Note 75: Checkpoint
A (not so) quick catch-up post about what I've been up to.
This Note will be a potpourri of miscellaneous items, none of which would merit a full post of their own. It's been a while since I've checked in with the Constant Readers.
Prepare for randomness ahead...
Let there be sprinklers
We're almost through the first week of May, with February, March, and April having slipped through my fingers as has been the case for the past few years. I'm not sure what it is about those months that make them seem temporally slippery, but we're already in May now.
Summer for me began this last Saturday, as we had The Sprinkler Guy come over and get us up and running with our parkway irrigation. It's been a wet enough spring that I don't feel like we missed out watering earlier, and I'm interested in seeing how the parkway develops this season.
Now - despite my best efforts - the parkway doesn't look as good as some of those on Reddit's r/landscaping, and this has been a years-long incremental project. That said, with more and more grass coming back after each winter, I'll notch as a win.
Social media
Speaking of Reddit, I recently passed my 100-day streak and earned a badge for my engagement.
May 2025 is looking a good deal different when it comes to social media than May 2024.
First of all, my heavy Discord usage has been replaced with moderate Reddit usage. Most of my Discord activity was driven by participating in a "diaspora" community from the old comment boards over at The American Conservative. As my opinion of those folks soured, I eventually found that even "hate" reading folks like Rod Dreher ceased to be fun, and my engagement tapered off accordingly. I still drop in from time to time to see what they are talking about, but that's turned into a couple times per week dip, instead of running in a background browser tab all day.
Until the last year, I was never a heavy Reddit user. I started using the site during the pandemic to keep up with Elite Dangerous news, and later moved onto reading Chicago-related communities, and adding a group here and there. Now, I'm there a couple of times per day, and generally finding it as a decent tool to surface things that I'm interested in: landscaping, Transformers collecting, #MAGA resistance, etc.
A lot of the communities that I follow now on Reddit are direct replacements for stuff that I used to follow over at Facebook. I quit Facebook earlier this year on the news that Zuck wanted a seat at the #MAGA table and would be settling a lawsuit he would have won, as protection money to get Trump's toadies to leave him alone. I still keep an account around there so that I have access to Messenger (which has largely been supplanted by Signal for me) and the Weird Fiction Quarterly group (that, I'm migrating over to a private Ghost site). I culled my friends list down to zero, and have to have the "why I'm not accepting your friend request" conversation once every couple of weeks. I also have a private politics group that I was invited to, but my engagement with that group has been slipping lately as well.
Signal has been a good replacement for Messenger, and it has allowed me to reconnect with some old friends in a way that wasn't happening on Zuck's plantation. I'm not going to divulge the kinds of things we chat about (the First Rule of Signal is...), but it's nice reassembling a small part of the Forbes College Addition community. (We affectionately called it "The Ghetto" back in my day, which may not be acceptable nomenclature anymore.)
As much as I'd like to say that I'm on social media less, that would be a mostly false statement, given that Bluesky has taken over the position that Facebook once enjoyed. I check in more times a day than I probably should, and have put together a fun community of folks that I follow over there. Overall, Bluesky is a pretty political place, but I've been curating my follow lists and trying (and often failing) to post content that doesn't have anything to do with the post-Schoolhouse Rock reality we now live in. I have some Real Life FGriends there, but probably interact more with Internet Randos more often than my busy (or influencer) friends.
Finally, if you want to count Substack as a social network, I'm still subscribed to a few newsletters, but it seems like a good number of those have been slowing down. I don't participate in their Notes or other social features, and removed their app from my phone. I haven't missed it at all.
Writing
On the writing front, I'm still publishing Weird Fiction Quarterly (with Sarah Walker) and writing flash fiction pieces for the publication. However, over the past couple of months, I've been drawn into a wider fiction writing community and have been working more on longer pieces to sell to publications that aren't my own.
As I mentioned before, my first non-WFQ fiction was published in Underland Press's Even Cozier Cosmic last year, and I sold a science fiction to Eighth Tower Records earlier this year for inclusion in their Solaris: Stories and Reflections Inspired by Andrei Tarkowsky's Movie anthology (now available to order).
Eighth Tower Records
The Eighth Tower folks invited me back to contribute to an H.R. Giger anthology, but the cautionary tale I wrote ("Chip of Theseus") wasn't sufficiently "Giger" enough (I thought it may be a stretch when I submitted), and rather than make revisions to bring it more into line with the Swiss artist's aesthetic, I'm working on shopping it around to some other folks to see if there's any interest in the fable of a man who automates his life to the point where he becomes irrelevant.
I'm looking forward to taking a stab at future Eighth Tower projects, and Underland Press has a new call for contributions out that I'll be submitting a piece to. (It's a fun theme that is very close to my heart. Now just to figure out my angle...)
