I’m experimenting with more general blogging, so here’s my first Life Rambles post. So here’s some short various rambles not long enough for a post of their own.
Blog Structure
Oh, first off, a meta-point about this very Life Rambles idea.
As I said last week, I feel in flux about the current internet social networking age. But I’m still interested in writing stuff that’s more casual and not essay-like. I’m wondering about Mastodon and ActivityPub and if there’s a way to connect all this stuff together (I hear Tumblr and Threads will be integrated soon, for example). This Life Rambles thing might be able to work in other formats. Microblogging is fun in theory, but the platforms they’re on, and the lack of connection to this site here, always bugged me. But what if that’s all fixed?
Well, I’m really bad at computer stuff but
Server Set-Up
The Quinlan Circle server host is shutting down at the end of the year, and so the site has to transition to new servers. However, the Quinlan Circle server structure was extremely…. stupid, in retrospect, and it’s currently split across I believe 9 different WordPress installs, one for each subdomain. So a bigger transition may be in order! Sites like Hands Held and ATL might end up getting smushed into this one here… It’ll be sad but it might be for the best; neither of those stories even got 10% of their total views on the actual sites, compared to Royal Road and other platforms. Having whole websites is super cool but not that useful.
Alternatively, during Amazon’s big sale, I splurged and bought a $100 mini PC. I need to find a free weekend to go deep into it, but I want to try setting up my very own self-hosted web server! This is only viable while traffic is extremely low, but I might attempt hosting this site on my PC for a while. Rather than paying for annoying hosting costs every month–at least until traffic is high enough to justify it.
Worst-case scenario, all these Quinlan Circle sites will either die or be transitioned into .wordpress.com free blogs, in which case all the current hyperlinks will die and that’s really annoying, but it’s not the worst thing in the world honestly.
Diet & Exercise
(Big time Life Rambles section here)
I’m always going on these sudden diet & exercise kicks and then losing it bigtime. It usually starts in the spring, and then I do some running in the summer, and then when it gets too hot I fall off, and then in Aomori it just got too cold to even try.
This year, though, I started in the fall! Weird. But with one big benefit–I’m now an Anytime Fitness gym member. There’s a couple dozen of them in the Kansai area, so I can exercise pretty much anywhere, 24/7. It’s expensive, and I’m sure these gyms are 5/10 quality at best, but yo, extreme convenience is perfect. There’s one right next to one of my workplaces, another one station away from my house. Since September I’ve been going about 4 times a week.
And I’m also doing calorie counting. I find that literally just counting calories, not trying too hard to hit the goal (mine’s 1500), completely changes my eating habits. This too I always fall off on, but I’ve been doing it for 2 months now and I hope I can do it for an entire year.
So far, I haven’t lost any notable weight, maybe 1kg. But I’m also just trying to build healthy long-term habits, not going so hard I fall off like every other time.
Should I Write for Money? + Editor Anxiety
Friends of mine have suggested for years that I actually do serious journalism. That I submit my bazillion essay concepts as pitches to web magazines and indie journals and media publications. But I’ve never tried it all this time.
However, I do want more writing credits to my name. And I especially do want money. So far I’ve just written everything on this site and previous blogs for free. But maybe that should change?
It’s tough, though… I hate submitting stuff and trying to follow all the submission guidelines, different for every site. And getting a rejection after 3 months. For short fiction it’s like that anyway. I’m also legitimately terrified about what a good editor would do with my writing. For fiction, I’m used to that… But my nonfiction writing style is totally different. It’s very similar to my actual speaking voice and I’m not sure that’s, you know, good.
I might try it soon though! I’ll definitely write more about it if I go through the process.
