The truth is that this is often the case, especially on Mondays that are rather free of any work duties and where I am done with my weeknotes relatively quickly—even if there are times where I end up publishing them a day later, whoops.
The funny thing is that I don’t really have any idea of what to write about, I just like to go blind and start typing something.
This was going to start out as a “What Interested Me Today” kind of post, and I was going to share links to stuff I found cool. But then I think “I could just save these links for my weeknotes later”, but I also remember I can just post whatever I want because it’s my website and these are my rules.
I really like the format used on Steve’s Thursday Thoughts, where he shares his stream of thoughts throughout the day.
Honestly I just wanted an excuse to also mention that I just pre-ordered another TTRPG. I am talking about Nimble, which just reached a million bucks raised on Kickstarted and I contributed by ordering the complete physical set for it.
I haven’t even received my physical Land of Eem set and I am already excited to get into more TTRPG systems for some reason.
I have some very bad influences that get me to buy evil things, but I am happy to be a bad influence to many people here as well, getting each other into expensive hobbies and ordering e-ink readers or whatever.
]]>It was a long one, I couldn’t really read the title of it from where I was. All seats occupied, I was standing five or so seats away and the title was written in a cursive font that was not legible from afar.
She was reading the last twenty or so pages, by the art style of the cover, I assume it was some sort of romance YA novel, she seemed to be rather emotional about whatever was going on. I noticed the back and forth of her eyes as she was flying through every line, paragraph, and page.
After a couple minutes a seat freed up right in front of her, I glanced at her general direction, although she was so glued to the book to notice, although I wasn’t being obvious, I think. I still couldn’t make up what the title was, so I gave it up, sat down, rested my backpack on my lap, took my Kobo reader out, and continued my sci-fi novel.
I didn’t notice when she got down from the bus.
Sorry if you expected some sort of romantic twist, or any kind of interaction at all, oh well.
Anyway, that little event really made me think about books read in public.
Today, most people are looking at their phones, tiny screens, each person using different apps, social media platforms, or ad-ridden mobile games, and all of it is for the same thing, feeding from quick entertainment, slop and domapine, in the best case maybe having a chat with someone, although it’s usually a bubble—yes, Facebook Messenger here rules 🤢—left on a corner, replying when needed as one continues to consume.
So, I wonder how it would be if we just carried a book around instead?
Wouldn’t it be a sight to behold? Every person sitting at the bus, with a book on hand, or in ther pockets, reading something and engaging in a whole unique world for themselves. Some guy would be carrying one of those pocket-sized editions of some timeless classic, holding it at their eye level, another wouldn’t mind the full-sized 900 pages long romance novel, half-way hidden by the open bag its leaning on. Some other person would be standing, one hand firm on handle, the book held with the other in an awkward position, flipping a page with their some weird maneuver, the next guy just tapping on an e-ink device enjoying some sports manga.
Imagine, a never-ending book club, during lunch breaks, after the gym, or on a video-call, conversations sparking when two people notice they are reading the same one, heated discussions when the finale of a long-running series comes out at last. Best-sellers only lasting a few days as the fans catch up on them and the rest just borrow from their friends or libraries, which are fully functional buildings providing easy access to everyone in town, as ids aren’t needed, just pick what you want and leave it anytime, nobody really worries because there is plenty of supply for the demand.
Who needs “BookTok”, when your circle of friends will have suggestions and a backlog to share? when everyone is out there displaying their book cover as they read something?—instead of watching reels with monotone AI voices at full volume. Approaching people and making friends with shared interests would be much easier too!
I wonder if historians know of a period like this, a time where this was a common thing. I must admit I am completely unaware of a period where this was the case.
Did books ever get widely popular, as to be read in public or be carried around in pockets? I feel most people were too busy trying to get by with whatever working conditions there were at the time, and of course, knowing how to write or read was a privilege that not many people got to have for centuries.
If there’s something that I know, is that today we are more “connected” than ever before, and we have more access to information than any previous age, and more books widely available in both physical and digital format, and yet, it seems like books remain a niche, something rarely talked about in public, because you are seen as a snob or a geek when you mention it to someone, somehow.
