Posts published in “Real Life”

It’s what happens when we’re not working or playing or thinking or doing. That thing we do that doesn’t fit into all the other categories.

Sometimes we call it living.

[twenty twenty-four day sixty-five]: it’s gotta get done sometime

Published March 5, 2024 by centaur

SO! I am still chasing down places in my life where I have been “letting things pile up” and, as a consequence, causing myself stress down the road when I have to clean it up. And I found yet another one - tied in with my drawing / blogging projects.

I have a tremendous complexity tolerance compared to some of the people I’ve worked with, to the point that I’ve been repeatedly told that I need to focus the information that I’m presenting in a way that more clearly gets to the point.

But when piled complexity passes even my tolerance level, I get EXTREMELY stressed out. I knew I got stressed from time to time, but as part of examining my behavior and mental states looking for triggers - inspired by Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism - I zeroed in on dealing with the piles as the actual problem.

Online files aren’t quite as bad - I think it is the actual physical piles that become intimidating, though I think any task too big for my brain to wrap around all the things that need to be done, like editing a novel, may cause the same problem - and so, as part of working on Drawing Every Day, I decided to clean up those files.

I already had a good system for this, broken down by day and year … which I was not using. Now, in theory, you could throw all these files into a bin and forget about it, or even delete them, but I hope to use my files for a deep learning project, so it will likely benefit me to categorize the files as I go.

But, as part of trying to “get ahead”, I’d been working fast, letting the files pile up. This, I realized, easily could turn into one of those aversive pile situations, so I dug in today and fixed it. As a result, I didn’t get to all the things I wanted to get to over lunch.

For decades I’ve had the habit eat-read-write, and my weekend lunches and brunches are a particularly precious writing / coding / thinking time for me. I gets a sad when I don’t get to fully use that time, as today where I spent time on cleanup and I have remote meetings with my friends and my small press in the afternoon.

But this work has to get done sometime, or it won’t get done. And for this project, my collected files for Drawing Every Day will become useless if they aren’t organized - not just for the hypothetical deep learning project, but also for me, in reviewing my own work purely artistically to decide where I should put my learning effort next.

For me, I’ve had to learn not to be so hard on myself. By many metrics, I get a lot done; by other metrics, I feel unproductive, disorganized, even outright lazy. But the truth is that there’s a lot of groundwork that needs to be put in to make progress.

I’ve been trying to teach myself game development since, hell, the early 2000’s. Most of the time, other than a little side effort on interactive fiction, I didn’t make any progress at this, because it was always more important to code for work, to draw, and then, after I got my drawing laptop stolen and got a novel contract not too far apart, to write.

After I got laid off, I decided, “now’s the time! I’m going to do games!” Of course, that didn’t happen: I and my research collaborators had a major paper in flight, a workshop to plan, and I had to launch a consulting business - all while still writing. While I did read up on game development, and spent a lot of time thinking about it, no coding got done.

But most of your learning is on the plateau: you don’t appear to be making progress, but you’re building the tools you’ll need to progress when you’re ready. So all the work I’ve been doing on consulting and for the research projects is looping back around, and I’ve used what I learned to start not one but three tiny games projects.

It’s not likely that I’ll release any of these - at this point, I am just futzing around trying to teach myself - but it is striking to me how much we can accomplish if we put in continual effort over a long period of time and don’t give up.

I can’t tell you how many people over the years have told me “well, if you haven’t seen progress on something in six months, you should quit” or “if you haven’t worked on something in two years, you should get rid of it”. I mean, what? This is terrible advice.

If you want to be productive, don’t take advice from unproductive people. Productive writers and artists typically have apprenticeships lasting anywhere from a year to a decade. It can take years of work to become an overnight success.

And many of the steps leading to that success are unglamorous, tiresome, unsexy scutwork, like organizing your files so you know what you have, or reviewing them so you can decide the next learning project you need to take on to master a skill.

The work has to be done sometime. Best get on with it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the Drawing Every Day project files, post-cleanup and organization. There’s still a bin of files that need to be filed, but they’re a very contained bin, compared to the mess there was before. Also, a picture of this essay being composed, at my precious Saturday lunch-read-and-write.

[twenty twenty-four day sixty-two]: and you really can’t tell

Published March 2, 2024 by centaur

Following up recent posts about things taking longer than you think.

