making the space to think

I spend two hours daily stuck in public transport. It only made sense to me that during this time that I shall read. And so I did, completing many books that I wouldn't have otherwise. And until recently, I've felt happy about this habit of mine.

It dawned on me that my reading has become very shallow. Since I commute to work with everyone else in peak hours, I mostly spend these hours squished together with a bunch of strangers who can't decide where they want to stand. So I can't focus on the page, get distracted and often have to reread the same sentence. My overall immersion is nothing compared to the one I'd achieve in a quiet corner of my house, and it felt like I was robbing myself of an opportunity to connect with the page on a deeper level, while also not respecting the author, who has spent hours upon hours of pure concentration on every word.

So I decided I'd stop. I'd stop reading, listening to music and playing games on my way to and from work. Instead, I allocated this, otherwise wasted, time to mind wandering. It is something I've read so much about and always wanted to do, but I've lacked the time and intention. Ideally, you'd go for a nature walk, but it is a luxury, and I'd rather start small than wait for perfection.

After doing nothing for a while, I felt much more relaxed. A lot of unnoticed stress suddenly went away, and I've had a lot of time to think, mostly about dumb stuff, but with time, deeper thoughts started to arrive on me. It amazes me how difficult it was for me to notice my lack of thinking time until I've regained just a tiny bit of thinking space.

I thought a lot about whether I should quit gaming, since I wasn't happy with it for a long time and just kept trying to make it work again. I pondered how I would go about completely removing the internet from my house. Overall, I tried to replace some of the lower-quality activities in my life with fewer activities, while improving their quality.

But then came November with its gray days, where the sun rises almost at noon, then goes back down just a few hours later, while all this time being hidden by a wall of fog. Every year, I forget how terrible this time is. Everything around is dead and silent, and the amount of willpower required to do anything skyrockets.

In good times, it is hard to go off the beaten path and change your habits. But in this perpetual darkness machine, it feels literally impossible to do anything but crumble and give in to your worst vices. For now, I've put off the changes and thoughts for a time, when I will be in a better shape.

backlinks

• thoughts

i hate the smartphone

While reading this post, please keep in mind that it is in no way objective or completely correct. This is nothing else but an internal scream that I can no longer contain inside. Your opinion is as valid as mine, and everyone's situation is different. Thank you.

Everywhere I look, I see a phone. I can't escape them. Everywhere I go, people are stuck in a constant loop of doing something on their phones. Every place now looks the same: it is just a backdrop for people who are texting, scrolling, and taking pictures. They are everywhere.

A year ago, I ditched my smartphone in hopes of an escape. I wanted to experience the world again with my own eyes. I wished for a break from the ever-increasing flood of information. I thought that my habits and my phone were to blame.

Yet my life changed much less drastically than I had hoped for. Once my eyes and mind started wandering around again, I noticed how much everything has changed. I've suddenly become hypersensitive to the amount of "phones" around me. I could escape my habits, but I couldn't escape the habits of everyone else.

It is hard for me to name any other change in human history that has happened so fast and seamlessly as the worldwide adoption of smartphones. Just 15 years ago, they were still a novelty. Today it's nearly impossible to find someone who doesn't own one.

In this short amount of time, it has already left a deep scar on the face of humanity. We were sold on a tool, not understanding how much it would change us. Without knowing, we've traded our autonomy and time for the shiny "technology of the future". And now, when we slowly start to notice the consequences, it is too late. We've been taking the drug for too long, and the world only demands more of it.

Phones have became socially acceptable drugs. They separate us from each other, they dumb us down, they break our ability to focus, they make us all want and do the same stuff. Yet, unlike other drugs, everyone is abusing them, and we aren't really worried about them. Sure, people talk about their massive screen time in a negative sense, but the addiction is real, and it is insanely hard to break from. And once you are sober, you start to see things that make you wish that you weren't.

I can't stop the feeling that people find their phones more interesting than each other. Instead of putting priority on friends around us, we are eager to reply to some random person texting them. People meet up in cafes to chat, yet they all just end up staring at their screens. As I'm writing this in a local cafe, there is not a single person who isn't currently sitting in front of their phone. I can't express my grief in words.

Most people can't imagine leaving their house without their phone. What will they do when they get bored? What if they get lost? What if there is an emergency? How will they live without taking pictures and listening to music? Yet, somehow people not only lived but thrived without all of these things just 20 years ago.

The ability to instantly look something up and message anyone has drastically dumbed us down. We gladly offered the "burdens" of life to our devices. No more do you have to actually orient in the city, because you always have a navigator on hand. Why would you ever want to remember anything, if you can just look it up instantly? Why talk to another human, if it is much more convenient to ask your phone? Why would you put effort into picking what to listen to, if there is an algorithm that already knows better than you what you enjoy? Why choose, if there is an infinite content served on a silver plate? Why spend energy on thinking, if you can just consume? Consume everywhere: on your job, in transit, in a restaurant, in a toilet, in your bed — everywhere. Because the reality is slow and boring.

I truly want to live in a better world. I try to be positive about all of this, but I fail so hard. Everywhere I go, I am constantly slapped with the harsh reality of this brave new world. I've given up on pretending that the internet is a nice place. But I did not expect that when I try and escape back to the real world, I would find it in even more depressing state.

Owning a smartphone is the de facto norm these days. A lot of things are becoming hard or impossible to do without one. In many places, you can't buy a ticket without an app. On my job, you have to pay for lunches by scanning a QR code. In general, human-readable links are quickly being replaced with QR codes that only a machine can read. Android users laugh about the walled-off Apple users, while themselves being trapped in a similar walled garden, albeit a bit bigger.

Self-reflection and contemplation have become a luxury. The majority of thinking and free time has been replaced by looking at things outside of ourselves, be that books, movies, shops, or social media, it doesn't matter.

As humans, we have found solutions to a lot of complex problems. Yet, it is becoming harder and harder to think. Our thoughts rarely go deeper than our worries and everyday tasks these days, because we literally don't have enough time to process the incoming information. The increase in the amount of information consumed by an average person has been increasing for a long time, but the arrival of the source of infinite information in our pockets has put that trend on fast-forward.

If to think means to be alive, then we are much less alive than we used to be.

I wish for a world where people are focused on one thing at a time.
A world where you could go out with friends without interruptions.
A world where you can go anywhere without taking pictures.
A world where it is normal to be bored and do stupid stuff IRL again.
A world where I don't get shoved opinions of everyone around me and where my every sentence isn't judged by a like counter.
A world where people are open to trying things that aren't popular.
A world where music, movies, and games are discovered through word of mouth.
A world where my every single action isn't recorded for extracting ad money from it.
A world where I am not bombarded by ads everywhere I go.
A world where it is okay not to know something and not look it up instantly.
A world where food is just food and not a source of likes.
A world where to hang out with someone, I have to put effort into physically seeing the person.
A world where it is okay to talk to strangers in bars, cafes, and everywhere else.

