Category: Blog

Morning Me, May 18 ’23

Good morning folks it’s time again for the “Morning Me!” Let’s take a look around at what’s happening in JH’s world today…

Item: Prestidigitation: Brett Favre is catching headlines all over the place today for saying the country was in better shape under TFG.

Those headlines are conveniently crowding out the headlines about Brett Favre filing paperwork yesterday to be dismissed from the gigantic welfare fraud lawsuit he’s part of for taking millions of dollars intended to help needy families in exchange for speaking fees and other perks.

Guess what we’re not gonna be talking about today?

Item: Legendary professional wrestler Superstar Billy Graham passed away. It remains to be seen whether Jesse Ventura or Hulk Hogan will take the opportunity to also pass away and then claim they did it first. Without the Superstar, half the wrestling business would have never existed.

Item: the rest of this is pretty dark so here’s something upbeat to dull the edge. Since we were talking about prestidigitation above…here’s Randy Savage surprising you with a little magic from “the cream of the crop” in one of the all-time classic wrestling promos, this one from the lead-up to Wrestlemania III. Just watch it – and watch Savage artfully cover his own flubs without a hitch. There’s a reason I respect the hell out of old-school wrestlers, those cats would come out and cut these promos off the tops of their heads, maybe a little back-planning like the creamers here, and just GO, and I love that. From my own work I know that may not always be how you get the cleanest and shiniest cuts, but it is how you get to the real emotion you need to project for a quality performance…even if it’s something as “goofy” as a professional wrestling match.

Item: I’m thinking today about how this guy in NYC who murdered Jordan Neely on the subway has already raised $2+ million for his defense fund. I’m thinking about it because over on LinkedIn, I’m seeing a lot of things like people saying they find it “troubling” that this happens.

I find it troubling every time this happens, and it happens often one way or another. Here’s why it happens:

The simple reality is fascists, bigots, racists and other bullies support their heroes passionately, enthusiastically, and with LOTS of money, and “we” – “we” being “everyone who isn’t a fascist, bigot, racist, or bully” – don’t.

They send their kids deliberately to infiltate and take ownership of our systems and processes. We don’t.

They throw money at people who are out actually doing the things they want done, like murdering Black people and anti-capitalist/anti-fascist protesters. We don’t.

We refuse.

Our people – whatever the melanin content of their skin or inclinations of their sexuality or genetics of their gender – who are out doing it starve in the streets while being harangued online as “beggars” and “grifters” while we all sit around telling each other how smart and clever we are for getting on this hot new Doterra or Crossfit trend.

Our people have to beg for ramen on the internet and half the time can’t even get that.

Our people are left to couch surf and desperately beg for subsistence while also desperately begging us to pull our heads out of our asses.

Our people who are really doing the work get ignored while “Occupy Democrats” and “Worldstar Hip Hop” and “TMZ” rake in millions by appealing to our egos.

Until that changes, you’re gonna keep seeing this happen. Why wouldn’t it? It’s rewarding.

When someone like me – and I mean “like me,” not some prefab instapundit who made one viral tweet and immediately sold out to the DNC or who’s actually working FOR the DNC while pretending to be an “independent voice” like JoJoFromJerz or BrooklynDadDefiant, the only difference between them and Rittenhouse is the gun – makes $2.5 million dollars for saying that murdering black people and anti-fascists is wrong, and Kyle Rittenhouse needs a public defender because nobody cares to support a murderer, maybe we’ll be getting somewhere. Right now the evidence is clear: the fascists want to fash far more than the anti-fascists want them to stop.

That’s a big, big problem everywhere, and not just because I’m bitter and angry about the paltry rewards of a life of public service that *isn’t* prefabricated and based entirely on privilege. Until we’re willing to put as much time, energy, and money into doing right as the fascists are willing to put into rewarding wrong, they’re gonna keep winning.

I know that’s not a happy uplifting thought for your morning and I’m sorry for that, but it is a true thought and it ought to be motivating you and giving you strength of purpose and focus.

What can YOU do? Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse have no money…but they have no problem telling their friends to pitch in. Lots of people supporting Rittenhouse and others like him have no resources, but they spread every bit of related propaganda around like it was engraved on stone tablets and handed directly to Moses by God. The Rittenhouse supporters aren’t off in a little klatch somewhere arguing intently over whether the kid “deserves” support because he used a Bushmaster and a third of the people in the crowd prefer Remington. The terror funders aren’t worrying about whether Aunt Sally will be offended. The terror funders are THERE. FOR. IT.

