Excursions

I started reading (listening to) a novel by David Baldacci today and decided right away I didn’t need to continue doing that. It started with gruesome details of a crime scene. Not the way I want to start my day. Or end my day. For that matter, I am tired of crime and mystery novels for now. This is the genre that I have been reading for the past few months. I will take a pause now.

I usually listen to my #books while on a morning walk. Crime novels are not the best companion at that time of the hour.

I returned the audiobook and purchased P. G. Wodehouse – the Blandings Castle collection. I will let Stephen Fry narrate light stories from the master of humour throughout the day. And I have got about 45 hours of that narration. Nice!

I have decided to change my routine from being an early-morning person to becoming a late-night guy. I realized that the mornings did not leave me with much time. The routine got packed recently with the added responsibility of Snoopy gobbling up the mornings. It just didn’t leave me much time to read and write.

So when Snoopy recently started going to bed early, leaving me a silent hour at night, I couldn’t pass on the opportunity. I sit alone with my laptop and a blinking cursor at write.as. There is hardly any noise around as my wife and daughter are in bed with their thoughts. Doing their stuff.

Mornings in my #life had stopped being calm. I was always praying that others should not wake up early. Before that, I should. Even if I did wake up, I felt sleepy. Thoughts ceased to come through. There was always something waiting to clog my mind.

“Maybe I should read the news first?” “I shouldn’t make too much noise, or I will wake others”. “Let me just lie down for 15 minutes”. And on and on.

That’s not how I remember a productive morning routine. It was time to change things. I have. I have no idea if this works. I hope, for the sake of my writing, that it does.

I have been watching a lot of movies and a lot fewer series. The latter demand too much time, something I do not have much of. Even the shows I watch are the selected episodes of the ones I have already seen earlier. I don’t remember the last new TV series I watched. Suzhal?

Matt Gemmell reminded me recently that it is ok to write less. However, this passage especially caught my attention.

Blogs were originally a kind of diary, and they were mostly repositories of short pieces, not huge articles. It’s an absolute fallacy that longer works are better or more valuable; indeed, shorter pieces are more likely to be read and digested, which intrinsically increases their value.

As I had complained recently, I have been growing through a slump in my writing. I have started taking my blogging too seriously. “Not every thought deserves to be published”, I convinced myself. Or “this needs to be elaborated; the readers won’t understand”.

This might sound rude, but since when have I started caring about my readers? I should read some of my earlier posts. They were terrible. They made no sense then and don’t make any sense even now. Even to me. So why care?

Publish anything, everything. Short, long - doesn’t matter. Anywhere that’s convenient at the moment. Don’t take Grammarly too seriously. Get back to writing more. I can work on making it better later.

Coffee and a book. After a long long time 🍵📖

I watched Pathaan yesterday. The only reason this movie even is bearable is due to the charisma that is SRK. It’s a terrible movie otherwise. A two star movie with one big star, who earns an additional star by himself.

It keeps mistaking skiers, and some other fitness enthusiasts, for car-wreck victims.

Source - My Watch Thinks I’m Dead - New York Times →

I never tried Matter enough, even though I like most of what I have seen and respect their goal. I just don’t want to start liking an app that will eventually cost me another monthly subscription. One that’s not cheap either at $8 per month.

Finally, if you were subscriber to Twitterrific for iOS, we would ask you to please consider not requesting a refund from Apple. The loss of ongoing, recurring revenue from Twitterrific is already going to hurt our business significantly, and any refunds will come directly out of our pockets – not Twitter’s and not Apple’s. To put it simply, thousands of refunds would be devastating to a small company like ours.

Source - Twitterrific: End of an Era • The Breakroom →

I had missed to post this, but this passage was painful to read.

In general, what characterizes this phase of the tech giants’ development is a shift from unlocking user creativity and customer value to doubling down on surveillance, usually augmented by AI.

Source: Two ways to think about decline →