Dude, kill it!
Procrastination is the problem I'm working on right now- my aha moment was that I have a huge fear of disappointment, because disappointment sucks ups the fun of the actually finishing. At least, it gets really hard for me to work on something once the deadline has already past, and thinking about it, that's what usually happens whenever I try Nanowrimo.
I... am almost the same? I graduated in Psychology and Political Science, I've been thinking about going to grad school to study Moral Psychology because I wanted to contribute to get people united for big issues. I've done freelance in web and graphic design to make ends meet since I graduated 3 years ago, but I don't really see myself getting into it any further. There is an interview by Julia Galef that I keep relistening to, she kind of touches on how she makes money through her organizations, but I keep going back to it to daydream about what I'd do if I continued to pursue psychology. https://80000hours.org/2017/09/is-it-time-for-a-new-scientific-revolution-julia-galef-on-how-to-make-humans-smarter/
I'm in a cafe in Cheney, Washington. The first odd thing is that I am the only person in a 3/4 full cafe with a laptop out. It's very bizarre to me. I'm trying to be conservative with my computer usage right now. Quite a bit of turbulence on my flight to Washington. I stuck my camera to the window and held the shutter to get this: https://i.imgur.com/FXhTNH7.gif Finally got a portfolio for myself together before I left. Then one interview I had lined up in Spokane fell apart on me, found out a couple hours after I got off the plane. I came here to visit a friend, so I should focus on that. Trying not to think too much about employment, or maybe I should be. Trying to enjoy myself on vacation. Trying.
Something beautiful died tonight and I was u crazy and I didn't realize that you were pretty much my best friend this time and I was so weird yesterday and I didn't realize that you were pretty much my best friend this time and I was so weird yesterday and I didn't realize that you were pretty much my best friend this year. My SwiftKey prediction from this sentence is really sad.
I once had three mice. I named them Theodore, Buttercup, and The Holy Spirit. They were feeder mice meant to be fed to snakes. I had them for about 6 months and they helped with my depression. Mice are particularly hard to pet, and they started to hiss and bite at me whenever I went to feed them in the cage. This went on for awhile and on one particularly bad day I decided to kill them off. I rationalized that they were feeder mice that were going to die anyway. I took a half empty jar of peanut butter and put then waited awhile before I put the lid on it. I woke up the next day feeling the absolute worst, and I was worried that my family would come in and notice that my mice were missing. I bought three more mice and pretended that everything was fine, but in the back of my mind I felt that there was an aura of fear left behind by the previous trio and these new mice knew that I was a mouse killer. I kept them until I left to find myself across the US and I couldn't find anyone to take care of them and I didn't have any friends with snakes so I decided to kill them in the same way, in a peanut butter jar. I don't trust myself to take care of pets or plants right now. If you buy a succulent I'll buy a succulent.
Invisible Cities was the first book I put on my Kindle Paperwhite. I remember I got the actual device for ludicrously cheap on ebay, and it felt like a magical device that would change my life. I dreamed about the possibility of keeping an entire stash of comfort books on the device. I mainly kept the device in the car, for days parked alongside the Alaskan highway reading in the sun, because I am a person who enjoys possibilities more than experiencing things. There is a line from a story by Camus where a bookshop owner says "History shows, that the more people buy books, the less they read." I don't think I ever read in the car, or even used it for the first year I had it. I had a lot of fun using Calibre and using Google-fu to try to pirate the books I wanted to read- I didn't have a private tracker invite or anything special, and it feels as though the pirate world for epubs and mobis is the least developed and the most treacherous. I'm pretty sure it's because libraries already do a good job of filesharing. Here's when I finally read with it: while in trains, greyhounds, and airplanes. It's the only place where reading is an isolated activity, and the perhaps the only time when I don't feel guilty about enjoying my time. I'm always surprised at how quickly time passes. It just occurred to me that this is probably the part of traveling that I enjoy the most, and I should probably embrace this. That said, I am someone who has trouble reading books, period. I joke to myself that I only read to fuck interesting people, and the longer I think about it the better I get at convincing myself that it's actually true. I am a person who enjoys possibilities more than experiencing things.
