I'm someone who has trouble showering in the mornings. I have ADHD and I do everything slowly until my brain wakes up. So unless I want to be late for work, I'm usually stuck showering in the evenings, which is inconvenient for other reasons: my hair takes a long time to dry, I have sound sensitivity issues and the noise can amp my brain up and make it harder to fall asleep.
So here's my hack for making myself shower in the morning: I have a maximum of ~30 minutes, so I made a 25m playlist of high-energy music I can listen to on a water-resistant bluetooth speaker. The BPM helps me move faster, and the song transitions help keep me on track, e.g. "ok, I should finish washing my hair by the end of this track", etc. When the music stops, I'm incentivized to quickly wrap it up if I haven't already (so I can continue listening to music.)
It works like a charm. This morning I got in the shower a little after 7:30 and was drying off at the stroke of 8. Now if I can only convince my cat to let me finish getting ready, I'll never be late for work again! 🫠
Current shower playlist
- Matra Magic - Contagious
- DMX Krew - Good Time Girl
- Krystal Klear ft. Jenna G - Addiction
- Kiesza - No Enemiesz
- Space Dimension Controller - Welcome to Mikrosector-50
- Anderson - Trevor on the Dancefloor
Where I've been
I've been pretty active recently, just not in a way that translates into blog posts.
First off, if you only read my blog via the feed and never check the web version, you may not be aware that my new website is live. It's not the new website I was talking about previously: that was an experiment that didn't really pan out. Maybe I'll write about it someday. Long story short, mediawikia is way more trouble than it's worth.
My website's back to being hosted on Neocities, which is good and bad. It means that, as long as Neocities is willing to keep hosting it for free, it should never "go down" again. And they have a pretty good track record of sticking around and not shitting up their service. Previously I was hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech, which as the name implies is about the most dirt-cheap hosting you're going to find, but it's still a problem when I have unexpected expenses and I can't even spare a dollar to pay my hosting costs for the month.
I did get some donations recently, so I was able to get a URL: you can find my new website at harmless.monster. I was thinking of changing the site's name, but I didn't know that .monster was a TLD, and when I saw this was available for cheap I had to snag it. I registered through porkbun.com, which seems like a decent registrar, and they claim that the price shouldn't be jacked up after a year like my other domains, since .monster isn't a "premium" TLD. But if something happens and I can't afford to renew it next year, the site should always be available at its canonical URL, bluelander.neocities.org.
The downside to moving back to Neocities is that it doesn't support any kind of server-side scripting. So if I wanted to consolidate my blog and website, I'd need to manually update the feed and use some sort of javascript comment widget. I am using a smattering of javascript for various optional conveniences and extra features, but I don't want core functionality to be gated behind javascript. So for now I'm fine continuing to use Mataroa as my main blog, and archiving the best entries on my website.
That's mostly what I've been doing there: archiving, collating and collecting things I've written here and elsewhere. So if you've been following the blog for awhile, there won't be much that's new to you. But maybe give it a look anyway, you may find something you missed, or have fun with the little toys and Easter eggs I've added (there's an exclusive new game on the 404 page!)
Neocities does offer a basic RSS feed you can follow for website updates: here it is, if you want to subscribe. But I don't know how useful it'll be.
The way the Neocities feed works is this: if I make any change to an HTML file, then Neocities will generate a generic "this website has been updated" item, a maximum of one per day. It gives you a link you can click to a page that'll show you which files have been edited (up to 10 per day) but there's no way to tell what the edit was. So that means if all I do in a given day is go into an old article and fix a typo I found, you'll be notified of it and won't know why. I can see this being annoying.
But the feed may be useful if you treat it as a "heartbeat signal". If you haven't heard from me on the blog for awhile, you can remember I still exist because you get periodic pings showing signs of life. I dunno. Up to you if that's something you want.
I do feel like writing, so regular updates here may resume shortly, but also I've been trying to help my mental health by doing things out in the real world to improve my internal locus of control, and those activities aren't always appropriate to write about in this medium. I've also been feeling the itch for another long-term creative project, so I dunno. Too much I want to do, not enough time or spoons to really do any of it properly.