L. Rhodes @lrhodes@merveilles.town

What are some of your favorite non-tech, non-dev blogs, and what do you appreciate about them?

(Boosts appreciated; trying to cast a wide net.)

e-reader users: Do you use a desktop #ebook manager? If so, which one? And why that one? (Feel free to boost.)

LET'S DO THIS!!! #worldofhorror

I've got at least a dozen notebooks full of material, and I'm experimenting with putting it all into a Zettelkasten so that it's easier to navigate. The challenge is to keep that from turning into a time sink that never translates into anything productive.

Took a scalpel to my Bandcamp follows yesterday.

Don't know how many people actually use their feed page, but I have it set as one of my browser home pages. And I had a pretty extensive list of fan follows as a way of finding new music. But it was filling up with cruft that didn't interest me, so now I've swung the balance: Lots of label follows, only a few particularly interesting/active fan follows.

Feels much better so far.

I'm sure you all were burning to know all that.

The biggest disappointment so far is that I haven't yet figured out a good system for incorporating PDFs into my reading habits. That's one of the principle reasons I bought an e-reader, but the organizational structure of the device isn't really structured to surface those easily. Right now, they're lumped in with ebooks, cluttering up my "Books" folder, and mostly going unread. (Advice appreciated!)

I've also knocked out an ebook or two, mostly public domain stuff, but I'm not as regular about that. Maybe that shouldn't be surprising: the synced Pocket folder works a bit like a social media stream, right down to the attraction it exerts. I've been reading a book of short stories (LeBlanc's Lupin stories, public domain), but honestly, it's been most useful for reference works. I even bought an epub Bible for my research project!

Part of the credit for that improvement likely also goes to my set-up. I'm getting probably 2/3rds of that material from RSS feeds that sync to my desktop and phone. (The rest comes from social media, a few email newsletters, and one-off searches.) When I see something relatively long that interests me, I save it to Pocket, which syncs to my Kobo. Most days, I have a few small periods of regular downtime that may be filled with chipping away at those articles.

One month on, I'm seeing some pretty dramatic changes as a result of incorporating an e-ink device into my reading habits, though not entirely in the ways I expected.

The biggest change involves online longform — I'm reading more of it, reading all the way through much of what I start, and engaging with the material much more easily. Chalk that up to the superiority of the experience: pagination vs. scrolling, matte vs. reflective surface, more comfortable reading dimensions, etc.

For as long as we believed that single nutrients were the main cause of poor diets, industrial foods could be endlessly tweaked to fit with the theory of the day. But what if processing is itself part of the problem? https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/13/how-ultra-processed-food-took-over-your-shopping-basket-brazil-carlos-monteiro

Good story about a federal regulator spending the last phase of his career working to reforest the parts of Kentucky denuded by the mountaintop removal coal mining he oversaw. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/lifestyle/magazine/appalachia-kentucky-reforestation/

Underrated feeling: Finishing up a book you've been reading, and thereby freeing up the cognitive energy needed to start another book you've been looking forward to reading.

"I have learned to bear the yoke of necessity without complaining," writes Rousseau, eight chapters into a book about how he's perfectly happy even though the entire world is conspiring against him and his only solace is amateur botany.

"What makes this seem secure, whether or not it actually is?" Zuckerberg wrote in one of the notebooks outlining his plans to transition Facebook from a gated community to an open platform. https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-lost-notebook/

Humans invented gods to have someone worth getting their lives together for.

I guess what I want isn't a productivity system so much as a motivation. Something more compelling than, y'know, me. Because I've lived with myself long enough to know that I'm not very compelling.

If I had the ability to do organizational tasks every day, I wouldn't be in the market for a system.

"To help you be more productive, allow me to explain the system I use to stay organized and on-task. First, every day…"

Okay, let me stop you right there.

It occurs to me that plate tectonics are a major concern here. You don't want store up a lot of terawattage only to find that, when it's time to reconvert it back into electricity, your mine shaft has gone crooked in the meantime.