As I'm getting some submissions under my belt (including one failed submission sitting in The Trunk that could be expanded into something cool), I'm really enjoying writing and imagine that this will be something I continue doing until I'm physically incapable of doing so. As for what I want to be writing, I look to folks like Ted Chiang and Kazuo Ishiguro who find ways to write emotionally resonant stories while probing questions at the frontier of what's going on in our world and universe. (There's also a part of me that wants to try my hand at a Neal Stephenson-esque graduate seminar disguised as a thick novel one of these days.)
I still have around 9,885 hours to put into fiction writing before I can declare Mastery, so I still have a ways to go, but I enjoy putting the time in.
Mental health
Towards the end of last year, my plan for mentally coping with our new Black Mirror reality was to throw myself into projects and to just stay busy with projects to avoid unnecessary Doom-Scrolling. While I've been moderately successful in not letting the news of the day pull me down too far, I have been struggling mentally these past few months.
From the outside looking in, I seem to be dealing with a general depressive disposition, which this weekend's Thunderbolts* drove home during my Thursday night "beat the spoilers" viewing of it. Florence Pugh did an excellent job portraying on screen the same malaise and sluggishness that I've been infected with lately, and it was one of those films that felt like I already knew all the emotional beats by heart.
I enjoyed the film while watching it, but the more it sits with me, the more it becomes my favorite film to come out of Marvel Studios, (very) narrowly edging out poignant conclusion to Rocket Raccoon's story that we saw laid out in James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. I'll be interested to see what a second viewing is like.
Getting back to my personal situation (and away from the film review), my depression has manifested itself as a general sluggishness and difficulty in starting things that I need to finish. (Once I'm started, I'm generally in good shape.) I've had a marked decrease in energy and excitement in general, which compounds the problem.
I think that this is a combination of the world I knew falling apart around me (why invest energy in stuff that will just be vandalized?), some unexpected challenges (US gov't freezing funds to my major research clients), and simply getting older. (David Harbour's Red Guardian is now my MCU spirit animal.)
Also, I suspect that I have an undiagnosed case of minor bipolar disorder (with a splash of ADHD), where I can have manic periods where I have Projects that I throw myself into to Save the World, and depressive periods, where the name of the game is Keeping the Lights On. It feels like I'm emerging out of the latter into the former, and I plan to ride that wave as far as it takes me, and erect some infrastructure to mitigate the Slow Sad Brain Days along the way. (Building space colonies in Elite Dangerous has served as my coping mechanism and escape since that feature dropped a few months back.)
As much as trying to reason oneself out of a depressive period is a fool's errand (like the honey badger, brain chemistry don't care), it is useful to remind myself that the stars are aligned in a pretty nifty way for me to take advantage of:
- I have a fun writing hobby that has the potential to grow into something more significant.
- Despite Trump & Co.'s war on research in the United States, I still have more work to do within the research realm. So much that I've paused seeking out non-research sources of revenue for my business (for the time being).
- I'm sitting on a mountain of software intellectual property with growing demand for future projects.
- Due to the epic efforts of my non-profit co-founder, we do have a new organization that is what I've been building my whole career towards building in the Behavioral Innovation Research Center (BRIC). (In retrospect, I never would have pulled this off on my own.)
My core challenge now is just sitting my ass down, throwing on some decent music, and focusing on building on top of these foundations, and resisting the temptation to fall into a mindset where I feel like I'm starting at Square One on everything, and having that pull me into The Void.
Hitting the road
After a few months of staying put, I'll be hitting the road this summer, primarily to drum up support and resources for BRIC.
On Tuesday, May 20th, we'll be at Rutgers at the WEBSCI'25 conference doing a workshop and panel on data collection using Passive Data Kit (and some related technologies) for gathering multimodal behavioral data across devices and platforms.
On Sunday, June 15th, we'll be doing a similar presentation (more demo than workshop) at the annual meeting of the International Communications Association in Denver, Colorado.
Finally, I'll be involved in a number of presentations at the annual International Society for Research on Internet Interventions (ISRII) conference in San Diego at the beginning of August. While May and June's presentations will be on passive data collection, the ISRII presentation(s) will be highlighting the messaging technologies I've been building, especially the pieces that incorporate AI large language models (LLMs) into interventions in accountable and responsible ways.
I'll be using each of these trips as excuses to set out on some other local "side quests" while I'm in the respective areas. I've already lined up a couple meetings at Princeton and BRIC will be attending the pitch session hosted by the Social Science Research Council for New York city government units to pitch projects to researchers and technologists. I don't know what to expect from that event, but I do have a number of projects that I've worked on over the past decade that the Big Apple might find some interest in replicating or adapting.
I'm going to close here, as I can see the day drawing shorter while my responsibilities list grows longer. I wanted to get all of this out my head and into a Note so that I didn't spend a fraction of my brain recomposing this update over and over. I did spend a good weekend resting and sleeping, so it's good to be at the beginning of the week with a full head of steam.
Don't let me waste it.
