J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

Having More Fun With It, Getting Better At It (Instead of New Year’s Resolutions)

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On January 3

In Metaprogramming

This year I wasn’t in the mood for revving myself up for ambitious goals or New Year’s resolutions requiring a lot of discipline. My family is recovering from Covid, we’re still in quarantine, and the best I can do is try to avoid being a complete grouch. None of us got seriously ill and I am grateful for that. Knock on wood, but we’re over the worst of it as far as I can tell.

Anyway, instead of making any big New Year’s resolutions, I made a simple list of activities I want to do more of in 2022. Activities I usually enjoy. Writing fiction, making music, the usual suspects…

But also asking myself — can I have more fun with it? While also getting better at it?

My life needs more fun. But not hedonism. I don’t want to get drunk and fat. But more fun and playfulness, yes. It’s been a fucking serious couple of years.

So my motto for 2022 is to have more fun with it, while getting better at it. That applies to writing, making beats, making money, parenting, getting healthier, playing chess, everything.

That’s all I got: a simple plan.

Wishing you the best for 2022. May this year bring you health, wealth, joy, and many excellent experiences.

A Merry Covid Christmas to You!

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On December 24

In Personal Updates

I’m in good spirits despite probably having Covid, as does my whole family. I was exposed a couple weeks ago, but thought I had dodged a bullet despite having some minor cold symptoms. I tested negative three days in a row via home tests, then on day five after exposure got a negative PCR test. All clear, right? You would think. But a few days later Kia came down with symptoms, including a fever, and tested positive for Covid. Our kid is sick too, though she has yet to test positive.

We’re all vaccinated and Kia and our daughter are already feeling somewhat better. My symptoms are 90% gone. Of course it’s possible that I actually just had a cold and am about to get Covid, but that seems unlikely. My suspicion is that Omicron can spread even if a person is testing negative. But if I do/did have Covid, I’ve had colds that were much worse.

I’m sad that we have to quarantine and won’t be able to celebrate Christmas with the grandparents, but we’ll doing something in January to make up for it.

Treatment plan has been C, zinc, bromelain, black seed, and lots of garlic.

This and That

  • Finally started The Witcher on Netflix. How did I overlook this show? It’s so good (at least for a D&D/high-fantasy fan such as myself). Might have to read the books and play the videogames as well.
  • I have a new music release out today, a single from the forthcoming Momu album Moons of Jupiter.  Momu – Io (Remixes) opened at #16 on the Beatport Breakbeat releases chart and the Jondi & Spesh Remix is featured at #3 on Beatport’s new Hype releases. The other remix is from Nosk, one of my favorite breakbeat production teams.
  • I’m freelance consulting more than I have in a long time, doing Salesforce config and project management, and well as maintaining Access and SQL Server projects. That’s only leaving me a couple hours each morning for writing, but making good progress nonetheless on some new short fiction. The project management work is harder to batch than I’m used to, but I’m building up the skills and discipline to silo the consulting work into blocks and protect my deep work/creative time.
  • As always, a reminder that my new novel The Last Crucible published by Flame Tree Press is available for sale. And a huge thank you to everyone that has read and/or reviewed any of the books in the series, or mentioned one to a friend.

I hope you are having a great winter holiday. And if you celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas to you and yours!

Doing <> Training, and Natural Talent is Not Holding You Back

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On December 4

In Metaprogramming

Following the World Chess Championship, I’m starkly reminded that there are many levels to the game that I will never personally experience. Magnus and Ian are freaks of nature in their ability to recall and analyze hundreds or even thousands of games, to perform deep calculations extremely rapidly, to rival the play of even the most powerful chess engines.

You and I will never be that good.

At the same time, I know perfectly well that I can get much better of chess if I put in the time and effort. A lack of natural talent is not what’s holding me back. In a few months my ELO went from 500 to around 1100, and though it has plateaued lately, I’m fairly sure I can crack 1200 if I learn a few more openings, and maybe even a gambit or two. Of course there is a hard wall out there somewhere, some natural limit that I will never surpass no matter how much I study. But I’m nowhere near that wall. Nor are the vast majority of most people pursuing improvement in any particular skill.

