# We're off to my in-laws tomorrow (Sunday 17th) for the day. It's a much easier and shorter drive since they moved, making it achievable to get and back on the same day.
Still, it will be a long day and, as I would have to be up for work at 6am on Monday, I decided to take the week off work. It fits in nicely with the August bank holiday meaning I get 10 days off in a row — including the weekends.
There's plenty to do at home but I hope to spend some time in the studio, AKA the spare room, working on some new ideas.
# I've not really had any more thoughts on what I want to do with the site. I'll probably leave the blog as it is — it works nicely and would be heavy work to rebuild. Any changes will be with the rest of the site, especially a new home page and reworked /music page.
This is part seven of a series on tackling wants, managing my media diet, and finding enough. Each post stands alone. See the introduction on “the mindset of more” for links to all posts in the series.
Social media and streaming subscriptions encourage us to gorge on the glut of information (Harjas Sandhu describes “hoarding type scrolling” that sounds veeeery familiar), promising that the algorithm will feed us the best. Instead of helping us practice discernment, corporate platforms offer us an all-you-can-eat buffet of candy. Yet as Olga Koutseridi writes, “low-quality info is designed to leave us craving more instead of leaving us feeling satisfied.” We keep eating and eating, but there’s nothing of substance to sustain us.
I think curiosity is innately good, and that there’s value in learning about many aspects of the world for no more reason than that it is interesting. At the same time, I have limited time and capacity for thinking — I need some sort of filter for what to read, especially as I make efforts to slow my pace. The morass of information online is what brought us algorithmic curation and now pushes genAI — but corporate algorithms encourage rage and polarization and create “curiosity ruts”, so I avoid them.
How can I create my own mental algorithm for choosing what to read?
For me, reading and blogging are interconnected; what I read influences what I write about. I’m working on flipping that around, with the goal that what I want to write about determines what I read. But how to decide what to write about, if not by what I read?
What I’m trying is using my Big Questions as a structure for curiosity, a way to practice more intentionality in what I spend my time thinking about. I’ve been working on this for a few years, but I feel like I’m getting a better handle on it now.
Since I started this experiment, I’ve noticed I’m less driven to read random stuff online because I’m so excited about this playful approach to reading. The carrot method — giving myself exciting things to think about — has worked way better than the stick method of deleting my feed reader from my phone so that the only thing I had to read was my Read Later app, which instead drove me to read the Bluesky and mastodon.social Discover feeds (do not recommend) in a desperate quest for novelty and news. Glad I dodged that becoming a habit 🙌
The Big Questions framing
I got the framing of Big Questions at an Oliver Burkeman workshop. I recall it as a tangential mention but it immediately sent me spinning. As simple an idea as it is to identify some key overarching questions in your life, sometimes we need to put a name to something to really get it.
Anne-Laure Le Cunff recounts advice Richard Feynman gave “to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind,” and describes favorite problems as “a curiosity engine”:
Your favorite problems form a prism that separates incoming information into a spectrum of ideas — a frame that allows you to deliberately filter distractions, direct your attention, and nurture your curiosity.
Last year, I wanted to do more self-directed writing, but it was challenging not to be reactive. This year, I’m discovering that self-guided reading is the other half of the equation.
Big questions give me a reason to seek rather than simply receive, and are broad enough to provide direction without constraint.
Turning directed curiosity into big questions
Reading towards questions gives purpose to my curiosity. Curiosity comes in two styles: receptive and directed. Receptive curiosity is openness to learning; directed curiosity is more active, and invites you deeper. Allen Pike observes that the internet primarily serves our receptive curiosity:
By occasionally picking things to go deep on, you balance out the otherwise broad information diet we all get by default by being on the internet, consuming media, and just kind of being a modern human.
My big questions coalesced out of my receptive curiosity reading; I identified my first big questions in 2023 by reflecting on what I’d been thinking and writing about and looking for overarching themes. I first listed off a bunch of smaller questions within that theme, then worked backwards to find a bigger question uniting them all. Defining these questions made me enunciate for myself exactly what it was I was wondering, a process I found helpful in itself.
Last fall, I realized that my big questions didn’t align with my main interests anymore, so I created a few new ones and retired a couple. Updating my big question pages a couple-three times a year also nudges me to notice which questions I’ve been neglecting and might like to put some attention towards, or retire.