I'm painfully aware of all the phones around me at all times. They are eyesores that break my immersion in this world. Every time I see one, I get a stark reminder of how things are now and that the person holding it is bound to snap out of the world around them at any moment now. I'm aware that this sounds like anything but healthy, but I can't unsee them anymore.

I do not know what to do. Trying to stay away from everything above requires a constant uphill battle. The amount of effort exerted in the fight for our attention by the other side is colossal. It is foolish to think that my current situation is sustainable. But unless I move to a remote location, there is no way to prevent the spillage of garbage into my life. Because they are literally everywhere.

None of my friends are really on board with my viewpoint, nor even my wife. Everyone around me sees this as a weird quirk of mine that causes them more trouble than it is worth. I've met only a single person IRL who came to the same conclusions as me and took actions. I'm starting to feel exhausted and hopeless.

I do not know what to do.

backlinks

• home page
• thoughts

i ran a marathon

Finishing a marathon always felt like a landmark achievement, which I always thought would make me a "real runner". After 4 years of running, I finally did it. My time is 3:49:12 (5:26/km), while I was targeting maybe way too optimistically 3:20:00 (4:44/km). It is an experience that I will never forget.

A few days before the start, my right leg started to hurt. A doctor managed to get me back in shape, but it was a very temporary fix, and I'm yet to resolve the real issue. Sometimes the leg would start feeling uncomfortable out of the blue, so I had doubts if I would be able to run at all, when the day of the marathon came.

It rained heavily that night. The track ran almost exclusively alongside rivers, and I was afraid of the heavy wind joining in. There were some questionable decisions from the organizers that only added to my overall anxiety and stress. I ended up in a corral that was much slower than my target pace. Since I didn't notice this in time, I had to force my way through a crowd constantly instead of turning my mind off and running behind a pacer.

For the first 10 kilometers, everything was looking alright. I'd felt very stressed from constantly jumping around slower runners and puddles, but I was comfortably keeping up my pace. But after eating an energy gel, my stomach went wild and didn't stop until the end of the race. I've never had an issue with gels before. For the next 10k I've fought with my stomach, trying to keep up the target pace, but I kept losing. After the half-distance mark, I gave up on trying to get a good time and instead decided to focus on getting to the finish line.

As this was happening, we'd entered the worst part of the track by far. It was a long straight shot alongside a river that was very dull and boring, stretching almost till the very end. The darkness had fully settled, and as the rain intensified, only very dim lamp posts were visible.

I felt so demoralized. It was dark, cold, nowhere close to the finish line, and my stomach was constantly nudging me. It has gotten so bad that I had to stop a few times to sit to try and calm my stomach down. My running shoes were soaking wet, and I lost all hope of getting a good time. I wondered if I would make it at all. Thankfully, at least my legs were cooperating and showing no signs of pain.

I decided not to deviate from my diet plan and consumed another gel at 23km, and then a caffeine one at 32km. They didn't go down well too, but at least I didn't hit the "energy depletion wall".

It was far beyond my typical bedtime, and my mind was constantly slipping out of focus, only to be jerked back by a loud scream from the side of the road. The time perception became completely whack, and those 4 hours went by both very quickly and painfully slowly. Sometimes I would be counting meters to the next kilometer mark, and sometimes they would fly by unnoticed.

The caffeine finally kicked in at around 39k, and I picked my pace back up. I could finally see the finish line getting tangibly close. Near the very end, I saw my wife and friends losing their minds at finally seeing me (they were expecting to see me half an hour earlier). My foggy brain couldn't quite comprehend anything besides that the finish line is here and this is the end. The rain turned into a storm, but it was finally over.

This all feels like a dream to me. I've completely recovered overnight. The marathon was a goal for me for so long that I can't quite comprehend what it means that it is over now.

To be honest, I'm going through a running crisis right now. With my primary goal achieved (even very poorly), I'm left unsure of what to do. I've been preparing for this event for so long that now I feel like I've lost a part of myself. Sure, the next logical goal would be to run again, but with a better time, without my stomach feeling like it's going to explode, and preferably during daylight, but something feels off now.

For the second half of the race, most of my thoughts revolved around never doing this again. Now, a few days later, I'm mentally recovered enough to see myself continuing with this endeavour. I just need more time to process everything that I've experienced.

backlinks

• home page
• thoughts

learning from consuming

Today, we consume an immense amount of information. We watch videos, spend time on social media, and read books. Everywhere we go, we are constantly exposed to a never-ending flow of "new stuff".

With so much to consume, it is easy to fall into a passive position of consuming a lot, while not spending a lot on a single thing. Rarely does a piece of media have enough time to leave a meaningful impact on us. When we finish reading one book, we jump straight to the next one. But a few weeks later, you won't be able to recall much from what you've read.

And it makes sense. Our brains are not great at dealing with a large amount of information. We have a limited number of items that can take up our attention. To notice details or build theories, our brain needs time. But when a new thing comes in, something else has to be discarded.

It wasn't always like this. A few decades ago, almost all children would obsess over the same things. In my childhood, literally everyone dreamed of becoming Spider-Man. There wasn't much new stuff out there, so people focused on their limited pool of media much more.

levels of attention

We don't always pay the same amount of attention to everything. This "optimization" allows us to save on the amount of processing our brain has to do, and overall is a net positive skill. To focus on something and to keep our attention from wandering is a seriously demanding task.

level A

I divide engagement into a few levels. Say, we are watching a movie. We can watch it:

• In the background, not as the main activity
• As the main activity, trying to relax and not giving much thought to it
• Emotionally engaged by the plot/narrative

This is as much attention as we give to most media. Let's call these levels A1-A3.

level B

In some cases, we go deeper:

• We consume related content, like movies from the same universe or interviews with actors
• We rewatch the content
• We imagine alternate scenarios, create fan art

These levels (B1-B3) imply that we were hooked by the content. We start putting actual effort into thinking, searching, and creating. But that's where it usually stops. We almost never go deeper. Because after all, usually we consume media for entertainment or some light learning.

level C

If we put in a bit more effort, we uncover a huge treasure trove of lessons that we can extract from our favorite media. To engage deeper, you can:

• Write down your thoughts and observations.
• Take it apart: look at the character arcs, mood transitions, camera movement. Try to understand the thought process and the creator's intention.
• Recreate small parts of it (maybe in different media).
• Create your own stuff with the lessons and observations from other people's work.

