Kyberwarlord

Now that we are few days out of the New Years, I can officially feel I can take a breath. The holidays have always been very difficult for me. They are always extraordinarily busy. Always breaks in the routine. I think that I thrive on the routine. It is how I do my best work, and how I make myself happiest. For the past few weeks, I have not had my routine, and I find that I cannot remember what day it is, what I should be doing, and what I did yesterday. I do not typically have this issue when I have my beloved routine.

Ringing in with the first blog post of 2026!

New Years Resolutions

1) Hate the Right Things

I will be the first to admit that I hate a lot. In the sense that I just find myself angry at people, places, and things a lot more than I should. I want to be able to direct this hate at the productive side. Not to hate the random person that talks too loud at the cafe, or the person on their phone in the movie theater. But for much too long, I have been taught that I cannot hate. I believe that hate can be productive, when directed at the right entities. In 2026, I will hate the people around me less, and hate the ideas and the actions around me more. Put in a nicer way, I want to be more patient with people.

2) Be Less Anxious

I have a very bizarre trait. In the time immediately preceding “going somewhere”, I tend to feel rather sick. There is always a pit in my stomach, telling me that something will be very wrong. I get this feeling before going on a night out with friends, before going on a date, before getting on a plane, among others.

The odd part about this trait is that this feeling completely leaves my body as soon as I actually leave. Once I am on the plane, or out with my friends, or on the date, I feel completely normal. It is odd. Maybe it is the waiting that makes me anxious. Maybe this falls into number 1 where I need to be more patient with others and myself. In 2026, I will try to be more patient with myself.

3) Read More, and Promote Reading More

I have always loved books and reading. Although my reading habits ebb and flow over the years, it has always been a consistent presence in my life. It makes me sad that people do not read more. It makes me sad that books and reading have become a rather expensive pastime. I bought three books at my local bookstore, only one was a hardcover, and two were new editions for old books.¹ The total exceeded $70. Of course, the used books market is always present, but I think it is a shame that the cost of such a beautiful medium is out of reach for a great many people. Particularly if one reads a lot.

File Formats

Speaking of expensive books: academic texts! I am currently working on the second volume of Studies in Russian Philosophy, Literature, and Religious Thought. It is arduous and time-consuming, but it is my baby and I am very proud to see it come to fruition.

Being a modern academic journal requires both a web and print presence. Although we do not have a physical journal, we do publish PDF versions of the texts. This requires some, let’s say finagling, to automate the process as much as possible. For reasons I have written about before, I try as hard as possible to build everything myself. I fail to see the value of a librarian’s education if we are to simply outsource it to the private sector. As much as I would prefer to start with a .md file, we must work with what we have, which often means a .docx file. We then pandoc it to markdown, where the initial metadata creation begins. Tagging headings in ATX style, making block quotes actual block quotes, et cetera. The worst of this are the flairs that people want. Epigraphs in non-latin languages, poetry, and the million other ways text can be represented digitally.

XML is great for some things, but it is very verbose and can be difficult to read. I would like a happy medium, where we can include stuff like epigraph in a markdown file. Perhaps I will build an extension with an entire publishing elements suite to aid in quickly building and customizing elements of an academic text. Could be a good project in the new year.

Citations

At the end of 2025, I did get my first citations. It is difficult to describe the feeling I had when I learned this. I just happened to be trying to explain what I do for work and figured that reading the article would be faster. When I found it on google scholar with 1 citation, I was absolutely thrilled. It is rather validating and nice to be recognized as someone with ideas worth citing. And then, just yesterday, I got a second citation. That made me even more thrilled. People actually read my stuff.

It is a good feeling. I suppose another resolution would be to write more both on the blog and in the press and for myself in 2026.