2024-02-16 Happy Cheap Pink Candy Day

Posted on by Dave Stucky

What I Did

FRONT-END:

I’m slowly running out of backed-up content I wrote during my last bout of manic writing, which may be just in time for another bout of manic writing.

BACK-END:

The yak shaving continues, and it’s been boring. I’ve been parsing piles of hyperlinks much more than anything else, though I’ve been taking some free online courses while my brain melts out the back of my skull.

My latest accomplishment has been to parse my monstrous piles (i.e., over 500 lines at a time, per-page) into less-monstrous piles (not surpassing 100 lines, or 50 hyperlinks per-page).

What I (Re)Learned

Anyone who wants to sell you a book can tell you: success is elegant, simple, and easy. All you need to do is to do the right things, in the right order, and you’ll be better than everyone else.

But, to the practical person who doesn’t appreciate that sort of dialogue, success takes far longer than you’d expect, and can be downright tedious.

While there are plenty of definitions for success, I’ll give my own cynical-not-cynical aphorism:

  • Success is an obsession that yields consequences that don’t end in what everyone expects to be failure.

This is predicated on a few prevailing realities more-or-less gleaned from the axioms on one of my success pages:

  1. Success is harder work than expected.
  2. It’s devoted to long-term results (and therefore at least somewhat sidelines the short-term and makes everyone expect failure).
  3. You’re a crazy hermit while doing that thing, left for dead until everyone sees you emerge triumphantly with your prize.
  4. You’re sorta breaking the rules, so there’s risk involved, and that can backfire.
  5. You can’t get it perfect, so you’re aiming for “good enough”, which looks kinda dangerous.

I’m sure I could assert this more, but you get my point. Wildly successful are a tad bit unhinged.

This isn’t exactly new information to me, but I keep realizing that there’s an extremely fine line between what/who society showcases on a pedestal versus what they institutionalize to “fix”.

What I’m Doing

WHAT I MUST DO:

  • Working in an insurance office right now.
  • Keeping a home together with a woman at the maximum threshold of the Crazy/Hot Matrix.
  • Slowly succumbing to the standard mental decline caused by maintaining two schoolchildren before they’re old enough to vote.

MY HOBBY:

My Grandiose De-Hoarding Mission now has 2 domains, loosely inspired by Johnny.Decimal:

  • It consists of 3,909 files, each one containing between 1 and 50 subjects.
  • As I go, each condensation will make fewer files, but each re-categorization may make more files.
  • The number is moderately arbitrary relative to results, thereby avoiding the risk of Goodhart’s Law while also implying I’ve made some sort of progress.

The software-leaning side has 2,822 pages, and will (eventually) go to my toolbox:

  • 03X — an inbox of stuff that goes everywhere else, and where I dump any new content when it’s not explicitly obvious or convenient to file away (36 files)
  • 1XX — need to both sift for duplicates in the system and group the information (1,983 files)
  • 2XX — need to sift for duplicates in the system (289 files)
  • 3XX — need to group the information (429 files)
  • 4XX — has been sifted and grouped and ready for the toolbox, presuming I understand it (79 files)

The writing-leaning side has 1,087 pages, and spans the output of my Trendless Tech essays and my remaining NotaGenius essays:

  • 00X — needs regrouping into narrower classifications (253 files)
  • 02X — content to update my already-finalized essays (103 files)
  • 1XX — written content (my notes or copy-pasted stuff) that must make its way to a new essay (662 files)
  • 2XX — hyperlinks-only lists of guides (36 files)
  • 3XX — hyperlinks-only opinions and expert wisdom (32 files)

Throughout the entire system, I maintain a sub-schema that actually reflects the content I’m building:

The flow of work represents itself through a unique flow of “phases”:

  1. Sift through the duplicates (somewhat alongside Phase 2)
    • S1->S3
  2. Precisely group content (somewhat alongside Phase 1)
    • S1->S2
  3. Sift through duplicates in grouped content (alongside Phase 5)
    • S2->S4
  4. Group/merge content into other categorizations (alongside Phase 4)
    • S3->S4
  5. Separate out the toolbox items, guides, and opinions
    • S4->TB
    • S4->W2
    • S4->W3
  6. Regroup the essays and update old content
    • S0->S1
    • S0->S2
    • S0->S3
    • S0->TT/NAG/TLS
  7. Add ready-to-go content updates, which will make all my essays officially “done”
    • S1->TT/NAG/TLS
  8. Make decisions on the guides
    • S2->Maybe/Later
    • S2->?
  9. Consume and update the last of TrendlessTech
    • S3->TT