'fun side projects'. Life has four parts: completing these tasks, consuming things that I won...

After some soul-searching, I've come to two difficult conclusions. I want to be religious It would be very difficult for me to successfully convert I'm not sure if this is a very common mentality. I could go on and on about my personal reasons for 1, but I won't right now simply because I don't want to give an incomplete explanation. 2 is what I'm more concerned with, and it has to do with the ideas of conviction and faith. As anyone who has observed any mainstream religion has seen, convic...

Stupid activities will expand to waste as much time as possible if you let them. Don't let them. Spend your time on things that you want to spend your time on, after you finish the stupid shit in as little time as possible. Work with urgency. It is the little things that slip through the cracks that are dragging you down. If you have to call someone, set a time for it. If you have to clean, set an alarm. If you need to do laundry, do it before you start your work. Don't let your bad prioritizat...

I was highly productive but highly inefficient today. I spent pretty much six hours working and got a lot done - just not six hours' worth. I'm going to set intentions and focus timers, (after which I will take breaks) from now on, see if that increases my productivity. I should be spending a lot less time on stuff than I am right now. -branches ...

When I compare myself to others people (which I inevitably do), one common difference I've noticed between myself and them has been practiced skills. A lot of my friends, for example, have incredible art or chess skills. As I've written about before, learning these skills is mostly structured practice; while I do play music and sports, those two are my only high-practice skills, and both of those things don't really feel like 'practice' per se - I passed the point after which mundane practice t...

Tonight, I went for a one-and-a-half-hour walk. I focused on one thing: setting goals for the month of February. It was extremely successful! More on this in the future, there are a few goal-setting tricks that I discovered as I thought to myself. -branches ...

I read for two reasons: Enjoyment Learning I often feel like note-taking gets in the way of my reading. I need to maximize reading's two values simultaneously, not sacrifice one for the other. Today, I spent about half an hour reading an article from Foreign Affairs on the ongoing and future US/China "cold war." The reason it took me this long is that I was highlighting and annotating while I read - but more importantly, I spent a while after I read the article just summarizing the three i...

(short post tonight; I have two exams tomorrow and need to get to bed.) I had a conversation with my father tonight about how best to improve the world if you are in a position of wealth. An idea that I stumbled upon that I find interesting is that good compounds like interest - good done now will usually continue to ripple through time and cause more good to happen in the future, and those ripples increase based on the scale of the good. For example, building roads in underprivileged communit...

I am working hard, constantly, but getting nowhere. Despite my organizational efforts, my task management and knowledge management systems (among many others) have made no progress. I have poured hours and hours into research, trying new tools, downloading apps, listening to podcasts, and I am still working in the same disorganized way that I used to. My post from two days ago, Zettelkasten - 50 is an example of this. I have begun numerous projects upon which I have made little progress. I hate ...

As I enter the second half of my #100days challenge, I wanted to write a reflection on what I wrote back at Listed - 0. I am incredibly happy that I have gone with a pseudonymous blog over one connected to my real-life identity. I feel empowered, freed from self-censorship - and I don't even post anything personal here. The words that I wrote in my first post here sum it up: Essentially, I'm here because I need a place where I can write without pressure, constraint, or expectation. Pseudo...

I've been trying to learn the Zettelkasten note-taking system on and off for about a year now. Over the past few days, I've been reading the book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens, and I keep getting 'insight' and 'explanation' but no examples of how to actually use the system. It is the same with most online tutorials; they love to give me info about the system but not tell me how to use it. One day, I swear. One day. (Halfway through the challenge!) -branches ...

I feel like there are so many systems with fundamentally bad basic incentives for the actors within the system, yet people blame surface-level problems for the results of these deep-rooted problems. U.S. Politics: Politicians' incentives push them to make them decisions get (re)elected and stay in office, not to run the country well, make compromises, or represent the will of the people. This is the problem with almost any democratic system, but it's still the root cause of a lot of the U.S.'s...

i’ve now written multiple drafts and one full, published post entirely using dictation software rather than typing (albeit with some edits to fix misinterpretation). It took me 20 minutes to write my previous post using only voice type, and that was without having my ideas fleshed out before hand. I’m not sure whether I type as quickly as I speak, but it is definitely nice being able to focus on my thoughts without having a clicking sound going on behind me. whether I will use this long-term r...

