Excursions avatar

Excursions

I published another issue of my newsletter today - it narrates my experience to be back to the place I’ve been calling home for the past 10 years. This is also the first issue posted on the Ghost platform. You can subscribe to Slanting Nib here.

In process of recording myself talk, I have earned a new respect for the folks who do this regularly. I love writing, it comes naturally to me. I enjoy recording audio. But video? Boy, that’s not easy.

Back to the Home

Hello Friend,

I have recently moved back to my permanent address — the place I have been calling home for the past ten years. It was precisely a year ago that I had shifted to my original hometown. My wife and I wanted to be closer to our parents in these uncertain times. Good that we did. We ploughed through some of the toughest times with the support of the extended family. The sheer burden of the unknown and uncertainty would have crushed the lonely and separated souls.

Even though the closeness to the family was welcoming, the place you call your home always lends innate warmth. You feel calm, at home, free of some strange burden. Possibly, it is because of the familiarity of the surroundings. Or maybe it is because you have fallen in love with your abode over the many years of togetherness. Whatever the reason, things generally feel right.

That has been the experience for me for the past week. The period when I was away from this place appears way back in history. Is it not spectacular that you can so easily get habituated to the change in your surroundings?

That said, the drive back was full of anxiety. The ride, itself, was  uneventful — instead, we welcomed the chance to spend a pleasant 12 hours on the road. It was the inside that was churning with thoughts. I was petrified, thinking about the state the home would be in. Would it be covered knee-deep in the dust? Or full of cobwebs? With pests running everywhere? The fear of the unknown was nibbling my heart within. Just the thought of the sheer work we may have to put in to make the place liveable made me uncomfortable.

As I unlocked the main door and stepped inside, I realized I was foolish to let these thoughts burden my mind. Of course. Our home is not somewhere in the wild, open for unruly animals to pry at. It is part of a gated community. No cockroaches or spiders were running around the house. The dust that I was so terrified of was barely visible. I could feel it was there. But cleaning that was far from the back-bending chore that I imagined it to be. The home was just the way we had left it, our own. Calm.

Anyway, the place is back to being our home again. Now, this is also a time to settle into a new routine. A change of setting calls for a change in the way I was leading my life for the past year. I have already got my mornings back — a familiar, peaceful morning is when I am writing this letter in. Now, it is time to handle the other phases of the day.

With that update out of the way, here is the selection of three brilliant essays on life for this week.

“The Capital T Truth” by David Foster Wallace →

[I]t is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.

“Why Go Out?” by Sheila Heti →

I’m always super-aware of how whenever I go out into the world, or whenever I get involved in a relationship, my idea of who I think I am utterly collides with the reality of who I actually am. And I continue to go out even though who I am always comes up short. I always prove myself to be less generous, less charming, less considerate, not as bold or energetic or intelligent or courageous as I imagined in my solitude. And I’m always being insulted, or snubbed, or disappointed.
And yet, in some way, maybe this is better. Each of us could suffer the pangs of withdrawal from other people and gain the serenity of the non-smoker. We could be demi-gods in our little castles, all alone, but perhaps, deep down, none of us really wants that. Maybe the only cure for self-confidence and courage is humility. Maybe we go out in order to fall short, because we want to learn how to be good at being people, and moreover, because we want to be people.

“How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day” by Arnold Bennett →

A failure or so, in itself, would not matter, if it did not incur a loss of self-esteem and of self-confidence. But just as nothing succeeds like success, so nothing fails like failure. Most people who are ruined are ruined by attempting too much. Therefore, in setting out on the immense enterprise of living fully and comfort- ably within the narrow limits of twenty-four hours a day, let us avoid at any cost the risk of an early failure. I will not agree that, in this business at any rate, a glorious failure is better than a petty success. I am all for the petty success. A glorious failure leads to nothing; a petty success may lead to a success that is not petty.

Postscript

You, my reader with a keen eye, must have noticed that this issue looks slightly different. It does because I have moved my newsletters to the Ghost platform. Without going too much into details, let us just say that I wanted to challenge myself to write more long-form essays. I do plan to do that on Ghost.

I have published below essays since I delivered the last issue of the newsletter. Given that I recently started publishing with Ghost, these posts are meta thoughts on my choice of platforms.

