#and then i'm going to post my goals and resolutions here to keep myself accountable

[hairtusk]

so very excited to start on my new year's goals that i might actually tomorrow. i'm bored of waiting for an arbitrary date. i want to begin anew anew anew.

[likegemstone]

Some gestures! I'm going to try to work up to doing some quick gesture drawings every day--people and animals--and the biggest challenge will be doing it traditionally instead of digitally. I'll be posting some of them here so instagram doesn't forget I exist, and also to keep me accountable.

I'm trying a new technique for my new year's resolutions where I decide on them ahead of time and spend a few months working up to them so by the time 2024 rolls around I'll have some momentum going! Daily gestures is just one of those goals--writing daily, posting more regularly to my social media, and building a creative community around myself are some other goals!

What are some of y'all's goals? What do y'all dream about and strive for??

[bee-saucee]

Fanfic Writing Resolutions 2024

With the start of 2024, I wrote out some of my personal writing goals for the year and thought I would share them with you all! I don't usually make posts like this but I hope I can inspire other writers to make goals for themselves in this next year and have a greater sense of accountability for myself.

Some writing accomplishments from 2023

I learned a lot in 2023 as a fanfic writer and I'm proud of what I did! I deleted my Wattpad to start fresh with a new writing style, posted my first three fics to Ao3, applied to two zines and got accepted as a pinch hitter for one, grew my Tumblr account, started a Twitter, commissioned several artists including my current pfp for a new look, and started writing more consistently again!

This post is pretty long so here's the short list:

Create and refine a writing process to have a written process outline that makes writing simpler

Watch a video and take notes on a writing topic at least once a month centering predominantly on craft but also on storytelling

Apply to at least two zines

Post on Tumblr every other week

Build out my Twitter

Keep better track of my writing habits 

Bring fun back into the writing process

1. Create and refine a writing process to have a written process outline that makes writing simpler

When I refer to my "writing process" in this goal, I'm talking about 1) my outlining process and 2) what goes on off of the page such as how often, when, and where I'm writing.

To address the outlining portion of this goal, I plan to intentionally try out different outlining methods. My balance of plotting and pantsing is off but I can't find that balance until I just try stuff out! I want to try a lot of existing outlining methods and hopefully combine the facets that I like about various methods I've tried over the course of the year to get a mix that is tailored to me and how I like to write. I think it is also important to think out and write down the outlining methods I try so I can replicate or change my process iteratively. I've found that not having a outlining process that makes writing easy and enjoyable for me is the biggest reason why I've started and dropped so many projects this year!

Regarding the off the page process, consistency is my main goal. I just kind of squeeze in writing whenever I can or feel like it but that means that writing has often fallen off my radar. I want to set up specific times to write every day, but to be frank, I'm not sure when or how the best way for me is to write as I haven't experienced next semester's schedule or my post-college routine at all! I'm fine going with the flow on this one, but again, I've gotta be intentional about it.

2. Watch a video and take notes on a writing topic at least once a month centering predominantly on craft but also on storytelling

I've been writing stories ever since I was a kid but this year is really the first time I'm trying to do it more seriously. My public school and even college education has not fully equipped me to write creatively so I recognize that I have to learn about all of the parts of creative writing I don't know!

3. Apply to at least two zines

Contributing to zines have always been a super big dream of mine so I will keep on monitoring upcoming zines and hopefully find two I can apply for this year! Getting accepted isn't even the goal for me, I think that there is a lot to learn in the application process itself and I can't get accepted to a zine unless I try!

4. Post on Tumblr every other week

It's really important for me to build out my social media presence but I also value the lower stakes creative fun I have on Tumblr! So the goal is to write in a chill manner as I currently do for Tumblr and grow my reach at the same time! I just love making people smile with my stories.

I think the best way for me to post consistently on Tumblr is to introduce writing warm up exercises into my writing routine and share them on Tumblr. I can also use extra time that I have on breaks to stock up a bunch of Tumblr posts I can share in the future.

5. Build out my Twitter

I don't get Twitter at all and I'm not a super big fan of it but this is such a big space for the bnha fandom! I think I definitely am holding myself back particularly when it comes to zine applications by not having a Twitter presence. So I hope to not only understand twitter but post at least once a week and retweet or comment on posts at least every other day.