Shame and embarrassment, an instinct to not want to go against the grain… if I think about it, they are more of an enemy than a friend. Theoretically, their development makes sense. Collective thinking is one of humanity's important traits; instinctively following the path of others, the path of the pack, should put decisions in the hands of leaders and/or The judgment of the group as a whole. Rather than doing that, however, these traits seem to simply apply social pressure on individuals not ...

Rather than write some thoughts down, I want to get some work done on my reorganization. Using the meta-questions from #45, I'm going to start putting things into action. (I'm writing in some form, so I'd say it counts toward #100days.) Sorry if it's boring. How will I ___ effectively? Decide what tasks to do I'm going to have a running list, an inbox of sorts, which stores every single assignment, step in a project, etc. - must be concrete, quantifiable achievements in order to be added, o...

I'm really having trouble prioritizing my personal projects. I work hard on my schoolwork, but then I don't feel like doing anything other than lying down and doing nothing. I don't know when I'm supposed to fit these things, but I guess I'll figure it out sometime. Dedicated, scheduled time seems to be the answer. ...

Maybe getting things organized how I want them is simply a matter of asking and answering the right questions. Complex systems evolve from simple ones that work, and what's simpler than answering a question? Here are the questions that make up most of the stuff I'm trying to organize: How will I ___ (effectively)? Decide what tasks to do Distribute my time Organize my calendar Ensure that my bedroom is orderly Ensure that my phone doesnt get cluttered Secure and protect my data Organize an...

As I've aged, I’ve constantly gone through community after community. Each time I 'grow into' a new place and leave behind the one before, I look back on myself and the people in that community and wonder how I was ever a part of it. In my mind, I've matured; now, that old community is for immature people (like my younger self). Take for example /r/PCMasterRace (and the whole of Reddit, I guess, but that's for another time). I went through a period about a year ago in which I thought myself mor...

Staying up late talking with my friends makes me realize how much I value conversation with them. I constantly forget what a toll the coronavirus has taken on me socially, and reconnecting - even virtually - reminds me, every time; I usually end up talking for 5+ hours in the meeting. It's a refreshing feeling, even though my eyes can end up dry. -branches ...

It's an extremely weird feeling to see my content indexed, to have it show up in search results. My personal blog is the second result for my name on DuckDuckGo. On Google, it's very different - results are almost entirely profiles for high school sports players in the midwest - but one day I think it'll get there. The same thing goes for this blog, though it needs more specific search terms; it's a lot less likely to be found by accident. I am currently the second and fifth results on DDG a...

I'm thinking about starting a daily work section of the blog. Other people on this site have done this (you'll notice it if you look around listed.to, there are some great blogs here) and I think it is a pretty good idea. I think it would look something like this: What I did today Worked on $project project task one project task two Spent time learning $thing time spent/resources used Uncategorized goals/tasks spent x minutes on community building during quarantine Other activitie...

It turns out that I can work significantly faster than I realized. Work that would have taken me potentially four hours under normal circumstances took me two earlier today, and all I needed to do was focus. Putting my phone onto Do Not Disturb, with a special timer app that penalizes me for exiting, and buckling down for 1h 50m was enough to finish more than I expected. I'm excited. If I work at this rate for 45 minutes per night, what could I get done? An hour? Two? If I am focused on a go...

I'm trying to figure out my goals for the longer-term - a year, two years, etc. I'm having a more difficult time than I expected, though, since I'm not sure what I would find fulfilling. I'm imagining myself looking back on 2021 and thinking about what I did, imagining that I'd accomplished various things and gauging my own reactions to them. The problem here is that I don't know what I'll be like in a year. In the same way that you can't just make a learning plan for a subject you don't know ...

