💾 Archived View for caseyrichins.online › logs › 2023-11-17_Still-here.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:33:16. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Published November 17, 2023
The capsule still lives and is still relevant. it's not abandoned. I know there haven't been any postings as of late. I am personally disappointed that I've discoverd how much self-discipline I lack to be able to write consistently as I have desired to or imagined in my mind that I would write. Much has happened since my last update. There have been many periods of mental struggle and feeling disconnected from the projects that I want to complete. I struggle to get into the mindset of writing because I end up feeling mentally exhausted most days. If Cal Newport and other profilic authors have anything to say about this, it's due to the fact that I'm doing things that don't benefit me mentally and I'm doing too much context switching between tasks or taking on too much at one time causing fractured focus.
Financial stress plays a lot into that I think. Many of my fellow humans are going through the same stress so it's not as if my situation is unique in any way. Student Loans have started again and the one car I have is starting to have mechanical problems after paying off the note for it. The car is only 6 years old but I'm having to pay for some costly repairs, I have a mechanic I trust so I know I'm not getting ripped off or at least I hope I'm not. These repairs are making the struggle to pay off debt much more difficult. I'm trying to minimize my finances down to the essentials and eliminate anything that doesn't provide value to my life. I've already cancelled all of my streaming subscription services. I trying to come up with a plan to localize as much data as possible to prevent having to pay for services I don't need. As convenient as Evernote is, I don't travel as much to warrant paying the subscription to keep notes on every single device I have when I could just keep them in one place on my personal computer with a good backup strategy.
I've stared to go much more further down the gopherhole and have come to realize that since most all of my notes are text files when it comes to documentation. A gopher server makes perfect sense to keep things in a place were they can be easily referenced and indexed. I didn't ever use gopher much in my younger days but I'm finding that I wished I would have used it. It's quite an interesting protocol and it's simplicity is fantastic. I recently migrated all of my services from Digital Ocean to Linode since that is where my monitoring service is and now I don't get a as many alerts about things being broken when everything is fine. I have not noticed much in the way of extreme differences between the two hosting services that make me prefer one over the other.
I have a fiction series that I want to start writing but I need to discipline myself to write every day, so that the habit of writing allows me to write the stories that I have saved up but never began to write. With that said I haven't decided if I want to publish for income or publish for fun and self-happiness. There was a video that I recently watched that help put things into perspective when it comes to trying to write for income. If I choose not to publish for income, then I must decide where online and what medium to publish my writing. I'm leaning to gopher and usenet in some vain attempt to revive those technologies and bring back the internet I remember that wasn't a bloated mess of advertising everywhere. I need to make sure that as I start this process to not edit as I write, that is going to be a bad habit to break. With that said, I hope visitors will help remind me to write if I don't post updates often enough to give updates to the progress that is being made. I've not not decided if I will make a RSS feed for my writing yet.
[HTTPS] Writing Full Time? No thanks.
"Prefer knowledge to wealth, for the one is transitory, the other perpetual." - Socrates
I also desire to read much more every day. I used to read 6 to 7 books a week and in some instances with smaller books being able to read in 2 books a day. I miss being single in such that I was able to dictate my own schedule of activities without needing to consult anyone and there wasn't anyone depending on me. If I wanted to turn unplug/turn off my phone and close all my windows to be able to sit in my room and read a book all day, I was able to in my younger years. I miss that, I miss the ability to fully disconnect from the outside world.
Time will tell this coming year if I can develop more discipline amd if I can prevent issues or situations in my personal life from interfering with what I want to accomplish with m Gemini and Gopher sites. Tell me, do you use down time at your work or job to complete personal projects without guilt or do you feel guilty for desiring to do such?