Day 5: It's been a pretty good day, beautiful weather, cool and breezy, very conducive to working. Though, my ADHD ass has been minimally productive to the point that real workaholic types probably would say I was basically idle, every day I continue to maintain discipline, avoid writer's block, and add something valuable to the page, I'm happy.
And yeah it's been hard to avoid distraction with a brand new gaming PC and my brain absolutely hooked on Starfield. Some people have been quick to point out its flaws and shit on Bethesda, but it's fucking mind crack, and I love it. I'm old enough that I remember being one of those who was disappointed when they dumbed down the Elder Scrolls after Morrowind, but I ended up loving Oblivion, and Skyrim, and the Fallout series, to the point that it has conditioned the way I approach games.
So yeah, while you can say that it's not a great thing for Bethesda to have such lot of control over gamers, you can't really argue that they used their privileged position to deliver mediocrity. Maybe Fallout 76 fits that bill, but I think you could also argue that they were just too ambitious with that one, though either way, perfection isn't necessary to deliver greatness.
And yeah, let that be the lesson of the day. Or hell, scale it back even further if you want: greatness isn't necessary to deliver value.
Hard to rationalise the actions of a coked-out, roidhead, sex-pest with the virtues of dedicated commitment to martial arts, but hey, credit where it's due, you can't deny the dedication itself.
A variation on the theme:
And the PM2.5 pollution, and just being considerate towards the public in general when you're sick and trying to MINIMISE (not eliminate obviously) your capacity to infect others...
I'll fucking gut you for saying that!
Day 4: Been a bit of a rough one, because of the garbage fucking weather to a certain extent, but mostly because of the distraction/lost sleep over my new gaming PC (childish maybe, sure, but fuck you I'm treating myself!)
I will admit that it's not conducive at all to my new mindset of discipline and purpose and hard work, but in some roundabout way I am able to justify it to myself: Now my laptop is freed up from its perch on my desk to be portable for working out of the house, I'm back to a dual monitor setup which aids productivity (no more tiny second laptop screen), and I can blow off some steam to the silky-smooth graphics of all the latest games, which will presumably help, somehow.
I'll try to put in a couple extra hours this weekend...yawn.
Day 3: It's slow going, but I'm making progress and actually found myself looking forward to this work on the weekend which is wild.
I feel like my writing is kinda amateurish, but the work is important and I'm doing what I should be doing, and I'm telling it like no one else can.
Trying to make dreams reality, and for once I'm trying to avoid the trap of fiat-brain: only the work matters, not deadlines or metrics or budgets.
Bitcoin only, Nostr only #BONO
The gall to put your picture on a book cover with the words "empathy" and "prosperity" when you're partially responsible for the greatest destruction of wealth in history.
Makes me sick.
I hear you bud; been thinking a lot about this lately.
I feel like the path forward is for Bitcoiners is to take their knowledge and understanding into other more organic, preferably meatspace, communities and just spread the adoption of Bitcoin as just better money, nothing more, nothing less.
Because at the end of the day, as great as Bitcoiners are and as fruitful as some of the discussions and software developments are within this community, it's always going to be a circlejerk to a certain degree. It makes me think of the scene from "Idiocracy" where Dax Shepard's character is talking to the Starbucks employee, and they are so delighted at the fact that they both like money (and sex). But of course it is different to an extent, because so much about the cult of Bitcoin forces you to rethink what money is, how it works, how it could be improved, and not just uncritically thirsting for more of the same.
We just need to move beyond this; I'm not sure exactly what it will take, but there's a point where the Bitcoin/money singularity will occur and the world is going to be turned on its head.
I hear you bud; been thinking a lot about this lately.
I feel like the path forward is for Bitcoiners is to take their knowledge and understanding into other more organic, preferably meatspace, communities and just spread the adoption of Bitcoin as just better money, nothing more, nothing less.
Because at the end of the day, as great as Bitcoiners are and as fruitful as some of the discussions and software developments are within this community, it's always going to be a circlejerk to a certain degree. It makes me think of the scene from "Idiocracy" where Dax Shepard's character is talking to the Starbucks employee, and they are so delighted at the fact that they both like money (and sex). But of course it is different to an extent, because so much about the cult of Bitcoin forces you to rethink what money is, how it works, how it could be improved, and not just uncritically thirsting for more of the same.
We just need to move beyond this; I'm not sure exactly what it will take, but there's a point where the Bitcoin/money singularity will occur and the world is going to be turned on its head.
I saw that corn in the window with the "adopt me" sign and told myself: "I gotta have it"
So I did.
I want to donate to the Internet Archive, and they accept on-chain donations, but out of principle I would only do it with lightning
Anyone know someone who could make that happen? I may have to just do it on chain, but I thought there may be some overlap between the nostr/IA devs, though if that were the case then it would probably already be possible.