6. Keep better track of my writing habits 

Both when I write consistently and inconsistently, I wish that I kept better track of how I spend my writing time because it is so precious. I want to use the often limited time that I have to work on the projects I truly want/need to work on. I'm thinking that logging what I write through Google Calendar could be easy and effective, but we'll see!

7. Bring fun back into the writing process

When I've tried to focus more on "professionalism" and "writing well" I sucked all of the fun out of writing and I basically stopped for a year or two. I don't want that to happen to me again because writing is so therapeutic to me so I'm going to focus on editing less for craft and instead keep my eye on the concepts and feelings behind what I write.

Writing is so so hard but I think that fanfiction is such a beautiful and powerful form of creation. I hope that I can keep up with these goals to continue to participate in this creative process that I have come to love dearly and make more content that brings a smile to people's faces.

Thanks for reading! Check out my masterlist for more.

[motherhenna]

getting consistent w Goodreads + reviews

hey all! So one of my 2024 resolutions has been to read more consistently--specifically the goal is 1 book per month, at least, which probably sounds pathetic to a lot of people but uhhh ya girl has ADHD and depression for days so the bar is low lol. Anyway, one of the ways I'm planning on holding myself accountable and keeping my brain / recall sharp is to start writing reviews (however short) for every book I finish. The good news is that I'm already ahead of schedule! I've managed to complete two books since the start of the month, and followed through on reviewing them via goodreads. I know a few of my lovely long-time mutuals follow me on there (much love to you guys), though otherwise I wasn't sure how interested the rest of y'all would be on my book opinions. Feel free to friend-request or follow me over there, as I'll hopefully be more active going forward. Here's a sneak peak:

Would also be open to posting my reviews on here too, if requested

[acompassrosa]

January 2023 Wrap-Up

I am not usually a New Years resolution person, at least not in January, but this year I had a few things that it made sense to start with the new year purely because I knew having a fresh start in my planners would help me stay on target:

Create better routines, especially around journaling, tarot, and other self-care/reflection tasks.

Actually use more of my tarot collection-- in particular to spend time with the decks that I keep saying I want to spend more time with/get to know but put aside in favor of familiar favorites.

Figure out a means of mediation that works for me.

So I set up some trackers and got started.

2022 was a chaotic year for me on basically all levels. Lots of good things happened, but so did a lot of not so good and just plain disruptive things. I am really hoping to ground myself and set myself up with better, more well practiced, tools this year.

This blog is factoring into this as a bit of an accountability measure: am I doing the thing?

In January the answer was a resounding yes. I used nine decks, none of which were my standard go-tos, and made some new favorites out of the bunch. My tarot tracker spread in my journal was robust enough that I could see trends in what cards came up-- Fool, Eight of Coins, Queen of Coins being the most frequent fliers: take the steps, do the work, build the dream! And I used my journal(s) frequently, making a point of jumping back in after missed days-- a big improvement over abandoning ship the first time I got a cold or something came up and feeling too guilty to return.

Didn't touch the meditation goal, though I have found that whenever I run across a TikTok or reel with guided breathing I am super on board for that. Maybe there's hope for me after all?

Anyways, that's the idea. I'm going to add a picture of my tarot tracker for the lolz here. I may do a post on my experiences with the decks I used in January at some point.

[mbti-notes]

Would you mind explaining why you see Rey as ESFJ and Kylo Ren as INTP from the new Star Wars? I've always seen Rey as a stereotypical ISFP action hero (quick to adapt to new situations, hands on, a fierce sense of 'moral right' borne of self), and I'm undecided on Kylo, but thought he exhibited FP tendencies -- a struggle between self-identity and rationality, that indicates a F/T imbalance.

[con’t: In reading Leonore Thomson’s book on personalities, the Fi-dom section brought Kylo to mind – unless prone to developing Se/Ne, the IFP fiercely guards their sense of ‘identity’ / self against outside influences and becomes rigid. Isn’t that what he’s doing, in differentiating himself from his parents and refusing to see reality any other way than what he has decided it is, based on his feelings / experiences?]

Judging by the debates I saw online, there doesn’t seem to be any general consensus on either character, which is interesting. It’s a trilogy and the character development beats are scattered and difficult to piece together. And there were several blanks that I had to fill with my own speculation. I didn’t really enjoy the process of typing these characters, but I did it because I kept on receiving requests week after week ever since the first movie came out. I found the character development arcs shallow and poorly paced, and the resolutions were too pat to be very interesting. I reviewed the Kylo and Rey scenes several times, with different personality types in focus each time, in order to ensure that the function pieces fit together to my satisfaction.

