website/content/posts/blogging-time.md

title	date	draft	description	type	tags
Blogging Time	2022-05-25T22:31:50-05:00	true	Random ramblings about time, blogging, and blogging about time	post	meta blogging writing time life

I don't know about you, but recently I've been feeling like I can't get anything done.

Of course, I have actually been getting things done, like this (non-exhaustive) list of things I did in the past few weeks: I participated in a programming contest with some friends and won $200, I migrated all the Ladue Computer Science repositories from GitHub to Codeberg, I copied all my old AoPS blog posts to my website, I learned more HTML and CSS and rewrote the LadueCS website and cleaned up the CSS of the exozyme website, I started rewriting my Gitea pull request to use go-ap instead of go-fed, I bought and set up a new laptop, I changed my email address from @pm.me to @proton.me for most online accounts since I can actually send emails from the latter using a free Proton account, I released exozyme v8.3 and helped codedotjs start development on exozyme v9.0, I spent a lot of time with my neighbor's cat, and so on...

So yeah, I have been getting stuff done. Just not the stuff that I really want to finish.

The one that bothers me the most is Gitea federation work. Understandably though, the past few weeks have been really crazy for a lot of personal reasons. I did have some long blocks of time available to work on Gitea, but that's stuff's just hard. Like barely anyone's been making that much progress so far anyways, so yeah, it's some very hard work. Also, much of my go-fed work has been in limbo due to concerns over go-fed's flaws. Three weeks ago, no one knew whether we were going to use go-fed or not, so I just didn't really have the motivation to do further ActivityPub implementation work with go-fed. It would have been really beneficial though, since I'm not an ActivityPub expert in any way and it would have helped me gain valuable hands-on experience with the protocol, but I had too many other things going on.

When you have a lot of concurrent projects, often times it doesn't really matter which one you work on right now. My problem was that I didn't want to work on any of my major projects over the past few weeks, so I instead did a lot of small side projects, like revamping the LadueCS website. That's always been on my to-do list, but I've never really wanted to actually learn enough HTML and CSS to do it. A few hours later, I'd learned a heaping ton of CSS and created, well, quite the fun no-Javascript-required 100%-CSS-animated website! If that link doesn't work, it's because we're still figuring out how to do communal ownership of that domain, but that's also been a to-do list item that I started working on a few days ago.

There's a commonly-thrown-around word that perfectly describes what's going on for me, but I don't want to use it here.

I think the most significant outcome of these few weeks is that I've set up a kanban board (using Nextcloud deck which is a very mediocre app but gets the job done) with things I want to accomplish this summer. Instead of sitting around trying to find something interesting to do to avoid working on the super hard stuff, I can just take a look at the board. I've also been trying to check stuff less often, since nowadays I have five emails, Matrix (and bridges), my fedi account, my feed reader, and Git hosting sites to check. It's exhausting, that's what it is.

Fortunately, I'm going to take a weeklong vacation soon, since I definitely need a weeklong break from the internet.

These three weeks of summer (it's summer for me even though summer technically doesn't start until June 21 or whenever the solstice is) have taught me that my summer's going to go by quickly, and I just can't waste it. I've wasted suprisingly little of the weeks so far, given that I haven't accomplished much on my biggest projects, but yeah, I've gotten a lot done. The next few months will be interesting for sure, but I'm optimistic that after my vacation, I'll be ready to work on Gitea. We'll see.

I'm currently writing this in a TTY because it's impossible to not focus when you're in a TTY. I still have half a page to fill, and I already know this article is going to remain unpublished as a draft forever...

Anyways, I've been trying to write more blog posts recently since I've been too reliant on just posting tiny random useless tidbits on the fediverse. With my newly copied old posts though, I'm only a few posts away from 100, so I just need a few more ideas for blog posts...

I guess again, the reason I haven't been writing as much as I'd wish is because it's just hard. I have to think of a good topic, come up with a strong opinion that I can write a sizeable amount about, and throw it up online and hope for the best. The fact that my installing every Arch Linux package blog post is a blog post makes absolutely no sense. I worked on that for at least a week (well of course I did other things throughout the week. I wasn't just downloading and installing packages the whole week.) and made a ton of commits to that post. That's not a blog post, that should be a separate repo! On the other hard, there are some posts in my archive (permanently unpublished) that are just two or three lines and have absolutely no content except for a punchline. (My favorite example is the unpublished post, "Why are TI Calculators so Expensive?" with a screenshot with some ads for $1000 calculators. Absolutely absurd but also absolutely hilarious.)

So I started with talking about getting things done and now I'm on what should be a blog post. Wow, maybe I should put more thought into these posts...

It probably feels like I'm just trying to write as much as possible to fill up the entire TTY screen, and that's probably actually true.

But really, I'm trying to write as much as possible to put me back into the writing blog posts mood. There's a time about a year ago, when I was cranking out a few blog posts a month. And look at now, how many blog posts have I written in 2022???

Part of the problem is the installing every Arch package post, which successful destroyed my blog in more than one way. Yeah, it was so successful on Hacker News that my blog (and server) were effectively DDoSed, but also, that post was so insanely good it shouldn't have been a post. I felt like every post after that had to be as insightful and amazing and hilarious. I wrote a detailed analysis of the lessons I learned from the server failure that day, but that post seemed like a mind-numblingly boring lecture you use to torture innocent victims when compared side-to-side with the Arch packages post. I had concocted a (very crazy) scheme to use a CVE to exploit my router and enabled better IPv6 rules in the firewall, perfect content for another awesome blog post, but that kind of stuff is just too much work. I wasted a ton of time trying to create another post just as successful as the Arch post, and ended up with absolutely nothing at the end except for a hilarious unpublished post about maid cafes that I would cringe if you read.

At this point, I should confess my guilt at purposely dodging the question "Why blog in the first place?" since that adds a lot to this discussion. So why do I even have a blog?

Yes, very meta question, now I'm nonironically going to have an existential crisis.

More seriously, I think the true purpose of a blog is for self-reflection, instead of constantly trying crazy new projects all the time and trying to get tons of stuff done, It's crucial to step back and look at what you've already done, and share it with others. Yeah sure, there's also the purpose of having a blog because literally everyone has one (my local view of the network is very distorted, I know).

Self-reflection?? You're making this sound like a journal or diary now! I want to read crazy technical stuff on your blog, not your sorry sad life!

In many ways, I feel like the unpublished draft posts in this repo have sort of become some kind of (weird) journal. If you look at the unpublished posts (like this one), it's a choatic mixture of bad jokes, bizzare stories, and self-reflection. The published posts often dive into more technical and tech stuff (I want to write about more math and science, maybe later), but what do I want this blog to look like? That's the question that I don't know yet how to answer.

Maybe I should ask what my blog's current genre or theme is, and I'd probably have to respond with weird techno-comedy satirical Linux posts, which is quite cringe-worthy when you think about it. And I do wonder if people even read these unpublished posts (or my posts overall other than the Arch post). If you're reading this right now, start a blog, and worry about the existential crises later.

Now all I need is someone to give me back the 30 minutes I wasted writing this blog post...