Excursions

I have recently been a lot picky about the stuff I buy. Or the subscriptions I sign up for. Or the projects I undertake. I was never good at it. And I don’t claim that I have mastered the skill now. I still struggle to recognise the price that I would eventually have to pay. First look, the listed cost looks cheap. But I have started asking now, “can I pay the second price?”

The answer is usually a big no. David Cain succinctly words the reasons behind this problem of mine (the above linked essay is a must-read).

I believe this is one reason our modern lifestyles can feel a little self-defeating sometimes. In our search for fulfillment, we keep paying first prices, creating a correspondingly enormous debt of unpaid second prices. Yet the rewards of any purchase – the reason we buy it at all — stay locked up until both prices are paid.

I could also closely associate with the side effects of this problem, as David lists them. This made me acutely aware of the gravity of this pilling debt.

This scarcity feeling creates one of the major side-effects of our insurmountable second-price debt: we reflexively overindulge in entertainment and other low-second-price pleasures –- phone apps, streaming services, and processed food — even though their rewards are often only marginally better than doing nothing. This stuff is attractive because it takes little effort (and we’re tired from working to pay for so many first prices) but it can eat up a ton of time, depleting the second-price budget even further.

The guiding philosophy is “Go deeper, not wider.” Drill down for value and enrichment instead of fanning out. You turn to the wealth of options already in your house, literally and figuratively. We could call it a “Depth Year” or a “Year of Deepening” or something. In the consumer age, where it’s so easy to pick up and abandon new pursuits, I imagine this Depth Year thing really catching on, and maybe becoming a kind of rite of passage. People are already getting sick of being half-assed about things, I like to think.

Source: Go Deeper, Not Wider →

Last year, TikTokker Avery Steeves posted a video asking why no one talks about how there’s an entire generation of teenage girls who taught themselves to code HTML on Tumblr. “People are like, ‘Oh, there’s no girls in STEM,’” she says, imitating the faceless internet mob. “No, there were! They were just making pale blogs,” an emblem of the washed-out, soft-grunge aesthetic popular on the platform in 2014.

Source: How Tumblr taught young women to code →

This year (2022) is going to see my journal/log’s 10th anniversary and 100th notebook. After many attempts to write this up, I’m just going to disgorge it all. This article is long and rambling and I make no apology for it.

Source: My Notebook System - ratfactor.

I don’t even know what to think of this. It is extensive and over-planned for my liking. I can’t do consistently follow through with such a system even if I wanted to. I am glad I don’t want to.

Liked a thought by Noah Garfinkel →

One reason I still have trouble believing crypto currency is money is that there aren’t commercials for money.

I find the story of Douglas Corrigan pretty fascinating and inspiring. Sometimes the wrong way is the right way. All that matters is your intention and people’s perception.

Having flown his nine year-old, $900 Curtiss Robin to New York, Corrigan fueled up and took off after announcing that he planned to return to Los Angeles. When next heard from, Corrigan and his old plane were in Dublin, Ireland, where he said, “My name’s Corrigan. I left New York yesterday morning headed for California, but I got mixed up in the clouds and must have flown the wrong way.” And so was born the wry legend of “Wrong Way” Corrigan.

I Cannot Begin to Tell You How Proficient I Am in Microsoft Word →

Many are the candidates who come touting their areas of expertise—beginner Spanish, ability to work well under pressure—but none compare to the fluency with which I insert links and align text, add comments and reply to the comments left by others.

The web doesn’t have version numbers →

I just wanted to make the point that it’s unfair to claim a version number for the web for a specific set of innovations you happen to like. There are many ways the web evolves. Sometimes they involve the kinds of technology that ‘web3’ adepts use, but usually they don’t.

JavaScript Is Not What It Used To Be →

The legacy of JavaScript is something that cannot be changed without immeasurable consequences. Hence why avoiding the worst parts rely on the developers: It is a trade of Developer Experience for Backward Compatibility.

How Hobbies Infiltrated American Life - The Atlantic →

Theoretically, hobbies should be among the most intrinsically motivated things we could do—they are the work we choose to do when we could be doing anything. But the validation we get from others online, and the validation we get from our culture writ large for spending our free time in a productive, virtuous way, muddies that motivation.

A brilliant essay, specifically this snippet highlights a key issue that social media platforms foster, something that I had written about recently.