I decided to not read a book.

It may not be a first for me, but it is definitely much too rare that I actively decide to stop reading a book. I can leave them around for a long time, sometimes eventually giving up on them. But the giving up is very rare, and a light sense of guilt that I should be finishing them is very easy to awaken.

I am therefore happy to report that I am not finishing Ken Follet's Never. I started it with some hesitation. I know that I can enjoy his writing quite a bit, but I also realized rather quickly that he is such a bastard to his characters. In a medieval story where the plague plays a part, do we really need a detailed description of someone being flayed alive? (If I recally correctly, it was also a total side note to the whole rest of the story.) How much rape do we strictly need to make the story come alive? Does every evil character have to get away with all their bad deeds all the way to the end?

I am not sure why exactly I started to see Follet as the evil puppet master when I have never thought of any other author like that. Perhaps I liked some of the good characters too much? Perhaps starting stories with literally putting someone's feet to the fire and randomly killing somebody's puppy was choosing to start uphill?

Or perhaps I have simply had enough of all the dumb evil shit idiots all over the world get away with daily? I do not mind if my fiction includes a bit more of the wrath of the heavens descending on evil-doers than does the flow of news.

I chose to stop Never when I realized how likely a horrible story of human trafficking centered around a woman and her child were to play a central part of the story.

Sorry Ken, I do not feel like bracing myself before my evening reading right now.

(The annoying part is that I am pretty interested in the bigger story of the book. Oh well.)

I have a bit less than a week to go until my summer holiday starts, and I already feel very much in holiday mode. In sync with soon turning off the alarm for a couple of weeks, trying to not feel like I need to do too much during the days, tricky stuff like that.

I think I can do fine at it this year. Some years it feels hard to get into the right mindset, but this time I think I have it.

Which, yes, probably means I will completely fall out of it in some strange way. I will deal with that when it happens.

For now, I am quite happy tapping away at my keyboard on a Thursday night, having had an evening meal in the setting sun with some alcohol to go along with it.

Completely as if tomorrow was not a work day, and also somehow completely fine with tomorrow being one.

Is this not the kind of feeling I tend to have toward the end of a holiday? "Oh, I should try to hold on to this relaxed state of mind when work starts again."

Surely it can not be a bad thing to start that feeling early?

Moments when it is easy to fall out of the podcast editing session:

• Before I have started
• When I have dragged all tracks into Hindenburg and lined them up
• When I have found the episode starting point and removed everything before it
• When I realize that something will need to be added or treated in a special way, breaking the standard flow

Dependency chains are fun. Yesterday was the first time I ever edited a Kodsnack episode because I realized I needed to get the episode image drawn. Drawing the image means I need the episode title (and, preferably, some additional idea from the topics to base the image on).

And so: the need to edit before I am able to draw.

There is a lot of time to finish up the actual episode, but what I realized was that this was the last opportunity where I had convenient access to my usual drawing tools.

So, the dependency chain brought me here, where I have maybe fifteen minutes of work left to do before publishing the episode next week. And that feels great! I should finish things early more often!

… except life and late changes of plans and information and everything else of course. But apart from that? Getting stuff done early just feels so good whenever it happens.

Today is also a day off, and I have exactly zero commitments. I spent and eternity (measured in my own relative time) this morning just having a cup of tea and listening to the rain, feeling the need to do nothing at all.

I hope and aim to keep that feeling all day.

Auto-interrupter

I sort of knew this already, but this week's episode of Econtalk brought self interruptions to the front of my mind. They discussed focus and interruptions, and then the guest (David Epstein) mentioned that your mind gets to used to interruptions that, even if you are left alone, you will tend to interrupt yourself with a distraction at about the same time intervals you are used to.

That rings true to me, and I have been thinking about when and how I interrupt myself during the week. I have not necessarily been any better at stopping myself, but I have at least noticed. A further realization is that I think my self interruptions are setting my focus interval to a much higher degree than any external forces.

This annoys me. I have been attempting to deal with this - so many times - by closing tabs, cancelling services, screen time, and all the other classics. But perhaps it can be easier to make progress if I just focus on the interval? I do not have to cut anything out (which could also avoid the classic of just replacing one distraction with another) - if I just focus on switching to any distraction slightly less often. Small changes are easier, and just trying to move in the right direction instead of hitting some hard target leaves much less opportunity to declare failure and just give up.

That could work, right? It sure will not hurt to try.

I am beginning to feel reasonably recovered from the whirlwind week.

Sun, summery warmth (when in the right wind-protected corner), and everything turning green all at once certainly helps too.

In one way, it feels like things will now stay calm until the summer holidays.

In another, it feels like those holidays are like two breaths away, and there are plenty of things in the calendar before they start too.

In any case, it does feel good to sit down in the evening - after work and dinner and dog walks - and at least feel caught up with what I hoped to get done during the day.

Then, that familiar thought starts seeping into my mind: is there something more I should be doing with the evening to feel even better? I would really like to find a good default way of dealing with that thought, because it usually leads me nowhere. It feels like a gateway to sitting around flipping between little things, not focusing on anything but not resting and recovering or really letting my mind wander either.

Still pretty relaxed as far as problems go, but also a very silly way of making a free evening just slightly worse.

Hey: books!

I finished another book! More everything forever was a great and easy read about the beliefs of singularitarians, effective altruists, and related people and billionaires of all sorts. It is one more on my growing pile of AI-related reading, and I am sure this is the first time since university I have ever bought this many books related to the same topic, and got through them so relatively quickly too. It is the kind of experience that makes one look back at university and wonder how one could manage to not enjoy studying then as much as one does now. (Does it matter slightly that I hand-picked my own course literature and read at precisely my own pace, without any tests afterward? It might …) We have touched on many of the topics of the books in Kodsnack episodes, but I think I want to do one or more directly related to them as well, because there is so much in there.

Which reminds me: I have a Murakami on my bedside table, only just started! There is a great thing to spend some unallocated evening time on!

By the way, I wrote this in Gram. It is a pretty darn nice little editor.