April 2024 Updates

Switch Flipping

📍 Location: San Jose, CA

The weather in the Bay Area during this season is like Mother Nature flipping the switch between cold and hot. She can’t make up her mind if it’s ready for full blown summer or cold rainy days. This comes as I think if lavender bushes will bloom for my wedding next month 🤞🏼. Like most things in life, these forces are outside our control. You prepare as much as you can and let the rest play out.

As with the previous months, I come with some website updates.

Inspirations

I carved my own space of curated inspirations. A table of websites that should technically be a mood board of the vibes I think could go with CraftByZen’s website.

For the past few years, I’ve kept a note of inspirational websites. These websites include blogs that I continue to follow, creatives showing their talents, and web design that makes me wonder.

In the future, I want to expand this to other types of inspirations. It’s driven by my own curiosity attractors.

The Stream

I created a separate feed called ”The Stream”. I wrote a short blog about it.

The stream is a personal feed of my thoughts on things I’m working on, interested in, or a random shower thought that might be worth putting some additional thought into. The stream is a form of expression, posting something spur of the moment, without the crowdedness of a social network like Twitter or Facebook. Don’t get me wrong, those places are great for comment and reply interactions. But I also need my own trail of what I’m writing and thinking about that’s not hammered by likes, comments, and other social features that I find distracting.

Classifieds

As part of an ongoing effort to engage my network, I want to use this opportunity for anyone to advertise on my newsletters. If you’ve got a big launch, trying to look for work, maybe find that missed connection, feel free to reach out to me.

• Keith Eastman looking for new opportunities
• Brian Smaalders is looking for new opportunities

Closing thoughts

As mentioned in the last newsletter, I’ve been practicing something along the lines of my theme, “The year of renewal”. In March, it was testing out different activities to break my dopamine addiction. A dopamine detox if you will. I realized how strong my pulls were and it will take more than a month to break those addictions, like doomscrolling and a constant feed of consumption. During April, I’m experimenting with renewed interests in language learning. I’m almost half a year with my streaks on Duolingo!

I hope you are all doing well and enjoy this lovely spring transition!