How often do you pay attention to how cameras move in movies? Not often. But it is someone's job to make that heavy rig move smoothly and to convey emotions. It is a deep and interesting world on its own. And there are so many other things that go into making something that we don't appreciate because we don't stop to even think about them!

understanding your taste

It is easy to judge if you like something or not. For example, say you like how a building looks. Nice. But can you tell what exactly you like about it? What you have to remove or change in the building so that you stop liking it? Those questions are much harder to answer.

A building is made up of thousands of individual decisions and choices. So is a movie, a book, a painting. To understand what you like is to see those small decisions and to have an opinion on them.

We are not born with this understanding of millions of different things. We have to learn them through practice. And in the process of analyzing and taking apart the work of other people, you build up this understanding, piece by piece.

a practical example

Imagine a painting. You'd rarely come to a museum to see just one painting, unless it is an extremely famous one. Even then, while you walk through the halls of the museum, you see countless paintings, big and small. Some of them you pass without a second thought, but some of them manage to catch your attention for a minute or two. You can hire a guide, who will tell you more about the artist and history of the painting. Maybe he will tell you why it is a great piece and what makes it special.

But these steps can only take you so far. You can develop some taste by listening to what other people say about paintings. But unless you learn how to apply those things, you won't become a better painter. And to "apply" a painting, to learn from its creator, you need to understand what makes it work.

When you focus on small parts of the overall composition, it is much easier to understand what works and what doesn't. Why do you enjoy the colors? Why does the lighting look so mysterious? How is the scene framed?

You don't need to like the whole painting. You can be a fan of how that one specific detail was drawn. But to do that, you need to spend time with the painting, taking it apart. And while doing that, you will learn all those small things and how to apply them to your own work.

what to do

The levels of attention described above come from my personal experience. They are in no way complete or fit any situation or person. But for me, it is a great reminder that I could engage more. After all, the more I engage with something, the more I grow to love and appreciate it.

A great place to start is to write stuff down. When you notice something interesting in a movie, write it down. When you see an art piece you feel inspired by it, draw a small sketch!

The amount of your contribution doesn't matter that much. The difference between not doing anything and doing something small is infinite.

backlinks

• home page
• thoughts

blogs are (not) dead!

I'm so happy to report this! Sadly, I missed the "golden age" of blogging for various reasons. But these days I will sometimes stumble upon a blog article while researching something. "What a great post. I wonder, what else did this person say?" I usually think. And then I look at their last last post, it is from 2011 and the blog was never updated since.

I've followed a few blogs throughout the years, but I've always assumed that the format is dead and is replaced by videos and social media. And that is a bummer.

But it turns out I just didn't know where to look! All this time, they were hiding in plain sight. Once I've discovered a few pages under the common name "indie web", I was bombarded with such an insane amount of cool and unique blogs/websites that I'm seriously wondering how I didn't stumble upon them earlier. There is just SO MUCH STUFF!

Did you know about website buttons? I didn't have access to the internet back when they were the hotness, and I've only learned about them by playing a bit of Hypnospace Outlaw¹. The game had some really cool and creative pages (inspired by GeoCities, apparently), all linked together by a bunch of buttons. "Oh, how I wish the REAL web was more like this" thought I. Well, as I've already said, it turns out it is! You just have to know what stone to turn over to find them all.

I'm yet to make my own button, I don't know what to put on it. But once I have one, I will put it here.

I prefer text to any other type of media. I can consume it at my own pace, and it is really easy to search through and document. Sure, there are things that I can't experience with just plain letters, but I would argue there are too many videos that should've stayed in their script form.

And now, my RSS reader finally has a use! I was subscribed to two blogs before, so it rarely had anything new to read, so I ignored it for years. But now it is THE source of inspiration and interesting thoughts for me. I can see everything in chronological order. I can enjoy long-form text articles from people that I enjoy reading. And yes, RSS is more alive than ever, you can even subscribe to YouTube channels with it²! And yes, I have an RSS³ feed too.

I love looking at people's creations. There are so many ideas, so much passion, especially from people who had to learn how to write HTML just to make their own page. I'm taking my hat off before them. After being content with customizing just the profile picture in so many places, it is truly something amazing to express yourself without bounds.

If you are looking for something to read or to get inspired, I've assembled a list of other people on the indieweb⁴, that I enjoy.

1. Hypnospace Outlaw^↩
2. "My distraction free way of following channels on youtube"^↩
3. My RSS feed^↩
4. A list of great places on the indieweb^↩

backlinks

• thoughts

the factory must grow, and you don't matter

In the industrial age, we were finally able to start mass-producing stuff. No longer do you need to waste human potential repeating the same task over and over again? And as humanity marches up the technological ladder, more and more things become produced in quantities, that we've never dreamed about before.

The biggest players are constantly growing their market shares. As their audience widens, the product has to satisfy more and more people. And as this process accelerates, we are quickly eliminating the last remains of identity in products. There is no longer time for uniqueness. We approach the average.

the cost of uniqueness

It helps to view this dilemma as a scale. On one hand, we have a worker, who can create vases, but slowly. On the other hand, there is a huge factory, that can pump out an astronomical amount of vases in the same amount of time, that it takes a human to make one. But the factory makes every single vase exactly the same. Now the question is, who is a better fit for your average Joe's needs?

Of course, if you want just a single vase, you don't care how many vases can the human make in a year. You care only about one vase. And if the factory doesn't yet exist, there is no reason for you to invest in one. But at the same time, if you need 1 trillion vases for a major art installation in space, you probably don't care about any single one of those vases, and buying them from a human would be a waste of time, money, and humans. Simple enough.

But what happens, if you have options? You can either buy a more unique vase from a human or a more generic one from a factory for less money. And by the way, the factory ships it to your house in a single working day. To get the human-made vase you would have to travel somewhere to pick it up. What would you choose? It quickly becomes a question of how much you value the product's uniqueness versus your money and time. And if enough people value their money more, the smaller creators are slowly driven out of the equation.

Why we value uniqueness is a hard question to answer. Not everyone values it the same, but we can see from countless examples, that on average people do care about it. We love to decorate our workplaces, customize characters in games, and do wild things to stand out in real life. Yet we also don't want to stand out too much, we crave to be like the others, to do the stuff our friends do, rarely someone wants to be "that weird one".

