Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
- Mary Oliver
To me the simple act of tying a knot is an adventure in unlimited space. A bit of string affords a dimensional latitude that is unique among the entities. For an uncomplicated strand is a palpable object that, for all practical purposes, possesses one dimension only. If we move a single strand in a plane, interlacing it at will, actual objects of beauty and of utility can result in what is practically two dimensions; and if we choose to direct our strand out of this one plane, another dimension is added which provides opportunity for an excursion that is limited only by the scope of our own imagery and the length of the ropemaker’s coil.
What can be more wonderful than that?
-- Clifford W Ashley, The Ashley Book of Knots
A blog is a structure for casualness, and its way of organizing things liberates you all of those worries. Freed of the neurotic worry to organize, I can just write, jot, scribble, rant, or whatever. And since blog posts are all run together, I don't have to worry that one is too small for a HTML page (or just too much work once I add the necessary framing).
Blog writing doesn't have to be scribbles, and a lot of the blogs that I most enjoy reading are very carefully put together. But I'm not sure I have the time and energy for that; a good part of my purpose in trying out blogging is the theory that writing something is better than writing nothing.
It is very helpful to make a list of things that you need to pack for a trip, before you start packing for the trip. I call this a "pack list". Writing down such a list feels a little bit obsessive, but it saves a lot of rummaging around both mentally and physically.
If you have the list written down in front of you, then you can scrutinize the list. Does it have everything that we'll need? Does it have any obvious gaps? Does it focus too heavily on one thing or another? One could, in principle, lay out all the stuff that you want to pack and then stare at it carefully to answer these questions. This practice is making a sort of physical pack list. (This is what I used to do for a long time.)
Writing down a pack list allows you do a couple things which coming up with ideas on-the-fly or laying everything out, do not allow. If everything is written down, then you can make an order to pack things. "First, get all the garage stuff. Second, all the wardrobe stuff. etc." You can delegate fetching things to people without worrying about overlapping or redundancy. And lastly, and this is quite meta, you can preserve the list and check how much stuff you used or didn't use. That speeds up packing next time around, as your list gets more and more honed.
iris. And, wow, this is hot writing. It has a killer hook in the first chapter. Going back and reading the introduction suggests that it is going to be very political. I'm excited for the paper copies to arrive via the library. It's going to be a thrilling read. Act on your curiousity. If you find yourself repeatedly thinking about something, and you want to try / do / explore it, then go for it. There will never be a perfect moment to begin. You will never get around to it unless you just take a leap.
For the last couple years, I have wanted to check out a grocery store down the road from us. It's just out of reach and there are much more convenient grocery stores. But, every time I see it, I think: "Hmm -- One day, I should go there." This is a great the kind of curiousity to act on. However, it is exactly the sort of thing that lingers and never gets done: it's low priority, less convenient, and has no obvious pay off.
But, like, why not? So, today, I hopped on a bus and checked out the grocery store. It is really really cool. There are all kinds of interesting things, the prices look great, and the food seems very fresh. I left with a bag of dried mango, a crysanthemum juice, and a smile on my face. Totally worth it.
I've been attending Anglican church fairly regularly this year. It's much much more liturgical than the Quaker Meetings that I'm used to. There is a whole cycle of readings. Each mass has several readings. There is a group that studies the Bible apart from the mass. It's a whole thing. And, I can't escape the feeling that it's all an elaborate spaced repetition system. Like, an ancient version of Anki or a Leitner system. You slowly get exposed and re-exposed to the same readings over and over.
Now that I think of it: Neilsen and Matushak explicitly baked this in to their essay on Timeful Texts.
My mother is a devout member of Alcoholics Anonymous. She's been sober for little over a decade. And the thing that keeps her sober is a morning ritual of inspirational reading and a long walk.
Every morning, she reads a bit from a battered AA daily devotional book and then goes on a long walk. In the winter, she goes cross-country skiing. She does a mini-stretching routine and then hits the road with a little MP3 player that I bought for her and loaded up with music for her years ago. Every day. For years.
And, I think that there is something to this. It seems like a good idea. I'm not my mother, but we have lots of similarities.
Last night, I put up a post on my personal server about newsboat and sfeed, two RSS readers that I use. ~gome asked for a write-up, and I obliged. And I really flipped-flopped about putting it on ctrl-c.club, or my personal server. Ultimately, I decided that the post was about some services run on pgadey.ca and so I should host it there. But! That tension and flip-flopping was really interesting. Why didn't I want to self-host it? Why did I feel like it mattered?
On reflection, I think that social computing is important. It would be nice if ~gome's question got answered on ctrl-c.club. It is nice that they asked about my thing via ctrl-c.club. I feel like I want to keep that sort of thing inside our little community of hackers and tinkerers.
I've seen a few people move from the tilde-verse towards self-hosting. And that's a totally reasonable move. You get more control, you can do more things, you learn more about admin. But you also lose something about community and camaraderie. It is another push in the direction of individualization. More and more, I feel like people are all flying away from each other. Self-hosting, while very enjoyable, creates isolation.
Of course, self-hosting and participating in a pubnix are not mutually exclusive. Here I am doing both. But, I think the tension between social and solitary computing is very interesting.
One thing that I was thinking about working "headless" is that LaTeX rendering might be a hassle. It turns out that it's not! I've just tried the following hack: I'm working on a document with latexmk running locally (on zenbook) while editing and viewing a file (on officebox) via sshfs. It works fine.
This is a bit of a crazy way to work on a document. The idea is that officebox is doing all the storage and zenbook is doing all the rendering / displaying. What is to be gained here? The idea is that officebox is the "official" computer doing all the storing and zenbook is the "un-official" computer.
mapn :set relativenumber! :set number!
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