Winnie Lim » notes

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2022

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December 26, 2022 respond

note

poisoned by self / compact cameras / effort of writing notes

Really enjoyed watching this youtube interview with Reuben Radding, a street photographer. Usually interviews with photographers are about photography and cameras (duh) but Reuben talks about using photography as an escape from his obsessive thinking:

“I’m obsessed with death that this is going to end and I don’t know how much time I have. When you spend this kind of time alone up in your head not talking to anybody and just like looking at everything it’s really hard not to go there. It was a period of about three minutes just now in Herald Square where all of that went away.”

…and his self:

“I am poisoned by self: by self-consciousness, by self-criticism, by some inner grandiosities like all this ego related stuff I need an escape valve from. You know you can do it all kinds of ways or try to do it all kinds of ways but this is the greatest way I’ve ever found”

I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who describes the way he’s being trapped by the concept of self as being poisoned – I can very much relate to.

I also like that he shoots from his hip, makes me want to experiment with this technique some day.

I also watched another interview with Ishiuchi Miyako, because I saw someone on reddit mention that she uses a point and shoot. This reminds me of Daido Moriyama who uses a Ricoh 35mm compact camera. I wonder what is with Japanese photographers and compact cameras? Is it their cultural predisposition to being minimal?

I’m still finding my own preferred way of taking photos.

I like the idea of writing notes like this: because else I won’t remember the things I’ve learnt from my media consumption. But it takes considerable effort to write a note that captures enough. I think it is because I try to do a one-time recall days after, but maybe what I should try doing is to capture quick notes right after if something left a deep impression on me. I don’t really have the habit of note-taking yet, something I wish to actively change.

December 14, 2022 respond

note

looking through someone’s eyes

In my last note I mentioned one of the reasons why I continue to share online is because I like seeing the world through someone else’s eyes, so I hope some people will like seeing the world through mine. I also hope to make connections that are not possible offline, simply because the chances of meeting another like-minded person in the same geographical space remains quite small – especially if we come from a geographical culture that can be quite homogeneous.

This morning I was looking at google search console to see which pages have linked to this website. I don’t know if it is my imagination but these days it seems rare to get linked to because of the fast-moving nature of social media. People tend to share quickly on social media and it goes into some void after the golden hour passes. I think it takes psychic energy to publish something, and sometimes social media use tend to deplete that energy. Why bother having a website when you can accomplish the same thing easier, quicker, with even more reach on social media? Hence, personal websites are special to me: the effort, energy and intention that goes into upkeeping an online space when there is so much noise and isolation at the same time.

So I belatedly discovered after 2 years that Kickscondor had written a really intricate post about my writing sometime in 2020. I don’t want to write much about my reaction because honestly I don’t know how to react, except that I’m truly deeply grateful to be able to see a version of myself through someone’s eyes.

This is another bonus – however rare – of publishing online vulnerably I guess? That for a moment a deep part of my psyche overlaps with someone else’s, and now it gets to occupy a small space on the interwebs. Websites may not last very long either, but at the very least they tend to live a lot longer than a social media post. They take more work too.

That said, I wonder where has Kickscondor gone? I was a fan of their website for the longest time, and it has not been updated since July 2022. I hope wherever they are they will get to see this, and receive my utmost gratitude.

December 12, 2022 7 responses

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what is the point of sharing online

Lately I’ve been reevaluating my relationships with social media and of course this website. I’ve been sharing instagram stories of my entire trip in bangkok, and there was this persistent subconscious question of why do I even bother.

I still don’t really know why – I mean sometimes we just really don’t know our unconscious motives – but am writing this note down for reference. For me I guess I just enjoy sharing what I experience so people can see through my eyes, to experience a little of the world I am experiencing. A thousand people can go to bangkok and they would capture different things. Or they may go to the same places I go and yet gather radically different experiences. I like seeing the world through people’s eyes too.

Some people have issues with social media because they think it invokes jealousy and a sense of inadequacy. I mostly don’t experience these sentiments. I don’t feel like my life is lacking because my friend is in Maldives. There is envy of course, I too want to know what it is like to live above clear turquoise waters, but it wouldn’t send me into a spiralling depression. I know this differs from person to person, so I have become sensitive to what I share.