In any case, just imagine that picture again, that bus, filled with people, wobbling their heads with their books on hand as the driver avoids the potholes on the roadway. The only noise inside? the fluttering of pages turning over, such a pleasant breeze.
Now that I think about it, some people can’t handle reading while on the move. I guess that’s how you can tell it’s just a dream.
It would be nice though.
]]>I already completed #100DaysToOffload this year, so I thought I may as well participate on something else that gives me another excuse to use a trendy hashtag interact with the community a little bit more.
Blaugust is a month long blogging event where the goal is to write 31 blog posts! It’s similar to WeblogPoMo or Writing Month, and there are some weekly prompts you can follow if you need ideas.
I am pretty good at just coming up with my own themes, but I like some of the suggested ones, so I may use them in the upcoming weeks. Pretty much everyone is welcome to take part on this, so, this is your chance! share me your post if you are worried nobody will read it, because I definitely will.
As I’m trying to cutdown on my social media usage, I won’t be joining the Discord server, but I’ll send emails and replies when inspired by the posts being written, and I’ll still share my own to social media (albeit via a shell script using toot) whenever they happen, with the appropiate hashtags. Of course, if you want me to see any replies related to them, you would be better off contacting me directly.
So far, I’ve seen these people participating, and I’m sure there’s a list somewhere with more:
I just remembered that I can follow the hashtag via RSS so I don’t need to open Mastodon or anything! Feeds for the win!
]]>I only read the premise in the first paragraph of Shellshark’s blog post, because I wanted to avoid reading it and being like “oh yeah I do that too,” therefore I have decided to do the same thing, and list some of the thing commonly found in my writing—according to me.
I ended up reading the whole thing anyway so some of these will definitely be answers to what he wrote, oops. Anyway, here’s what I have to say:
This is not that uncommon—I hope—but there is a lot of vocabulary I repeat a lot of the time. words like “really”, “so”, “kinda”, “though”, “a lot” are found quite often in most of my blog posts, I’ve been using some dictionaries and looking for synonyms in my last few posts where I just say “this anime good” and “this videogame good” a lot of the time though.
When I write reviews I sometimes feel bad that I don’t have as much to say about something I enjoyed, I just say “it was awesome” and such but I think I could be better at doing analogies and describing the feelings I get from them instead of using synonyms of “neat.”
I barely use commas sometimes, this is something I realized when writing some of my previous post and then going to a spellchecking website. There were lots of missing commas, at least according to the site I used, that should be before or after words like “but” and “so” and “and.”
Tons of wrong words when it comes to referring to plurals or singular things. Especially when doing “there is” or “that is” when it should have been “there are” or “those are.” I still think I’m pretty good at using the proper words but it slips somewhat often. Notice how there’s no comma before that “but.” 🤣
I almost never use hyphens to join words, I actually did it in my last few posts again, because I decided to see what a spellchecker had to say for it, but using a hyphen in “top-notch” feels sacrilegious to me…
Now, using em dashes “—” is something I quite like! I’m not sure where I started using them more often on my posts, but I like that, at least with Jekyll and my markdown parser (kramdown) typing --- turns into an em dash ~automagically! ✨
I like to use links, but I always struggle to know where to put them. I don’t like to use a link on a single word like “here” but I also don’t really want to spell the titles of whatever I’m linking directly. So I try to balance things out.
When I start to list things in a sentence, I am never sure on how to stop. In Spanish, using “etc.” is very common, but for some reason I don’t like it in English, I have used it a few times, but I prefer to try and find the some clever sentence that ends things well. Also I use the Oxford comma depending on vibes.
When I use emojis, I always finish the sentence and put them after the last period, I think it’s more elegant that way. 🙂↕
I also really like to use exclamation marks, but sometimes I feel weird about using them alongside em dashes!—but who cares right?—I tend to finish my paragraphs with them as well!
I barely use pictures and when I do I like to add a little caption to them, but these past few blog posts I’ve started to add some more pics, and I think I like them when they are more like banners, horizontal and right after a heading, I vibe with that, and I hate the vertical ones, I could dabble with my CSS but they really have no place imo.
