J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

Author: J.D. Moyer Page 2 of 101

J.D. Moyer is a science fiction author and electronic music producer from Oakland, California.

No More Building on Sand

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On June 16

In Culture Rants/Shares, Personal Updates

When Twitter went downhill, I wasn’t sure what to “do” about social media. Many of the authors and artists I followed fled the platform, and my feed became a cesspool of vile posts from accounts I was not following. Though my Twitter/X feed has become more sane, I rarely go there anymore. The company dismantled TweetDeck, my preferred mode of viewing and posting, and I just lost interest.

Until then, Twitter had been my preferred social media platform. I posted to Facebook and Instagram a few times a year, usually to promote a new release. But I was on Twitter daily, posting at least a few times a week, sharing thoughts, opinions, and retweeting items of interest.

Post-Twitter, I decided not to rush the process of finding my next “main” social media site. I signed up for Bluesky, Threads, and Mastadon, but I didn’t spend much time on any of them.

I’d been burned. I’d spent significant time on Twitter, and my experience had been ruined by Elon Musk’s ego purchase and atrociously poor management (firing top engineers, dismantling moderation teams, inviting fascists and bigots back to the platform, alienating advertisers, and generally running the company into the ground). I didn’t want to repeat my mistake by hopping on a new bandwagon.

Then, a few weeks ago, I had a realization. I already had a “main” social media site. It’s this website. It’s self-hosted WordPress.

If I have something to say or share, long-form text is usually my preferred mode of communication. Sometimes I like to share a picture or two, but usually it’s just words. So a WordPress blog is perfect. People can comment on my posts if they want, or message me. And I can share posts to different audiences on Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn, depending on the subject matter and vibe.

Many of my family and friends visit my site occasionally to see what I’m up to. I keep up with them by following their posts on whatever social media site(s) they post on, or just call and say hi (a Gen X thing). So my blog does function as a social media site, in addition to being a place where anyone can read my posts or learn more about my fiction writing and music.

And I’m no longer building on sand. No one can rug pull my own site, or buy it and ruin it. Nothing lasts forever, but WordPress.org is open source software. I own my own domain and my own content. Being the sole moderator, I can edit or remove old posts or comments whenever I want.

So welcome to my social media platform.

Reading in Crockett

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On May 19

In Fiction Writing

I put out the message on all my social media channels but forgot to post here until now. If you’re in the Bay Area and looking for something to do today, I’ll be reading at Passionate Feast Vintage & Book in Crockett at around 2pm. I’ve chosen an excerpt from The Last Crucible (Book 3 of Reclaimed Earth) featuring Aina, an awakened cybrid, one of my favorite minor characters in the series. Also reading will be T.K. Rex, Douglas Henderson, and L. Ann Kinyon.

How to More Easily Use Your Own Power

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On May 8

In Metaprogramming

Sometime in my forties I realized that all major choices could be boiled down to two paths:

  1. Empowering action (research/planning/implementation)
  2. Passive paralysis (inaction, worry, pathological perfectionism, denial, etc.)

And yet all too often, I still catch myself taking the second, objectively worse path. Why? Because empowering action requires the expenditure of energy, mental focus, and the risk of failure or poor returns. So I look for “outs” that will exempt me from difficult actions and effortful tasks. These might look like:

“That’s out of my control or influence.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“That’s way too hard.”

Success or improvement in every aspect of life is achievable, and there are multitudes of people who have already achieved success in those areas who will happily share the exact steps they took, often for free. But it’s often disappointing to hear their “answers” because an accurate depiction of how they achieved success invariably includes specialized knowledge, many hours of focused work, and/or difficult behavioral or attitudinal shifts.

So how do we get past those mental barriers and expand our personal power?

For me, the answer is twofold:

1. I accept that what I want may well be within my reach, but not immediately and not without effort. I reject modes of thinking that lead to passivity and living with low standards.

2. I build motivation and focus by letting go of some wants and desires that aren’t consistent with my core values, and double down on what’s really important to me (relationships with family and friends, mental and physical health, artistic work and integrity, making a good living and co-providing for my family, saving democracy, the habitability of our planet, etc.).

That’s my thought for the day.

Posts in the pipeline:

  • some pictures of our new house
  • a fiction reading May 19th near a lesser-known bridge
  • taurine!

Take Your Wins

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On April 29

In Metaprogramming

Often when something good happens to me, I just take it in stride. I don’t want to get too excited about any particular success because fortune rises and falls. Everything that goes up must come down. And even if the general trend in any particular area is up/good/optimistic, I often find myself anticipating or worrying about the inevitable declines and losses.

Recently I decided this is completely wrong-headed.

Kia, who recently lost both her mother and uncle (and her father a few years earlier) helped me change my mind. She, too, had been focusing too much on loss, especially witnessing end-of-life declines in health, wealth, and mental clarity. But gradually, over the course of many conversations, we both changed how we were looking at things.

