GHDR Report 0909: The Month of Motion

⊕captionAt the center of the current Sri Master Diagram for 2025 is this fortress-shaped core that summarizes what's most important to me as a person. Everything ultimately flows through this core.

Happy September! It's time for the 7th Groundhog Day Resolutions Report of 2025! I had declared August as The Month fo Change, as there had been a LOT of personal and professional stuff happening! Old life chapters closed! New life chapters beckoned! I was feeling a bit lost, though, how to proceed.

The Strategy

Rather than create a huge plan that covered all contingencies, I focused on what seemed certain:

• I wanted to prepare my blogging platforms for increased posting activity! This meant I had to steel myself to do the tech updates I'd been avoiding because they seemed very tedious. The old blogging platform, Wordpress, hasn't been fun to use for at least 15 years, and I didn't need that kind of drain on my energy.
• I wanted to start doing freelance design and community projects and write about them, retooling my professional toolkit for new work, and create more stuff to share! While doing Javascript development for the past 10 years has been fulfilling in other ways, I had not used any of my design skills.

In a sense, I'm returning to the David Seah of 2009-2014, though David Seah has become DSri Seah as I processed my gender identity crisis and worked-through the ramifications from being clinically diagnosed with a mild form of Autism instead of ADHD. So, the old activities of the 2009-2015 Epoch have evolved under new management. What's different this time around is that I've put my personal values first in 2025, trusting that my past experience would help me stay productive, professional, and focused. I want to live by my values, not chase metrics all the time.

Another new goal is participating in the open social web. This is a movement to take back the Internet from companies like Facebook and TikTok that exploit and control our attention for profit, with no shame in creating social harm as its toxic byproductFor further reading, this brief article by Ben Werdmuller does a nice job of providing additional details..

So that's a lot. I'm wise enough now to know that I couldn't do all of that in a month, so I focused just two things:

1. Fixing the blog
2. Figuring out what tangible projects I could do

Step 1. Fixing the Blog

My media strategy is to maintain the old davidseah.com* and current dsriseah.com sites as they have specific purposes, then create a new website for partipating in the emerging Open Social Web. I thought of using self-hosted Ghost 6.0, which has the ability to share content with all other Ghost instances as well as integrate with decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon and BlueSky. The problem? My current web server can't run Ghost because it is using an old operating system. And to upgrade to a new operating system, I had to update my Wordpress install so it would work on it. This would be extremely tedious.

Ultimately, it took three weeks to make these changes. I had to restore old local web development software I hadn't used in almost a decade and remember how it worked. I had to refamiliarize myself with the inner workings of my Wordpress theme and figure out why it was incompatible with the latest version of PHP. It was such a pain in the ass that I decided to brute force my way through it:

• Rather than convert the old Wordpress theme and keep davidseah.com running as it had, I created a static mirror of it and dumped Wordpress entirely. Good riddance!
• With davidseah.com now just a regular static html website, the server migration was very easy as I didn't have to do a lot of tedious PHP debugging and engineering.
• With the server migration complete, I now had a modern server stack that could run Ghost 6.0 and all the fancy new federated stuff.

With the heavy lifting out of the way, I then took care of the features that broke because Wordpress was no longer powering them:

• I remove the site search and commenting user interfaces
• I replaced the davidseah.com RSS feed with the one from this site at https://dsriseah.com/feed

Step 2. Evaulating Ghost

I made a test install of Ghost on my web host Opalstack, which provides a nice installer for it. However, as Ghost 6.0 is really new, I ran into some installation problems due to unknown technical requirements, but Opalstack has great technical support for people like me with an intermediate level of system administration experience.

After getting Ghost 6.0 to work, I evaluated it further. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Ghost is similar to Substack or Medium in that it is designed like a newsletter delivery platform with different levels of subscribers. Authors and other internet thought leaders use these platforms to promote and distribute their writing to generate a revenue stream as they grow their audience. The disadvantage of Ghost was that it lacked reach and discoverability in the way Medium (and to some extent Substack) have in attracting new readers who might decided to subscribe; with version 6.0 Ghost overcomes that by plugging into the federated ActivityPub network that powers Mastodon and other decentralized social media services. The problem? At the time of this writing, you can only discover other Ghost content creators through the "Network Readerer" provided by Ghost.

In hindsight, it makes sense that Ghost has to provide its own "reader experience", as there are no social platforms that really handle it despite them sharing the same underlying protocol. There are good technical reasons for this, but it isn't quite the experience I wanted. So I made the decision to not use Ghost 6.0 and implement an interim solution: use a service called EchoFeed to post new stuff to my BlueSky and Mastodon accounts. This inexpensive web service processes an RSS feed and posts updates to my existing Bluesky and Mastodon accounts, which was an improvement over Ghost's requirement to have a dedicated domain to create its own Ghost-only network. I had to rewrite my RSS feed generator to create short-enough excerpts that would fit within the character limit of a typical Bluesky post (around 300 characters), and then I added a simple RSS stylesheet so the raw feed didn't look like ass. But it all got done, and it works!