But ultimately I just want to be myself online too. Maybe due to sensitivities I don’t really enjoy interacting with people in real life, so the online world has always been the majority of my world. I like the intimacy it can offer and yet the distance.

I guess that is why I share stuff online. Apart from sharing my thoughts on taboo subjects to make similar souls feel less alone, I share my obscure thoughts so I have a hope of connecting to someone out there.

The internet makes me feel extremely lonely sometimes, but without it I’ll feel utterly hopelessly alienated.

Why do you share stuff online?

November 16, 2022 respond

book

storing up spirit in a chain of notes

Came across this quote while reading “Born to run“:

Poetry, music, forests, oceans, solitude—they were what developed enormous spiritual strength. I came to realize that spirit, as much or more than physical conditioning, had to be stored up before a race.
(– Herb Elliott, Olympic champion and world-record holder in the mile who trained in bare feet, wrote poetry, and retired undefeated)

Source: Born to run by Christopher McDougall | link

…and it immediately reminded me of this note I wrote on storing vs mortgaging energy. I like noticing obscure synchronicities in the media I consume, and I really like the idea of writing a chain of notes (and other formats) linked to each other. This would make it easy for me to gather thoughts and ideas bundled around a concept.

I guess on a meta level this is what this website is about? In a way it stores my energy and spirit in a form that can be accessed even without my person. I just need to remember to store them instead of squandering it away, taking them for granted that they will stay or reappear some day.

The human spirit – what that is still unaccounted for whenever we talk about self-improvement, health, medical science, economies. We can see a heart rate, measure electrical activity from the brain, but what is it that forms the spirit? I don’t mean “spirit” in a supernatural way, but whatever part of our human consciousness that propels us to express our aliveness.

September 21, 2022 4 responses

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displaying relationships between content on the RSS feed

Some time ago I belatedly realised the rss feed for wordpress does not display custom fields by default. I spend considerable time and effort inter-linking the content on this website, so I don’t want RSS subscribers to miss out on seeing any possible related content that is being stored in custom fields.

I am not very good at coding so it took some time to figure out how to display variables stored in a wordpress custom field array.

But it works now:

screenshot of my essay: "love, online"'s footer in Netnewswire: displaying related posts and notes — screenshot of my essay: “love, online“‘s footer in Netnewswire: displaying related posts and notes

We’ll be able to see:

related posts
related notes
related resources
related collections

Maybe this isn’t that important for a typical post, but if I am writing about a quote it would be meaningful to be able to see the parent at the footer (and when you browse the parent page – example – you will be able to see all the related posts and notes I’ve written about that particular resource ):

screenshot of "storing vs managing energy"'s footer in Netnewswire: displaying its related resource — screenshot of “storing vs managing energy“‘s footer in Netnewswire: displaying its related resource

It is displaying just the title for now, will probably do a bit of work to include the type of resource – link, book, video, etc – and its authour at the very least.

Let me know in the comments if you encounter any bug! I just realised I have to include a comment link (and also tags) in the RSS post footer as well.

Maybe I’m doing all this work for like 10 RSS subscribers (I don’t actually know), but I think it is especially precious that anyone bothers to subscribe and read this RSS feed in this day and age.

September 17, 2022 one response

book

storing vs mortgaging energy

I was writing in my journal this morning on the concept of storing energy – something I’d learnt from reading Robert A Johnson‘s biography – so I thought I’ll document and share it here:

She also taught me that it is important to store up energy during major life transitions. People rarely store up energy; almost everyone today has their energy mortgaged way into the future. I nurtured myself, trying not to make any major decisions and allowing my unconscious to wander wherever and however it would.

Source: Balancing heaven and earth by Robert A. Johnson, Jerry M. Ruhl | link

I guess I’ve written quite a few posts about getting as much out of life as possible before having to face inevitable suffering in life, but this is the first time I’ve seen this articulated in this manner.

As a chronically ill person I am very familiar with the concept of storing energy, because I have to store up energy for multiple days in a row in order to do what normal people can do every day. I’ve also been semi-consciously storing psychological energy up sometimes almost being Peter Pan like so I can have some emotional buffer when shit happens.

