{"id":666,"date":"2008-06-24T15:07:43","date_gmt":"2008-06-24T21:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nerdflood.wordpress.com\/?p=666"},"modified":"2008-06-24T15:07:43","modified_gmt":"2008-06-24T21:07:43","slug":"disconnecting-and-it-feels-so-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/disconnecting-and-it-feels-so-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Disconnecting, and it feels so good"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Being offline for an entire week has really put a lot of things into perspective. Coming back to a veritable information overload online with over 1,500 unread Google Reader items, I&#8217;ve decided that a lot of the noise I listen to runs completely counter to my goals in life. So I&#8217;ve decided to make a few drastic changes to my habits.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>I pared down my Google Reader subscriptions from 237 feeds to just 63<\/strong>. That might still sound like a lot, but the ones I&#8217;ve kept align well with my interests. Instead of multitudes of technology and gaming blogs, I&#8217;m keeping just a small handful of interesting gaming sites, alongside all of the writing, art, and politics blogs I followed previously.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Twitter and FriendFeed have been removed from my default Firefox home tabs, and from my bookmarks<\/strong>. This one was tough. But I&#8217;ve mentioned several times in the past that Twitter is an enormous timesink, and FriendFeed wasn&#8217;t getting any better. FriendFeed works well as a lifestreaming service, but being involved in the community wasn&#8217;t doing me any favors. The Twitter community is one I would miss; there&#8217;s a lot of great local people there that I have been really connecting with recently. Ultimately, however, they simply aren&#8217;t necessary.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Numerous bookmarks deleted<\/strong>. There&#8217;s quite a few social sites that I&#8217;ve had bookmarked that I never truly intend to visit again. Now, I don&#8217;t have to even think about it.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Art is taking a backseat to writing<\/strong>. I still love art and drawing; and to a lesser extent, photography (I think I really only like my wife&#8217;s photography), but I have to shelve the idea that continues to sit in the back of my mind that I could potentially be some sort of artist and\/or cartoonist. That isn&#8217;t the life I want. I predominantly love the written word, and that needs to be my focus more than anything else. This includes both fiction and blogging, my two most accessible creative outlets.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Since drafting my <a href=\"http:\/\/nerdflood.com\/2008\/04\/30\/i-demand-creativity-from-myself\/\">declaration of creativity back in April<\/a>, I haven&#8217;t actually demanded all that much creativity out of myself. I don&#8217;t know how many declarations or demands I&#8217;ll have to make of myself before I actually begin to live that life, but hopefully not too many. Otherwise, I&#8217;ll just be making a mockery of my own desires, and I don&#8217;t think any of us really wants that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Being offline for an entire week has really put a lot of things into perspective. Coming back to a veritable information overload online with over 1,500 unread Google Reader items, I&#8217;ve decided that a lot of the noise I listen to runs completely counter to my goals in life. So I&#8217;ve decided to make a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[252],"tags":[322,335,568,465],"class_list":["post-666","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-blogging","tag-disconnecting","tag-friendfeed","tag-twitter","last-post"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=666"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/666\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=666"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=666"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanielpayne.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=666"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}