Daily goals – Lunar Obverse

Day 10 – 502 words about frustration

What on Earth can I type 500 words about tonight? I’m feeling discouraged and frustrated about job hunting. Found out I didn’t get a job I wanted after three rounds of interviews, but considering how they reacted to my tough questions, maybe I dodged a bullet. But unemployment checks don’t come forever, so I have to get something going. I do have the advantage of a dad who’s got a little money who can help for a bit, that’s always nice. I just don’t want to lean on him too much, y’know? I’d like to pull my own weight. I know I can be a great employee for the right organization. I can fix things. People tend to like me. I can jump in and be useful almost immediately and have a short learning curve.

Where is the boss that wants someone like that? You’re out there, I can feel it. I’m right here. Come find me.

I had a dream last night about being gaslit by the organization I mentioned above, the one that went a different direction after three interview rounds. I’m a practical person, don’t believe in metaphysics, so I won’t say it was a psychic revelation. I just knew that since I hadn’t heard back from them when they said they’d know either way by earlier this week that no news was bad news, and it permeated my subconscious.

Still working on this website and working on another one I will focus my technical skills and stories about working the Help Desk, and getting the rest of my digital infrastructure in place. Was messing around with OBS Studio last night and maybe I’ll start streaming on a regular basis again. Had fun doing that for Fallout 4 and Fallout 76, and now that the Fallout TV show is out it’s making me yearn for the wasteland once again. Would streaming older Fallout games be interesting to people? I’m willing to try.

Have to re-write my Hire Me page; it’s a mess right now, not very good from a marketing perspective and I’ve been trying to learn more about marketing and sales since that’s a huge weakness for my liberal arts ass. My sister is great at that, and so is my friend Christi, so I’m trying to apply the lessons they have to teach me. I can learn. Is our Brian learning? Time will tell.

Just a hundred more words and tonight’s diary entry is done. I don’t know what else to write. I’m doing daily walks; that’s a good thing. Gotta stay active. Dad is still here and will be for another couple of weeks while they rebuild his apartment space. Was supposed to play D&D last night but it got postponed another two weeks from now, which is frustrating but that’s the status quo of D&D games. Finding time for that is hard for adults with busy lives. It’s not like back in the day when we could play all weekend every weekend.

Two more words. Done.

Day 8 – Here I am

Daily Story Project, fear

This whole 500 words a day writing exercise is supposed to be about just giving myself the chance every day to sit down and write something. It doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be about something. I just need to put 500 words down on the screen and post them to the blog.

That being so, why did I just complain to my bestie, Tracy, that I didn’t know what today’s post was going to be about? I know it doesn’t have to be about anything. I’m the one who set the rules up. I know this in the cockles of the soul I don’t have.

Tracy, being helpful, suggested a few things, asked me some questions about what I’ve been doing all day, even suggested I could ask ChatGPT for a prompt. Not gonna do that last one. I don’t really trust ChatGPT or the other LLMs for anything creative because every time I’ve used them they’ve lied, made things up, or gotten factual things wrong and been very certain about them when questioned. They’re not ready for general purpose use yet. But that’s not on Tracy. She was trying to help.

I’m flailing. I know I should just do this, ramble and harrumph and blather until I hit the word goal. Because last night’s post was good. It was real good. It was tight, it had an emotional basis, it took a natural event and made it personal and even profound. I loved it. Today, I wanted to try to top it.

That’s not how this works, though. I have to just do it, the writing bit, and see what happens. Inspiration is incredibly fickle; if I have to wait for inspiration I might be waiting a long long time. This project is about building a habit. About making space. About giving myself permission to be bad, or even clumsy and un-word-y-like. I don’t have to DO anything but put down at least 500 words today. Tomorrow is another chance to write, and the day after that, and the day after that. Maybe some of them will be beautiful. Maybe some of them will be hilarious. Maybe some of them will be sad. But, realistically, as Theodore Sturgeon once said, 90% of them will be crap. That’s how it works.

I need to be OK with that and I guess, today, I’m not, so it’s a snag and I’m having trouble getting past it. You can’t see this but I’m looking at the word count on screen and I’m just barely over 400 words. I have to go on, and on. I should stop using contractions just to eke out a few extra words here and there. You, dear reader, have probably stopped reading because you can tell I’m padding all this out. It is true, I very much am. I do not blame you for moving on at this point.

But you should at least know this: tomorrow I will be back, doing this again. I’m showing up. Imperfectly. Honestly. Just me.

Day 6 – Capitalism

Daily Story Project, Politics

Can I limit my definition and concerns about capitalism to only 500 words? Let’s find out!

I was listening to a podcast last week that I will not name; just using this as a jumping-off point. The hosts are generally liberal or left-leaning, and the normal topic of the show is the tech industry, but because of a reader question they were talking about tech CEOs and what they could do to push back against things like anti-labor practices, wealth inequality, and resource exploitation. In other words, the hosts were talking about capitalism, especially as it’s practiced in the early 21st century here in America and the world.

And one of the hosts said that they like capitalism. Specifically they said they like some parts of capitalism, some parts of socialism, but that neither one of them is the complete picture of how to organize society.

