myrtana.sk news October, 2022: 2022 sleep, deep summer sleep + antispam

It has been a quite long time since I wrote news article, from May. But not this year as I thought, 2022, but 2021 which I named The End of the Road. And it was…in a deep sense. This year has been such chaos, not only endless lockdowns, slowly losing civil freedoms, censorship, the conflict between Russia and Ukraine and generally the world degrading and starting to appear like from Czechoslovak communist era. The chaos is everywhere and much of the world is decaying. And I feel it and have to constantly find a balance, just observe it and do not invest myself in it.

That also meant I had to really think about how I want my life to look like. What currently works and what doesn’t anymore. I question everything, even the existence of myrtana. Myrtana was created with a goal in mind and also with a set of values I imagined my ideal life would express. I review these values from time to time and agree or disagree with them. Sure, the site is not developing as fast as I originally intended, but it just mirrors my life. I need to feel a passion, because this is a passion project.

While I created bogofilter library last in August I think, today I added model and methods to CMS to handle spam like a person and not through using ActiveRecord and SQL queries to mark. Management still requires Rails console and there are rough edges, but I can publish comments much faster than every two or three months. And also I have to get better bogofilter models, currently it catches like 95% of spam which is good, but not perfect. There is a surprising number of bots just posting weird link as a body, always the same. Still, I’m not thinking to add a captcha, automatic antispam is much better way currently.

Much harder was loss of creativity for much of a year. I felt really discouraged to do anything except like two weeks in total. I didn’t have motivation, energy and fear, and following preparations and discerning what is important played a part too. I decided as always to stop consuming so much information, but this time I’m more confident in myself. I noticed huge global loss of creativity which means I can do my (not perfect) stuff and ignore much of the rest. The other explanation is I don’t react to creativity of other like I did before which means the same for me.

What are the plans to the future? Immediate would be to do design changes. I woudn’t say I’m tired of dark theme, not at all. But it is getting outdated. Background images shows mostly thinking or dreaming people which is I tire of. Also Webb telescope has launched recently, so that background is outdated too. And I want to make text placement nicer.

Currently I see the future in a optimistic way. I had to do changes in my life though. My taste in music changed, I don’t watch many movies and series anymore, don’t play video games, don’t watch videogames, no videogames news. Watching almost no podcasts. I really wanted to make space in my life to write, draw and play music, code freely, but also spend time exercising the body and just feel passion and relax by doing nothing and it seems I just got to that place. I worked hard and spend insane amount of hours to let go of things mentally and rebalance…and be fine with that. Not to be afraid to be left behind whatever that means.