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 ...