The Reed and Pickup

I don’t really believe in new year’s resolutions. Most people fail them within a couple of weeks and end up reverting to their default programming in short order, but there is some sense in having a vague plan for what you want to do with the year.

This year my plan was to take a photo every day and to absorb a meditation from my Daily Stoic book. I also wanted to get back into some routine physical activity. I’d like to think I did that.

I’m thinking I’ll just stick with the physical activity for 2025. That’s not to say the Stoicism and the photography were a waste of time –they definitely were not. I think I just need to give my head a rest for a few months.

This year I think the main project will be downsizing into a couple of bags and getting some work done on the house. It’s not terribly exciting, but it does need to be done.

I will also be doing my best to avoid the news. One thing I can take away from the Stoicism is the idea that if something is not within my control, I don’t need to dwell on it.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Hope you had a good festive break and hope 2025 is a good one for you.

As the year draws to a close it is perhaps time to reflect on the year that has passed.

At the outset I decided to accompany the daily photo project with a dose of Stoicism, using the 366 passages in the Daily Stoic. Have I learned anything?

Why Stoicism?

One thing I’ve always struggled with is knowing how to exist in this world. The first 15 years or so were fairly typical and I think I had a fair grasp of being a normal child and a normal teen, but the wheels started to come off as my twenties approached.

For various reasons I didn’t have a lot of luck with father figures so when those situations arose where the advice of said father figure would be helpful there was none forthcoming.

So, I found myself following the path of least resistance and not really getting anywhere. Between then and now my mental health has been a seemingly well-controlled dumpster fire, at least until I reached out for some help and had some counselling and cognitive behavioural therapy.

The latter made a big difference in figuring out where I was starting to go wrong, helping me retrace my steps and take corrective action. Many people have said that CBT takes some of its inspiration from Stoicism, so I thought I’d try to absorb myself in it.

For the most part it does feel like many of these passages are sinking in. My instant reaction to various issues that crop up is more measured now and I’m less likely to ruminate on various things that bother me.

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…” –Epictetus

Considering the Stoics lived around the time of the Roman Empire there were very few instances where passages from the Daily Stoic felt dated. Granted the book has hand-picked passages from ancient writings and reinterprets them for a modern audience, but the meaning doesn’t seem to have been lost in the previous two thousand years or so.

The premise of the book is a passage a day for 366 days, so as this year was a leap year with, as luck would have it, 366 days it made sense to do it this year. I’m quite glad I did. Each page is a pearl of wisdom you’d hope your wise and knowledgeable father would impart at the dinner table.

Even if you don’t feel lost, like I occasionally do, I suspect most people will get something out of the various teachings of Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca all those centuries ago.

The Photos

I know we’re not at the end yet and I still have a week left of work before I see daylight again, but I’m hopefully going to complete another year of taking a photo every day.

By some miracle, quite a few of my shots were picked up by Flickr’s algorithm, so the views and favourites has distorted my stats somewhat, but it’s always a bit of fun when it happens.

I’m going to have a year off from it next year, at least the posting part. I may carry on taking photos in private and only post the good ones, but the routine is healthy and I don’t want to lose that.

I’ve mentioned the Mullenweg Skirmishes already in my re-introduction post. However, I first started out with Wordpress in the early 2010s and even won a Wales Blog Award for the technology category in its inaugural year.

However, it was in essence a second phase of maintaining a home on the internet. The first phase was in the days of Netscape Communicator and Frontpage. I would build static websites before they were cool. Sure, they looked dreadful by today’s standards, but they were mine.

The decision to give up my own little corner of the internet was one borne out of despondence more than anything. I was getting frustrated with the LLM fad, the flagrant disregard of platform holders –particularly Wordpress, to respect the efforts of their users in the pursuit of training materials for Grand Theft Autocomplete.

At the time it felt easier to just walk away entirely. I nearly did, but not having a place to call my own didn’t feel right somehow. I hope that Micro.Blog will serve me well.

As the web becomes an anaerobic lagoon for botshit, the quantum of human-generated “content” in any internet core sample is dwindling to homeopathic levels. - Cory Doctorow - The Coprophagic AI crisis

I’d like to think that humans continuing to write or create art solely for the benefit of other humans is something worth clinging onto, however futile it may seem right now.

Trying out Sunlit…

One thing I hadn’t appreciated when I signed up to Micro.Blog is the variety of apps that are available in addition to the main Micro.Blog app. One of them is called Epilogue and is a way to track your books –the ones you are reading, the ones you want to read etc.

The other one is Sunlit, which is for sharing photos. It seems a bit short on features right now, but I like the idea of a separate app that feeds into your main blog.

Photo taken on St David’s Day in Cardiff, Wales. Shot on a Nikon F80 with 50mm F1.8, Ilford XP2 film.

Those of you who may have known me from Mastodon, or from Wordpress before the Mullenweg Skirmishes --that’s what I’m going to call it from now on. I found myself in a place were I didn’t see much point trying to carve out my own little space on an internet I was convinced would be overwhelmed by AI Slop before the decade was out.

The Skirmishes gave me a plausible excuse to get out, save a bit of money and spend some more time in the real world.

I then had this crazy idea about making an online music magazine. But then I remembered I quite like music but didn’t really want to make it feel like a job. So, I binned that. Besides, I had started building it in Ghost, which is great but much more than I really need.

So, then I was then pointed towards Micro.Blog by someone on Mastodon and...it’s five bucks a month and seems like a far better fit. I still had the domain there waiting to be used so, here I am.

I’m Gavin, a middle-aged guy from Wales. I like taking photos, I like technical death metal and its softer, brassier cousin, jazz. I’ve also had a long time love-affair with Paradise Lost. No, not the John Milton poem but the doom metal band from the north of England.

Pleased to meet you.