And we…aren’t.

Fascism appeals to the inherently obedient and submissive. They do what they’re told and march in straight lines, and while I’m definitely one for doing what I want and marching how I want it’s undeniable that there are times when that rigid obedience and unquestioning fealty are an enormous tactical and strategic advantage. This is the problem of the left: the left is inherently disobedient and averse to being herded…which ironically makes us that much easier to herd when a bad actor comes along.

That’s why actual grifters like Matt “Being Liberal” Desmond, the “Occupy Democrats” Rivero brothers, and the collection of fraudulent astroturf faketivists collected under the “ReallyAmerican1” banner (itself a barely-disclosed account 100% owned and operated by the Democratic Party, and NOT the progressive wing!), among a host of others, are making millions of dollars off you while the real power of the left, the people with integrity and meaningful ideological commitment, ends up dropping off and having to go pick up a job flipping burgers or sweeping floors.

NOT murdering innocent people doesn’t even pay minimum wage, but killing just one homeless black guy or antifa protestor is worth more than I’ve made, in total, in my entire life.

Those are your “American Values.”

When we fix that problem maybe we’ll stop seeing bigots get away with murder.

Until the people who have the moral high ground decide it’s worth fighting to defend, we’ll keep losing.

In lighter news, I took most of yesterday offline to handle some meatspace business like cleaning my living space and getting some laundry done, a little light maintenance for my host.

As I write this, I frankly haven’t decided yet which of the several things on my plate I’m going to eat today, but it’ll be something. Probably get the second part of that National Debt piece up, I don’t want that to get cold before it’s done.

Beyond that I’ll probably spend the day creating project nodes and subcontent on JHUS. I feel like this last couple of weeks of frenetic construction activity has me getting a bit burned out on structure and meta-work, and I suspect but cannot currently confirm that the next few weeks will pivot back toward actual content, working up video and audio that I can maintain a regular schedule on, and getting a couple more regular content features rolled out. Then when I’ve got a routine set on that stuff so a five minute video isn’t an all-day project, I’ll get back to the meta stuff and build more on that, see what I can fit in. (By way of comparison, as of this moment I’ve got…45 minutes into this post, it’ll be 1:15 or so before I’m done, and I’m hoping to get this into A/V as well as text, regularly, soon…so that’s another hour or so after writing to record, edit, and process everything before posting. That’s too long – two hours a day just to say hello? So I’m working on ways to maximize efficiency on that whole process before I even start doing it, and then that work should translate pretty easily and quickly to other work.)

Sorry it wasn’t all bright and shiny today. I’m still in a fine mood, mental health is doing great other than worrying about money, and my workrate is still through the roof. I don’t know how long the tiger’s gonna run this time – at *some* point it’s a given that I’m going to hit a depression and things will slow down for a minute, that’s just the nature of my mental illness – but I’m going to hold on tight and ride that sucker until it drops, and right now it’s staying nice and steady, more so than probably at any time in my memory.

So let me shut up and get back to work. Love y’all, please don’t forget to throw some support my way if you can. Unlike Kyle Rittenhouse I don’t have people throwing millions of dollars at me.

May 18, 2023
Morning Me, May 17 2023

It is the morning and I am me so let’s get rolling on the Morning Me! A little late today – I got started find but then a friend (actually a friend’s kid, although given they’re in their 20’s “kid” isn’t really the right word) stopped by needing a little ear and advice so I broke off this and talked with them for a couple of hours. Time well spent, but not outwardly productive for my purposes here.

Work continues apace and I’m happy with it. Finally having a project management tool that does what I need it to do has been a real game-changer. We’re still in the stage where it’s eating up as much time as its saving while I learn all the things it can do and how to use it for my explicit purposes, but it’s definitely doing the job.

I think I’m about done with the “building” part of things for the most part at JHUS now. There’s still a lot of content and nodes and sections to be added, but the key thing for me the last week or so has been building a process that facilitates easy and efficient content creation and other work. There’s a million years of other work that needs doing too, but one thing at a time. Right now I feel like I have things in place such that you’ll start seeing a shift back toward content rather than infrastructure in the next week or so.

The AfterParty newsletters went out yesterday, this week’s for supporters and last week’s for everyone else. I am not anticipating a lot of output today, as I have a number of offline tasks that need attending from basic human needs to rearranging my room, and I anticipate that will absorb most of my truly useful energy for the day, plus it’ll probably have me tied up for at least four or five hours.

