Working with heavily linked notes shows that one unexpected value of a link is not the link but its usefulness as an alias for what you are actually looking for. Quite often I don’t find the title of the note, but a link to the note I was looking for.

When I think about it, it is very fascinating to think that my body can metabolize food and drinks. I can alter the state of my mind through what I do to and with my body. But how do you find the right food that makes you want to write (undercomplex perspective, I know.)? ;)

Jeez. Somebody blocked the ventilation slits above almost all of our windows in our apartment (probably a freezing previous tennant?) with insulation wool instead of air filter material. We have been living here for two years.

Hm. For how much I dislike when a discussion gets derailed, I tend to do it quite often. We had such a nice evening. Argh. Hate the feeling of when a loved one shares something and all I have is critical remarks. ☹️

This vacation has me the most motivated about writing in a few years. Have to transform it somehow into a steady thing.

Accidentally opened twitter. Ugh. I want to be enlightened and able to say: You can have or be part of a „positive“ social graph over there, but I’m not so sure.

Thinking about starting my own newsletter.

First little balcony harvest. 🌱 It wasn’t easy or sure with all the scaffolding from the roof reno that lasts the whole summer. But grateful for the results nonetheless. 🍅 ☺️

Today I discovered Manuel Moreale’s Blog thanks to this great endorsement by @uncertainquark (which I in turn found thanks to micro.blog’s discovery tab):

I just donated to a personal blog writer I really like. Check out his very human blog, which actually cares about the state of the Internet: manuelmoreale.com 📝

One of the posts there (On discovery and consumption) made me pause when I was thinking about how to react to this beautifully little post by @pimoore:

Who we are is the most eloquent and unique story that we all write every single day.

There is a difference between commenting and quoting a post like this. Since that post was inspiration to a point (this) I wanted to make, I don’t think that a comment would have been appropriate. Looking at the comments other people actually made, they are engaging with the post more directly, by uttering e.g. approval (for example, @patrickrhone’s “Truth”)

There is also a difference in the way I engage with the post when quoting it: The engagement here is very indirect, the other person does not even necessarily notice that I took what they wrote and re-contextualized it for my own needs.

Similarly to Manuel Morale’s point about discovery and consumption, this might be an obvious difference. But I think commenting and quoting also is related to what Manuel has to say about the centralization of discovery and consumption (meaning the engagement with the discovered content):

One major change the web has experienced was the consolidation of discovery and consumption. Digg was—and still is—a place to discover new content but the consumption of that content takes place away outside of Digg. And the same was true for discussions around the content. Those used to happen in comment sections spread across the internet. But now, places like Twitter or Instagram are acting as places for both the discovery and the consumption of new content.

A platform that only allows comments about content linked from elsewhere on the web will not lead to this kind of centralization. A comment-only platform like this is also much less convenient to use to actually build upon other people’s content, which most often happens in the quoting (or linking) style instead the commenting-style of engagement.

Making it easier to quote other people’s content might on the other hand have consequences as regards to how we engage with the creators behind the content. Which brings me to another post of Manuel (The internet is not broken. People are.), which is that social media exposes a lot of people’s interest not in doing the thing for the love of the thing, but for the fame, which might be achieved through it (Something I have always appreciated about @merlinmann: He does the things because he loves doing them).

A commenter is not very likely to become famous through commenting. A quoter on the other hand produces first order content: This post here stands on its own, even though it is inspired by other content. Combined with the strong network effects of the big social media platforms, odds are that the wish for fame becomes more likely to surface - because fame itself is more probable in these conditions.

Therefore offering tools for quoting, for building upon other people’s content, is a double edged sword. If the social media platform is too big and quoting is too easy, there is an increased likelihood of a bloodless hunt for fame, in which first order creators become increasingly invisible to each other.

I had a feeling something was up after this week’s RecDiffs - which was excellent btw. As if you’d notice something off in a good friend’s otherwise normal behavior. I hope everyone is fine. (I’m just a listener and concern of this sort feels intrusive.)