You can also receive my essays along with the newsletter issues, if interested. Just let me know. I will deliver every essay I publish by email. Or you could, of course, also subscribe to the good old RSS feed.

Have any recommendations or feedback for me for the newsletter issue? I’d love to hear from you. Just hit reply, or you can even email me.

Thank you for reading and sharing.

—Amit

No Blogging Platform is Perfect

The real test for any blogging platform is how simple it makes it to write from both a desktop and a mobile device. I have come to realize that no platform does it perfectly.

I look for these features in an editor from any platform before I select it. It needs to have a simple editor that works well for posts of any length, works well from a device of any form. It needs to support building drafts before posts are published. It needs to support a simple editing workflow. That's it. And even these simple needs are not fulfilled by a single platform.

WordPress has a decent mobile app, supporting all the necessary features of the platform. But the Gutenberg block editor is so convoluted to work with even on desktops that working with it on a mobile device is an absolute pain. It has too many bells and whistles that a blogger with simple text writing needs rarely uses. It is good to capture the ideas in short and expand on them on a desktop. No wait, the editor is pain even on desktop.

The static site generators like Hugo, Jekyll, Eleventy etc. need a CMS to be tacked on to them. Sure, you can choose a CMS of your choice, but for me, the experience never worked well. I have tried multiple static site generators, but the overall publishing workflow is unnecessarily complicated for my simple needs.

Of course, there is always an option to use a text editor of your choice on your machine and publish the posts from the editors – if the integration exists for your selected platform that is. But that works best when you draft a post from a single machine. For me, that's typically not the case. For example, just this post has been written across three different devices – a web-based CMS is a must for me.

Another promising option is connecting to IndieWeb and using any Micropub clients to publish to your sites. But unfortunately, after years of enabling all my sites with IndieWeb components and publishing via Micropub clients, I have come to realize that none is, by design, a CMS in any form. I find them lacking in supporting creation of drafts to work on later or editing of existing posts.

Sure, it has all the definitions for you to build such a system over, but that's an unnecessary overhead that I am not ready to sign up for.

Micro.blog simplies hosting of a simple blog. It has a pretty decent iOS app, and a suite of well-defined APIs. A few third-party apps have already been build over those APIs. But the platform lacks a good editor – its editor is too basic for any post longer than a regular micro post. Sure, it works. But barely. On a mobile device, it does not work at all. The recommendation seems to be to use any of the mobile apps, but they all lack the features I need.

When I moved my blog to Micro.blog, I had published this concern.

I wonder if I would be ok to post mainly from mobile, but as a regular micropub post. WordPress always allowed me to post so much more. I am not sure what m.b allows. It should be good enough, but is it really? That would be a test.

Unfortunately, I have realized that the platform doesn't pass that test, wholly. The editing experience remains poor for the long form posts – both from a desktop and a mobile device. It's a great system with a promising base, but still has a long way to go before I can use it for the longer form content.

So where does this leave me?

I have been struggling a lot from the beginnning to find that one good platform that addresses all my needs mentioned above. But, unfortunately, I have failed to find a single one that does all the aspects well. I love Micro.blog as it solves my simple needs of hosting with a no-nonsense platform for blog. It works great for micro posts – I can live with the mobile workflow for such short posts.

And I have recently fallen in love with Ghost for the long-form needs. It has a great editor on both the desktop and mobile devices, it has a brilliant CMS for my drafting and editing needs and is a solid platform all-round that I can host myself. WordPress failed big time in that aspect.

So, at least for the foreseeable future, here's how my posting is going to be. Micro.blog for micro-posts. Self-hosted Ghost for long-form posts, that includes my newsletter.

Why a special space for long-form writing you may ask?

I believe the choice of your blogging platform affects the type of posts you write. If the writing experience you have with a platform does not suit a particular form, you will invariably stop writing those posts.

My love for writing words is satiated only by the long-form posts. That love is also the reason why I started writing on the web in the first place. I can't stop writing them just because the platform I choose for my convinience does not support such writing well.

Slanting Nib & A Keyboard

Subscribe to Slanting Nib here or read through the issues archive first. You can also receive every essay I publish by email, if interested. Just let me know. Or you could, of course, subscribe to the good old RSS feed.

It’s not easy to become a writer. It is fiendishly difficult to stay a writer. To string words together, day in day out, that would be meaningful. To be inspired to do so every day. To not get lost in the deluge of “inspiration” posts that are anything but.

