Drunken Owls and Other Delights

 Some of my friends and I have been talking about the state of Twitter lately, and yeah, it's pretty bad these days. I'm trying to think of a similar situation and I've come up with a few:

--It feels like that temp job you had where you know that the department you're working in is on its way towards close-down, and you've been hired to basically do the last rounds of assignments while various cubicles are being torn down around you.
--It feels like the last semester of senior year in high school when all those social stigmas and irritations just...don't really matter all that much anymore.
--It feels like your two relatives who you love dearly but all they ever do when they get together is complain about the idiocy someone caused or how the quality of things has declined. And how it's not really their fault.
--It feels like you've just landed in someone's basement that stinks of stale Cheetos and hundreds of cans of Monster Energy.

The first one especially for me. The site has either chased off or disgusted a large number of users for a multitude of reasons, and it's a shell of what it used to be. I would not be surprised if there was a considerable number difference between active non-bot users in, say, 2013 and this past month. It doesn't help that its current CEO has treated it so badly you'd think he's dissecting and disassembling it piece by piece on purpose.

Mind you, I still connect with a number of people, creators and friends on there because like me, they haven't quite given up on it yet. I've given up (or at least muted) those who spend their online time QTing or RTing bigots -- I know they're there and I'd rather not be reminded so often, thank you -- but for the most part I'll still follow you if you're still there.

I'm mostly following the blogs these days, to be honest, but if I'm looking for that instant dopamine rush of chat-centric social media, then I bounce between Twitter and Facebook. I've tried Mastodon and it's a bit past my level of brainspace I'm willing to give (not that I don't understand it, it's just too fiddly for the amount of patience I'm willing to give it). I'm on Discord because my east coast friends have created a great server where we can all meet on the daily. But that's about it.

I'm sure I'll probably quit Twitter at some point, and I think it'll probably be in the same fashion I left LiveJournal: when no one I know is there anymore and it ceases to be useful, then I'll log off for the last time.

It's Sunday afternoon, so here I am in Spare Oom, cleaning out the week's emails while listening to Garrison Keillor. We'll be going to see him and his gang again this January along with my in-laws. I'll try not to schedule a symphony and lose my umbrella this time out.

This week's schedule has been weird to the point where I'd forgotten what day it was more than once. I had jury duty this week and had to go in during the afternoon on Monday (in which I shoehorned a few hours of work that morning before heading out). I went in again on Wednesday for jury selection, in which I was let go midmorning, and chose to use the rest of the day for errands and contemplation, including getting a smog check done on the car and avoiding the rainfall whenever possible. The day and a half off, and my sense of time went all out of whack!

As mentioned in the previous post, I'm choosing to unplug myself from social media for a bit to clear my head. More than a few times I was catching myself refreshing my overburdened Twitter feed for updates and dropping by various other sites, and I started to realize I don't want to be that kind of person. It's a waste of time that could be better used with creative endeavors that I keep "wanting to do" and "never have enough time for". Yes, I'm calling myself out for time management whingeing. Time to shut up and make good on it.

First off was the trimming of the Twitter feed--at last check I noticed I was following 500+ users, and I really don't need to follow THAT many. A lot of users who haven't updated in months, some I chose to follow but in reality never read, and so on. Time to thin it out. I got rid of 100+ so far, and may drop a few more. I read it via the website and rarely if ever use lists (read: can't be bothered to take the extra steps to do so, and I find I really don't like the multifeed setup of Janetter), and it's now much easier to read without all the extraneous stuff I know I've been skipping.

And really, do I need to waste my time visiting the same random websites on a daily basis?


So about this creative endeavor thing.

Well. A bit of a shake-up there. Two Thousand has come to a stop and may be so indefinitely, or at least until I decide to rethink it. It's been bothering me for a while now--I thought it might have been my lack of concrete outline, but I came to realize it was more than that...MUCH more than that. To wit: one-note secondary characters that are boring as hell, scenes that go nowhere other than the characters saying "I don't know what I want to do" in various ways, and a budding relationship that's interesting in idea but quite uninteresting in plot. But the worst part? It suddenly dawned on me, to my extreme distaste: I'm writing a pathetic Mary-Sue story, aren't I? [I'm not bothering to use gendered "Gary-Stu" here, as I'm sure you get my gist.] I was trying to write what I wished happened in 1994 when I lived in Boston, and in turn it sounds like a whiny, one-note story of characters that sit there smoking at a park bench and contemplating just how much life sucks in the sucktastic economy of the mid-90s.

And this is decidedly NOT what I want to write. I don't want to waste my time writing crap that's not going to sell or be interesting to anyone else. Or more to the point--I know instinctively that Two Thousand was not going to be worth continuing in the direction I was going in, so I stopped while I was ahead. Thankfully it was only about two and a half months' worth of work, so I don't feel I wasted my time. I'm considering it fiction practice.

So what now?

First off, I'm switching the daily project back to Walk in Silence for the time being. I'm going to work on that one until I have a more concrete idea of what major project I'll work on next. I've a few plans there, but I won't go into details just yet. Besides, I'm pretty far ahead with WiS and have a solid outline for that one, so the turnaround should be rather quick.

Second of all, I'm going to shut up about the whiteboard schedule. As in, Stop talking about it and just f**king DO it already. Daily 750 Words, music playing, poetry, WordPress posts, art and photography, and whatever main project I'm on. Time to STFU about it already.


Okay...three, two, one, let's jam.