Flagging Motivation

For most of the past week or so, I’ve been preoccupied first with moving from TV Time to Trakt for tracking my television viewing (the former having apparently done away with public user profiles); then on once again rebooting my homepage, bringing it back to omg.lol from Carrd; and then on battening down the hatches to get through the frigid weather system that descending upon Portland over this past weekend.

During this time, I’ve also once again been settling into a rhythm on Mastodon (somewhat ignoring Bluesky in the process), and that sort of collided with not being compelled to blog anything. By which collision I mean that one of the things I struggle with in social media is a sense of feeling invisible as I watch people who’ve written about similar things as I have getting all sort of attention, even in the occasional instance when I’ve written about them better or more interestingly.

This is a longstanding hangup of mine that pre-dates social media, and I’m still figuring out how to navigate it.

I was going to post a sort of roundup of bloggers talking about blogging, as I’ve done now and then, but that just felt at least mildly performative, and I never got past the opening paragraph because of it. Which more or less is how we got here, to this post instead.

I’m still stalled on the restoration project because that works takes a large amount of very specific self-motivation and that’s simply been lacking for months now.

As for the weather, it stalled any attempts to get out for my daily walk for two days, and while I got out for one yesterday it just wasn’t going to happen today with it not only still being below freezing but expecting new precipitation this afternoon.

Yesterday I finally started getting to the glowing pile of articles and newsletters saved to Instapaper over the past couple of months, but that’s slow-going. It’s difficult for anything to go more than slowly when even with the single cadet heater in the wall of my living room on all day my apartment hadn’t been above around 55ºF except maybe once in the past several days.

At any rate, this lackadaisical and haphazard post gets you more or less up to speed, and in the near term I expect the blog to be more of the same, which is to say: nothing. This happens, and I’m not spending much time wondering about the whys and wherefores of it. I’ll just be over here, all layered up while watching television and continuing to tinker around the margins of the homepage reboot.