Sorry, I was just being snarky.
I forgot how to change it back for a few weeks and now I have a myriad of rationalizations for the Ugly theme, including: - It makes Hubski feel unique from other websites - It is easier for me to read long paragraphs in this font (there is no proof of this) - It exposes me as a web designer to different viable styles - It humbles me as a web designer to the effect of getting used to things so I don't change shit all the time - It makes me think I'm smarter because I associate mono-spaced fonts with coding which is still mystical to me because I don't code - It feels delicious to be on the wrong side of history - If you stare at the default sans-serif font for too long the default sans-serif font stares back at you - Obviously someone who does Hubski has a sense of humor because they named it the Ugly style, I want them to know that I appreciate it and that their efforts didn't go unnoticed - I just like it this way, gosh
They sent me an two emails for a pizza party, where they would literally just send a pizza to your house. That was kind of a big red flag for me, it made me feel like something was wrong. I joined Imzy at the same time as Hubski because I was looking for an online community. A few things about Imzy: - Imzy has a lot of features that would have been great if it had millions of users. Communities, profiles that serve as blogs, posts could be customized to either have a live chat feed or comment - Tipping moderators with money was a feature I was curious about. I have never seen it used in my time there. - A negative: When you clicked on a post, it shows that you "participated" in the post, with your profile icon. - A bigger negative: There was a wide post / comment ratio in the communities I was in, and I thought I was in the more active ones. It's a huge turnoff for me since I already frequent a lot of news aggregators. - The thing that actually drove me away: notifications for trending posts in communities. It's a pet peeve of mine, I like my notifications to actually mean something. - There was a "Let's Grab Coffee" community that was really active and involved, talking nightly. I imagine that there was a main core of people there that I would have loved to talk to, but I didn't know anyone and it felt weird lurking because it was mostly general conversation. - It's sad when a community goes down. Reading through the comments is really disheartening, because the users sense that there's something that they did wrong. They did nothing wrong, and their website was really cool.
I have way too many thoughts on this. This article shook me to the core. The biggest realization I currently have is that this is the first time I remember in my life where I was actually interested in my family history, as a second generation Filipino in the US I've always been ambivalent about my culture (I also publicly hated participating in the Filipino dance group my mom taught), and something about my parents making sure that I didn't learn their native language (they thought it stunt my English) just closed my curiosity about being Filipino. Also, I dreaded my family trips to the Philippines because it always terrified me on an existential level. I have a hard time thinking about my extended family there without thinking that I am the worst person ever.
I feel consistently on the verge of collapse. I think trying to deal with feeling is probably what my definition of adulthood is for awhile. On my head is the relationship between my ADHD and depression- at least, I'm beginning to realize that there is a relationship between my careless moments of ADHD causing a lot of anxiety and the ensuing depression caused by the looming inevitability of fuck ups. Does anyone want to hear my epic fail of a virginity story? I told it at a storytelling show: I have complex thoughts about how I feel about how it went. The problem is that I was invited to tell this story after the producers heard the one time I told it amazingly, with a highly reactive crowd. This crowd was so lukewarm in comparison. The idealized version in my head will always have precedence, I guess.