Big questions are a self-created tool that serves my thinking, not the other way around. I don’t treat them as a boundary to my curiosity, but can expand or add to my questions when I need. The questions are big enough to keep exploring within for a year or more, still offering plenty of the novelty I crave. I think of the Big Questions as high level themes, and blog posts as a way to explore sub-questions within them.
How this changes my reading
The feed reader and beyond
I subscribe to a ton of feeds, ever-changing, which showers me in riches of information that satisfy my broad curiosity, some directly from topical blogs and some shared by cool people. Earlier this year, I reoriented the way I think of the topic-specific blogs and newsletters I follow, and moved them from my blogroll page onto my big question pages. It’s now easier for me to unfollow and refollow topical feeds as my focus shifts between questions.
I’ve also been more proactive in seeking out online articles related to my questions — I’ve been using Search My Site, Marginalia Search, and appending Reddit to DDG searches to seek out opinions and recommendations. These smaller, weirder information pools yield some intriguing results. (There are so many personal websites out there guys!)
Filtering out spam and slop is relatively easy with the right tools and a little thought, at least at an emotional level.
The much tougher job, I think, is giving up on things that would be good, meaningful, fulfilling, and useful in order to do things that are even more so—or, to be precise, to do things that are better aligned with what I really care about right now. The hard part is dealing with the fact that, whatever I may try, I will never get to do the vast majority of those amazing activities.
Oliver Burkeman writes about accepting our finitude in Four Thousand Weeks, commenting (emphasis mine):
“Social media is a giant machine for getting you to spend your time caring about the wrong things, but for the same reason, it’s also a machine for getting you to care about too many things, even if they’re each indisputably worthwhile.”
I cannot care about everything, and trying to prevents me from going deep on the things I care most about. Wendell Berry puts it: “To know some things well is to know other things not so well, or not at all. Knowledge is always surrounded by ignorance.”
Accepting my own interests
I use my Read Later app as the filter point between my shoulds and my interests; everything I encounter online and want to read gets saved there. I tag articles with key topics and themes (including “mindset of more” for articles related to this series) to let me see only articles related to my questions. When a bit of time has passed from saving the article and I am less emotionally invested, I can more easily let go of the things that I imagine “someone like me” ought to read. Looking into these “should” articles often exposes tender spots of (typically unwarranted) inadequacy, or what-if’s around choices long since made.
What this ultimately requires is self-knowledge and self-acceptance — to release our imagined selves and “navigate by aliveness.”We must not judge our own curiosities as unworthy, or torment ourselves that we ought to be different people than we are. Whatever we are interested in, however idiosyncratic, holds meaning for us, and that’s what counts.
Curating reading lists
After reading around a question for a while online, I start to get a better feel for where I should dig in to books. The internet primarily produces breadth, but books offer depth.
In the past, I would pick a single book as representative of a topic I was broadly curious about and call it good. Now, I’m going more research-style, collecting a stack of books on the same topic, knowing full well that I won’t read them all*.
I start off by browse-searching the library catalog for books related to a question that’s been niggling at me — this spring one has been: in the age of generative AI, what’s the value in craftsmanship? — and collecting potential titles into a list. Of course, I have my own answer to this question, but the meaning of making can be a tricky thing to describe, so I wanted to see how others have done so, and explore some different angles:
What’s the value of art and craftsmanship to the creator, to the receiving audience, to society?
How have we dealt with similar challenges to craftsmanship in the past, and how is generative AI different?
What do artists, writers, academics, craftspeople think?
What is craft, and how do we learn it? How is what generative AI does different than what human creators are doing?
I try to keep the lists generously open-ended — since these are library books I don’t have to pay for, I have nothing to lose from trying something a bit out there besides a bit of time. (I had been keeping a single list with all my questions crammed together but have finally taken the time to separate them out 😉) Art books, poetry, memoirs, all fair game. Celine Nguyen observes, “Research as a leisure activity isn’t constrained by these disciplinary fiefdoms and schisms. Any discipline can offer interesting ideas, tools, techniques.” I’m trying to turn my “ooh?” energy towards intriguing books than enticing online articles.