Trying to do cleanup, laundry, and organization before starting my next task? I predicted “a few minutes”. It took a bleeding hour.

I need hours at a time to get coding done. I need focus.

I don’t need to be interrupted by rescuing a cat from the rain!

But you have to anyway. Argh!

Time tracking (I use Clockify), if done pretty rigorously, can really dispel some illusions about how much work we can get done in a short amount of time - and, conversely, about all we did do in that block of time that didn’t feel productive.

Case in point: I’ve already done 6 hours of stuff today that wasn’t on my agenda for today. And all this stuff “needed” to get done - at least for a normal, human interpretation of the word “need”.

I feel the need to qualify that as I’ve been through cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), an evidence-based approach to dealing with stress, and while it is wonderful, it does have some intellectually dishonest components, like throwing out “need” language.

I get it — there are things we think we “need” that we really don’t — but some of the therapists I worked with pushed that to an extreme that didn’t make sense. Sure, you don’t “need” to breathe, but if you don’t, you’ll pass out and/or die.

So, yes, the stuff “needed” to get done in the normal, human sense of the word. I mean, sure, you could throw out all your clothes instead of doing laundry and order new ones online, but that would neither be efficient nor sustainable.

But more directly, some of that was organizing my files for my current active projects, some of which I did indeed need to pull up and organize in order to take the next steps on those projects.

Funny how our busy-beaver selves sometimes try to convince ourselves that certain things don’t “need” to be done … but if we don’t do them, we won’t get anything done.

Or the cat will have to stay in the rain.

-the Centaur

P.S. And this post took another 15-30 minutes, as I came back to it later.

Pictured: the bottom coming out. It was short, but it was a hell of a rainstorm.

[twenty twenty-four day sixty]: why i have to be hard on myself to be easy on myself

Published February 29, 2024 by centaur

SO! Working on The Neurodiversiverse led me to writing again, and writing those stories led me to Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism, which in turn led me to realize I have undiagnosed social anxiety disorder with autistic / ADHD / OCD tendencies.

“Unmasking” is an important process that autistic people can elect to undergo where they stop putting so much effort into conforming to neurotypical expectations - “masking” - and start building a life which is built around how their bodies and minds work.

While unmasking can be risky, with a real threat to life, limb or livelihood even for autistics who are privileged, much less people from other disadvantaged groups, it often comes with great benefits - not just to mental health, but physical well being.

But, if you know one autistic person, then you know one autistic person, and advice that helps one autistic person may not help another. So I found some of Price’s advice to be helpful - even as I had to subvert it for my own use case.

In particular, one thing many autistic people who are stressed out by trying to keep up with neurotypical expectations of cleanliness is to stop worrying so much about it. The thinking goes, if it stresses you out to put clothes in a hamper, who cares? Just change clothes in the same place and let them pile until you take them to the laundry.

But what I realized is that I was unconsciously doing this - letting mail, dishes, or laundry (cleaned or dirty) pile up until I had enough spoons to deal with it. My thinking went, if I am doing my work and keeping the lights on, who cares if the mail piles up for a few weeks? I’ll get to it when I deliver what I am responsible for.

But what I realized was, this was hurting me. The bigger the piles were, the more intimidating they became, and the more I put off dealing with them - a vicious cycle. But when I finally was forced to deal with one of the piles, I found myself infinitely MORE stressed than I was taking care of things a step at a time.

A habit I had adopted to deal with one aspect of my undiagnosed neurodivergence - a possibly autistic avoidance of organizing chores in favor of focus on work that kept the lights on - was really messing with another aspect of my mental makeup: an obsessive-compulsive need to have everything organized and in its place.

I went through this before with the library where I’m typing this; it used to be so disorganized that I didn’t want to spend time here, but once it was organized, I loved spending time here. So I am rewarded to expend this effort.

So, in an effort to go easier on myself, I have started being harder on myself about piles. Not letting them grow; dealing with them right away, before they become intimidating. The hope is, if I can keep the space around me organized, maybe the stress I feel about dealing with piles will fade away, and I can really focus on the work I want to.

Let’s see how it goes.

-the CentaurPictured: The afternoon lunch-and-read habit, featuring Unmasking Autism.

