There’s a good-sized snow mound on one side of the playground at school, a mound created by the plow truck driver. The kids have loved playing on it during recess for the past week, but after speaking to a few of the teachers, I’ve learned that they’re the only ones happy about it. “I hate the snow mound,” one of the teachers told me. And I hate winter.

Here are some notes from today, this 9th day of December, 2022:

Health

Yes, I will always post screenshots of my phone whenever I manage to sleep for over nine hours. The last time I slept this long was over two weeks ago, so needless to say, I have felt really good today. Once I returned to work last week, I’ve been averaging about 7 hours and 45 minutes of sleep, which isn’t bad, but I would love an extra hour. Where to find it?

I found the courage to finally quit intermittent fasting. I started this maybe 4 or 5 years ago with the intention of both trying to lose a bit of weight and to quit snacking late at night. I succeeded in the latter, failed with the former. I’m not super overweight or anything, but I do want to keep an eye on it. Over the last 4 or 5 years, I grew used to eating at set times, so much so that I think I screwed up my metabolism or something. Sure, it could be my body changing because I’m getting older, but no matter how hard I worked out and how little I ate, I still managed to gain weight. It got pretty bad during COVID, where I gained maybe 5-8 pounds over my “average,” weight I have not been able to lose since.

So I decided to eat breakfast every day this week, snack a bit in the afternoon, and have a smaller-ish dinner at night. And you know what? After the first few mornings hating the feel of food in the morning, I’ve grown accustomed to it, and today, for the first time, I was eager to eat breakfast. I’m not sure what this will do to my weight yet, but I can already tell the difference with my workouts. I’m working out harder and longer, and my body feels stronger. These changes have been great, and I’m looking forward to see how my health changes in the coming weeks and months.

Books

One thing I have found the time to do this week is reading more books. I finished both Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi and Slow Horses by Mick Herron. Both were fun reads, both gave me that old, familiar writing energy I used to have a lot when I was younger but have lost over the last decade or so.

Writing used to be fun. In high school, back when I was first learning that I liked to write, I had fun writing my stories. They were heavily inspired by the stories I loved: action movies, crime thrillers, murder mysteries, stuff like that. I got into film school by writing stories like these for my portfolio. At film school, I had the most fun when I wrote these types of stories, scenes inspired by movies like Le Cercle Rouge and Heat. At some point, though, I lost that. I started to take things seriously. I started writing more “serious” stuff, stuff that would win awards, would win Oscars or whatever. I took myself too seriously and my writing suffered, I think. And it has suffered ever since.

Earlier this year, I wrote a silly short story in my notebook that reminded me a lot of what I used to write. It was this stupid idea of this guy who invented a way of synthesizing people’s memories into pills, and he got addicted to these pills because whenever he took them, he would be this other person for a while and that helped him forget who he was. He could be a 16 year old girl at her prom or a 29 year ball player hitting the game-winning home run at the World Series. He would be anyone but himself. And I dunno, I had fun writing this story, and it wasn’t something I had written in over a decade. My stuff had all been about heavy drama and shit like that, and the weight of trying to write something that I can sell to a “serious” publisher became too much for me.

So I stopped writing. And because I stopped, I stopped reading, too. At least reading fun and enjoyable fiction. Instead I focused on non-fiction stuff that was all about optimizing my life in some way, to be a “better” person, a “smarter” person. All that stupid bullshit.

But then I read Kaiju Preservation Society and Slow Horses this week, both on the same day—Slow Horses in the morning, Kaiju Preservation Society in the afternoon—and I remembered why I wanted to be a writer in the first place. Because writing was fun. Writing an action hero who was tougher than Nathan Drake or a thief better than Neil McCauley. That was all fun to me, and goddammit, I miss that shit. And you know? Nobody gives a shit if I write serious fiction or whatever, because honestly, nobody gives a shit about me, right? And what I mean by that is I’m an unknown. I’ve never been published, so who cares?

I did for so long, and now I don’t care. I want to write whatever the fuck I want to write.

Focus

A big reason why I was able to read so much (to me) this week was because I made some changes to try and curtail some of my bad habits. For weeks now I’ve been using Apple’s Screen Time and Focus modes to help me curb my social media usage. In a way, it worked, but only with Facebook and Instagram, surprisingly. I set a limit of 10 minutes on both of these apps, and that has been more than enough for me. I never reach it! Once I get the 5 minute left notification, I stop using those apps and move on. It used to be 20 minutes, but that included Mastodon and Micro.blog, but these last two apps have been awful to my attention and focus, so I deleted them from my phone. I’ll admit, I had that twitch to check my phone for the first few days, but once I grew used to not having them on my phone, I started to feel better. But still not where I wanted to be.