I tend to assume people just get what I’m talking about, so when I go back and read some of my posts I wonder what was I thinking? just look at the random intro of this post about fetching full articles in FreshRSS, poor @ssafar! 😭
Breaking paragraphs is something I still struggle with, I always do it after the fact, I write as much as I like in my draft, and by the time I realize I have been going on with the same topic for like 10 lines of uninterrumpted text. I also can end up using a lot of commas and not enough periods, making it harder to grasp what is even going, the worst is when it happens in the middle of a listing, like in this case, because the paragraph is long, but I don’t want to break it up because it looks weird to me.
It’s possible to break the paragraph while keeping the same margin of the previous listed paragraph, but it still feels wrong.
Whatever! I think there’s a couple of extra mannerisms I could mention, but being kinda lazy is also a bit of a mannerism for me, and I’ll honor it by not finishing this properly.
This is day 32 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I always do this even on my monthly summaries and such, but for my weeknotes, I just don’t, I list my random notes of the week and just finish the post.
I saw RL Dane sharing a post about his every day carry and noticed that he also does not have any conclusion, just listed the things and called it a day.
Maybe I should try and do that, write what I’m going to write and stop, not everything needs to have a proper ending I guess?
Another thing I notice is that I probably use the word “anyway” and “regardless” a lot, but what else can I say?
No matter how hard I try, I’ll probably still try to conclude this in some way, my previous two paragraphs already ended with unanswered questions, maybe this time it will be just a sudden break with no continuation.
But here I am, continuing again, I just think it’s incomplete, maybe I will try with a quote I’ve used before.
Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife - chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: “Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.”
— from “Collected Sayings of Maud’Dib’’ by the Princess Irulan
Aaagh, you see, but that was the ending of my review of Dune! oops, spoilers, it is not fair to rehash it again for some random rambling of mine that is so off-topic and doesn’t even deserve such a great quote in it.
At this point, I’m just trying to keep you reading a completely non-sensical text, but did it work? If it did and you reached this point of the article, comment your favorite fruit in an email or comments below!
Such a cheap way to create engagement, I know, I can’t end this article with such a tactic, it has to be fair and square—but please, do that random comment anyway. 😉
Honestly, I’m just trying to reach a word count at this point, you can really go read something else now, I beg of you.
And done, this should be right around 400 words now, good job me! See you around my dear reader! Until later.
This is 90 day of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Making Writing a Natural Part of Our Day
Although I write every day and have a certain routine for it, I don't think it's the most important thing (I'll come back to that). As my life situation looks right now, with a full-time job, I write after work. Usually after a yoga or strength training session. On weekends, when I'm free, I prefer to sit down at a cafe and write...
I have done quite a lot of blog posts at this point, most of the time I write them on my laptop, but honestly, it can be quite varied from day to day.
I do not write on a daily basis, I believe I am perfectly capable of
doing it if I wanted to, but with so many hobbies I could do instead,
I would rather strike a balance between them all and laze around a
bit too.
Previously I’ve been able to write daily for a whole month with no issues, even twice a day. Even now, despite having a job, I always have some time to write short blog posts like this one.
Early in the year I tried to write more consistently, which despite my best efforts, is something I haven’t quite achieved, but at least I’ve written 4 or more blog posts per month, which is a win in my book—compared to how it went last year.
I could write in the morning, sometimes as soon as I wake up, I have like 20 or so minutes to write something, and then get ready to work. Most of the times, I prefer to stay in bed or do other things, but I’ve done it before.
During my commute to work, I always have 20 or 30 minutes I can use to listen to a podcast and even draft a blog post. It used to be a whole hour before but even half is enough to make some progress. Again, I prefer to just close my eyes for a bit or read some pages on my Kobo, but I could write if I wanted.
Once I am at work, I usually get there early, and I have some dead times where I can just open Notepad++ and write for a bit—like I’m doing while writing this post. Then I email myself the text and do a final edit at home.
On my way back home, the bus takes another hour which I could be using to write, but I prefer to read on my Kobo some more, check my RSS feeds or Mastodon, or game for a bit on my Anbernic handheld.