When I’m requesting books from the library (we get free holds — 25 on ebooks and I’ve never hit the limit on physical), I skim through the library list and try to think about which would be most helpful to read next based on where my thinking is now. (This is also influenced by what has a wait list.) Although I like reading fiction as an ebook, I prefer to read non-fiction in hard copy. I benefit from having a non-fiction book in sight — it’s easy for non-fiction ebooks to get pushed below the digital fold so I forget I have them borrowed — and a due date so I actually get around to reading it 😉
Although I’m reading the book or article towards a particular theme, I’ll still write down unrelated connections — if I can’t use it for the post at top of mind, it might apply to a future question or post. Despite starting off with a vague idea of the question I’m getting at, I find that my original question often shifts and becomes more compelling, and I develop new questions. I’ll write more than one blog post, and explore more than one question, based on what I’ve been reading this spring and summer.
How I’ve been choosing books to read
Here’s a demonstration of my selections across four library runs (you’ll see I’m still grabbing books for entertainment, other interests, and broad curiosity, but also focusing on a particular topic):
In April, I decided to dig into the Arts and Crafts movement as a historic example of valuing handiwork. I started with In Harmony with Nature, an art-style book about Arts & Crafts gardens that offered an introduction, then read The Arts and Crafts Movement, which gave me just what I was looking for: quotes from the founders of the movement about what craftsmanship meant to them. Dangerous Fictions offered a slightly different angle on interrogating the function of art in culture, especially difficult art. I drew on the Arts & Crafts background for my blog post about the Business Borg.My early May library haul had four books loosely related to AI / craftsmanship (American Book Design and William Morris, Deep Dream, More Than Words, and Changing the Subject) and two related more broadly to the “mindset of more” theme (Possessed and The Plenitude of Distraction). I dipped into American Book Design, decided it was more technical than I wanted, and fully read More Than Words, which directly compared writing with generative AI text, and Plenitude for an exploration of leisurely thinking and “unproductive” behavior.My late May library haul focused on cultural elites and impacts on the creative class. I read Pretentiousness, which advocated for the value of pushing artistic boundaries, and The Crisis of Culture, which connected better to a different question I was thinking about 😉 I rejected The Meaning in the Making and read a review of Elite Capture that made me think their definition of elite wasn’t what I was looking for. After skimming the table of contents for Culture Crash, I decided it wasn’t getting at the interesting part of the question for me, so my reading time would be better spent elsewhere.For my early June library haul, I wanted to follow a thread of interest on identity politics, so I grabbed The Class Matrix and The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class. I also borrowed four more related to the AI / craftsmanship question: What We See When We Read, The Art of Slow Writing, The AI Mirror, and Unmasking AI. I read all of What We See, digging into what’s actually happening while we are reading. The introduction to The Class Matrix made me realize it was more advanced theory than I was prepared to read. Based on time limitations, I decided the AI books weren’t a priority.
When writing is the point of your notes — when informing your writing is the goal behind reading — Richard Griffiths proposes that it’s most useful to “develop a concept of your intended output before you start reading a book. That way, your interests will fruitfully guide your reading and note-making.” I do this by periodically ducking into my collecting grounds (draft blog post) for a particular question and developing a starter outline of declarative statements. I organize the material I’ve already collected (initially from online readings) into those headings, then continue to read more based on the parts of my argument I’m not sold on yet, or where I don’t feel comfortable making a declarative / interesting statement.
Reading with purpose
Sometimes I like to read for the sake of reading, and sometimes I enjoy more purposeful reading. Knowing that I’m planning to write about a question changes how I read by defining my idea space. Instead of reading according to receptive curiosity, I’m using directed curiosity to seek what of the text relates to my question. It makes me pay closer attention to language that I might quote in a blog post.
When I read non-fiction, two levels of interpretation are happening in my mind at the same time: first, I am directly intaking the language and interpreting the author’s intention; at another level, I am processing it analytically and relationally, trying to understand what it means to me. Johan Hari describes it: “If you weren’t letting your mind wander a little bit right now, you wouldn’t really be reading this book in a way that would make sense to you. Having enough mental space to roam is essential for you to be able to understand a book.” This is an unfocused, connective mode of thinking that uses my brain’s default mode network. I use reading non-fiction as a commitment to spend time thinking about a subject; the book itself is a tool towards that.
When I read towards a question, I concentrate my connection-making within that question space, but it remains loose. I am reading for ideas, not information per se, so the dialogue between me and the book is what matters. Roland Barthes writes, “[The text] produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else.” Just as writing doesn’t only look like typing, reading doesn’t only look like rapt attention to the page. A big question offers a frame for my reading, like the viewfinder of a camera; framing is a way of sense-making.
