So, on Mastodon last night, I saw someone say something along the line of “I couldn’t finish this book, I’m so sorry. No hate on the author, it’s a great book!”
This pissed me off.
I read a lot. I read many books that are good, many that are bad. I DNF books all the time because they’re not something I want to finish. Never, not a single time, did I think about putting out a public apology to the author because I couldn’t finish their book.
So, I’m a well known note taker. I’ve talked about it many times on this here blog. I will undoubtedly talk about it many more times. I’m a bit of a note taking junkie. But, I’ve moved between platforms so much over the years, my organization is a bloody mess.
For example, I have multiple folders titled a variation of “ideas”. These all have subfolders and untitled (but dated) notes inside them. And these are just the directories and files on my current machine. I also have years of backlogged notes on Google Keep, Notesnook, and many other platforms that I’ve tried throughout the years.
Okay, so I haven’t done one of these in almost two months. But it’s time to get back on the wagon.
Yes. Work. I got a job. Well, I’m hired at least. I don’t actually start until this summer, but it’s a done deal. I start some online training in early March. What is the gig?
I’m going to be a teacher?
Yeah, it’s crazy. I’m going to be teaching two online courses at a local community college. One centering around Latin America during the Cold War and one general American History.
I hate everything.
I used to really love technology. And I guess I still do, but I hate what a lot of tech, especially software, has become. It used to be either an app was free or it wasn’t. Usually the free stuff came with some other way to monetize itself (remember the bars that used to be forced on you when you downloaded a Windows app?) The paid stuff, you paid for and that was it. Maybe legally you didn’t own it (EULAs were a bitch even back then), but you didn’t really have to worry about too much since you had a honest-to-God-CD you could use to re-install with if something fucked up.
Back in August, I took part in Blaugust along with a large community of bloggers. The idea is to write every day during the month of August. It was wonderful.
Perhaps the best part of that experience wasn’t the writing, but the discovery of so many new blogs to read. I wrote about the upsides and downsides of that here. At that point I had over 4000 unread blog posts to read. Obviously since then, many (many) more have been added to that list. After all, just because blaugust is over, doesn’t mean people stopped blogging.
I have a thing for notebooks. I have way too many blank notebooks. I’m steadily filling them up, but I have enough to last me for… a while. But there’s always more to look at when it comes to stationary and notebooks. I’ve gotten into the fountain pen hobby, so now I’m on the lookout for some pocket sized notebooks that work well with fountain pens. Preferably ones that lie flat.
Blog rolls are important. I have one. If you consider yourself a part of the “IndieWeb,” you should have one too. Because the IndieWeb dies without people spreading the word.
The thing is, Google sucks donkey balls, and not the good kind. You can’t go search for my blog here unless you know it exists or you know my name, which is probably not something normal people know. Other search engines exist, but again, you have to know what to search for. I don’t have one topic on this blog that people could search for, as I write about anything that catches my fancy. I get maybe 30 clicks from Google each month, and I’m shocked that it is that high.
I’ve been gainfully employed every single minute of my life since I was 15 years old. For the record, that was 25 years ago. I started out bagging groceries, and then moved to making pizza, and then to another grocery store, and finally to a historical magazine.
Now, I’m unemployed. I was pretty fine with it when it happened. Well, not fine. I thought I was prepared for it. I thought I knew what was coming. I would apply for new gigs, and I’d put serious effort into my two YouTube channels and my two blogs.
After my lukewarm experience with Mistborn I didn’t really think I’d ever go back to Brandon Sanderson. But Tress of the Emerald Sea was really good, so I decided to get back out of The Cosmere, and go back to Sanderson’s Special Projects, this time with The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England.
This book is much more science fiction than fantasy, which is a good thing, I think. It is so different from Mistborn, that I didn’t feel any lingering bad thoughts about the author that I might have if it had more similarities. Overall, I really liked this book. It is unlike any other book I’ve ever read, and it is phenomenally easy to read. It does what Tress did: it makes the entire book digestable and enjoyable without having to read a 1,000 page monster book.
I’m not calling these resolutions. Resolutions never work, they never stick. These are goals. They say that to reach towards the stars, you must first extend your hand. This is me doing just that.
I think that is all pretty ambitious. I’ll use this post at the end of the year to see how I did.