Tag: cynic’s guide

  • Day 21: aaaaarghhhhh

    Day 21: aaaaarghhhhh

    I nearly made the whole body of the email just “aaaargh” but I opted for not. But man, it was tempting. I just spent the best part of the evening taking turns with My Wife trying to get the daughter to sleep when she would much rather be up making cute and not-so-cute noises and yeah. Aaaargh.

    I also started doing my morning todo list with my morning coffee — apparently when you’re trying to make a new habit, it’s best to tie the new one to something you do without fail, and I simply never don’t drink coffee. Tonight, after getting through about half of the todo list as is traditional, I am starting to think that the list is simply too long. I’ve read before that it’s better to keep a shorter todo list and get everything checked off than have a long one you can’t complete. But then where will I put the things I need to remember to do but can’t do today? And having all those undone ones looks so untidy; and writing out the same task again the following day is just a pain.

    I have never once found a todo system that works for me. Bullet journaling is the closest thing to it but I find myself getting annoyed with that too. Every app has been a mixture of too much and too little, not to mention extortionate pricing. Hey, maybe this nifty little thing that got profiled in the New York Times might help…

    https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/ugmonk-analog-to-do-system-review

    Wait, what? It’s $100? For a piece of wood with a slot in it? No. God no. This self-improvement space is so endlessly rife with these things; if it’s not an outright grift it’s just absurdly expensive. Maybe I’ll just make one myself; I’ll need some cardstock for the printer and some plywood. If you have access to tools want one I suggest going the same route; by the time you’re done you’ll have an organiser, saved yourself around $90, and you’ll have learned some woodworking!

    Or you could just keep the cards on your desk. In a rubber band. They’re like ten cents. Also, I reread the article to check something just now and realised it contains the phrase “The Analog system speaks to my Gemini spirit,” which made me want to bite down on broken glass. Even more aaaargh.

    The things that got done today include getting the first batch of Print Club prints sent off (there is still space to join Print Club this October if anyone wants to get amongst it!) as well as the commission I finished yesterday. For reasons I don’t entirely understand, doing this took up nearly the entire morning. Seemingly simple things that develop unwieldy complications as you go are my least favourite kind of tasks. Anyway, here’s the Print Club, in case you missed it the first time around.

    Print Club

    Do check it out; I am often very wrong about what I want to be popular but I can’t help loving the idea of getting snail mail happening again.

    miscellaneous

    A reader sent me this video which I’ve seen before but will watch again, which resonates with the magical combination of “inspirational” and “uncomfortably seen.”

    So. How was your week? Feel free to ping me a reply. I appreciate you sticking around for this series, especially on a night like tonight when I imagine these even more frustrating to read than they are to write.

    Still, I’m here, and it’s Day 21, and I haven’t missed a day yet. Even if all I manage to send is a mass of guff, I’m finally putting together the daily writing habit I’ve always wanted to have, and once this challenge is over I think it’ll serve me well.

    Thanks, as always, for reading.

  • Day 19: it just keeps happening!

    Day 19: it just keeps happening!

    I did a couple of the hard things that my previous email assured readers, courtesy of Ms Rachel, that you can in fact do. I guess this email is proof!

    I am feeling more testy and scatterbrained than normal because I’ve spent the last couple of hours writing about AI, and there is no topic more recursively annoying. The short version is that AI isn’t intelligent; it’s a marketing term for a technology that can be quite useful but is being used for a colossal grift to prop up the growth/stock price of a bunch of wildly unscrupulous (steal everything) and dishonest (lie near-constantly about their technology) tech companies. I hate nearly everything about it and consequently I am very grumpy. But writing the article — and trying to make it readable, an awful task — is indeed one of the Hard Things I must do.

    So was sending an invoice. I hate sending invoices; they key right in to my rejection anxiety. What if the client quibbles the amount? What if they don’t pay? The problem is, if I don’t send them, I don’t get paid. Like so many things in neurodiversity (or possibly just life, I’m sure this happens to everyone but I only know the neurodiverse side of it, sorry) it comes down to duelling anxieties. Two wolves, if you will. Eventually one Anxiety Wolf (being able to pay the mortgage) eats the other one (being worried about asking people for money in return for services rendered) and I enjoy a few minutes peace before the cosmic cycle births a new Anxiety Wolf and it begins anew.

    The way I sometimes remember to deal with these things is something I’m going to call reverse urge-surfing. No, don’t run, let me explain. “Urge surfing” is a meditation-adjacent term which involves feeling an urge — let’s say, to eat a cookie when you’ve already had two today — and noting it, taking a scientific interest in it, rather than acting on it. Almost always, it will fade away; showing that it was in fact just another thought.

    The idea of reverse urge-surfing is employed when I feel the urge to not do something, like sending an invoice. I’ve written about this only once before because it’s… a bit weird, but for me, it works. Essentially, I pretend that I’m a robot; or that I’m a passenger in my otherwise autonomous body. It’s a kind of low-key disassociation, I suppose. If it’s invoicing, I just kind of let my fingers do the walking across the document that needs sending and think to myself, “ah well, this is happening. That “Send” button will get clicked in a minute, and then I can take the wheel back again.”

    I’m not sure I’m explaining it very well, but it works. Another place I find myself doing it is getting out of bed when there isn’t a kid yelling at me to do so; I can lose myself in arguments for and against getting up but I find if I pretend my legs are swinging up and out of the bed of their own accord, like someone else was holding a remote control for my limbs, my body makes up my mind for me.

