takeonrules-com-joumfe.txt (13302B)
1 [1]Skip to Main Content · [2]Take on Rules · [3]About · [4]RSS Feed · [5]Site 2 Map · [6]Search 3 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 4 Breadcrumbs [7]Home / [8]Posts for 2025 / [9]Some Entries from My Personal 5 Journal 6 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 7 8 Some Entries from My Personal Journal 9 10 [10]Jeremy Friesen wrote [11]< [12]this post [13]> on 2025-01-16 :: Tags: [14]< 11 [15]personal [16]> · [17]< [18]poetry [19]> 12 13 Summary: Here I draw two entries from my #journal; annotating some thoughts as 14 well as how I’ve expanded my #writing process over the last two months. There’s 15 a #poem in here as well. 16 17 On Tuesday the 12th of November, 2024, I started what I hoped to be a new 18 habit. That is writing a personal daily journal. Over the weeks, I expanded my 19 aspirations to include a daily check list of activities I wanted to do. 20 21 I’ve also used these journals to spin-off blog posts; such as this one. In 22 other words, my daily journal is growing a virtuous cycle in my creative 23 process. 24 25 How It Got Going 26 27 These are the notes for November 19th, one week after starting my electronic 28 journal endeavor. 29 30 2024-11-19 Tuesday 31 32 This used to be a bulleted list, but I went back and converted lists to terse 33 paragraphs. As future entries attest, going from list to paragraph was a good 34 move; I’m spending just a bit more time synthesizing the “list” item.Today I: 35 36 Wrote [20]“Spear” by Nicola Griffith. 37 38 Finished reading bell hooks all about love by bell hooks. 39 40 I was able to get quite a bit of work done; and have some tasks lined up for 41 tomorrow. 42 43 Downloaded [21]The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide. 44 45 I encourage everyone to watch A Small Light; the story of Miep and Jan Geis and 46 their efforts to hide Anne Frank and several other Jews. We started watching 47 it, knowing the heartbreak and hurt. But there are reminders that each little 48 act of life affirmation is a positive and worthy act. 49 50 Watched episode 2 of A Small Light. 51 52 Some “works” I will add to my Bibliography; others I won’t. A Small Light is in 53 my bibliography and thus uses CITE tag, whereas “Interior Chinatown” is not and 54 does not. 55 56 We watched the first episode of “Interior Chinatown”. 57 58 Practiced testing a radio frequency detector; this one works on vibrate or 59 making noise. 60 61 Tonight I plan to continue reading The Once and Future King by T.H. White. 62 63 How It’s Going 64 65 The section below is yesterday’s entry. The margin notes are my reflections for 66 today. 67 68 2025-01-15 Wednesday 69 70 I include a date link as a matter of practice. This is a custom [22]Org-Mode 71 [23]📖 link that I have used for a year and a half. It serves two purposes: 72 generate an HTML time element and to provide backlink-ing. I think I could move 73 towards the native Org-Mode time element; but for now this is what I have. 74 75 Today: 76 77 • [24][*] Read one book chapter 78 • [25][*] Read one poem 79 • [26][*] Read one essay 80 • [27][*] Tend my daily feed 81 • [28][*] Write one response to a feed item 82 83 The dogs woke me up around 4am, and I went outside. The moon, close to full, 84 shown through clear skies. Setting a light the bitter cold snow, which twinkled 85 as though themselves stars on a white sky. 86 87 Deep indigo shroud 88 Pierced and gouged 89 Light reflected spills 90 Upon white fields 91 Twinkling a promise 92 Of the morrow rise 93 94 Often my first entries will be related to what I’ve read. However, the above 95 poem needed to be written. Capturing at least a bit of that memory. 96 97 I read [29]Don’t Use Session (Signal Fork); and this stinks of someone creating 98 a platform that eases well-funded actors attempting to crack encryption. 99 100 In reading [30]Book Review: Rules for Radicals- A Pragmatic Primer for 101 Realistic Radicals by Saul Alinsky, I added Rules for Radicals by Saul D. 102 Alinksy to my shopping list. The salient point, of the review, is the book 103 helps equip change agents by asking “What is your theory of change?” 104 105 Reading [31]The Multiplier Effect of Collective Curiosity leads with an ancient 106 practice of walking and wondering together. I’ve done this in past meetings and 107 can say it was some of the most transformative conversations I’ve had. Rarely 108 is there “lone genius” instead this is an effort of collaboration and 109 conversation. Each building upon what we share. 