Chronically ill or not, I do think it is important to always have some buffer instead of what he says – always mortgaging our energy into the future. We only think this way about money and fail to protect one of our most important resources: our energy. And when we think about energy we associate it with physical energy, without realising the impetus to do significant things require more of psychological energy.

September 15, 2022 respond

book

on being the odd one out

Because of my views on many issues – covid, mortality, purpose, etc – differ from the mainstream, I spend a lot of time and energy wondering if I am insane.

I read David Loy’s “Lack & Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism” midway months ago and forgot about it. It was a book I randomly discovered from someone’s tweet, and I immediately purchased it because it has all the key words I am attracted to in its title. I just finished a book and was looking for my next read when I chanced upon it again. I decided to start at the beginning again instead of resuming where I had left off, because I had completely forgotten everything I’ve read.

These quotes struck me deeply:

For Becker, this is literally true: normality is our collective, protective madness, in which we repress the truth of the human condition, and those who have difficulty playing this game are the ones we call mentally ill…a paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on. Psychoanalysis reveals the high price of denying this truth about man’s condition, what might be called “the costs of pretending not to be mad.”

Source: Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism by David R. Loy | link

Evidently we must choose between anxiety and repression. If we cannot face the truth of our condition, which is mortality (or groundlessness, according to my Buddhist interpretation), we must forget that truth, which is to repress it. The difference between neurosis and normality — that undramatic, unnoticed psychopathology of the average, according to Maslow — is how successful that repression is. The neurotic has a better memory than most of us, so anxiety keeps breaking through into consciousness and must be dealt with more harshly in order to preserve some purchase on one’s fate, some circumscribed sphere of action.

Source: Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism by David R. Loy | link

According to him, apparently I am always anxious because I have a better memory than other people? And being “normal” is a mask for our collective madness?

I recognise I am biased obviously, but it is still comforting to know there are people (philosophers mostly I guess) out there who have a radically different worldview from the norm. Maybe it doesn’t make me feel less insane – what is the definition of sanity and normal anyway – but it does make me feel less alone in the way I think of life and the world.

September 8, 2022 respond

note

random discoveries: 8th sep 2022

I accumulated a bunch of links and accompanying thoughts I would like to share, but I thought one note per link is a bit excessive, so I’ll round them up in one. Didn’t know how I wanted to title this sort of note: weekly links? monthly roundups? I guess I’ll just date it simply so I don’t get locked into an expected frequency.

I realise my desire to post notes like this one is a bit sporadic. I think sharing on the internet requires a sort of life-force, because like what this post says it is a bit like “casting our words into the void”.

looking at my referral stats I discovered this lovely interview with Laurel Schwulst on her equally lovely website for her apartment (no it is an actual apartment’s website, not a real estate listing). Laurel produces a ton of interesting internet stuff so check out her website if you’re into weird internet energy like me.
loved this documentation and photos on the old British Linotype factory. Makes me marvel again at the human spirit to share.
from Wouter Groeneveld’s post I discovered people on the internet sharing their salary history publicly – couldn’t help but admire the nicely formatted table. Someone is even sharing their spending (also love the very formatted unformatted website).
through maya.land I decided to try signing up on hypothes.is. I actually want to try annotating this website…there was so much of my writing I now want to have commentary on. Was thinking to custom build margin notes for the longest time, but I still don’t possess the energy for a coding sprint. I am still undecided. I love the idea of socially annotating the web anyhow, but I also have this fear that the service dies and all the precious annotations would be gone.
bonus: a tweet on looking up stuff on our own websites, which is something I regularly do on this website. Apart from the desire to share, posting stuff like this note will allow me to dig up these links in the future should I think of them again. It would be a lot easier if each link exists as a note, but hopefully the text search would suffice.
all may come to nothing if I should die one day, but who knows? Maybe there will be a website graveyard service in the next few decades. If I do survive these decades.

Wow, this turned out to take more effort and time than I thought.

August 11, 2022 respond

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missing Hong Kong

I’m not sure how I stumbled upon these youtube videos on Hong Kong. It made me miss the city very much. I particularly enjoyed the two-part series on Sham Shui Po, one of my favourite areas because there is a giant mall selling all sorts of weird computer-related knick knacks.

