---
title: "Wait, what am I actually doing?"
date: 2024-09-19
summary: "A quick update post thinking about the blog aspect of my site... and wondering if I'm going about this the right way."
cover: "/blog/banner_sept19.png"
cover_alt: "A mysterious sattelite tower standing in the center of a dense dark fog, a sickly yellow sky peering from behind. Photo by Julian Zwengel on Unsplash."
---

<MDXCallout preset="warning">
Lower your expectations. Dumbness lies ahead.
</MDXCallout>

I might have lied. 

I thought I was going to be able to pump out an article once a month, maybe two a month. Turns out that did not happen.
Instead, I'm now just three days off of exactly three months since my last article. Whoops.

# How could this happen??!?!

This summer was weirdly stressful for me. Everyone was talking about "hot girl summer", "brat summer", all that stuff... to me it all
just felt aimless and endless. Every day I wanted the summer to end so I could go back to some sort of routine that I could fit myself in.

Now that it's the fall and I'm back in school, my mental health has improved considerably. Even though I technically have less free time,
I feel like I can do *more* with that free time because I have a structure around that free time I can plan around. Without a
consistent schedule, my time blindness gets jacked up to 11 and I have no idea how to organize that extra time that I have.

Part of it is probably just me not being used to adulting yet. Now in my fifth year of college, I feel like I'm just starting to find my
footing in this "adulting" business. Every time I thought I was getting closer, reality taught me I had a much longer way to go... but now,
I think I am *actually* making progress this time. Trial and error with time management and general organization is slowly giving way 
to actual understanding, though I really wish I didn't have to learn all of this the hard way.

The result of all of this is that I feel like I have more focus and energy *to* focus, which means I can make better progress on the
creative projects I want to work on... which includes this blog. It's a shame it took this long to (mostly) figure everything out, though.

## So what were all of those new features added to the site for?

That was me reaching for tasks related to my site that would give me more dopamine / a greater sense of accomplishment from engaging in that work.
Adding new features to the site is frankly more fun than writing new blog posts.

I think for the forseeable future, I'm pausing my idea for narrated articles &mdash; in fact, I'm hiding the feed for that so there's less random stuff
that doesn't do anything on my site. It's actually way more difficult than I thought it would be to read through an entire blog post out loud 
and edit the resulting audio to remove stutters, random pauses, and other unpleasantries. I might do it one day if I make a post specifically for
conversion into a podcast, but for right now I think it would be too much work for not enough benefits back. If there is anyone who would benefit from
narrated articles who would like to provide feedback regarding this and/or tips on how to make them more easily, please reach out!

I *do* want to implement my comments seciton idea at some point, but that will require a lot of work, so what I'm going to do is make a new branch
in my repo for implementing it **after** I publish this post so all of that mess is on its own separated verison of the codebase. As always, you can
see what exactly I'm doing by visiting [the repo on my Forgejo instance](https://forgejo.eleboog.com/kebokyo/eleboog-refresh).

Finally, I still really like the idea of the sharefeed, but the reality is that I have such a flood of stuff that could be cool coming in that it's
hard to choose what to read. Most of my sharefeed posts come from a Telegram bot that showcases top Hacker News posts, and while I really
appreciate that resource... it's a lot to take in. I need to start currating this stuff more, and I think what I really need is to turn NetNewsWire
into a Cool Shit from People I Like & Trust Aggregator™. I'm not sure how, but I want to make it work. And hey, if I do end up getting it working,
I could turn *that* into a blog post! Eh? Eeehh???

## ...okay, so where *have* you been posting?

Here, mostly, just in [my journal page](/journal/) instead of actual blog posts. 

I feel less pressure writing there because that page is
specifically designed for shorter, less professional-looking posts. This kinda ends up being a self-fulfilling prophecy, though, because
if I keep writing in my journal, I keep reinforcing that the place where I can write anything is in the journal, and actual posts need
to be reserved for Big Stuff™... which isn't true. Hell, there's [a whole hashtag about how that isn't true](https://100daystooffload.com)
(that I won't be participating in just yet because 100 posts in a year sounds like a lot lmao).

Still, I find writing in this journal a lot better than posting to social media such as Fedi or Bluesky. 

---

Not sure if I shared this album yet in my journal, but
[here's a really cool J-rock album](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lI4xDv36-meW-Z8s1nxRvpH1OaHG5DbzM) 
with a surprising amount of English lyrics and one song that got featured in an (imo) underated anime.