I’ve still got at least one and probably two more segments of the “National Debt” section to kick out; if I get any writing time in today and there are published results, it’ll probably end up being part 2 of that. Plus I’ve still got several dozen screenshots to go through from Fallout and will likely build a bunch of sub-set pages for that, but a lot of that work isn’t at all time-sensitive so I’m not rushed about it. Still, I do want to get that content built up because it’s already drawing traffic organically via search and that’s a good sign that the work’s worth doing and people are interested in it.

Whole lot of stuff bouncing around in the ol’ brain this morning, but what’s going to really happen is I’m going to finish this quick post, account for the time on it, and then disconnect and get on this room; I told my roommate that if she got home and I wasn’t on it she had my permission to climb my ass about it, and she’s due home in like three hours.

Right now I’m broadly and roughly thinking that my next “project” will be getting another daily-ish post like this happening that deals with everything else in the world that isn’t me – a quick news take, probably closer to SNL’s “Weekend Update” or the news coverage segments Jon Stewart used to often open his shows with. “Here’s a thing that happened, here’s 1-4 quick sentences deconstructing it and baking it down and telling you what it really means, probably with a smart-ass twist at the end.”

One that’s rolling, my current plan is to take that and this and add video and audio versions with each drop. Not sure how far I’ll take that, but we’ll see. I feel like there’s definitely part of my audience who fall into that space of folks who like to have that quick little morning shot and then a little dose of afternoon news and comment.

It dawns on me that I’m basically setting myself up like a modern Paul Harvey, that was his gimmick right? He had the “News & Comment” segments that would run like 3-5 minutes on your local radio station during their news break, and then “The Rest Of The Story” which would be an essay and you’re probably all familiar with it especially if you’re over forty. Funny story: he basically started his career at WKZO radio, which was also WKZO-TV when I was growing up. WKZO radio is still around, WKZO-TV is now WWMT. They’re local, the “KZO” obviously stands for “Kalamazoo.” Just a funny-quirky-synchronicity that crossed my mind as I was describing how I currently see things unfolding over the next few months. As always, Card Subject To Change.

Anyway, beyond that is where we start looking at getting back to regularly creating video and audio content, getting back to podcasting and maybe doing an hour-long livestream every week. I’m trying to stay super mindful about committing to more work than I can realistically accomplish, that’s another long-standing habit of mine (my aunts used to say my eyes are bigger than my stomach; that was about the amount of food I’d eat at the holiday table but the principle persists – it’s not “biting off more than I can chew” so much as “swallowing more than I can digest,” if that’s not a bit too grossly gastrointestinal.

I may have said this yesterday and forgotten I said it, but today I plan to follow through: this is the last day I’ll be distributing the “Morning Me” outside of my “me” platforms – the JH page at FB, my twitter, etc. – and leaving Custode, WeAntiFascists, and Progressive American out of it. The point of MM is to be a little chunk of me for my readers and whatever relevance it has to those pages will be, at best, secondary if it exists at all. That’s not to say I’m dumping those pages, just trying to be a little more mindful that everything I do doesn’t have to be seen everywhere I do things.

And it’s almost not even morning anymore so let me get the heck out of here and I’ll talk with y’all later.

May 17, 2023
Morning Me, 16-May-23

Good morning folks and welcome to the show, let’s see what’s rattling around in the ol’ brainpan today…

Got a ton of new stuff kicked out yesterday, lot of backend work on this new project management tool. I’m super excited about that, I’ve been trying for years to find just the right PM tool for me and the way I work, and this one seems to be doing the job. I’ve got some playing around to do with it yet, but I think it’s going to be a powerful help for my work and my personal life as well.

I haven’t yet figured out how, but I’m going to make the reporting tool viewable for supporters and add it to the “perk” list, since I figure details like that are in the package of stuff that pretty much nobody’s going to be interested in except supporters.

Fact is the tool is for me, first and foremost, to help me stay organized and stop losing good ideas to the ongoing rush of trying to keep up with my own brain. Sharing it and showing everyone else is just a lucky artifact of its abilities that allows me some transparency while also not getting stuck in a loop of writing a twenty-minute Facebook status every time I have a thought I need to chew on or a little bit of happy fluff I want to share. Like this:

Health insurance companies should be outlawed and if you work for one you should make them fire you and start collecting unemployment. There’s no reason for health insurance, at least in the way we have it, to exist in a nation that respects its people.
– John Henry

I don’t want to get too deep into this today because I’ve got the JH AfterParty newsletter to get released. As I’ve mentioned previously I’m trying to get in the habit of having that ready to drop for the advance edition by 9am on Tuesdays, and then the public release of the previous weeks’ edition at noon (all times Eastern). This week because I just started this “Morning Me” thing and didn’t want to skip it on the second day, I went ahead and decided to let the AfterParty be a little late because I didn’t finish it last night like I should’ve. In the future, if there’s a conflict the AfterParty will take precedence and the MM will get skipped.