Both videos feature interviews with the residents towards the end, and I really appreciated how they had a common theme of trying to preserve something they deem to be worthwhile.

I am afraid that the culture I see so richly embedded in these videos will die out soon. But that’s just life, isn’t it?

I think it is so cool that someone bothered to make these videos.

August 6, 2022 respond

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being over it

I clicked on this click-baity youtube video titled, “The BEST Cooking Videos on Youtube” expecting to roll my eyes while watching it, but I was pleasantly surprised to be schooled in a short history of Marco Pierre White. I am embarrassed to say I have no idea who was he was before this video (spoiler: he trained Gordon Ramsay).

The video is about White being “over it” – basically he just doesn’t give a shit and just cooks the way he wants to cook:

“Why should there be a recipe? Why can’t it just be feel? A philosophy.”
– Marco Pierre White

I mean after reaching the very top it can be perceived as easy to not give a shit anymore, then again there are many people who reach the top and they’re more uptight than ever.

The youtube comments are interesting on their own as everybody has their own interpretation whether White is truly over it or it is just a persona he has cultivated for the public. He did return his Michelin stars though:

“I was being judged by people who had less knowledge than me, so what was it truly worth? I gave Michelin inspectors too much respect, and I belittled myself. I had three options: I could be a prisoner of my world and continue to work six days a week, I could live a lie and charge high prices and not be behind the stove or I could give my stars back, spend time with my children and re-invent myself.”
– Marco Pierre White, Wikipedia

I also really liked a statement Adam Ragusea made in the video which I wholly agree with:

“It takes practice to learn yourself.”
– Adam Ragusea

The video is about cooking, but it applies a lot to life in general – perhaps it takes a certain ease with ourselves and with life to be able to truly enjoy cooking.

August 2, 2022 2 responses

note

the intimate resonance of strangers

Yesterday through my stats I discovered Ben Werdmüller (who is technically my ex-colleague at Medium but we didn’t overlap) linked to one of my posts:

representation matters. Winnie Lim’s blog is one of the best things I read. This is a great example of why.
– Reading, watching, playing, using: July, 2022

My posts don’t really get that many reads. Once in a while a post unexpectedly goes slightly viral – in the hundreds – but most of the time it is like in the low tens. I don’t expect my writing to resonate with the masses because I think it is quite obscure.

But once in a while it resonates with one person, and they in turn make a meaningful note about it. I emailed Ben to thank him, telling him that being linked to is one of the best feelings in my world.

Maybe people may ask, why? It is just a link. But for me the link is everything. The link represents resonance, and because of the spectrum of writing I do, for it is a kind of intimate resonance. I think to have this intimate resonance with internet strangers is a very special thing.

August 1, 2022 respond

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eating my failures

I tried making korean rolled omelette and I made a mistake in the middle of the cooking process, but it turned out quite decent for the first attempt – still looks nothing like the actual thing though:

I like cooking because it can be very experimental, and it requires improvisation skills especially if not using a recipe, and things can go bad really quickly – food gets burnt or too soggy or it becomes a weird unpalatable mess – so it has been an interesting journey to eat my failures.

July 30, 2022 respond

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beyond my control

My dad just got discharged from the hospital. Many years of reading too many medical research papers for my own health has made me turn into a health control freak. I am inclined to tell him to do this, don’t do that, eat this, don’t eat that. I feel anxious and unsettled about the medication he’s on and how it would affect his long term health.

But I am also aware he’s an adult, an old one in fact though biological age does not correspond with emotional age it seems. There’s only so much I can do as a child, and I can sort of understand why I was subject to so much control as a kid. It is difficult to maintain some detachment towards people you care about and respect their independence as an individual.

I think life is this long practice of constant letting go, and a lot of forced letting go.

July 27, 2022 respond

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don’t skip that visit

I haven’t posted in this notes section for a while. My early intention for this section was to provide a space for me to pen down casual and insignificant thoughts, but today I realised that perhaps I would like to try using this section to be even more personal instead – at least sometimes.

I share my regular journal posts to facebook where there are actual friends, ex-colleagues, relatives, etc. To be honest I think most of the people who know me in real life probably don’t bother with my writing or they might be confused because the person they knew 10, 20 or 30 years ago may not correspond.