[twenty twenty-four day fifty-nine]: it’s good to take a break sometimes

Published February 28, 2024 by centaur

So, my “blog buffer” enabled me to spend most of Tuesday focusing on work and writing. (And even doing a little game playing in Infinite Craft.) When I crashed out, I remembered, “oh, I need to blog” … but checked my blogroll, and saw that the buffer had posted for me. So I instead got to turn in early and get some much-needed sleep.

I’m going to need to catch up today and tomorrow, of course, trying to get four posts in two days so I have time to chill out over the weekend and focus on editing the rough draft of Spectral Iron and the returning stories on The Neurodiversiverse. But it sure is easier to keep a commitment when you plan ahead to make sure you fulfill that commitment than it is to commit without thought and hope that muddling through with “hard work and discipline” will somehow manage the job that should be done by actual thinking.

-the Centaur

Pictured: breakfast at Nose Dive, one of the many places in downtown Greenville where it is impossible to eat breakfast on Sunday morning without an hour wait - unless you reserve ahead.

[twenty twenty-four day fifty-seven]: how do “normal” people manage?

Published February 26, 2024 by centaur

So I’m confused: I know I’m a bit weird, but I stopped to think about the supposedly "weird" way that I do things and I genuinely do not understand how “normal” people manage it.

So what you see above is my collection of genre T-shirts. I love genre T-shirts and wear them most of the year - as my shirt in the summer, and as my undershirt in the winter.

I used to think this collection was excessive; most of the other people I know don’t have near as many themed shirts, just a collection of normal clothes.

But I started pulling on that thread (ha, ha) a bit and it just didn’t make sense to me.

SO what you see there is something like 300-500 shirts in my closet. I didn’t count them all, but I estimated by counting a few piles and extrapolating by the number of piles.

But if you wear a shirt every day, this is only enough shirts for roughly a year. And I know from *ahem* considerable experience now that even rarely worn old T-shirts, which are typically made from better fabric than modern T-shirts, last at most 20-30 years.

Now, between science fiction conventions, travel, and very occasional clothes shopping, I purchase maaaaybe 10 or so T-shirts per year, which I thought was an excessive habit.

But over 20-30 years, this adds up again to 300 shirts … so by the time that I’ve worn out all the shirts in my collection, I will have purchased enough shirts to fill it up again.

Now the conundrum: most of the people I know don’t buy a lot of t-shirts, and they don’t have a huge library of clothes. So how are they not wearing through all their clothes all the time?

Now, I know my wife buys a lot of clothes (mostly at Goodwill), but she’s power tool girl, and her clothes rapidly get worn out or covered with paint and later used as rags.

But the friends that I know who DON’T seem to buy that many clothes ALSO have a similar strategy. One of them called it “the circle of shirts”: First it’s a nice T-shirt, then it’s an undershirt, then it’s a gym shirt, then it’s a yard shirt, then it’s a rag.

But if people don’t have a huge library of shirts, and they’re not buying a buttload t-shirts, why aren’t they going around in tattered rags all the time?

What do “normal” people do? Go to Target and buy white T-shirts every week, as the six pairs of shirts and undies that they have rapidly disintegrate from the rotation?

I genuinely don't get it.

-the Centaur

Pictured: my collection of T-shirts, some of which do eventually get retired from wear.

[twenty twenty-four day fifty-five]: like it always was that way

Published February 24, 2024 by centaur

According to legend, the man who built this house died in this courtyard. Well, technically, he's the man who oversaw its most recent renovation; the core of the house is almost 75 years old, and on plans for the renovations we found in an old drawer, the courtyard appears to have been a swimming pool. Regardless, when he passed, this big, rambling old house soon became too large for his widow, who moved out, leaving it empty for quite a while, enabling us to get it for a steal during the pandemic.

While we wouldn't have turned down a swimming pool - we were actually more concerned with getting away from the drought and the fires and the burning than we were about where we were moving to, other than "big enough for an art studio and a library" - we much prefer the courtyard, which we've started calling "The French Quarter." But the excellent design of this house - architecturally, most of the windows have an excellent view, and the landscaping slopes away from the house almost everywhere to keep it dry - has a few minor warts on it, including the courtyard: under the overhangs, nothing will live.

