Finished reading: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King 📚
Avoiding YouTube's algorithm
I’m still trying to spend less time watching YouTube, and the trick mentioned in this earlier post has been really good. I’ve actually gone one step further now, and I’m pleasantly surprised with how well it (usually) works.
I mentioned it a little at the bottom of the previous post, but what I do, instead of subscribing to a channel on YouTube, I subscribe that that channel’s RSS feed in Reeder. Then I browse the videos within Reeder. If something looks interesting, I then save it to Instapaper.
What’s cool is that (usually) I can watch the video in Instapaper directly, and it’s probably thanks to some ad-blocker or another, but I don’t even seem to get ads before/after/during the video either. Sometimes it doesn’t work and you see an error box instead of the video. Sometimes redownloading the ‘article’ fixes this. Sometimes it doesn’t. So it’s not perfect, but I now have a method to watch YouTube without even really going on YouTube
Skyrim will always be delightful
Finished reading: We Are the Beasts by Gigi Griffis 📚
🍿 Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) - ★★★★☆
Don’t think I’ve seen this since it came out. Pleasantly surprised that it’s still really funny
Just been watching this YouTube video about using YouTube in a ‘healthy’ way. The main point was to get away from the algorithm by staying away from the front page for the most part, and instead using your Subscriptions page to browse and choose something to watch. And to be happy to subscribe and unsubscribe freely.
I really like the idea, and actually I’m going to start trying it out. I do something a bit different though which I’m going to keep doing because I think it will still work alright - instead of diving straight into something that looks interesting, you save it to your Watch Later playlist (you can do this while you’re idly looking to kill 5 minutes on your phone). Then when you’re ready to actually watch something, you just watch the playlist.
I suppose both ways let you curate your videos before you watch them. Maybe doing both will be too much.
I like doing something similar with RSS feeds though. Like, everything gets chucked into Reeder, and I’ll sift through that every now and then, and send the interesting-looking articles to Instapaper. Then I actually read them there.
🍿 The Thursday Murder Club (2025) - ★★★☆☆
The more I think about it, the more I realise this is missing the lovely ‘neat little package’ thing that murder mysteries are supposed to do at the end (and the book does do it, so it’s a shame). I still enjoyed watching it though, and Ibrahim is still my fave
Waiting for it to become officially official, but at the end of the month I’m going to be stepping down from my current role at work into something less people-focused.
I’m going to be sad about the reduced pay, and nervous about working with a new peer group, but I’m also kind of excited to do something that plays more to my strengths, instead of taxing my weaknesses.
Feels strange to think of all the responsibilities that I’ll be dropping in a few weeks
February review:
- watching films in my living room is awesome
- Hearing aids are awesome
- ear infections aren’t 🫠
- productivity: it’s good to make a list but don’t expect to actually do it all
- don’t be scared to ‘think on paper’
- You’re not wasting paper
The main problem with the bullet journal method is maintenance. Separating the entries into multiple locations and transferring them from one place to another, for me, was too much. What I was looking for is, quoting Steve Losh(2), a “list manager for people that want to finish tasks, not organize them”. In order to achieve this a lot of parts needed to be removed
I love this. What a wild spin on bullet journaling! I’m not sure it would match with my brain (it feels like a lot of things become ‘present’ ‘tasks’ and I don’t know how I feel about that) but man I love it. Turn the whole system on its side and let all of the maintenance fall out. Awesome.
Finished Reading: How to Come Alive Again by Beth McColl 📚
This was an audiobook from the library. I wanted something that could be kind of playing in the background, just giving me some advice while I’m doing chores and driving to work and things. It worked.
An update from this post: here is my completed tracker for January. No alcohol all month! And the stress/anxiety levels weren’t too bad.
The thing is I can’t tell if alcohol had an effect on how I felt because I didn’t drink at all. So I suppose that means I need to drink tons in February, for science :P
Seriously though, I’m going to use the same tracker again this month. It was interesting and ultimately it shows me I didn’t feel so bad last month. Let’s see what happens this month.