Each week, I dig through the endless archives of the Internet to find those few fascinating posts, which I deliver as issues of this newsletter to assist a writer to stay inspired. This is what I had written while introducing the newsletter as part of the first issue.

There are times when we [the creative people] get stuck and look for inspiration. There are times when we wish that finding help was simpler. With this newsletter, I intend to lend exactly that to the writers, a helping hand of sorts.
With every update, I will publish a curated list of the articles and tools that I believe every writer would find interesting and helpful. I will also feature one writer that inspires me to write more, along with some of their writing.

I have struggled many a time for inspiration, for guidance. I often wished if only there was a hidden dole of helpful articles and directions that will keep me interested, motivated to trudge along. Slanting Nib & A Keyboard (referred interchangeably as Slanting Nib) will attempt to be that nudge for me first. My wish is it manages to do the same for the writer in you, manages to inspire the words in you.

Slanting Nib will be delivered every Sunday at 5 PM UTC. Featuring a personal letter and essays about something close to me, along with three thoughtfully curated posts. That's all. Each issue aims to be interesting enough to be worthy of your time without becoming too long to be a burden, a drag.

What can I expect in each issue?

Each issue generally follows some theme. The first issue focused on the history of writing, for example; the second one presented a few inspiring words from masters. As long as I could, I intended to maintain a common thread that connects all the posts included in an issue.

However, I soon realized that I needed to make the newsletter more about my thoughts. Make it personal. So in addition, I have started drafting a warm letter for the readers. I follow it up by a section of featured writing with a maximum of 3 articles. All the articles will be meaningful. I will make it a point that neither is a listicle of any form. Or one from the myriad of productivity hacks.

What if I have feedback?

I would love to hear from you. If you come across something that you think would be the right fit for an issue, do send the recommendations to me. If you find something incorrect or some part that doesn’t work, don’t hesitate to let me know. And of course, if you like something I have included in the newsletter issue, or it helped you in some way, I would love to hear about that too.

Just hit reply to the issue or email me with any recommendations or tips, writer or tools. I am a completionist, I will acknowledge every email.

So if this sounds interesting to you, you can subscribe here. Or you can also read through the issues archive. No rush.

Slanting Nib & A Keyboard

Subscribe to Slanting Nib here or read through the issues archive first. You can also receive every essay I publish by email, if interested. Just let me know. Or you could, of course, subscribe to the good old RSS feed.

It’s not easy to become a writer. It is fiendishly difficult to stay a writer. To string words together, day in day out, that would be meaningful. To be inspired to do so every day. To not get lost in the deluge of “inspiration” posts that are anything but.

Each week, I dig through the endless archives of the Internet to find those few fascinating posts, which I deliver as issues of this newsletter to assist a writer to stay inspired. This is what I had written while introducing the newsletter as part of the first issue.

There are times when we [the creative people] get stuck and look for inspiration. There are times when we wish that finding help was simpler. With this newsletter, I intend to lend exactly that to the writers, a helping hand of sorts.
With every update, I will publish a curated list of the articles and tools that I believe every writer would find interesting and helpful. I will also feature one writer that inspires me to write more, along with some of their writing.

I have struggled many a time for inspiration, for guidance. I often wished if only there was a hidden dole of helpful articles and directions that will keep me interested, motivated to trudge along. Slanting Nib & A Keyboard (referred interchangeably as Slanting Nib) will attempt to be that nudge for me first. My wish is it manages to do the same for the writer in you, manages to inspire the words in you.

Slanting Nib will be delivered every Sunday at 5 PM UTC. Featuring a personal letter and essays about something close to me, along with three thoughtfully curated posts. That's all. Each issue aims to be interesting enough to be worthy of your time without becoming too long to be a burden, a drag.

What can I expect in each issue?

Each issue generally follows some theme. The first issue focused on the history of writing, for example; the second one presented a few inspiring words from masters. As long as I could, I intended to maintain a common thread that connects all the posts included in an issue.

However, I soon realized that I needed to make the newsletter more about my thoughts. Make it personal. So in addition, I have started drafting a warm letter for the readers. I follow it up by a section of featured writing with a maximum of 3 articles. All the articles will be meaningful. I will make it a point that neither is a listicle of any form. Or one from the myriad of productivity hacks.

