Like last year I'm going to do another month long challenge, which has already begun so I'm just going to jump straight into the rules
Rules
Not much has changed from my previous attempt, but I've relaxed rule 4 a little bit, you can read the details of the original rules here
- Only one task at a time,
- No algorithmically fed content,
- Background music is allowed (within limits),
- No social media. In addition to the exceptions that were already part of that rule I have added "videos from previously setup RSS feeds" and, as an experiment this year, Mastodon as I (from my use of it during this year) find that it is significantly different from other social media platforms for a couple of reasons. The main reason is that the main feeds (Home and Local) are finite and highly curateable (that's probably not a word but we'll just roll with it), there is no infinite scroll, so whenever I open it up I only use it for a couple of minutes to catch up with the people I follow and the instance I'm a part of and then I'm at the end of the feed so I quit, the other also very important reason is that due to the general way it works there isn't pretty much any rage-baity content or people following trends just to get clicks, instead there are tons of smaller communities dedicated to what they do that share a lot of cool stuff between them.
The plan™
For this year I wanted to pick up some of the things that worked well last year and double down on them. One of them was reading, so I looked back and wanted to improve on some the the downsides or less ideal things about it. I really liked reading but carrying books around was less than ideal and reading long stretches of text on my phone or tablet put quite a bit of strain on my eyes so I had kept those for manga as with that style of book I wasn't just focusing on lines of text but also frequently stepping back to admire the artworks, so after a bit of research I ended up buying a Kobo Libra Color and am enjoying it a lot, it also has the nice bonus that I can read in bed without the extremely bright non-dimmable lights of my bedroom or the use of my phone for the previously stated reason.
I also want to go trough my old accounts like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, you know, the ones I've not used in a while and terminate them. This is something I should have done a while back but the thoughts on the back of my head kept me from doing it.
I want to focus again on my personal projects, some that I had already shared here, starting with the smaller 3D print related ones.
Two things that I've already done are canceling my YouTube Premium membership as I have not been using it for the main reason I had got it for (YouTube Music) and I feel like it was pushing me to use YouTube anyway when I didn't really want to because "I was paying for it", the other thing was disabling and clearing my YouTube watch history , I have not used the recommendations on my desktop since last year but they managed to suck me in a bit on my other devices so turning history off gets rid of at least the front page and Shorts.
One other thing that I wanted to double down on this year is to be more mindful and aware of the media I consume, and as I was about halfway trough writing this very blog post when JayTheDevGuy, who I only recently became a Patreon member of, started a members only stream on his Discord organizing his list of games that he wants to play and later actually played one of them, and as he played the game he did something that I somehow had not thought of before, he took notes, that's it, he wrote down things about the game he was playing, just short bullet points and a few sentences, and that's when I said to myself "that seems like a good way to be more aware of the media I consume". Jay has a video about Obsidian, a video that I'll admit I had skipped watching because I had already been down that rabbit hole with tons of other videos and got nothing out of it, but after watching him work in real time with it I had to take a look, and I wish I had done before (and also recommend you to watch it), it was noting like the million other videos or blog posts describing huge complex note taking systems, I can probably summarize it with a couple points:
- Just write stuff down, don't spend much time thinking,
- Don't add any complex extensions/systems unless you absolutely need to,
- Use links and let Obsidian's Graph organize your notes for you. (this one is huge)
So that is what I'm going to do, I wanted to give obsidian another shot, and in fact this very blog post you are reading right now was entirely written in it, so now I have a couple of better guidelines to help me forward. Of course it won't always be practical to write down stuff as I'm trying to enjoy certain pieces of media, but I think I should still get my thoughts down after finishing them.
And that is about it for now, I have a bunch of projects, both small and big, and now that things have gotten mostly in order from a fairly chaotic previous year I will start to post here more often. I hope to have you around reading about my silly little projects :)