      ***** Major spoilers ahead! ******

Kylo

Although I think there are weak points in her book, I don’t take issue with Thomson’s description of Fi doms. I mainly disagree with the motive that you ascribe to Kylo. I don’t think he’s being protective of his identity, I don’t think he cares about identity, in the way that Fi doms do. I will concede that he gives the impression of being a rebellious teenager in defying his parents/mentor/birthright, but defiance alone does not make him Fi dom. Pretty much everyone (even some animal species) goes through a stupid teenage phase of rebellion at some point in their life, and some people never properly get past it. To me, he looks like a stuck-in-adolescence INTP: entirely too full of himself and blind to everything else.

One little point made it difficult for me to settle on a type. Leia was absolutely convinced that Kylo was “manipulated” by Snoke/Palpatine to join the dark side, but there was little indication from Kylo, Luke, and Han that this was actually the case. Should we trust Leia, since the movie portrayed her as being much more powerful than meets the eye, or should we trust Kylo’s subjective experience of himself as being fully and completely the master of his own fate? I go for the latter. If anyone’s going to be prone to blind belief, it’s a mom who doesn’t want to admit that she’s lost her son to her enemies. And I see no compelling evidence that he is a person who’s easily manipulated, emotionally or otherwise, which is a big strike against F. If you see such evidence, please present it.

The most revealing aspect of Kylo’s development was found in the conflicting and exaggerated accounts about what happened with Luke that led to the destruction of the Jedi academy. If you grow up being fed a constant diet of legends about galactic warfare from the Alliance, you’re naturally going to think of the Jedi as the good guys and the Empire as the bad guys (as we, the audience, are supposed to). However, if you’re Ben Solo, you don’t experience the Jedi as good guys, at all. He was “abandoned” by parents who were too busy/neglectful/high-minded to properly care for him and he was “abandoned” by a supposedly saintly mentor/uncle who wanted to kill him (even if the urge was fleeting). Additionally, Jedi training is essentially martial arts training in that you’re not supposed to use it violently unless you absolutely have to, which leaves the Jedi looking like total wusses much of the time, politically, always leading from behind and allowing evil to get a foothold over and over again.

Therefore, my theory is that Kylo turned, completely willingly, because he saw nothing but pathetic posturing and hypocrisy around him. It was an extremely deep cynicism (the belief that “good”, “love”, “happiness”, or anything that makes humans noble, don’t really exist) that allowed him to fully embrace his own darkness to very powerful effect - no manipulation necessary. This wouldn’t work with Fi-Te but fits with Ti-Fe. I postulate that his conception of morality was extremely reductive and childish. Essentially, “good guys should be totally free of bad”, so any whiff of anyone feeling conflicted or making dumb choices and they no longer get the privilege of being labeled as a “good” person. Accordingly, any hint of conflict in himself cements the fact that he is bad, irredeemably bad, because he’s full of conflict. 

But I argue that the reason he’s full of conflict is not because he’s bad or a Feeler, it’s because the way he was being taught was not well-suited to his personality at all, in fact, it was quite damaging to him, which pushed him into skepticism and alienation. Here’s the blank I’m filling in: Luke is Fi dom. Fi and Ti do not communicate easily. Being forced or shamed into being good with no proper reasoning process by Fs tends to really aggravate inferior Fe grip problems in young Ti doms (it’s a common relationship dynamic). Fi doms construct beliefs from their feelings and it’s easy for them to expect that everyone should feel-believe the same. How is a person supposed to react when you keep telling them to Fi everything but they simply can’t or have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about? External manipulation or not, I speculate that Kylo was already in a deep state of doubt about whether he was in the right place. Luke’s intense fear and disgust in that fateful moment only confirmed Kylo’s suspicions that he didn’t belong there, and that Luke was no “good” guy. 

