The Wedge is a thing I've used in the past. Being somewhat of a starter but less of a finisher, I've had to find ways to make my projects go ahead. Something that works for brain-only projects has been a genre of music I've just found out is called lo-fi beats. It does help tune out a lot of distraction, lets me get into that fabled "Zone" and stay there a bit longer. It was only the name I wasn't familiar with and now I've found it and it's been a godsend.
When working as the IT guy for a SME software house I suddenly realised what I'd been doing for the past 15 years was "sort of almost programming" but without any of the basic education, and my 36 hours bursts of keyboard-bashing were what happens when you're in The Zone. Then as I got out of my 20s / 30s, The Zone got harder and harder to get into.
For example - look - if there isn't an image here, it illustrates how my work collapses into a heap if I'm not on the ball. There's supposed to be an EvilCorp logo just below this. If there is, I levelled up, if it isn't, then I'll have gotten into a paint program and spent half a day fiddling with art concepts instead. Stuff Happens...
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| PS: Yeah, I modified it. But I did it. |
At some point I found a thing I started to call Wedging. (Yeah I know I'm making this shit up as I go - but (as my wife often says) - don't we all?) I found that I needed a wedge - a tiny chink, something I could start on - and then hopefully nothing would disturb me for a few hours while I tackled the wedge project, and then suddenly I'd have slipped into the zone and worked until. . . *sigh...* adult life yanked me out of it. . .
So a wedge to me is one thing that's small enough to tackle, zone or no zone, and so draw me in to the rest of the project. With the Bastard Gate / Not So Bastard Gate thing, that wedge was the turning one of my foldaway thirty-buck folding workbenches into a larger stable work table with the attachments for the drill press, a power distribution panel, and aids to cut the wood for the project.
(And yes, I'm aware that those workbenches now cost over forty bucks but the first - exactly the same - one I ever bought cost $19, and the two I now have cost $29 at the time. O tempus, o argentum!)
Anyway - the project was a) interesting enough and b) involved enough and c) simple enough that I could use it as the wedge to get me wanting to Zone into the design and building of the fence panels. I'd had a Zone moment a few weeks earlier where I sat down to Tinkercad and scaled all the materials and built the NSBG in virtualis and printed that off and it got the landlord on side, but then some cold wet weather happened and the spark drowned...
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| About 1/2way through but had to stop for heat, and also cat now owns it not I. |
But then there were several HOT days. It would have been just as hard to get out there and work in the blazing sun as in the cold and rain, but a) I'm way better in warm weather and b) I have tarps and the skills to rig up an undercover work area almost anywhere.
So the rigging was part of setting up a workspace I was comfortable in and setting it up was the wedge, and I slipped from looking at a print of my idea to scribbling designs on the backs of pieces of plywood I was going to slice and dice into panels, cutting to length all the main structural supports, and lining up the hardware ready to go.
This wedge lasted past another week of ColdWet interrupting the project and carried me to part two of the NSBG as well. So to me, this method has value.
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| It got me this far, and more recently, even more. A new article on this is due pretty soon now. Probably. |
And now to lo-fi.
I've got some Lo-Fi Girl streaming on the system right now, helping me keep my head from asploding with all the different ideas I'm wanting to put (and will forget the majority of before I finish this sentence) into this article. Thanks to Sabrina (AnswerInProgress) for this video that made me realise why this kind of mentalspace elevator music works for me.
I don't know what it is but I can hear a pin drop at fifty paces but not hear correctly a conversation right next to me if there's the slightest background disturbing noise. With music I can let myself gloss over smaller disturbing noises but louder unexpected or disturbing noises are distressing. Sometimes so shocking that I have to settle my heart rate again and pretty much all hope of retaining a train of thought go down the shitter.
Our street is a highway. No matter what time of day or night, when an empty B-double rattles and BANGS its way over the road bumps, any semblance of relaxation or calm are gone for 10 - 20 minutes, music or not. And music seems to shorten that unsettled period.
Anyway - the Segue.
Because - there's another kind of wedge when we experience these kinds of mental paralysis. And now I'm talking about some rather more important things than whether we got our fingers pinched in a Bastard Gate that kept falling over. Stuff like:
- Why am I sticking to this old 3D printer? There are so many to choose from nowadays asks Thomas who has a great Youtube channel I'm subscribed to and follow.
