Grind is a process of slowly getting valuable resources (be it experience points or loot) by repetitive and often simple tasks in video games. It has been present from the beginning of gaming but has become more widespread with the popularization of online RPG games because of their leveling systems and competitive elements. 

It is highly criticized by gamers around the world for making games boring and work-like, yet many people specifically choose to play grind-heavy games. The reason might be because they find simple repetitive tasks relaxing and distracting from real-life problems, as a form of escapism.

However, there is also a gameplay reason for grinding: getting valuable resources early can make a game easier later. Some popular games like Diablo are even centered around grind. Thus, everyone will have to grind at some point to prevent gameplay from getting too difficult, which quickly becomes an inescapable habit. Later, gamers might apply grinding even to games that do not require it. Interestingly enough, grinding early on can also make the late-game boring because it is going to be too easy if the game was not designed for grinding. For example, in Subnautica, getting a lot of resources early on will make some of the late-game tools useless because all the resources that could have been gained with them have already been gained.

From the example above, we can see that grind does not always improve the gameplay. We can also see that it is not always a necessary process and can be either minimized or avoided entirely: sometimes, the need for it exists only in our mind, forcing us to diminish the fun of actually playing the game. Is it just a question of habit or is there any other reason for us to grind?

Techstars Startup Digest was designed as a discovery tool for entrepreneurs looking for tech events in their area. It was founded in 2009 by Chris McCann who just moved to the Valley. He created an old-school newsletter, featuring promising events in the Bay Area. There was no website, all the events were hand-picked by Chris himself, and the newsletter had 22 subscribers. People liked the idea and that number quickly grew. In 2012 it was acquired by Startup Weekend. Three years later, Startup Weekend’s parent company UP Global was acquired by Techstars — and that’s how the project got its name.

Startup Digest can be a useful tool for startups and event coordinators. If you can successfully leverage it, your event, blog post and/or tech product can reach thousands of people at no cost.

Here is a bit refreshed translation of my 2015 blog post. The post shows how to organize a personal academic library of unlimited size for free. This is a funny case of a self written manual which I came back to multiple times myself and many many more times referred my friends to it, even non-Russian speakers who had to use Google Translator and infer the rest from screenshots. Finally, I decided to translate it adding some basic information on how to use Zotero with rmarkdown.

A brief (and hopefully unnecessary for you) intro of bibliographic managers

Bibliographic manager is a life saver in everyday academic life. I suffer almost physical pain just thinking about colleagues who for some reason never started using one — all those excel spreadsheets with favorite citations, messy folders with PDFs, constant hours lost for the joy-killing task of manual reference list formatting. Once you start using a reference manager this all becomes a happily forgotten nightmare.

Have you ever noticed that you were busy all day, however, you've done nothing or at X-mas evening you experience an epiphany that nothing was done during the year? If your answer is "yes", you should improve your time management skills. According to Wikipedia, time management is the process of planning and exercising conscious control of time spent on specific activities, especially to increase effectiveness, efficiency and productivity. Nevertheless, how can we deal with it?