This week, I've been re-orienting my online life so as not to spend the next 4+ years staring directly into the void, enjoying famed director Ridley Scott's hilariously candid interviews in the run-up to Gladiator 2, watching a curiously grounded David Lynch film about a man who drives his lawnmower from Iowa to Wisconsin, doing my quarterly rewatch of the Mother of All Demos 1968 (the mouse! Hyperlinks! Remote desktop! Collaborative editing! OMG!), and playing with VB6 lovingly recreated in the browser, feeling wistful about the state of rapidly-iterative development in 'the good old days' I never got to experience first-hand.

On the first topic of de-coupling from the news/social media doomscrolling to which I recall being especially prone from 2016-2020, I have a plan to double down on an approach that has worked to wean me off of social media sites like Reddit and HackerNews: 1) light curation and 2) consuming in as basic a format as possible.

My project for next week is to expand on a cloud function I made earlier in the year that emails me a daily feed from HackerNews, so I know I'll get a rundown and not miss anything important, but as it's read from my email inbox it's unlikely to spin me out into doomscrolling. And even though I'm moving away from Gmail, I'm also thinking about redesigning an app I made that presents a simple view of any newsletters or similar feed-based content sent to my inbox. I feel this app is one redesign away from being my main solution for keeping up to date enough to not want to go on media sites and become tempted to doomscroll.