In some places, we are picky about what we use and own, and then in some, we don't even think about the alternatives. At the end of the day, not everything comes down to how unique something is. We don't buy or use something, just because it is unique on its own (in most cases). Our decision depends on other factors, like the features and stylistic preferences. And in many places, we don't even think about how unique something is. Shovel is a shovel, it doesn't need to be handmade or have some nice art on it. It just has to do one thing well: dig. And if 492 humans have rated it with 5 stars, then probably it is a good shovel?

you can't be unique on mass

The bigger the amount you produce of something, the cheaper a single unit becomes. The less time you spend on each one, the more you can produce. And if you want to minimize the time spent on each product, you need to make them all exactly the same way, to avoid debugging issues. So you need to make sure that all your factories work in the same exact way, use the same machines, and require the same replacement parts and the same training for humans (or better, no humans). You need to simplify your equation. This way, you can stop micromanaging your production, and focus on more important matters, like securing that sweet monopoly.

So here we are. We've increased our vase production beyond all imaginable limits, sacrificing the smaller creators and uniqueness in the process. But if we want to finish that art installation, this is the only way forward!

A small aside: games, that promise infinite amounts of procedurally generated content fall into the same trap: you can be unique on mass. Yes, your planets can have differently colored premade animal models, but there are only so many colors, that feel distinct from one another. And the human brain is a master at recognizing patterns, so the current approach of just setting a bunch of parameters to random values doesn't really trick you for long enough. "Sure, those two rooms in those two dungeons are the same handmade rooms, but look, they are put together in a different order! This is so procgen!" No. That is legit lazy. I'd take a hand-designed level over a thousand procedurally generated.

when the factory must stop

The fact, that we can mass-produce something, doesn't mean, that we always should. There is a place for weird products and ideas. There is a place for solutions, that are hand-crafted for a specific problem.

I can't stop thinking about the fact, that the computers, that took us to the moon, had 2.8 KB of RAM (converted to 8-bit words), yet a self-checkout machine today runs Windows on 8 GB of memory and manages to lag and suck at doing it. It is wrong on so many levels. But it makes economic sense, why would you waste time designing a custom solution, when you could just throw a computer with a browser on it, and it just works (barely!).

YOU DON'T NEED TO WRITE EVERYTHING IN REACT!! JUST STOP ALREADY!!! I don't know, what to attribute this to, but in general, the easier something to do, the sloppier we get with the execution. Now when we don't have to care about every single byte of space used by our programs, we treat memory as infinite. The cost of it has dropped so much, that we almost never bother with optimizations. Oh, my website weighs 10 MB? Well, what's the problem, EVERYONE has a fast unlimited internet connection these days, don't they? We can talk forever about what happened with the modern web, about the terrible layouts, pages that load for ages, you name it. But as sad as it is, it just makes sense: if it is so easy these days to load up 10 different google fonts on your page, why wouldn't you?

It is hard not to fear for your own fate when we observe this all-consuming gluttony. If we don't agree with it, we are but a small obstacle and all opinions that differ from the right one will be swept away and destroyed. But if we abstract away from the situation, what is the end goal of this growth? To make even more money (how much exactly? and for what purpose?)? To actually finish that space art installation? To consume the whole solar system, or even the whole galaxy? We don't question ourselves about the purpose of our actions often enough. And as our consumption grows, we only yarn for more. And if there is no stop, then at some point we will be left with nothing left to consume.

So let's spend time pondering about the question, what are we trying to achieve? I think for most people answer is happiness. Then what's different between people in the XVIIIth century and now? They had no factories. Were they happy? I don't think they were more or less happy. So why does the factory need to grow?

P.S.

There are two games that I must mention, that really help you to visualize the exponential growth and loss of uniqueness. Here they are:

Factorio

With the recent release of Space Age DLC, I've been playing Factorio [1] again. I adore this game to death! But the more I play it, the more I grow sad about how streamlined most tasks in the game become, once you figure out the basic patterns. At first, your factory looks like a delicious mess of belts, assemblers, and inserters. But once you figure out, that all the game really boils down to is routing resources to crafters, the patterns start to emerge. And as the consumption demands grow, you replace your beautiful spaghetti with efficient, but boring setups. If you look around the games community, you will see, that literally everyone is using the bus design. It is very efficient, but it trivializes the game so much, that in my current playthrough, I'm restricting myself from building one.

Universal Paper Clips

Universal Paper Clips [2] took me around 8 hours to beat, and you would be surprised how varied the gameplay could be when all you do is click buttons. You start by producing a single paper clip per click, buying wire from your profits, and adjusting the selling price. But the situation spirals out of control really quickly. Be warned, it is highly addictive (so is Factorio, to be honest).

P.P.S articles on the topic

backlinks

• thoughts

leaving behind the smartphone

I've removed my beloved iPhone 12 mini from my life almost half a year ago. It was not a decision, that came swiftly or lightly for me, but I've never regretted it ever since, and I have no plans on owning a smartphone ever again.

but why?

The biggest motivation to quit smartphones were my never ending struggles with destructive behavior. I've deleted the YouTube app from my phone countless times, in the hopes that it would prevent me from watching videos so much. I wanted to stop checking my phone in hopes of a message from a friend.

I love tinkering with home screens. I've always tried to keep them looking minimalistic, disabling most notifications, arranging app icons in a nicely looking gradient and looking for hacks to force iOS into submission. But there is only so much, that you can do, without writing your own launcher. Regardless of if it was an Android or an iPhone, there was a never-ending list of small little annoyances, that I couldn't get rid of, so I've learned to avoid them. And the "obvious features" always outweighed the negatives, so the thought of just not using the phone never entered my brain.

But most of all I grew to have the compulsion to try and fill any boring moment in my life with something on my phone. I would either watch something or listen to music literally all day. I couldn't go for a run without a podcast, because I was so bored and so not willing to be left with my own thoughts. But my mind grew tired of the constant content stream, I literally couldn't listen to it anymore. And then I started taking my headphones off and listening to the sounds of my city whizzing by, as I ran. In those moments of quietness, I wondered, if I made a mistake somewhere.

why I owned one in the first place

I don't think I need to explain, why I owned a smartphone in the first place. Everyone has one. I wasn't even in school yet, when the first iPhone was released, so they were around me most of my life. My parents got me a small LG smartphone, running Android 2. I'm not sure, what happened to it, but soon after I became an owner of Google/HTC Nexus 1. I really like how it looks to this day, the little trackball wheel at the bottom was pretty much useless, but it made it stand out. Oh, I have so many great memories about this phone... Terraria, Angry Birds, Minecraft, Doodle Jump, Where is my water, I had so much fun with this phone! At that time I only used it as a gaming device, I didn't even have a mobile data plan, so I had to hope for that one random passwordless WiFi network to show up again to download something. It was truly a great era.

