general

There are 113 posts filed in general (this is page 3 of 12).

Playing with a new iOS app

Playing with new quick notes app called Funnel. Pointed by Agam on his blog.

The power of such apps is to quickly get to a writing place. The problem with such apps is that they need a prominent place on your homescreen.

My homescreen has been locked to the current set of apps since a very long time. The second page is flexible. But I don’t see how the first page would be. I’m not sure what the fate of this app will be either.

I mean, I literally have the free version of Drafts sitting on the second page and I rarely use it. Maybe I should just use the back tap feature of iOS to do quick thoughts capture?

Utterly immersed in the audiobook for Vita Nostra. What a mind blowing book! Calling it an anti-Harry Potter is such a disservice to the brilliance of the Dyanchenkos.

Watched: Saltburn (1/5⭐️)

What a pathetic waste of time.

Saltburn is a decadent and windy art film. It has a story, yes. But it’s rather linear and further ruined by a rather dull and obvious cast of characters. Ten minutes in, you’ll know who the antagonists are. Midway through, you’ll know what the climax will be.

What does that leave the movie to show?

Only cringy shock-value scenes. That’s it.

2/5 stars because it could be sat through, if you feel like wasting an evening of your life.

Go for a walk instead. You’ll feel much better.

Update: After careful consideration, I’ve reduced the rating from 2/5 stars to 1/5 stars. This was a horrid movie. Skip it. Do not watch.

Parents on Art Advice

She said that you have to be willing to disappoint other people in order to be a writer.

Source: How Do You Write a Book?

What an interesting thought! And so true, not just for writing but for all art, all hobbies, all creativity; heck, even spirituality and meditation. All of these are deeply personal. The satisfaction from these is almost never monetary, by which you could justify the time spent on the activity to the world, but more importantly your friends and family. Instead, the satisfaction is deeply personal too. You’ll be called selfish and greedy. “Your time and your energy”, instead of being devoted to this abstract thing, “should be devoted to people around you”, they’ll say. You’re going to ignore children and thus force your partner to take up more work. You’re going to eat into their personal time or into shared personal time, which is even rarer for parents.

But it’s worth it. In the end, you get a book, a piece of art, a more settled personality, or none of these. But the journey is important, no matter who it may disappoint.

I changed the title from “How do You Write a Book?” to “Parents on Art Advice” simply because there’s so much more that this advice applies to. Maybe it shouldn’t be “Art” but “Life”, because Life is all about balancing other people’s disappointments with your own needs.

Sticky is good, brimming is better

In my last post on the topic, I said that when I reached into my memory for alternatives to Goodreads, I remembered only StoryGraph and Literal.

This is good. Whatever is sticky is what we use in the end.

Recently, it went a little further. Lately, I’ve become a fan of a lot of alternatives to books. 13 out of the 18 books I “read” this past year were audiobooks. Another 3 were actually Harry Potter fan fiction web novellas from a series called Ever Upward. It’s worth a read.

There’s another web novel which I’m reading right now, on and off, which I have no hopes of finishing soon. It’s called Worm and it’s three times the size of War and Peace, which took me well over 2 years to read.

But the significant thing is that both the fan fiction and the web novel are online entities that have no ISBN, publishing house, or even profit motive. They are purely labors of love, freely given to the world, published online in a format that may outlast humanity or may disappear tomorrow.

Which means there’s no serious way to track the fact that I’m reading them other than putting them in my notes or on my blog. Goodreads doesn’t acknowledge them. Neither does Literal.

But StoryGraph does.

A few months ago, I wanted to record that I’m reading Worm. None of the services – Goodreads or it’s alternatives seemed to have Worm as a “book”. But StoryGraph did. I added it. But I’ve not really used it to track my progress. Mostly lack thereof.

