It's the Winter Solstice: What Am I Doing?

Tue 21 Dec 2021

Blessed Winter Solstice to those in the northern hemisphere. It's been a while since I last wrote here, and I thought I'd leave a note about what I'm doing.

Mostly, I've been overwhelmed with work, both of the $DAYJOB and housework kinds. Waking up at 6 AM and not really stopping or having any time to myself until 9 PM, at which point I'm too tired to write, or to work on side projects. I don't know if I'm going to get much time over the holidays to spend on my own projects. But here's what I'm trying.

House and family

• Visiting family I haven't seen for a while. It's not the best time to do it, but everyone will take all the necessary precautions. This is the most important thing on my docket.

• Cleaning house. This is the next most important thing.

Dayjob

• Taking most of a week off. Thank goodness.

Reading

• "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow. A book written for popular audiences that applies new archaeological data and overlooked ethnographies to the question of why we seem to be "stuck" with stratified societies. Currently in progress.

• "In the Dust of This Planet" by Eugene Thacker. Addresses the question of the "unthinkable" in philosophy by approaching it via horror literature. Finished, but there are two more volumes in the Horror Of Philosophy series.

• "Sword and Mythos" edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Paula R. Stiles. A collection of sword and sorcery short stories that go back to the roots of the sub-genre adjacent to Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos, but with a modern bent, often feminist or multicultural. Finished. This was some light reading during a break from "The Dawn of Everything".

Writing prose

All of these are basically on hold due to lack of time or energy.

• Applying translation patches to Gemini Quickstart† and then updating the document to reflect changes in Geminispace over the last six months. This is the most important thing I could be working on, and therefore I have no energy for it.

• A write-up of how I use org-roam for personal productivity, separate from how I use org-mode for dayjob productivity.

• A "President Xi, Send the Nukes" article on living in a world that's ending. I could spit out the link-blog parts now, but I feel like I have some deeper stuff to say, informed by radical pessimism. I have some notes.

• A Christmas ghost story. Really? Maybe. I don't have a solid idea, but I've read so much about the aesthetics of horror lately, I kind of want to apply it.

† Gemini Quickstart

Writing code

Last but least.

• An undisclosed Android project. I'm still at the stage of figuring out the tooling, but I'm kind of anxious to get a first draft up and running, because I need the app for my own use.

• Maintaining my existing Geminispace projects.