Thanks for the great advice bl00, your comment has been on my head all day. I've made a triple venn diagramm for my job, litcat, and freelance. You're right about how thinly I'm spread - I worry about my other jobs while doing the job I'm supposed to be doing, and it's fucking with me hard. Out of respect for how angry and frustrated I was yesterday, I did my best to apply myself to my job today. I acted like I had gotten out of a depression this morning (why this works is still amazing to me), and acted as jovial as could be (I also ThatFanFicGuy's comment and thought it was hilarious, so I acted like what he probably thought I was like) I voiced my fear of my review with my team lead today, she enthusiastically felt that I had nothing to worry about. That I was helpful and the account managers really liked me, I was a serious asset to the company. I trust her judgement, mostly because I felt I was going insane yesterday. It's more likely that I am just a weird person with a lot of individual skills that are useful when the fires are bright. There was a few days where I spent 7 hours dicking around, but more days where I was immediately useful at other things. But there is another lens that occurred to me while at work today: My job is to keep clients on our monthly retainer. SEO doesn't actually matter at the scale that we're doing it, (most of the keyword estimates are at 10 searches a month) it is more that the clients are kept, they believe we are doing something, and we are there when they need help. This is what's wrong - my position's value lies mostly in reaction, when my idea of productivity is in being proactive. I need to see myself more like a firefighter to enjoy my work. My job vs. my freelance work is interesting topic that I need to reflect on, because its something me and my boss talk have talked about and is something that I'm going to think about this weekend. I tell my clients that I can't do SEO work for them because of my job conflict, and I end up doing the work I'm passionate about - web design and hosting. At the agency, it's cheaper to have me make a few emails to designers and developers from Freelancer.com, than it is for me to go into the code. The Venn Diagram I have is about which of three jobs I should cut. It would probably sound insane to you, but my gut instinct is to cut Lit.cat and focus on embracing my job and freelance work. I'm starting to realize that this entire comment and the reasoning is starting to sound more like weaseling out of burden of doing good work that you're trying to instill in me. I promise, goddammit, good work is all I want to do. I'll be more cognizant.
I read this as dildo appreciation thread because I am still 13 years old and this is was what was on the radio at the time.
Just a heads up:
This is one of those places where I feel like I'm outnumbered and will be outreasoned, but I will say that I've only enjoyed Star Wars as a major cultural institution to join into until I saw Rogue One. This movie made me care about the series in a way that I'm convinced I should go back and watch the other 6 again for enjoyment, not because I'm socially guilted to watch it. This movie is perfect for the person who has never given a shit about Star Wars. The last 40 minutes on the planet (fuck, who cares what the planet's name was) were really stressful and exciting, because you don't actually know the ultimate fate of the protagonists because you only have a general sense of the storyline and you're not 100% sure that they're going to die at the end. It's a motherfucking suicide mission a la Saving Pirates of the Caribbean Ryan except this time, its all about establishing the most engaging cause and effect relationship through action sequences without feeling like they're in arbitrary situations and it leads to bam - the memory of watching Star Wars for the first time in your high school freshman AP English class to learn about Joseph Campbell's hero's cycle, and how it made you feel to watch this movie that all of your white friends were excited about who had parents who were more culturally adept than your own - and then you realize that Princess Leia, who's hair probably swirls in the opposite direction in Australia, looks a little off, and you wonder if that was a CGI rendering and you walk outside of the movie theater and your friends talk about how obvious the CGI was and you nod in agreement and say that you noticed right away, because Star Wars makes sense and feels whole and personal to you for the first time in your life - you feel like you understand, and that's what you remember about movies; not the names of the characters, but how those characters made you feel.
Earlier this week I found out that my favorite artist released an album last year, and I was a little sad because I'm no longer in contact with anyone who would enjoy listening to it. I guess that's life. The album is If by Paul De Jong the cellist, gentle half of The Books. Three of the songs get me teary eyed, I highly recommend a listen.
I have 7 clocks in my room, they were 1 dollar each from IKEA. I stack them in weird formations on my shelf as a weird sound sculpture - individually, they're all pretty loud. But unlike a single clock, with it's long, drawn out, tick-tocking- 7 cheap cheap clocks combine in this funky, 60 bpm subdued drumbeat that I don't get annoyed by. Rhythmically, it reminds me of this rim shots in this song.
I found a bunch of good stuff from the classical music thread and have been going through my library lately for interesting songs with pianos in it. Nothing specific, I'm just bummed out that I don't actually have many songs in pianos in it. Pianos for dayz.
I absolutely recommend The Design of Everyday Things. It's full of concrete case stories of design failures and improvements on them, pretty much like a bunch of 99% Invisible episodes strung together. Admittedly, I now get a little angrier whenever I use other people's bathrooms and find weird faucets and toilets, but at least I can rationalize it better.
I'm pretty sure Haushka doesn't count as classical, but it's great concentration music for those who like classical instruments:
My agency switched to https://asmallorange.com/ recently because of their price and extremely quick service. Their live chat game is rock solid.