Seeing oneself as irredeemably bad is a big blow to the ego, so one must engage in self-defense. The fact that turning dark allowed him to realize the full potential of his force capabilities, to him, meant that the Jedi were completely wrong in their conception of what is “good”. Therefore, he doesn’t consider himself to be bad per se, rather, he believes that he has discovered the truth about what it means to be great - being great via T is better than being good via F. He was trying to discover his true self through dominant Ti, perfectly normal part of development, but he chose the wrong path, because it was a reactionary decision that was merely rebelling against all the people who were trying to force him into being F. This poor choice meant that he had to keep trying to sever his connection to everything good in himself = disowning F. In his mind, the Jedi were stupid, weak, and deluding themselves all along, but he knows what’s up, and that granted him a high degree of confidence in his decisions. He saw himself as the real deal because he was smart enough and strong enough to be brutally honest about what he is. In essence, he’s no faker, and that makes him superior. These mental gymnastics happen with Ti, not Fi. 

When Fi doms (even just start to) see themselves as bad, it ruins them and renders them impotent and dysfunctional (see previous post about Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender as a great example). Yet I see no compelling evidence that Kylo’s identity, feelings, or conflicts held him back, rather, they only served to fuel his rise. Despite appearances, he didn’t lust for power and validation like Te loop/grip, rather, he was only interested in self-mastery, and was willing to do whatever it took to achieve it, because he had no other ideal outside of himself to believe in. Nothing could really stop him unless he decided to stop. When he was frustrated, he would let it out in a quick burst, and then continued on as though it never happened (Fe). He was actually very disciplined in growing his abilities by setting consistent and logical challenges for himself to overcome (Ti), and he always succeeded in achieving his goals and reaching whatever potential he had envisioned for himself (Ne). Furthermore, someone who is very “defensive of their identity” wouldn’t be able to change themselves on a dime, as he did at the end. When faced with the right counter-evidence, he did a whiplash 180 without hemming or hawing or performative self-flagellation or whining about “losing myself”, etc. Would that be possible for Fi-Te?

Rey

Is she introverted? She is unapologetically assertive, she gets involved even when it doesn’t/shouldn’t involve her, she never balks at interacting with people/objects, she always faces situations immediately, she has trouble holding her tongue, she has difficulty introspecting (as evidenced from Luke’s training sessions), and most importantly, she exhibits no sign of needing a lot of down time to recharge. I’ve never known an introvert like that, let alone an ISFP, as they often dwell in their feelings away from the world and dislike taking on too much responsibility due to inferior Te. If she’s introverted, provide me with evidence, since I seem to have missed it.

I don’t think that there’s any evidence of N. She’s resourceful to a certain extent, but she seems to rely very heavily on other people to generate positive ideas and possibilities for reassurance, because she starts to panic when thinking on her own about “what could happen” (low Ne). She doesn’t easily come to intuitive insights about anything, let alone the future (no Ni). One scene in particular made me LOL. Luke was training her and asked her to close her eyes to meditate. He instructed her to “reach out” (to feel the energy of the force), and she extended her hand out physically into the air. That is the exemplar of being too literal. Furthermore, she spent how many freakin’ years following the same set routine day after day, in the same crap dump of a town, waiting obediently for her parents to pick her up? That’s the exemplar of Si discipline. Would SPs be capable of that patience or living in the dreary past for so long? 

I agree that she is primarily motivated by her feelings when making judgments and decisions, which means F. She had to fend for herself since childhood, so her skills are unsurprising. Yet she irrationally lacks self-confidence despite the fact that she’s proven over and over again to be quite scrappy and capable, and people even tell her as much all the time - this is likely to indicate an inferior T insecurity. She has great difficulty (i.e. is unconsciously resistant to) probing around within herself, which is common for inferior Ti in not wanting to feel one’s own darkness. The fact that introspection results in her discovering that her deepest, darkest fear is being completely and utterly “alone” as a “nothing” in “nothingness” is very compelling evidence for inferior Ti.

If inferior Ti, then dominant Fe is a must. I see lots of evidence. She is inexplicably able to communicate with anyone, of any species of bot or animal, with effortless empathic understanding? Her first stance is to give people the benefit of the doubt, no matter how strange or wayward they seem. She has a very naive trust in the goodness of people despite dealing with crooks all the time. She takes it upon herself to bring out the good in people whenever she is in a position to. I don’t think she’s always sure of her feelings (Fi-Ni), rather, she’s always sure that there is goodness to be found if one only looks hard enough (Fe-Ne). A lot of people have strong moral feelings and values, so I’m a bit tired of the lazy stereotype that Fi doms have the monopoly on morality. If you’re going to reference a person’s morality, go deeper to see what exactly it is they believe, how they came to those beliefs, and how they express those beliefs in detail, as that would be more revealing of their functions.