And the last smartphone I've bought was an iPhone 12 mini. A great option, only lacking in the battery department. But as the time passed, I've started to notice the cracks, that have formed in my relationship with technology as a whole, and especially, the smartphone.

After thinking a lot about it, it is still wild to me, how it is considered normal and mundane to spend more money on a consumption device, than most people are willing to spend on a creative tool like a laptop. For people in my country that means spending 1-2 monthly paychecks on a new flagship. Even worse, it is considered a flex to own the latest model, a large culture exists around the experctation to be gifted the new coolest iPhone once it comes out. Honestly, it leaves me wondering, how sad it is, that some people have nothing else to wish for, or spend a sizable chunk of money on.

how it went

Two years ago I had a bet with a friend, where I wanted to see if I could function without my phone for a week. It was a fun experiment, and it went pretty smoothly. It is curious to me, that I was already thinking about it back then.

This time around, inspired by a book "Digital Minimalism" by Cal Newport, I went for a month without using any digital device, besides my laptop at work time. When I read the book, I knew, that if I let myself think about it, arguing that I should prepare for this experiment, I would ultimately find a way to not do it. So I decided not to wait for the 1st of the next month, and jump off a cliff without any preparations.

Again, it went surprisingly smoothly. I struggled with the urge to check something for a week, but that's it. It was a really interesting month for me, I was very eager to do things, for example, I was going to just cheer up my buddy, who was running a marathon, but I ended up running half a marathon by his side, just because I had a free evening. I told my friends they were welcome to just come and ring my door any time. I went to visit a lot more people that month, and overall it was a really positive experience.

The sense of freedom was unparalleled. I could just leave my house, and nobody would be able to reach or find me. I stopped worrying about work, because if you can't know or do anything anyway, why should you worry?

I've started thinking again. Usually, while traveling I would listen to some music, and that makes it so that your mind is busy and you don't have to think. But now I had all the time in the world, it was a sunny summer, and I discovered, that I do not remember the last time when I sat down and just thought. I would always try and find a task for myself, something to occupy my hands and mind, but never just think. I didn't like to be bored. I rediscovered how much writing thoughts on paper helps me to think.

I dusted off my vinyl turn table, and in the absence of constant music in my ears, listening to an album as a whole started to have different colors in my eyes. I grew to enjoy the slow process of taking out a record, cleaning, and putting it on the player. And as I paid more attention to the music, I started to notice a lot of motives, that I didn't hear behind the leading instruments.

As the month was closing, I knew for myself I wanted to continue on the path I set my foot on. I knew, that I had to loosen the rules, because I still wanted to enjoy games and programming. But, surprisingly, I was eager to get rid of my smartphone forever.

my shiny new phone

And with my old smartphone gone, I turned back to future phones. I knew I would need to make an occasional call or send an SMS, but there would be literally nothing else on it that could distract me. I stopped on this little Samsung flip phone:

It is not perfect, I am looking for a different one with a second screen. But it is so fun to flip open and close the lid! And it cost me only 1/60th of what I paypaided for my iPhone. I've been proudly rocking it for a while now, and I'm very happy with how the experiment went down.

bonus critique points of smartphones

• We get blasted by information, advertisements, and news from our screens. What is so valuable in our smartphones, that we are eating that up?
• Smartphones attempt to be a single tool for many use cases, but they don't do any of them well (or better, than the respective tool).
• Having all the tools with you is great, but when you take a real camera with you, you make a conscious decision to use it, instead of doing it on a whim.
• Current phones are on the verge of devices, that don't function without cloud connection anymore.
• New phones all became this unrecognizable chunk of glass, both fragile and unexpressive. I miss the unique designs, that were everywhere in the 2000s.
• Future phone batteries last forever compared to smartphones
• With so much info at our fingertips, we "don't need to remember anything", because we can just look it up instantly. I think it is a worrying trend, we shouldn't let our memory rot.
• It sucks, how people much people are distracted by their phones at real-life gatherings.
• Speaking to another person in real life requires your full attention, you can't multitask it with talking to a bunch of other people and doing the chores.
• You can do everything you could do on a phone, on your computer, but better and so much more! I'm still catching myself being annoyed at having to navigate from one place of my bank website, copying a number and going back, and only then remembering, that I can just open a new browser tab! I'm so used to a terrible user experience of mobile apps, that I'm rendered completely blind to how much easier some things become on a proper computing device.

backlinks

• thoughts
• 2024 in review

the fear of cosmos

For thousands of years, human lives came and went. The further back into the past you look, the less we know about your everyday Joe. But through the fall and rise of empires, if everything else was washed down the shores of time, one thing has remained constant: the night sky. As the first humans raised their heads to the stars, they saw the same view as we do today. Nowadays, it is harder and harder to see the stars due to light pollution, but if you travel far enough from civilization, you can stare into the darkness, that puzzled and inspired humans for centuries.

The more we learned about space, the more questions arose. As it became clear, that the sun is just another star in the 100–400 billion of stars in the Milky Way, we naturally started to wonder, if there are other alive things out there. We looked at the stars with hope, curiosity, and fear. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has left a deep footprint in our culture and media. Curiosity vastly outgrew the fear, and we contemplate the potential encounter with hope. But the universe remains silent. Where is everyone?

an estimate for life

If the universe is so big, what are the chances, that we are alone? In 1961 Frank Drake proposed the following equation, to estimate the number of active communicative alien civilizations in our galaxy:

N = R * fp * ne * f1 * fi * fc * L

Where:

• N = the number of civilizations in the galaxy, that communication with might be possible
• R = the average rate of star birth in our galaxy
• fp = the fraction of those stars that have planets
• ne = the average number of planets that can support life (around stars with planets)
• fi = the fraction of planets that developed life at some point
• fc = the fraction of civilizations that develop to a level of technology, that we can detect
• L = the amount of time that they are detectable

Of course, we can't even closely know most of these variables. However, according to the current estimates, results vary from almost zero to 15.6 million civilizations. If we average that, we are left with an impressive 7.8 million. That means, that depending on the number of stars in our galaxy, each 13th (if we estimate 100 million stars) to 51th (if we estimate 400 million stars) star system should contain a civilization, that we can detect. Again, this is by no means any real data, but it is nice food for thought. Why with so many chances for life to evolve, we don't observe any? This is called the Fermi paradox.

the great filter

One of the most popular theories, that tries to answer the Fermi paradox, is called the great filter. It proposes the idea, that there is a technological, social, or physical challenge (or a set of them), that very few civilizations are able to overcome. For example, it could be the creation of the atomic bomb, that we ourselves had a hard time living with. If "the Cold War" has a 0.01% chance of not ending terribly for the whole planet, that means that we are in luck, but not the 99.9% of other civilizations. But what is even more likely, is that we are speeding face-forward to the actual filter, and we will only know of its existing as we smash into it at full speed.

the berserker

On the other side of the coin, the berserker novels and similar theories propose, that other lifeforms know something, that we can only theorize about for now: the galaxy is full of life, but if you show yourself, your time in this world will come to an end. A huge force patrols the void, and as soon as it detects signs of life, it seeks to destroy it. In "berserker" is a swarm of automatic self-replicating killer drones. In other works, it is the ancestor civilization, that controls the galaxy and prevents any new civilizations from rising to a high enough technology level, that they become a threat. If this is the case, then our solar system is already doomed since we've been translating to the empty void for a while now, but who knows how far the radio waves have to travel before they reach the trained ear of a killer.

the dark forest

This is the theory, that blew my mind. It makes so much sense! Yet if it is true, the reality is a thousand times more dark and depressing, than the other theories paint it to be.

