Entries tagged 'cat:Personal'

How I'm Dreaming Now Entry created on 2025-12-17 (edited 2026-01-04) author:steeph (364) cat:Dreams (4) cat:Lucid Dreaming (12) cat:Personal (12) cat:incomplete (20)

This will probably become one of those posts here that will stay unfinished for long without getting to the point. But I'll try not to care. But if I want to be able to finish it at some point I have to start it first.

Lucid Dreaming (I'll not include a definition here. But there are different ones.) was one of the subjects I spent years intensively studying. Both by reading and by experimenting with my own dreams. Most of my experimenting was about trying out different induction techniques. My success wasn't greater than that of most people attempting to learn to dream lucidly at will. Most give up without much success. I was too interested and not blinded by exaggerated claims enough to stop after a few months. To be honest and complete, I did stop after a few months and not as much success as I wished for. But after a pause of a few years my newfound interest in the subject was greater, lasted longer and lead to a deeper dive into the literature, science and culture of lucid dreaming. I hung out in the largest German-language lucid dreaming web forum and connected chats and TeamSpeak gatherings a lot. I read every recommended book on the topic, then continued with every mentioned book, then went to find even more on my own (and then stopped because most newly published "ebooks" on the topic at the time were of very low quality). I visited meetups, started the German-language podcasst together with Zitrom.I've tested and compared a lot of dream diary software (most, actually), filled books of physical dream diaries and built my own dream diary software. I took part in a project to fix up the German-language lucid dreaming wiki, assisted in research, edited and translated texts, helped fund projects, tried assisting tech and drugs, wrote articles for several blogs in the field, and so on.

I've also looked at every published lucid dream induction technique in 2014 that I could find in German and English sources, compared and categorised them and wrote and overview about them. I've tried many of them for four to six weeks at a time and picket out some for more experiments. This is probably the part most people who take an interest in lucid dreaming are mainly interested in: How to increase the rate of lucid dreams and improve their quality? I don't necessarily have any better answers to that than others. But I have a few years of experience of and for my own.

I've always struggled to keep my mind free enough from stress to be able to accomplish much in my hobbies (or anything beside my day job) when I'm working full-time. So while I'm working full-time (I am and have been since I stopped my intense occupation with the topic of lucid dreaming) I don't have any advances over any other motivated and interested person. But I did collect some experience in some key abilities that help to increade lucid dreaming rate. When I want to remember my dreams (and am not super-stressed and distracted), I do. When I have free time and sleep in I remember my dreams if I intenmd to or not. This is a good jump start to using my dreams for insight or lucdid reaming attempts. Every now and then I gain insight in the fact that I'm dreaming without trying, even in times where I'm not interested in my dreams at all. It's just something that happens in my dreams now. It can be part of the plot of a non-lucid dream, or I realise more of the possibilities that my dreaming state opens for decisions in that moment, or I have a full lucid dream worth taking a place in one of my dream diaries. Either of those are usually fun or at least interesting.

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[Still (Not)] Budgeting Entry created on 2022-10-30 author:steeph (364) cat:Money (1) cat:Personal (12) cat:Thoughts (70) lang:en (248)

~ 10 years ago I listed to a podcast about budgeting software for private households and learned how much it can help and how much of a difference it can make. Back then I had the time and energy to try out various software and pan and budget the heck out of my monthly income. But it didn't work. I didn't manage to stay in the budget unless I planned to not ever save anything and to not ever eat right. At the time I didn't realise how much more money people in regular jobs make than me.

Now I have a proper job, but not the time and energy to plan things right unless I make it my only hobby. I could probably even save money "for later" (whenever that will be). But it's hard for me to not opt for the more convenient and less time consuming option in almost every decision. And I can't stop myself from buying nice things to make up for the stressful life that I have otherwise.

Today I'm slacking off, after a quiet day at the home office yesterday because of IT problems that shouldn't be my business and therefor prevented me from doing much work. No checking out budgeting software today either.

But I need this lazy, unproductive time from time to time. Time and time again I have to remind myself that time relaxing is time invested in my health, which will be useful at a later time. For the time being, I keep ignoring that time flies by when I spend time instinctively satisfying my basic needs instead of using time efficiently and getting things done in time.

Sorry, people whom I have promised to do or make things for. I sometimes have the time, but not the energy.

I wonder how savings richt I could be if I would seriously start to budget.

Stop Liking What I Don't Like: Tiktok Entry created on 2022-08-01 author:steeph (364) cat:Personal (12) cat:Rants (3) cat:Shared (16) cat:Videos (4) lang:en (248)

Letting out some of my dissatisfaction with the modern web seems to become a regular thing here. Here's the take of somebody else on some of these things. It's a different angle than my own. But I agree with lots of it. Maybe it's just a video that you're supposed to watch for fun and move on. But I had a few thoughts while listening. It's a video on YouTube. But the audio is most important.

Absolute Unit - Stop Liking What I Don't Like: Tiktok

Most of the thoughts that I had aren't worth mentioning. But here is one anyway: I forget what I wanted to say. Anyway, I just felt like sharing the video anyway.

Also: "The Small Web" with independent small web sites doesn still exist. "Little corners on the internet", "hidden jems you can stumble upon", "creativity". It's not gone. It's just flooded by other web sites and forgotten while posting and reading on some few central web sited.