That there hasn’t been a new Back To Work in two weeks has me gravely concerned for @merlinmann and Dan Benjamin alike. I noticed that there was also no new Road Work. So I assume it has something to do with the Fireside Dispute.

Finished reading: Blue Nights by Joan Didion 📚My thoughts: The Melancholic Richness Of Frailty

This book is as much about aging than it is about her adopted daughter Quintana. It is a sad book. It is a book of acceptance, I think.

I read this in one siting on the porch of my Girlfriends mom, living in Finnland, it was already a little too cold to sit there for the four hours or so it took me. But the book didn’t let me go.

In my last review of two of Didion’s books I wrote that the author’s smarts won’t save her from the inevitability of life. In the end her body, her mind, will fail. In the end, what could she even have done to save her child? So she mourns, or tries to mourn, like a person not acquainted with these traditions. This outsider’s view to a very human problem was very relatable: I find myself often fascinated but not affected personally by the emotional weather of day to day life. It’s more the second order emotions - emotions about other people’s reactions to things I believe to have already understood, filed away, moved on from - that get me. This is probably more common than I know I presume at times.

It is very powerful to read about a person so gifted that she can’t help it to struggle with the voice in which she writes. Was how she wrote before her memoirist turn ever anything more than something she used instead of her own voice? In short: a voice instead of her voice? That is probably not fair. Authenticity is not a boolean. It is a construct. A repeated question from the book: How can one be direct in one’s writing? Although I listened to “The Year Of Magical Thinking” I think Blue Nights might be her most reflective book I have consumed, yet.

Didion is not shy to discuss the many mental health issues, that her Daughter had to face. How the names for the diagnosis changed over time, but the problems essentially stayed the same. One such name: borderline personality disorder. Mental health is not what took her life, not directly at least, but a lost battle against infection. That Quintana was adopted plays a big part in the book and is one of the most powerful themes: Didion’s reflection about the ‘recommended choice narrative’ and Quintanas question “What if you didn’t choose me?” is as relatable as it is gut-wrenching.

It’s hard to imagine what my impression of “Blue Nights” would have been without knowing “The Year Of Magical Thinking”. It is often the case with memoirist writing that its power stems from the layers - in volume as in sophistication and arrangement. And I feel like Didion’s two memoirs, as sad as they might be, are amazingly rich and deep.

In my last review I mentioned the problem of privilege in Didion’s writing and this makes it harder at times to relate to her. In Blue Nights she makes an attempt to address this topic, when she asks whether Quintana had a privileged childhood or not. The answer comes down to “I mean, we weren’t that rich…”. Maybe this would have needed a more elaborate treatment.

I really liked this book and I am surprised how much I managed to write about it, or rather my thoughts about it, here. I like Didion as a memoirist, too. I am not so sure that I will ever check out her more literary works. I actually rarely do that after having consumed memoirs of writers or artists. No, it’s the mundane and not so mundane everyday stuff - or rather its heightened, polished reflective version - that interests me.

One last time back to the book: “Blue Nights” is a great book about mourning, about aging, about being a parent and a writer. Didion is steeped in a way of life that I would guess only exists in its fossilized forms, in memories. The relatable topics and the now lost to us extravagance of old Hollywood produce a rich, deep and at times paradoxical memoir that I would especially recommend if you can spare the time to consume “The Year Of Magical Thinking” beforehand.

A very good person to follow on here, if you are interested in web development, is @baldur. He links consistently interesting articles and offers in his commentary on them very often refreshing takes on the current status of the field. Insightful!

When will I learn that early flights are to blame for everything? Their seductive quality of „having a few more hours“ (that short night extra) is never worth it.

Test was negative. What a relief.

First Corona test ever. Hopefully it’s nothing.

Switched over today from Youtube Music to Apple Music. Something I wanted to try for a while, but since I share an account (family account) with my GF, it was not as simple. I like it so far, she doesn’t. So let’s see where we land after a month with this.

Finished reading: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion AND Let Me Tell You What I Mean also by Joan Didion 📚 Thoughts about these two books: Acceptance As A Worthwhile Struggle

As I said in my last review: I love autobiographical writing. To continue the theme, I recently listened to Joan Didion’s Books: The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean.

