It's now less than a week a way from weigh-in (and the Holiday of Bill) and less than 150 days from the new year!

It's a good time to make a strong pivot toward being better, dare I say...SPECIAL? In the game Fallout 4, the character build system is structured as below—I pulled directly from the game the description:

S is for Strength, and that means I am strong! I can carry lots of toys and swing stuff all day long!

P is for Perception, a long, funny word! It means what I tasted, smell, saw and heard!

E is for Endurance, and that's how long I can play! I'm always really healthy, and have energy all day!

C is for Charisma, it's why people think I'm great! I make my friends all laugh and smile, and never want to hate!

I is for Intelligence, it means I'm really smart! I use my brain for lots of stuff, like science, math and art!

A is for Agility, that's how I get around! I move real fast and easy, and I never make a sound!

L is for Luck, and it's simple, you see! It means that good things always happen to me!

I love this as a schema for personal development! It's something I want to apply for the rest of the year. And you might think, "Luck? You cannot improve luck!" Hey, just grab this classic, "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." It's the capacity of putting yourself in the position, isn't?

I look forward to adopting a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. framework for the rest of 2021.

The Tech Sandlot

Music

My CD-to-FLAC experiment is over along with the overall spirit of music ownership—this is definitely a topic I've seesawed over! I went so far as to start buying MP3s of content that isn't otherwise available! But, the inherent problems of all of that are storage, application and breadth. It's difficult to be satiated and I get worn out on the same genre/content. And it's really hard to follow the retrowave genre that way! I even signed up for a Bandcamp account to buy albums from the artists directly!

Ultimately, streaming music is the shift toward the future. Sure, I can grab one of my old vinyls and listen to Springsteen's The River or Simon & Garfunkel Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme when want to hear the warm grooves again that only a turntable can provide.

I am glad to have made this decision so I that I can go ahead and free my head for other things!

Books

I'm back to reading again! Or should I say listening? Yesterday, I finished another book by one of my favorite authors, Annie Jacobsen Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of CIA Paramilitary Armies, Operators, and Assassins (2019). I'm starting her latest book, First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance (2021). While I never know the applicability to my own life, it's like digging up holes and finding something shiny.

Now, as to whether I want to use Goodreads again for tracking or do my own thing here, I haven't decided. Goodreads always comes off (to me) as the totality of everything I've ever read. I just need something that tracks the 25-30+ books a month I gobble down when I'm feasting. And frankly, I find sparse value in unweighted crowd-sourced evaluation.

Website

My flirtation with a Jekyll/markdown/Github version of this site has met it's end. Sure, I've toyed with it on-and-off—even implemented for a few months; there's something enchanting about having a free website that's static! And I love that the copies of my writing are saved in a text format—a great archival approach! Ultimately, however, I'm sticking with Wordpress so that I can better focus my efforts. I've found that Jekyll/Github is more needy for development and content creation. It's not like Jekyll is a worldwide standard anyway. It was just fun to have a static site behave like a dynamic one. But, to become the best version of me, it's about honing my focus, isn't it?

Regarding CSS, I do want to return into some sort of retrowave vibe again—it points to the direction I'm going!

Other Tools

I like to more effectively apply Garmin's Connect platform. While my my watch has been my faithful ride along, I haven't given it much attention, which provides the results thereof: Garbage in...the Grouch out.

I NEED some sort of task management platform. Perhaps I'll make a callback to 2020 and run with Habitica or Todoist.