First thing, I still strongly dislike Twitter. I’m not going back there anytime soon, even though it’s been almost a year since I dropped it and left it to an RSS bot, if it’s still up. If anyone sent me a message on there, I haven’t seen it and I insist that you either send it to my hopefully-easy-to-guess email on ProtonMail, or if there’s some other way you can reliably contact me, do it that way. I’m on some other things, and I do check the email sometimes. I’m not 100% avoiding Twitter, because people have shared tweets with me, but I’m not going there on my own volition. It’s too much trash to sort through and I’d much rather leave it to the bots, like my ideas for advancing recycling. Also when friends and friends of friends keep getting kicked off of it due to automated moderation having no idea what the hell language is, it’s pretty pointless to stick around.
I just feel I can get way more done when I’m not obsessed over figuring out how to be angry at the latest outrage that everyone’s reposting. If you can actually figure out what to be angry at the most, as far as what matters the most there, you could actually do something with regards to it instead of just sitting around and complaining for someone else to do something. You can also take that time to better yourself instead of constantly checking some thing. Of course getting some level of exposure to whatever you’re doing tends to lean toward using social media, so you could just sparingly use it if you must. Maybe just post and don’t go follow crazy over it. As I’ve mentioned, my Twitter, if it still exists, is run purely through a bot that posts the RSS feed from this site, and possibly also mentions if I start a stream on Twitch if I do that. I’m still way more likely to use Twitch than Twitter even as infrequently as I stream and with as many problems as I have with Twitch as a business.
But what have I been doing while not using Twitter and also being stuck in the house forever, aside from occasional drives to pick things up or look at nature? My site holds some clues, particularly in the art pages. Last year’s art page ended up getting pretty long. I’m certainly giving it my all, at least. And it’s running into this year as well. Outside of art, I’ve mostly been focused on games, but that’s usual. I still cleared about as many games as I did the year prior by the looks of things, even despite having more time to do so. I did focus on getting the last of the hardware I was generally looking for at the time, including the last two consoles on my list and putting together a gaming PC for VR. And getting the VR part figured out was also partly driven by the desire to socialize more, not just that a certain killer app or two or possibly more came out for VR recently. If it ends up possible to upgrade to a newer graphics card without a second mortgage, I’ll eventually do that, but I feel at the moment, with everything running pretty well, I’m pretty much done there. I just have to play the games.
The big reasons for why I didn’t just entirely focus on games were probably due to making sure I was prepared for anything, but as well to work on art and the site. I even worked more on my sewing skills, something important for crafting basic protection, useful in addition to typical prevention and avoidance methods. As far as the site, though, I moved my review blog over again, which meant converting all the Blogger posts to pure HTML, which they generally were already but needed some adjustments to move all the hosted images and also unbreak links where needed. I even felt like setting up a whole index of what songs in what lists I’d reviewed since I don’t exactly have a search feature there. I’m still thinking of features to add as I figure out what I’m doing with them. I really want to keep having the site around as a site proper with all sorts of pages about all sorts of stuff.
I do a lot for myself, but I really want to stay some kind of social and help out others, being friendly in groups and communities, not constantly plotting revenge against society and such, maybe finding less violent or even nonviolent ways to take on the world if possible. I was making good progress in reaching out, and I don’t want to be stopped by paranoia brought on by a death plague. I want to do this to be helpful wherever I’d fit in, and not to just obsess over finding something to help with when it’s not necessary. I just need a strong foundation to do so better, so I end up looking out for myself. And I told myself to get the hell out of social media. I’d have done it before last November if I didn’t do it earlier. I was planning the whole idea since the year before but it got pushed way forward. I at least figured out the RSS thing just in time. I just like having the site be accessible since it’s where I put my updates now, for anyone even remotely interested. I even had a go at making it more readable on mobile without compromising the overall design.
I don’t entirely know what I’m planning next, as I’ve sort of shifted to a more in-the-moment approach as I could foresee things going completely wrong in a matter of days at any time, but not entirely abandoning the idea of planning for a possible future. I’m not announcing any planned features specifically so I can be sure that they’ll mesh well in the site, even with a variety of styles, but I do have ideas, like something else artistic or retrospective or potentially helpful. I do plan to keep going with art, possibly getting back into my own programming projects. Even if the Second Crash happens, I might still want to make my own games anyway. If nobody’s buying, I’ll just make them free.