Changes for 2014

Once again, I have reevaluated my blogs and feel that there need to be some tweaks to my Mental Exercises. A lot of this has been copied and pasted from my main evaluation on my personal blog.

I have had some issues with my Rethink exercises. In an attempt to tie in my mental exercise blog to the rest of my presence, I have tried to use topics of posts from those blogs as inspiration for some of my exercises. I have found that I am frequently asking people to rethink their opinions when they are likely to differ from mine. This could be viewed as a way of pushing my personal beliefs on others. That was not my intention, and I am planning on addressing this problem.

Since I develop mental exercises a year in advance, changes will not show up until 2015. At that time, I will replace Rethink with a new category. I am not ready to explain the new mental exercises at this time. Some rethink exercises will be modified to fit elsewhere. Others will not. The opinion-related exercises might live on in the form of posts to my other blogs, but I will not ask others to participate. Although I have no intentions of bringing back Rethink, I don’t like to say, “never.” There’s always a possibility that the category will be redeveloped and reintroduced.

I will start introducing a few new types of Challenges starting in 2015, and the easier Excel-based challenges should be spread out a little better. As stated last year, Random Creativity is now getting words and phrases exclusively from Wiktionary.

I also want to talk about the sharing policies. These will be changing for the new year. I have always felt that my description of sharing at the end of some exercises doesn’t always make a lot of sense and makes for a horrible read. The idea all along was that people should use common sense and not blame me if there’s a disagreement over how solutions should be shared. I think I can simplify and put it as a general guideline instead of writing guidelines for each post. The idea is that concepts should be open for others to use while specific work should require permission from the person responsible.

I feel that my mental exercises should probably be shared through Google+. Since I have a strict guideline for this blog to only use scheduled posts, I can’t automate the process how I would like. Instead, this is a matter of remembering to make the connections each time something gets posted. Times will never match, and I might forget a few.