Last night I wrote this blog post:
I decided not to post it, instead putting it as a comment on the kid's blog, where, not surprisingly, it sits unpublished, awaiting moderation, and presumably will do so forever.
I write with furious contempt pretty much every time I bother to read anything on Hacker News these days. The
economically inevitable decline in quality hit, and it hit hard. That's easy to understand. What's harder to understand is why I was reading Hacker News in the first place.
I needed to get about 10 hours of work done yesterday; instead I had one of the most epic self-indulgence days ever. None of the work I had to do was hard, and some of it looked quite enjoyable. But I didn't do it. I played video games all day, I was on Twitter and Hacker News - both of which are sites I've been on much less than usual recently - and the weirdest part is I only noticed it was happening a few times. It's as if I went into these little trances and found myself procrastinating for hours.
It's very much as if that happened, in fact, because that is
exactly what happened. I listen to hypnosis mp3s daily, partly for the health benefits, and partly for the hypnosis itself. Recently I've been listening to an mp3 about increasing self-discipline. Most of the time, when you're hypnotized, you're not conscious, almost by definition, so I haven't actually analyzed the content, but I bought it because most of the other mp3s from the same source are pretty good.
Unfortunately, I can only say "pretty good" there, because I'm actually a very thoroughly trained hypnotist myself, and I've noticed them doing a few counterproductive things in some other mp3s. So I gave this self-discipline mp3 a closer listen. The reasons are technical, but I believe this self-discipline mp3 is doing a number of
seriously counter-productive things and actually resulted in me spending significantly more time goofing off than usual.
I've been thinking about setting up a side business in hypnosis and creating mp3s with a higher standard of quality. This experience is pushing me in that direction, just because it's making me think I'll need to record my own mp3 on self-discipline anyway. I put out a couple little hypnosis products last year, and got some good feedback. However, I'm undecided for now, and working on a lot of other stuff, so if it happens, expect a pretty modest little side business at most. I actually created the first draft of another hypnosis product recently, for similar reasons - there was nothing good enough on the market - but I haven't yet turned that first draft into its second draft, let alone a finished product.
All I'm saying here, basically, is stay tuned.
