February 2023 Digest

A lot of what I thought was necessary revealed itself to be unnecessary. As a result, much time & energy has been spent on undoing the things that I did.

The whole affair was quite silly, really. I really gotta stop watching Youtube and taking advice from it. There is great advice on there, it’s just that no amount of great advice will do anything unless I actually incorporate such advice into my life.

Trying to use objectively “good” elements turned out to be futile. In the end, the answer comes from within, not from without. There is simply no way for other people to know what I want and need. I have to figure it out myself and/or with the people who are actually involved in the matter.

At the simplest level, it’s something like this: I will probably not use affiliate links on my sites, especially not something like Amazon’s. It’s not that Amazon’s is “bad”; it’s that I couldn’t make it fit into the format of things I already had and wanted to have in the future.

Putting affiliate links goes beyond simply adding the links. At a rudimentary level, just by adding the links and adding disclaimers (required by law), a site gets a different look and feel.

(I’ve seen various sites using Amazon affiliate links that ignore the legally-required disclaimers. The way I read the contract, it sounded like, technically, there had to be a “paid link” disclaimer near every link.

Maybe I am just too chicken to ignore that part and use affiliate links in an aesthetically-pleasing manner…)

Anyway, long story short: probably no affiliate links for me, especially not from Amazon, because then the “paid link” disclaimer would have to be so numerous and conspicuous that my sites would look quite ugly. And… visual cleanliness is nothing to sneeze at.

And similarly, other things that I thought were necessary will disappear into history. And history will soon be forgotten, as it often happens.

Pure Fiction short stories have been collected in Band 2. There will, most likely, not be another Band for quite some time. I am struggling with the many WIPs that I have left sitting; they are all long novels.

Sponge is gradually settling into long-form. I should have seen it sooner that I prefer long-form anyway. I keep falling into the trap of “what people like,” over and over again, when in reality, it’s more like “what people supposedly like.” Who are “people” anyway? There is no one people.

Anyway, with the longer episodes, I have decided to make the schedule regular: every other week. This will be announced in the first March episode.

“Every other week” felt like a much-too-slow pace, back when the episodes used to be shorter-but-still-fairly-long. Now, every other week seems perfect.

아임 드리밍‘s season 4 is continuing. This podcast, too, will undergo structural changes. But that won’t begin until season 5. And the changes will be announced at the end of season 4.

After the recent guest post on 고막사람, it is back to the regular cast, Omak and I.

Blog/일기 keep on going. I feel that I should give these two more love. They have been sitting on the back burner as I restructured other elements. Now, I will have time and mental space to give them extra attention.

In the background, the translation for MODERN GROTESQUE TIMES continues.