Colors of the ruska season in the Riisitunturi Nationalpark
Just upgraded to MB premium! Reasons forthcoming.
The maxfun show story break is gonna end their run in 5 eps. Damn. Not one of my regular shows, but just goes to show that projects we love might end sooner then we‘d expect.
The Netflix movie Kate, which we just watched, is amazing. Check it out if you haven’t already.
(I should really pledge to interact with people here, every day, a little bit.)
What a nice thought: My mom sent me a Google Nest Mini for my birthday. But: In Finnland you can’t use it for Apple Music (Why?). Siri won’t work with it (e. g. can’t put tasks into my Things inbox) either. So I now have a very smart, barely usable bluetoothspeaker on my desk.
Kinda surprising: The recommendations on library thing are very very good. I’m tracking my read books here, since this is were I write about them, but I also track them there, because library thing somehow really gets online recommendations.
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. 🍅 ☺️
On Quoting And Commenting
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
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.