Today was an extremely unproductive day. I did the bare minimum amount of work, and did it at 11pm. I did my jobs, got through events, but in general it sucked. Hopefully I'll learn from the experience. I have a big project in the works, one that I'll surely be explaining in depth sometime soon on this blog. Until then, I'm going to bed. -branches ...

Like many others across the country, I really enjoyed seeing Amanda Gorman recite at the Biden-Harris inauguration ceremony. She showed some awesome (as in inspiring awe) poetic ability. The spoken word style that she used - with varying rhythm and rhyme structure, plenty of wordplay, motion, and an intent to convey a message - was familiar to me, as I've had the chance to try out performing in spoken word events before. Now, being 'appreciated' and 'applauded is very different from being able t...

I honestly don't have the energy (or the time) to write a post I can be proud of right now (but I have written some ideas for future posts) so instead I'll just write down some disconnected thoughts. Nevermind, my head is empty. It's interesting how I will often just lose the capacity to think when I sit down to write, yet when I try to empty my mind to meditate I suddenly get a burst of activity. Irritating, too. See you tomorrow. -branches ...

As I am used to small social circles (schools, sports teams, and local communities), it is always a strange thing when my close friends mention other friends that I don't know, especially when they're making plans. Though of course I know it, confronting the fact that these people that I know so well have friends other than me is never a pleasant experience. I feel like this is caused by some other, larger characteristic of humans. While I'm not sure what it is, I could take a guess: humans ha...

One thing that I can never have enough of is ideas. I come up with what I think of as a 'cool idea' on an almost-daily basis, and since I have a Notes shortcut in my Control Center, I usually just open my phone, write it down, and then that's it. I created a Shortcut to export these notes in a single textfile, in bullet point format, with the intention of sorting through them and categorizing them for future use (e.g. when i'm looking for a project to finally help myself learn JS). This didn't...

I'm writing this post so that I can link to it when I use [potential identifier] in a blog post, rather than having to explain it every time I use it. When you see this in a post, it means that I wrote something that I liked but realized that posting it could create a verifiable link to my real identity. In order to stay as true to my real thoughts as possible (and to save time/effort), I simply replaced the part that could identify me with [potential identifier] rather than trying to edit it o...

Today, using the iOS Screen Time feature, along with ActivityWatch (my favorite open-source device analytics software), I have calculated the total "leisure time" (time spent on my phone and on my personal computer account is almost entirely that) for the past three weeks. I have spent one hundred and one hours using technology over the past 3 weeks, and that's not including time spent working on schoolwork or attending online classes. 101 hours. 4.2 days. Four and a fifth fucking days. If I ...

Infinite power, infinite money, infinite time... they all seem great and all, until you realize the effects that they have on the human brain. Power will turn you into a dictator; money will turn you avaricious, infinite time will make you depressed. The internet is yet another example, in this case an infinite expanse of information. Using it unstructured is one of the worst things I can do (and am doing) to myself. I am constantly in a state of searching and exploring, finding new, cool stuf...

The more I spend time learning and reading, the more sure I become that creativity is the most important thing that schools can foster in kids. Morals, a desire to learn, critical thinking, and information evaluation (i.e. discerning between biased and least biased information, sorting out truth and valuable insight from noise, etc.) are close behind, but I believe that creativity is more important; most virtues are (in my opinion) far more effectively instilled in kids in the home rather than t...

I returned to school in-person yesterday. It's a hell of a lot better than online school, even if it means that it's more work to get there. My school has done a very good job with taking precautions, so I feel comfortable while I'm there, and getting to see my classmates for the first time in-person is a great experience. I didn't realize how much I missed in-person school till I returned; it's impressive how quickly I managed to adjust to the online experience. ...