This notes section is mostly hidden from people who know me, and probably no one reads them unless they follow me on RSS or twitter. Even within these groups there will be only a small subset who would read these. So ironically I feel like I can write more intimately here.

My dad had to be hospitalised a few weeks ago. He seemed to be on the mend, but developed a fever yesterday so he’s now in the hospital again. He’s okay for now, but I was just thinking how I was supposed to visit him yesterday but changed it to today instead. And now I can’t visit him because of covid restrictions for hospitals.

I really wouldn’t know which of these visits would be the last.

Sometimes we may be inclined to skip an intended visit because of last minute inconveniences or issues. Maybe we’re busy with work or something. I just felt like I had to say, don’t skip that visit you’ve been meaning to make.

April 15, 2022 respond

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peeking into people’s routines

He started off the post with saying “I doubt this is useful to anyone but me”, but strangely I was very drawn to peeking into Warren Ellis’s Morning Routine and Work Day (via Roy Tang). Maybe it is because I’m still struggling to establish a routine for myself, and also we probably believe if we can know how creative people work, we can have creative output like them.

Maria Popova has also compiled a post on the routines of writers, and there is also an entire book on how artists work. Coincidentally I am now reading a book titled, “Rest” because I’ve seen two people mention it within a day. It is about how people with a high rate of creative output actually work 4-5 hours a day, and they spend the day hiking, meeting friends, generally having fun. This concept is not new to me, but it is always interesting to see how someone else approach a topic.

I’m still searching for the balance between creative flexibility and the rigour of a routine. There are many days when I don’t feel like doing anything creative, but I don’t want to take my available time for granted.

April 13, 2022 respond

note

Proust on seeing ourselves in books

This quote re-surfaced on facebook’s “on this day” a while ago, and I thought I should note it down here so it can have a permanent place in my learning library. Hopefully at some point I’ll design a better way to resurface memorable learnings for myself apart from the rudimentary “on this day” function.

Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book’s truth.

Source: Time Regained by Marcel Proust | link

In recent times I’ve fallen behind on my reading. I think partially it is because of pandemic fatigue and partially I’ve kinda saturated many of the “recommended” books in my areas of interest so I’ll have to dig deeper and wider to find good enough reads. I like reading books which compel me to pick it up again and again, but lately I have found myself getting bored with most of the books I’m reading. The last book I really liked was Becky Chambers’ “A Psalm for the Wild-Built”, I tend to not go back to the same author because I feel like I should read in a wider range, but maybe I should just exhaust all her books.

But the above quote by Proust reminded me that I must have reading as part of my routine again, so I can continue to get to know myself better. I am also reminded that it is usually when reading that I get provoked to think more – versus watching tv, for example.

I’ve also fallen behind with writing notes here. It does take work still, and I keep getting plagued by the feeling of “what is the point”. But fundamentally I think writing and contributing to our websites – there is an invisible compound effect that is taking place which isn’t obvious until much later after the fact.

I mean, the fact that I even rediscovered this Proust quote was because I bothered to post it on social media in the first place. And why does it matter? Because sometimes I tend to lose myself, and such quotes tend to put me back at where I wish to belong.

March 17, 2022 respond

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some thoughts on snippets from Matt Mullenweg on WordPress and Tumblr

I saw someone share (sorry I forgot who) this thought-provoking blurb from Matt Mullenweg on the open web vs scarcity-minded things like NFTs:

I will add that one of the most amazing things about the technological revolution was allowing for economics of abundance, not scarcity. Things get more valuable the more copies there are. We were talking about the positive flywheel of open-source earlier. WordPress gets more valuable the more free copies there are. Now we’re getting more things to introduce scarcity and the value of scarcity into the web, perhaps even programmatically with stuff like NFTs. The difference between what’s come before — from tens of thousands of humanity’s advances — is this idea that, in the world of bits instead of atoms, you and I don’t have a zero-sum way of prospering. We can both benefit from the same thing. We can perfectly copy that software and that actually enables entirely new business models that are pretty exciting. Or maybe that it’s not a business at all, which is okay. Everything doesn’t have to be for profit.
– Matt Mullenweg, How WordPress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird

I think it is pretty revolutionary to think of things getting more valuable the more copies there are. It is the complete opposite of how we’ve been conditioned to believe. Some part of me is deeply cynical, but there is also another part of me who also believes in this philosophy, which is one of the main reasons why I wanted to design a network for self-directed learning in the first place. It also underlies this website – the desire to openly share resources. I appreciate that WordPress is very profitable and yet allows most of its users to use it for free, in almost anyway they want. That in itself is powering so much human creativity and expression (that said I’m mostly neutral towards NFTs because it is still very nascent).

