July, August, September.
Right 'peeps. Get ready for a minddump. It's been three months, and my mind's been racing.
Internet Blackout
The family experimented with boredom during our summer holiday. My gf suggested we turned off the wifi, just to play around with a digital detox and I was all for it. I still brought my computer to the summer house so I could write, which I did rather a lot of, in spite on having no internet access.
I'm still battling information addiction. It feels like I have to structure my entire day around avoiding the computer or I'll end up on a YouTube/Wikipedia/stack exchange safari, and those have yet to give me true lasting sense of satisfaction. One day I had to take a day off from work because my latter days have been information dense and self-esteem deficient, so while the rest of the family was out I: started my day with a cup of coffe and then exercised. Then I spent some time enjoying cooking[1], picked up drawing again after a 10 year hiatus, played some guitar, meditated[2], researched the Shikoku[*] pilgrimage (more on that later), and took an hour long barefoot walk in the crazy-nice summer weather we've got going at the moment. I've also picked sugar snaps with my daughter and planted some parsley. So even in spite of structuring my days around not using the computer, I still wound up researching something that I don't need to know right now, ie the Shikoku pilgrimage. It's not a big loss because for once something good came of it, but still. Somehow I'm am rather addicted to information.
In a more general life perspective I am trying to focus more on Sitting, Walking, and Eating (with a capital S, W, and E respectively). In spite of sneering at people who've got their greasy little noses buried in their phones while they're zombiying down the street, I realize that I am prone to distraction myself. Not from phones, but from thinking, and planning. Although being a planner and forward looking person is lauded, I can tell that I need to keep my plans where they are: in the future, and keep my mind where I am: which is here, now. This is really a buddhist ideal, but I can tell that it appeals to me a lot: Put your daily actions on autopilot to make sure you go where you need to go, and keep your head where you are now. It's not some more-frugal-than-thou notion that dishes out the reward. I'm not trying to incorporate free 'entertainment' for the sake of free entertainment but for holistic reasons. Discovering the joy of sitting still, eating, and having functioning legs feels profound. The very worst that could happen is that I enjoy whatever is already available to me a little bit more than I used to. There is no reason not to learn MBCT if you ask me.
At some point in my life I want to walk the Shikoku Pilgrimage. 1200 km of walking in solitude in the less neon covered parts of Japan. Some of it is mountainous, most of it beautiful. I am thinking of ways to practice walking long stretches and naturally there are one million pilgrimage-like routes I could walk right outside my own backdoor (herp derp travel to the other side of the world, 'cause what you got available already isn't good enough for you). In fact, in spite of living in the suburbs of the nation's capital, there are shelters that are open to the public even a few kilometers away so I think my little family might go for a night of sleeping outside some time soon. I'm quite sure my daughter would love to fall asleep outside, and I'm quite sure I'd like to wake up next to a lake. So there: my research on a possibly taxing 'pilgrimage' dug up an opportunity to try something fun with the family. Anyways: Sitting, Eating, and Walking (as referenced above) is part of the reason why I want to try the pilgrimage. It's (almost literally) all there is to do for 1200 kms!
Writing:
I found out that writers are not necessarily artsy-fartsy types. The most successful writers are actually planning types with racing minds. 'don't know 'bout you, but that seems to describe someone I spend a lot of time with.
I've outlined two novels I'd like to write to begin with, one in a complete universe I've built, the other as a standalone novel.
Well, complete universe is a bit much. In fact, I realized that the idea I had for a cyberpunk future has already been effectuated by the Chinese in the 70's. All the way down to the political fuckup that enables the creation of the particular setting and the God damned need for close fly-bys to the nearest airport. Naturally William Gibson has already written a book on that setting so.... Fuck me.
I think I'll go ahead anyway because I love the setting and the political tension in enables me to play with.
So as the elevator pitch: The Kowloon Walled City locked in a Isreal/Palestine like conflict with the surrounding wealthy parts of the city. It's a military-drone monitored Berlin wall, meets cyberpunk, meets the extreme effects of Universal Basic Income, meets a conglomerate-run city, meets a city-wide eco-anarcist uprising.
Imagine the Kowloon Walled City but 80 stories high and ten times larger. Massive riots -after the local city council decided to demolish the area- escalated to full on guerilla war between the residents of the area (called The Well) and the surrounding boroughs (called The Shards). After prolonged guerilla-terrorism and political pressure a demilitarized zone was estables around The Well and the inhabitants we're effectively put under a multi decade siege. The wealthy part of the city is split into the economies of those who live solely on drugs and VR entertainment which incidentally fits exactly within the limits of the UBI and those who skim the top off of all those who live like that. The poor city, The Well, lives like a ecologically minded urban area where any kind of waste is heavily frowned upon. Every southfacing skyscraper (at the edge of the area) has been refitted to a complete hydroponic lab, as has every roof surface. Buildings have been torn down in a jagged pattern around the south of The Well to increase the surface area, and the slummiest buildings towards the middle of The Well have been torn down giving the entire area a look very much like a thick walled well (and fuck me this is exactly what the Kowloon Walled City looked like.).
https://visual.ly/community/infographic ... ty-anarchy
I have a lot of cool stories I want to write about how The Well was born, how defectors from either side try to escape across the DMZ, how crime and corruption works in The Shards, and how the anarchy and ecology-mindedness works inside The Well.