The Year of Magical Thinking is a memoir of an especially tumultuous year in her life. After the sudden death of her husband and the hospitalization of her daughter, Didion finds herself detached from reality and has to claw herself back to reason. There is a certain sharpness in the way she puts things, a certain breathlessness in the intelligence with which she follows the paths of her own thoughts while mourning the loss of a writing partner and spouse (a parallel to Hampl’s book).

We see here a woman who is smart, quick and in control of her faculties wanting to fight and having to accept, that there is no real shortcut, no swift way to skip the all too human need to just feel shitty for a while, to be scared, to be upset, to not know, to maybe not even understand why your own seemingly better argument, the pointed question or educated guess doesn’t cut it. To be clear, what Didion focusses on is not this desire to skip the lowly emotions and loss of control that are part of the human condition. But, to me, she exemplifies how hard it is to accept the necessity of being a passenger, not the driver, for a while after an event like this.

One strength of Didion’s writing is that she can put a finger on the power of slightly changed emphases. Like in her text “Everywoman.com” about Martha Stewart and her empire from the second book of her’s I have listened to: Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of essays from 1968 to 2000.

In Everywoman.com she turns the critique on Martha Stewart, a home maker turned CEO of a billion dollar company, inside out. The critique goes something like this: Martha Stewart is a fraud, because she pretends to be a simple homemaker, like her fans, even though in reality she is a driven business woman who created merely an artifice of being a homemaker. Didion is directing her more empathetic read of Stewart mainly against Jerry Oppenheimer’s unauthorized investigative Book on her: Just Desserts. Opposed to Oppenheimer, Didion concludes that Stewart’s success, Artifice and all, are inspirational to US-American women because Stewart managed to create her own rags to riches story: from homemaker to CEO.

One thing I picked up and that is eerily related to her empathy for Stewart is her own success. I stumbled upon the following review of The Year of Magical Thinking on Amazon that is an example of what I mean:

She certainly went through losses that would make anyone stagger. I just found that I couldn’t identify with her experiences. She describes months of folks making sure she was taken care of. Can’t relate. She recounts good times in a long marriage that involves luxurious travels and freedom gained through wealth. Can’t relate. Am I jealous? Probably.

Didion is well off, that much is clear. She has been a successful writer for a long time and coming up in a much more socially mobile era, she ended up being wealthy. The question is: Does this take away from her writing? And the answer is: Yes, a little bit. I wouldn’t go so far to suggest that I can’t relate or that what she has to say is not interesting, quiet the opposite, but because Didion’s voice is one of careful reexamination (it reminds of the idiom “show me, I’m from Missouri”) and her reputation is one of popularizing counter culture, of problematizing the American Dream I can’t deny that the success, although earned, subverts a little bit her persona, her self-conception or the frame from which I read her (so maybe, probably, this is on me). It complicates the relationship between me, the reader (or listener in my case), and her, the counter culture writer. Now, I am not owed an uncomplicated relationship. But I do have to admit that the contrast of a now wealthy writer that came from a place of socially conscious reporting - and still has those instincts but lives a totally different life - lead to some cognitive dissonance. It totally makes sense that lives like this exist. She is not the first, nor the last that will have had also monetary success from writing empathetically about various social issues. I still enjoyed the books, I just wish there was a way to ask the question: How do you integrate your being well off with writing so empathetically? How do you try to juggle not being perceived as patronizing?

• You can find her Essay on Martha Stewart on the New Yorker’s website: Everywoman.com.

Birdnet made the rounds on hacker news yesterday. Can’t wait to test it out when we’re hiking again. Same goes for Plantnet for that matter.

Finished reading: The Art of the Wasted Day by Patricia Hampl 📚For my thoughts see: The Art Of Writing About Yourself.

Also learned that you can archive your posts to github and to the internet archive. Great stuff @manton

Now I need to figure out how to migrate all the old blog posts from all the other blogs here. Many incarnations over the years…

Just set up my custom domain so that it would point to my micro blog instead of an old blog I don’t update anymore. Posts gonna be available under blog.martin-haehnel.de