I should note here also that while I loosely intend to try to get one of these out daily, I’m not committing to it. My personal goal is to try to hold the line at no fewer than four “Morning Me” posts per week.

I noticed last night that my FB login app for the comment system is not working properly, which leads me to suspect the rest of the social logins aren’t working either. I’ll probably have to take half a day or a day in the next few to hack that out and see what the problem is.

Sidebar: if y’all notice something broken, tell me. Please. Thanks.

I really can’t be effusive enough about my current state of mind. I’m pretty sure I’ve never “had it together” at the level I do right now, in terms of how I’m approaching and accomplishing my work. I know there’s a lot of noise and confusion right now because I’m doing a lot of things in many different directions, but it should get more steady and stable and predictable around here steadily and quickly.

On that note, I’m giving a few days to make sure I haven’t overwhelmed myself but I’m probably going to try to work up a second daily (or sorta-daily) issue newsletter, like this one but about news, events, etc. that are catching my eye or potentially going to work up into a bigger piece. A bit like a short version of the excellent Heather Cox Richardson newsletter (man, I can get 120wpm freehand when I’m really cranking it out, she must be using a voice parser or have a couple of people typing for her or something, I seriously have no idea how she creates such long, comprehensive newsletters every day….and I’m the guy most people are like TOO MANY WORDS SLOW DOWN WITH ALL THE WORDS ITS TOO MUCH! I’ll try to get a link to her substack in an upcoming MM.

And with that I’m going to get on with my day. First priority is getting this JH AfterParty newsletter written, and then I’m back into content creation wherever I pick up, probably will get to work on the second part of that series about the national debt.

I’m probably going to stop distributing the MM to my “other” FB pages like Antifa, Progressive American, and Custode. This newsletter is really just about me for my people, my way of staying in touch as my work pulls me ever farther from the levels of social media engagement I’m used to. As such, I think cranking it out to those pages would be more annoying than interesting to their readers.

Please don’t forget my existence is predicated on your support so please remember to lean hard on those like and share buttons. We’re past the point in history where worrying about being “spammy” is even on the radar. Flood the net with JH as best you can – plenty of content to do it with right here! – and JH is gonna keep working on making sure you’ve got plenty of material to work with.

Love y’all, don’t forget to pitch in few if you can at the money page. (Sustained support is critical! Far better to have forty supporters sending me five bucks a month than have one person send me $250 one time. Check out the options for weekly and monthly support via PayPal and Patreon at that link.) There’ll be a lot more coming on that, too, but that conversation is better held at the AfterParty. Have a happy upbeat song to get your day off to a great start! You can always count on George Harrison for a smile…

May 16, 2023
Morning Me

As part of this whole process I’m going through of finally nailing myself down into good work habits and maximum productivity, I’m facing the not-entirely-pleasant reality that writing social media updates about what I’ve got going on is a fairly important part of my thinking process; it’s where I work out ideas and often will find flaws and gaps in my own thinking or planning as I’m writing.

Obviously there are two flaws involved there: the first is that it doesn’t have to be done on social media and the second is that it’s content and ought to be treated that way. Ergo, more blog posts like this one and I hope you dig it. I’ll probably end up playing with some kind of official cute daily title thing or whatever (I did, see below), but taking this time to focus on exactly what my goals are for the day and how I intend to achieve them is important to making each day I have left as productive – on my own terms and for my own purposes – as they can possibly be. That’ll be the last meta comment on that whole thing, at least for now, let’s commence with the thoughts that actually prompted this like 90 minutes ago and then yeah.

A screenshot of the ProjeQtOr ticket for this blog post.

So I have this tool called “ProjeQtOr” running on a subdomain now, and it seems to be just what I needed (an earlier promising candidate turned out to be a false start). Good, solid project management, works great for a one-person show but still easily scalable and scopable to include stuff like some CRM and collaboration on projects. I’ve got it running on a subdomain right now (https://projects.johnhenry.us – you can go peek if you want but all you’ll see is a login screen).

