I'm more of a thinker than a doer, but you can't not do things. Today went well, as well as I could have hoped anyway. I continued with yesterday's goal of not playing chess or hanabi at all and succeed in playing no other games as well. On the topic of balance I feel I did alright, with about 8 hours going to work and at least the designated 10 minutes about to go into writing. I think in order for it to truly start falling into the productive bucket though, it's going to need to shift more strongly away from thought-stream based writing and toward active world building and story crafting writing. Some of that can be thought based clearly, but it cannot really be stream of thought based, it has to be more like brainstorming. I did mess up slightly on checking email and facebook today. I think I'll make those two things my self-improvement goals for tomorrow: maintain the no chess, no hanabi protocol AND meet the facebook and email checking protocols (personal email 2x - morning and night; work email 3x - morning, noon, night; facebook 1x - morning); require at least some of the writing to be productive in the sense that it focuses on stories I want to tell using ideas that are worth sharing (either my fears & dreams, or cool sci fi ideas). I like Salvation, and I like that it is fairly political and topical in ways; in fact I rather wish that it were even moreso like that, which I guess is how I plan/hope to make the book I end up writing. I also like how it uses a slightly elevated vocabulary and makes up words and linguistic devices for ideas, but a book is definitely going to have ability to attain wider readership if its focused toward a less educated more child-like audiance. I should consider reading romance novels a la Twilight and 50 Shades, as that is one of the other best ways to get readership beyond Rowling's humor, which is truly great (maybe I should lean into cultivating some such style, even if it seems a stretch for me now).

In terms of balance and fulfillment and thrift and living my best life and whatnot... the overall perfection goal, I guess I should put sex back on the bottom of the list, rather than a traditional sexual relationship. I think the intimacy outside of physical intimacy is fairly well fulfilled, so even though ideally my goal is physical intimacy in the context of meaning, if I ever get down far enough on the list that I'm putting non-trivial effort into trying to get laid, I should at least start with that goal, rather than the more constrained version(s), which include criteria on emotional and intelectual intimacy and on mutual attraction - intellectual, emotional, physical.

At work I realized that Agna's NLS integration is largely just rewriting the loan service library in java, which is depressing, but I suppose there's nothing inherently wrong about it. I have other qualms about the infrastructure, like the fact that the Agna service isn't publicly accessible, but we're just passing through ops service without doing anything distinct at that level (nor does it make much sense to shoehorn some distinctness into such a level). Tomorrow I need to basically rewrite the two nls read functions that are used in the search endpoint of ops service. They make something like 5 or 6 db calls to nls currently and touch a total of maybe 7 to 9 distinct tables. I should talk to Gopal and/or Bala and probably even before that have a document with my plan and why I chose it and with some other options I considered and why I didn't go with them.

One twist on the black mirror virtual realities combined with Salvation's exile makes for vitual cells that still fully engage the criminal-victim-exile's mind, even if their body is atrophied or even sacrificed.

While not productive per se, it feels like tonight's writing sesh (session) was still a decent exercise in simply transfering thoughts to a more permanent medium. Back to Salvation (by some author - it's the name of a book).