The rest of this post contains heavy spoilers for the amazing trilogy "Remembrance of Earth's Past" by Liu Cixin. It includes the books "The Three-Body Problem", "The Dark Forest" and "Death's End". I highly recommend you read them spoiler-free. The knowledge from the following discussion will heavily alter the way you consume the books!

The real post starts now. The whole reason for the parts above was to give some context around the problem and solutions, that I knew of, before reading the books. Just today I've finished the last part of the trilogy. The past two weeks will forever be the "Trisolaris" period. I got the recommendation for the books from CGP Grey¹, and I cannot recommend it enough.

In the second book, cosmic sociology is proposed, with the following:

• Suppose, that the galaxy is filled to the brim with civilizations
• The primary concern of a civilization is survival
• Civilizations grow and expand, but the total matter in the universe is limited and remains constant

There are also two terms proposed: "chain of suspicion" and "technological explosion".

These points don't seem to be too concerning on the surface level. But let's look at a practical example: say, we found a civilization. There are 4 main combinations of our intents here:

• They are friendly, we are friendly
• They are unfriendly, we are friendly
• They are friendly, we are unfriendly
• They are unfriendly, we are unfriendly

As soon as we both learn of each other, a clock starts ticking. Unless we are both friendly, someone will attack. Even if the other civilization says it is friendly, we can't know that for sure. Or maybe they are not advanced enough right now, but with the "technological explosion" that could happen any day. So it becomes the question of survival. If we don't conquer them, we will be conquered.

But what if we both are friendly? Well, each side can't know for sure that the other side is not plotting against it ("chain of suspicion"), plus the third axiom comes into play: the more they grow and expand, the less territory is left for us to take over.

So what this means, is that finding extraterrestrial life is a sad situation for both sides. One side will inevitably fall. So it turns out it is better to sit quiet and not show yourself, just as in the "berserker" theory. But the big difference is, that there is no "one big common enemy" that everyone else is afraid of. Everyone is afraid of everyone else. In the whole galaxy! Leaking the location of your world means quick and inevitable death.

Liu Cixin was not the first to propose this concept, but he did an amazing job of explaining it. He drew the picture of a "dark forest" at night, where hunters lurk and seek prey. And the earth is a careless bird, that signs as loud as it can, thankfully it can't sign loud just yet. Everyone else in the forest is scared and in hiding. It is a grim place indeed.

Another interesting consequence of everyone being afraid of showing themselves to others is that civilizations who came into contact with others, can try and keep a peace treaty, by threatening to send out the location of other's side star system. It is a mutually assured destruction (I like the acronym MAD), just like the Cold War.

in conclusion

I love science fiction. There is something so beautiful and enticing in galaxies, that are formed into huge republics, alien diplomacy, battles in space, and light sabers. Of course, we all understand that it is just that, fiction, but it is so hard to look the grim reality in the eyes and to say, that it will probably remain fiction forever. At least with our current understanding of the world, there is no place for diplomacy and love in the cold void of space.

extra fun facts

• There are an estimated 100-400 billion stars in the Milky Way
• There are an estimated 100 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the universe
• The current estimate for the number of stars in the universe is 10^24 (1 septillion) or 1.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000

1. CGP Grey^↩

backlinks

• thoughts
• 2024 in review

accurate clocks

Clocks surround us daily. We obey to the laws of hours and days. If you are running late, you feel stress, if you are too early, you feel boredom. When you look at your phone, the clock is always starting at you from the top of the screen. And it has been like this since, what feels like, forever.

First time keeping devices we've found were created 1200 BC. The humanity has spent three thousand years under the ever marching forward hand of time. But as I've discussed in my post about teleportation¹, having the technology and having that technology with you all the time can be seen as two completely different topics. Even so, we didn't have the luxury of carrying around accurate time with us until mid XVIII century.

And there is no wonder why! Modern mechanical watches are a marvel of engineering. We take it for granted this days, especially with the simplifications that quartz oscillators introduced to the internals. I highly recommend you to checkout out this amazing post about the internals of mechanical watches².

Being able to tell the time precisely gave us the ability to orient on the seas with much more accuracy. You can calculate latitude by measuring the sun's angle at noon, but to find out your longitude you need to know the exact time. Even today, GPS satellites rely on an insanely high accuracy atomic clock to calculate your position.

So there is no doubt, that time tracking has been a huge blessing for the humanity. And today clocks are literally everywhere. They mostly became digital, but if you look around yourself right now you will probably find at least a few devices, that besides everything else, also have internal clocks in them. Do they all tell different time? Different kinds of time? No? But why do we need so many of them, then?

I've been noticing a pattern in myself, that I am trying to eradicate: say, I'm traveling somewhere via a bus to meet up with a friend. We've agreed to meet at X:00. I'm just sitting there. And then I get an urge to check the time. Why? Can I make the bus go faster, if I am running late? Does it really matter, if I am late by a few minutes? I literally can't influence the situation in any way, but for some reason I feel better knowing if I am late or if I am on time.

And I see this pattern in so many places now. At least for me, knowing the time makes me feel safer. But I think, it is just a habit, that has been developed through out my whole life. My life doesn't depend on me knowing the current time, especially to the minute.

Overall, the format of time tracking we stuck to is an interesting choice, if you could call it that. There are so many interesting alternative time measurement systems: hexadecimal time, metric time, arvelie… The system we use today, is the one we are stuck for the rest of our lives. But it doesn't mean, that it is the best one out there. The fact, that we think of time in minutes is just a historical tradition. There is no reason why 1.225 minutes is not a correct time unit to think in. We can even give it a name, call it morenits, and it would be as valid to say that there are 1175.51 morenits in a day, as that there are 1440 minutes in that same day. So there is also no reason, why we need to know the exact time to a minute, and not to 10 minutes, or 15 or 30 or even to an hour. Knowing that it is roughly 15:00 is already good enough for most use cases. So why do we default to 15:07 instead?