I still need to spend some time learning the reporting tools to get everything I want out of it, including opening it up for public view as a supporter perk and using it to help generate work reports for inclusion in the Saturday Substack, which is where this whole side-track with the project/task management stuff started (again – I’ve taken many runs at this, but I’m finally in an environment where I have a hope of making it stick). Once I do that I’ll figure out a way to make it visible to users with access and tell them how to access it.

From my POV it’s a necessary sanity tool to keep everything I’m doing in order and stop forgetting and leaving off on things – there are probably three dozen unfinished articles on my blog! – but also the public-facing functionality that I may be able to put to use is significant and constitutes a legitimate value add for folks who are supporting my work to be able to see more closely what exactly they’re supporting and how it’s getting done.

Other than that…let’s see, I’ve got this blog post, the piece about the national debt, continuing to learn and develop with this new tool while simultaneously using it for its intended purpose which is to help me keep track of what I’m doing, when, and for how long. I did force myself to take a few hours off last night and got some new Fallout 4 screenshots…I think I’ve talked enough for here and now. I really appreciate everyone’s patience during this exciting and energetic period of major growth and development on my end; I’m doing my best to stay visible so you know I’m working and not just off screwing around somewhere.

(NTS: Maybe get into a habit of a “morning me” blog post and then something else that’s a sort of “morning news review” where folks can just get a peek at what I’ve been seeing in the news and what I think of it, small-dose stuff some of which will likely end up developing into more substantial content in time…and oh hey, half an hour later I’ve created a new project node with two levels, a new project for a new newsletter titled “morning me” that I’ll do kinda daily, and turned this into the first issue…but I have other work to do and I’ve already got a couple of hours in this plus a couple more undocumented fiddling with infrastructure and yeah. I’ll go more into what I’m thinking for this in the next edition, for now I gotta run, see you soon!)

May 15, 2023
Ratholes and Tangents

Hey kids, let’s write a blog post about ratholes and tangents!

I wanted to take a second and tell you a little “behind the scenes” story of how sometimes even when you’re firing on all cylinders, you end up taking a detour…

Front page of this site

So if you’ve been paying attention here the last couple of weeks you know I’ve been doing a lot of work across the board, but mostly here at JohnHenry.US. I’ve got a couple of huge new articles up, a handful of smaller ones, and entire new sections of the site.

As I write this there’s still some flash that needs to be trimmed all over, but this is about the rathole so ignore that part and check out this page real quick. Just peek and scan, there’s not much there in the way of words.

Now look at the front of this site.

The front of this site should be that “Home” page, but this theme won’t let that happen. Why? Don’t know, and hacking through the internals to track it down would take weeks. Harumph.

Guess I have to try a new theme. I’ve got all kinds of new branching internal content set up and planned and executing (like this) that’s designed around this theme with the same basic setup of hero banner on top, pages and posts below, and sidebar, so we’ll try to stick to something close to this layout…and nothing works.

I noticed this problem late Wednesday night.

I tried almost forty themes on this site yesterday, and the ones that would properly render the “right” home page, ended up having other major content formatting issues that made them unusable or would have forced me to redesign the entire site again.

There’s probably a fairly easy solution to this, but nothing jumped out at me in the theme code, and all the available Google solutions are dead ends. I even gave some serious thought into using WordPress’ new “Site Builder” feature, which is rather deeper than simply theming, but again this would be a huge rathole that would take me weeks to crawl out of and bring my forward momentum to a dead stop. (Note to self: make time for that rathole once you’re back in production.)

I’ve been trying to improve a lot of things about myself over these last few weeks that I’ve been quiet, for me, since I moved out of the motel. On one hand, I’m not in a crisis which demands that I just keep paddling as fast as I can and hope I hit land before I sink, so I can take the time to find the right solution. On the other hand, I know I’m prone to getting lost in these ratholes and tangents,

What the front page of this site is supposed to look like.

So I gave it one day. I mean, it’s the entire site design, right, so it’s okay to take a minute and see what you can do to make it exactly the “right” way you want it. But again: let’s not lose momentum or get into tangents of tangents of tangents, or all this stuff you’ve started doing is going to get lost.

Turns out: no good solution! I spent a day fiddling with different themes trying to make it work, and consistently the themes that fit reasonably well into the aesthetic and UI I had in place, will not render that home page as the root page of the site no matter what I do to it.

So the home page of the site is just gonna have to be vaguely mis-matched from the rest of it from now on. Hardly anyone visits home pages anymore anyway. Plus I can rig it a little bit by taking the time to properly set up my site’s page structure, using the “right” page as the root of the site tree, and then the breadcrumbs should use that as home and get SOME traffic pointed there.