“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.” ― La Rochefoucauld To look death in the eyes is to face the fact that one day I will not matter. This is incredibly frustrating to me. It is a fact that I do not have the courage to open myself to, nor the enlightenment to accept. I desperately want to have some semblance of permanence, to be remembered, to matter, and the prospect of death ensures that none of that will happen. Not just the prospect of my individual death, or that of h...

My sister, an avid TikTok user, sent me a video yesterday teaching people about decentralized cloud storage. I prefer self-hosting, but of course e2ee, decentralized file storage is awesome. I'd never seen a serious implementation of it before - I'd never looked - but this video linked to three different ones: SpiderOak, Arweave, and Storj. Considering how cool these platforms are, I figured I'd try to get more resources in that same manor, so I've decided to re-download social media and force t...

I wish that there was a way to pause my life for a while, just put everything on hold and just have some time to think. There are a lot of ideas, thoughts, emotions, opinions, and desires floating around my head, and they push me in the general direction of where I think I want to go. It's a 'general' direction for two reasons: first, because it is a literally general direction - I want to be able to have lots of varied skills and use them all - and secondly because it's a very broad idea. I thi...

I always find it funny when people see someone being aggressive or angry and they decide to say "Relax" or "Calm down". It seems obvious that those things are only going to make the person that is aggressive/angry more so than they already are, yet it's sort of the default response I hear (though I don't really spend a lot of time around angry people myself, so my opinion may not be representative of the general population). I don't think I've seen a single instance in which things don't go down...

There is no reason that I don't meditate. I went on a 60-day meditation streak and it made me happy. Everyone says it's a good thing for your mind, health, creativity, you name it. I'm just not doing it right now. I'll probably start next week, when my new habits kick in: I'm setting a diet and eating schedule, implementing a time blocking system, practicing various prosocial behaviors, etc. etc. I'll write something about it - hopefully - when I get further into it. The general gist of my pre...

I feel like I keep misrepresenting my views to people. Not just internet strangers, but to people I actually know really well and who understand me. I defended an ideology that I don't agree with in front of my mother, not because I think it's a good one to follow, but because I thought the criticisms that a guy in a video we were watching together was giving weren't valid. I feel like I seemed closed-minded, rather than just, I don't know, critically thinking. A similar thing happened a few da...

Despite the fact that I've had no social media apps on my phone for a while (something like 6-12 months, it's been too long to remember), I still manage to fall into the trap of Near-Unconscious Consumption, the same way that I did back when I did have them. I think that I was breaking the wrong habit. I pick up my phone absentmindedly and (despite my 27-character passcode that I only have because I think it's funny) start consummmmiinnnnnggg. That's the habit I now have to break; though the in...

I think I need rigid structure to keep myself on task, and since no one is there to keep me on task, I need to do it myself. Time blocking seems like a good way to do that: forcing myself to follow a schedule and do certain work during certain times will make me more productive and probably feel more rested, since deliberate rest is always more fulfilling than unintentional breaks (also known as time wasting). I've set out a skeleton schedule for myself, and will continue to update it across th...

I fucking hate the ;) face. I see it used everywhere on the internet, especially on tech forums, and it hurts me every time I see it. It's such a condescending, irritating thing, especially when the person using it is wrong. I'm not sure whether the people that use it are trying to be condescending or whether they're genuinely just tone deaf and think it's a friendly thing to end your comment with. I have a close friend who uses it constantly, both during (friendly) debates in group chats and d...

I want to learn to program well. Not only do I feel cool when things are working, but knowing languages like Python and JS is actually functionally useful. I just wish I had a better use case for it - I've learned a lot of bash and general conceptual compsci knowledge since I actually use it. The same cannot be said for other languages. Someonce said that "you'll only learn things if they are relevant, so make them relevant". Every time I think of the phrase I can give another example of it be...

This post is, as the title says, a filler post. I'm exhausted and working on the Firefox Focus and Relinquishing Control sequels, so I'm not really going to write anything today. That said, I did practice a lot of narrative writing. That can be my writing for the day, since I wrote... holy shit, 15k words tonight. Yeah, that's good enough. See you tomorrow. ...

