Cleaning the office, Day 2

I’ve reached the stage where I’ve moved a lot of the standing clutter out but it looks like I’ve changed nothing because it was all in out of the way places. In fact, there are a few boxes floating around here that weren’t here before. Moral is low, and enthusiasm is starting to run out.

Will have to move onto shear willpower from here on out. We’ll see how this plays out. Pretty tired right now, and my back is starting to bother me. Probably going to throw on some youtube and see if I can start taking care of the Warhammer 40k and arts and crafts shelf. (Yes, I know those two things probably shouldn’t be lumped together, but you now see why I had to go through this exercise.

Blank sheets of paper

Finally broke down and cleaned the desk for the first time in a while. Now it’s a blank sheet of paper waiting for me to mess up again.

I’ll take some pictures of it once I consider it to be finished. But we aren’t there yet. I’m thinking about moving some of the desk furniture around because – well – I do have the time.

Opened the screaming depression factory that is Facebook and regretted it immediately. To be fair, this isn’t a recent development on that site. I believe it turned into a place where we communicate to each other over how helpless we feel long ago.

So what I’m saying is that opening it is on me at this point. I should know better.

Voyager re-watch, Part 2

Star Trek Voyager is trying to melt my brain with its uneven storytelling. I keep falling in love with these characters only to have their arcs not followed up on or dealt with in award ways: such as the Doctor being asked to make himself sick so that he can have more empathy five episodes AFTER a story where he was in extreme pain and thought he was dying.

I watched Voyager when it first came out and I was excited to get back into space exploration after being disappointed with Deep Space Nine. (However, DS9 has since become my favorite of the Trek shows.) But after the middle or so of season three, I stopped watching it because the show seemed like it was focusing on the wrong characters (i.e. the Doctor) and it retreading a lot of old ground. (the Borg hadn’t shown up yet, but it felt like something like that was coming.)

So this is only sort of a re-watch as I have more than half the series that I’ve never seen, and what I have seen I’ve forgotten due to being in my early teens.

What I did like about the show, I like more, and what I didn’t like, I hate even more because now I have the language to actually express it.

All this said, there’s an episode in season 2 called Death Wish, which I think has not only become my favorite single episode of Star Trek, but the episode I’ll show people that has everything in it that makes Star Trek great.

3.22.20

Can’t seem to draw anything into focus today. I’ve tried doing so coding and can’t seem to concentrate. This normally means that I have some fiction in coming.

But for now, the computer is closed.

Star Trek binge

Wil Wheaton said on his Facebook page recently that he’s been getting a lot of people tweeting at him to let him know that they are spending their time in self isolation watching or re-watching Star Trek.

That’s kind of inspired me so I’ve been re-watching Star Trek Voyager. So far, it’s not as uneven as I remember. But I’ve only re-watched a handful of episodes so far. However, every time I see an interesting story line start to get teased out, my wife says, “Yeah, they don’t go anywhere with that.”

But each episode I watch is pretty good in and of itself. Maybe it’s just the universe’s way of telling me to live in the moment more.

Good advice for right now.

Wait for the wheel

Today has been a bit of a wash. I was looking at the news and that’s taken a bit out of me. But tomorrow will be better. I’m going to get back to a web development course tomorrow, so maybe we can both look forward to a slightly better design for the site.

A fresh redesign might be what we all need right now.

Glass computer

One thing about posting the output of neofetch on your blog is that you make it known to the entire world that you haven’t turned off your computer in over 60 days.

So I restarted the computer, and since I was doing that anyway, I decided it was a good idea to update it as well. It then started showing signs of giving up the ghost.

This means the urgency of getting all my configs backed up just raised a little bit. Not that I think my computer is going to randomly die, I just don’t know how many more updates it has in it.

Sites that don’t freak me out

GoodReads might be the only social media site that I actually like. It’s certainly the only one that doesn’t fill me with crushing anxiety every time I log in. While I understand that’s because you can’t link out to the screaming freak shows the news sites plug us into, I think it’s more than that.

I felt positively about goodReads before the world was literally and figurative on fire. It’s probably because unlike most of the sites that make up social media, it has something to offer me, the user. It’s not just a gapping maw to fling links into so the algorithm can drip feed it back to people with some kind of connection to me; it wants to provide me with recommendations of books.

Yes, this is not done out of the goodness of its heart. Amazon is trying to make a sale. (Remember when Amazon was just a book seller? Grandpa Millennial does!) But this transactional model feels quaint by todays standard of creating linked based Skinner Boxes to farm users for data points.

I’m a writer, so by definition I like books. Not just reading them; I like talking about books, I like thinking about books, I like book shopping, and making reading lists. GoodReads gives me tools to do all of these things, and gets out of my way and lets me use them.

While all of this seems basic, they are become novel concepts in the Year of Our Lord 2020. We should relearn them and apply them to the things we build: be direct about what you are, and make the service you provide users the core of your business.

Tuesday

Email is still a mess – never did get around to cleaning it up the other week. Haven’t been out of the house in a few days, so that’s on the docket for tomorrow as well.

We’ll play it by ear.