Excursions avatar

Excursions

Straight drives with so little fuss it felt like the fulfilment of a pact. “Just be a good ball and go for four, okay?” Back-foot punches that combined the grace of a ballet dancer with the power of a heavyweight fighter. And those flicks. If they could talk, they’d be like, “Come on, man. Don’t make it this easy.” He was geometric perfection.

Source - Sachin Tendulkar at 50 - The stranger we kept calling by his first name →

A Blog No More

A few months back, I responded to Om Malik’s thoughts on the importance of stream of posts on one’s blog. Here’s what I proposed we bloggers should do.

Recommend stuff to the reader on our platform, our blogs. On our home pages. And around our posts. But instead of letting AI decide, let’s curate these recommendations manually.

I have since wanted to update my website, my primary home on the web, to do away with the standard design principle for a blog. Why does every home page have to look a certain way? Pages after pages of reverse chronological lists of posts.

I recently quipped that blogs have made the web boring. That every blog looks the same. All themes are more or less the same. A slight layout change here. A margin or padding there. Varied columns. But all look the same to me. You know that you are reading a blog.

I wanted to stop doing that. I want to curate the experience for the readers. Worst case, for the one reader that’s me. So, I have been working on laying out the structure for this space afresh1.

A home page recommends a selection of posts. No page’s a reverse chronological list. Even if a reader visits one that’s supposed to be, for example, archive, they won’t see a list. Every page allows a search and an option to visit a random post. A prominent nav bar allows navigation around every post. There are a lot of other minor touches sprinkled across.

Plus there are colours. Minimal doesn’t mean black and white. Minimal can have personality. It does now.

Satisfied after playing around and iterating with the changes for a couple of days, I applied the layout to the site today. Once I did, I wondered if this space was a typical blog any more. As per Wikipedia.

A blog is an informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page.

Not a diary. No reverse chronological order. And yet I don’t care. To me, a blog is what a blogger wants it to be. And I am done with the stream of posts. So here’s to a bold new start.

  1. I do maintain and actively publish at a traditional blog and the nav bar points to that. Irony much? ↩︎

Until digital video arrived in the late 1990s, 16-millimeter film was the mainstay of the amateur or independent filmmaker, requiring neither the investment nor the know-how of commercial cinema.

Source: Happy 100th Birthday, 16-Millimeter Film →

Fascinating. I had no idea about this history.

I have a fascinating relationship with Mondays. There’s some charm to the first day of the week as if it dawns with a responsibility to set things right. With a new zeal not to carry the mistakes from the week gone by.

To follow the routine. To focus on the work. To get back to life.

With responsibility comes pressure. The pressure of all the things undone in the last week and pushed to the next. Pushed out with the hope that the first day of the following week would be different. Better. It never is.

I usually want to get back to all the right habits on Mondays. Why do so on any other day? In the middle of a week? Right? I remember we, friends, once had a running joke where we would answer any suggestion of starting something healthy with “let’s start on Monday”.

Gym? Let’s start on Monday. Stop eating junk food? Let’s start on Monday. Read more? “Let’s start …”

This habit of waiting for Monday to start something different, something good, has stuck with me. Funny how bad habits die hard.

Lawmakers have begun to contemplate new rules around authorship and ownership in connection with creative machines, and the stakes are huge for both the businesses that depend on creative work and the investors who poured billions into new AI tools.

Source - Who Owns a Song Created by AI? →

This is an important debate that needs addressed before it becomes a legal mess.

I generally find it easy to write about meta topics around my writing process. Or platforms. Among the people I read online, the behaviour is common. At the same time, I’m not too fond of these meta posts. All I am doing is convincing myself why the choice of a platform is the right one. No one cares about them.

Will I ever run out of places where I can write at? I won’t. Can I ever have enough of them? Never. Should I write about all of them? Absolutely not.

Holding oneself back from writing about a particular topic is antithetical to the spirit of blogging, where no topic is beyond the bounds.

But writing about every experiment lends me a false sense of achievement. I write because I want to think better. I write because I want to improve my writing skill. Writing mindlessly about my experiments doesn’t help me with either of those. Hence I don’t write meta posts any longer.

Or so I think. Ironically, this itself is a meta post.

Substack Notes experience, especially with signup, is horrible. I provided an email address to login. Finding things very similar to Twitter, I followed a bunch of people and soon I was bombarded with newsletter issues. When did I agree to sign up for the newsletters? Terrible!