Self-Censorship FTL

I'm doing it again. No, that's not where to start.

My life tends to move in waves. A lot of one thing, then a lot of another, and so on. When I am having a wave of creativity, or research, or insight, it's easy to blog. When I am having a good time, it's easy to blog. When I am having a hard time... it depends.


Right now is a hard time. I had written a long post explaining the situation and sharing my thoughts, but I can't post it. The back of my head is screaming too hard about potential backfiring, possibly years or even decades into the future.

So, once the wave has passed, and I am back on something positive, there will be another wave of content. Until then... yeah, things are pretty Weird.

Boring vs. Tedious

There is a fine distinction between the meanings of "boring" and "tedious", which doesn't even show up obviously in the dictionary definitions. For me, it is a significant distinction; put most simply, boring things put you into a soporific state, while tedious things you get tired of. The reason this is a meaningful distinction for me is that my brain reacts very differently to the two.

If I am working towards a goal I care about, I can handle a great deal of tedium. Repetitive or painstaking tasks don't bother me, as long as there's a point to them. Data entry so that I won't have to look things up manually again, building elaborate excel sheets, painstakingly building webpages; none of these bother me, as long as the output is useful to me.

On the other hand, boredom... just shuts me down. If I try to focus on something that doesn't provide a sense of purpose or meaning, even one as minor as entertainment, my brain just shuts down. My eyes glaze over, my mind flails to find a train of thought that is more stimulating, and if I don't find something interesting, I simply zone out until something happens. Waiting with nothing to work on, watching informational videos that aren't paced well for how I learn, listening to explanations of things I already understand, are all torment for me.

With regard to tedious tasks, I can be patient as a stone as long as I see the point of what I am doing. As for boredom, I am almost useless when I lack engaging input. So, if you see me taking care of a useful but tedious task, I look like one of the most patient people on the planet. If you see me trying to deal with a lack of input to keep my brain active, I look like there is something seriously wrong with me; depending on how far through the process I have gotten, I am either fidgety and distracted or simply stupefied.

Given that I know many knitters who took up the hobby as a way to always have something to do while waiting, I suspect there is some common ground there. Given the highly repetitive nature of many tasks involved in period or other elaborate costuming, I suspect many costumers share my tolerance for tedium. Given the massive attention to detail required for almost any kind of programming, I have seen many examples that show a similar pattern in coders.

Boredom and Tedium may be synonyms in the dictionary, but I see many indications that, in practice, they can be very different. Kinda weird.

Why Pinterest Condensate?

While there are many reasons this blog exists, the final impetus that got me onto Blogger to make it was the urge to condense collections of craft-related Pinterest pins down to their essence to increase the likelihood that I would actually be able to make use of the wisdom contained therein.

While I am perfectly willing to read blog posts once to see what they offer, I don't have much urge to re-read a half-dozen blog posts at the same time on one topic that overlap significantly in their advice just to find the nuggets of insight that each one contains, especially right in the middle of a project that would make that advice relevant. Flow is delicate, and not generally amenable to shifting from making something to lengthy internet reading. That tends to lead to lost afternoons, rather than finished objects. So, I condense them down to their essence, in a form that is likely to be useful, rather than theoretical.

I have actually been doing this for quite a while, but I have discovered that while I love Evernote for keeping track of projects and ideas, I don't care for its format for this purpose, and the relevant Notes have languished for lack of attention. The blog itself works as a great storage setup for these, and having them mixed in with posts and articles I didn't feel the need to cut down (on my Pinterest boards) makes it very likely that I will actually see them when they are relevant, rather than only when I am sorting through my Notes to filter out the cruft.
I adore Pinterest. I love their algorithm, which does a great job of showing me things I actually am interested in based on my previous behavior. I love how pretty the boards are. I love being able to sort things out into as many or as few boards as I feel are appropriate for the content. I love how easy it is to find everything as long as I keep each board trim. And so on.

I do not, however, love that it is missing some key features of a real pinboard. I can't pin anything that doesn't have a picture- no putting notes or concepts up without attaching them to or turning them into a graphic. Which also means I can't pin my own notes or summaries of articles/posts when I keep seeing the same concept over and over, which is one thing a real pinboard is awesome for.

Since I love using Pinterest other than this limitation, I decided to just figure out a way to make my own content easier to pin. Since it had to have a picture, and I couldn't fit a whole lot into a Pin description, I needed a way to connect a significant amount of writing to a picture. I poked at various ways of doing that, from Evernote to Google Drive, but when it comes down to it, those are designed for limited sharing; they break if you try to pin them. Blogging, on the other hand, is entirely meant to be shared far and wide.

Thus, we have the Pinterest Condensate series. A way to combine efficiency of delivery with the power of online pinboards. Awesome.

And so, it begins...

Okay, so yet another blog. Why the heck did I do that? Because the others didn't really fit my ongoing writing style. Most were too specific- I bounce around a lot between interests, and it's torture to have to stick with one long enough to blog usefully about it. QC was too flippant. Basically, it implied that what I was writing about was boring and everyday. I really don't do boring; my brain literally (and yes, I am using that word correctly) shuts down important functions and I go into this weird hibernation state until something interesting happens. So... boring and everyday doesn't describe it.

This, however, does. My interests scatter widely, but the center is a general love for things that are weird and awesome. Thus, this blog, which I hope will continue a bit more reliably than the others.

As the description indicates, just about anything I find interesting could end up on this blog. It will likely contain several threads, and any given reader is likely to be interested in only some of them. That's fine; I hope to keep things organized enough that you can find the ones you want. Likely threads based on what I have written before are: Knitting and yarny stuff, sewing, condensation of information found a lot of different places into a more useful form, living with chronic illness, gaming (various kinds), philosophy, how do do risky things more safely, and the scientific method as applied to whatever my goal is for the day. Feel free to request more (or any) posts on a particular topic, as other people being interested makes a topic more interesting to me.

As my old website has died, I will be collecting the flotsam and jetsam on a new version, and some of the miscellaneous stuff, like the Exploding CD Incident and the Great Dyeing Experiment, will probably end up here. I will mark old content somehow so you know what I have done recently and what I am just gathering up.

Expect the look of the blog to evolve considerably; I just set things so that it's readable and I kinda like it at the moment. I will put more effort into it as I go. I am also trying to figure out how to use my original version of the logo, which was better-looking, but too tall for use on most computers. It took up way too much space. Would work nicely for the mobile version, though, and for links that need a graphic. *cough-Pinterest-cough*

Also, Hallo!