Nicholas Bate says to choose a word for 2020:
Whiteboard it. Write it every day on your planner, put the word on a handful of 3 by 5 cards and place them in strategic places as an ever-present reminder.
Driving
There are two types of driving.
First is functional driving, the kind you do when you need to go somewhere, that gets you from A to B in the quickest, most efficient way. Then there’s the fun stuff, the driving you do just for the sake of driving.
Patience. A reminder from on this day.
I want to get to a point where I no longer use the #bypen tag on posts. It’s historically been the exception rather than the rule that things have been written by hand but that is something I plan to remedy. I suppose I’ve already started.
Writing by hand necessarily introduces an additional editing and review phase that wasn’t there before.
When typing posts from scratch I would really only be performing a final check for grammar and errors whereas transcribing from paper to screen forces me to re-read and re-evaluate what I have written.
I don’t know if it’s just the Field Notes notebooks or whether they’ve triggered a change in mindset but, whenever I have one available, I always start writing there rather than on my phone.
Over the years I have both called myself a writer and chastised myself over the very same description. Imposter syndrome has been in full effect.
But, what is a writer? Is it purely semantic? It doesn’t help that there are various definitions.
SW: TROS
I wanted to post some initial, largely spoiler free, thoughts about the final movie in the Skywalker saga having seen it last night.
Firstly, let’s get out of the way the obligatory shortcuts and plot devices; the Star Wars films are just good yarns and never written to win best original screenplay. You just have to let the contrivances go, accept them and enjoy the spectacle. And what a spectacle it is: it’s a visual wonder and quite possibly the most consistently visually impressive Star Wars film to date.
I searched for what time dawn was this morning and came across this definition of the different types of dawn: astronomical, nautical and civil.
Birdsong is nature’s ambient music; a background, almost abstract, soundscape that, in the words of Brian Eno, accommodates “many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.”
Last night I read BSAG’s post “Listening for the return of spring” in which she outlines an almost irrational fear of never hearing birdsong again:
“…part of my difficulty in expressing how I felt was that I was deeply embarrassed about admitting to these fears. It seemed to me a ridiculously archaic, pre-scientific folk belief, like believing that the sun will not rise tomorrow.”
Now one rather annoying thing about scholars is that they are always using Big Words that some of us can’t understand…
…and one sometimes gets the impression that those intimidating words are there to keep us from understanding.
I sat on the train yesterday on the way to work with the intention of writing a few notes, nothing more, but the words just flowed. I’m glad they did – it’s been too long since I tagged a post as “bypen”.
Reflection and looking ahead
It’s the time of year for both reflection and looking ahead but there’s a danger in only doing so around New Year and somehow expecting everything to come together as the calendar ticks over.
The plugin has been updated on GitHub.
There have been a few instances recently where WordPress users have raised the issue of comments being closed on posts published via micro.blog. My plugin works around it but I thought about adding a check to ensure the default comment status was set to ‘open’ before enabling them. This post serves as a test.
I’ve mentioned in the past about my struggles with pen and paper – whether it is the friction of getting out the pad and having somewhere to lean, or being an impatient writer who struggles with his handwriting at anything less than a snail’s pace.
Liked: Rhoneisms…
“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.”
Sadly, I can relate all too well to this.
In line with keeping things simple I decided to disable my DIY private journal plugin. I don’t use it, don’t need it, and certainly don’t need it cluttering things up.
Liked: On the caustic focus on temporality in social media…
social is thereby forcing us to not only think shallowly, but to make our shared histories completely valueless