*shrug*
Day 2: I'm sticking with it. Discipline; it comes difficultly. I definitely need to cultivate more, but right now my focus is just not quitting, trying to apply my ethos as a Bitcoiner to help me stick with my work and focus on long-term goals.
steady progress adds up.
Proof of Work:
Today marks the first day on my journey toward an important project that will hopefully have a profound impact on the (or at least my) world.
I have had a lot of downtime since I quit my job back in mid-2021, trying to transition to some kind of digital content creation. I imagined myself as a YouTube creator, and had the vaguest of ideas about the kind of content and format that I would be going for, but I just didn't have the drive or the follow through. Today I looked over some of the "scripting" that I worked on back then, and it was basically unreadable incoherent rambling; my heart wasn't in it, and my head was in a bad place.
And I'm not trying to make excuses, I do have issues with self-motivation to put it lightly (I can absolutely be a straight lazy-ass son of a bitch) but so much work that people around the world are forced to do is so much more onerous because they are meant to be doing something else, even if they don't know what that is.
Anyways, I've known that I'm meant to be a writer, but it's never been something that I've pursued because I was forced to do subsistence work in order to survive and felt like I lacked time. Now, I had the time, but I lacked the confidence, the motivation, and the vision. Eventually I ended up finding a part-time job because bills need paying, and I wasn't getting anything done, and I was starting to get into a really dark head-space accomplishing fuck-all day in and day out.
It's hard to say exactly what changed between then and now, but the best explanation that I can come up with was just that I started reading again, or in other words, working my brain. It's taken a while, and every time I think I have some kind of momentous breakthrough or moment of clarity, it inevitably evades me, but bit by bit I've worked my way out of the funk that I had been in, basically since the pandemic hit in early 2020, and into a head-space that aligns with a serious effort to follow my dreams. In order to achieve this, and maintain the positive momentum that has been gathering, I've imposed a work schedule on myself, as well as a ban on social media during the work day, excluding Nostr, of course.
Unlike other sites, posting on Nostr is work (in a good way) and I hope that I can leverage all the work done by the honest plebs here into achieving something far greater than what I could accomplish myself. Like Nostr, my works' potential is still a dream, a twinkle in one's eye.
And I don't want to make it sound like I have delusions of grandeur either; it's hard for me to imagine having an impact on the world by any stretch of the imagination, but I hope that at the very least I'll be able to channel my downtime into productive work consistently enough to complete my project, and even just that will be valuable to me.
So, as proof, what I worked on today, the outline, to be researched and fleshed out moving forward.
"Study your history, whoever don't, I pity the foo' like Mr. T"
MF Doom
I hope there's opportunity for non-Bitcoin-related communities to spring up here...and then we cross-contaminate and orange pill them all!
But seriously, people are such herd animals and just follow their flock wherever they go. There will continue to be fuck ups and breaches of trust over at "X" and the whole thing could collapse at any minute, so it's only a matter of time that a transition away from that sinking ship becomes necessary to more, and more diverse, communities.
I don't think nostr takes in the majority of the refugees, mostly because the sheep will flock to corporate social media out of ignorance and convenience, but those few who value security, privacy, and growth potential will wander over here eventually, no doubt.
Pure astroturfed hypocrisy from the latest right-wing darling trying to use populism to drum up support for fascism. If you look into the guy's background even slightly (look up @TheMagaHulk on turd app), it's pretty easy to see how inorganic the roll out of his song is, not to mention his affinity for fringe, fascist-adjacent conspiracy theories.
He says "I hate the way the internet divides us" while taking money to gin up an entirely inauthentic surge of viral attention on the internet, in order to serve as a propagandist for plutocrats, who stay in power primarily by using culture-war wedge issues that divide populations and brainwash a sizeable portion of the electorate into voting against their own interests, and for the interests of a powerful minority.
Not only do the song lyrics contain dehumanising language that directly seeks to sow division among the working class, the central conceit in the lyrics of the chorus literally emphasises the symbolic importance of the Mason-Dixon line (!) which is the figurative representation of the foundational divisions that plague America: black/white, Republican/Democrat, democracy/oligarchy, etc.
Look, I will say that he is absolutely right that the internet does nothing but divide us, it's just that this guy is the absolute last person on earth to have anything to say on that issue given the way he acquired his platform, the language that he uses, and the ideas that he espouses.
I'm particularly concerned in this case the way Bitcoiners are so terminally online that they just adopt narratives served up to them on a platter, without being critical at all of where they come from or why they are being so heavily promoted, if it aligns even slightly with the thesis that the state is illegitimate and therefore so is the currency that it issues (a thesis I agree with by the way).
I really want to get into the topics of online media literacy, internet usage best practices for individuals, as well as all the philosophical implications of the ideological divisions within populations and their connections with online astroturfing campaigns, or even marketing as a practice more broadly, so that I can better serve this community.
And finally, while I know that I'm shouting into the void, I'm hopeful that I'll find some kind of support or at least feedback here for my new endeavour:
I'm gonna write a book about it. I'll keep you posted, cheers.