So ends the month of October.

 

Fogbanking: An Overview August-October 2013

August (started writing mid-month): 4 posts, ~5,600 words, post to revisit: Kludge.

September: 8 posts, ~11,400 words, post to revisit: Developing Organizations (I talked about TIMN, which uses some vocabulary that I use and abuse pretty frequently. My definition of ‘tribe’ has expanded from this post, for instance). 

October: 21 posts, ~25,700 words.

This trend of prolific writing is not sustainable. I have a job. 

I had no idea I was writing that much, but looking back I was scheduling posts for consecutive days most weeks. I don’t think I’m worried about abandoning my enforced writing anymore, that’s for sure.

This month, I wrote some notes outlining a few historical and philosophical views I’ve been exploring, I wrote a sequence of posts on my own interest in apologetics, wrote a sequence on a few ideas of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West that I found interesting, and after some navel gazing I decided I wasn’t done being depressed and picked up some Moldbug and other DownWing material, which I decided was my vague direction right now.

Next month, more of the same in topic but probably not in quantity.

 

Reviewing Five Week Plan I

Quoting my to-do from last month:

• Take more walks. Maybe establish a small workout routine. (Not for any reason other than health, really. I’m incredibly sedentary lately.) [Meh. Not well defined.]

• Finish A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History- it should be done in short order [DONE]
• Work out a to-read list for Q3. Otherwise I’m going to drift aimlessly. [DONE]
• Decorate my place a bit for Halloween. Because I want to. [I got some colorful lights. I realized that’s all I really wanted.]
• My girlfriend is teaching me Cantonese, a little bit at a time. I can count to ten (poorly), tell time (really poorly), and talk about what I’m eating and drinking (as long as it’s rice and tea/water). I suck at inflecting. [If anything, I’ve gotten worse.]
• Maybe take a better look at Spengler, who is a big influence on a lot of sources I’ve been visiting lately. [Spent quite a bit of time with Spengler.]
• I’ve been reviewing my school notes on the Pragmatists, maybe I’ll come up with something there to write about. [One post and a few references, it didn’t bloom into a full sequence of posts like I expected]
• Manage fewer projects at a time (or at least smaller roles in those projects). I’m going to hurt myself otherwise- September was an unnecessarily intense, backheavy month. [Working on this- I definitely have fewer projects now]
• Maybe begin scratching together more content that is my own and less explicitly a summary of my influences [Meh. I think summarizing is where my most fruitful content ends up coming from, personally.]
• Play with more hardware. Maybe purchase something that can help me learn on that front. [Hard Failure.]
• Plow through at least a one language on Codecademy. Partly to experience the UX of it and partly because it would feel productive. [Python]
• Coursera: Financial Accounting; Video Games and Learning, 21st Century American Foreign Policy. (Maybe: Analysis of Algorithms, Logic) [ongoing]
• More posts on what I am presently working on. [A post-mortem, some book notes, some aimless wandering/wondering. I’d call the small-backlog decision a success.]

 

Five Week Plan II

• Take more walks. Maybe establish a small workout routine. This time for real. It will get much colder soon.
• Be a grownup this Christmas. Get gifts for more people, you’re not a hermit.
• Work on my Cantonese. I really ought to have more defined goals so I can’t write them off later.
• Plow through at least a one more language on Codecademy.
• Read some more fiction. Biographies count, because all biographies are sort of fiction anyway.
• Coursera: Financial Accounting; Video Games and Learning, 21st Century American Foreign Policy. [still ongoing]
• Want more money outside of work. Haven’t won anything in a while. Provide a plan to make at least $1000 additional (outside of work payment) by 2014.
• I saw some interesting Khan Academy videos, including some on BitCoin, which I’ve known of for a while but lacked the sophistication to tell (or know who to trust) on whether or not it’s a sucker’s game or what. I want to improve my financial literacy in general, reading one book on investing (The Young Person’s Guide), and taking a course on personal and business finance. It’s something adults should know about (right?!)
• Buy an arduino set by Christmas.