2025-04-02 Journal Entry

I forgot how nice it is to write in these little code editors. I’m obviously biased, but whatever. I’ve been writing in Scrivener for a while now, and it really is nice, but there’s something so easy about just working with raw files and scripts and plain text that an app like that can’t handle. It’s almost like writing in a physical journal, not because of the physicality of it but because the experience is so open to whatever I want it to be.

I feel a bit bad that my journals are so spread out between physical notebooks, a few weeks in Scrivener, and here. I haven’t written in here in almost two months, but here we are.

Anyways, what all do I have to say. I wrote and published an essay yesterday. Look at me go! Actually writing things and putting them out into the world. It feels good to have something be DoneTM and not to have to think about it anymore. That’s probably the biggest value in Getting to Done or whatever the hell that framework is called: something basically fully exits your mind once you’ve finished it.

Plus I can feel myself getting the dopamine hit from having finished it. Or perhaps that’s just the caffeine hit. I suppose better yet that they happen at the same time. I also moved my blog back to my own site – it just looks so much better than the substack site. Sure, I don’t get all the network effects or whatever, but on the bright side I don’t really need them. Right now I’m just trying to write to get things out into the world.

Anyways, more thoughts more thoughts more thoughts. The nice thing about writing on a keyboard is mostly that my fingers move approximately at the speed of thought, minus the backtracking and the times I have to think about how to spell the word approximately.

I still have some other ideas coming down the pipe, mostly ideas that sprung out of my previous essay. As I was going to sleep last night, I also had the idea for a story based on someone in the bardo or purgatory or wherever and learning that reincarnation is real, but that they get to pick what to be reincarnated as. Either as one of any number of people, and then they debate if they would rather be a rock or a barn mouse or a bicycle or any other number of things. It’s very Ruth Ozeki Book of Form and Emptiness-esque, I think.

I’m considering going to watch a movie today. It’s kinda rainy, and some theatres are showing some English-language movies. Mickey 17 is out, or there’s one theatre near Tokyo station doing a retrospective on David Lynch, so I wonder if I should go watch Eraserhead or something. (It’s the only Lynch film they’re showing that I haven’t seen, although I would totally watch Lost Highway again.)

Otherwise, I think I would sit around and write all day again. I still have an article in me about technology and phones and the art of changing oneself by tapping into your own desires and so forth. That one’s probably a good one. It’s kinda in line with Sasha Chapin’s anti-grinding principle, now that I think about it. I always thought the anti-coercion crowd was a little off, but I think it was mostly that I think you need a bit of not coercion per se but intention and force to recognize where your current limitations are and how they’re caused by your belief systems or whatever. There’s probably also something worthwhile in talking about how to change one’s belief systems, but I’m also not entirely sure how exactly that works yet. I feel like my own beliefs have sort of changed underneath me at some point in time in a way that’s almost imperceptible. I think there’s also some other gems in my morning pages and so on, something something asceticism or whatever, but I’m not quite sure what those would be yet. And then there’s getting back into smoe fiction, probably. What I wrote above, plus poking and prodding at some of the character studies I started before.

Anyways, what will the new day bring. I think I’ll go see Eraserhead. I need some weird, fucked up inspiration, I think. Plus RIP DL, occasionally I find myself just watching clips of him on YouTube and loving him. But that’s also not until this evening. Perhaps a workout or something like that. I should respond to Dan and probably call Thorne and see what’s up. He didn’t leave a message or anything, so I doubt it’s particularly important, plus I’ll be home in about a week. Should probably also update people on that as well lol. Sayonara.