The feature that keeps the water away from the house - the landscaping and the big sofits - makes it hard for anything smaller than a bush to live. When we moved in, and put in that little sitting area using paving stones and chairs from my late mother's old garden, I dug up the monkey grass where I put in the paving stones, and used it to fill in the areas you now see filled with rocks. That grass lasted about a season, and by the next year, you couldn't even tell anything had been planted there. It was just dust and weeds, and even the weeds frankly weren't doing too well themselves and could have used a watering.

So, kind of in desperation, we hit on the idea of putting in more stream stone as a kind of a border, which the former owners had put around the fountain. This is something our termite folks have actually been asking us to do around the whole house to create a barrier, but we decided to get started here.

And I guess the surprise is that this stopgap effort looks really good. We sort of expected that it would have looked better than scraggly weeds and dead dirt, but, actually, it looks REALLY good, as if it was always supposed to have had a stone border around the outside.

I guess my point, if I did have one, is that sometimes you do things that you have to in order to patch a problem, but if you pick the right patch, sometimes it seems like it was on purpose.

-the Centaur

Pictured: um, well, I think I said it.

[twenty twenty-four day fifty-four]: totes cheatin it, yo

Published February 23, 2024 by centaur

I now FREELY admit that what I'm doing with the blog is posting, as much as possible, easy posts so I can get ahead on my buffer. Legendary cartoonist Bill Holbrook started the longest running daily webcomic, Kevin and Kell, after he'd built up a multi-week buffer, a process he's still continuing today.

SO! I find it better if I bunch up posts so that I am working on the same thing for a while - this is not just better for mental focus, but also for dealing with problems with your computing infrastructure (it is REALLY frustrating to try to do a quick post when the internet decides to gum the fuck up).

And therefore, I'm doing short, brief posts on the blog, while I build up a library of longer posts, hoping that at some point I'll get a rhythm where I'm always 2-3 days ahead, and can thus put the effort into new posts that is harder to come by when it is 145am and you need to both blog, draw, shower, and let the cat in.

-the Centaur

Pictured: the late night ritual: eat some pound cake, drink some soy milk, read a difficult book. Currently, I'm working through Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning, a book which is available online, and has been almost as useful to me as Probability Theory: The Logic of Science, also online.

UPDATE: This was actually day 54. So I was ahead of where I thought I was.

[twenty twenty-four day fifty-two]: master of all he surveys

Published February 21, 2024 by centaur

When we finally get superintelligence, I want it to explain to me what cats are thinking. Loki clearly wants something, but it isn't clear what it is. He wants your attention, he wants to go outside, he wants to go somewhere not too far from the house, but he doesn't seem satisfied with you just standing there, nor with you bending down to scratch him, nor with you going anywhere else.

What do you want, for me to just stand here, so you feel safe rolling in the dirt?

There's no pleasing some people.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, in the external cat condo which we got as part of our successful "cat sitting solution".

[twenty twenty-four day fifty]: almost halfway there

Published February 19, 2024 by centaur

So this is the second 2010 Toyota Prius we've owned that reached 100,000 miles. The one we still have on the Left Coast is closing in on a quarter million miles, if it isn't already there - far enough to reach the moon, if one could drive it (and even if you could, it would take half a year, and +5000 gallons of gas.

We got this car when we moved from the Left Coast after all the drought and the fires and the burning, but needed to leave the old Prius out there as I was still working for the Google remotely, visiting several times per year to perform on-robot experiments and sync with the team.

Now that's up in the air. 200,000+ miles, maybe closing in on 250K - even though we had to rebuild the whole engine at around the 100,000 mark. That gave us the confidence to purchase this used Prius at the 80,000 mile mark - we knew what this type of vehicle is capable of.

This is a completely different strategy than my father used. He used to buy a new car every two to three years, like clockwork, to try to preserve as much trade-in value as possible - and to ensure that the car was reliable. Perhaps this made sense back in the day, when cars didn't last as long, but I'm not sure.

I think it was just a strategy. He enjoyed having new cars, and could afford it. I enjoy having new cars, and maybe we could afford it, but I enjoy being environmental more, and getting a very efficient hybrid car and running it into the ground to recoup the energy that went into its manufacture feels like the way to go.