What if I have feedback?

I would love to hear from you. If you come across something that you think would be the right fit for an issue, do send the recommendations to me. If you find something incorrect or some part that doesn’t work, don’t hesitate to let me know. And of course, if you like something I have included in the newsletter issue, or it helped you in some way, I would love to hear about that too.

Just hit reply to the issue or email me with any recommendations or tips, writer or tools. I am a completionist, I will acknowledge every email.

So if this sounds interesting to you, you can subscribe here. Or you can also read through the issues archive. No rush.

Rating the film rating systems

Isn't it odd that we can't decide on a consistent content rating system across all the countries? I know I have ranted about this a many times before this. But I just can't wrap my head around the fact that we, supposedly smart humans, haven't figured out a way yet to addresses such a trivial aspect of our film watching experience.

How difficult is it to say that this content is made for children 6 years and above? Or 13 years and above?

I know. I'm ignoring the fact that all nations are not governed the same. They have individual definitions and expectations of freedom. Oversimplifying the problem at hand may not take us anywhere. The least I can do at least is to check which countries handle this rating problem the best.

I find it fascinating that Turkey has the simplest content rating system. These are the rating — General Audience, 6+, 10+, 13+, 16+, 18+. Austria is in the same league — Unrestricted, 6, 10, 12, 14, 16. Russia's not too far behind, too — 0+, 6+, 12+, 16+, 18+.

India has a simple range — U, UA, A, S. But those characters are meaningless. How is one to map them to the age of the child?

United States follows an even more muddled system — G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17. That's complication is unnecessary. It's unfortunate that those are the ratings that are most widely followed.

A couple of curious cases. South Africa has these categories — A, PG, 7–9PG, 10–12PG, 13, 16, 18, X18, XX. Plus these sub-descriptors — S, L, V, P, N, H, D, SV. Wow! I am sure a significant post-production budget goes towards arriving at the right rating for a film.

And finally, of course, China. It has no official rating system. There are only two categories — suitable for all ages and banned.

---

Here are a few additional observations and a proposal. 6, 16 and 18 are the most commonly agreed boundaries for the films. Only a few countries have any ranges beyond 18.

So, if we manage to find an agreeable boundary between 6 ad 16, we should be able to cover major countries with these ratings — 0+, 6+, 12+, 16+, 18+ . I am sure folks smarter than me will find a better way of conveying all why this system should work. Or convince me why this will never work.

About

I am Amit Gawande and this is an experiment that I have undertaken to answer a key question that I often ask myself subconsciously – what if my choice of service is impacting the type of writing I do online?

I want to write deep, meaningful posts that I put more work in, put more thoughts around. My primary site hosted by Micro.blog does not allow such a workflow. Here's an attempt to see if a more conventional site allows that space to my mind to work on thoughts.

If you have reached this space, it possibly means I have managed to post and share at least a couple of long-form essays. Does that mean that the experiment was fruitful? I guess, when I find an answer to that, this about page would read very differently.

Skies blanketed by clouds
Breeze idling with playfulness
Garden nurtured at home.

Ingredients of a peaceful morning, And a calm mind.

What Will Happen to My Music Library When Spotify Dies? →

These methods of archiving are either imperfect, impractical, or both—and besides, even if I went through with them, chances are that decades from now, I’d just end up with a monster text file or a long-obsolete hard drive that would be a pain to sync up with some future listening platform.

I lost my music collection some 7 years back and I never attempted to build a personal music library since then. I have accepted the fact that the benefits of streaming services (mainly around discovery) are more valuable to me than my quest for a personal collection of my favorite songs. Unfortunate, but practical.

I am wary of using any Apple services as my default - they make it very difficult to use them outside of their ecosystem. I do not use only Apple devices. There was a time when I did. And then things slowly changed.

I use Windows at work. I use Android and iOS. I use iPad. Apple services rarely work well across all the platforms. Just access then on web is not an answer am comfortable with.

So as much as I dislike it, I am slowly using more and more services from Google and Microsoft. Surprisingly, Microsoft does well to fill the void between Android and iOS platforms with apps that work well on both platforms backed by Microsoft services.

I find it crazy that neither Google nor Apple are keen to address this key problem.

