Sam Gentle.com

Failure

I fell asleep unexpectedly early last night and didn't write anything. This shares a common theme with most of my failures in that something happened around the time I was going to write, either social-related or a sudden attack of tiredness. I think a sufficient level of sacrifice would also prevent those failures, but I'm not convinced it's sustainable long-term or in line with my true priorities.

Separately I've had a class of... you might call them semi-failures, or lack of imagination as far as specification goes. I've been writing every day, as defined by the time between when I wake up and go to sleep. Unfortunately, sometimes (like during timezone transitions) the mapping between my day and an Earth day gets a little bit out of whack. For that reason, my posts have been a little bit behind schedule; I've still been writing them every day, but the date they're labeled with is a few days behind the date I write them. Effectively, my dates and Gregorian dates have gone out of sync, and I suspect I'm in need of some calendar reform.

Related problems with posting to my own schedule are that the time when new posts will appear is somewhat unpredictable for others, and that it's easier for me to accidentally miss a day without an absolute reference for where I'm up to. So ironically I need a solution that is simultaneously more consistent (so posts appear regularly) and more flexible (so it can survive occasional life intrusions). Luckily, I have just such a solution prepared.

I'm going to shift from writing in arrears to writing in advance. That is, I'll alter the site so that a post only becomes visible if its publication time is earlier than the current time, and I'll write (up to) one day ahead of the time each post will be published. This should mean a more consistent reading experience without really changing my writing experience. I'm also going to change the post date on the articles to midnight UTC, which is 10am here. That should mean that in the event of a disastrous good-night's-sleep-related accident, I'll still have time to make my deadline in the morning.

Doing things this way also provides the opportunity to front-load posts if I expect to be away from a computer for a little while. I'm not sure if I'll actually do that, but it's nice to have it as an option. Meanwhile, I need to actually make the transition to normal calendar dates, which I guess means having my own annus confusionis.

Look forward to a big flood of posts today!