Morning Pages: December 31st, 2020

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, I've been locking myself down until I think it's safe to go out again. To alleviate fear and stress, my writer's group has put together a daily "morning pages" get-together on Zoom in order to touch base before starting the day. Here's some of my brief thoughts.

I like this comparison.

yzma

is that my voice? is that my voice?? oh i guess so

Last day of 2020!!!!! So much to be excited about, both the year ending and having a fresh year coming up. I'm currently typing up a set of "year in review" posts and a set of New Year's Resolutions for 2021. It's actually a bit of a slog. I finished an entire book's worth of financial ledging, and I wanted to digitize those records so that I would have it. Turns out, digitizing three year's worth of pay periods and bad handwriting in a few days is not a fun experience. I wish there was somebody who I could like pay or something in order to scan this in, but that would mean handing over some personal financial information to a third party, which I'm unwilling to do. No OCR software or anything like that too. Sigh. I think the data entry will be a good experience, and I'll only need to do it every three years or so.

This is what I call progress. It's like the whole milk and cookies thing.

oh no

I record everything in my notes, then I want to digitize my notes in order to run visualizations, then I need to move to on-prem because I don't trust Google to make Sheets run properly on Firefox, then I need to build out my own spreadsheet software because I don't like the other ones I'm using. It's a very convoluted process for something that shouldn't be a big deal. Most people just say fuck it and don't record this stuff at all.

I'm not sure whether this is actually a thing, but I dream better when I fall into REM sleep while listening to Calm's Sleep Stories. The Calm app itself is...kinda shitty to be honest, but they apparently raised a shitton of money and are now a unicorn. I'm guessing they're spending a bunch of money in order to pay for actors to read stories, which I think is a pretty nice usage of IP and content generation. I have two favorite sleep stories, Amy Acton's "The Velveteen Rabbit" and Nick Offerman's "Big Bad Wolf Learns Anger Management". And then when I dream I have a much stronger desire in order to get out of bed and go start my day. I think that's pretty interesting.