A few days ago, I felt like adding my progress on the Ever Upward series to the reading services. Sure enough, StoryGraph is the only one that has it, with each numbered novella a separate entity. I added it and quickly marked the first three novellas as “read”, adding them to my 2023 Reading list.

I like Literal. It’s got a nice interface, a very good community. They have this cool feature where you can create Clubs based on any random criteria and people can join them and add recommended books as well as posts to those Clubs. I’m an active member of a club called “Complex Females” and the creator of a club called “Short books“. But like most other non-Goodreads platforms, Literal suffers from a lack of records. Books are missing or not available in the format I’m reading them in. To fight this, Literal created a program called Librarians where you can contribute information about missing books and editions. Still, there doesn’t seem to be a way in Literal to track non-ISBN books.

StoryGraph doesn’t have a program like this per se. But any member can import a ISBN based book. What they also have is a feature that says that if you don’t have an ISBN, you can manually add a book and plug in information about the work. This is probably what some kind strangers used to add Worm and Ever Upward to the platform. I’ve found this to be a rather unique option that’s not present anywhere else. In general, if you want to track something you’re reading on the web, your main options are Read Later tools like Instapaper or Omnivore. I do not want StoryGraph to track every article or LongRead out there, but the idea of tracking web novellas is unique and very satisfying.

I want to give my money to StoryGraph. It’s $50 a year for the annual plan (or $5 a month for the monthly plan). That seems like a reasonable way to support the platform. Literal on the other hand, has a “Patron” system where you can contribute $5/$10/$20 a month to help keep the lights on and improve the platform. Seems reasonable too.

Literal has a social aspect that StoryGraph lacks. StoryGraph has Stats. Who doesn’t like stats?

Ideally, I’d like these platforms to merge so I can have exceptional stats as well as a social aspect that’s entirely around book clubs. But that’s just wishful thinking.

What do you think dear reader? Where should my money go?

Oh, and about the title of the post. I am leaning towards StoryGraph because it’s brimming with more than just ISBN based books. It’s helping me track web novellas which I would have no way of tracking through a “reading platform” otherwise.

DNR’d two books back into 2023

Not a 2023 roundup post.

Just wanted to note that I was trying to finish 2023 with two audiobooks – To Her Credit and Classic Women’s Short Stories. Could not finish either of them. To the point that these are the only books that I picked up in 2023 that I will not finish.

“Classic Women’s Short Stories” is just too dated to read. There are a few short stories in there by some famous authors – Katherine Mansfield, Kate Chopin, Virginia Woolf. But most of the stories were just too… boring… to read. Ultimately had to drop the entire book. Woolf’s story, A Mark on the Wall, and Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Daughters of the Late Colonel, were the only ones I finished. I would recommend you to read these stories individually instead of through this book.

I thought To Her Credit would be similar to Figuring by Maria Popova, the book that kick-started my love for Feminist Memoirs. Instead, it was just a series of “here’s a woman who did amazing things and here’s a man we want to put down through her”. We need more writing like Popova’s which celebrates women’s accomplishments (or non-accomplishments, like Three Women by Lisa Taddeo) without demeaning them with comparisons. I’m still looking for anything as well written as Figuring.

I’m starting 2024 with a wondering book named Berlin by Bea Setton. It’s very along the lines of A Year of Rest and Relaxation. I’m loving the inner monologue of the main character and the audio narration by Ell Potter.

Sticky is good

Huh, I just realized that I’ve basically forgotten what all goodreads alternatives I was using. The only one that stuck properly was StoryGraph and after a little pressure on my brain, Literal.

That’s good! That’s what I wanted to do – use a few of these services and let some of them fall away, till I am left with the ones I remember.

It’s like email addresses – we’ve all got a few – gmail, yahoo, personal domain. But which is your goto? It’s the one that pops into your head as soon as you need to give your email to someone.

Sticky is good.

