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I don't usually make too much of a habit of setting New Year's resolutions, but this year I definitely feel the need for a few. At the highest level, my resolution for 2021 is exactly the same as the one that no-good thunder-stealer Tomasino posted just the other day - that the computer should not be "my default place to hang out". I want to make the deliberate decision to sit down in front of a computer with the intention of doing something in particular, and then step away from it when I'm done. This doesn't necessarily need to be something *productive*, it might just be "spend 30-60 minutes catching up on the small internet", I just don't want to always have a laptop within arm's reach and mindlessly fritter away hours of spare time on it. Easier said than done, of course, but I have more specific ideas / subgoals in place to help achieve this. Some of them relate to also trying to do more of specific non-computery things, while others are about continuing to change the way I use computers to make distraction and time wasting more difficult.
Tomasino's latest New Year's resolution phlog post
I have three main "non-computery" goals for this year, alongside keeping up my cycling. One is to read more, and another is to keep up the deliberate music listening and exploration I started last year. In service of these two goals, I've bought a comfy chair and set it up in a room of our new apartment here, and it's *not* in the room with the desk where my computers are going to live. There's a bookshelf on one side of said comfy chair (since I'm hoping not to have to move internationally again for a good long while now, I'm no longer so afraid of buying things like physical books), and on the other side is a small, low table on which I've put a used CD player I purchased off eBay shortly after arriving here. As a Christmas gift to myself I bought a nice pair of over-ear headphones - a rare purchase of non-used electronics for me these days, but they have replaceable ear pads and a replaceable cable (using a non-proprietary connector, so I'm not locked into one manufacturer for replacements), and since they won't ever leave my house I hope I will be able to keep them in service for a very long time. I'm looking forward to hunting for cheap used CDs in person when the Covid situation here makes it possible again, and I can shop online in the meantime.
The third goal is to pick up some kind of creative / artistic pursuit. I haven't got this one fully worked out yet, but it's something I've been half-assedly thinking about for a while. Fountain pen sketching is an obvious choice, as I already have a handful of pens and different inks so there's very little barrier to entry in terms of gearing up, but I'm considering other possibilities as well. I was highly intrigued by atyrfingerprints' recent gemlog post about linoleum print making, especially since I fell in love with a certain style of Japanese woodblock printing mid last year, but I have some reservations about the material impact side of it. Lino is synthetic, of course, and each piece can only be used once. Of course, woodblock carving is probably a lot harder and more expensive, so there's a definite trade-off. Some kind of wood carving hobby might be nice. As you can see, my thoughts on this are pretty scattered, thanks to random sources of inspiration from (mostly) stuff I've seen people do on Mastodon. I'll probably just start trying things out similarly at random and see what resonates with me.
"printmaking for the unskilled" by atyrfingerprints
July Pikkulog, see the post for 2020-07-21 on woodblock printing
I have computery goals, too. One of them overlaps with the reading goal. Toward the end of 2020 I started once again writing somewhat regularly about environmental concerns around electronic and especially computer manufacturing, and what the various options might be for concerned individuals to alleviate this. I intend to continue to make this a major focus of my Gopher/Gemini writing for 2021, and I intend to do a lot of relevant reading to inform said writing. I have surprised myself by very quickly having ending up holding much more extreme views on this front than I expected when I started thinking about it, and I want to make sure I haven't overlooked any important counter-arguments.
I plan to get a lot more hands-on experience with the "salvage computing" idea I've written about. I have a few old mobile devices lying around and I want to try installing PostmarketOS on at least one of them. I'd like to experiment with WiFi mesh networking, and with off-grid power solutions for mobile devices.
As 2021 progresses I want to invest progressively less and less time and energy in running the Gemini project (not, let me be clear, by abandoning it, just by trying to move things to a state where they *require* less and less time and energy, and by delegating some of the remaining requirements to other people I trust), and progressively more and more time and energy into the Circumlunar Space universe. Gemini kind of turned into a surprise distraction from that little world, but the recent launch of the Soviet colony has reminded me of just how great the pubnix scene is, and I want to throw myself back into it again.
Finally, I also want to spend an awful lot less time and energy on Mastodon. I'm a little torn on this. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with the Fediverse as a platform. I've met a lot of great people on there and had good conversations. But my experience there has slowly changed over time. When I first joined, I followed just a few people, and they were the only people who followed me, and the whole thing was casual and relaxed and felt like a small community. But over time - and especially since Gemini became so popular - I've accumulated more and more followers, and it's shifted my experience. I don't have any delusions of grandeur here. I know that, by the standards of social media "influencers", my 830 followers are very few. But it's more than 10 people following me for every person I follow and feel like I know. It took me a long time to make the mental shift to realise that I wasn't just tooting at my friends anymore, and that anything I said was likely to either get replies from or be boosted by an effective stranger. Once I did make the shift, I occasionally found myself making toots just because I thought this large audience I'd accumulated would enjoy them, and then being happy when I got lots of likes/boosts. I never said anything I didn't believe or that was in any way misleading, but I was still kind of uncomfortable with the dynamic I could feel developing and I just want to step away from the whole thing for a while. I don't know how permanent this will be, we'll see.
Similar to the comfy chair reading/listening station idea, I'm thinking of trying to encourage success in these goals by tailoring my physical environment to suit it. I might end up building a "small internet terminal" - a computer on which I install a Gopher and Gemini client, my ssh keys for the Zaibatsu, and a few other bits and pieces, but no browser and no mail client. It'll be a machine with very low capacity for distraction or obligation. I'll try to make this the machine at which I spend the most of my time, only using my "full powered" X220 for things that require it. To some extent I've been down this road before with my little OpenBSD eeePC, but the thing is that machine is overall *less* inviting to use than my main machine, because the screen and keyboard are smaller and, while it's probably not actually heavier, it's certain denser and so it somehow feels more cumbersome. I'm not really sure how to make my distraction-free machine easier or more appealing to use than the X220, which has a very nice keyboard and is portable to anywhere in the house. It might be that this is a silly idea and I'm just inventing an excuse to build a new toy, but it certainly can't possibly *increase* the amount of time I spend on the "big internet", so I figure it's worth a shot.
Phlog post "OpenBSD on an eeePC 1005HA" (2019-02-23)
That's about it, I think. If I can stick to even some of these goals, I'll be happy.