blog.tylerball

I’m taking a break

Since getting back to school after the Christmas break my life has been a total flurry of activity. I realised if I were to keep up with school work and The Journal while still finding time to make art and take pictures, something had to give.

You see, I’m the classic lazy internet person. I use it to kill time, but when “killing time” became “I’ll do that later, let me just finish reading through my tumblr dashboard,” my life away from the screen became smaller and smaller. My attention span has decreased, my interest in school work has declined (despite taking some very interesting classes) and my sleep schedule is perpetually fucked.

But there is a breaking point.

Throughout this period I’ve thought a lot about what Merlin Mann said in this “Most Days” video regarding his idea of the day.

“Unsubscribe”

He didn’t say alot, or get into specifics, but his sincerity stuck in my head. I asked myself “Which blogs would I go out of my way to read on its own?” and realised that most of my internet intake is meaningless crap, and this page is being reblogged into crap.

I think it’s the unrelenting-ness (?) of the internet that is to blame. Things like tumblr dashboards, twitter homepages and RSS readers push unrelated ideas right up against each other without room for the reader to contemplate and think about context.

Thus, in order to make this work, I have to unfollow and unsubscribe. It’s unreasonable to go cold turkey, so I’m stashing best friends and great thinkers in my Google Reader and unfollowing the rest. I’m going to keep twitter around because I find it useful fun for perusing on Tweetie while waiting in line. Either that or I could twiddle my thumbs and stare at people like you. Same goes for GReader and Instapaper.

This has already been a few weeks in practice and its going well. I just thought you might want to know why I’m not looking at your LOLcats anymore.

I’ll see you again when I have something interesting to show you.