Take Fifty-One

I cashed in some PTO, and I'm having a four-day weekend for my birthday. I've reached an age where you can't kid yourself about the time. Barring some incredible breakthrough in science, I almost certainly have fewer days before me than in my wake.

It's fair to say I spent my youth pursuing artistic and intellectual interests to the detriment of my economic needs. Not so long ago, in an attempt to remedy the state of my finances (and put some irresolvable interpersonal issues out of mind), I overcorrected and focused almost exclusively on a career. That was a pretty good idea, really, even if people didn't understand what I was up to initially. It's now time to adjust course once more and focus on a more balanced approach.

As part of this shift, I'm starting some creative projects, many of which fall under the umbrella domain www.365erik.com:

1. I'm setting up a Flickr account where I plan to post one new photo every day (which is where the "365" comes from). I'll be maintaining the same exact thing at SmugMug while I decide which I like better (Flickr or SmugMug). The money all goes to the same place, and it's not Zuck or an authoritarian government. Posting a daily photo will be a challenge, but that's the exercise, and I paid upfront for a year of both services to do it.

2. I'll be posting code snippets and other programming-related stuff to the Dev.to account I set up last year and never got around to using.

3. I'm "micro blogging" at micro.blog. It's kind of like Twitter without all the advertising, algorithms, data mining, dopamine gaming, and troll farms. Money has to come from somewhere, though, so they require a paid subscription to post your own content.

4. I created @ErikSmith365 at Twitter for those of you who can't not Twitter. It will be primarily automated cross-posts from my micro.blog account and maybe retweets of skateboard tricks.

5. And, as always, you can sign up to receive an email update whenever there is a new post to Sitting in Oblivion. (I'm working on something for text updates, too.)

Have a spooky Halloween!