So far my novel-centric writing revolves mainly around fleshing out characters and their ideosynchracies, shuffling events around and gluing them together in the two novels I'm planning right now. To train my actual writing craft I've begun to write a three paragraph story every day. A small evocative piece to get used to writing, and expressing ideas succinctly and effectively. Then I edit the piece after a few days and the immediate emotions of writing it has died down, allowing me to edit with a bit more clarity.
So far I've tried to boil down the most important scenes of the books down into three paragraph stories to get used to writing, as well as getting familiar with how the scene actually evolves within the setting. It's really funny to sit there and watch your own imagination take you places you never planned to begin with. It's almost meditative.
I'm keeping a small notebook with me at all times to write down ideas as soon as they strike me. It's amazing how well it works. The more ideas you write down the more ideas you get. In fact I just came up with an new idea for a novel just now.
Job hunting:
The third -and last- startup venture was shut down. It was fun, and apparently employers abso-freakin'-lutely love people who've been involved in startups. So all in all I'm really glad I did it. It was also a good post-stress litmus test to get me back on a working schedule with a lot of freedom. It enabled me to get a feel for how well my brain still works. It definitely feels re-wired, and only time will tell if I can find a way to make it work. So now I'm officially unemployed. I've been through hydroponic horticulture, robotics, business planning, deep neural networks, reinforcement learning, ISO certifications, and the EU data privacy shitshow that is probably the best competitive moat I will never be able to swim across... ever!
I'm getting plenty of leads and help from my network, so with a bit of luck I'll be calling myself Data Scientist before too long. It's been almost two years since the last time I solved an actual problem, so I'm naturally rather anxious to see how I stack up now. I know for a fact that I can learn a lot of disjoint stuff, the big question now is just whether I can learn fast enough, and without wearing myself down again. There are indications that stress and depression tend to stick, and so once you've really been down the rabbit hole, you're highly susceptible to relapse. Time will tell. Of course I'd prefer to skim the high wages of a skill so high in demand as Data Science, especially given how many stressful years of my life I've alrady put into the endeavour, but if the working environment is conducive to more suicidal ideation, I'll be doing something else with my life rather than planning how to end it. Sunk Cost Fallacy might actually kill me this time, so let's not do that again.
But now, I have millions of citizens of a futuristic South American city that are about to die to militarized smallpox and they're not going to die unless I make them. Toodles!
[*] That is the first time the word Shikoku has been used on the ERE forums. Also: no one has ever used the word portyanki. [**]
[**] Not until now, that is!
[1] Fried rice with soy and sesame oil. Soup made from arame seaweed, barley miso, and katsuobushi flakes. Rangiri carrots with strips of cabbage fried in ketjap manis, mirin, and plenty of salt, with raw slices of radish. Smoked mackarel, soft boiled egg and a tuna mousse made of sesame oil, ume furikake, salt, and helman's mayo finally adding some fried strips of indeterminate non-shiitake black-and-white mushroom.[1.1].
[1.1] Have you ever noticed that food tends to sound delicious if it takes a lot of words to describe it? In reality it was a fish flavoured round of brownish veggy/rice goop[1.2].
[1.2] Even my footnote's footnotes has footnotes. Isn't that cool?
[2] And by meditated I mean slept for 15 minutes on the floor until the singing bowl chime that marks the end of the guided meditation woke me up, whereafter I rolled over on the side and napped for another 15 minutes.
Smashter wrote: ↑Mon Jul 09, 2018 12:20 pm
@Fbeyer -- the
first 350? Is this going to be the War and Peace of frugality books?
I imagine it'll go to 400, then get edited back down to 350 so... Yeah. At least 350 pages.
Unless of course the phrase: The first 350 pages, means that you suspect there is going to be 350 pages more. That it of course not the intention.
How quickly can you
teach and show the average Joe:
- the whys of applied non-suffering frugality.
- the psychological basis of living well.
- how to practice and counteract learned helplessness
- the answers to the most common complaints
without referring to financial independence, but always anchoring the exposition in personal well-being rather than as a matter of herp-derp-saving-rate-at-the-expense-of-well being?
If you wanted to write the go-to book, for getting your financial attitude and financial practices in order, how would you do it?
Mark Rippetoe's Starting Strength needs 350 (almost A4) pages to describe the squat, standing press, bench press, clean, and deadlift. Why spend 350 pages on that when you can watch 20 minutes of YouTube videos and be done? Is he writing the War and Peace of barbell training? Is there a reason why Rippetoe gets people lifting properly and YouTube videos don't? I whole-heartedly believe that people need all the in-depth help they can get so I'm writing a toolkit, rather than a from-A-to-Z book so my (potential) future readers have a place to look when they want to expand their skills when it comes to getting what they need without shelling out more than they need. But the basics need to be in order, and the basics of frugality has nothing to with money. So...
Finally: This Markov state space diagram of the stock market looks like a uterus...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... _space.svg