Yesterday was the first day of summer time, an annoying archaic system that for some unexplicable reason is still being observed here.

If memory serves, I already wrote about this last year, hoping for it to be the last time we needed to subject ourselves to such unnecessities, though alas the wheels of bureocracy turn slowly and we are here yet again, suffering.

It remains, as always, an unfit solution for a problem that need not exist were it not for the unflexibility of the systems and procedures that came before, trying to fit nature into a box, working against her instead of with her.

I find myself in the fortunate yet unfortunate position of mayhaps not needing to care a great deal about the comings and goings of the ticking of clocks and their rendering of time, the cruel master we all serve in one way or another, yet even then I find myself incetivized to a degree to follow those monstrous things so as to allow myself to participate better in society at the times it is necessary or pleasant. The company of other people remains, despite my assurances at times to the contrary, important to me.

In the end, this too shall pass, and given time I shall once again adapt to the new reality presented before me, and life with all her ups and downs will go on, this being but yet another bump on the road.

A bumpy road it may be, life, and one I am often enough not too keen to travel on, yet it is the road before me and the road I shall remain on so long I am able, savoring every smile and tear along the way.

There was some hubbub recently around Tusky, a app for Mastodon, getting removed from the Google Play Store. It has fortunately since then been reinstated, but it did remind me to take another look at Mastodon and consequently the fediverse as a whole.

Mastodon, in case you aren't aware, is a federated alternative to Twitter—federated meaning it's not a central service run by one organisation or company but several different persons or organisations each running their own instance yet capable of talking to each other, a bit like email. The fediverse on the other hand refers to all of the different services talking this same protocol, allowing all of them to interoperate to a degree. There are other services that function as alternatives to things like Instagram or YouTube as well, though there I don't really have any experience.

It has been a somewhat interesting experience so far, trying to start to use something that is very clearly built as a social and sharing platform, when both of those are things that don't come particularily naturally to me. It's very clearly more of an active effort to actually think of things I want to say there, as well as sometimes overthinking what is acceptable for me to say. Simultaneously, I am rather fascinated by the whole idea for some reason, both from a techical as well as a social aspect, so there is a certain drive there for me to continue to do it, I just have a hard time figuring out what to do with it.

I feel like that's a trap I fall into somewhat easily, liking an idea but having no idea what to do with that idea or lacking the motivation to see it through.

There remains, of course, the option of using it in a similar manner to which I use Twitter currently, namely as an observer and reader. This time around I have been rather more succesful in finding things to read that I also want to read—so the option is definitely more appealing now than it was before, and I don't think I will end up completely stopping using Mastodon at the very least—but for some reason remaining an observer feels like the wrong move. Sharing things publicly is definitely an activity that is outside my comfort zone—I think this blog works because I know basically nobody reads it—but I think exactly that is what makes it potentially so valuable.

Why you ask? Because it is both something I feel like I want to do yet uncomfortable, which means it is an opportunity to widen the horizon of things I am comfortable doing and in doing so not only allow me to learn new skills but improve my self-confidence as well. Widening my horizon is in general something that I am quite interested in at the moment, since I have this sneaking suspicion that I've arrived in a local maxima of sorts. I've grown comfortable with where I am and terrified of going anywhere since it feels like all paths lead downwards; yet I'm sure I have not found the peak.

I'm in a strange place when it comes to typing at the moment. I am currently in the process of learning to do ten-finger typing, and it has gone rather well so far, however there is a small thing that is bothering me a bit about it. There was a small remark in the program when starting it, noting that one shouldn't revert to the old way of typing, even if one needs to type fast for something temporarily, and the problem is I seem to have taken this into heart a bit too much. It's gotten to the point where I think I'm avoiding typing to a certain degree, because I'm worried about making mistakes, and instead resorting to using the mouse for things where I'd previously typed a search.

Now this fear is obviously hampering both my ability to learn and my ability to do things since it takes me longer, yet I persevere, for some to me unknown reason. I still, even while writing this post, am doing my best to keep up with the skills I've learned, taking my time, and thinking the actions through I need to take in order to get my thoughts on paper as it were. It feels really strange, typing in this way, especially since it gives me a heightened awarenes of any mistakes I make, which again isn't exactly motivating.

Despite all of that negativity I've just written, there is also a sense of accomplishment to the whole thing, having taken something new and learned it in a relatively short time, a week or so. I am still far from perfect at it, and make what feels like a ton of mistakes especially when I try to go faster for once, but all of that is part of learning something new, I have to remind myself.

It feels a bit strange, but the biggest change really seems to be the lack of confidence I have in my skills now, that is holding me back from performing better. This lack of confidence however, is a good thing to a certain degree, since by going slowly I am better able to notice when I try to take shortcuts an accidentally revert to my old way of doing things. I then at the same time tend to notice why I shouldn't be doing things the old way, since I spot inefficiencies and conflicts in the way my fingers are moving. I try to correct myself when I notice that, erasing what I've written and writing it again correctly, and that again feels good and like learning is taking place—even if it is a bit annoying since it does hamper my speed even further.

I'm also noticing my strange dependance on glancing at the keyboard, which again makes me slower since it makes me all the more aware of what I'm doing. At the same time, I don't really have problem with writing with my eyes closed and that to a certain degree seems to actually even be easier since I can concentrate on what I'm doing better. Maybe that really is the way for me to learn the best, writing with my eyes closed, though there is only so much I have to say at one time and it tends to get kind of repetitive. So back to practising for me then.

