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Online decentralization and Wikiwrimo

If you know me at all, you probably know about Wikiwrimo, my passion project of the past thirteen years. It’s been cited by sources all over the internet, the folks at NaNo HQ use it, and I’m pretty sure Wikiwrimo has helped me get at least one job.

If you don’t know this, you’re probably in that very large circle of people who play my secret Pokemon Go hobby but somehow don’t know about my less secret hobby of NaNoWriMo.

It’s a weird secret to keep because in case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t worked that much on the wiki in over a year. I mentioned this last year; I don’t need the money to keep the site afloat. I need help.

I’ve touched on the topic before, both in my 2021 post asking for Wikiwrimo help and in the “What has happened here?” thread on the NaNoWriMo forums in late 2022.

Now, the biggest challenge to running Wikiwrimo isn’t help. There’s a wider issue of decentralization online that is not unique to NaNoWriMo, and you’ve probably noticed it in every online community you’re in.

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Charlotte Pokemon regionals, or how I got gud in two weeks

I’ve played in Silph tournaments since PVP came out, where I’ve consistently reached Ace since season 2. I dabble in Go Battle League but have never tried to reach Legend for two reasons: one, because GBL is a commitment and I have other hobbies, and two, I strongly prefer pick six formats and chatting with my opponents over malding alone at pocket monster battles.

After going 1-2 in Orlando with zero practice and 2-2 in Knoxville with only a little practice, I had almost a whole month to prepare for Charlotte. Even though Toxapex was my MVP in Knoxville (and I felt justified with the rise of double fairy teams), it was also very hard to build around. I ditched my neon Bastiodon the week before Charlotte for a team of Medicham, Galarian Stunfisk, shadow Alolan Ninetales, Lickitung, Noctowl, and Lanturn.

The end result? 4-2 and finishing one win short of my stacked group’s lower bracket semifinals. That’s a significant improvement so let’s talk about the three big things that went into it.

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Why the Eisenhower matrix sucks

I love productivity methods, and I’ve spent far too much time evaluating which one fits my lifestyle best.

Lately my problem has been that all the non-urgent things that will eventually be urgent if you don’t take care of them in a timely manner.

Then there are the things I want to do for home improvement at some point with no real deadline, like figure out how to make my closets a little nicer and hang my NaNo posters and replace the track lights in my kitchen and over my desk. (Step one: figure out what type of lighting to put there.)

The Eisenhower matrix categorizes items into four categories based on the answers to two questions:

Is this important? That is, does completing this task satisfy some goal of yours, short-term or long-term?

Is this urgent? That is, does this task need to be done as soon as possible?

The answers to these questions let you categorize your tasks into four sections, according to proponents:

Important and urgent – these are impending deadlines, a broken air conditioner in the middle of summer. These are the items to take care of ASAP.

Important and not urgent – these are long-term hobbies, personal development, substantial home improvement, and most of the “I should do this at some point” items. These are the items to schedule and do.

Not important and urgent – these are the urgency effect items, the notifications. In theory these are the items to delegate.

Not important and not urgent – these are the time wasters that in theory give you no real value. In theory these are the items to just not do.

There are dozens of articles out there singing the praises of this matrix in professional and personal life. This post is not one of them.

If you’re using this matrix in your professional life, this system might works fine, especially if you can delegate a lot of the unimportant stuff. But I don’t buy that a regular middle-class person can delegate their way through their personal lives, especially a single person without much social support or spare income. That’s because some of the categorization of regular life maintenance from productivity blogs is detached from reality.

Let’s talk about the “important but not urgent” category. This category contains a lot of regular adulting items that aren’t immediate but will become pretty damn immediate if they aren’t taken care of at some point. Not renewing my passport will become a real problem when I have to turn down a cool international trip for that reason alone. Not applying for a homestead exemption will become a real problem when property tax payment time comes and I have to pay a lot more as a result.

Hobbies that contribute to long-term goals are usually in this part of the matrix. The goal of this matrix, proponents say, is to spend most of your time in this quadrant, the long-term goals area. But that’s not realistic for many people, and not just because we live in the age of distraction.

The “not important but urgent” category also contains a lot of adulting items, the category that these blogs like to label as “delegate”. Some of these items are technically delegatable. You can get groceries and essentials delivered. You can hire a cleaning person. You can also just not clean. But at some point these items catch up to you, and delegating any of these comes with a price tag. Delegating all of these is for the wealthy only, and this is where proponents of the Eisenhower matrix start to show their privilege; after all, Eisenhower himself had a staff to delegate to. Not everyone has this luxury.

Besides, getting groceries does satisfy a short-term goal of mine: the one of continuing to be alive and healthy, doubly so since I usually walk to and from the store.

A more realistic solution is to batch these boring adulting items. My approach to batching is to meal prep so I have five or six meals in the freezer at once. I’m extremely lucky to have a Flex Friday every month that I typically use to batch errands and other boring maintenance so I can take advantage of regular business hours, but not everyone is that lucky. For most people (me included), the “not important but urgent” category is filled with notifications and social media updates and things other people want them to do. Unless that notification is from someone coordinating something happening soon, it’s probably not immediate.

And then there’s the “not important and not urgent” category. Items I’ve seen in this category include mindless social media scrolling (fine, this one can live here), sorting through junk mail (uhhh), and other items that give you no real benefit.