110 111 In [32]Lit Hub Daily: January 15, 2025 I learned about [33]Olga Tokarczuk’s New 112 Rules for Realism | The Nation which reviews The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk; 113 which I added to my shopping list. Why? Olga’s anti-national (e.g. how do we 114 move away from tribalism); and to move forward we’re going to look at how to 115 reduce our us vs. them mindsets. 116 117 Read [34]Why am I not taking pictures?, I responded/reflected and wrote [35]Re: 118 Why am I not playing games?. This makes two responses to Jack in as many days. 119 120 With having finished my RSS [36]📖 feed, I turn to my books of poetry. I grabbed 121 one and opened to somewhere in the middle. I tend to reflect on them a bit 122 more, but this time I didn’t. I suppose I’ll need to re-read it. 123 124 I read the poem A Thousand Dawns from The Half-Life of Angels by Mark Nepo. 125 126 Looking to the Fediverse, there’s statements by the Proton’s CEO and then 127 official Mastodon account that are alarming. Especially given that their threat 128 model includes state actors. 129 130 Finding out that Proton’s CEO is teetering on MAGA-boosting is gross. So I 131 started exploring other options. A cursory review is as follows: 132 133 Email 134 Tuta (see [37]https://tuta.com/) 135 VPN 136 Favor Mullvad VPN (see [38]https://mullvad.net/en) 137 Calendar 138 Tuta (see [39]https://tuta.com/) 139 Password Manager 140 Bitwarden 141 Cloud Storage 142 Run Sync-Thing with multiple devices. I am interested in Synchronization 143 and thus back-up. This looks to be a reasonable pathway. I’ll need to 144 review and establish a Runbook. 145 146 I had heard of SyncThing but didn’t use it. In part because how it was 147 originally used was conflated with a gaslighting mansplaining experience. But 148 don’t throw the technology used out with the people using it. Now the people 149 developing it? 150 151 I started experimenting with syncthing; easy enough to use. Can replace my 152 Cloud Drive (if I get one more device in the loop). However, I must consider 153 how to make this available for my family. I’m using [40]Syncthing-Fork on my 154 Android (as found on [41]Community Contributions — Syncthing documentation) and 155 brew install syncthing on my Mac. It’s just a bit much for non-programmers; but 156 I think there’s some documentation to help. 157 158 The notes are not chronological; I read the following essay before really 159 diving into [42]SyncThing [43]📖 . While writing this post, I opted to create a 160 glossary entry for SyncThing ; but did not amend my journal. 161 162 Before dinner, I read Finance is Just Another Word for Other People’s Debt from 163 The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World… by David Graeber. 164 165 166 Both nationally and internationally, we are ruled by a ruling class whose 167 profits are based primarily on complex forms of rent extraction, backed by 168 coercive of force.―David Graeber, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World… 169 170 I’m not prepared to take these steps, but understanding what folks are 171 considering is a helpful exercise. Reminding me a bit of the nano swarms from 172 The Diamond Age by Neil Stephenson. 173 174 I chuckled as I learned about [44]ZADZMO code, namely Nepenthes: 175 176 177 This is a tarpit intended to catch web crawlers. Specifically, it’s 178 targeting crawlers that scrape data for Large Language Models (LLMs [45]📖) 179 □ but really, like the plants it is named after, it’ll eat just about 180 anything that finds it’s way inside. 181 182 I’m eager for LLM model collapse, as this hype cycle is one that is hellbent on 183 consuming all creative output. But, I think they are fully on the “sunk cost” 184 fallacy trajectory. 185 186 I drifted off to sleep listening to some Iain M. Banks. 187 188 I read the fourth chapter of Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks. 189 190 Conclusion 191 192 I had an idea of what I wanted to do. But kept that idea light weight. And 193 started building the habit; expanding upon it. This week I started adapting the 194 journal at work; writing to a different file of course. 195 196 Building from the same habit, has helped in my day to day work. Keeping on top 197 of blockers as well as improving the odds of tracking down past one off work. 198 I’m thinking how I can build from this habit to incorporate a todo list. 199 200 I’ve started many todo lists, but nothing has quite worked. In that I lose 201 momentum using them. Paper lists are the best, and one would think I could 202 simply “make a file on my computer” for these todo items. 203 204 But it doesn’t quite work. So I’m going to do what’s working and reflect on how 205 I can build upon that for a todo list. 206 207 [46]Reply by Email 208 209 Related Posts 210 211 • [47]Go Down Swinging? 