- How can I decide on an EV when the technology is changing so rapidly?
- Why should I care about waste pollution when it's the corporations are the main perpetrators?
- How can I make a difference to sustainable energy use? It's like pushing manure up a steep hill with a pointy stick, and without anyone else seemingly caring.
But there's always always always a wedge you can find.
Thomas is someone I admire and respect, and he illustrates both sides of the quandary perfectly in that video, one by intention and the other because it's inherent. At the time that Jo & bro Prusa started making printers, they made what has turned out to be a bit of a gold standard in 3D printers, the Mk3. Had Tom succumbed to choice (and the implications of there being future better choices) paralysis, his channel might never have gotten underway and become the go-to resource and great business that it is today.
And by today, as he says, there are MUCH better 3D printers to be had - even for a complete beginner that just wants to make geegaws for a folding workbench they're producing. But for them the paralysis lies in whether the Prusa Mk3 will be fast enough to keep up. Or will a new Bambu Labs Carbon X1 be faster, easier to use, and turn out to, like the Mk3, stand the test of time?
Two years ago, people were still getting turned away from buying an EV because "the batteries only last three years before having to be replaced." And it was bullshit propaganda. Because back then, people who'd had an EV for five or more years - and still hadn't reached the point where the batteries needed replacing - were living proof that the three-year lifespan was fearmongering bullshit - but their testimonies just got swallowed up in the much louder flood of bullshit.
If you were to buy one of the cutest and cheapest global market Chinese EVs right now, you'd have a decent little EV right now and be reaping the running cost savings right now and when (IF!!!) the need for a new battery pack ever came up in the time you owned the car - right up to perhaps twelve years' time the way reliability and lifespan of battery packs has improved - all you'd have been paying in maintenance is tyres and some grease on the few bearings that aren't these days fully sealed. By the time battery replacement comes around, there'll be quite literally dozens of different battery types available along with conversion kits to suit the Ora Good Cat, recycling and refurbishing of Lithium ion battery packs is already fast approaching being an established process, and you'd have agonised over this choice for no good reason.
Plastic waste pollution is another of those things where we're paralysed. But YOU can make a difference. I have a bit online at PTEC3D blog and will be adding articles there and at my Youtube and Odysee video channels simultaneously. The hangup here is that I haven't quite got a wedge into photographing and videoing everything I do and then have the skills to stitch those into coherent stories. Add to this that I have COPD/emphysema and I can't finish sentences without gasping for air so I'll have to add TTS voiceovers and you can see where I'm going - yet another skillset to teach to an old dog, and it's taking time.
But I can show how a community can recycle, or a single person can recycle, at tiny scales and generally not so much for profit as for public awareness of the issues and solutions.
The sustainable energy issue is another thing, and along with it the ridiculous posturings of the energy companies trying to paint a picture of how expensive they'll make what is in essence totally FREE energy once the infrastructure is paid off. Look - you can say what you want but when two articles, written within a day of one another, and about exactly the same topic, say the same thing in two such radically different ways - you know there's a very large quantity of bullshit involved. See my post on this a few weeks back.
When one reporter can say the energy industry is in for a billion-dollar shock and the other says that energy companies are in fact reaping a billion-dollar windfall - and they're both referring to the exact same thing - then you know. You know it's exactly the same tactics as tobacco companies used to obscure the truth by burying it in bullshit, the same tactics as car manufacturers are using to bury EVs in bullshit so that they can extract every last cent out of their old factory tooling rather than do the societally and environmentally responsible thing and eradicate ICEVs right now - then you can see energy companies doing that exact same bullshit flooding right now as well.
And THAT'S how you can always make a difference, just by even talking about it, sharing articles like mine, getting people to sign those petitions and mass emails online, and doing the same. From victims of those bullshitting bastards to activists making a change is a few swipes / types on a keyboard, a few words here and there. We can ALL do that. After applying the Paralysis Wedge, that is.
The wedge to all these particular forms of paralysis is information.
Don't just read the bullshit artist that says it's a "billion dollar shock," read some more about it and discover that it's US who are going to get the billion-dollar-gold-plated shock shafting from this - and then GET MAD, GET ACTIVATED, AND KEEP THE BASTARDS HONEST.
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