Or why does the time start at midnight? Why don't we say that the 0th hour is when we wake up? (I actually tried that for a while, interesting, but it is hard to constantly sync up with everyone else's time)

We need to relax about accuracy. We have enough pressure in our lives already. It is okay to be late by 5 minutes. Or by 5 morenits. Time is a tool, and it should remain just that.

1. teleportation^↩
2. this amazing post about the internals of mechanical watches^↩

backlinks

• thoughts

heretic of dune

I've finally read Dune, all 6th main books. But I don't want to talk about the books today. I want to talk about the new Dune movies by Denis Villeneuve. (From now on I will refer to them as two parts of a single movie.) I'm baffled at how the film is so successful. Literally everyone praises it, and I've found only a few instances of people criticizing it publicly, besides how "long and boring" it is. What happened here?

It's hard to leave behind the old "book vs movie adaptation" trope, even when a movie can stand on its own. But this is not the case here. If we forget that this is a terrible book adaptation, we are left with an awful mess of a movie.

The characters are unexplored, dull, missing their arcs, and most of them die off without much of an impact or screen time. We have no clue why everyone is fighting. What's the conflict? The Harkonnens just dislike Atreides? We know barely anything, if at all, about the Spacing Guild, Landsraad, CHOAM, the Padishah Emperor, Bene Gesserit, as well as Tleilax and Ixians. It is a very complex conflict of interests; everyone is fighting in very different and subtle ways, and the balance of power in the galaxy is very delicate. Yet we see none of this complexity.

We can't understand how unexpected the betrayal of Suk doctor Yueh was. We don't know who mentats are, and the spice effects are barely explained.

People who praise Dune often love to tell the story of how its director read the books as a child and dreamt of making a movie version of it. It is a pretty narrative, but for someone who had their whole lifetime to prepare for this project, Denis Villeneuve did a terrible job. The film feels like a forgettable modern blockbuster, and if you didn't know anything about the cult following it has, you wouldn't think twice about it. Sometimes I'm wondering if he's read past the first two books.

Denis Villeneuve says in an interview that he hates dialogue. Awesome! So why did you pick for your adaptation a book that is basically nothing but dialogue? And the dialogues are tense, deep, enigmatic, and philosophical.

Dune puts a lot of focus on people's inner thoughts, body expressions, and the choice of words. There are a lot of hidden languages throughout the books, and you just can't adapt that well into a movie form. Movies rely on showing expression instead of thoughts. So how can you show Bene Gesserit, who are in control of their faces completely? (Why is Lady Jessica such a slop in this movie? She cries literally all the time. She is supposed to control her emotions better than this...)

Basic stuff doesn't make sense. Why do people wearing water-preserving costumes expose their whole heads to the sun? A character later in the books literally almost dies because she didn't know that you have to cover up your mouth. I understand that it would be really hard to tell characters apart if their faces were all covered up, but there are ways around that. Or at least, you could find a way to explain it so that it doesn't just look dumb.

I think Dune is not a book that can be made into a movie. And it baffles me that the version we've got is so widely praised. It feels like people did not pay enough attention to the actual movie. Everyone praises the visuals, yet there are a bunch of scenes of two people talking against a solid gray background. There is so much пафос in basic scenes that it makes it hard to watch without laughing. The costumes look very cheap and basic. For people who are fighting for survival, Fremens look too neat and tidy, like instead of living in a cave they just came out of a barbershop.

So yeah, if you want to experience Dune, read the books.

backlinks

• home page
• thoughts

minimalism

I've travelled down a road, that I did not intend to take. The road of minimalism. But I've noticed it too late, and I don't think there is a way to turn back now. I've always enjoyed the fresh feeling of an empty desk, the liberation of finally cleaning out your lockers and organizing everything nicely there. But I've never been intentional about it.

The last drop for me became the book Digital Minimalism. It is really funny to read the author mumbling trash about Facebook, but his main message is still loud and clear: we don't weight the decision of owning a thing anymore. The questions we ask ourselves shifted from "should I buy this" and "should I use this app" to "what model of this product should I buy" and "how do I use this app most effectively". And this message really struck a chord with me.

Is a big cup of coffee really better, than the small one? I came to the conclusion, that the difference between having no coffee and having a small cup of coffee is so infinitely larger, than the difference between having a small and a large cup of coffee. On top of that, I feel like the sense of scarcity allows me to enjoy each sip much more. You can always finish the small cup, without having the sad feeling of throwing away cold leftovers of the big one. And it costs less, not by a lot, but still. This coffee example is applicable to so many things. A small old car is still so much better, than no car, and it covers your basic transportation needs. Etc, etc.

In some cases having less also helps with the fear of choice. When you have one or two books, it is much easier to pick it up and just read, instead of getting stuck on the choice. I've discovered, that this is the reason behind my enjoyment of ink drawing: it is as simple, as it gets. There is no picking colors, I don't have many choices of pens either, I usually stick to the one I've exclusively used for years now. And the contrast of black and white is just so impressively good!

Contrast between colors is another helpful way of thinking about choices. When you have just 2 colors on the ends of the color wheel, they just work together. They have so much chemistry, contrast, play. Yet if you start introducing additional colors, it becomes harder and harder to make them work together. Yes, you can do it, but it takes effort. And in the best case scenario, if you have 10 colors, your contrast will be much closer to 10% than to the initial 100% of b/w drawing.

Turns out, that our mind pays a lot of attention to contrasts. For example, the first layers of our eye-signal processing neurons are literally responsible for detecting edges and lines. In this sense, we are much more interested in the edges between colors of an object, than in the object itself. If something gets stale, our mind starts to pay less attention to it. But once something changes in the signal, once the contrast between old and new is large enough, our attention swings to that. And I find, that for me minimalism is largely about controlling contrast in your life.

Minimalism is about deliberately limiting the palette of your choices, so that each choice, each item, has a chance to shine on its own. The smaller the collection of gems, the more unique and important each of them feels.

I think this quote sums it up perfectly:

A perfect collection is not the one, where you can't add anything, but the one where you can't remove anything

backlinks

• thoughts

teleportation and the internet

Imagine, how cool it would be to have teleportation technology today. Everybody dreamed of this as a child. No boring commute to school, easy and quick travel to any place in the world! Shouldn't we abandon all other research, and instead focus on this technology, that promises so much economic benefit, that it is pretty much impossible to calculate?