Chess is cool. I like the game, like to watch it, like to read about it... but I hate playing it. I just don't enjoy it, and that's probably because I suck at it. I've read the first few chapters (so far) of David Epstein's Range, and it's been helpful in understanding chess as it is. Epstein explains that there are two types of learning environments, as theorized by psychologists Gary Klein and Daniel Kahneman: "Kind" environments and "Wicked" learning environments. The distinction between th...

Everyone likes to debate, right? It's an innate human characteristic, I think. Debate plays into the human desire for outrage - the same thing that has made twitter so successful, I'd endeavor - and that coveted feeling of self-righteousness and correctness, however toxic it may be. Debate tends to be something that we use to make ourselves feel good about our own views, or in the case of politicians make the base feel good about its candidate, so it's natural that it's not very effective at cha...

Free time always feels like it's slipping away from me and being wasted, no matter how productive I am on any given day. I tend to focus heavily on certain activities or experiences in my life, so I'll often forget anything that wasn't important at the time: for example, I was doing applications over last winter and my cat was sick. I was on a ski trip. Other than that, I don't really remember much about the winter of 2019. I want to figure out how to make myself feel like I'm in control of my...

There are certain basic elements of human life that we must ignore in order to function normally. Humans, being mortal and not omnipotent, are by nature impermanent and insignificant. No one will leave this world without experiencing loss, conflict, weakness, and of course eventually death. In order to function normally, without being overpowered by grief, fear, etc., we must subconsciously ignore these things. Historically, those listed above have not been the only things that we have to accep...

For the past week, my room and phone - two major parts of what I refer to as my living spaces - have been cluttered. I managed to reach 500 tabs, the maximum tabs allowed in safari, because I haven't managed to iron out my flow for bookmarking and effectively organizing resources. My phone (as referenced in Clean - 5 below) has way too many applications on it, though I have been working in that. Most notably, though, has been my room. After opening up and sorting through some bins of stuff that ...

When trying to enforce (upon myself) new habits and behaviors, I've always acted as though I have a choice in doing them. That's natural, since I do: I am able to make the decision to do or not to do something. This results often in me making the wrong choice. I want to try a little experiment. What if, instead of the mentality of I am making a choice to do this, I tell myself that I am not in control? It seems a little weird, of course. It would be interesting, though, to see how I react menta...

Language is strange and incredible. We, as humans, somehow managed to create thousands of unique languages, with massive amounts of variance, somewhere along the line. It's something of an obstacle, nowadays, since globalization and global multilingualism don't pair that well, but it is nonetheless cool as hell. We should make a new one. The first few steps don't sound that difficult; gather a few language experts from around the world, develop a new language that is easy to learn and simple, ...

My primary laptop is a Windows computer. My phone is an iPhone. After using this system for years, I've come to appreciate the ability to sync outside of the built-in Apple ecosystem. I can't tell you how many times I've seen an app with a sync feature that I can't use - at no fault to the developers, two platforms is already hard enough - or how quietly annoying it is to discover that there's a mac app but no windows versions. At least it forced me to use more open-source software. Anyway, I j...

Writing motivation tends to go in a generally repetitive pattern: get excited about doing it and write a very long post, crash and write a short post, then recover and write a medium post. The length of the long posts fluctuate too. 1400-word pseudo-essays mixed with 100-word shower thought-sort of things make for a blog that looks kinda funny. As you can probably tell, I'm in a period of waning motivation. I'm currently working on various side projects, including getting my Zettelkasten into ...

The moon is a strange thing. We don't think about it very often, but when we do recognize it for what it is, it's really fucking weird: a massive sphere of solid rock, metal, and regolith, floating out in space and spinning endlessly around the earth. There's little interesting geology, (effectively) no atmosphere, just dust, craters, and moon-mountains, as far as the eye can see. Not only that, there's a side of the moon that never comes into our view from earth, since the moon spins as it orbi...

