Recent Updates

• I finished reading The Introvert’s Way by Sophia Dembling, which was considerably lighter than either Quiet by Susan Cain or The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron but a lot easier to digest as a result. Of the three, Quiet covers a lot of the history behind research and understanding of introversion and extroversion, and the rise of the Extrovert Ideal (a surprisingly recent development, as it turns out.) But as a result, it was also the heaviest read. Elaine Aron’s writing falls about mid-way between that book and Sophia Dembling’s in approachability, and I think her years of blogging probably account for that.
• I’m now finally starting on What The Dormouse Said by John Markoff, which I got as a second-hand hardback a few years ago. I suspect that I have a rudimentary understanding of some of the events chronicled in that book, and it will be interesting to see what new detail, and insight, I discover.
• I’ve restarted my Backblaze backup plan, having cancelled it at the end of last year. While it’s an extra expense, I’d like the extra reassurance that my data is backed up in more than one way, particularly as I suspect I may need to replace my system disk and perhaps one of my external hard disks at some point in the future.
• I’ve gone through my iOS / iPadOS purchases and hidden almost all games and distracting apps, to make it harder for me to succumb to temptation. I really want to stop myself from losing time (and battery power) mindlessly idling on the iPhone.
• I now have a basic understanding of 3D modelling using Blender, and I’m now learning how to do rigging and animation. I just wish that it was easier to access some functions without needing to remember the keyboard shortcuts to bring up special menus that don’t appear anywhere else.
• While I still have occasional bad days when it comes to my mental health, things have improved a lot over the last few months. That’s partly because I’m getting more stuff out of my head, and more importantly getting things done and out of the way.
• My foray onto Mastodon has been interesting, but I’ve now had to scale back completely, and move over to RSS feeds for the remaining people that I follow. It was becoming a time-sink again, much as Twitter and Facebook were in the past. While there is value to be gained through those connections, I feel it’s important to balance against the time sacrificed to scrolling and going down rabbit-holes.
• I’ve also had to pare back my RSS feed subscription to just those that justify my time spent reading them, and those bloggers whose insight I value.