My Actifit Report Card: March 13 2021

Didn’t post an update yesterday, partly because I kept accidentally turning Actifit off–I ended the day with a lovely 702 steps if my memory serves, which is definitely less than the real number–and partly because it was rainy and dreary and I didn’t get much done.

Progress on My Pacifism Project

I say that, but my work on my book on pacifism is going along well. It was never going to be a particularly long book. It’s going to be a short collection of essays that lay out a case for pacifism, and I’ve already laid out most of these.

The foreword talks about my motivations for writing the book.

The first “chapter” contains an academic explanation of what pacifism is.

The second “chapter” is my particular brand of pacifism.

Then I launch into a series of essays.

First, on the reasons why pacifism reduces violence, even when it seems paradoxical. (tentatively: “The Ocean of Violence”)

Second, on the practical powers pacifists can use to change the world and defend themselves. (tentatively: “Powerful Peace”)

Third, on a definition of violence and an explanation of why it is objectionable. (tentatively: “On Coercive Force”, modeled after my greatest influence, Leo Tolstoy, and his essay “The State”)

Then I intend to write a further essay on each of the following topics: law and justice, the flaws of coerced morality, and the concept of human rights, though these may be subsumed into each other. Law and justice, in particular, may make their way into “On Coercive Force” because of the way it’s shaping up.

The final chapter will be called “Pacifism and Heroism” and serve as a conclusion to the book and a synthesis of the previous ideas.

Progress on Exoworld

Ironically given my work on pacifism, I’ve started working on more combat stuff for my game Exoworld, whose development you can follow more closely on my blog @loreshapergames. Unfortunately, I’ve been hitting some blocks and bogging down in things, which makes me thing that I might need to do some other foundational work because I keep hitting progress blockers.

Other Activities

I’ve been doing a lot of work for my classes at the start of the week until this week rolled around. This week I’ve decided to procrastinate and put everything off until nearly the last minute.

That includes getting the textbook and doing the reading for this week. As far as textbooks go, it’s actually quite good and I might actually buy it instead of renting it (thanks Amazon free trials!). It’s theoretically an education textbook, so I was very leery of it because most education textbooks are utter nonsense and not worth the paper they’re printed on, but it seems to be worth actually reading and contains some information that’s helpful. Because I’ve had more experience in the classroom than I did when I was actually studying education in my undergrad program, some of my affinity for this book might be that the author and editor seem to think like me. But I’m not going to let that get me down.

I also hit ten thousand steps today, a number that stemmed from pacing around with my tablet and trying to read while having serious issues paying attention to the text. I’ve been spoiled by audiobooks, but I don’t learn quite as well from them and I enjoy having highlighted sections to reference for classes in case I need them when I write a paper.

I also have been continuing my series of posts on Jordan Peterson’s books. I’m burning out on them fairly quickly because I was doing one reflection on a post from 2018 on 12 Rules for Life and then one new post on a chapter from Beyond Order that just came out each day. To keep myself from hitting the point I hit this week where I’m just not continuing my blog posts regularly and posting sporadically, I’m going to just do one or the other each day. I’m almost out of the 12 Rules for Life posts anyway, which will make the project easier.

On my more professional blog (@kwilleywrites or kwilleywrites.com, pick your poison), I missed my goal to post something for Fiction Friday. I need to decide if it’s worth splitting up a story with interludes from other pieces or not, because I’m just taking snippets of the Exoworld intro fiction and slapping them onto the blog.

The problem is that the piece I’ve been posting is WIP and I figured I’d get enough written to update this week.

I did not.

I’ve been using a different plugin to track visitors to my blog since updating. On one hand, I think it’s subject to certain anti-tracking measures because it runs as Javascript, but on the other hand it frees me from using any of the big analytics systems and it covers a very different set of data from what Google Analytics used to give me.

According to that, I get about 20 views a day on my writer’s blog and 40 on my personal blog (thanks Jordan Peterson), but Cloudflare says that I get roughly ten times that. I’m not sure whether to trust my dinky little WordPress embedded plugin, which is almost certainly low-balling me, or Cloudflare, which I would guess includes a lot of inauthentic traffic when it does its analysis.

In any case, it’s funny to see that I’m actually moving literal gigabytes of data according to Cloudflare. It also means it’s probably time for me to smoosh down the resolution of some of my embedded images so my web host doesn’t have issues.

This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io

Walking