Near-Unconscious consumption is the name I've (just) given to that state of just consuming, not thinking about what you're doing, not really thinking all that much about the content, just sort of floating on the breeze that what ever you're consuming is blowing at you. I notice it the most on the internet. It's one of the (many) reasons why I've left social media almost entirely: I couldn't, without unreasonable effort, consistently avoid falling into this state. (When it's me against a recomm...

Though I'm almost never active there, I occasionally return to Twitter just to see what's happening. What I see there scares me. Using the power of the internet and by exploiting the minds of people who aren't great at figuring out what factual sources look like, multiple huge groups of users on the platform have been entrapped in various narratives by various charismatic figures or organizations, and are at the point of flat-out denying reality. '''''''Alternative news''''''' sources push the...

I started using Firefox Focus today. I initially discovered it probably a year-year and a half ago when I began looking for browser alternatives (to whatever I was using at the time, I don't remember) on my phone. I've always enjoyed downloading and testing new apps, for better or for worse (see Clean - 5 down below), and when I tried Focus out for the first time, it was a strange experience. I found myself liking the app's aesthetics, and was excited for its built-in content blockers - I didn...

Brace yourself, because this one is long as hell and has way less editing than I wish I could do. I'm honestly not sure if what I say here is coherent but I'm getting my thoughts down and that's what matters to me currently. Once I eventually link this identity back to my main one, I can thoroughly rewrite this and throw it up on my actual, personal site. I apologize in advance if what I write here sounds like the faux-philosophical ramblings of a twelve year old, or if a badly-written descripti...

Keeping shit clean is hard, sometimes agonizingly so. Despite my consistent motivation to keep my living spaces (physical and digital) organized, things always manage to spiral out of control. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, and sometimes only hours, but the ultimate result remains unchanged. I'm almost absolutely certain that the problem is the sheer amount of stuff that I keep around, a large part of which is stuff that I don't often use but keep for that one use case or for sentimental valu...

Getting started learning something completely new is difficult, with few exceptions. It's hard to dedicate yourself to a new activity or subject. It's hard to find the time, it's hard to find the motivation to do something that you're not very good at, but most of all, it's hard to know what you need to know and where you need to look to learn it. I'm calling that last one "the learning paradox" since (1) it is sort-of paradoxical and (2) it makes for a good title. It is a serious problem thou...

Listed's servers must be located in a different timezone than mine, since it's December 16th for me and the published post says December 17th. Oh well. #100days still stands. Usernames are, strangely, one of my favorite parts of the internet. The creativity, individuality, and childlike "coolness" involved in their creation makes for a fun creation process. Seeing the results of a search term, sticking words into translation programs, finding words related to one another, adopting character pat...

We had the vents cleaned in my house today. People were sneezing a lot, so we called in a vent-cleaning crew, put on masks, and locked ourselves away (for coronavirus safety reasons) for a few hours. It really makes me realize how many stupid little things you need to take care of when you own a house. Along with cleaning out the lint in the washing machine, taking care of the yard, fixing structural issues, leaks, electrical issues, and messed-up roofing, repainting the exterior, getting the c...

I'd argue that small sacrifices are always a good thing to do. Helping others at your own expense - getting up to refill someone's glass at dinner, staying with your friend when they're going through rough times, giving donations to charity - is a net positive for the world, and it makes for a network of happier people. There's very little good reason not to make make small sacrifices from time to time. Larger sacrifices - namely, the sacrifice of one's own well-being or life - are a much more ...

My brain generates a lot of ideas. They tend to get lost in the #thoughts or #pages tags in my notes (when they're not sitting scattered across some other platform I briefly tried to start using). I don't the time or energy to fully develop them into posts that I want to put on my blog, but I would like to centralize them somewhere, and with minimal effort. Back on the main site, I called it a 'mesoblog' - a middle ground between a microblog, like Twitter or Mastodon, and a macroblog. I'd also l...