So I set another limit, and that was on Reeder, my RSS reader of choice. I set a limit of 30 minutes on that, and I made the decision to only check it once throughout the day. The evening is what I chose. After work, after my workout, before dinner. 30 minutes has been more than enough for me to check my feeds for the day. I would add anything I wanted to read later into GoodLinks, and when I can, I would read those later. I again felt that twitch to check Reeder earlier this week, but by Wednesday, that twitch disappeared. Instead, I would pick up one of my two books and read that instead. And again, surprisingly, I have loved this change. It has given me more time and focus to read, and with this rediscovered writing energy, I hope more time and focus to write, too.

But not yet. I’m not quite there yet. What needs to change? I’m not sure. My focus is on a lot of things right now: trying to find another hour of sleep, changing my eating habits and trying to eat better, working out more and working out harder, reading more books, and now trying to write more, too. So, I have a lot on my mind right now. If I can somehow figure out to do and fit all this into my life?

Oh man… that would be great.

A short post to note a personal accomplishment.

I’ve meditated for 5,000 minutes with Headspace. Another way to think about it: that’s 3 days, 11 hours, and 20 minutes spent focusing on my breath with my eyes closed.

This morning, my phone reminded me that I was very lazy over holiday break.

I averaged 3,190 steps over the previous five days, which is accurate. I spent my break living like a lazy person, and I enjoyed every second of it. But I knew that type of life wouldn’t last forever, so today I returned to work: I both clocked into my job, and I pulled out my workout mat and burned some calories.

I’m understating it when I say I’m tired. My resting heart rate for the past hour has been in the 70s, up from a yearly average of 49bpm. After my workout, I texted my friend, “🤮🤮🤮.”

She replied by challenging me to a 7-day competition on our Apple Watches.

“Friendly competition,” she said.

Game on.

Toward the end of October, I added Headspace back to my morning routine.

I first heard about the app from this 2015 article in The New Yorker. At the time, I had used Insight Timer to help me meditate, an app I loved for its simplicity and the fact that it was free. But Headspace appeared interesting, so I tried it. I used it briefly, but I missed Insight Timer, so I returned to it and moved on from Headspace. A few years later, I learned that Headspace offered free lifetime access for educators, so I applied and upgraded my account, and I began to use it again to meditate. Like before, I used it for a few months, tried their new meditation courses, but for some reason, I couldn’t stick with it. Around that time, I had learned that Calm also offered lifetime access for educators, so I applied and used that app for a while. I liked this one more because they had a nice daily meditation, so I stuck with Calm.

Sometime last year, I stopped meditating. I think I had hit a plateau, and I no longer felt like meditating was bringing my life any value. So I stopped, and I didn’t miss it. At least, it wasn’t something I craved. All those years of meditating didn’t mean much to me anymore, and I felt like I was okay with that. As you might be able to guess, I wasn’t okay with that. Over time, I had started to feel on edge more and more. It’s remarkable sometimes how something could affect your life so much, but you only realize by how much when it’s gone. I had lost something when I stopped meditating, and the only way to get it back was to meditate again.

So—toward the end of October, I added Headspace back to my morning routine.

And I love it.

I setup Headspace to send me a reminder every day at 8:15am, and every day at around that time, I open the app and start my day with The Wake Up, then I follow it with that day’s meditation. Sometimes they include nature videos, videos of animals in the jungle or the sea or the desert, and these ten minute videos have been a joy to watch in the afternoon and evening. At the moment, I’m only meditating for ten minutes every morning, but I am planning to add another meditation later in the day.

My current streak stands at 39 days, and I’ve been meditating everywhere, at home, at work, and in different times throughout the day. I feel like I’ve regained a piece of whatever it was I was missing—some mental edge I had lost over the last year. Will I ever quit again? Honestly—probably. I’m human, after all. At the moment, though, I’m appreciating what this app has done for my life and for my mental health.

I slept for nine hours and thirty-nine minutes last night.

I’m not sure how I was asleep for longer than I was in bed, but I’m not questioning it. As soon as I woke up, I texted my friend, “I slept in past 8 and I slept for over 9 hours… can’t every day be like this?!?!” I wish it were because I have felt amazing all day.

What did I do with these good feelings? Absolutely nothing, and I don’t feel guilty about that one bit. After my morning routine, I had lunch and watched the season finale of Andor (how is this show this good?), then I started working a bit on my computer. My new SSD arrived yesterday, and I hadn’t had time to set it up yet, so I started transferring all my pictures onto it as my plan was to use this drive to edit my photos with Capture One, but…

1.29 TB takes a while to transfer, so while I waited (am waiting?), I played Spider-Man: Miles Morales for a few hours. I am enjoying this game a lot, and I’m already quite far into it.

