The conjunction of spheres

I’m merging my two blogs (and other ideas) into one, allowing a bit of chaos to set my mind free.

The conjunction of spheres is the topic of The Witcher - Blood Origin series on Netflix. I watched it lately, hence the idea for the titel. I give it a 2 out of 5. It nurtured my thirst for Witcher lore and fantasy, but to be honest it also has flat characters and tropes that have been told a thousand times like that so it definitely is not rewatch material for me.

Up until now I used to post on two blogs, one for technical stuff in English and another one for this and that in German. I struggled quite some time to accept that I have many different interests that do not fit neatly into one coherent blog, or so I thought. It took me quite some time to realize that my blog is my f#!=%$! space and where I can write whatever I like. As obvious as that might seem. So I invite chaos into this blog, mixing ideas, hobbies, languages, etc. Making it more lively.

I figured that my anxiety for writing on the blog (although I love it and do it regularly in my personal journal) has much to do with a fear for coherence which ultimately roots in missing self-confidence that expressing all part’s of myself make me coherent with myself. Dividing myself into several pieces and expecting too much from every aspect creates a block.

The conjunction of spheres (hopefully) did something great for me. It is somewhat a reunion of conflicting parts of myself, which feared the chaos involved in letting go and relax. Now it does not feel frightening at all but rather relaxing and chill. There now is a much greater pool of (chaotic) thoughts to poor from and write about. The higher pressure, in terms of thought-energy if that makes any sense, pushes me to overcome the block.

Another thing which helps me a lot is to re-publish things / ideas from my blog, which I deem valuable to others, in a refined state in contexts with higher reception like the FedoraMagazine or in a Wiki. You see my writing process nowadays is basically this: first I push raw thoughts and logs of what I do in a sophisticated note taking system, then I post a condensed but blunt blog post about it, before finally choosing a broader platform for further reach. Just posting what I’m thinking or working on right now in a raw state on my blog, then pushing it to other platforms, did a trick. It created some sort of insignificance for this second part of my writing process, which held me back for a long time. This approach allows me to write on many things, but focus more of my energy on some few topics while keeping enough residual energy for more blog posts over time.

With reduced hurdles, higher frequency, lower expectations and more residual energy it is easier to keep up a smaller but more fulfilling blogging / writing experience for me.

From yak shaving to procrastination

My thirst for interesting thoughts and blog posts creates a strong pull towards procrastination or in the better case yak shaving. I want to create interesting tech blog content, pursue many different projects so I nurture the pool of thoughts I draw upon. Combined with a tendency towards fear and write blocks this pushed me down the rabbit hole more than once. Sometimes it’s more-or-less healthy work which furthers my ambitions, but at other times it’s just distraction. Distraction is not always distraction however, which makes it complicated. Sometimes distraction is a warning of my psyche that I’m running low on resources and have to rest.

A technical hurdle

Mixing languages introduced a rather annoying technical problem by the way. The CI/CD tooling for spell checking does not check multiple languages in one go, so basically I’m restricted to one language per file if I want to use the CI/CD spell checker. I introduced a “mixed” category of posts, language-wise, where I resort to the live spell-checking capabilities of my editor.

Overview on my projects

With the merge I also introduce a “Projects” page, where I centrally provide an overview of what I do.