Another rant on software updates

When I opened my blog today, after quite some time, I didn’t have any idea I wanted to write about. Just an ache to see my space. I’ve been reading my RSS feeds a lot more recently, since I’ve been able to get my homelab going on a new mini pc I bought. I also setup Cloudflare tunnels to the software I’m running on said mini-pc-turned-server so I can access it anywhere. The majority of blogs I follow in my feed reader is personal blogs and with reading all those blogs comes the ache of wanting to write to my own.

But soon as I opened it, it prompted me to deal with 15 updates. I hate software updates. They’re so irritating. I get the point, but come on. This is part of the reason why I like working for the company where I recently joined – JFrog. One of their big ideas is “liquid software”. Updates shouldn’t come in your way. They should just happen in the background. So I went into the WordPress interface and turned on automatic updates for as many plugins it made sense for. I’d rather deal with updated and broken plugins by removing them than have to update them every time I come to the blog to think. I also took action on this previous statement by deleting the Apple News plugin. It throws some sort of error on the WordPress Gutenberg editor which always irks me. Besides, I don’t think Apple News works for personal blogs any more. Hasn’t worked for a while. So why keep a relic around? Out with it!

I recently had about half an hour of “me” time and chose to pick up my rarely used Nintendo Switch to play something, anything on it. I own Zelda Breath of the Wild on it, but I never feel like diving into a storymode game any more. So I had remotely installed Apex Legends on it at some point. I thought I’d dive into that game and setup my character and maybe play a quick match.

First the Switch had some software updates it forced upon me. Then Apex Legends had a software update it forced upon me. I keep the Switch plugin in and charging at all times. This way if I ever have the time, I can pick it up and just enjoy it. But no, updates got in the way again. You’re plugged in and charging. How about just download these damn updates in the background? Dejected, I shoved the device back into its charging slot while Apex Legends was downloading its update. I’m almost sure that the stupid thing didn’t finish the download and install and will irk me the next time I have a few minutes to myself.

I have a policy on my iPhone – no software updates unless I’m forced to. Banking apps and my Car Insurance app will often force me to update. The insurance app is the most egregious. It’s almost always needed when stared in the face by a cop or in an accident. Instead of letting the user get to vital information, this stupid app forces an update. So I’ve taken to opening it once a month or so to get any potential updates out of the way. The banking app, I open regularly enough to get the updates in as needed.

All other apps can shove it. Facebook has figured out that people hate updates, so they have a shitty SDK that does the updates for them, all within the app. This leads to a loss of control, but at least it’s consistent – I can open the app and use it, even if I have to deal with a whole new UI when I do. Still other apps will keep working till things break, and that’s when I go hunting and realize there was an update a year ago that fixed said bug. So I missed a year of updates. No worries.

I could just turn on autoupdates on iOS, but there’s a stark difference between WordPress and iOS – on WordPress, on the plugins view, I can choose which of the plugins would get the autoupdates feature. Plugins that are critical or those that I don’t trust enough should not be autoupdated OR force updates on me.

iOS has no such features. Autoupdating is an all-in or all-out approach. This is a horrible UX. Granted, we all have hundreds of apps on our phones and such granular controls can be cumbersome. But it’s a better problem to have than to have no autoupdates at all.

Thought about WordPress as a digital garden

I was just thinking that WordPress is amazing as a website builder and a blogging solution but really not great as a knowledge base or a digital garden. It obviously supports back links, which seem to be an integral part of digital gardens, and it supports markdown to an extent, which also seems to be the markup system of choice for most writing and thinking tools now. But it still acts like a web app. It expects you to be in one view and one view only. You’re either editing or administering. You can’t ever be “collating”.

For example is that purpose, tools like Obsidian (which I’m using a lot these days) work very well, though each tool has its own flaws. I’d love for there to be an alternative interface for WordPress. One that acts like a digital garden app but uses WordPress as its backend. Too much to ask for?

Update: Desktop tools are something I’ve stopped exploring. But today I looked at MarsEdit and it’s… there?