Hi! I'm Jack 👋

I imagine life without being able to consult my many deliverables from my phone and some unpleasant part of my personality sends a jolt to the pain and nausea centers, hitting the intersection of old work trauma and pigheaded nerd completionism.

Mike Hall - Seeking Friction

I know the feelings, but I'm learning to repress them. I've also been thinking a lot about the value of friction. What is just the right amount?

Since I'll be down to a single computer soon, I thought it would be fun to move things out of the ~/Sync folder, since I won't be needing that.

hahahahaha

Do you have any idea how many places I hard-coded that path? I knew there'd be some, but my life the past two days has been all about updating paths. In scripts, code, settings, symlinks, everywhere. It may have been a mistake.

Well, the Ghost blog is down this morning, so I have no choice but to dust off this here blog and do something with it while I wait.

But. With the social media system fragmenting and falling down, our inboxes choked with newsletters, search mangled by AI and the slopocalypse cresting the battlements, curation matters.

Warren Ellis

When I visit my blog, I want to see something. Something more than just an index of post titles. That's boring. Efficient, but boring.

I'm trying to reel things in a bit, blog-wise, so I'm focusing my blogging at baty.net for now. See you there.

I created a new, empty Tinderbox document today.

It's meant to be an antidote to the Emacs Fatigue I've been feeling recently. A nice outliner and map views, timeline views, fancy exports, smart agents, etc. I want it to make my notes more immediately useful. We'll see.

There's a difference between "having my notes in plain text" and making that text immediately useful. I focus a lot of attention on the former, when the latter is more important.

There's a new macOS email client in town: MailMaven.

I downloaded the beta and played with it for a few minutes. Looks fun, and really customizable. Thing is, I'm happy with reading my email in Emacs, or Apple Mail if I get all pointy-clicky. Is it possible my phase of futzing with various email clients is coming to an end? I kind of hope so.

🎶 “Absolute Elsewhere” by Blood Incantation.

When are we going to get past this period of Metal sounding like call-and-respond between Backstreet Boys and Cookie Monster with the flu? It’s been self-parody for a decade.

I have to admit, my recent email fiasco has really taken the wind out of my Emacs sails. If I'm using Emacs, I want to use Notmuch. If I'm using Notmuch, I want to use it on both Macs. If I can't do that, I kind of don't want to use Emacs. Those things don't necessarily follow, but that's how I'm feeling.

One of the qualities I like about the way this Tinderbox blog works is its lack of necessary decisions. There's only one kind of post. The only choice is whether or not to display a title. I suppose the option of writing directly in the daily parent note, (which isn't included in the RSS feed), is a decision, but still. Over on baty.net I choose between a main daily note, a sub-note, or a full-on blog post. I find myself often starting in one place, then changing my mind later. This site is easier to deal with that way.

Dave's bramble photo is prettier than mine. I hope his post's title is a Led Zeppelin reference :).

I made some Journaling changes like 3 days ago. A lot has happened since then. The important thing is that I got mad at Emacs again. Not Emacs, specifically, but what Emacs does to my system. So, I fired up Tinderbox and started putting stuff in my LifeBook.tbx document instead of my Daybook.org file. I do this occasionally, and, while I don't regret it, it's not a good idea.

There's simply no chance that I'll pick one and stick with it. I wish that wasn't true.

At this point, with Emacs I'm falling for the sunk cost fallacy. I've got too much invested to change.

It makes me twitchy when I don't use Tinderbox for too long. It's one of the most interesting, powerful, and flexible apps I've ever known. It's a pointy-clicky graphical counterpart to Emacs. It may not be quite as tweakable as Emacs, but it makes up for it with ease of use.

And it makes a great blogging tool. You're soaking in it.

I think it's time for another sabbatical from social media. There is so much terrible shit happening right now, and social media just amplifies it. If I thought that was helpful, it would be one thing, but it's not helpful. It's debilitating.