According to this matrix my Pokemoning adventures would go to category four, not important and not urgent, and therefore I should just delete it, but look. Sometimes we just want to have fun, and my Pokemon hobby has improved my social life, which is important to me. Living your entire life in the other quadrants obsessed with productivity and goals means never letting go and having fun, and that becomes a problem when you get burned out on those goals and hobbies. Trust me, I know I have. Look at how Wikiwrimo barely got updated for a couple of years.

Sometimes you have to live a little, you know? Proponents will tell you that there shouldn’t be too many items in any section so that you aren’t overwhelmed.

If this method works for you, great, but it’s definitely not for me.

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NaNoWriMo 2021: The Virtual World Tour, Part Two

Since NaNoWriMo remained all-virtual this year, there was only one thing for a Sushi to do: Continue the virtual world tour. I kept the same rules as last year’s tour with one twist: No repeat visits. And yes, this includes last year’s visits.

This twist eliminated almost a hundred regions, but hundreds of regions remained to visit. I set out on the tour, hoping to visit at least eighty more. With four non-weekend days away from work throughout the month, comparable to last year, this felt like an achievable goal.

Most of the logistics are the same as last year. Here’s where I talked about last year’s virtual world tour.

Let’s get to it.

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NaNoWriMo 2021: The Writing Part

2021 was my 20th NaNoWriMo. I had big dreams after last year’s virtual world tour. I’d write a lot of words. I’d reconnect with Wrimos new and old. I’d write my best book to date.

But the panini still wasn’t done cooking, so once again, NaNoWriMo was all-virtual. Womp.

The world tour post is coming, so let’s talk about the writing first.

Two charts displaying my NaNoWriMo 2021 stats.

I won’t lie, this November was hard. For once I had an idea over 24 hours in advance: a rewrite of my 2019 NaNoWriMo novel, where a human is the test subject for an AI version of herself and everyone likes the AI version better. Despite a big start and reaching 50,000 words on day seven, I fell flat on my face after that, struggling for days at a time despite attending multiple write-ins most days. I thought one book would be enough to reach my goal of 100,000 words because the first draft crossed that line handily before I had any idea of the deeper story happening.

So I found myself dumbfounded when that book ended at 86,000 words. Now what? I couldn’t let a six-digit streak die. Heck, at this point I’ve written the double NaNo longer than I haven’t. I considered writing scenes that should have happened earlier in the book but decided against it; doing this would send me down the rabbit hole of editing. Instead I flipped through past NaNo projects in search of one that could use that NaNo magic with a rewrite and was disappointed when I couldn’t find any. (In fact, I couldn’t remember some of those stories in the first place. Oops.) In the end I wrote about a side character from last year’s novel, the main character’s best friend who moved before the main events of the story.

Wow, that book was a slog. I had a general idea but it became apparent early on that I should have set the book in the fall semester instead of the spring semester and wow, these teenagers were acting like miniature adults because all they cared about school and the main character got into Tetris so naturally I took a lot of Tetris breaks for “research” as the month wore on. All these mistakes I made early in the story hammered at me in the back of my head, but there was no way to go back.

I left the second book unfinished around 30,000 words. I need to figure out its general direction, but I’m glad I started it. This book is the other perspective of my 2020 novel, and having a companion book in the works will be nice if the first one gets published.

The current state of the world led to some interesting questions in my novels. For context, both books take place in the real world’s San Francisco Bay Area, but the scifi book takes place in the near-ish future and the young adult novel takes place now-ish (minus the pandemic). I was hesitant to nail down the exact date of the scifi novel because it would open a lot of questions: How old were the characters during the pandemic? What else has happened to the world since then? Has society become more or less divided?

The scifi novel’s characters work in tech, and as I wrote scenes of them in the office I found myself thinking things like “Would they even be in an office? Will the pandemic shift the world that much? Will Silicon Valley still be a prestigious place for tech ten or twenty years in the future?” These are questions we still don’t have an answer to, especially as certain major tech companies aren’t embracing a fully remote company. This comes up more in tech for folks who have to work with the hardware. (Hey, someone had to build the AI body.) These questions never came to mind when writing the first draft in 2019 because they didn’t have to.

The young adult novel brought up similar questions. It takes place in the same universe as a novel I’ve drafted three times since 2015, when the American political atmosphere was starting to become more divided but not as starkly as it is now. A lot has changed in those six years, from the apps teens use to what we think of people we disagree with.

I also found myself thinking of how (or whether) to address the current political climate. Doing so would require placing my novel in a set point in time. For now it’s easier to write in an alternate universe where the darkness of 2016 and beyond never happened, particularly 45’s administration and the pandemic. Depending on how long I edit this novel, continuing to do this will look naive without explicitly showing the alternate timeline. Writing from a position of privilege and hiding from the present would dismiss the suffering of others who want and deserve to see themselves represented.

Which leads to my other lesson and question from this NaNoWriMo: There’s a lot of worldbuilding involved in writing contemporary fiction. Since both of these take place in some sort of alternate timeline, I need to establish some rules before editing. What happened with the pandemic and 45’s administration and that aftermath (if those things happened)? If they didn’t happen, what did happen? How did that change society?

And how can we use those possibilities to change our society for the better?