In the last three days, I have started reading three new books. It wasn't planned, people who know my likings recommended the books to me. And each read brilliantly in samples. So, I am reading five in parallel now - a humour, a mystery, a self-help, one on psychology and one fantasy. Now, that's a personal record. No harm doing that, right? Right?

The publication portals and channels around tech news are too noisy. They make exclusives out of trivial bites. Plus, the updates to the tech that they boast about are incremental, more often than not. It is crazy yet how many such portals and channels exists today. Just open YouTube or any feed and search for a mobile brand. It is an endless list of attention hungry wannabes.

It is so unfortunate that the genuine and worthy thoughts and updates are lost in this noise.

I am reading many people's writing process today and am absolutely stunned at how simple my writing needs are. I don't write drafts after drafts in any tool. All my drafts are one line ideas in my notebook or saved articles with tags "to-write". I find time for writing and complete a post about an idea or article.

For that matter, most of my posts are spontaneous -- I get a thought and I put it down into a post. I don't insert too many images, individual or as part of the posts. Sure, there are times when I need to spend time on researching or explaining some projects that I am working on. Or when I am writing a fiction. Such posts are very rare, though (and continue to become even rarer as the time goes on).

Plus, I like writing in Markdown. But I am not too attached to the language. I could very well go about writing posts after posts without using any of the Markdown syntax. The most I do is emphasize a word or a line. It won't matter to me how I do it. That said, I continue to enjoy writing my post in Markdown editors and would do that wherever I get a chance.

There was a time when all my posts originated in some text editor installed on my laptop. But that's not the case any more. Most of the posts that I write are in a portal of sorts hosted on web - mainly Quill. (I wish Micro.blog had a better writing interface, though. The current one is too basic and doesn't work well for longer posts). On a mobile device, I only write microposts and I would post them from some Micropub client -- I use Micro.blog apps (Gluon or Dialog) or Indigenous.

All in all, I have realized I have a simple publishing workflow. I open a web or mobile app, put down my thoughts and hit publish. So, what use do I have for the text editors any more?

I dislike the fact that I have published very few long form posts recently. It's as if I can only think in micro form. Should it matter? I don't think so. But I have slowly come to the realization that I am writing with one eye on the character count. It's really foolish of me to do that. But I do this subconsciously.

Somewhere deep down, a thread also continuously evaluates how the post is going to look in a timeline -- the only one where I believe it matters would be Micro.blog. Again, it's foolish. But I have realized it affects me. If it didn't, I would be publishing more posts with titles.

I need to bring my mind out of the habit to character check my posts.

I’m struggling to find a convinient way to share videos with family members for a recent wedding event. I want one that provides convinience for receivers but allows control with me as sender. I’m not sure if YouTube performs copyright checks even on unlisted videos.

OnePlus completely messed up my upgrade plans with its product launches this year.

I have been pleased with my OnePlus 7, it has worked brilliantly for the past two years. For that matter, the phone continues to work well for me. It hasn’t slowed down. Battery still lasts me throughout the day. I just wish for better cameras now.

I had made my mind that my next phone was going to be the pro variant of next OnePlus. But somehow the company has managed to screw up its most valuable brand.

First, they priced the devices far too high this year. In itself, it’s OK if you can match the offerings of the other flagship brands - mainly Apple and Samsung - beyond the device. OnePlus still has some work to do to reach that state.

Then, after unnecessary hype, they launched a product which has been marred by coverage that they could very well have avoided. They mindlessly under-spec’d the non-pro variant of the device. The pro variant is facing the outcome of overpromising and then deliver just on expected lines.

I could still decide to ignore the negative coverage and go ahead with the Pro variant. The reviews haven’t been too bad, and I know what I can expect from a OnePlus device now. But I wish the company did not make the decision so difficult for me. I had just started warming up to the Android platform and its benefits.

It still boggles my mind that there is no link to GoodReads from Amazon when I am looking at a book there. Or way to add it to lists – for example in “Want to read” list.

I looked at my daughter get frustrated that a book is too boring for her - it never holds my interest she says. I asked her to stop reading it, to which she said, “But I have it now, so I will have to read it someday, right?”

I guess it’s time for her first lesson to read more - stop reading it if you find it boring.

I understand link rot is considered as a huge problem. But why? I mean I technically understand why. But I feel it is a feature of every entity, digital or physical - if not taken care of, it gets lost with time. Rotten.