This site runs on WordPress as you know, and it wasn’t a frivolous choice. It is not perfect and it really attracts attacks and spam, but I liked that it has been around for the longest time and has one of the largest open-source eco-systems. I have upgraded sites that were installed on WordPress version 2 or something and they still work, like 10-15 years later. I like how Matt describes his philosophy for managing WordPress as antifragile:

When I’m thinking long-term, I’m thinking first and foremost, “What will be best for the WordPress community this year, 10 years, 30 years from now? What will make us the most sustainable, the most resilient, the most antifragile?” I think of that first.

I don’t think many people think of their software/projects/businesses in the timeframe of decades, especially now when most entities are just trying to survive the next financial cycle. But maybe this is the gift of being open-source and non-profit if you do it right (I mean, there are also people who try the non-profit route and languish). Reminds me of why the creator of NetNewsWire decided to make it free.

I also liked other tidbits in that article, particularly how Taylor Swift is using Tumblr – really dig the weird interplay between online communities and other types of media:

Taylor Swift is reading Tumblr, and that shows up in the lyrics. There’s a feedback loop between the lyrics and the Tumblr people. It’s nuts.

…and how one of India’s most famous actors use Tumblr everyday for like the past 5000 days:

Amitabh Bachchan. He’s one the most famous actors in India. He’s the I ndian actor.Look at this. He just posted today at 11:42AM. Day 5,130 of his daily updates. It’s awesome. He’s a daily active user of Tumblr.

I guess this notes section is like my tumblr. I would like to have posted everyday for 5000 days. It seems so easy, but it requires some form of commitment to show up still, everyday.

March 11, 2022 respond

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Tom Critchlow on building a digital homestead

I like reading posts on how people approach building their personal websites in an incremental manner versus treating it like a one-time project that is destroyed and rebuilt with every new version. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is cool to redesign it entirely, it is just that many times along with the process the information architecture is also destroyed, so we often see ghost urls and entire missing sections. The archivist in me mourns the loss.

Often a time because it is just so easy to make a website, it is often treated as something that can be easily thrown away and replaced. I think there is value in thinking of it as a long-term sprawling project that grows and trims like we do. Of course just like we shed identities at every mid-life crisis, I think it is perfectly fine to have an entire website rehaul when it can no longer express ourselves authentically.

I love how Tom Critchlow picks out quotes from a few blog posts about other people thinking around similar lines of thought – mine included – and in the same post I got to discover this beautiful attempt at organising content through questions by Emmanuel Quartey. I’ve been trying to organise my notebooks quite unsuccessfully, so unsuccessful that I stopped working on them, but this fresh approach gave me much food for thought.

February 23, 2022 3 responses

note

mirrored links

The other day Wesley left a comment on one of my posts to let me know that they referenced it in one of their recent posts, “How Websites Die“.

I think it is so cool that by them leaving a comment, my post now has a link to their post which links back to mine, like a mirror.

Most links are one-directional, and we don’t really know who is linking to us if not for analytics.

Note-taking apps like Roamresearch call them backlinks – two links that reference each other. Wouldn’t it be cool there is a standard way of displaying backlinks from someone else’s website? WordPress does this with trackbacks, but as far as I know they only work with other wordpress sites. Then there is Indieweb’s webmentions, but everytime I take a look to see if I can implement it, it just sounds a little too complicated. I wish there was a simple way for everyone to do it.

We could then have a way to display conversations that take place over a series of blog posts from different websites. Or a themed chain of blog posts from different sources.

If you didn’t know this, I implemented this sort of linking within my website. It doesn’t show up in RSS for now but on my website below this post you could see I linked to the original post that Wesley commented on, and if you navigate to that post it links back to this note. So I can personally keep track of the contextual relationships within my own content. I just think it’ll be cool to do so with other people’s blogs too.

