Life

Starting again

Published · 3min

I haven’t posted here in two years. This site was meant to be a way for me to start writing something more than post random crap on Twitter. I’ve failed at that, but I’d like to try again.

Note

What’s written above was accurate when I wrote it and referred to “Esperanto orthography is terrible“, but I’m currently moving posts and other bits of content over here in an effort to consolidate everything together, hence why the archive here might look incongruous.

I’ve a couple of small projects that I think I can use to get started again. I haven’t been able to get a start on this year’s Advent of Code, but I’d like to do as much of them through until the end of the year as I can, and write posts about the problems, any issues I ran into, and how I solved them.

Also, there are a few books I’d like to write posts about, as I intend on finally going through with reading them. They’re mostly self-help books that I want to read so I can try to become a better person than I am now.

  • :59 Seconds by Professor Richard Wiseman. The idea here is to develop some better habits to make me more effective than I am now. I like to be more organised and diligent than I am now, and possibly become a little less anxious and more open with people without needing something like alcohol for it to happen. I’d like to have healthier relationships with people, and especially friends and family.

  • How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. Even if the title seems a bit mercenary, it’s really just about becoming a better conversationalist. I don’t particularly care about the salesman side of the book or trying to become pursuasive, just to become more engaging with people that matter to me.

  • Asperger’s from the Inside Out is something I’ve been meaning to read so that I can learn to cope better with life rather than avoiding it, a pattern I’ve found myself trapped in since my twenties, which hasn’t done much to make my life as good as it might be. While I’m high functioning, and I think I mostly pass, that’s partly through avoidance of situations that might out me or which I don’t think I could deal with well. I’d like to fix that.

  • Finally, Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right by Harry Frankfurt. The one book here that isn’t at self-help book, but it does, for me, fit the theme. To quote one of the reviewers on Good Reads, “Frankfurt’s thesis is that love, being volitional, can serve as both a unifying principle in the personality and as moral guidance.”

It’s thus upon me now to read these four books and then write about them here.