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The speed of time

February 1, 2022 / Jesse / 0 Comments

It’s a commonly held idea that time seems to pass faster as we get older. That the seasons lasted forever when we were kids, and the years fly by now that we’re adults. That when we were young, each day felt like an eternity—because each day was a more noteworthy percentage of the entire time we’d been alive so far—and now that we’re older, a whole month can pass by in a snap—because what’s one more month when you’ve already been alive for hundreds of them?

I think this idea is wrong.

(Sorry kids, this post doesn’t apply to you. You aren’t allowed to read it I guess; it’s X-rated now. The X stands for “existential.”)

What kind of creator do I want to be?

January 1, 2022 / Jesse / 0 Comments

Recently, a video was released which set the long-dead Homestuck fandom aflame with drama. You don’t really need to watch it (I mean… unless you’re curious about the very troubled production of the Homestuck Kickstarter game). But to make a long story short: Andrew Hussie, the writer of Homestuck, made his first public comments on the Kickstarter game in years, and he unintentionally portrayed himself as a terrible businessperson and kind of an asshole.

This isn’t a post about that though. It’s a post about authors, how they engage with their fans, and how a bunch of stupid fandom drama made me ask myself: what kind of content creator do I want to be?

2021 Year in Review

December 31, 2021 / Jesse / 0 Comments

I always get sentimental about my projects and my progress with them around the new year. For the last few years, I would spend the last week of December writing up a Google Doc with a long analysis of how my year went, how I did in terms of accomplishing the goals I set for myself the prior year (which I usually failed to reach), and setting new goals for the next year (which, again, I would usually fail to reach).

Instead of doing that again this year, I’d like to put into practice some of that author transparency I’m always raving about, and share my year in review thoughts publicly, in blog post form.

So. What have I been up to for the last year?

I don’t want to die in my sleep

December 1, 2021 / Jesse / 0 Comments

I’ve never been drunk before.

Porydex – An Introduction

November 1, 2021 / Jesse / 1 Comment

I’m a big fan of the Pokémon franchise.

When it first came to the US, I was at just the right age of childhood for its megalithic multimedia-ness to consume me. I sunk hundreds of hours into each of the games, I collected the cards, I watched the cartoon—I even had a Pokémon fansite on Maxpages.com! (If you’ve never heard of Maxpages, imagine Geocities, but even less professional and even more overrun by little kids.)

At one point, my obsession was so great that I wanted to make a Pokédex website—a site that would list all 150 Pokémon and all of their Pokédex entries from each of the games. I even went as far as borrowing an “HTML For Dummies” book from one of my parents’ friends, so I could do it all myself the right and proper way.

… But I was just a dumb ten year old with better things to do (like playing Pokémon games for another billion hours, probably), so I didn’t get very far. Making a Pokédex website would stay a childhood dream in the back of my mind for the rest of my life.

I am not a rationalist

October 1, 2021 / Jesse / 0 Comments

Some time in early 2011, I discovered Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality—a Harry Potter fanfiction in which Harry is a child genius in math and physics and psychology and probability, and he gets his Hogwarts acceptance letter and finds out magic is real, and then he vows to use Science to learn how “magic” really works—among other ambitious goals, like wanting to reveal magic to the entire world, and end death forever by making everyone immortal.

It was unlike anything I had read before, and as a casual fan of both Harry Potter and nerdy things in general, I was hooked.

My productivity tracking over the years

September 1, 2021 / Jesse / 3 Comments

Like many creative people, I struggle with getting things done. Motivating myself to actually sit down and write the next page of my novel, or work on the outline, or read the next chapter of that book I said I was going to read… Somehow, despite having all these “things” I “want” to “do,” when the moment comes, it’s always easier to keep browsing the web for just a few more ~~minutes~~ ~~hours~~ days, or to suddenly realize I need to reorganize my entire hard drive.

This post isn’t to teach you how to overcome your own procrastination. There are countless self-help books for those things. This post is just about the strategies I’ve used over the years to track my own productivity—the successes, the failures, and everything in between.

(If you are looking for some self-help advice, I’ve read and recommend each of those articles/books linked above. They’re all great and full of great advice.)

(I don’t follow any of their advice, though, because I’m dense and stubborn and bad with change.)

Anyway, here’s a brief history of my productivity tracking methods.

Uhh, Reincarnation Goddess? Project Retrospective

August 1, 2021 / Jesse / 2 Comments

Thanks for reading Uhh, Reincarnation Goddess? You Forgot to Give Me the System, my semi-satirical, semi-serious LitRPG web serial that ran for the last half-year. I hope you enjoyed it! Or, if you didn’t enjoy it (or if you didn’t even read it), then I hope you enjoy this systematic project breakdown/beatdown in which I reveal that I didn’t enjoy it.

I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I should have.

New year, new web serial

January 5, 2021 / Jesse / 0 Comments

This is a blog post. I blog now, apparently.

Tomorrow I’m going to launch my first web serial: Uhh, Reincarnation Goddess? You Forgot to Give Me the System – a LitRPG isekai progression fantasy story that draws heavily on my love for the Cradle series and my desire to see more “rational fiction” that doesn’t ultimately end in disappointment.

Justice Never Dies

August 3, 2020 / Jesse / 0 Comments

Justice Ambrose Erkens, lying in his bed in the George Washington Memorial Hospital, struggled to keep his eyes open. The doctor was in the hallway, talking to Ambrose’s daughter Julia and her husband Lucas. Ambrose wished he could hear them. Their soft voices were barely audible over the beeps and hums of the various monitors in the room. Something the doctor said caused Julia to cover her mouth with her hand, eyes widening in—shock? Fear? Lucas took her in for a comforting embrace just as tears started to form in her eyes.

Jesse Pirnat Writes