[INCOMING] #BelshawBlackOps14

TL;DR: as I’ve done for the past few years, I’ll be spending some time away from personal email, blogging and social networking during the months of November and December. You can see what I got up to last year here.

‘Belshaw Black Ops’ is the name Paul Lewis gave to my annual time away from personal email, blogging, social networking, and writing my weekly newsletter. The aim is to recharge, both mentally and physically. Due to Seasonal Affective Disorder and living at 55.2° latitude, I’m a different version of Doug in the winter months.

This will be my fourth year of ‘black ops’ and it will be the second time I’ve spent two months away from email, blogging and social networking. I’ll be reading more books, watching more films, and generally pursuing longer-form, less emotionally-draining things. Boone Gorges summed it up well when he said:

A life spent on Twitter is a death by a thousand emotional microtransactions. I want to be pouring these energies into my family and my friends and my work.

Unlike Boone, I’m not saying ‘goodbye’, but merely ‘adieu’ for a defined period.

So if you need to contact me in November/December, first think about whether it can wait until January 1st. If you decide that it can’t, then you can find me in the places I hang out for work (Skype/IRC, mostly). It’s also not hard to find/guess my Mozilla email address.

Oh, and if you’ve got any recommended reading/watching to add to my list, please do add a comment below!

Image CC BY-NC-SA Stéfan