New Project Ideas
2025-09-07
I've been doing well lately. I mean, I'm not doing anything extremely major. But I feel better because I've been having a better experience with getting basic chores done and staying clean and taking care of myself. I've also been writing more, which I deeply appreciate. I've been thinking a lot more about how I want to approach my body of writing and I have become more and more convinced that doing it on my own through this website is the best medium for my skills and creative potential. I've seen many others have great results with it and it's been a pleasure reading different people's blogs and other digitized writings. I think it says a good thing about the world: people have an ample opportunity to express themselves with technology. I've definitely been in a bit of a doomerist mood regarding my attitudes on technology, so having something positive to say about it is good.
But yeah, I've been thinking more about what I want this website to look like and part of that involves producing more writing projects. One thing I've been thinking of is making a section of the blog called "Orthodox Hermeneutics" (working title) where I write devotionals, which could be quite rewarding. I'm reminded of Griffin Gooch's Reality Theology as a decent inspiration for a kind of personal Christian writing I'd like to do. I'm no theologian by any means (except maybe in spirit haha) but I think it would be a great outlet for me to explore the mysteries of faith, salvation, grace, and all that. God expects us to wrestle with faith because of how little we can comprehend the sheer scope and complexity of the universe, so I expect myself to do a lot of that when writing devotionals. I don't really see any good devotionals in their own right. Many popular devotional publications feel too close to self-help than expressing any kind of applications of church doctrines and wisdom. No one really talks about the parts that suck about being a Christian and how hard it is to really come to terms with the exact nature of salvation. To me, it always feels like I'm being pandered or sold to and I hate that.
I had a few other trains of thought I wanted to follow (because this entry and yesterday's broke my rule of 15-minute meditations—holy funk I'm evoooooolving) in between writing today's entry, but I guess I'll just have to let them go. I have a lot of things I want to say, but I also know that I need to keep my catalog of thoughts and ideas as fresh as possible. Ideas are kind of like cooked meals or fresh produce: they go bad if you leave them for too long. So with that, I have to try my best to balance the cognitive load of unprocessed thoughts and doing the basics as aforementioned.
Regular readers can also tell that I'm getting more hip to putting pictures in these entries, which has been quite liberating for me. When IOKTIKN was on Substack, it felt important for me to put pictures in my pieces that felt relevant to the text. Typically this process was done by going on Cara and finding some sort of image that I felt encapsulated the overall disposition of the piece. While publishing on Substack, I was pretty into an oil painting aesthetic. Yeah, thanks Cara.