Commonplace : April 2021
I’ve declared email bankruptcy again and cleared out my inbox of wonderful newsletters I haven’t had time to read. I did the same with my RSS reader (The Old Reader, which works like the beloved defunkt Google Reader of old) and I feel digitally lighter.
I do still love newsletters. They’ve more or less replaced social media for me and are basically what personal blogs used to be. It’s part of why I still try to occasionally get this one out the door to you all.
As a larger effort in my digital spring cleaning, I’ve become smitten with Obsidian and am in the very slow process of replacing my four or so various digital notebooks with this one repository, backed up to Github so I even have versioning.
Obsidian can be used like a regular notebook, with folders and files (in markdown, which has become my preferred format). However, it’s power lies in how it can wiki-style connect thoughts and ideas. I’m working through all of my notes in bits and pieces, detaching them from their folders and allowing the ensuing chaos to evolve into unexpected connections as a new structure emerges.
A great example of how things are connecting in new ways is a draft blog post I have about writing code. There are now connections between that post, a few thoughts on Ikigai, bindrunes, algorithms, and puzzles. A sense of wonder is starting to emerge.
The whole effort seemed overwhelming until a coworker passed along the LYT Kit which provides a bit more guidance for working with notes beyond “Here is a cool tool that makes a graph showing you how your knowledge is interconnected”.
The challenge now is embracing the chaos until things are in better order. Also, a few things aren’t getting jumbled in here with the rest. My fiction writing will be kept separate, though still in Obsidian (in a separate “vault”). I am trying to get all my writing into plain text and backed up to paper copies because to be honest the idea of losing everything I’ve written to a solar flare would probably be the thing that breaks me in such a scenario.
News
-
I did the hard, but smart thing and swapped the phone by my bed for my stripped down old iPhone 6. It’s got the alarm I actually need along with a few meditation apps and some music for when I wake in the middle of the night but otherwise that’s it. No real phone (and distractions) before bed. It’s helped tremendously on many levels.
-
I’m currently reading “Gideon the Ninth” by Tamsin Muir, which has finally shown me that I can remember how to read long-form fiction. “Fortunately the Milk” by Neil Gaiman was a warm-up.
-
I keep coming back to Sylvan Esso for my listening and was reminded recently how much I love Peter Gabriel and that I haven’t listened to “Red-Headed Stranger” by Willie Nelson in a while.
-
Also, baseball is back and I couldn’t be happier.
A few quotes of interest
Sacraments get invented during lean times like this. - Frank Chimero
“We all only get better at what we spend time on. And we do get better if we spend time on things.” - Tanya Reilly
“If you get tired, learn to rest, not quit.” - Banksy
Some reading
TikTok’s Sea Shanties ‘Wellerman’ Music Trend, Explained
The sea shanty seems like the strangest possible pick for this year’s new, hot music trend, but as a longtime sea-shanty fan (what can I say, I’m the type who read Horatio Hornblower novels in high school), I’m here to tell you that sea shanties make so much sense for this moment, right now. They’re songs with simple, blunt rhythms, meant to be easy to learn and easy to sing along with while doing the hard physical work of sailing a large fishing vessel. One person is the song leader, setting the pace and singing the verses, but the engine of the song is in the repeating chorus that everyone sings together over and over again. They are unifying, survivalist songs, designed to transform a huge group of people into one collective body, all working together to keep the ship afloat.
Lillördag: Sweden’s workers de-stress with ‘Little Saturday’ - BBC Worklife
“Lillördag is a square contrast to the North American concept of ‘Hump Day’, which frames Wednesday as a runner-up to Monday for worst day of the week; you’re almost through, but still have plenty of time to go before the weekend. According to Constanze Leineweber, associate professor at the Stress Research Institute of Stockholm University, perceiving Wednesday as Little Saturday can make the workweek more bearable – especially now when our days in isolation seem to blur together “with no end in sight”.”
Daft Punk breakup: anime Interstella 5555 might be their most interesting and influential work.
“As a Daft Punk fan, this anime visual album is a must-watch. And now that the duo has hung up their helmets and headed into retirement, there’s no better time to watch some rare performances of theirs—even if they’re animated.”
That’s it from me this month. See you later!