For such a goody-goody-two-shoes, her response to Kylo wasn’t the judgmental disgust that Luke barfed up (Fi-Te) but rather a scary desire to figure him out (Fe-Ti). She seemed quite UNcertain about her personal feelings about him (not Fi), which made their relationship one-sided for quite some time, as she struggled with the push-pull dynamic. ESFJs are often attracted to “dark and mysterious” people due to the unconscious yearnings of inferior Ti, even when Si-Ne warns them that these people are bad news. And it doesn’t get more mysterious than some powerful dude dressed in black donning a mask that shows up in random visions. When avoiding him was no longer possible, she made an admirable effort to dive deeper into his perspective, even when she rightfully feared losing herself in the process. She felt compelled to “get both sides of the story” in typical diplomat fashion before deciding what to do, in hopes of “fixing” Kylo through repairing his relationship with Luke.

Although there seemed to be constant teasing about the possibility of Rey turning dark, I never really saw any possibility. She gave no major indication of being afraid of turning, and it seemed that she never lost touch with her strong desire to be good. She only ever indicated a fear of failing to perform her duty capably (Si) and of failing all the people who were relying upon her powers to succeed (Fe). Discovering her true lineage didn’t really shake her because her parents were good in spite of their bloodline, so there was already an “exception to the rule” for her to follow and emulate. Turning dark would sever and betray her emotional connection to her parents - totally out of the question.

As far as I can tell, the only reason she survived her horrible childhood relatively unscathed was because she held on to the belief that her parents loved her enough to come back, i.e., emotional connection to others is her lifeline. I don’t think it’s an accident that, in her moment of greatest need, it was the connection to past Jedi and their encouragement that saved her butt. She was existentially SHOOK when Kylo claimed that her parents were horrible and abandoned her. And she was only able to find her footing again by inserting herself (i.e. “belonging” to) the Skywalker clan, essentially by being the model of a kid that Ben should’ve been. What self-respecting ISFP would be happy latching on to someone else’s mom, riding someone else’s coattails, and literally defining their identity through someone else’s name and legacy? 

I’ve heard some people critique Rey as a flat mary sue character, and I see where they’re coming from. But which type is most likely to resemble a mary sue at first glance? She is supposed to be the hero in a fairy tale after all, so one would expect her flawedness to be minimized.

Relationship Dynamics

In the final movie, the audience is bludgeoned over and over again with the claim that Kylo and Rey are meant to be a dyad. This all but guarantees that they will be exact functional opposites, otherwise, there would be no strong sense of complementary forces pulling them together into one perfectly harmonized and united front. Although the chemistry between them wasn’t properly developed IMO, I think I saw on paper what was meant to be happening in terms of the writer’s intentions.

Luke was unsuited to helping either of them with questions of identity and morality because, being Fi dom, he took these things for granted, presumptive, already settled non-issues, which amounts to him being closed to any real questioning and discussion. As a result of lacking good guidance, what drew Kylo and Rey together was an underlying need to help each other make sense of themselves, with the unconscious suspicion that the other person held the missing piece of the puzzle. 

Rey was only able to reach her potential by confronting the full extent of her own darkness within (inferior Ti), which was what Kylo forced her to do in incremental steps, as he kept nudging her to question her fundamental beliefs about who she is and what she stands for, presumably in the same way that he had done for himself. But it’s not as easy to twist someone’s sense of morality when F is at the top and healthy versus the bottom of the stack. By making it through his gauntlet of tests and critiques and facing down her fears, she was able to develop into a stronger and more self-assured person to eventually achieve inferior Ti closure. Don’t forget how her eyes would light up when hearing stories of Jedi masters and their achievements. It is mainly EJs who run headfirst toward responsibility rather than away from it. We see, in the end, a picture of Rey as a beaming, confident, and self-possessed person who feels like the world is her oyster, fully inhabiting her role in the hero story that she had always wished to be a part of. The audience is meant to believe that she’s the rightful heir when she finally believes in herself.

