There is a lot of hype around Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman, and I’ve always wondered why. I knew from the summary that it was LitRPG, and those are hardly ever “mainstream.” I’ll be honest and say that I was never really won over by the hype or the concept of the books themselves, despite having a soft spot for LitRPG novels. I just couldn’t really get myself that excited about a man and his cat going dungeon crawling. Add in that there was some odd rumblings online about there being some sort of romance between the MC and the cat. Those are false, thankfully, but honestly at this point I’d kind of be happy if those rumors had been true.

I use AI for some things. I’m putting that out there right from the start because it will get rid of those people who are so unreasonable that they can’t even be arsed to hear me out.

I get most of the arguments against “Artificial Intelligence”. In fact, I agree with a lot of them. From the environmental and human costs to the apocalyptic possibilities, the arguments make a lot of sense. There are a lot of dangers when it comes to this “AI” revolution, and the corporations who are in charge of this revolution cannot be trusted to do anything but try to pad their bottom line.

Awhile back, Joel wrote about his Inoassis Y1 which is a little iPod-like thing that you can buy to play music. As with most things in life, I aspire to be Joel, so I bought one too. (Seriously, Joel is cool and has tons of ideas, so he gets me into a ton of bad habits like fountain pens. I should probably stop following his blog, I spend too much money as is).

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).