Intentionality

I’ve been leaving a note at the end of a lot of my writing to “do the thing I want to do, not the thing that is easy.” I think I’ve actually been managing to do that a little. I may not be able to keep it up all the time (or at all!) but it really does feel good when I can do it.

Above anything else, Obsidian has helped me to succeed in this area. With the Tasks plugin as the driving force, and some habits from Building a Second Brain, I’ve been better able to actually evaluate what I really want to do. I’ve also been able to jump in and out of personal projects more easily by keeping better notes i the app. Having the notes for consistency has really helped lower the barrier to returning to difficult and complex tasks when time allows.

The hard part remains, which is breaking off from easy to do things, like watching hours of YouTube on topics I barely care about. For that I think the mantra I started with has helped the most. Also helpful has been Android’s app timer feature, which at least keeps me off certain apps on my phone. Additions have even been made which allowed me to block or limit sites in Chrome, which works much better than my old pihole solution.

Reading

I finished my reread of Gibson’s Zero History. It was as good as ever! The final chapter is actually quite weird. I don’t remember it from previous reads. I’m a little surprised it made it into the final version. It almost feels like a sequel hook from another writer.

I did some significant work on my RSS setup. I switched from Readrops to FeedMe on my phone. I added several feeds including the Welcome to Garbagetown substack (it’s neat that these have rss compatible feeds), Ribbonfarm, Increment, and Robin Sloan’s newsletters. I also added the podcasts from my podcast app. I’m going to experiment with using FeedMe for those as well (I didn’t trust Readrops to handle audio). I continue to use FreshRSS after switching to it from TinyTinyRSS some time ago and it has been working well.

Games

My journey back into arena first person shooters continues. I’ve managed to find a few free for all lobbies in Diabotical, which is the ideal. I’ve also found that there are consistent ffa lobbies for Quake Live on several Chicago servers.

My best friend and I tried to play Zelda Twilight Princess on Wii on Friday. It was overall a frustrating experiece. The motion controls simply haven’t aged well. I imagine my old controller doesn’t help, but the control scheme itself was frustrating for both of us. I have elected to sell both Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. There are so many other games that I own and would rather play.

I’m a little disappointed in losing the Zelda games to be honest. I had always assumed that someday I would be able to push through and find a way to enjoy these games. I was able to do that with Sonic and the Secret Rings. So I’m really not sure why I can’t do it here.

The Journey Continues

I’m backdating this post to when I wrote it, but it took me a couple of weeks to post. To be honest I’m not completely happy with how it turned out. I’ve been hesitant to put it up. Immediately after drafting this I had a long hard weekend of low motivation wallowing in easy activities that I didn’t really enjoy or want to do. I still believe that I want to live with intentionality, but I’m not sure if I’m succeeding as much as I believe I was in the moment.

I think this shows that living intentionally is something that must be worked on moment to moment with mindfulness. I also believe that I need to be compassionate with myself when I fail to do so.

Stay chill and enjoy