One of the things I’m trying to do with my life is lower the amount of money I spend on things I don’t really need. I call it The Don’t Buy Shit Challenge. I’m actually doing really well with that so far, which I’m proud of. I do have several yearly subscriptions, however, that I still need to figure out what to do with. One of those is TickTick Pro.

TickTick is a ToDo application that I’ve used for a couple years. Technically, I could probably get away with using the free plan, but there are a few premium features that I do use so it has, in the past, made sense for me to continue to subscribe to their service.

I am not a people person. Despite being a YouTuber and now a “professor”, I would much rather be away from people as much as possible. Of course, that’s not very healthy, so I try to put myself out there as much as I’m comfortable with.

But each time I have interactions with someone else, I get very anxious beforehand. I deal with it because I must, but it’s something I’ve felt basically my entire life.

I’m in a bit of a reading slump and have been for almost a month. It’s not unusual, I’ve talked about it a few times before, as I do tend to go through these from time to time.

This time I seem to be conducting a little self reflection experiment. As I find myself less and less interested in reading, I find myself spending more time taking in shortform content on TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Obviously, this is horrible. Replacing reading with mind-numbing, mind-rotting, TikTok is not conducive to good mental health or productivity.

So, yesterday I wrote more about pens and how I keep buying them. I need to stop buying stuff, not just pens. I’ve tried to do the low-buy or no-buy challenges in the past, but I’ve failed every time.

This time is going to be different. I hope, anyway.

My goal is to go at least the next six months without buying anything I don’t absolutely need. And by absolutely need, I mean can’t live without: food, shelter, and such. Anything tech wise, pens, gaming, etc. needs to go into the “don’t buy” category. I have enough tech and such already, I don’t need anymore. Now, obviously if my computer dies, I’ll probaby have to break the challenge, though I do have other computers around so maybe not.

Soon, I’m going to issue a challenge. The “Don’t Buy Shit” Challenge. I’ll write more about that tomorrow, but for now you need to understand what has prompted that challenge.

I’ve bought “some” fountain pens. I’ve talked about this new hobby of mine before and I’ve mentioned it several times on the podcast, but it’s worse than I want to admit.

I now have at least two dozen fountain pens. Now, none of these were overly expensive, at least when you learn that some pens can cost thousands of dollars, but they are not 10 cent Bics either.

Times are dark. There’s war (I’d call it a stupid war, but all wars are stupid, this one just happens to be more idiotic than most), and a horrible economy. There’s all sorts of horribleness going on around the world. It is very hard to watch or read the news and not be super depressed about everything.

Now the rest of this post is going to sound really trite, but we’re all in this together and there are still happy and good things happening in the world.

I have an odd situationship when it comes to audiobooks. I used to swear by them. I still enjoyed actually reading the words, but when I worked out in the public, I would almost always have an audiobook playing in the background.

But now I work from home, and I don’t use my audiobooks as much as I used to. (On a side note, I also don’t listen to podcasts as often as I used to either).

You may have noticed a lack of content from me lately. My Internet has been super unreliable for ages, and these last two weeks it has been even worse. And it’s not like it has been down. Instead we’ve been having these periods (almost every day) where our upload speed goes down to nothing.

The way the internet works is, packets are exchanged between you and the server you’re trying to visit. That means both ways. And with no upload speed, or very little, it was almost impossible to get anything done.

Got myself in an odd thought spiral tonight while listening to some oldies. What would the world be like if Buddy Holly had lived? What would the world be like if Hank Williams Sr. had lived?

There are so many artists out there that died long before their time, men and women who were genre defining artists. Elvis may be the biggest name there. If he’d stayed away from the drugs? He might still be alive today (though he would be in his 90s). Think of how music would have changed if he’d been whole and healthy for another 50 years?

Discord has ruined itself for me. I actually liked Discord a lot, which feels like a minority opinion most days. I liked it because I have cultivated an awesome community on there with almost 2500 wonderful souls. The TLC Discord server is one of the highlights of my day. Even if I’m only lurking, I still interact with people damn near every single day of the week.

And then Discord decided they needed to verify ages. I get that it wasn’t really their choice (even if they’re implementing it in places where those laws don’t reach), but it drove a lot of people off of the platfrom. Other niches probably didn’t notice as much a drop off, but Linux and FOSS enthusiasts are probably the type to care about this sort of thing.