I am also considering Elementary OS for the Air. Who knows, in a couple of years I may even replace MacOS on the MBP.
2025/03/07#p2
2025/03/07#p1
Over the years, I have thought about using blogging prompts to suggest things to write about. There are almost endless lists and tools out there with an increasing number of ChatGPT generated ideas. Lili has started using the inktober prompts which made me consider this whole idea again.
I've had an app version of Oblique Strategies 1 installed on my phone for a while but never used it for anything. Maybe this could be a point of reference when I'm stuck and need a nudge. I opened it and 'pulled' "You don't have to be ashamed of using your own ideas" – how ironic.
I'm not sure I could follow prompts every day (I don't think my brain would let me work like that) but seeking an occasional prompt when devoid of ideas could be a worthwhile experiment.
Isn't the internet as a whole (and more specifically the subset served up to /reader) a prompt engine? Why not just write about what I read? I could, and do, but that suffers from the paradox of choice. A blogging prompt is singular, specific: write about this! Of course, there's nothing to say you have to or how you incorporate that prompt. It's just a pointer in a different direction.
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the creative card based prompt system devised by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt in 1975 ↩
2025/03/07#p1
In reply to: Jan-Lukas Else...
I have toyed with the idea of adding reactions to posts but it goes against the ethos I've been trying to instill for a while now. Hearts, likes, thumbs up, they are all minimum viable social actions:
"completely disposable and, in most cases, reliant on no other interaction to initiate"
You don't even have to read something before tapping a button.
They are surrogates for more meaningful, considered responses, a metric we can agonise over – a marker of the approval of others. I can get annoyed when what I think is a good post doesn't get any comments but something thrown out there in five seconds gets a whole thread. This feeling can be amplified enormously if a heart, which takes just a second to interact with, doesn't get clicked?
They may seem like innocent, harmless fun but they can be damaging; better not to add them and antagonise myself.
This might seem like an overreaction (no pun intended) but the idea of minimum viable social actions has irked me for years. I believe that our interactions online should be worth something, should be more meaningful than metrics and anonymous validation.
If I was ever going to add reactions to (b)log-In they would need to work something like this:
- tap the heart
- be presented with a comment box and a message saying "Now tell me why"
- the reaction wouldn't be registered without an explanation