By questioning Rey’s identity, Kylo eventually had to question his own as well, since he was the one who wanted to believe that they shared a similar path to feeling lost. Kylo is stuck in adolescent cynicism as explained above, with Si loop resentment from the past preventing him from seeing other, better possibilities for himself. Late in the trilogy, I see in his face that he’s probably suffering from the sunk cost fallacy of thinking that he is past the point of no return. Perhaps he believes that he has no choice but to resign himself to the fate he has chosen (parallel to Vader) since Ti doms strongly believe in personal responsibility. He’s not wrong. If he wasn’t irredeemable at first, he certainly was after the profound destruction he had wrought. Ti doms are rarely wrong as their logic is usually impeccable, but they tend to lack perspective. E.g. He’s not wrong in believing that people are hypocritical because they really are (Ti factual judgment is spot on), but then he defines his terms too narrowly in dismissing all people as unworthy of being called “good” (Fe value judgment is very immature).

What finally broke the mental confinement of Si loop? IMO, three contributing factors: 1) He started to suffer the same skepticism about the dark side as he had with the Jedi, since Ti promotes impartial judgment, which opened him up somewhat to questioning his choices. INTPs deeply dislike sheep mentality and blind ideology, so being constantly asked to prove his “allegiance” and quietly “submit” all the time by his superiors only served to reveal their flawed mentality in the same vein as Luke, which gave him the logical justification he needed for eliminating one boss after another. 2) He was drawn deeper and deeper into Rey’s psychology, which backfired on him, because it proved to him, again and again, every which way, that goodness is indeed possible, as Rey easily aced every temptation and challenge that he was able to fling at her. For NPs(Ne), believing in possibility can’t help but create a strong desire to actualize it. 3) Leia intervened with what I’m assuming was one last-ditch attempt to communicate how much she truly loves him despite what he’s become, which perhaps served to expand his thinking about what it means to love. 

In the end, he redeemed himself on his own terms (even if he was not fully redeemed for the audience). As a result, he discovered something resembling happiness in his last moments of connection with Rey. You can’t tell a Ti dom to be good “just because”, or take goodness as default without question, or present a fake and idealized image of goodness for them to live up to, because that will never satisfy Ti. At the same time, morality cannot remain an abstract concept or else it is very easy to twist upside down. Goodness must be deeply FELT in order to be a motivating force, and he, at long last, felt goodness in his bones, through his decision to place the greater good above himself - inferior F often means arriving very late to the feeling party. He finally caught a glimpse of what he could be and should be through Rey’s, and possibly his mother’s, eyes, which allowed for inferior Fe closure. He had always gotten by okay without love and only believing and trusting in himself, but he realized that he was far better off for opening himself up to something more. 

That’s my take anyway. Or perhaps that’s what I needed to see to make the story more interesting for myself, lol.

[topicprinter]

