Wednesday weblog: week ending November 20, 2024

Nov 20, 2024| weekly, weblog, review

Reflection on writing style - 2024-11-18T00:44:18.080Z

I notice that I have a lot more fun writing tiny workflow tweaks (mostly #Emacs ) and sharing them on my blog versus, say, insightful reflections developed over a longer period of time. I think it's the payoff of being able to enjoy those tweaks. Sometimes abstract thoughts help me come to realizations that I can then try to use to change my concrete behaviours, but it's a lot less straightforward.

Also, I notice that I prefer to write with a curious, exploratory tone instead of an authoritative one, which is probably also related to my focus on "I" rather than "you". Kinda like: here's what I'm experimenting with, sharing in case it's helpful (and also because I want to be able to find it again), everyone's different and that's awesome, curious about what works for you. :) I'm glad other people can pull off being authoritative/persuasive, though.

23+ years #blogging and still learning more!
Sketchnote blogs - 2024-11-17T18:19:47.826Z

I'm surprised by how few active blogs I could find about #sketchnotes (or had a category feed for sketchnotes). It's mostly rohdesign and Verbal to Visual, I think. Sketchnote Army still comes out with episodes, but the posts themselves don't seem to be very visual, so people have to click through to the person's website. I guess a lot of people are on Instagram, but that doesn't seem to support RSS any more, and I'm not really keen on scrolling through that. Ah well!
dark mode sketch filter - 2024-11-14T13:41:01.165Z
I tweaked my dark-mode sketch CSS rule thanks to stefanvdwalt's comment. Now I've got
```
  @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  .sketch-full img, .gallery img, .left-doodle, .right-doodle,
  .center-doodle { filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg) brightness(150%)
  contrast(0.9); }
  }
```
Updated: https://sachachua.com/blog/2024/11/using-a-coloured-template-on-my-supernote-a5x/
Researched BBB hosting options and compared the costs with self-hosting on Linode.
Checked the shell scripts to make sure that hosts can start the videos by using shortcuts.

Quotes

Excerpts from Rebecca Solnit's "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" (2006) - 2024-11-19T12:52:11.878Z

One of the books that has just arrived from the library is "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" (Rebecca Solnit, 2006), which was recommended to me by @janoli .

Here are some snippets that have resonated with me so far:

p5. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration–how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?

p10. and there's another art of being at home in the unknown, so that being in its midst isn't cause for panic or suffering, of being at home with being lost.

p14. The historian Aaron Sachs, about explorers: "In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way."

p80. Even in the everyday world of the present, an anxiety to survive manifests itself in cars and clothes for far more rugged occasions than those at hand, as though to express some sense of the toughness of things and of readiness to face them. But the real difficulties, the real arts of survival, seem to lie in more subtle realms. There, what's called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next.

p99. Probably it had its origins in protective urges, but it had gone sour long ago.
Excerpts from Bill Watterson's speech at Kenyon College in 1990 - 2024-11-19T12:19:15.286Z

Thanks to @kims for sharing Bill Watterson's speech at Kenyon College, Gambier Ohio, to the 1990 graduating class (https://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html)

This section particularly resonated with me: "Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it's to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth."

I also appreciated his resistance to commercializing Calvin & Hobbes:
"Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.
The so-called 'opportunity' I faced would have meant giving up my individual voice for that of a money-grubbing corporation. It would have meant my purpose in writing was to sell things, not say things. My pride in craft would be sacrificed to the efficiency of mass production and the work of assistants. Authorship would become committee decision. Creativity would become work for pay. Art would turn into commerce. In short, money was supposed to supply all the meaning I'd need.
What the syndicate wanted to do, in other words, was turn my comic strip into everything calculated, empty and robotic that I hated about my old job. They would turn my characters into television hucksters and T-shirt sloganeers and deprive me of characters that actually expressed my own thoughts."

Quotes

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