Been having a lot of moments lately where I sit down to do something creative and I can’t manage to get anything down. I try to at least spend a few minutes to see if I can get over that initial hump of getting started. But that hasn’t been working.

Routine has been particularly helpful for me. Until my environment or schedule gets knocked around. I would do something for months, but suddenly completely stop when the routine breaks for a week or two. I recently joined a gym. A cheap one that’s every where around Tokyo. I like going running, but the summers here have been getting particularly long that I don’t want to wait until winter to attempt to fix my routine.

But creative things are harder to get to play with my routine powered mind. I sit down to do something and nothing. It’s frustrating when you make it all the way through the week. You have time to do something and nothing. At least I am getting some exercise in I suppose.

Wrote this and realized it fits well in this months IndieWeb Carnival. Go check out what some other bloggers are talking about in response to the “tools” prompt.

Anna has a recent post on the ephemerality of digital. I grew up spending way too much time on the computer. In my mind, putting things on paper was the way for it to get lost. My parents seemed to like to moving houses as I was growing up. Each move brought with it a purge of physical belongings. Marie Kondo put to writing what I did years before with each move. Books, toys, clothes, notebooks, drawings, everything was subject to being thrown away. Needing to examine the sentimentality of each item. But if it was on my computer. That I could just keep for as long as I want.

But even my computers had their limits. They would have a bad crash, burn out, or software stops getting supported. A forced moving of house. Each time is a pain because you have to figure out what you want to keep or throw away. Assuming there was even a choice of keeping your old data. I’d occasional gamble on if a tech company will shutdown their product or the “product vision” wildly changes. Hoping that I will not have to re-download the entirety of my past data and re-upload it to some other service. Alternatively, I could to spend a lot of time and money on self hosting. Even that is not without it’s own risks. This happened so many times over the years that I’ve thrown out features for simplicity.

I feel so torn. I grew up believing that the digital format could only get better. And for a long time it seemed to always be getting better. But at some point the industries focus on software changed. The number of times I’ve had to do those gambles seemed to increase. Software seemed to no longer be focused on the simplest solution for a complex problem. Many of the downfalls are rakes being laid out on the yard waiting to be stepped on and be comically slapped in the face. Software feels so close to being good. Like just put the rake away. But it keeps slapping us in the face in ways that seem to surprise us each time.

This gets back to the simplest tools end up being the most resiliant. Pen and paper vs Google Docs. Physical books vs Kindle. Plain text vs “You can’t even download it because it’s in the cloud”. My brother gave me a mechanical watch. It has the mechanism to self wind as you walk around wearing it. My grandpa was amused by me wearing a mechanical watch as I was going to school for computer science. A simple little device that just works. I take more and more paper notes now. But I also spent this afternoon on my iPad practicing to write the kanji for the new address we’re moving to. No need to draw out 100 little squares. I can trivially load up a grid page and erase my mistakes with wreckless abandon. There’s value in some ephemerality. I just wish software would get itself together so we can chose the ephemerality with confidence.

Going to talk about the Lord of the Rings books and Moonbound by Robin Sloan. The blurb on Moonbound mentions how the books feel like a mixture of Tolkein, Terry Pratchett, Ursela K. Le Guin. And it’s pretty much that. If you enjoy those authors and looking for a sci-fi fantasy, it’s worth checking out. Here’s your warning that I will be talking about details in this post that you’d likely more enjoy to just read yourself.

I don’t remember writing book reports. I feel like I some how avoided writing them. Either we went through a book as a class so things would be on each chapter. So escaped the need to write some summary about the story. Or I did have such an assignment and I didn’t take it seriously enough to remember ever doing it. But in my previous thoughts on wanting to be a better writer. So here’s my mini-report on what I (dis)liked.

Also, I know Tolkein fans can be passionate about the series. This was a casual read through. I might’ve missed things. I definitely skimmed over parts that were not working for me. I don’t care if some details or impressions were incorrect. This will be about how it landed for me.

Last time I was talking about how much of a slog it was to get through the Lord of the Rings books. Pretty much that week I got past the rough bits and it was pretty fast moving right after. I remember hearing that the series is a tough read. I think there’s a few chapters in the last book that were incredibly strong that made the slog worth it. Maybe the writing is supposed to make you tired like the characters are tired from all the traveling and fighting. The whole reunion of the fellowship at the end was something that hit really well compared to any other part in the series. If it ended here and I would’ve been happy. But it goes on to include another little segment with Sharkey. I get why this last segment is here. It’s meant to tie the bow on “and the hobbits return home changed”. For some reason, I did not feel convinced of some of the characters growth. The hobbits were quite a bit bossy when they got back? In a weird way. There are things going wrong in the Shire when they get back and they were correct to treat the situation as unusual, but the way that they talked to some of the other hobbits felt like a break of character. I don’t know if this is the movies ruining my perception of Merry and Pippin. I wasn’t very convinced that they were now strategists of war despite that was their noted strength in the battle against Sharkey and his hooligans. I would’ve been convinced of “they were in their home territory and now knew how to fight”, but the strategist angle didn’t land. I don’t know why I am stuck on that detail. The whole Sharkey segment is completely gone from the movies (at least I am pretty sure it was, I don’t remember how Sharkey was taken care of in the movies). I very much enjoyed the character interactions way more than being told about the cardinal locations of the characters relative to some mountain. The dialog was where things moved and was interesting. Many battles, despite being such a huge thing in the movies, seemed like a rather small part of the story. Still happy to finish it and the chapter with the reunion really did feel like a great culmination of all the trials. It was worth reading for that payoff there.

Moonbound was a ride. It starts with the discovery of a crashed space ship in the distant future of earth, but it’s also a fantasy story. Castles, swords, talking animals. It’s a lot of fun. A weird quirk that seems to happen in books that reference the past in a book about the future. Is how narrow their references seem to be. As in, you talk about the distant future and then make cutural references about current time. Talking about current worlds problems. They even did it to the point of referencing current technology. Everything felt magical until it did this. It was not entirely pointlessly referenced, but it referenced technologies like LLMs and vector search. I am quite tired of LLMs things. These references pulled me out of the story. And kind of killed the fear of the dragons (the bad guys). Despite that, I felt like there was a good variety of characters in the book and this is what kept me hooked into the story. They felt varied and meaningful. The world they live in was interesting to see explored. Also, there was an annoying talking sword. I enjoyed that bit in the Adventure Zone podcast and it’s funny here too. I want to reread the last few chapters again and see if it lands better.

In terms of world building, Moonbound was incredible imagination fuel. I’ll probably go pickup Robins other books. I don’t know if I am just too passively familiar with Tolkein’s world that a lot of the magic was sucked out of it. I didn’t feel like I was really discovering anything new in it. The way Tolkein describes the world was hard to read despite being so rich and detailed. I did enjoy see his characters play out in the world.

Another book that had great world building that I’ve read this year was Wiktopher. Maybe I’ll do a mini-report when I get around to re-reading it.