February 15, 2022 2 responses

note

on “A Psalm for the Wild-Built”

Someone on reddit asked for: “A book that tells you that your life doesn’t need a purpose, or a grand ambition; and that it’s okay to just wander through life finding interesting things to do until you die” on r/suggestmeabook, and I saw that quite a few people recommended “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers. I thought it was quite an interesting title – there was a line on the cover that says “A monk and robot book”, and I was immediately sold.

It was one of the most soothing books I’ve read in recent times. Sometimes I just want to freeze my brain and read something that would make me hate the world less. This is such a book. I loved the breadth of its imagination. There was a top Goodreads review that criticised it for utopian-like world without explaining how it solved all its issues. But personally I feel we need books like that. There is a lot of dark and hard sci-fi around which I don’t enjoy. I just need to look at the existing world for my dose of darkness.

I won’t spoil the book, but I thought I could share a highlight that I loved:

It’s very hard to keep track of robots. We get so caught up in things. Fire Nettle, for example. It walked up a mountain one day and we didn’t see it again for six years. I thought it had broken down, but no, it was watching a sapling grow from seed. Oh, and there’s Black Marbled Frostfrog. It’s something of a legend. It’s been holed up in a cave, watching stalagmites form for three and a half decades, and plans to do nothing else. A lot of robots do things like that. Not all of us want the company of others, and none of us keep schedules that humans would find comfortable.

Source: A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers | link

How beautiful it is to entertain the idea that we can watch stalagmites form for three and a half decades and do nothing else and just be okay with that.

February 9, 2022 respond

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George Saunders on why we should study the way we read

I frequently acquire books through reading people’s blog posts. I picked up George Saunder’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain from someone’s blog (sorry I forgot whose, but I’ll make more effort to note it down the next time), and I started reading it today. I want to share a quote that left quite a linger impression:

To study the way we read is to study the way the mind works: the way it evaluates a statement for truth, the way it behaves in relation to another mind (i.e., the writer’s) across space and time. What we’re going to be doing here, essentially, is watching ourselves read (trying to reconstruct how we felt as we were, just now, reading). Why would we want to do this? Well, the part of the mind that reads a story is also the part that reads the world; it can deceive us, but it can also be trained to accuracy; it can fall into disuse and make us more susceptible to lazy, violent, materialistic forces, but it can also be urged back to life, transforming us into more active, curious, alert readers of reality.

Source: A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders | link

I like that he insinuates that reading like plenty of other things is essentially a skill, an act of interpretation as well as a response to the world. One could read something as it is, or one could think about it critically or even just start wondering about it.

I guess this is something that speaks to me at this point in time when there is so much disinformation, and perhaps the reason why the world is in this state is because we’ve been taught to read as though it is a technical skill – if only it was taught more philosophically.

February 5, 2022 respond

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added featured image & custom fields of notes to the RSS feed

Once in a while I’ll check the rss feed for this website just in case something is off, and I belatedly found out that the image designated as the featured image did not appear in the RSS feed by default in WordPress, so the graphic of a haiku I made didn’t show up, and the text looked like a chunk of unbroken mess because there was no context that I originally posted it on instagram where it is the norm for me to write in one unbroken paragraph.

For notes I use custom fields to show the url of the origin if I post stuff from instagram, twitter or facebook, and occasionally I pin a location which shows up as a rendered google map on the website itself. WordPress doesn’t show custom fields by default as well. Without them displaying on RSS a lot of context is missing.

Now you can see if posts originate from elsewhere, in this example “originally published on: twitter” is displayed. I think the origin of the content affects the perception of the form, so this small detail is important to me.

Pinned locations if any is rendered as plain text, because I think displaying rendered iframed maps is iffy in RSS readers.

I also use custom fields heavily for other parts of the website to display relationships between content – I guess that would be worked on another day.

