2024-06-12: Not Writing, Changing, Hacking
(If you work at FF/FFDW 🄽 links will send you to a local, editable page in the Filecoin Foundation Notion. If you are in the Filecoin ecosystem, you may be able to join the #monologue-danny Slack channel where I answer questions, take meeting bookings, talk to myself and the other voices in my head. In the glorious decentralized ocap-enabled future, such data-hoardings will be a thing of the past, but we live for now in a fallen ACL world.)
Working on:
The Not Writing
For over a decade every single week I wrote a newspaper column, sometimes two: in the London Sunday Times, and the Irish Times (the Irish Times one was more fun, and included my early coverage of Bitcoin, rich in personal anecdotal lore). Anyway, I would basically have “writer’s block” on finishing these columns every week, and have to stay up until ridiculous o’clock forcing myself to write 800 words.
I’ve got to put together an update on STFIL 🄽 and feel the same buzzy incapacity in my typing fingers. I’ll get through it, I always do, but I’ve never worked out a way to speed through this tortuous bit of process.
One strategy that sometimes works, along with a) writing in an notepad at a Denny’s restaurant at 2AM, b) smoking an entire pack of cigarettes, c) listening to “Get off The Internet” by Le Tigre on loop, d) playing FTL until I can no longer bear losing, e) writing longhand on anything but a computer, f) dictating into a voice recorder, g) explaining my ideas to a random stranger, h) walking for miles in the dark, i) watching opossum families forage, j) staring at my sleeping child and reminding myself of my responsibilities, k) designing a new organizational system for writing columns, l) imaging how disappointing I am to my friends and family, m) re-considering becoming a monk, n) pacing, o) dancing alone in the hallway, p) binge eating icecream, q) 24 hour garage break, r) reading all of the Internet, s) getting someone to lock me in a room, t) booking a hotel in my hometown, u) giving up, v) quitting my job, w) realising I somehow missed the deadline anyway, x) pulling out one of my emergency columns, y) realising I’ve run out of emergency columns, z) just bloody writing the bloody stupid bloody thing, is to write something else first, and hope that the momentum carries me through to the thing I’m actually supposed to write. So, thank you, I suppose!
Thinking about:
How to enact change in our ecosystem. I had a strange call today from some folks who are trying to work out how to put together a fairly complex new Filecoin feature, and wanted advice on how to coordinate it. (it was only strange because I wasn’t expecting it, and burbled even more than usual as I tried to wrap my head around it). They were absolutely right that the Foundation is the org to be enabling these conversations. But, criminy, every conversation is different, and I’ve not concretely thought about how to do this since nucleation 🄽.Thinking! Thinking harder!
Link du jour:
- Programming is (should be) fun! - The patron saint of Spritely Institute 🄽 and many others, Gerald Jay Sussman 🄽, noodles pleasantly on video about the pleasures of hacking code.