It's been just over a year since I sold my company and I'm trying to shake the rust off. It's scary how fast the world changes, especially when building software. But a fresh start is an advantage in a weird way because it lets you pull back and look at trends and where you want to focus your energy. So here are some things I've noticed in the past month just looking around the internet. I'll probably start a business in one of these categories.​Curating the curatorsThis is less of a new trend and more one of those exponential curves that is hitting the hockey stick part. There's so much information online that the traditional curators of the past decade are struggling to keep up. For example, Youtube likely has 50-100 videos per category on most popular how-to subjects, so the burden is back on the user to scroll through and make the mental calculations. "Okay this one has more views, but the guy in the thumbnail looks super annoying and is probably going to give a 2-minute intro."There's an opportunity to curate the curators to once again ease the burden on the user. I used to search Product Hunt for new software tools, and now when I search for something simple like "image optimizer" there are 6-7 results I have to consider, which is basically Google. I'd love for someone to tell me the one that they chose after doing the same comparison search I'm about to do. Save me opening another 7 tabs, please.The ProductHunt example is interesting because it seems they've realized they need to evolve their upvote curation method, and recently released a new product called YourStack. This site lets you look at what tools other people are using, which is partially helpful for discovery but still doesn't solve the search problem I looked at above.Whether its Google, Youtube, Product Hunt, or even the people I should be following on Twitter, there's a need for someone to aggregate the best resources from most content platforms.​Machine learning as a utilityIt's hard to escape the hype, and I've seen way too many founders start "AI" companies by hiding a very basic algorithm under a bunch of marketing language and a cool .ai domain name.Skepticism aside, my view on the subject shifted when I heard Kevin Kelly talk about AI as a utility. I can't remember the exact quote, but he said that rather than needing everyone to become AI programmers in the years to come, there would be a few algorithms that would be sold like electricity, and every business would integrate them without needing to be experts. He made that prediction about 5 years ago, and we are just now starting to see this take shape in a few limited applications.At its core, a machine learning algorithm helps you do something more accurately by using a large amount of training data. A lot of the early wins in machine learning were low-level tasks that humans did, but could now feed their decisions as training data and build an algorithm around. Examples: moderating content, filtering out graphic material, etc.As for the utility aspect, while you can't get access to the algorithm Facebook uses to auto-moderate posts, there are machine learning APIs available that have the potential to launch many different businesses.In one category, document/image parsing using an API like Google OCR Vision or Docparserrepresents a huge opportunity to replace manual labor in a lot of industries. Let's say I know that bar owners have a stack of liquor vendor invoices that they pay someone to manually type into Excel for accounting. I don't need to be a machine learning expert to build an app that uses a phone camera plus a parsing API to make that much easier.For another example, I have no idea how a tool like Gigapixel AI can turn old photos into high resolution just with their upscaling algorithm, but if they offered an API (and similar tools may already) then I could use it to create a service that helps people update and print their old wedding photos.The opportunity is there, and I'd say you can build on most of these APIs by learning some React/Node.js skills.​Goal-based educationI'm a bit biased because my last company was in education, but I also have been closely watching how online education has evolved in the past decade.While the world is full of free courseware and Youtube videos on almost any subject, there's still a huge opportunity emerging to create educational content for a wide variety of purposes and learning styles.One area I'm surprised isn't getting more attention is goal-based training. Related to the signal-to-noise problem with all online content, it's very difficult to piece together the right courses to achieve a specific goal. This was the main principle my last company used to succeed. I taught a course called "How to build a marketplace app like Airbnb" and since many startup founders had marketplace ideas, it connected a path to the goal.To break down another example, let's say I need a place to store my extra books, and I'm feeling adventurous enough to break out the power tools and build a bookshelf myself. Currently, my path looks something like this:Google "how to build a bookshelf"Read a few top articles, try to resolve conflicting informationGo to Youtube and watch a 6-minute bookshelf tutorialWatch another video because the first cut out a lot of stepsTry to resolve conflicting info between those videos and the articles I readGoogle "basics of woodworking"And while it's amazing that we live in an age where all this information is freely available, I'd happily pay for someone to do that work for me and record a "zero to bookshelf" course. I find it odd that when I search Skillshare and Udemy, there's nothing like this out there. Do I take "Woodworking essentials" and then try it on my own? Who knows.​Platform ExtensionsIt's a bit terrifying to build on a platform. In the last decade, countless businesses were killed off overnight as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram restricted their once-open APIs. As a founder, there's nothing scarier than the prospect of waking up and seeing your software is broken and can't be fixed.The industry trend of a less-open internet and more limited API offerings has stopped many from building on top of other business platforms. But the upside is high enough that it's worth asking whether there is a less risky way forward.I'd argue that you don't want to build a business on a massive platform. Any of the social networks mentioned above have enough money and power to make platform decisions with very little regard to the businesses built off them. Instead, I'll be looking at smaller platforms with very engaged audiences.A good model of a platform extension business is Baremetrics. The business was founded on Stripe's platform in 2013. Stripe had emerged as a super simple way to integrate a payments API into an application, but their reporting features were lacking. Baremetrics took their reporting data, built it into a dashboard tailored for subscription-revenue, and grew into a respectable platform company. 7 years later, it's far from dead, even though Stripe's reporting capabilities have grown significantly.To replicate this, start off by finding a piece of software you are using/passionate about that has a decently large community (bonus points if they already have an API). It's easy to figure out what the community is asking for as far as features/extensions, and if you build it you know where to find users. Another benefit of a smaller platform is that you can reach out directly to the team. "Hey, love using X, was thinking about building something to help users do Y better. Thoughts?" That way you can get a heads up if that feature/extension is on their roadmap, or if they have no plans to build in that direction. Or, worst case, just say "please don't do that."​Those four areas are where I'll be focusing my efforts building software this year, and now comes the hard part: actually doing it. Would love to hear where you're focusing and if you're building in one of the areas highlighted above, how's it going?