I live! Life in the physical world is cool: friends, art classes, embroidery projects. Here's a newsletter:

Yes, yes it can.

So, this is worth it for me. I’m still learning things about myself and how I interact with my world. I’m doing a bunch of new things because I have time--but also energy. So, on to the next month! My online goal for the next month is to get back to my newsletter and Patreon. And see friends. 10/

I said my social life has gotten a lot more interesting, and that’s true. There’s more f2f interaction than there used to be, but I also text and call more. And none of the things we share in any of these environments are things we’d share in social media, for a lot of reasons. 9/

I’m not talking about literature as an escape (which is a valid use), I’m talking about reading to fill the hours the internet used to fill. Preferable—for me—is to read when I want to read, not when I can’t think of anything else to do. I spend a lot of time doing things now. 8/

I’ve freed up a lot of time by not killing it with a stick via the internet. This led me to a weird discovery I’d never have made otherwise: that it’s just as possible to kill time by reading obsessively. In my case, it was 1930s crime novels--put one down and pick up the next. 7/

I do research, buy things, and check facts online. I play a couple of low-key casual games that only come out once a day. I use the internet more for Zoom, Whereby, and Discord calls and chats than anything else. 6/

I don't check art, photography, or poetry groups. I hate this part, but it’s the cost of not doing the rest of it. Sites are designed to lead me away from minimalist photography and haiku and toward whatever they want from me. I can’t have the one without the other, so I choose neither, sadly. 5/

I’m also not scrolling news or commentary. I get news through two sites with tight focus that distinguish between relevant and/or actionable news, and chatter I can’t do anything about except feel angry and depressed. I miss things in the vacuum, but otherwise I miss things in the howling gale. 4/

I miss happenings in friends’ lives. But I can’t be all the different places they call home--I'd miss something somewhere. The social media world is too fractured to reliably find everyone anywhere. In any case, lots of the real events are not being shared this way any more. 3/

I do miss people, but the algorithms weren’t showing me any actual people I know or even had friended--a year ago I spent an evening scorekeeping on FB, and found out that only 3% of what I was being shown was anything or anyone I’d friended—how did I think that was okay? 2/

Three-month checkin for my social-media-and-scrolling fast: At two months, I still scrolled automatically, but yesterday I went to FB for freecycle, and I didn’t look at anything, just found the page, posted the ad, and came back later to remove it, without interacting with any other posts. 1/

I will never use LLM for anything to do with my writing. Even my research is driven by good research practice, not AI. Why would I? I like the work. If you don't like doing the work, ask yourself why you're not actually doing something you do like to do, instead.