The idea of teleportation has been with us for ages. So many novels, movies, especially games that utilize this concept to a great advantage. It fits so well with any setting. How does it work? Magic? Advanced science? Ancient rituals? You name it. It feels so mystical, whimsical. But once you commit to using it in your world, you open up a huge Pandora's box.

Teleportation removes any stakes from the story. Criminals appear in a bank vault and then vanish in an instant. Frodo appears on the Death mountain and performs a ring drop. The whole plot of Interstellar would be pointless. Because of this, teleportation is usually introduced with a lot of caveats and drawbacks. And even then, it usually creates more plot holes and questions than answers.

Is it a cool technology? YES! Is it worth it? It really depends on your usage of it. It really helps if there is a very specific set of conditions, that is required to teleport. Say, you can ONLY teleport while moving at 88 miles per hour and you happen to have a huge ton of energy. Adding cost to it is another great way to add flavor. If it costs something (morally, physically, you name it), it creates a dilemma. The choice to teleport is not so obvious now. Would you teleport, if you had to sacrifice a limb every time you do so? Well, that definitely cuts of food teleportation as a service in your universe…

At this point you are probably asking yourself, what internet has to do with all of this? Well, think about it:

• Can you explain, how any of these technologies work? If yes, can you recreate everything yourself? No? Some wizards-looking dudes with glasses on "clouds" are the only ones who know how to do it? Sounds like magic to me. Jokes aside, just think about how much infrastructure it takes for the bytes of data to even travel between you and servers!
• Both technologies give you almost instant access to other places. Internet is more of a "traveling almost at the speed of light" kind of teleportation, but for you it looks like the data arrives almost instantly and out of nowhere, thanks to radio waves. No, you can't instantly go to a library and get a book about the topic you want, but you can instantly download it, and watch it appear from the thin air on your e-book.
• Both technologies break a lot of set in stone conventions and require a ton of new rules for old stuff to function. Instant access to most of the human knowledge at our finger tips is an insanely game breaking tool, if you think about it. And with the rise of "smart chatbots", the line between what I know and can do and what WE as humans know and can do is getting really blurry.

The only difference is that internet exists today, and teleportation does not. But from how internet has changed our lives we can draw some guesses about the future with teleportation:

• Probably it wouldn't be really great for everyone, as with everything you have to pay more for a better teleportation experience
• You can tell me as much as you want about the wonders, that internet allows us to do, but who cares about that? What are YOU using the internet for? Or let's just take a look at the top websites by traffic today, and draw our conclusions from that.
• I think will be heavily centralized. Not at the start, no, but neither was the internet. And nowadays we spend our days on select few websites, owned by huge organizations.
• Even more events would be happening constantly, because it's now as easy to get to a convention as just looking the address.
• Parties would be even more lame. I don't think, that people will stop being late, and the phenomenon of checking the phone while talking with a person at the same time would probably evolve into chaotic teleportation back and forth in between sentences.
• And to that end, we will be completely lost, if something happens and the teleportation machine/whatever is broken for a day or two. If everybody relies on it to go to work, would anyone own a car? Probably not many.

Yes, it does sound grim. And yes, there are totally positive sides to having teleportation technology. But I do not think we are ready for it. I think we are not ready for the internet, and especially for the speed, with which it evolves. We really really to rethink, how and why we use the internet daily. Does it really provide as much value for us, as we think it does? Is being aware of the lives of other random people that worth it? What price would be a fare exchange for each google search you run?

People take it for granted, because there are thousands of new websites everyday, but running a big website is an insanely costly endeavor. Even if we don't take into the account the massive amount of human labor hours, that someone needs to pay for, upkeep and infrastructure are also insanely expensive. Website is rarely the correct word to describe those massive undertakings. The "cloud" is not magic. The amount of effort that goes into designing parts in private subnetworks, that no real user will ever see, is insane. But most of these services are free. Wild, right?

I'm not going to talk about "big corporations selling your data", because this is not the point. Whatever they do to justify their costs, think about your costs. What is the cost of being up to date on the new hottest memes? Those 15-30-60 minutes add up really quickly. And that is bluntly ignoring other factors, like the opportunity cost, attention fragmentation, negative self perception & more. Is it a worthy price to pay?

Maybe it is a worth while price for you. Maybe you even see it as a bargain! I definitely do not. I've cut off my home WiFi and I do not own anything, that can use mobile networks. I have to go out of my way to find a spot with WiFi to access the internet. And this way of using it has transformed my understanding massively. I will tell you more about my personal experience in a later post.

But for now, ask yourself: do I really need Internet everywhere I go?

backlinks

• home page
• accurate clocks
• thoughts

why I've created this place

I really enjoy writing. I've been doing it for a long time, sometimes often, sometimes rare. I use my notebooks, messages to myself, little notes, and I even another blog. Physically writing or typing something is always slower, than just saying it, or thinking about it. And I've started to value slowness a lot. Writing is a great way to engage with your thoughts more.

As I've mentioned, I already have a blog¹. I write about game development on it. But since I've been struggling to make games, there is not much for me to write about anymore. My interests grew so wide, that I cannot put them under the label of programming anymore. And thus, the blog sits empty, besides the yearly updates.

Another key factor is pressure, that I feel whenever I sit down to write there. It might sound weird, since it is a quiet place, but I have standards in my head for the type of content that must go there, and what arbitrary qualities it must have. Thus, I do not feel comfortable putting out most of my thoughts out there. I agree, that It is a stupid situation. But I need an even quieter place, where I can put anything, that I want.

I grew so tired of how same-y everything looks on social media. I was wondering for a while, what happened to all the creativeness from the early web. I cried on the graves of blogs, where people just wrote their thoughts, without any rush or pressure. I held tight to the few sites that remained alive, but sadly they were the minority.

And then I found the small web movement. I felt like a pirate captain, who just found a legendary treasure. Everywhere I looked I saw a beautiful perl of creativity. So many of them. Perhaps, a little too many, I've gotten lost in them so easily. But I immediately knew, that I wanted to participate.

I'm a developer at my day job, HTML was the first thing I've learned to work with. Most of the people from the small web movement had to learn how to make websites. And I get paid to do it. But I still struggle, all be it not from not knowing how to make sites, but from the amount of options. What stack to use, what content to include, what colors do I go with. I've been sitting on these questions for a week now, and I couldn't come up with any design that I liked. So I decided to start from what this is all about, from writing a blog post.

One of the best way to interact with something that you enjoy, is to create something with or about it. Write about your favorite songs. Make fan art of the game you've been playing. And I enjoy a lot of things. So this is the place for me to obsess over my hobbies. I hope, that you will find some of them interesting too!

Egor.

1. blog^↩

backlinks

• thoughts