Picking Stuff to Do

Now that I had a "good enough" blogging solution working, I could write! But I needed something to write about, and that meant doing things that I could report on and share. It is through consistent and frequent sharing that one builds an audience. For the new chapters in my life, I wanted to reach several audiences:

• people who remembered and liked my old productivity tools and design approach
• people who are going through their own personal development struggles and are looking for allies and partners.
• people who are neurodivergent or socially isolated because the way they think is different than the mainstream.
• people who recognize the value of architecting and building communities that elevate people, not exploit them.
• people who value the integration of architect-level planning with the capacity to build and implement.
• people who value empathy-first human-centered design over more typical operational modeling.
• people who value multi-discplinary, cross-domain system analysis and design.
• people who resonate with my core personal values of authenticity, transparency, and curiosity as the basis for creating genuine bonds
• people who want to join my cause to create a self-sustaining society that embodies my personal values.

That's quite a lot of stuff, and I could only make the list after swishing around the cloud of thoughts over several weeks. I wanted to make some kind of bridge or anchoring map so I could visualize "where I stood" and "where I wanted to go", then imagine what I needed to build to make that journey. That reminded me of my 2009 and 2017 Master Vantage Point diagramsHere's a reference page for all Master Vantage Point diagrams..

In past versions of the Master Vantage Point diagram, I drew the whole map at once. This time, I broke it into several steps because I wasn't sure exactly what I was making. The list of audiences above were not as refined back then, and therefore I didn't have to consider so many factors at once.

Step 1: Brain Dump

First, I just dumped everything on my mind out on a piece of paper.

⊕captionClick to see it bigger!

This captured what was on my mind, and allowed me to see initial patterns related to my sense of self, my values, and the way I've changed since 2017.

Step 2: Expansion of Brain Dump

Then I transcribed the initial mind dump into a big Whimsical document, expanding the short notes into more detailed passages and filling-in missing details. I was able to see the overall patterns at work as "My path in hindsight" and "My path looking forward".

⊕captionSee the full-resolution document here

From this, I could then infer what my NEW DEVELOPMENT PATH might look like, which is the bottom section. In brief, it lists:

• My Core Directives - leading with emotion, supporting with logic, and truthfully expressing myself through authenticity, transparency, and curiosity
• My Community Development Goals for concepts like The Meadow and The Colony
• My Opportunities to practice core directives and community development

While this provided some clarity, it still wasn't anything like an Action Plan, so I continued to work through the process.

Step 3: Sri's Systems Cheat Sheet

I created a new map, intending to put Core Directives in the center. These are my deeply held innate values. Then, I started rewriting everything on pieces of paper and trying to see what patterns emerged.

⊕captionClick to see it bigger!

While this diagram is still evolving, I've decided that it's "good enough" for now. It's a cheat sheet that reminds me of how I function while also serving as a troubleshooting guide when I start to lose energy.

I can use this to derive a set of things to do that are actually result in meaningful work.

Tasks for The Month of Motion

Now that I have my blogging setup working, it's time to start producing blog posts! But that means I need something to write about.

To help keep things controllable, I've decided to work on a few "silos" of independent activities that work within the constraints implied by my so-called Cheat Sheet.

Goal 1: Maintain Project Silos

The idea behind project silos is to chose a few things to focus on that produce some tangible result that can be shown and/or shared with other people. This month I'm starting with four:

• Engineering - Software projects that can be completed in 2-3 days. Strengthening my software foundation builds new capacity and also helps with credibility as an architect who can develop should I seek new contracts.
• Community Building - Getting the local "what's going on in Nashua" nerd zine going, calling on interested acquaintances to meet and see what emerges. This is the kind of fun group connection that I crave.
• Swirling - Allowing myself to do short half-day explorations of rabbitholes that are UNRELATED to any strategic goal, simply to learn while playing. This is critical for nourishing one's own heart.
• Blogging - Sharing the goings-ons above in frequent blog posts.

There are other things I could be doing, but I don't want to overload myself. At the end of the month I'll have an idea of whether I can handle a higher load or not.

Goal 2: Practice Physical Motion

A big part of the Month of Motion is to maintain physical movement. I am getting older and noticing that my metabolism is slowing down. This has resulted a spiral of doom where I don't feel like moving, and this lowers my energy further, which lowers my motivation to start things, and so on.

In the past, I've tried to find new ways to motivate myself. I've experimented with finding different sources of energy based on having frequent conversations with engaged coworkers and peers. What I'm trying now is simply moving without thinking about it at all. I feel better when I am physically moving. It never occurs to me that I can just move, and I've discovered that "unthinking" seems to help. Part of my lethargy may simply be due to thinking way too much about how everything and everyone is connected with me, and this is what leads to crashes. In fact, this kind of thinking may be a sort of rationalized worry that gives me the false impression that I have everything under control when in fact it just gives me a headache.

But I digress! That's the report for September 2025! We'll see how I do on my goals. Thanks for reading!

INDEX of GHDR 2025 POSTS