From another great piece of writing by Joan Westenberg, “Why Belief Beats Discipline”:

We are not consistent with our goals. We are consistent with our identities. And if your identity says you’re inconsistent, undisciplined, doomed to flake or drift or binge or relapse, then the moment you raise your standards, your subconscious files an objection. You “forget” your commitments. You postpone things “just for today.” You start researching better productivity tools instead of doing the actual work. All of it in the service of returning to your known baseline - the set of standards you believe you can meet.

Watching the video “You need to be bored. Here’s Why” where Harvard Professor Arthur C. Brooks explains why boredom is a necessary part of our lives.

One of the reasons we have such an explosion of depression and anxiety in our society today is because people actually don’t know the meaning of their lives.

Good reminder to carve out some boredom time. No phone. No Internet. No distractions.

My favorite hack lately is adding detailed AI prompts to my text expander. Really useful for repetitive tasks like translation requests. Since I use AI primarily for Thai to English translation giving it specific instructions/added context is very useful.

Watched a video on the controversial question “Are wooden pencils better than fountain pens?” and it convinced me to order a wooden pencil and a pencil sharpener. I think it’s been decades since I used a wooden pencil. I have a really nice mechanical pencil that I almost never use because pens have always been my go-to and more so now that I’ve discovered fountain pens. But I’m willing to experiment.

I guess the question is: which wooden pencil? I’ll have to do some research.

The Ritman Library has digitized 2,178 rare Occult books and made them available in their online reading room.

I may have broken my website somehow so I’m not sure when today’s post will be going up. If you’re reading this the good news is my website isn’t all broken. Just partly broken.

Checking out Kite, which is Kagi’s news aggregator. Very simple and easy to set up. You can keep an eye on the news you’re interested in without being overwhelmed by it. Very cool. You can even add it as an RSS feed.

I managed to make enough gold in MoP classic to buy myself a WoW Token. Way easier to make 11K in classic than 300K in retail right now, though I guess it’ll depend how many people keep playing classic. I also played a bit of the new retail patch, but I think I’m having more fun questing through MoP.

I’ll likely return to New World before the October content drop. But for now I’m having fun being zen in Pandaria.

I’ve enjoyed doing laundry lately, and not in a productive, getting things done kind of way. In a “this is really fun” kind of way.

It’s weird and it won’t last but I’ll enjoy all the clean clothes in the meantime.

So when I said I was going to post here every day in August I guess what I meant is that I will post here at least 31 times in August.

Happy to report that my blogging adventures have inspired at least one person to start blogging (livejournaling) again. My new goal in life is to get all my friends to start/resume blogging. Join the revolution.

I spent all of yesterday playing Mists of Pandaria Classic and I have no regrets. WoW Classic is very relaxing for some reason. But as soon as I got to Pandaria on my newly-boosted level 85 Orc Warlock, I realized I had to turn around and go back to the old world to level my gathering professions. I don’t miss that part.

I watched some of Dark Winds S3 while flying around gathering ore. Today I might listen to some podcasts. See? Relaxing. I’ll either listen to Astonishing Legends or And That’s Why We Drink. Probably the latter.