Last week I read two books about the supply chain: Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle (high-five if you were among the “late-night friends on Mastodon” mentioned in the acknowledgements) and Alexis Madrigal’s The Pacific Circuit. What I want to talk about here, though, is Kurt Vonnegut.
Late in the Madrigal, he mentions a story Vonnegut once told in an interview on PBS—it shows up so much online that it’s been fact-checked. (He mentions it as well in his recent appearance on the Newitz’s podcast with Charlie Jane Anders, Our Opinions Are Correct.) It’s a story, ostensibly, about envelopes.
BRANCACCIO: There’s a little sweet moment, I’ve got to say, in a very intense book — your latest — in which you’re heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say — I’m getting — I’m going to buy an envelope.
VONNEGUT: Yeah.
BRANCACCIO: What happens then?
VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know…. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.
It’s well established here that I am financially dependent upon my mother, my sole remaining parent, who for some time now has lived in her own quarters, so to speak, in the home of my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew back east. Once that support is gone, as it stands now I’ll have less than six months of financial support left until everyone expects me to take her place although that doesn’t actually “solve” anything but the matter of not instead simply ending unhoused somewhere on the streets of Portland. Given the methodical destruction of what little safety net we have in this country anymore, we can’t even expect that I’d anymore even have the food stamps required to actually feed me.
The word “solve” is in quotes there because for me it isn’t any kind of a solution at all, and the reason is somewhere up there inside Vonnegut’s envelope.
If there’s one thing I have despite the financial dependence and the welfare support, as stunted as sometimes it can be what with the autism and the fatigue, it’s independence. I’m temperamentally unsuited to live with other human beings (just ask those I’ve lived with as an adult), and in fact I’m emotionally unsuited to have a social circle of what you’d term friends (versus intermittent acquaintances), but my relative sanity itself does depend upon the fact that I live in a Portland neighborhood that’s somewhat akin to a small town where I easily can walk to coffee, or brunch, or a movie without needing to stroll beyond a six-block radius.
I don’t need close attachments but I do need these loose, sociable if passing and fleeting connections of the kind Vonnegut valorizes as being of such fundamental human importance.
Those quarters foreseen as passing from my mother to me, it’s no exaggeration to say, would be among my worst nightmares, as suddenly I’d be forced to life in very close proximity to others when really I’m only as self-regulated as I am because I don’t have to closely (I’d argue, for me, claustrophobically) navigate a life of other people, and I’d be entirely and completely dependent upon those very people—whose mere presence would be dysregulating for me—to ever see and experience anything at all outside the home.
Those daily, weekly, or monthly routines of coffee, brunch, and movie in effect are my pacific circuit—regular acts of sociality if not direct sociableness that help regulate my nervous system and, for lack of a better term for it, my general levels of peace.
This all is further fed by the fact that recently I was thinking again about how the disability determination consultive evaluation after my post-diagnosis Vocational Rehabilitation job placement showed work was impossible for me yielded a report which instead said that while due to that job experience I had acute adjustment disorder, because I did so well on during two-hour exam clearly I can work just fine, and definitionally screwed me forever. There is no path ahead that results in me obtaining disability benefits, because of this original sin on the part of Disability Determinations Services that now and forever presents an insurmountable hurdle.
Complicating the idea of my pacific circuit is that through either resilience or resignation, as my world shrinks due to the still-undiagnosed fatigue, I keep marking most days as having been “neutral” (my general target for overall state of mind) despite, for example, not having been to the zoo—a once weekly, then monthly, activity—since May and not having blogged—until right now—for two months, when those things were of a self-regulatory nature. It’s entirely possible that through such resilience or resignation I’d continue grading on this kind of curve when imprisoned in that room somewhere in New England, but as much as this dynamic makes me sad now it would only make me all that much sadder then.
The other day I received the news that The Belmont Goats had lost another member of the herd, bringing it down from its high of fourteen to just nine. Bambi, a Nigerian dwarf goat and the first (along withher brother, Cooper) who joined the herd as a kid and bottle baby (which made them the go-to goats for taking to events), turned twelve in April. She could ask for attention like a cat, and insisted on being a lap goat for as long as she could, until she had to be content with just sitting in chairs by herself. Bambi’s passing comes in the days and weeks before the project moves into my neighborhood after seven years just across the railroad cut, to a space intended to be where that nine will live out the rest of their lives. That project itself for several years was a not insubstantial part of my pacific circuit.