SOFA Entry created on 2022-05-28 author:steeph (364) cat:Personal (12) cat:Rules (3) cat:SOFA (1) cat:Shared (16) cat:Thoughts (70) lang:en (248)

Sometimes I find it helpful, calming and stress reducing to remind myself of SOFA. The principle "Start Often Fuck Achievements" is one I tend to live by and believe in. But I also often hold myself accountable to the status of unfinished projects and try to justify before myself the state of hobby projects that didn't end up looking as professional as they could have been if I had put 10 years more work and experience into them, even though that never really is the goal when I start a project. When I start to write some software, build or compile something, write a blog entry (or a series) or even just watch a movie series or read a book, I almost always do it for fun, out of interest for the subject, to pass time in a fulfilling way or to do something for somebody elese. If - or I rather should say when - I stop before something is "done" because it's not that much fun any more, I lost interest, don't have the time at that moment or the one I was trying to help is satisfied with very little or no longer in need what I was trying to do, then there is no purpose to continue these projects. When something is "done" could be seen as an arbitrary point anyway. Almost no hobby projects actually have a point were they suddenly become having been worth the effort and leaving nothing else to do. Even a jigsaw puzzle, to use a simple example, that actually does have such a sudden point of being finished (unless it's this one) could be aborted at any point and still have served the purpose of passing time and training skills. But most of my projects don't even have a predefined point at which they would be considered finished. So why feel bad if I abandon a project without having reached that point?

From the SOFA 🛋 web page: You can be finished with your project whenever you decide to be done with it. And "done" can mean anything you want it to be. Whose standards of completion or perfection are you holding yourself to anyway? Forget about those! Something is done when you say it is. When it's no longer interesting. When you've gotten a sufficient amount of entertainment and experience from it. When you've learned enough from it. Whatever, whenever. Done is what you say it is.

You can find different philosophical reasonings or rational justifications for how and why applying this principle might be a good thing, or even what it means to you and which rules apply to you. I myself am actually satisfied with just stating that it's a good idea. It feels good to remember. That's enough. This web site was founded with a similar philosophy in mind even though I had never heard of SOFA. I just need to remind myself of that every now and then.

Unpublished Poetry Entry created on 2022-02-03 author:steeph (364) cat:Personal (12) cat:Poetry (2) cat:World Wide Web (9) lang:en (248)

There was a time where my days were more influenced by poetry. A time where I ruminated more about feelings. At that time I was a regular reader of some web forums that were hardly or not specific to any topic. Do you remember those web forums? It may have been created as a place for a group of friends to interact online, but kept public, growing into a close community of so-called virtual friends. Or it may have been created to be a place to mainly discuss things around a single topic, like most web forums, but the off-topic sub-forum developed to be an important part of people's lifes, or even the main purpose to visit the web site. Or it may have been a web forum that was created for no declared reason, as a learning object for somebody who wanted to learn more about computers and web hosting. I loved those places. I still love the memories of them, and the thought that I was carelessly interacting with strangers back then, without the issues that are inherent in posting something to an unknown or wide audience of people today.

Anyway, I stumbled over short poems in 2008 that one user kept posting from time to time. Sometimes two a day, sometimes one a quarter. He was posting those for years and usually got no, seldom one, reply. I don't know what meaningful things people could have replied to them. They were just expressions of the authors feelings at the time, philosophical thoughts in a poetic dress, sometimes short stories, furious or gleeful, of events in the author's life. I didn't understand why they didn't catch more attention, expression of gratitude, attempts at answers to open questions or reader's thoughts from their own viewpoint. After all, they posted them publicly, in a friendly community, where it was expected to get all sorts of replies. Maybe the poems didn't often resonate with a lot of people. But many of them did with me. I never before thought that poetry would ever build a nest in my head. But theirs did, before I noticed. They hit a spot in my mind that I didn't know was perfect for reading and feeling poetry. I made a compilation of their posts in which I was sure to find a piece to cheer me up when needed, get the strength to make the right decision against my intuition when I knew my intuition wasn't a good guide, and all sorts of other little helpers in everyday life, as well as new thoughts I wasn't looking for. In that nest in my head there soon were my own thoughts and experiences, that, at some point, wanted to leave that nest. So I made some effort to form them into nice sentences, phrases, lines, sometimes rimes. That is, I started to write my own poetry. It felt necessary. Those thoughts had to go somewhere. I wasn't any good at it, which is why this entry is about somebody else's unpublished poetry, not mine. Mine fell to the ground as soon as they left the nest, and I didn't care for them enough to make them into something that I would have deemed worth backing up or copying to a new hard disk when necessary. I didn't even remember them when I typed the title of this entry.

But the poems of this unnamed author were good. I was back then and pretty much still am as uneducated and inexperienced in poetry as I every was. I have no clue what a good poem is. But their pieces are really good, judged by the effect they had on myself back then and the feelings that they are still able to produce in me today when I read some of them. One time I got into a conversation with the author over personal messages and mentioned the compilation that I made. They replied with a PDF of their own, a complete (up until that day) compilation. It contained many poems that they hadn't published. Some of them because they were too personal or could have the potential to identify them. Many of the published ones were very personal, too. But they didn't want them to be connected to his person in "real life". I promised that I'll never share them with anyone, no matter how much I think they ought to be enjoyed by or given the opportunity to help others. And that's the reason I'm writing this entry instead of posting the PDF. I guess it is considered wrong to tell somebody that there is a secret that you won't say anything about except the fact that it is secret. Allegedly that's no use for anybody. I don't think that's true. It has the use for me to have shared what I sometimes can't stop thinking about and, hopefully, payed a little bit of tribute to the anonymous author.