Now, I told myself that I'd consider trading in the California Prius when we'd driven it to the moon - but my experience is that cars eventually do give up the ghost, either from sheer mechanical weardown (my old Isuzu Rodeo) or from collisions (my first car, the Mustang, and my last SUV, the Pathfinder).

So I'm in no rush, here or in California.

So, congratulations to your first 100K, East Coast Prius. Here's hoping you make it 100K more.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day forty-nine]: were you working here?

Published February 18, 2024 by centaur

You're staring. Were you working here? I feel like you were working here.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Loki, being very helpful, as usual.

[twenty twenty-four day forty-eight]: he haz a comfort

Published February 17, 2024 by centaur

When it rains, it pours. I missed a few meetings last week due to work on the Neurodiversiverse - we were working through edits, and needed more time, and decided to extend our meeting, ultimately taking three and a half hours. But I had an afternoon meeting I was supposed to schedule - we hadn't put it on the calendar yet, and were going to schedule it over email after my Neurodiversiverse meeting. But since that scheduling hadn't happened yet, I didn't see it on my calendar when we were deciding to extend the NDV meeting, and since that meeting didn't end for several hours, I completely missed the window my colleague and I were planning to meet in.

What's worse, I forgot what evening of the week it was, and completely spaced on the Vestry (church board) meeting scheduled for that night. I've added a recurring meeting for that, but the damage is done - and cascading. Since I missed that meeting, I missed the discussion at the Vestry meeting of when we were supposed to meet with the bishop - a retreat that I just found out is scheduled in just thirty minutes, when I had already booked this time to work on Neurodiversiverse edits, which are time urgent.

Sometimes I think it would be easier to be a cat.

However, I feel the need to point out that our capabilities often exceed our estimation of them. I was wondering how I was going to get everything done. Well, now, I am still going to get everything done - I'm just, somehow, going to do more than I thought I was capable of. Funny how that happens. We often imagine that we have less resources available to us than we do - this is an adaptive self-defense mechanism that keeps us from burning out. But it can make us feel that we can't handle things - when we can.

-the Centaur

Pictured: a cat, in comfort. Actually Loki had a very terrible, no good, bad night as he wanted out around midnight, right when I went to bed, and was forced to sit on his warm heating pad, unable to get crunchies for SEVERAL HOURS while his human slept. Imagine the injustice! When FINALLY let in, Loki went to every bowl in the house in turn, sampling each one, before finally settling down to warm and fuzzy sleep.

[twenty twenty-four day forty-seven]: two of two

Published February 16, 2024 by centaur

Back when I worked on-site, I used to keep a lot of genre toys on my desk - Oreius the centaur, a plush Cthulhu, a Star Trek Enterprise I used as a fidget - and I told myself that I was doing so to remind myself why I was working: not just to pay for food, clothing and shelter, but to pay for fun and entertainment.

But I had too much stuff, too poorly organized, to the point that I didn't want to come home and spend time in my own library. It got ridiculous at one point. My wife and I talked about it and I took on the big project of turning the library into something that I could REALLY use, from organized files to library style aisles.

But also, it meant having a place for everything. If I was to own the genre toys, if I was to keep them, I needed to SEE them, not just store them, and, ideally, have them be a part of my day-to-day life. This meant crafting a space, and, ultimately, building custom structures which enabled the toys to go on display. This became even more urgent in the pandemic, where we built out a lot of structure to enable us to put almost EVERYTHING on display, down to Porsche's scythe hanging over my desk.

But, as I said before, after we moved away from the drought and the fires and the burning, we left the swords lying around and the hardware to hang them in the metaphorical junk drawer. It's easy to put self-care chores like this on the back burner, as they are not "urgent". And they're not even really "important", in the grander scheme of things. But they are fulfilling, on two levels: first, in that they make your environment nicer; and second, in that they involve making and building things, which is an accomplishment of its own.

Well, now, we have assembled the things that we made to make Excalibur and Kylo Ren's lightsaber an integral part of my environment. They are no longer easily visible behind me when I'm on Meet or Zoom, but they are at last up on display again. And one more piece of the library falls into place.

All I need now is to find the jade monkey, roadmaps and ice scraper before the next full moon ...