    I hope that was weird enough for you. Sadly, my artificial intelligence article is much weirder, and hopefully it will soon be finished and published so I can subject you to that too.

    Until then, thanks as always for reading.

  • Day 5: The Printing Press

    Day 5: The Printing Press

    I have, true to my word, been absolutely smashing the website. As always when I make Website Stuff I feel like Homer when he’s been up all night eating cheese, or like Billy Joel Armstrong in Brain Stew.

    There, some comforting references for Elder Millenials. The rest of you will have to be confused. Let me assuage that by showing you the things I made today. Behold, my stuff!

    Some of the stuff I made today

    First up is a print of old mate Moby Duck, as requested by what seems like a billion but is more likely about ten TikTok commenters:

    Moby Duck on Classic Matte Paper Poster

    And next is a digital download, because DRM is silly and digital products are cheap and convenient for customers and all margin for me, baby! It’s a win-win!

    Moby Duck – Digital Download

    And lastly, the thing that took me most of the day and that I am — justly, I think — absurdly proud of. Welcome… to the Two Ruru Print Club!

    Print Club

    You folks who’ve signed up for this 30 day challenge malarkey are the first ever to see this. And if we’re all extremely lucky, all the subscription links and options on that page should actually work. Feel free to test it out! 1

    A bit more about the print club in the last few minutes before midnight. Essentially, it’s a way to subscribe to my art. I’d been wanting to set up a subscription print club for ages, but I thought the concept was a bit… done. Then I thought: why not postcards? So you can choose to keep them or send them to your mates?

    So that’s what I did.

    And then I thought: but why not stamps too? Because it turns out New Zealand Post offers a custom stamp option, and so now you can bathe in this glory:

    Minutes left until deadline! Oh, I almost forgot. Paid subscribers to the Cynic’s Guide are going to get opted into the Two Ruru Digital Archive automatically. I’ll send an email about it tomorrow. It’s the least I can do for you guys. With that in mind, here is the big red button.

    Thanks all! And feel free to reply to this email and let me know what you reckon.

    (Don’t worry, I’ll sort you if anything goes wrong.)

  • Day 4: Curtains

    Day 4: Curtains

    Today is a shorter update. I worked on my Secret Project — it’s a painting, but that’s not the secret bit — and I did House Chores.1 This episode isn’t likely to be riveting for anyone playing along at home, but I think there’s a metaphor to be mined out of the boring detritus of domesticity.

    We have a set of curtains in the master bedroom that is Not Doing Well, and hasn’t been for oh, let’s say, a year. The lining, I suppose you’d call it, the stuff that blocks out light and attracts mould, is getting sun-damaged and fragile and has ripped accordingly. When the rip started it was about four centimetres long.

    “We should fix that,” Louise, or I, said.

    Of course, since then, the rip has grown up and had little baby rips of its own. It’s now a good metre long. Or I should say was over a metre long, because today I finally took the curtains down and fixed them.

    Of course, I’d figured out how to fix them many months ago. About midway through what I am, entirely without justification, going to call the Rip Saga, I’d bought some iron-on patches and tape from Spotlight and done nothing with them. As is so often the case with ADHD stuff, there were what seemed like dozens of reasons not to fix the curtains. The stuff I’d bought might not work. The ironing board wasn’t big enough. The curtains might rip even more. All these excuses, half-thought, felt as a kind of almost tangible barrier in the mind.

    So while the kiddos were out and after I’d done enough work on my secret painting I popped into our bedroom, took the curtains down — five minutes, tops — laid them out on a set of drawers, no ironing board needed, grabbed the iron-on patches and scissors, and the curtains were fixed. It took maybe 45 minutes.

    45 minutes, for a job I’ve been avoiding for a year.

    I don’t want to pin all this sort of thing on ADHD. Every person in with a house has housework they don’t get to. But that odd little barrier in the mind, the terminal indecision followed by a reflexive urge to do something else — that, I believe, is an ADHD thing. So many of the things I struggle with come down to indecision. I can’t decide, so I avoid, so I fall in to some kind of default behaviour.

    Since finishing my old job and attempting my own thing, this sort of stuff happens far less. I’m noticing I get more done, more often. Some of this is the inevitable result of having more time and more mental bandwidth; there’s a reason newly unemployed people are so often portrayed in media as taking a sudden interest in housework or arcane hobbies.

    But I feel like mine runs a bit deeper; I’m finding myself more apt to do tasks I’d typically avoid. That little mental hiccup of indecision, the stab of resistance, is somehow more noticeable and therefore more avoidable. And some of this is quite definitely because of my do-something-every-day project; instead of just letting the roadblocks get in the way I’m just smashing through them, and realising (to continue the road transport metaphor) they were more cones than concrete barriers.

    Or maybe I just give fewer ducks these days.

    Speaking of ducks! For inexplicable reasons, that duck I painted has gone almost legitimately viral on TikTok. Last I looked it had 123,000 views, which is still small beer in the scheme of things but is by far the most looks anything I’ve ever made has had. My almost-daily posting and gruelling video-making has, at last, paid off. Not in money, of course. That would be too easy. But there are a lot of folks asking for prints, and so I’m going to have to get some of those ready to sell tomorrow.

    Oh here is that large red button again I suppose. Thanks to those who have taken out paid subscriptions! You can pay what you want, so long as it’s more than $3 dollarydoos

    https://buttondown.com/cynicsguide?as_embed=true
    1. Then I played D&D with friends, which is why this one is late (there will be a new reason every night, I’m sure.)