I don’t have big plans for Thanksgiving, but I might see some lovely people here and there tomorrow. All I hope to do during this holiday break is to continue to sleep in and to continue to be lazy. How does that saying go? I’ll work when I’m dead. Something like that.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around what exactly I’m wanting to do with these weekly notes (this is only my second one), but I’m the type of person that needs to do something to get a feel for it and not one that’s good at planning ahead… Anyways! Here are some notes from today, this 18th day of November, 2022:

Grab two of everything and hop onto the Arc

Earlier this week, I received an invite to try the brand new, overly hyped, Arc browser. First impressions:

• It’s… a browser? But the sidebar is on the left side, and it has a nice enough design, but that icon… it’s very ugly? Is that just me? It kinda looks like the Apple App Store icon had a baby with the Amazon logo.
• I really like how the ⌘+T shortcut brings up the Command Bar instead of opening a new tab. That shortcut is already ingrained in my muscle memory, so using it how the people behind Arc want me to use their browser is easy enough. I like how I can switch between tabs from here, search the web, enter URLs, whatever. Clever idea.
• I really like the idea of folders and spaces, and the easel seems like a great way to collect research and notes.
• My problem with all that though (and the fact that it’s based on Chromium) is that I already have years and years of workflows built using Safari, not to mention some amazing Safari-only extensions that I simply cannot install in Arc. I want to like Arc, but old habits die hard.
• If you’d like to try it, I have 5 invites to the first 5 people to click this link!

Not your father’s wrestling federation

Earlier this week, I hopped onto the Mastodon bandwagon, and I have mostly been enjoying myself. It’s not a place I’m spending too much of my time in, but when I do, it’s nice. Quiet. But it does have its quirks, quirks that were nicely explained in this article by the EFF:

No matter how much you love or hate email itself, it is a working federated system that’s been around for over a half-century. It doesn’t matter what email server you use, what email client you use, we all use email and the experience is more or less the same for us all, and that’s a good thing. The Web is also federated – any web site can link to, embed, refer to stuff on any other site and in general, it doesn’t matter what browser you use. The internet started out federated, and even continues to be.

I really liked this email analogy because once I read it, I immediately understood what a federated social media network actually meant and what it will mean in the future. This is what social media should have been all along!

However, it took email a long time before people fully grokked it, and I think the same will be true for Mastadon and other federated networks. Max Böck put it best when he wrote:

I think we’re at a special moment right now. People have been fed up with social media and its various problems (surveillance capitalism, erosion of mental health, active destruction of democracy, bla bla bla) for quite a while now. But it needs a special bang to get a critical mass of users to actually pack up their stuff and move.

When that happens, we have the chance to build something better. We could enable people to connect and publish their content on the web independently – the technology for these services is already there. For that to succeed though, these services have to be useable by all people - not just those who understand the tech.

Just like with migration to another country, it takes two sides to make this work: Easing access at the border to let folks in, and the willingness to accept a shared culture - to make that new place a home.

These services have to be useable by all people - not just those who understand the tech. Exactly. I think we can get there, though, especially if these services can accommodate more and more people, people who don’t want to understand all this “tech stuff.” Give it to the big guys, though: they made this stuff easy for anyone to understand. But it was this ease that got us into this mess in the first place!

“This enshittification [more mass surveillance, finer-grained and more intrusive ad targeting],” writes Cory Doctorow, “was made possible by high switching costs. The vast communities who’d been brought in by network effects were so valuable that users couldn’t afford to quit, because that would mean giving up on important personal, professional, commercial and romantic ties.”

With federated networks, these switching costs are no longer an issue. Hell, I created my Mastodon account in 2018, but I switched to the social.lol instance in just a few minutes. All my followers, everyone I followed, my block and mute lists, all transferred over just fine. The whole experience was slick! Again, this is what social media should be.

To the moon! Some stretchy stuff! 8 billion people!

NASA launched the Artemis 1 rocket earlier this week, “which will, among other things, take scientific experiments to produce metal on the moon.”

What if we could save money by using the resources that are already there? This process is called in-situ resource utilization, and it’s exactly what astrometallurgy researchers are trying to achieve.

[…]

While the moon has metals in abundance, they’re bound up in the rocks as oxides—metals and oxygen stuck together. This is where astrometallurgy comes in, which is simply the study of extracting metal from space rocks.

I love that astrometallurgy exists. What a cool word and what a cool science.

Apparently, scientists have created a “skinlike sticker” that “runs machine-learning algorithms to continuously collect and analyze health data directly on the body. The skinlike sticker… includes a soft, stretchable computing chip that mimics the human brain.”

