Chris Burnell on an /interests page. Cool idea. I’ve added one. (I have a small list of my interests listed on my about page, but I like having more space to talk about things — even though it carries an increased risk of becoming exceedingly boring.)
Alin Panaitiu’s woodworking projects. Every once in a while I think about ditching tech and becoming a carpenter instead. The fact that I haven’t built anything with wood since I was seven has not stopped me from thinking this.
The length of the list of books I want to read: so incredibly long and growing longer almost every day, all while the number of days I have left on this earth continues to shrink. I’m more aware of this than ever. I’ve started making lists of books I want to make sure to read before I die. (I will add here that I have no reason to believe my death is imminent.)
I need to get outside more often. It feels good.
For a while I was stalled on reading The Power Broker and Shift Happens (because of length, and because they’re physical books and I’m not as good at reading long physical books these days), but then I set myself a goal of ten pages per day per book and it has made all the difference.
I got a Boox Palma. I tried to like it. I failed. I returned it. The resolution was noticeably worse than on my Kobo Libra, I couldn’t find an app that gave me what I wanted (page numbers + custom fonts), I didn’t like the fiddliness of it being a full tablet, and after a handful of page turns it looked like a bad photocopy. I still read on my phone 99% of the time, but the Kobo Libra is the best ereader I’ve found so far.
A mouth is kind of like a third hand sometimes.
A few weeks ago I retypeset my “Will I Leave a Legacy?” song in MuseScore. Way fun. I like typesetting music.
Gathering these thoughts into a single post (vs. writing individual posts) means I’m less likely to go deeper into any one of them, especially in this list format, where I’m effectively constraining myself to a single paragraph per topic. Maybe I should go back to smaller posts.
Thinking about whether I should start writing weeknotes on here again. (I see weeknotes as different from these things-on-my-mind posts, though I realize there’s often some overlap.)
I hit my first year mark at Planet Labs.
Apparently LOTR isn’t on my reading log, which surprised me. I must have read it before I started tracking. Thinking about reading it again, partly because I want to read it as an adult and partly to have it on the reading log.
Periodically I wonder how I can do more good in the world. I don’t know what the answer is. My brain wants it to be some kind of project, something I can make, but I suspect most of the time it’s more in the vein of being kind to those around me and mourning with those who mourn and offering a listening ear. The good news: I can do that regardless of how flared up my back is. (Because the back pain does limit what kinds of projects I can work on.)
Rachel Kwon on technology. “Sometimes it feels like being able to take photos so easily means we also end up creating a lot of lower value photos that don’t take up much physical space but do take up mental energy to delete, deduplicate, etc.” Managing family photos: something I feel is super important but I am also not very good at it. (Currently using a folder for each month, and I rarely dedupe or delete photos. I back up [not regularly enough] both to local external hard drives and to Backblaze B2.)
Richard Holman on doing something daily. The times I’ve actually finished writing stories have almost always been when I’ve had a daily regimen, whether that’s a word count goal or a set number of minutes. Without the daily, I don’t write.
Alan Jacobs on rational choices. “The intellectual/political monoculture of the modern university leads to an intellectual/political monoculture in the major media companies, and when you combine that with the many ways the internet has disrupted the economic models of all the arts, you get a general environment in which interesting, imaginative work is not just resisted, it’s virtually prohibited. All the incentives of everyone involved are aligned against it.”
Veronique on blogging frequency. “There’s this part of me that always feels like I’m bothering people if I blog every day.” Same here. I also liked the quote from Winnie Lim: “instead of always feeling so hesitant because i feel so weird, i am just going to focus on being the fullest version of myself.”
The Disappearing Spoon, by Sam Kean (2010), about the periodic table. Enjoyed the heck out of it. Fascinating throughout, with lots of interesting history about the discovery of various elements and other tidbits.
Beauty Sick, by Renee Engeln (2017). An important corrective to my mental model, with what seems like good advice on what to do and what not to do.
A Molecule Away from Madness, by Sara Manning Peskin (2022), about cognitive neurology. Also fascinating and hard for me to put down. Maybe not as great for my hypochondria, though. But still very much worth reading.
Fiction
Children of Ruin, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (2019, science fiction), second in the Children of Time trilogy. It’s been five years since I read the first one, so my memory’s a bit fuzzy, but I think I liked this one about the same. Looking forward to Children of Memory. (And Tchaikovsky remains one of my favorite writers. I’m delighted that he’s so prolific.)
Jay Hoffmann on what he calls the analog web. “These websites don’t exist with any necessary agenda. They are handmade, and at times, even a bit weird. But they represent a person in some way; an interest, an ideology, a hobby, or nothing more bold than a point of view. Because they are distinct and imperfect, these sites can resist the wave of generated content heading our way.” I really love the analog web (or the indie web or the smol web or whatever you want to call it).
Henry Oliver on smartphones not being the source of all social ills. An interesting counterbalance, worth thinking about given humanity’s general reaction to new technologies over time. I love that I can read books on my phone and keep track of my to-do list and stay in touch with family and friends. (And of course I also recognize that it’s healthy to not be on screens all the time.)
myNoise (via swissmiss) has nice ad-free soundscapes (Irish coast, Japanese garden, distant thunder, white noise, etc.).