By the recent, long-awaited return of the phenomenal podcast NeuroDiving to discuss empathy I was reminded of how to a significant degree I live my social life through a sort of process of “out of sight, out of mind”. For reasons, I think, of self-regulation even if entirely unconscious, whenever I need to make a break from something—family because I moved west, fandom because it just sort of wound down, from the goats because of an ethical dispute—I make sharp breaks because I’ve never had the mental temperament or dexterity to mix and match or compartmentalize. In the never-ending battle of resources versus demands, what’s in sight is about all the demand I can manage.
(The autistic person with whom NeuroDiving discusses empathy at one point says—although I’m not really convinced this has anything to do with empathy, per se—that when they move away from somewhere, they don’t miss anyone. This is significantly the case for me, although it can be somewhat moderated by time and distance. To wit: I don’t spend my days missing my family back east, but I might sometimes miss the old Comic-Con crew—the difference and distinction being that I was attending Comic-Con ever year for some time but once I’d moved west I basically only went back for my father’s death.)
This was on display when I was texted about this most recent death in the herd, because I generally don’t really have the bandwidth capacity to maintain acquaintances beyond the lifetime of the circumstances in which they were formed—or, at least, especially when the nature of the break with those circumstances were negative, even if not all acquaintances were directly implicated in that negativity.
(Contrarily, this also is why whenever I was broken up with I had an aggravatingly difficult time letting go: they weren’t “out of sight’ so I couldn’t put that no longer valid version of them “out of mind”. This is all pre-diagnosis, so I had no concept of autism’s monotropic tendency and the challenges of getting one’s mental and emotional processes off one track and onto another.)
How does all of this square with my views on kindness, though? Late in Sue Burke’s Usurpation (the best in her Semiosis series), a character makes an observation that stopped me in my tracks. “You were kind to me,” they say. “That’s how I knew you were real.”
It’s true that I’ve two favorite literary quotes: one of which is about the need to be kind, especially given the other which is about being dropped down halfway. It’s true, too, that I believe everyday courtesiesmean something, given living in a universe in which nothing we do matters and so the only thing that matters is what we do. Which, however, is less kind: to cut people off because you know you can’t manage the reciprocal demands, or to try to fake it so they don’t feel cut off?
To what degree is that incapacity a result of knowing that I’ve a tendency to become too overwhelmed by the states of others to be able to navigate either their state or my own? I’ve got to take care of me, else there’s nothing to go around. My own particular variety of autistic empathy perhaps necessarily is one that only can operate at arm’s length.
Even absent specific, circumstantial breaks, my acquaintances tend to become intermittent appearances over time, and there are parts of my pacific circuit which I’ve come to travel on longer timeframes than the daily, weekly, or monthly.
Just last week I thought to put this year’s Portland Polish Festival into my calendar well in advance so I would not somehow forget. For more than a decade, there’s been a fair to middling chance that I’d run into a longstanding if increasingly intermittent acquaintance who stretches back to my MindVox days more than two decades ago. In the past, there were at times several, different such yearly touch points: the Adult Soapbox Derby, National Pie Day, the Polish Festival, and the occasional birthday.
Imagine the dislocating disorientation, then, when on Tuesday evening I logged into Instagram to see said Ryan Lloyd in the list of recommended accounts (I only use the site for knowing what my local, neighborhood businesses are up to, since they constitute almost the entirely of my world), and upon clicking through finding what at first appeared to me to be a flyer to a birthday celebration but turned out instead to be the notice of a memorial gathering. Anything I did over the next hour found itself interrupted by the sound of my own voice exclaiming, “What the fuck?!”
Quite the opposite, then, of a birthday.
Following the death of David Lynch, I took a walk in the woods. Next month, at the Polish Festival, I suppose I’ll have to grab a placki.
(Incidentally, he also once saved me from an unfortunate confrontation with a corporate landlord by repairing the hole in the drywall of an apartment I made when I threw a shoe at the wall because my neighbor for the umpteenth time was playing his keyboard at one o’clock in the morning. While I say this is incidental, if you follow the chain of links on Instagram you find that seeminglyhalfthebars (and a piercing shop) in Portland are waxing nostalgic about the fact that Ryan could, and did, build or fix just about anything.)
I’ve talked here before about my occasional bouts of death anxiety and existentialangst. Late last month I’d somehow managed to follow up a podcast episode about the philosophy of weirdness with one about why the universe began, the former of which essentially concludes that whatever underlying physics or metaphysics you choose to ascribe to existence cannot help but be in some profound and underlying sense deeply weird and beggaring of belief. It’s the nature of what happens when you try to eff the ineffable.