February 4, 2022 respond

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Ian Leslie’s notes on “Get Back”

I read this monstrous 7500+ word substack newsletter in multiple sittings, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I loved the observation at the end that sums it all up:

A good song or album – or novel or painting – seems authoritative and inevitable, as if it just had to be that way, but it rarely feels like that to the people making it. Art involves a kind of conjuring trick in which the artist conceals her false starts, her procrastination, her self-doubts, her confusion, behind the finished article.
– The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson’s Get Back

I guess we can say the same thing about personalities as well, that we often see people – especially people of a higher profile – as the finished article, hardly contemplating what it took to get them there or the scars that lie underneath.

I also enjoyed this analysis of a particular conversation that took place between Paul McCartney and John Lennon:

The first thing to note is that John and Paul are talking to each other without talking to each other. This is partly because they’re aware of the cameras and also because they’re just not sure how to communicate with each other at the moment. John’s contributions are oblique, gnomic, riddling, comprised only of songs and jokes, like the Fool in King Lear… But right now, Paul is not much in the mood for it. His speech is more direct, though he too adopts a quasi-poetic mode (“canyons of your mind” is borrowed from a song by the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band) and he can’t bring himself to make eye contact. “To wander aimlessly is very unswinging,” he says (another great line, I will pin it above my writing desk). Then John does something amazing: he starts talking in Beatle, dropping in lyrics from the early years of the band, I Want To Hold Your Hand and Ask Me Why.

When I watched the docu (probably in like ten sittings or so) I didn’t get what was going on at all. But since it was so long I just watched everything go by without thinking too much of anything, just wanting to get to the end. But wow what a thing to respond in lyrics in a ongoing conversation, like the writer noted about Lennon’s genius:

His gift for comedy was not far short of his gift for music. He uses jokes to obstruct, obfuscate and deflect, and yet the undeniable truth is that he is a genuinely brilliant, lightning-quick, Peter Cook-level improviser…Lennon, at least when he was in the mood, was a master of it. His linguistic jamming made its way into lyrics, most unforgettably on I Am The Walrus. Written down on the page, it pales somewhat (his poetry books are thin stuff). It is Lennon’s delivery, his voice, his physical self, that make his wordplay such a thrill.

What a read. I liked that it was so gloriously long.

On a meta level I appreciated the mind and personality the writer possessed to make these observations in such beautiful prose. I was also slightly disappointed that everything is on Substack and it took me two clicks to find out more about the writer, and an actual google search to get to his twitter profile.

But writers have to make money, and so they put their writing in walled gardens. I just wish there were better independent solutions that enables better ownership, archiving and SEO, like shopify (which is still somewhat planting your own garden on someone else’s land but at least you can do whatever you want with it and it is brightly in your name) for writers. If I search for “Ian Leslie” there is no mention of Substack of the first page of result, and without further deliberate digging I wouldn’t know such writing exists.

February 3, 2022 respond

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“I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words”

Sometimes I feel like an alien in this world where people are always seeking to connect while I am always seeking to disconnect, trying to live in my own self-made bubble. Came across this quote by Carl Jung and it ironically made me feel less alone:

Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often torment for me, and I need many days of silence to recover from the futility of words.
– Carl Jung, source

February 2, 2022 respond

instagram

69 months! I realised I haven’t written a haiku since 2019, so I wrote one for today’s special occasion for the special person in my life: empty and floatingentangled with her presencemy…
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January 20, 2022 respond

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when someone blogs about your writing

Yesterday I exchanged a couple of emails with Ray from blogroll.org (which is an excellent resource for discovering blogs) and he alerted me to a blog post written about me.

I spent the next few moments not really in my body as I read what he wrote. I felt really awkward (in a good way I suppose) because I am not used to this at all.

I am very thankful that someone sees and appreciates my writing in this way. My writing tend to be very personal and longwinded – I know I am longwinded but I don’t want to cut out pieces of myself and how I really think in my chaotic mind just to fit some perception of how one’s writing should be – I tend to feel like everything I write goes into some vacuum.

I do get private messages from strangers once in a while which I am also very thankful for, but someone translating my quotes in Dutch on index cards is another thing altogether. I hope Wouter doesn’t mind me sharing a screenshot of his website:

I feel so seen. This is a moment I will cherish.

January 12, 2022 respond

twitter

working on a list of posts I want to write in case I lose my capacity to write anytime soon. we wouldn’t know how much time we have left, so why not err on the side of caution? also it could allow me to move on to something else when I’m done with writing all of them.