That said, just playing more chess isn’t helping me much at this point. Nor will writing more words make me a great writer. Same for making more beats and becoming a great producer. In those areas, where I’ve achieved some level of basic competence, I’ve already made whatever gains I can make by just doing the thing. To get better, I need to actively study, to learn new techniques, to analyze and correct my weaknesses, and so on. It’s easy and comfortable to believe that doing=training, but it’s a lie.

Active learning is uncomfortable and makes me feel dumb. When I actively learn in chess (by studying and trying new openings, for example), I lose more games, and my rating goes down. When I try to write in a genre besides science fiction, or write music that isn’t dance music, I feel like a fish out water. But those experiments stretch my skill boundaries. And when I come back to my strengths (the London system, science fiction, dance music), I come back with a broader perspective and more tools.

Don’t give up just because you’ll never be the best. Being much better than you are now is achievable, and hugely satisfying.

Be Stupid Faster

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On November 20

In Metaprogramming, Personal Updates

I’m in a life phase where I’m doing a lot of things for the first time. Kia and I are remodeling our Oakland house. I’m managing projects and coordinating teams of software developers. I’m parenting a teenager. In all these cases, the stakes are high, but my levels of knowledge are low (or at least have significant gaps).

I’m finding some success in a new strategy: admitting my ignorance as quickly as possible. While I’ve never really minded “losing face” because I didn’t know something, I often took pride in trying to figure things out on my own. And sometimes I’m reluctant to bother other people with questions because I don’t want to impose.

But my life circumstances don’t have room for such delicacies. These days I’m asking, and asking aggressively. Of course I’m still going to make mistakes and take wrong turns, but I need to make as few mistakes as possible, and correct the mistakes I make quickly.

That’s my thought for the week! I’ll eventually have time for longer blog posts, but my to-do list is insane at the moment.

Life Update

  • We continue to enjoy life in our San Francisco high rise apartment. I’ve noticed I have an enhanced sense of security here. Some of that has to do with moving to a city with less gun violence, but I think most of it is the environmental psychology effect of my primate brain thinking I’m high in the trees.
  • While dance music has taken a back seat this year to everything else, Loöq Records is spinning up some new releases for December and 2022. We’ve landed a remix from Nosk, some of my favorite breakbeat producers, and I can’t wait to hear what they come up with.
  • I completed a first draft of a new novelette, “Alexandria”, a far-future archeology expedition featuring cuttlefolk, dogkin, and a godling construct of Anubis.
  • All editions of The Last Crucible are officially released. I’m so happy to have a science fiction trilogy in print (and digital, and audio book). If you haven’t yet checked out any of my Reclaimed Earth series, please consider doing so. And if you enjoy the books, you’d do me a huge favor by leaving a rating or brief review.

Vaccine Hesitancy and the Pursuit of Purity

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On November 14

In Culture Rants/Shares, Health/Body-hacking

Recently I unsubscribed from Chris Masterjohn’s YouTube channel. While previously I’d found his perspective on vitamin D and other nutrition research to be interesting and helpful, the fact that he got Covid twice and still won’t take the vaccine was just too much for me. I just don’t have any patience for vaccine hesitancy when there is so much evidence that the vaccine offers protection against severe disease and death from Covid. I don’t disagree with Masterjohn that some supplements (such as vitamin D and zinc) can also offer protection against severe Covid. And of course contracting and surviving Covid offers some natural immunity as well. But as I’ve written about before, continually rolling the dice when the stakes are so high just isn’t a good strategy. There are just too many cases of robustly healthy people who take all the right supplements getting severely sick from Covid.

So what’s behind vaccine hesitancy? Academics who have looked into the issue associate vaccine hesitancy with values such as purity and personal liberty. Many people are willing to accept the larger risk of Covid (or measles, or other serious diseases) to avoid the much smaller risks of adverse side effects from vaccines.

It makes me think of other health areas where priorities get mixed up in the pursuit of purity and optimization. For example:

  • Suffering from dehydration because you don’t want to drink tap water (which is mostly safe — though in some parts of the U.S. it isn’t)
  • Avoiding the sun so much (to prevent skin cancer) that you become deficient in vitamin D, and miss the blood-pressure lowering/nitric-oxide-releasing benefits of direct sunlight
  • Not getting enough calories or nutrients because of strict dietary restrictions (organic-only, veganism, etc.)

Tolerating some levels of impurity (in air, water, food, radiation and chemical exposure) can ultimately improve health outcomes.

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