And that struck me as just dumb. It’s that whole “moderate” view where you try to thread the needle so you don’t take any particular stance. And my one thought was, how does this person define capitalism? Because by my understanding, there ain’t nothing good about capitalism in the basic idea. I would love to ask this person for their definition, but that would probalby just end up in an argument, and generally I like this person and their tech and social opinions.

Instead, here’s my baseline understanding of capitalism, and how it’s been running lately. The base idea of capitalism is that it’s good to accumulate capital. Capital is whatever tangible goods, objects, factories, or labor needed to make things people need. Capital is classically the machines and factories used to manufacture goods, but that ignores the very real labor that the workers in that factory also provide. The labor is also capital, human capital.

Folks with the most capital are called capitalists. We generally don’t examine, at least outside of lefty circles, what or how those capitalists accumulated their capital. How did they have the money to buy or have factories built? My inclination is that most of them inherited it, and then through the process of underpaying for the labor and overpricing the output, kept accumulating profits that gave them even more capital.

Because that’s the ethical failing, as I see it. Labor will always produce a surplus. A leftist thinks that the laborer should retain most if not all of that surplus. A capitalist, though, claims to own that surplus because they own the factory. To my mind, that’s a tautology. The factory was itself built by labor, and labor was underpaid for that construction, because the capitalist retains ownership of the property.

Capitalists, are, definitionally, profit extractors. Rent-seekers. That’s how they accumulate capital.

Let’s briefly touch on what capitalism is not. It’s not the concept of money, or markets, or buying and selling. All of those things existed before Adam Smith tried to define a new economic model. Capitalism is also not the idea of profit; that, too, existed previously in human history. Funnily enough, excessive profits was seen as a negative, nearly a sin, definitely a moral failing. It’s just that it was called usury (and to be quite honest, applied in a very discriminatory and racist way.)

I’d love to bring back the accusation of usury, but I’d apply that to billionaires. Are you with me?

Daily Check-In #2

General

I’m numbering this Daily Check-In but I didn’t number the previous one. I’m whacky.

How did I do on my daily writing goals yesterday?

I did find two sites that accept freelance work.
I did not search for, nor find, any content-farm sites.
I did search Mechanical Turk for writing-related HITs and found none.
I didn’t work on my novel at all.
I did keep track of interesting stories; I saved 4 links.

In fact, I submitted some clippings and wrote a writing-specific resume and submitted it to an editor, which took me literally all day because I was anxious about it. But I did, in fact, do it. Finding and saving clippings of my favorite posts took about an hour; and I did it at the bar, because the beer helped quiet that voice in the back of my head.

It was interesting reading back over old posts here. I wrote a lot. And I wrote well, although now, reading back over some of my posts, I can see what I would change. That’s a topic for a post on its own, though.

I also looked into how other writers keep track of their clippings, going as far as setting up my profile at clippings.me and Contently. Feels odd linking to posts here and at Tumblr but that’s what I’ll have to do until I’m published elsewhere, I suppose.

Today’s plans: polish at least one story for submission to the other site I found, work on the novel, add links to my clippings.me and Contently profiles. Maybe a blog post here. I have already searched Mturk and completed a HIT or two.

Clearing my head

General

Man, I am so bad at naming things. Even posts. Ah, well.

I went to bed early last night. Tired in spite of myself. Didn’t much exercise and ate a big ol’ chocolate raspberry cupcake late in the day; I’m sure it was the sugar crash that did me in. I tried reading but my eyes just kept closing, and finally I turned off the light and drifted off to the sounds of my neighbors chatting on their patio. Longest day of the year and I spent most of it asleep.

I did, however, get this blog up and running, yesterday, and now I am committing to writing here daily. Should I set a word count? Nah. Just the habit is enough for now. I hope.

So that was yesterday. My dreams were interesting – oh, other people’s dreams aren’t interesting? You’re probably right. I do keep a simple dream journal but since dreams are based on personal symbology, they probably don’t mean much to other people. Suffice it to say that my dreams were out of the ordinary for me.

And then I was awake by 5:30 AM. How to spend my morning? I made my usual breakfast: coffee from beans I ground myself, three strips of uncured bacon, a raisin English muffin with butter, and two large organic vegetarian-fed scrambled eggs. Got the two eggs out then dropped the whole rest of the carton. Ugh. What a mess. The breakfast was good, though, after I cleaned things up.

Today’s plans: Sunday Parkways is in North Portland today so later I’ll ride up there. Maybe try to catch Ken and his kids if they’re around, or Chaz, or Terry and Yukari. I have vague plans to have a gaming night tonight with Terry and Russ, which will probably involve more biking. And in-between, I’ve got nothing but time. Maybe watch the season finale of Orphan Black. Maybe work on the novel. Maybe do some research to start freelance writing.

I need to set concrete goals, so here’s my freelance writing goals for this week:

Find 3-5 good websites where my style of writing is a good fit and get an actual person’s email address.
Find 3-5 “content farm” sites and start writing.
Check Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for writing HITs I can do daily.
Work on the novel for at least an hour a day
Keep track of stories that interest me daily
Blog about how successful I am at all of the above each morning

That should get me started and it’s easy enough that I’m not overwhelming myself, at least I don’t think. I know what I have to do. Now I have to do it.