Once I am finally home, it’s a free for all, I can do whatever one can do at home. Yeah, house chores, gaming, watching some movie or anime, and of course, write. This is the time I dedicate the most to writing something brand new, or complete a draft. Then I commit my work to my repo and it gets published for the world wide web to see!
I think one of the things that has helped me remain consistent is not to worry about being consistent. Maybe I can write daily, but I don’t need to write daily, it isn’t really necessary for me.
Yeah brushing your teeth is something you do everyday—I hope you do it everyday—but I think of writing more like shaving. Such a task has many reasons to do it, sometimes daily, sometimes it can wait, sometimes I want to do it, sometimes I have to do it. Some people have to do it more or less than others, some make a ritual out of it with three passes and shaving cream and traditional safety razors, while others try to just get it done with some soap, a disposable razor, and move on.
It’s not the best analogy ever but I think it gets the point across. I personally enjoy the writing process, but I don’t feel the need to turn it into a daily thing at least right now, but of course, some people like to have a baby-smooth shave every day, and that’s totally awesome!
Just keep writing at your own pace, and while you’re at it, send me your RSS feed and I will do my best to read you!
This is day 82 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I am once again not writing that much recently. However, unlike other times, it’s not really that I don’t have time for it, I guess I just don’t feel like posting anything lately.
It’s not even that I don’t write, I have actually written two drafts that I somehow haven’t published, and I have also been writing on paper twice a week or so. For a while my blogging workflow was kind of messed up because my script to share my blogposts to Mastodon broke due to a misconfiguration of toot.
But yeah that’s not the true reason. When I have time I game, or read, or listen to podcasts and watch videos, I have time to spare, I guess I just haven’t been feeling it, until now.
The thing that spawned this interest was actually this video that showcased a LotR game for GBA that played like Diablo. I have never played Diablo itself but the isometric view and gameplay looked kind of interesting and I wanted to see if there was more I could play on my PSP or my Anbernic handheld.
Reddit says that games that fit this style would be Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance and Shining Soul I and II, for the PSP it seemed like there weren’t many “worthy” alternatives other than Dungeon Explorer and the PS1 Eboot of Diablo itself.
This video titled The City of Omashu - Remastering Avatar The Last Airbender by ChunnyKay is exactly what the title says, this guy went ahead and filled in the left and right sides of the original 4:3 aspect ratio. The final result looks simply incredible and it was an enjoyable watch.
This release on F-Droid caught me by complete surprise, but Readrops, my favorite RSS reader with FreshRSS support, finally got an update after being silent since 2021. I am supper happy for this, although I had to delete my app data and login again for it to launch.
The end is upon us! Tomorrow I’ll be writing my summary, and there’s a lot of interesting stuff, so you better be here tomorrow!
This is day 67 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>This is why I am still not done with the blogpost on many topics, such as my overview of 2023, or my favorite XYZ of the year. Besides, I am having a great time playing Ori And The Blind Forest on my Switch and that’s keeping me a little busy. I’ll probably finish it really soon so stay tuned for a review! update: the review is here!
Still, I also want to go to sleep early today, hence the briefness of today’s post, its more of a notice rather than actual content so I am sorry for that.
Don’t worry, though, I am making use of the drafts feature in Jekyll to keep track of the ideas that pop into my head and also just write blogposts bit by bit over the span of a couple days, against my usual practice of just writing everything down in a single day. Some blogposts will still be written like that, and others will take some time, I’ll just try to keep it simple, and stay consistent.
This is day 4 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>I woke up from bed, I’d lost one of my socks, but I didn’t mind. I went towards the eating room, when my father, already awake, asked me to take the bed sheets to a friend’s house. He had just washed them, but they were still not fully dry, I found that weird, but I obliged.
I went to change my clothes and get ready, when my mom decided to go outside and help me pick up the bed sheets. As soon as I followed, the reason why we were moving the sheets was clear. There was smoke in the air.
I saw a motorcyclist passing by, alongside his dog. Then I saw it.
A creature, 4 or 5 times the size of the dog, was slowly, stealthy, closing the distance towards the cyclist, who had just parked in the house in front of ours. In normal circumstances I probably wouldn’t have seen it, but its usual for people in my city to burn the dry grass on empty fields from time to time. The contrast with the sorroundings was high enough. I told my mother to get inside, but, looking towards our house, she was unaware of any danger, ignoring me.