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day forty-six]: so conveeenient

Published February 15, 2024 by centaur

I do like the fact that Loki is spending more time in the library (especially while my wife is gone on a business trip, so he's been getting less attention due to having fewer attendants) but I sure hope that none of the things on my whiteboard desk were important TODOs, because they're TOSMEARS now.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day forty-five]: level but not even

Published February 14, 2024 by centaur

So back in the day (and on the Left Coast) I had a couple of swords mounted on my bookcases. We hadn't done that here because we were busy ... but two years is too long to be busy, so my wife and I decided it was time to set up the swords again, starting with the Kylo "Kylo Ren is Best Sith" Ren cross-lightsaber.

Only ... it ain't that simple. We had to buy new brackets as the previous ones disappeared in the move. We found those at Lowe's, but it turned out that we could not install the mounting diamonds as the old bookcases were solid wood and these were hollow - the screws would have pulled straight out.

Eventually we used bolts and washers and I was able to finish the installation after my wife left town.

A little duct tape and an old Amazon delivery bag protect the books in the case. There's only one problem:

Despite our careful measuring, it was not possible to make it both level (up-and-down) and even (side-to-side) at the same time. It may be that the bookcase itself is leaning (see the top of the previous picture) and since it is screwed into the bookcase next to it for stability, well, we're stuck with that.

Still, I like how it came out.

1 of 2. Next: Excalibur.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day forty-four]: i can’t drive fifty-five

Published February 13, 2024 by centaur

I and a politically opposite friend got together today to NOT solve the world's problems, and after a long and charged discussion we came to the conclusion ...

... that the 55+ menu at IHOP is good.

I think we can come together as a nation on this one.

Seriously, just turned 55 recently, and my buddy offered to take me out to breakfast at IHOP and order off the "senior" menu because, well ... sigh. It's time, literally, it's time. And it was pretty good!

So we've got that going for us, which is nice.

"What's that, sonny? First time trying it? I can't hear you over my advancing decrepitude ... "

-the Centaur @ 55(ish, give or take a few days)

[twenty twenty-four day forty-two]: a new life on the off-world colonies

Published February 11, 2024 by centaur

This is your periodic reminder that we may not be on the moon, but we live in a pretty awesome world, where almost every movie, book or comic book you ever wanted is either available to stream over the air or can be readily shipped to your home, genre toys that once were inaccessible are now readily available, and we can shrink a playable Galaga machine down to the size you can put it on your coffee table.

We've got it good. Don't screw it up.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day forty-one]: squirrel

Published February 10, 2024 by centaur

Mt internet has been flakey, so I chatted with an AT-AT Druid online about it and they unexpectedly had a free repair tech slot the next morning. Send them? Yeah baby yeah!

After some kerfuffle with the confirmation, we got it scheduled and they showed up at 830 this morning only to find ...

The internet box half ripped off the house and the beginnings of what looked like a squirrel's nest in it.

Remember, folks, step one of network debugging is to check layer one of the stack: your physical equipment. "Your wires are loose" is the network equivalent of "Ain't got no gas in it" from Sling Blade.

So, hopefully, regular blogging will resume soon. Till then, enjoy this lovely blog post thumb-crafted on my phone.

-the Centaur

[twenty twenty-four day forty]: minimalist but persistent

Published February 9, 2024 by centaur

Sometimes when I'm behind I shoot for a relatively minimal breakfast: a grapefruit or half pummelo, some toast, maybe some grits or vegan yogurt. I enjoy breakfast, even though I don't generally eat a full three meals a day: for some reason, since I've been out on my own, I've gravitated to two full meals (brunch and dinner) and the occasional midnight snack of milk and pound cake if I'm not too full.

But the "read and eat" ritual remains important, whether I do it two or three times a day. Unless I'm eating with others, or am in the middle of some absolute emergency, I always have a book with me when I eat --- to the point that I have a stand set up to read at the breakfast table. The current top-of-the-stack books are "Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning" for the late-night reads and "Unmasking Autism" for the daily reader (along with "GANs in Action" for a project at work, and various books for writing reference).

Even if your meals are quick and minimal, you can read a few paragraphs while you eat, and hopefully enjoy it. And, if you're persistent, you can get through enormous books this way ... like "A New Kind of Science" or "Machine Vision" or "Probability Theory: The Logic of Science", three long books that I ate, one bite at a time, mostly over breakfast and midnight snacks, a page or even a paragraph at a time, until, at long last, one more mountain was climbed.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Half a pummelo, two slices of toast, and "Unmasking Autism".

