When you’re a blogger, one of the things you do is talk about blogging. A lot of people do this. Yeah, that was all from the last few weeks.

Not a day goes by that I don’t see at least one blogger talk about blogging. There’s nothing wrong with this. As referenced above, I do it too. I just find it funny that often times I will resort to talking about the act of blogging when I don’t have anything else to talk about. So, today, I write a blog post about people talking about blog posts on their blogs. It’s all very meta.

This book took me months to read. I started it in mid-March. It is now, if you haven’t looked at a calendar recently, late July. And it’s not as if this was a bad book. It did start slow, but it picked up quickly. But there was just something off about it that I couldn’t put my finger on until the very end.

The entire concept of The Dresden Files is a fascinating one. A wizard who solves crimes? Sign me up. It should be excellent, right? I like crime novels. I love wizards. Put them together, and you get an amazing combo. Or at least, you should. And again, it’s not as if this book is bad. So let’s get into it. This is my review of Fool Moon by Jim Butcher, the second novel in The Dresden Files.

I have nearly 60GB of wallpapers on my hard drive. I feel like that’s a lot. Every time I see a cool wallpaper online or on discord, I add it to my collection. 99.9% of this so-called collection I’ve never used. I could use a new wallpaper every day for the rest of my life and still probably not get more than half way through, if that.

The thing is, I only use about 10 walls in my usual Hyprland setup, one for each color scheme. So, it’s like I’m not even trying to use the others. And yet, I still collect new ones all the time. It’s a habit at this point.

I was on a roll. I was blogging everyday. I was feeling good about it. There were cool things I wanted to add to the site. And then…

Nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

It made me think about the pressure I felt to keep blogging. I was having fun, but apparently there was a little bit of me that felt pressured into keeping the blog train going. Why else would I feel a little upset that there hasn’t been a blog post in a few days? And it’s not guilt. I don’t feel guilty that I’ve not written. I have some readers here, but it’s not like I have a million member army or a ton of paying subscribers. I write for myself.

I love football. I’m a die hard Philadelphia Eagles fan and have been for over 20 years. I watch every game, bitch about every call (even those that go for my team), and shout “fire him!” every time something doesn’t go the Eagles way. The Washington Commanders AKA The Washington Football Team AKA The Washington Redskins, are one of the Eagle’s biggest rivals. Maybe not the biggest, fuck the Cowboys, but big enough.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about how awesome it feels to get things done, and the satisfaction that comes with completing things you want to do. I wrote about that as if it were a new feeling, but one of the ways I keep myself motivated is by allowing myself a little taste of that satisfaction each day — no matter how productive I really am.

Since January 1st, 2020, I’ve been keeping a to-do list every single day. I have recurring tasks on there and ones that only need to be completed once. I’ll admit to often checking off things on the list that I haven’t actually done, but for the most part, keeping a list has really helped me stay on top of things.

Last year when I set up my new desk, one of the things I promised myself I’d do is make sure all the cables were properly managed. Now, I’ve been watching YouTubers for years show off their setups, and all of them appear to have no cables whatsoever. So, I figured: how hard could it be?

Turns out, it’s effin hard.

I have spent loads of money on tools to make it easier. I have straps, ties, rails, racks, and more. Nothing works. The damn cables have a mind of their own, and no matter how tightly I tie them together or stick them to the underside of my desk, they will find a way to look like this:

In the last three days, in addition to my regular day job, I’ve recorded 10 videos for my YouTube channel. Some of them I’m very happy with. There’s a certain feeling you get when you’ve done things you had to do. But there’s a better feeling you get when you do things because you want to do them.

For a while now, I’ve not really felt up to making videos for my channel. I’m sure some of my long time audience members could feel that as the content got less and less. I was just a little burnt out and had a bit of impostor syndrome to go along with everything else going on in my life. But these last few days, that’s changed. And I’ve finally felt like making some content again.

I love blogging, and I’ve talked about that a lot. I also love reading other people’s blogs (blog roll coming soon). Even if they blog about things I have no interest in, I like reading them, and I usually subscribe to their RSS feeds. My “blog” category in FreshRSS is, well let’s say it’s well populated.

Most of the blogs I follow are my fellow “Small Web” bloggers, folks who aren’t doing this professionally and are just catering to a small community. But I have a bone to pick with some of these guys. They have RSS feeds, which is great, but they don’t enable the full content of their posts to be pushed out via that feed. They either limit it to a paragraph, or there’s one guy who limits it to a single sentence. WTF?