Excursions

When a shade of green is glitzed up by the shadows. Just another game the light, or the lack thereof, plays.

Every service wants to be everyone’s favourite. But what the makers are working towards is being favoured. Or popular. There is a minute but significant distinction between those two.

It is easy to market something subjective, which is what the latter is. “Best…”. “Most liked…”. “Hottest…”. How often do we hear those words in advertisements? The former, on the other hand, is binary. Objective. You are either someone’s favourite, or you are not. More often than not, people won’t know what their favourite something is. Ask someone for their favourite movie or a book, and she can’t put her finger on one.

Being a favourite is also singular. What point is being just one person’s favourite? You can’t market that. Of course, as long as the someone in question is not famous.

I wonder if seeking to be someone’s favourite is more satisfying than trying to be popular to everyone.

Seth Godin made this observation in one of his latest posts. Well, it’s not about satisfaction but the ease of selling.

I have never had the dark mode turned off since the option was made available on my devices. I did today. After an initial bout of pain, things don’t look too bad. Instead, they look cleaner. The whole experience - the platform, the apps, the websites - is so very different.

One thing is pretty apparent - all the interfaces look better in the light mode. As if the apps are designed for the light mode first. The setting, the interface elements, and the colour palette look ingrained. With the dark mode, all apps look the same – white text on limited shades of dark background. Maybe that is the reason many people prefer this mode. Irrespective of the app, it looks the same.

I don’t mind a diverse collection of interfaces. So against the wishes of the techie in me, I will extend this experiment for a bit longer on my smartphone. I will use it with the dark mode turned off. It can’t be too bad, right?

I love the Remarkable tablet, from what I read – pity that it isn’t available in India. With Amazon being more open towards the Indian market, I am excited about Scribe. But chances are high that it would be locked into the Amazon ecosystem.

Choices are abundant these days - more variety of cuisines, more brands of clothes, more range of devices, more solutions. More of the same, yet different in imperceivable ways. More is good, right?

Not when the dread of choosing paralyses me. Making a selection demands brain cycles, both while and after choosing. It needs time from you. If there is real money involved, the process is even more demanding. Fear of regret kicks in then.

Is the other one better? Cheaper? Would I hate this later? Will my family hate me for choosing this? Will this improve my life? Each question is more complex than the previous one.

In the false hope of “saving” time and money, I postpone choosing. My unmade decisions pile up, and so does the burden on me. It is a vicious cycle – I delay choosing because I feel vague pressure, a choice that only adds to my burden.

Not choosing is a choice too. Make it your default, and it will only make you weaker.

I’ve pushed an upgrade v1.0.1 for Anatole theme today – it fixes a few minor issues with the categories on the archive page & images on smaller screens. The theme now also supports mastodon profile in the social links list. The upgrade is available in the plugins directory now.

Ever since I published the Paper theme to Micro.blog, I wanted to port one with multiple columns and yet stay minimal as possible. I’ve found one, and today I managed to port it to and customize it for Micro.blog. The theme, called Anatole, is a beautiful minimalist two-column theme. You can check for yourself in the screenshot below or see it live on my test blog.

The theme is available in Micro.blog’s Plug-ins directory and can directly be installed from there. Note that the theme is compatible with Hugo 0.91, which is available as a setting on Micro.blog. You can follow the below general steps to install the theme.

• Uninstall any theme that you have installed as a plugin.
• Set your current theme to blank and Hugo Version to 0.91 in the design section of your blog.
• Make sure there are no other conflicting custom CSS configured for the previous theme.
• Install the “Anatole theme” plug-in from the directory.
• Once the theme is successfully installed, you can configure the social icons displayed in the header by modifying the available options as plug-in settings.
• Additionally, you can configure parameters to display full post content on the homepage, disable animations and provide a path to a custom favicon.

It was fun to bring another option to Micro.blog’s already brilliant collection themes. I hope you like this and that a few folks benefit from it. If you do, I would love to hear from you. All feedback is welcome.

I watched The Adam Project today. It’s such lazy movie - it had all the ingredients to be a brilliant movie. It’s good fun in parts, has some nice moments. But makers were lazy to not be interested in making it any better, enough was enough.

After returning to Safari from Arc, I realized how pathetic the experience with this default browser is. It looks dated, is slow, and has terrible interface choices (tabs bar, bookmarks, home page and on & on). I tried Chrome, too, and it is ridden with bugs. So I’m back to Arc.

A Day in the Life in Pune, India. A stairway to the blue skies on the other side.

Every afternoon for the past few days, the clouds crowd the skies as I wait to pickup my daughter from the school. They didn’t disappoint even today.

14 October 2022, 3:30 PM