In the end, we all lose. There is no winning at life. You can die well loved, rich, with many achievements, and even with most of your marbles intact. But you still die. There’s no getting out of this game alive.

You can live a “good life”, contributing to the world, caring for your family, making lots of money, having adventures, living by whatever values you hold. But in the end we’re all still dead, unable to appreciate any nice words people might say about us after we’re gone (and of course it can go the other way too).

With this in mind, I no longer take my wins in stride. I celebrate them because there is no winning in general, there are only individual victories and positive moments.

Of course some wins are bigger than others. Graduating from college is a bigger deal than completing a single assignment. But I am no longer interested in deferring my sense of joy when something goes right. Just because something will inevitably go wrong tomorrow or the next day, just because there’s always a bigger hill to climb, doesn’t invalidate that something good or great just happened and deserves a moment of appreciation.

So take your wins, big and small, in every life area. Acknowledge them and feel good about them. They’re all we got.

What I’m Doing to Stay Organized in 2024

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On April 14

In Getting Organized

We recently moved to a new place in San Francisco, which created a cascade of to-do items. The move coincided with the death of my mother-in-law and our daughter starting a new school–three big life changes at once. It’s been a challenging time, but I’ve managed to not drop too many balls, even in the thick of it. Here’s a quick overview of the tools and systems I’m currently using to keep track of everything.

Operating Systems, Calendar and Contacts

My main computer is currently an iMac, but I use a Samsung phone. Fortunately, MacOS and Google play well together. Google Calendar and Contacts synchronize well with their Mac counterparts. I remember the bad-old-days of manually deduping contacts after failed synchs (looking at you, PalmPilot, and you too Now-Up-To-Date Plus). The only contacts I handle manually are a csv file of addresses for holiday card mail merges.

Task Management

I started using the free version of Todoist a few years ago, and now I’m happily a paid subscriber. I haven’t found a better option for handling repeating to-do items, subtasks, and task sharing, all with an intuitive interface and perfect synch between phone, desktop, and web.

The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to get Google Assistant to add a task in Todoist–something I’ve tried to do a few times while driving. Anybody know how to do this?

File Management, Backup, and Synch

All of my personal, writing, and music files are on my iMac, which I backup to external hard drives, Dropbox, and Google Drive. I get by on the free version of Dropbox but I pay $2/month for extra storage on Google drive, which I use to backup and deliver large music and database files.

The only exception to that is photos, which I take on my phone and backup to Google Photos. I gave up on Apple’s photo management years ago–it’s just too weird and unwieldy.

Notes

About a year ago I abandoned Evernote and switched to a combination of Google Docs and Google Keep. We use Google Docs for shared notes like shopping lists and I use Google Keep for personal notes. Keep is very primitive, but it synchs flawlessly. Evernote suffers from feature bloat, note duplication while synching, and relentless upgrade notifications. I still use it to reference an occasional legacy note, but I’ve pretty much given up on it.

I would only ever use Google Docs for notes and other temp docs. My friend’s sister lost an entire novel on Google Docs (or possibly Google Drive). Google’s tools are cheap and convenient, but they’re constantly deleting data, features, and even entire products and services with little warning or recourse. That’s just how they roll.

Money

For years I used Quicken and entered or downloaded every transaction. This worked great for account reconciliation and taxes, but was a subpar system for planning future cash flow.

Now I just use spreadsheets. I use a Google Sheet that pulls stock prices to track investments and sector percentages. For cash flow I use an OpenOffice worksheet with a block of income and expense categories that I copy and paste into each month. At the end of each month I reconcile the amount with my actual checking account balances. It’s a simpler and messier system than using Quicken, but I can quickly see what the next month is going to look like (and if I need to move money).

For taxes I just download a csv from each account for the entire year and categorize the expenses manually.

Goals and Plans

For years I set annual goals, but recently I switched back to a “one goal at a time” system. I keep a big spreadsheet of what I call “life purpose projects” with different categories (health, household, financial, writing, music, etc.)–basically everything that I’m working on. But then I designate ONE main thing that I’m trying to accomplish each quarter. In 2024 Q1, for example, my main goal was to complete and revise a rom-com script (which I did…more to come on that topic).

I also track monthly and annual big-picture to-do items and targets related to work, money, travel, etc., but it’s been clarifying to have a singular “goal” with a defined timeline.

Paper

Most of my bills and statements are paperless, but I do keep some physical receipts, and there are always a few bit of important paper to keep track of. I limit myself to a single file box, which works pretty well. Everything else gets shredded.

Physical Objects

Okay that’s too big of a topic–I’ll save it for another post!

I’d be curious as to what you use and what you no longer use to keep track of it all, feel free to comment below.

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