2022-11-04 Preparation = Success

What I Did

FRONT-END:

Many improvements to my AdequateLife cooking page, mostly by dividing the information into multiple pages:

• How to Cook
• Shelf Lives of Food
• Food Tricks
• Food Substitutes
• Basic Recipes

I’ve also improved my health pages, with one additional page:

• Basic First Aid – general field medicine everyone should know
• Weight Management – how to be about the right weight
• Modern Health Problems – a brand new page (!!) that describes how to manage health in a post-post-modern society

Then, I diverged into some basics on how to have fun correctly:

• Fun Ideas
• Fun Food & Drinks
• Alcohol Ideas
• Coffee Facts
• All About Tea
• Throwing a Party
• Enjoying Vacations & Trips
• Maintaining Plants

And next, to maintain the mood, I shifted to the art of managing hardship, with quite a few new pages:

• Overcoming Severe Hardship – the general ins and outs of sangfroid
• Handling Death – facing the greatest unknown
• Overcoming Personal Hardships – battling inner demons
• Overcoming Interpersonal Hardships – battling with those we love
• Overcoming Society’s Hardships – battling with society around us

To add some tinfoil, I broke down how to withstand the apocalypse:

• What is a Disaster? – defining a disaster
• Short-Term Preparation – planning for a temporary disruption in services
• Long-Term Preparation: Staying – planning for the end of the world, when you like where you live
• Long-Term Preparation: Moving – planning for the end of the world, when you want to get going
• Surviving Nature – withstanding the untamed wild
• Specific Survival Situations – odd, specific things everyone should be prepared for
• Disaster Checklist – what to pack

BACK-END:

The writing has become somewhat hum-drum. I broke apart my work on GainedInSite into 3 phases:

1. Edit the entire body of essays to conform to 2022 Dave, since it was written by 2020 Dave and a lack of editing is what differentiates “vast corpus of meaningful essays” from “what acronym describes that guy?”. I’ve just finished this phase this morning and, given that I have 2 more jobs, served time, and 2 different legal battles in between those 2.5 years, I’m surprised how a hefty chunk of my values and philosophy have not changed.
2. Go through iCOUlDfaul‘s largest ~17 piles. My organization convention required me to dump a huge set of potential notes into “close-enoughish-don’t-want-to-think-about-right-now” piles, and the CEDWTTARN piles may go somewhere else.
3. Sift through the other ~45 essays. They’ll go relatively more quickly.

I’m satisfied with my pace, especially since I’m in the process of moving my family. Nothing new to report on that end.

What I Learned

If dragons were real, the best way to defeat is not according to cultural convention (i.e., swinging dramatically at the head). Instead, it’s a far more mundane reality:

1. Get all your gear ahead of time.
2. Get all your gear in great condition.
3. Scope out where you’ll fight the dragon.
4. Prep your traps when the dragon is not around.
5. Wait.
6. Once you’ve snagged it, take out one its wings to prevent it fleeing.
7. Go after a limb to get it bleeding well.
8. After it’s weakened, put it out of its misery.

Life is fundamentally uninteresting. The myths portray success as a grandiose adventure of intrepid courage mixed with cleverness. In reality, most things in this life are slow, methodical marches of proven procedure and slow progression.

I’m sure there’s a time and place for adventure, but that’s only after you’ve stockpiled the adventure juice and gotten adventure insurance.

What I’m Doing

Working in an insurance office right now while I work through my vast body of essays. I’ve been distilling and thematically unifying all my creative works:

• Marching through GainedInSite:
  1. Philosodata (with some one-offs on AdequateLife)
  2. ~17 large-scale essays about large-scale aspects of existence
  3. ~45 essays about smaller, equally important aspects of existence
• Then, a venture into TheoLogos:
  1. Universal Christian facts
  2. Christian disciplines
  3. Christ’s influence
  4. Christ and society (with a new essay on cults)
  5. Christ and the future
  6. Alternative Christian perspectives
  7. My potential heresy
  8. Spiritual data
• And, finally, to the latest creation of NotaGenius:
  1. Human messiness
  2. Engineering
  3. Law
  4. Business – General
  5. Business – Money
  6. Business – Entrepreneurship
  7. Business – Management
  8. Nature
  9. Math
  10. Possessions
• Finally, after all this, I will feel sufficiently ready to plow heavily into TechSplained.