Twitter was bought by the villain from Glass Onion and the people I followed are no longer there. Facebook is for grandparents and right-wing echo chambers. LiveJournal – remember LiveJournal?! – was my original fix, before it was purchased by a Russian concern, purportedly to tamp down on dissidents. Reddit is reaching the final stages of enshittification – implosion – like a distant star going supernova. LinkedIn is generally full of people talking about their work so much you’re curious if they actually do their work. Mastadon is confusing. Discord is great for small groups, but quickly devolves into noise after you add the 20th person to the server. Instagram was fine until I never got to see my friends’ posts anymore, instead being shoveled content from people I would actively avoid in real life.

But I’m not telling you anything that hasn’t been written about many times before.

The best parts of social media, to me at least, was keeping tabs on friends (particularly as we left college and begun our adult lives) as well as being exposed to ideas related to topics and hobbies I care about. I find myself posting to social media less and less, since my friends don’t necessarily see my posts and I don’t necessarily see theirs. Social media isn’t about building or maintaining communities anymore; it’s about building a platform to keep you engaged as long as possible to sneak in as many ads as it possible.

In short, I’m not being served the content I came looking for – my friends and hobbies – but yet I would flit between social mediums, chasing that content. I’d be served it for a time, before more ads needed to be sold, the content no longer focused on friends and hobbies, but instead on memes and rage-bait, and I’d decamp for the next platform.

That cycle seems untenable going forward. Slowly over the years, as I’ve been finding sites and blogs and newsletters, I’ve been subscribing to their emails or (more typically) their RSS feeds to cobble together My Internet. All the neat corners of the web, containing all the information I care about related to my interests and my hobbies, as well as reputable news sources. My RSS reader (and to a lesser extent my email inbox) is now my social media, just like it was back in 2002. So not long ago, I deleted the social media apps and any free-time scrolling was limited to just my RSS feed.

People, I got fucking bored. I had to end up reading a really long article I saved for myself a few months ago. It took me 40 minutes to read. It had multiple, complex points. It was well-reasoned. It gave me a more nuanced view. It was marvelous. If nothing else, this approach has shifted my time away from lots of short, empty dopamine hits to longer, more intellectually ‘nutritious’ reading.

It’s not a complete replacement. Unless a friend has a site or similar, they don’t show up in my RSS feed. Of course, algorithms pushed a lot of my friends out of my social media feed over the years. (The comfort social media provided to some to share to some abhorrent views forced me to remove others.) And while I’ve deleted the apps from my devices, I’ve not deleted the accounts. For better or worse, memories were made on those networks that AI models can now use for training. And you never know when you might want to revisit past haunts.

So what’s this blog for, then? Well, the outbound posts. I’ll probably limit it to one a day, though, probably as a string of random thoughts or things I’ve learned or found interesting throughout the day. We’ll see.

And some days, your anxiety will look like you making lists of all the things you want to accomplish in a day while simultaneously being paralyzed by the thought of it all.

I realize I only did it for about a month, but I’m putting this experiment to rest. The primary reason is that it’s making life feel like a check-the-box exercise. To put it in context of a video game you have a goal: beat the last boss. I don’t have that sort of end-game sort of goal in my life – I just want to be the best human I can possibly be. And this is taking the joy out of it. So it’s over.

The blog isn’t. I’ll still post from time to time – I’m paying the hosting fees, after all. But I don’t want to continue with this project, so I won’t be. Because it’ll make me happier.

I was going to run yesterday. And usually I’ll run in any weather that doesn’t involve hail or being struck by lightning or flying cows. Which, in Indiana, you can never rule out. But I’ll run in the snow. I’ll run in the rain. I generally believe the axiom “there isn’t bad weather only bad clothing/gear”. But rain when it’s below 40 degrees is awful and I won’t do it. And it was just that yesterday – two and a half inches of it. No thanks.

And thus ends February, and the end of my first Arcane challenge, which I was perfect in – no eating out for lunch.

So, this month I’m giving myself a new Arcane challenge – and frankly it’s a bit difficult. I have our digital photographs – more than 20 years’ worth – stored in Lightroom, organized in folders by months. I’ve been intermittently trying to go through each folder, give the really good pictures 5 stars to make them easier to find, as well as try to cut down on some of the duplicates. I currently have 196 folders that need such review. There are 31 days in March. That’s a little over six folders – let’s round up to seven – that I need to review each day. And then I’ll be caught up!

And sometimes we’ll post multiple days in arrears. This weekend was our FIRST Tech Challenge State Championship for the robotics team I help coach, Panic in the Buildroom, which is a team with Center Grove’s Red Alert Robotics. While it appears we won’t be advancing to nationals, we were pretty pumped to go home with the Design Award for our robot, and considering we were a team of 7th to 9th graders competing against full-on high school teams, I couldn’t be happier with what we accomplished. It was definitely a long day, too – load the buses at 5 am and last kid out the door at 10 pm.

That all happened on Saturday, which ALSO happened to be my wife’s 40th birthday. (We knew in advance this was going to happen so took some time for ourselves on an adult trip a few weeks ago to make up for it.) All of this to say, it was a crazy weekend and hence the late post.

Also, and I’ll update my original post with the rules for this, but the wording in the Strength and Endurance categories are a little constricting. My point here is to do four endurance runs a week and two speed runs and/or strength sessions, leaving one day as a rest day. Weeks run Monday through Sunday for this. Starting with this entry and carrying forward, if I performed the workout, I get a point. If I didn’t and it won’t keep me from my 4/2 workout goals for the week, I get zero points (e.g., if I didn’t do strength on a Monday, I still have six days, so still possible to meet my goal, so I get zero points). If I skip and it keeps me from hitting my goal, that’s when I lose a point (e.g., it’s Sunday, I’ve only done one strength workout for the week and I skip – that’s me losing a point.). ss

Finally, I’m allowing myself to have ONE zero day a week on FP, meaning there is one day a week I can indulge the night owl in me at no penalty (but also no gain).

And also, since this is three days, I’ll just keep it to one graph with three emojis to represent each day.

OK – so sometimes I’ll post in arrears, today being one of those days.

Sometimes I like to stay up late. Usually it’s because there’s a video game, and after everyone else is in bed is the best time to play. Or I’ll want to read more. Or whatever. Sometimes I just like the silence at night in the house while everyone else is sleeping. I don’t know – maybe I’ll decide to give myself one or two free passes a week? But for now the original rules apply – no zeros possible.