New Cynic’s Guide post: the truly remarkable results from my “dopamine detox” (which isn’t a thing that’s actually possible, but never mind).
If you like my stuff, I’ve put up a tip jar. A bit more manageable than a paid subscription, but still helps pay the hosting costs and keep me in coffee!
This is probably a metaphor for something
New newsletter post: about the completely bogus trend of “dopamine detox” and why I’m doing it anyway
https://www.cynicsguidetoselfimprovement.com/rope-a-dopamine/
Every time I drive past I am fascinated by this sign. Not only is it textbook irony - the sign site is an incredibly popular informal dump - I’m always trying to puzzle out what on earth is going on with the slogan. You might - with effort - make the case that Hamilton is New Zealand’s most beautiful large town, but large city? No. Not even close. Auckland is spectacular even by world standards. Wellington has that astonishing windswept harbour. Even post-earthquake Christchurch has its gardens and a kind of broken grandeur. Tauranga is framed by mountains, the beach, and the Mount. And Dunedin looks like someone transported Edinburgh to the utter ends of the earth. Anyway, today I finally took the photo I’ve been threatening to take for years and I couldn’t be happier with it. I hope they never get rid of this absurd sign and that people keep using the site for overt drug deals and illegal dumping.
After a solid evening’s work on this beautiful new painting, it’s perhaps 60 or 70 percent finished.
I’m still not looking at social media or notifications as part of my dopamine fasting nonsense, but I’m quite looking forward to reading them when I’m done. 🖼️
Day 4 (?) of “dopamine detox” and I can report that itchy scrolling fingers are a very real phenomenon
If you just think positive, you’ll find that unnerving NZ Gothic is all around you 🥰
Had a beautiful Father’s Day afternoon working on this beautiful painting
Now it’s one of those days
It was that kind of day
Ata mārie, today’s local weather is 16 degrees with light drizzle. Despite the overcast sky the birds are celebrating spring and the roof is producing a steady 0.83 kilowatts. 
If you too want a magic roof, this referral code will get you one: www.solarzero.co.nz/enquire
For the next two weeks I’m on a “dopamine detox.” It’s a bad name for a dubious concept, but my newsletter is supposed to be about digging into weird self-improvement stuff. The idea is to do more posting and no scrolling. And hopefully I’ll get a few more paintings like this done.
Should I do more of these? I have to say, I love painting along with Bob Ross; the result is surreally lovely every time and every time I dig this canvas out of the cupboard it lives in it warms my cold heart
I’m determined to give this micro.blog thing a proper hoon, while I’m on my free trial. But experimenting with it has already made me realise just how much I’d love to consolidate my Internet presence on one platform that plays nice with others. I love the microblog concept, the idea of frictionless quick blogging and having a repository of my stuff that I control. I can see myself keeping it, for these reasons and as a way to syndicate my posts across the Indieweb.
But consolidation remains the dream. Currently, I have a long tail of Internet projects both current and abandoned that I would very, very much like to clean up, across a truly upsetting number of platforms. There’s:
I’m sure there are others, but those are the ones that spring to mind.
Now. Not only is the experience of keeping up with all that web stuff full of friction, it’s expensive. There’s no way to run two newsletters out of Ghost, so I have to pay a flat fee for both of them, and Shopify of course has a monthly cost. Both the Wordpress sites are self-hosted so the only thing I am paying for them is the hosting and domain name costs.
What I’d really like, I’ve realised, is a way to keep all that stuff straight in one container, if it’s at all possible. I’m aware that this is the Web and that there’s always going to be a need to straddle different technologies (and, I have to admit, a lot of my trouble stems from the fact that I’m a nerd who wants to do advanced nerd stuff who also never learned to code.) But I’d still love to be able to run and host my two newsletters from within one platform, without having to pay for two separate instances. As long as I am fantasising, I’d like to be able to do the same with my webcomic, and why not my online store as well? It’d be fantastic to draft a post for the Cynic’s Guide, knowing it was going to appear on the correct domain name, be sent out to the right email subscribers, and then upload a comic that also appears in the right spot and doesn’t get sent out to a bunch of subscribers. Then upload a new artwork to the shop and have that appear in the right place, because why not. And of course all this stuff has to play nice on the emerging indieweb: there needs to be webmentions and social web / Fediverse stuff included from the get-go. Oh, and microblogging, because I want to lean into things that keep me creating, rather than consuming. The ratio of consumption to creation has been wildly out of whack for the last 20 years and I’m slowly moving the needle in the right direction, which is of course what the Cynic’s Guide is all about, fundamentally.
So. Am I dreaming? Can I do what I want with some kind of mongrel Wordpress/WooCommerce implementation or do I need to go underground for a few years, learn to code, and build the Temple OS of mad web service convergence that suits my own, highly idiosyncratic needs?
Let me know what you think: I need to understand if I’m just being crazy, and if so, how much.
As a reward for reading that rant, here is my cat.
Just giving this little Micro.blog thing a hoon. To celebrate, a picture of the view from my office. It’s like working in a forest.