Finished Reading: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride by Matt Dinniman 📚
Scary to think I’m almost caught up - only one more book out! Like, I know these books should be silly and far-fetched and they are, but they’re also somehow really really good. I hope the seventh one isn’t going to be the last one
Finished Reading: Dead Happy by Josh Silver 📚
This sticker seemed appropriate for my new #bulletjournal
2024 in the bin where it belongs
Not surprised to see Skyrim and The Witcher on here, but I am kind of shocked at how much I played Enter the Gungeon! I got it while it was on sale, I think, and it’s not really my kind of game. And I’m definitely rubbish at it. But I do find it quite fun to play now and again, and looking back at the games I played on the Switch this year, I actually think this might be my favourite game of the year. What a nice surprise find.
This is my tracker for January in my #BulletJournal.
I want to start off slowly, not put any real pressure on myself to do anything I wouldn’t normally do, and also test out a little theory. When I drink alcohol, I notice when I go to bed that my heart is beating pretty fast, and it makes it harder to fall asleep. I also get to thinking, like, I’m not an expert but surely hearts can also take so much, and having mine race while I’m literally just lying in bed can’t really be a good thing. So whether it leads from those things or whether there’s more to it, I think that alcohol might be making my anxiety worse. This is where this little tracker comes in.
Each day is represented by a rectangle, the top half of which is for tracking alcohol, and the bottom half is for tracking anxiety. At the end of the day I’m going to draw a line in pen that separates the two halves, then mark each half as appropriate.
I kind of wanted to be able to keep ‘alcohol-free’ as the cleaner-looking mark, but I think leaving alcohol-free blank and having a pen mark for the days I do drink is kind of having to record that you ‘failed’, rather than having a mark for an alcohol free day to record that you succeeded. So it’s just a dot, to try and keep it as clean looking as possible.
For the anxiety side, I considered having the ‘bit stressed’ icon have the lower bottom half of the square filled, that way it might resemble a kind of bar chart once the tracker is finished. But considering it’s over several lines anyway, I don’t think this would achieve much. Plus, I’m quite likely to be a little messy and it might look uneven. Cutting the square in half diagonally is easier to draw precisely so the final tracker might look a little bit more uniform this way. And the colour ‘density’ will still represent high, medium or low states of anxiety.
This time, the ‘not stressed’ mark is the cleanest one, which I think makes sense. I don’t think that colouring a square or half a square when I’ve felt anxious is like ‘admitting defeat’, so I don’t have an issue with it here. To me I think it’s a little bit more like being aware of, and expressing that anxiety.
I built in the ‘draw a line to separate the two halves’ rule so that if I miss a day, it’s easy to spot. Imagine a day where I drank alcohol and didn’t feel anxious - that would be denoted by blank boxes both top and bottom. Having the additional line means that this scenario looks different to the scenario where I just miss a day.
Overall I wanted to have the tracker look a little like a calendar. I usually don’t go to the effort to do this and just put everything in one vertical line instead, but I think work days and days off have an impact on both of the things I want to track and so being able to easily compare between days of the week will be useful in this case, I think.
I am hoping that just writing down the ‘week commencing’ date on the left will be enough to keep me oriented while I’m filling this in. With the days of the week across the top I think it should be okay. I know other trackers write the individual dates in each box but since I don’t want to use additional colours I think that could make it look a lot more cluttered. Not to mention that it’s just more work to set up too! I feel like the overall design isn’t too hard to redraw, if I want to use it again in later months.
Look at this handsome A6 notebook. I’m going back to pen and paper bullet journaling.
This time I’m armed with a bit of self-compassion, to remember that if a task isn’t done or an idea isn’t acted on it’s actually okay.
I ordered some stickers off Redbubble so I might use some of them on the cover. I still have a ‘proper’ journal that lives elsewhere so this is just for the short, snappy, get it written down before it leaves your brain forever kind of stuff. Looking forward to relearning what works and what doesn’t, and what is and isn’t important to me.
Finished Reading: Wastelands by John Joseph Adams 📚
Slowly made my way through this over several months. A couple of the stories made no sense, a few made me say ‘well okay’.
My favourite stories were Waiting for the Zephyr and The End of the World as We Know It