“We envision that wearable electronics,” they continue

will play a key role in tracking complex indicators of human health, including body temperature, cardiac activity, levels of oxygen, sugar, metabolites and immune molecules in the blood. […] Our work is a good starting point for creating devices that build artificial intelligence into wearable electronics – devices that could help people live longer and healthier lives.

That always seems to be the promise, huh? This promise to “live longer and healthier lives.” Living longer is always nice, but should we? Our bodies might possibly go on for forever, but can our minds? Can a human mind handle 150, 500, 1000 years of being alive? At some point, we have to die. But this stretchable sticker idea is cool.

The UN reported earlier this week that humanity has surpassed 8 billion people. Imagine 8 billion people living for over 100 years. Can planet earth sustain that? I don’t think it can. I’m glad and excited that we’re pushing our species past our home and into the great unknown that is outer space, but earth is our home, too. Are we parasites or caretakers? Are we here to ravage this place and move on, or can we live with some sort of harmony with our ancestral home?

I hope we can, but unless I live to be 250 years old, I might not be alive to find out.

Sleeping while on duty

Finally, I learned a new term today: ‌inemuri (居眠り), or “present while sleeping” in Japanese. Basically, it’s this idea of taking power naps while at work, and in Japan, these naps are seen as virtuous because it signifies that you’ve worked to the point of complete exhaustion.

For me, though, it means that napping is a necessary part of modern human culture. I’ve been having trouble sleeping all year, but my 10, 20, 30 minute naps I have taken throughout the year have helped me stay sane. And yes, sometimes I have snuck a quick nap or two while at work, and I am not ashamed! It means I have worked myself to the point of complete exhaustion. Like a real American!

I’m trying something new. Here are some notes from today, this 11th day of November, 2022:

• I slept for 9 hours and 8 minutes. 9 hours and 8 minutes! I woke up fully rested and ready to go. I have been happy all day. I wish I could sleep in every day.
• I bought an annual subscription to Capture One. This was something I was thinking about earlier this week, and I decided to go for it this morning. Consequence of getting a good night’s sleep? Yes, I think. Now to migrate from Lightroom…
• Earlier this week, Affinity released version 2 of their creative suite of apps. I had purchased version 1 of their apps, but I found myself not using them too much. The one app I used the most was Affinity Designer, and I enjoyed that app when I needed it. As long as it still works, I’m keeping version 1. That means missing out on their 40% launch discount, but that’s okay. Now that I’m moving away from Adobe, I’ve been using Pixelmator Pro on my Mac and Pixelmator Photo on my iPhone. These apps satisfy all my needs for now. They are fast, beautiful, and just powerful enough.
• The one thing I love about Affinity are their educational videos. They are so well-done and produced. I remember going through all their Affinity Photo and Designer videos back in the day, and I nerded out so hard on them. Good times!
• Along with a Capture One subscription, I bought this SanDisk 2TB Extreme Portable SSD. I wanted this to act as a middle man between my SD Card and my long-term storage, something to load all my photos into while I processed them and something to then backup to my other hard drives later. Its rugged nature is what drew me in. This will be something I toss in my bag and not something that lies stationary on a desk.
• Cultured Code, the makers of Things, has a really cool link builder on their website. I wanted to create a custom url scheme to create a specific type of task that I could fire with Shortcuts whenever I needed to, and this tool helped me build it easily and quickly. A great find and a great resource!
• My ArticRisk name is Mario Extreme Winters Villalobos. Fits!

• Batman died today.
• Atlanta aired its final episode.
• Mythic Quest is back!
• Finally, I purchased Debut by Björk last night, and I listened to it today while working around the house. Just as good as I remember.

I’m not sure how many of these I will do, but I always liked the idea of collecting links and other tidbits from my day and aggregating them into a post. I can finally cross that off the list.

Happy Friday, everyone!

A Day in the Life. Donating blood at around 1pm in western Montana.

I’ve just come home from getting my third Pfizer shot of the year, six months after my second dose and three months after contracting the virus myself. Setting up the appointment and getting the shot was mind-boggling easy—the way it should be, though, I’m sure it was easy because demand is so low. But I don’t want to think about it like that. Like Ed Yong wrote yesterday:

Instead of asking “What’s my risk?,” I’ve tried to ask “What’s my contribution to everyone’s risk?”… I’ve tried to put we over me.

[…]

The infectious nature of a virus means that a tiny bad decision can cause exponential harm, but also that a tiny wise decision can do exponential good.

If you haven’t already, get vaccinated. This isn’t about you; it’s about us, so let’s all do our part.