Shifting books at the library the other day, I found a used condom (not a fresh one, either) stashed behind a shelf of J.D. Salinger, so that’s how my week is going!

(Honestly disappointed. If it had been a few bays earlier it would’ve been with the Ayn Rand, which would make a much better joke.)

(This is all in service of a big shifting/condensing project I’m doing with a bunch of 20th century authors. Books on 21st-century authors have been crammed into just one aisle, it keeps filling up and needing to be pared down — all the while there’s space on the aisles downwind, where nobody feels pressured to weed those, even though we definitely don’t need to still have 3 copies of a Salinger biography from 1992.)

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Nobly resisting the urge to download + start wasting time with a new stupid phone game.

Not sure if I’ve written about this before — my laundry place has an app, and the app has Sponsor Tie-In Offers, where if you reach (let’s say) levels 20, 50, and 100 of Ball Sort Puzzle, you get 5 cents, 13 cents, and 32 cents of credit in your laundry account. I haven’t added IRL cash to the account since this program started.

All this wouldn’t be worth doing if the games were a chore, but they’re engineered to be tiny little dopamine factories. You get a never-ending succession of Tasks, complicated enough to keep your attention, short enough that you’re getting steady hits to the Task Completed! part of your brain. The whole laundry tie-in is really useful for me, because “there is no more laundry credit to be earned from this game” is a built-in threshold for “okay, time to stop playing and delete the app now.”

So I’m currently between games, and missing those dopamine hits. But I know from experience that “oh, I’ll just play five levels, then go back to focusing on comics for a few hours” is a no-go. Like Odysseus needing to be tied to the mast to keep himself from following the Sirens, I need to not have a game app installed to keep myself from opening it.

You gotta set yourself up for success.

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Had to bail on Yuletide this year. I gave myself too many end-of-year deadlines to hit, something had to go. (The others are mostly Leif & Thorn stuff — today’s goal is to knock out another round of Volume 7 editing + bonus art.)

At least I did it at the start of the month, instead of denying the problem until the last minute, so my recip won’t be stuck with “a pinch hit that somebody only had a week to write”!

I do have the prompt set open in another tab, in the hopes that I’ll have time/energy to write somebody a quick treat before the collection goes live. It…does not seem likely. But, again, setting up for success, just in case.