Tootfinder

#ScribesAndMakers for July 3: When (and if) you procrastinate, what do you do? If you don't, what do you do to avoid it?
I'll swap right out of programming to read a book, play a video game, or watch some anime. Often got things open in other windows so it's as simple as alt-tab.
I've noticed recently I tend to do this more often when I have a hard problem to solve that I'm not 100% sure about. I definitely have cycles of better & worse motivation and I've gotten to a place where I'm pretty relaxed about it instead of feeling guilty. I work how I work, and that includes cycles of rest, and that's enough (at least, for me it has been so far, and I'm in a comfortable career, married with 2 kids).
Some projects ultimately lose steam and get abandoned, and I've learned to accept that too. I learn a lot and grow from each project, so nothing is a true waste of time, and there remains plenty of future ahead of me to achieve cool things.
The procrastination does sometimes impact my wife & kids, and that's something I do sometimes feel bad about, but I think I keep that in check well enough, and for things my wife worries about, I usually don't procrastinate those too much (used to be worse about this).
Right now I'm procrastinating a big work project by working on a hobby project instead. The work project probably won't get done by the start of the semester as a result. But as I remind myself, my work doesn't actually pay me to work during the summer, and things will be okay without the work project being finished until later.
When I want to force myself into a more productive cycle, talking to people about project details sometimes helps, as does finding some new tech I can learn about by shoehorning it into a project. Have been thinking about talking to a rubber duck, but haven't motivated myself to try that yet, and I'm not really in doldrums right now.

It's time to lower your inhibitions towards just asking a human the answer to your question.
In the early nineties, effectively before the internet, that's how you learned a lot of stuff. Your other option was to look it up in a book. I was a kid then, so I asked my parents a lot of questions.
Then by ~2000 or a little later, it started to feel almost rude to do this, because Google was now a thing, along with Wikipedia. "Let me Google that for you" became a joke website used to satirize the poor fool who would waste someone's time answering a random question. There were some upsides to this, as well as downsides. I'm not here to judge them.
At this point, Google doesn't work any more for answering random questions, let alone more serous ones. That era is over. If you don't believe it, try it yourself. Between Google intentionally making their results worse to show you more ads, the SEO cruft that already existed pre-LLMs, and the massive tsunami of SEO slop enabled by LLMs, trustworthy information is hard to find, and hard to distinguish from the slop. (I posted an example earlier: #AI #LLMs #DigitalCommons #AskAQuestion

Americans once had a coherent and clear understanding of political tyranny,
one crafted by Thomas Jefferson and updated for the industrial age by Louis Brandeis.
A concentration of power
—whether by government or banks
—was understood as autocratic and dangerous to individual liberty and democracy.
In the 1930s, people observed that the Great Depression was caused by financial concentration in the hands of a few
whose misuse of their power induced a financ…

I randomly bought this book in a quirky bookshop in Copenhagen for the sole reason that it said all the wrong things right on the cover.
(Sales: the single most important profession. NLP™: not natural language processing but neuro-linguistic programming. Meta: the Meta Model™ and Meta Publications™.)
I just started reading it and boy oh boy, I was not disappointed. It's outrageously hilarious.
"Persuasion engineering".

Persuasion engineering by Richard Bandler | Open Library
Persuasion engineering by Richard Bandler, unknown edition,

Just finished "Concrete Rose" by Angie Thomas (I haven't yet read "The Hate U Give" but that's now high on my list of things to find). It's excellent, and in particular, an excellent treatise on positive masculinity in fiction form. It's not a super easy book to read emotionally, but is excellently written and deeply immersive. I don't have the perspective to know how it might land among teens like those it portrays, but I have a feeling it's true enough to life, and it held a lot of great wisdom for me.
CW for the book include murder, hard drugs, and parental abandonment.
I caught myself in a racist/classist habit of thought while reading that others night appreciate hearing about: early on I was mentally comparing it to "All my Rage" by Sabaa Tahir and wondering if/when we'd see the human cost of the drug dealing to the junkies, thinking that it would weaken the book not to include that angle. Why is that racist/classist? Because I'm always expecting books with hard drug dealers in them to show the ugly side of their business since it's been drilled into me that they're evil for the harm they cause, yet I never expect the same of characters who are bankers, financial analysts, health insurance claims adjudicators, police officers, etc. (Okay, maybe I do now look for that in police narratives). The point is, our society includes many people who as part of their jobs directly immiserate others, so why and I only concerned about that misery being brought up when it's drug dealers?
#AmReading

This was foreseeable. Want to go on vacation on the state's dime? Pull your kids out of school and get vouchers.
Reminds me of the time I saw my sister-in-law tell her first grader to read a book for a treat. That was her idea of teaching her kid how to read. Both she and my brother benefited from special education throughout their schooling. The state was fine with them homeschooling. I believe they were eventually convinced by her parents to send the kids back to school. My pare…

Started reading Naomi Klein's "Doppelganger", a book about how she is often mixed up with Naomi Wolf (former feminist icon turned conspiracy nut/grifter). It's... tedious. I haven't gotten to the parts that are praised on the back cover yet. So far it has been 100 densely-printed pages of philosophical and historical treatise. Interesting for sure, but I would have preferred this as a much much shorter essay so far. Will continue to read, but it's work.

Writing a post
And double spacing it
Like this
Doesn't make it poetry
It just makes you a twat
Read a fucking book
Not just any book
Read a good book
You might learn something
Maybe even how to write well
Maybe