Thu 23 Sep 2021
I haven't been publishing a whole lot lately, on here, or on my personal projects. A lot of that is having to do with work and home stuff which is not bad, just mediocre. I've been inspired to pull back the curtain on this a little by a couple of Gemini writers who either explicitly gave an update like this, or who consistently put themselves out there.
Every morning, I wake up at 6:00 and get the kids ready for school, and take them to school most mornings before going directly to work. After work, I'm making dinner and tucking kids in and doing dishes until 8:00, by which time I'm usually too tired to do anything but read or watch a short TV show. Spouse, an adjunct professor, is similarly overworked.
At work, I'm currently in a phase where the work I have to do isn't very interesting, and has "high activation energy", so it's hard to get into it, and I have been tending to nibble around the edges. There are also environmental sensitivities that usually I can ignore or block out, but are a lot harder to deal with when I'm not focused — ambient noise and fluorescent light. Dealing with these makes me more tired at the end of the day. I'd probably feel more accomplished and less tired if I worked on personal projects during the work day, but I don't feel safe doing so except at lunch and on my own hardware.
It's not terrible. Lots of people, quite possibly including you, reader, have things worse. But I remember a high point of personal productivity for me a few months ago and just wish I didn't feel tired all the time.
I finished re-reading The King In Yellow for the umpteenth time a couple of weeks ago, including the Paris student romances that some people don't think of as a core part of the collection. While I was reading it, I got the idea of listening to some music that I already had that happened to be written around the same time as the book (1895). I then fell down a rabbit-hole of avant-garde fin-de-siecle music that I really enjoyed and want to share with people. I've collected the raw materials, so to speak, but I haven't had time to make a playlist and publish it.
Before I started being too tired to do anything, I had kind of gotten into a good rhythm of using org-roam (a package that adds Zettelkasten features to the well-known note-taking and personal organization package for Emacs, org-mode) as a kind of virtual Bullet Journal. Which is kind of ridiculous on its face, but the way org-mode works, let me eliminate the main blocker I had with BuJo, which is moving tasks forward if they're not finished that day, as well as integrating it with my long-established but poorly-followed GTD system.
I've read a lot of gemlogs lately that I'd like to respond to, but I never feel like I'll get a response written before the originals scroll off of people's feeds, even granting the slower pace of the smolnet.
I don't have any projects sitting unfinished, but I'd like to write more fiction.
I've been severely neglecting geminiquickst.art. I've received translations for several languages, and haven't been able to publish them, because the activation energy for setting up the needed changes to the static site generator has just been too high. And now I've received a number of update requests to the English version as well. Ack! I feel really guilty about this one.
I'd like to build more fun route handlers for Germinal, but I don't really have any ideas. My CL Gemini client library is basically done as far as I care, but it could use more command-line utils, and there's an annoying bug in the gemcast-player I wrote using it. The bug seems to be in the wrapper, not the library, at least.
Currently, my Gopher hole mirrors my website, which has slightly more professional content than my Gemini capsule. I wrote some templates for the static site generator my website uses to make it easy. But I haven't updated my website in ages, because fuck the Web. So I should probably make my Gopher hole mirror my Gemini capsule, but I maintain my Gemini capsule by hand, and I'd need to figure out some kind of tooling to export it for Gopher.
To quote the inimitable Rachel Bloom, "Ouis. Je suis garbage".