There was a tiger right behind them.
The animal jumped in front of the biker, who had just removed his helmet. His dog went on to try and bite, but such an opponent just was just too much, it was in vain. It took hold of the pet, the biker was courageous enough to try and scare it away, to separate them, to do something at all, it was in vain.
I turned away, and I ran towards my mother, who was still busy with the bedsheets. Then I heard it.
It was a weird sound, not the tiger. Something else, almost bird like, but somewhat reptile. It was a velociraptor.
Many of them. They were sorrounding my house, barely protected by a thin fence that wasn’t even high enough to stop them from jumping over it.
When my mom finally got a hold of the situation, we were both heading towards the front door. A raptor had spotted us, and started his chase. A few others were going to try and steal the tiger’s meal.
We finally reached the door, and managed to keep it shut somehow. I hoped it would be strong enough to at least let us think of something. Well, we hoped.
In my confusion, I’d forgotten I have my own dogs too. I guess I didn’t have them in my mind as much as that guy outside. But I was still alive.
Worried, I looked through the windows. They were not as brave to try and attack a tiger, but they were still in danger.
I finally noticed where the smoke was coming from. The reason I went outside at all. The Circus.
It was quite big, the biggest I’d seen (to be honest, they were out of fashion for a few years now, so maybe my memory was just wrong), and it was all in flames. Were they the reason all this happened? How did they…
Then I woke up.
Yeah this was all a dream I actually had today, and I thought I would try and write it here. I will say that I also remember some aliens involved at the end that interrogated me or something, but I can’t remember what happened as well as the first bits, so I am sorry for leaving you on a cliffhanger that will probably never get a continuation.
It makes no sense, why were velociraptors there. I get the tiger because of the circus, even if its illegal to have animals there, but what was my brain doing?
Anyways, this is day 7 of #100DaysToOffload
]]>Many things add up to trouble
On the simplest task, I remain still
My father knows, he sees through me
I don’t want to fail his will
While doing this very writing
There’s still work to do, I’ve seen
Maybe after this I will be starting
Be it homework, or a project, or a dream
During those days, while working and thinking, a lot of ideas crossed my mind, and I am a little sad, because I already forgot most of them, some of which could have been nice blogs, but I was unable to write them down, at least on paper or a quick note.
Yesterday, and today, I spent some of my free time to do some cleanup of my Hotmail account’s Inbox. There were hundreds, if not thousands of emails coming from old accounts, old forums, Facebook notifications, YouTube uploads, Blogger newsletters, email chains and spam, and a lot of other trash that was there stored in some random Microsoft server. And among those emails, there were a few conversations I had back in the day, some old friends threads of chatting and sharing stuff we missed out on, it brought some nostalgia for older times.
Also, reading some article or post shared on Mastodon, I ended up reading a PDF, dating from the 1800’s (or maybe it was a website?) and I realized how important and amazing writing stuff down is. Somebody somewhere, took the time to record these thoughts, store them and share them to the world.
I have no idea of what will happen to those old conversations I had on email in 2013, what about the chats and threads I have in Forums, Matrix servers or Fosstodon? Don’t even get me started on MSN Messenger and the stuff I used back then, before advocating for FOSS.
I recently started to use PGP encryption for my emails, and to think that I am probably the only person who has the key to read the contents of them, is amusing.
I write these posts in plain markdown text, which is then converted to HTML thanks to Jekyll, but, how will it be in the future? Yeah, plain text files might still be readable in 50 years, but, just like that PDF file, or those old books, will someone be reprinting these words in new formats? new languages? will somebody even read this a week from now?
I have some tracking enabled on this site, using GoatCounter, but I only visit it like once a month, and I don’t really get more than 20 or so visits. I don’t really mind, in the end, I am writing it for me.
I doubt that a way to recover those lost thoughts will ever exist, all I can do is write what I currently think, and maybe hope for a trigger word to bring back those memories, preferably in front of a keyboard.
This is day 39 or #100DaystoOffload
]]>