Anodyne

Awhile back Facebook killed the ability to scroll through your feeds via custom lists, thus eliminating my ability to focus on the fifty or so people in my tier one list — I had it organized in three tiers, in terms of interest level and closeness I guess. On Sunday evening, while I was laying around in bed, I started to unfollow people to see if I could make my Facebook feed a useful place again. Everyone has a mea culpa about why they haven’t left Facebook but broadly speaking, it’s useful to me as a minor keep-in-touch tool and ever since living in Asia, Facebook is a must — although I was scoffed at recently for asking to exchange Facebook info so maybe it’s Instagram now for the younger set. But mostly my retaining Facebook is its primary use case as a way to vet potential friends. Stalkers gonna stalk. So what I’m basically asking myself as I go through this most recent round of Facebook culling is to ask: Does this person’s posts add value? It's like the Kondo method bu...

We watched an episode of Netflix’s Our Planet, episode two I believe. In one stunning scene, Attenborough narrates along as walruses leap — okay roll — to their deaths from tremendous heights after scaling rocky cliffs they had no business climbing. It’s all in slow motion and pretty impactful. (See link below. I can’t decide if I’m going to bother linking out from this blog, but for now I will!) Tangent: This site, Convert Case , seems handy, it converts your text to sentence case, lower case, upper case, etc. And most importantly, aLtErNaTiNg case to really bring back that Nineties website flavor. I was also considering doing this entire blog in lower case to really throw it back but since I became a real writer that part of me died. Also I read somewhere that people who have the desire to write in all lowercase are really just compensating for something. In my case, sure, but I wish I knew what... In Singapore a few months ago, we went to a friend of a friend of a friend’s holi...

Tumblr is dead, blogging is sort of back, and so am I, with the effort to blog semi-regularly because otherwise I won’t get myself to a keyboard to type and hypothetically everything I should be doing involves a keyboard. There’s a lot of people who subscribe to the idea of morning pages and I guess that’s what I’m trying to do, but instead they’ll be late night pages. Stream of consciousness, no editing, no real intent to make coherence. In addition, I’ve been reading about the idea of “stock and flow,” which I took from Austin Kleon’s post and he took from Robin Sloan’s idea. Writing day should, in theory, get your brain spinning over the stuff that you want to review, and one of the things I want to do this year is try to sit on ideas more, instead the quick ingest and rinse cycle. "'Flow is the feed (“It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.”) and stock is the durable stuff (“It’s the content you produ...