So today it’s back to the tangent I was on…getting the gaming section of the site set up and a bit of content in it, then setting in to a production groove for a minute with new content coming in there and in other areas of my work…and at that point I can start thinking of doing the same things with music, film, books, TV/streaming, IT geek stuff, and all of the other things that interest me.

I figure it’ll be a year – and probably at least one more site redesign – before I’ve got this site in the condition I want it to be. The good news about that is it’s all one-time work that I frankly should have done twenty years ago anyway. Not only is it all scalable and amounts to a bunch of plug-and-play content boxes, the same techniques and some of the scripting I’ve written and so forth can also be used on Custode and WeAntiFascists, and it will be.

The same is true for some of the less major tangents I’ve been on this last week and a half or so – changing my SEO tool from Yoast to RankMath, adding and changing all kinds of back-end tools and plugins for the site (talked about some of this in last week’s Substack – make sure you’re signed up, all you gotta do is punch your e-mail address in the sidebar form on my site or go to my SubStack home page and punch it in there – always free!), most of which will also be implemented on my other sites. (The WAF site is set up a little differently with less metric/traffic monitoring and no advertising implemented whatsoever…so that’s like six different tools that aren’t used over there, or are used in substantially different ways.)

Shot of the “Gaming” section – you can see it’s still rough, but the aesthetic-thematic consistency should be obvious.

The first edition of the JH AfterParty newsletter goes public in a couple of hours, be sure to keep your eyes out for that please and thanks. Let me get back on the game section and get that wrapped up (mostly design elements and I want to get a few more Fallout 4 screenies posted, plus get the Cities:Skylines section started), then I’ll start picking up on the half-dozen articles I’ve got almost finished for other platforms (all my sites plus Medium, plus I need to get my Substack newsletter written so it’s ready to roll in the morning).

Finally just a quick personal note: yes, I recognize that from “out there” it looks like I’m kind of up my own butt right now, but that’s what happens when you’re a one-person conglomerate. I’d love to have some folks working for me to handle like 85% of this so I could just focus on writing, but that’s life in the big city. I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of social justice issues to discuss – and I have been even in the middle of all of this – so please don’t be concerned that I’ve decided to stop doing what I do and just focus on “light” stuff like gaming and music. I have a rich, full intellectual and artistic life, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of it in my public work. I’m starting to get some of that stuff out there now, because it’s interesting and – as I’ve mentioned before – I frankly have much less ethical quandry related to monetizing that stuff as opposed to public interest work that ought to be free. Ironically this will end up resulting in the other stuff generating the income necessary to do the social and public interest stuff well.

That’s it for me for now. I’m not going to set a schedule on “My Actual Blog,” but am trying to make sure I hit it at least once in every calendar period.

May 12, 2023
JH The Gamer

I’ve talked for a long time about my love of gaming, going back to childhood in the 70s. For those of you who are interested there’s going to be a lot more content related to that showing up on my blog as well. Kinda tired of allowing my public life to exist under the shadow of the idea that poor people don’t deserve to have fun. So watch for that, I’m about to throw up a bunch of Fallout 4 stuff and get some basic things in place to start doing a lot more work on that and dishing out a bit of the lore and wisdom carried by JH The Gamer.

Insider secret: I tend to bury myself in reading books and gaming when I’m super depressed AND when I’m in that “percolating” mode where I’ve been through a bunch of experiences and now it’s time to sit down and process them and build the platforms for whatever’s next.

Breaking that stuff out into content mitigates some of the losses involved when I’m locked in some mental illness issue that includes executive dysfunction, by creating interesting and monetizable content out of the results…and all I really have to do is lean on the screenshot button and then write about and post the results when I’m in a more productive and energized space.

EZ mode, and as a bonus there’s zero ideological or ethical reason not to monetize it and push it as a “product” rather than feeling very averse to that idea the way I do about my social justice, public interest, and creative artistic work. MBAs & muggles cf. “long tails” and monetizing EVERYTHING, just the way capitalism demands. Plus it’ll pull some inevitable cross-traffic to my work.

Also, as part of the overall reorganization of everything I do, I decided to launch an explicit category here called “My Actual Blog” that will serve as the space for little “by the ways” and “slices of life” and so forth that go by and I feel like blogging about with no particular explicit intent or purpose. This is the first entry in that blog 🙂

I’ll set up a nav tree and proper landing pages and get it all plugged in to the menu and all that stuff soon. Meanwhile have a little gallery of screenshots from Fallout 4!

May 6, 2023