212 • [48]Together We Could 213 • [49]The Fading of Winter 214 • [50]On Prescription and Description 215 • [51]Clutching Wood and Graphite 216 217 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 218 ©2025 [52]Jeremy Friesen 219 [53]Contact Me · [54]Changelog · [55]Colophon · [56]Content Disclaimers · [57] 220 Privacy Policy 221 Some Entries from My Personal Journal by [58]Jeremy Friesen is licensed under a 222 [59]Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International 223 License. Based on a work at [60]https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/16/ 224 some-entries-from-my-personal-journal/. Permissions beyond the scope of this 225 license may be available at [61]https://takeonrules.com/more_permissions/. 226 227 References: 228 229 [1] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/16/some-entries-from-my-personal-journal/#skip-to-content 230 [2] https://takeonrules.com/ 231 [3] https://takeonrules.com/about/ 232 [4] https://takeonrules.com/index.xml 233 [5] https://takeonrules.com/site-map/ 234 [6] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:takeonrules.com 235 [7] https://takeonrules.com/ 236 [8] https://takeonrules.com/2025/ 237 [9] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/16/some-entries-from-my-personal-journal/ 238 [10] https://takeonrules.com/contact-me/ 239 [11] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/15/re-why-am-i-not-playing-games/ 240 [12] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/16/some-entries-from-my-personal-journal/ 241 [13] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/17/re-creative-questions-challenge-from-james/ 242 [14] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/14/re-writing-on-a-tablet/ 243 [15] https://takeonrules.com/tags/personal/ 244 [16] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/17/re-creative-questions-challenge-from-james/ 245 [17] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/10/the-glories-of-a-winter-sunset/ 246 [18] https://takeonrules.com/tags/poetry/ 247 [19] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/20/together-we-could/ 248 [20] https://takeonrules.com/2024/11/19/spear-by-nicola-griffith/ 249 [21] https://verfassungsblog.de/the-authoritarian-regime-survival-guide/ 250 [22] https://orgmode.org/ 251 [23] https://takeonrules.com/site-map/glossary/#abbr-dfn-ORG-MODE 252 [29] https://soatok.blog/2025/01/14/dont-use-session-signal-fork/ 253 [30] https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/01/book-review-rules-for-radicals-a-pragmatic-primer-for-realistic-radicals-by-saul-alinsky/ 254 [31] https://nesslabs.com/collective-curiosity?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=collective-curiosity 255 [32] https://lithub.com/lit-hub-daily-january-15-2025/ 256 [33] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/olga-tokarczuk-empusium-realism/ 257 [34] https://baty.net/journal/2025/01/15/why-am-i-not-taking-pictures 258 [35] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/15/re-why-am-i-not-playing-games/ 259 [36] https://takeonrules.com/site-map/glossary/#abbr-dfn-RSS 260 [37] https://tuta.com/ 261 [38] https://mullvad.net/en 262 [39] https://tuta.com/ 263 [40] https://github.com/catfriend1/syncthing-android 264 [41] https://docs.syncthing.net/users/contrib.html 265 [42] https://syncthing.net/ 266 [43] https://takeonrules.com/site-map/glossary/#abbr-dfn-SYNCTHING 267 [44] https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/ 268 [45] https://takeonrules.com/site-map/glossary/#abbr-dfn-LLM 269 [46] mailto:[email protected]?subject=RE:Some%20Entries%20from%20My%20Personal%20Journal 270 [47] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/27/go-down-swinging/ 271 [48] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/20/together-we-could/ 272 [49] https://takeonrules.com/2024/12/27/the-fading-of-winter/ 273 [50] https://takeonrules.com/2024/12/18/on-prescription-and-description/ 274 [51] https://takeonrules.com/2024/12/13/clutching-wood-and-graphite/ 275 [52] https://takeonrules.com/ 276 [53] https://takeonrules.com/contact-me/ 277 [54] https://takeonrules.com/site-map/changelog/ 278 [55] https://takeonrules.com/about/colophon/ 279 [56] https://takeonrules.com/site-map/content-disclaimers/ 280 [57] https://takeonrules.com/privacy-policy/ 281 [58] https://takeonrules.com/about/ 282 [59] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 283 [60] https://takeonrules.com/2025/01/16/some-entries-from-my-personal-journal/ 284 [61] https://takeonrules.com/more_permissions/