[twenty twenty-four day thirty-nine]: space cadet crashes to earth

Published February 8, 2024 by centaur

When you've got a lot to do, sometimes it's tempting to just "power through it" - for example, by extending a meeting time until all the agenda items are handled. But this is just another instance of what's called "hero programming" in the software world, and while sometimes it's necessary (say, the day of a launch) it isn't a sustainable long-term strategy, and will incur debts that you can't easily repay.

Case in point, for the Neurodiversiverse Anthology, my coeditor and I burned up our normally scheduled meeting discussing, um, scheduling with the broader Thinking Ink team, so we added a spot meeting to catch up. We finalized the author and artist contracts, we developed guidance for the acceptance and rejection letters, and did a whole bunch of other things. It felt very productive.

But, all in all, a one hour meeting became three and a half, and I ended up missing two scheduled meetings because of that. The meetings hadn't yet landed on the calendar - one because we were still discussing it via email, and the other because it was a standing meeting out of my control. But because our three and a half hour meeting extended over the time we were supposed to follow up and set the actual meeting time, we never set that time, and when I was playing catch up later that evening, I literally spaced on what day of the week it was, and didn't notice the other meeting had started until it was over.

All that's on me, of course - it's important to put stuff on the calendar as soon as possible, including standing meetings, even if the invite is only for you, and I have no-one else to blame for that broken link in the chain. And both I and my co-editor agreed to (and wanted to) keep "powering through it" so we didn't have to schedule a Saturday meeting. But, I wonder: did my co-editor also have cascading side effects due to this longer meeting? How was her schedule impacted by this?

Overall, this is an anthology, and book publishing has long and unexpectedly complex and tight schedules: if we don't push to get the editing done ASAP, we'll miss our August publishing window. But it's worth remembering that we need to be kind to ourselves and realistic about our capabilities, or we'll burn out and still miss our window.

That happened to me once in grad school - on what I recall was my first trip to the Bay Area, in fact. I hadn't gotten as much done on my previous internship, and started trying to "power through it" to get a lot done from the very first week, putting in super long hours. I started to burn out the very first weekend - I couldn't keep the pace. Nevertheless, I kept trying to push, and even took on new projects, like the first draft of the proposal for the Personal Pet (PEPE) robotic assistant project.

In one sense, that all worked out: my internship turned into a love of the Bay Area, where I lived for ~16 years of my life; the PEPE project led to another internship in Japan, to co-founding Enkia, to a job at Google, and ultimately to my new career in robotics.

But, in another sense, it didn't: I got RSI from a combination of typing every day for work, typing every night for the proposal, and blowing off steam from playing video games when done. I couldn't type for almost nine months, during the writing of my PhD thesis, which I could not stop at, and had to learn to write with my left hand. I was VERY lucky: I know some other people in grad school with permanent wrist damage.

"Powering through it" isn't sustainable, and while it can lead to short-term gains and open long-term doors, can lead to short-term gaffes and long-term (or even permanent) injuries. That's why it's super important to figure out how to succeed at what you're doing by working at a sustainable pace, so you can conserve your "powering through it" resources for the times when you're really in the clinch.

Because if you don't save your resources for when you need them, you can burn yourself out along the way, and still fail despite your hard work - perhaps walking away with a disability as a consolation prize.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Powering through taking a photograph doesn't work that well, does it?

[twenty twenty-four day twenty-nine]: phantom enemies

Published January 29, 2024 by centaur

"I'ma gonna get that bird in the mirror, I swear, this is my territory, I'll show him---BONK!"
"Okay, this time for sure---BONK!"
"Tenth time's the charm---BONK!"

Not even putting up a screen in front of the mirror has helped; our little friend just hopped down onto the stairs of the cat condo (that "table" is a cat condo with a re-purposed glass tabletop, to give one of our now-passed older cats a place to sit and see the stars while shielding him from the rain) and started bonking the lower section of the mirror.

There's no reasoning with some people.

-the Centaur

P.S. Yes, I am making a direct comparison of people whose political beliefs are built around their persecution by imaginary enemies to a bird not smart enough to recognize his own reflection, why?