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johnnyFive  ·  2031 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 5, 2018

I'm here at this late morning trying to give a shit about work. Have a couple uninteresting errands to run at lunchtime (most of which involve mail), and I think I may do an emergency caffeine run as well. 'Cause damn.

The long weekend was glorious, and I desperately needed the downtime. One of the things I've realized, now that I'm on a good medication regimen, is just how much more energy I was using to do basic adulting. I'd had a vague inkling of this, and actually have written a couple drafts of this reverse-John Carter idea as a blag post but haven't really been able to make it work. Perhaps I just need more time in the New Regime to get a handle on what's happening so that I can kind of figure out the hook. I also think I've been too focused on this idea of explaining versus telling. I'm not sure I can fully put the distinction into words, but hopefully I'll be able to put together something workable. That aside, the real upshot has just been some deeper levels of mental/emotional exhaustion than I was aware of, and I think it's taken me this long (so more than 6 months) to recover enough to feel tired. I'm also having to re-learn a lot of how my inner workings, well, work.

On a more prosaic front, my (kung fu) teacher and I are organizing a big marketing push to start ASAP. We've both had a lot of other stuff and projects going on, but now's the time to try to get some more students up in this bitch. I'm glad he's helping, since he actually has some experience with this stuff. I have 0 facility for advertising and find the whole thing exhausting, to say nothing of hating how social-media-focused it's all become. Truth be told, I'm not sure how to sell us anyway. You really have to feel what we do to appreciate it, as by design it looks boring as hell. (We have an only-have-joking rule that if it looks cool, you're probably doing it wrong.) MMA is all the rage right now, and we have to walk a fine line between "pointing out the issues with their approach to things" and looking petty. I think YouTube may help us, as we can kind of show a little more. I want to engage with folks, but don't want to get into a pissing contest, and that's a tough thing to do on the internets. We kind of have to take a "retail politics" approach, in that a vast majority of what works is just talking to people. Hard to do that en masse, though.

That's about it. Gamings continue: I've gotten good and hooked on Dead Cells, plus am still playing Graveyard Keeper, Elite, and Just Cause 3 (super excited about 4 coming out later this year). Also started into Ni No Kuni 2 last night (I've been craving a good JRPG), and my daughter and I sometimes play Slime Rancher. I've gotten most of my tech issues resolved, and I know have a working Nextcloud server, a good plain text editor on my tablet so that I can move what I'm working on around, and a VPN service I'm happy with. (I was using Nord, but there's been some shadiness surrounding them that I bailed for a different one called Mullvad.)