Earlier this year, I stopped my habit of writing something in my diary daily. I'm not quite sure why, it just happened, one day I didn't write anything and the next day just kind of followed from there. It might partially have been just that, missing out on one day leading to a demotivational spiral, where it didn't feel like something I could do or perhaps needed to do. On reflection, I am also noticing a certain trend in the writing I did, where I had kind of hit a pattern of seemingly writing the same thing with different words and not really taking the time to actually reflect and write what was meaningful about that day.

Now, certainly, days that don't necessarily have anything meanginful to them—at least on a personal level—do exist, but the lack of actually having the habit and taking the time to reflect on the day also definitely lead to me not writing about the days that did have something important in them and consequently not reflecting and perhaps remembering that.

I think the more important part might be, rather than forcing myself to write something, anything, to take the time and think if there is anything I would like to write that day if I haven't done so already, or perhaps catching up the following day if anything comes to mind while lying about to sleep. The self-empathy of not punishing myself for missing out on recording something when there isn't anything to record is important, as is I think recording it when it was meaningful to me that day. What's meaningful might change with space and time, but that doesn't lessen its importance in the moment, so thinking about it and actually processing it instead of supressing it is a good start.

So the last week or so—could be longer, could be shorter, it's hard to keep track of time for me—I have actually been writing pretty much on the daily again. There were some difficulties and perhaps more boring entries during the start, though even then I did have thing to record from the previous weeks that I had neglected before so I actually ended up surprising myself with the amount of writing I had to do. It's a strange feeling sometimes, of only actually realizing what I have been thinking about and feeling when I need to put it into words and write it down, since before that time it has merely been an unacknowledged ambigious feeling, the process of writing it down makes it all more concrete. It doesn't always yield all of the answers, but it is a helpful tool on the way there.

I am not quite where I would like to be with the process yet, since it is perhaps too frequent occurrence that I don't yet take the time to do this reflection and end up doing it in bed before sleeping instead, making both falling asleep as well as actually recording it accurately more difficult than it needs to be—I tend to do it the following day so as to not make falling asleep even more difficult—but this is a learning experience for me, and making mistakes and not being perfect from the start are allowed.

It's a curious thing really, since this blog has become sort of another diary for me, chronicling my thoughts and feelings, but due to the different audiences and levels of privacy, the content is quite different. At the same time, despite those differences, both mediums help me process my thoughts and feelings and are a valuable tools in doing so.

I think I'm slowly starting to come to terms with the fact, that I don't especially like failure. Now, you might think that that's true for everyone, and sure to a certain degree that is probably true, but I'm very much noticing that I'm avoiding situations and activities where failure is a possibility, or at least enjoying such things a whole lot less. It just tends to, frustrate me I guess? Instead of becoming a learning opportunity and something I take as a lesson, I just end up all too easily giving up and doing something else.

This has been coming up in several different contexts in recent times, and also partially because I do quite a bit more self-reflection at the moment in general. Most recently I noticed this with Rise to Ruins, a kind of roguelike city-builder I suppose, where while I was enjoying the gameplay just fine and learning how it all works, my villagers started dying of starvation even though there was some food available—not much to be fair, I hadn't prepared for the season properly, but there was a little food available and they didn't really need to starve it felt like, and more was being prepared the whole time—and I just kind of ended up stopping playing at that point.

Now, the game bills itself as being hard and having a learning curve and saying that you won't succeed the first time around, so this experience is something I should've expected going into it, but it's still something that left me feeling like not wanting to play the game anymore and that feeling remains even though several weeks have passed since. My thoughts do wander to the game occasionally to be fair, so maybe I end up trying it again at some point, but we'll see.

Another example that comes to mind, last summer as I was playing through RPGs I mostly ended up playing them on something like easy, which is a bit out of the ordinary for me since I most often tend to play things on normal or the equivalent. This was partially motivated by me not being such a huge friend of the resource management in the spells system that tends to be present in the type of D&D-inspired RPGs I was playing, but even though that wasn't really the case in Pillars of Eternity II I still played the game on easy, so I'm not quite sure that was the whole reason. Now, to be fair, for me the more interesting part is the story and the social interactions anyway and the combat I don't find overly interesting, and it quite simply just felt more relaxing doing it this way around and I'm not advocating that everyone needs to always do things the hardest way possible or that something has to be difficult for it to be enjoyable but these are merely observations of a pattern in recent times.

I stated before, that I don't really believe failure is something that provides a great deal of joy to most people, even if they do then end up learning from it, and that it is then later the application of that learning and seeing the improvement that provides the joy. But it feels, therein lies the rub for me at the moment, I feel uncomfortable putting myself in situations where I don't feel safe being able to succeed instantly, and when that doesn't happen I feel all the more bad about my failure since it was something where I was expecting to succeed and am not able to gleam as much learning as might be possible from it. My problem, as it were, is not with failing itself but the reaction and mindset surrounding it that I have at the moment, and that is something I feel I need to work on.

I worry I might be paralysing myself with fear to a degree, where I find it more difficult to start with things since I fear I might not succeed—or perhaps my difficulties with starting things are mostly unrelated and at some point worth a post of their own.