My kids recently tricked me into playing a Roblox game called Blox Fruits. Within two weeks I passed their progress and within three made it to level 350. I might have a problem.

Can we fast forward to when the Project Hail Mary movie comes out?

As I get closer to finishing importing all my trick videos from the past five years, I’m thinking about creating monthly compilation videos covering that entire span—maybe with a voiceover talking about the tricks, noting which ones I’d like to revisit or try again. It could be a good way to generate new YouTube content for a while. It moves away from short-form videos but still makes use of all the short-form content I created over the past five years.

I wonder who was the bigger freak, Hagrids’ dad or his mom?

One of my favorite scenes from The Day After Tomorrow is when they are arguing over which books they can and cannot burn to survive the incoming freeze, and the kid on the lower level goes: “Uh.. excuse me? you guys? Yeah, there’s a whole section on tax law down here that we can burn.”

Around February of 2020 my monthly folders labeled “yo-yo tricks” go from having 10-20 of my videos to hundreds. I guess that’s when I joined TikTok.

When I post short videos of yoyo tricks to my YouTube channel, they typically get thousands of views and a decent amount of likes. No comments though. And when I stop and I wait for them to drop off the month-long feed showing stats, my passive views on my long-form stuff like tutorials and freestyles, they get about a hundred views combined. But I'm more proud of the passive views coming in from search traffic and recommendations than I probably ever will be from getting some attention from people scrolling endlessly through entertaining shorts. I know this. I've stopped making short videos about a month ago. But I still would like to post that type of content in a long-form version. Perhaps I stand in front of my camera and record for an hour working on a new trick, or just exploring and seeing what I can stumble my way into. And maybe I talk a little bit here and there, or I do a voiceover after I've trimmed it down to the highlights. But either way, I know that I like that kind of stuff, and I think that it would do better than just hoping people watch my tutorials from seven or eight years ago, that I've gone back and re-uploaded since I made a new YouTube account.

I thought I might sit down and write out a few paragraphs about this. What do you think, any input? - Is it possible to choose not to judge yourself when you’re wallowing in self-pity or self-deprecation mode and you’re putting yourself down and beating yourself up? It would seem difficult at that time to stop doing that, but looking back at myself as a person who wants to do that these days, if I’ve done something wrong in the past and my subconscious bubbles it up into consciousness, I acknowledge it. I consider it and then I tell myself, while I might have been an asshole or an idiot back then, I’m not being that person anymore, so I don’t need to torture myself for my past mistakes anymore.

I wonder how the Starlink outage is an affecting various states utilizing it for their militaries. And if it was an accident caused internally or a malicious action externally?

This is an attempt to write about a piece of life I passed through, divorce, and deferring it until it was too hard not to.

Too far down the wrong path

I can't tell you when my divorce was finalized, not that I don't want to, I just don't remember.

Well I’ve wrote a rough draft of something to do with divorce but it doesn’t really feel like anything worth reading. Perhaps I should read and edit it tomorrow. I’m hesitant to publish it as is because it feels rambling and doesn’t really have any kind of point it’s getting at. View quoted note →

I’m interested in writing posts derived from lived experiences. I’m just finding myself hesitant. It feels like airing my dirty laundry. But i know there is a personal benefit to sit down and process those moments and learnings from them. And if I’m going to do that, I feel like I might as well post it and maybe it’ll help someone else or perhaps I’ll connect with others who’ve gone through similar situations and get camaraderie out of the work. I’m not sure why I’m posting this about it. Perhaps it’s a ‘dipping my toes into the pool’ moment. If you have any thoughts on this I’d be happy to read them.

27 more listings and I’ll have 200 active eBay listings 😊🎉 It’s starting to reach the point where I have a few sales a day. Feel more like a store than an individual now. Will have to pay for a shop soon to up my “free monthly listings” from 250 to 1000.

How do you handle procrastination and creative avoidance? I wrote a short post about my issues with it and would love to hear any strategies others use to help get themselves going towards those things they tell themselves they want to do.

Creative Avoidance

I consider myself to be a legendary procrastinator.

I’ve been working on updating my old how to yo-yo book, Learn to Throw: a Beginners Course in Yo-Yoing for more than a year now. I’ve decided to publish the articles that comprise it as I go on my Substack and intend to self publish the completed and updated work in a book called Intro to Yo-Yoing once I’m done. This article is called A Brief History of Yo-Yoing.

A Brief History of Yo-Yoing

For a long time—and still in many popular accounts—yo-yos have been said to date back several thousand years.

When I sat down to write today’s Substack article the first thing I thought of was this fishing analogy I stumbled into while working on my eBay listings. I figured that was as good a topic as any.

Fishing Analogy for eBay

Most of my days are spent working on eBay lately.

It’s kind of exciting to see people are looking at the article. I didn’t email it to anyone so I’m guessing that means people who read it emailed it to people and those people clicked the link and checked it out? I’m not 100% sure but it’s still cool. View quoted note →

Back in March of this year my grandpa asked me What Bitcoin Is? Which I struggled to put into words and said I needed to write my thoughts out on it. That night I hammered out this essay in an attempt to answer that seemingly simple question. Today I polished it a little and added it to my recently created Substack account. It needs to be revisited and expanded on, but this is where I’ve gotten my explanation so far:

What is Bitcoin?

An Attempt to Grasp and Share the Logic Behind Bitcoin

Randomly decided to dehydrate a ton of mint. We have a 20‘ x 20‘ piece of our garden dedicated to just mint, mostly because it took over that area. So I picked a grocery bag’s worth, rinsed it, and now it’s in the dehydrator.

I spent all day listing individual Pokemon cards on eBay. One sold already. 3k more to go 😂🙃