Two deaths of different valences in a matter of days, then, each substantial in its own way, is nothing if not a thanatophobic gut punch. Ryan’s death necessarily implicates all my own thoughts about mortality and meaning, and has somewhat colored, complicated, and confused how this post about my pacific circuit (notes for which actually go back almost a week) eventually came together, or in some ways did not. It doesn’t, for instance, actually have much of an ending.
A roll of HP5 through the Stylus Epic. I love that little camera, but taping up the seam to avoid light leaks is no longer working. It’ll be sad if I have to retire the camera.
The cover photo here is the kind of photo I love. It’s just slightly off, somehow. It causes the viewer to stop and think, “Wait, what’s going on here?” for just a moment. That’s what it does for me, anyway.
I normally use a custom function in Emacs to create new posts here, but I’m in the mood for BBEdit today, so I wanted something more generic. I asked Claude to rewrite the function as a shell script (bash). It worked perfectly, first try. Scoff at this LLM stuff all you want, there’s no denying that it can be incredibly useful. In this case, it was 10 minutes from idea to working code. Maybe I’ll find bugs later, but Claude will fix them for me ;).
Here’s the bash script equivalent of your Emacs Lisp function! This script recreates all the key functionality:
Key features:
Title input: Can be provided as argument or prompted interactively
Slug conversion: Converts title to dashed-words format (lowercase, special chars become dashes)
Bundle vs Single file: Prompts whether to create a bundle (directory with index.md) or single .md file
Directory structure: Creates posts in ./content/posts/YYYY/MM/
File naming: Uses YYYY-MM-DD-slug format
Force overwrite: Same safety features as the journal script
Command line options: Flags to skip prompts and force behavior
Usage examples:
# Interactive mode (prompts for title and bundle choice)./hugo-post.sh
# Provide title, prompt for bundle choice./hugo-post.sh "My Amazing Post"# Force bundle creation./hugo-post.sh -b "My Amazing Post"# Force single file creation./hugo-post.sh -s "My Amazing Post"# Overwrite existing file./hugo-post.sh -f "My Amazing Post"# Combine flags./hugo-post.sh -f -b "My Amazing Post"
Command line options:
-f, --force: Overwrite existing files
-b, --bundle: Create as bundle (directory + index.md)
-s, --single: Create as single .md file
-h, --help: Show usage help
The script handles the same logic as your Emacs function: it asks whether to make a bundle, creates the appropriate file structure, and generates the same frontmatter format.
A couple of months ago, I changed my routine for writing blog posts.
I used to write in Swedish and then translate into English. It worked, but translations often carried errors, especially when Swedish expressions didn’t translate well.
Now I write directly in English. It takes longer, the texts are shorter, and I avoid proverbs or “fancy” words simply because I don’t know that many. Proofreading also takes more time. In Swedish I skim and move on, in English I cut and polish.
It may sound like a disadvantage, but I don’t think it is. My English improves, and maybe some readers even prefer shorter, simpler texts.
Issue #014 of Start Select Reset went out by snail mail yesterday to my supporters (£5/month+).
Start Select Reset is delivered straight to your snail mailbox 📬 four times a year!
Issue #014 – You Can Just Do Things
Issue #014 of SSRZ is about my firm belief that ‘you can just do things’.
The essay reflects on the end of the conclusion of 301 and who it’s taught me that the distance between ‘idea’ and ‘upload’ should be as short as possible.
I also talk about the difference between knowing and capital-K (K)nowing. and that you really don’t need to ask anyones permission to create something and share something online.
The ‘the dream’ and ‘the doing’ of creative work are for you. The ‘done’ is for everyone else.
As I’ve said a couple of times since I had the realisation that the 301 format would conclude at Episode 301, Start Select Zine will now begin to play a much bigger role in my creative life. In a duel orbit with whatever the podcast is going to become over the next few years. I must admit that right now I have a much clearer vision for with I want SSRZ to be, than I do the show! But I’m excited to make and create and post it online, and send it in the post.
When I posted the last issue of the zine I mentioned that I’m thinking of starting a small press / label called ‘Family of Giants’ to now house SSRZ under, and I think that is going to go a head. I’d like it to be a collective of people with fairly low stakes involved, just an association under a logo. If you have anything that you are working on, are thinking about putting out in the near future, get in touch and lets talk!
