A random selection

These past days I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of setting up a writing workflow that works for me. I’ve always wanted to write more and lately, I’ve been wanting to publish not for vanity’s sake but for putting things out there and connecting with people. I really believe that connecting with “random” people on the internet is such a lovely way for human beings to connect. It’s like a global-size version of a casual conversation on the street or public transport. It can change your day, it can even change your life.

I had read about POSSE before, but Molly White’s latest article “POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world” was so good I don’t think there’s really anything to add to it. Except, maybe, how to actually do it yourself.

I’ll be straight up honest: I don’t know. But in not knowing I’ve been experimenting with a few tools and landed on a workflow that I think works well:

1. Get a custom domain (full disclosure: this is my Hover referral code but use whatever you want).
2. Open up a micro.blog account.
3. Connect all your socials to it: just use the ones you have, don’t stress.
4. Write

I think that’s basically it.

Currently I’m experimenting with:

5. Install the Obsidian plugin Micro.publish, get your micro.blog token to connect your account and… write!

Hope it works!

Epilogue

This is actually the first time I am publishing from Obsidian connected to micro.blog. So, if you’re reading this, it means I’ve succeeded. Or it can also mean I failed a million times but eventually succeeded.

Which leads me to ask: Is there a difference?

A few times, I’ve been told I would be a good actor. Other times I’ve been asked if I was an actor. In both types of occasion, what had happened previous to the comment or question, was that I had been being… histrionic I guess is the most accurate word. Expressive, histrionic, actorly…

I think I’ve always been this way until the Great Shutdown of my Adolescence. Then I re-started and then there were a series of lesser, minor shutdowns that impeded the actorly expressive vibes to come through.

I’m very much against any idea of “essence”. I don’t think such a thing exists. But I do believe there are temperaments. Something more profound than habits but something less deterministic than nature.

This is to say that I don’t think I am any specific way, but that many of the ways that I am, including this histrionic aspect, were definitely shut down or repressed during painful periods of my life. I don’t think any of this is unique. But it does feel surprising and discovery-like to see myself anew or brought back to a former self. Not so much “former” as merely previous and, hence, memory-like.

When somebody tells me I’m like an actor, I’m reminded of who I was previous to the Great Shutdown of my Adolescence and it makes me like myself, strike that, love myself in the same way I love my nephew and niece. I’ll avoid the inner child metaphor but I guess it is relevant. In any case, it’s a love that’s not nostalgic in a sad way but memory-like and reminding in the way of a lovely holiday you had as a kid with your parents, or an afternoon or lunch spent with the whole family, grandparents still around, going to and from the table, with siblings and cousins, with that very specific three generation presence at the table which made everything so interesting.

Your parents telling you to do this or that, your grandparents allowing you other things, your parents telling their parents something about their children (you and your siblings), and your grandparents then answering to their children something about their grandchildren.

As I write this, I can’t help but notice I’m talking about identity: the same person as a child, as a parent, as a grandparent. The difference in roles for each and the difference in relating to others for each.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be a parent, let alone a grandparent. But I remember vividly being a grandchild and a son.

All this to say that when someone comments on my expressiveness, I remember the kid I was. The one that was exposed to the Home Alone movie and then forever thinking I was being filmed (predating reality TV). The one obsessed with the Ace Ventura movies and understanding something about myself in that hyper-expressiveness and the humor of removing yourself from the existing situation to both reference and parody it.

I honestly don’t think I can live or exist any other way. Nor do I think I want to.

After the Great Shutdown of my Adolescence, I think I started to believe there was a Truth to… life? Or a Truth to the way-of-being. A false belief in the (false) concept of authenticity. As if there was a true way of living or a true way of being in the world, one that you had to respect or strive toward.

And although I no longer believe that, I do know that there is a way of existing in the world that doesn’t take you out of it to constantly observe it, yourself, and yourself-in-the-world (3 separate items). I believe there is a way to “just be in the world” but these moments are either so quotidian as to not even register as significant (think: the exact moment you put down the sponge when washing the dishes); or they’re elevated to a point of Samadhi or well-executed alignment to the body’s sensation during a Vipassana meditation.

When somebody comments on my histrionic self I feel I’m being truthful to the kid I once was. I feel a sense of pride projected onto me from the kid I once was, as if he’s (finally) looking at me from afar and thinking I’m (finally) doing a good job living. It makes me think I’m (finally) living in a more joyful manner, even enjoying myself, enjoying my self, and enjoying my way of being my self.

Are actors fake or are they capable of being in touch with all possibilities of human emotions in a specific scenario?

There are few things I enjoy so much as arriving to an infinite regress type of conclusion. The way the brain bumps into a wall of thought limit or impossibility of thought.

But I also love the idea of infinitely forking paths after any minimal input into Life. So being actorly-removed from an ongoing life scene and being histrionic to the point where you can react to the situation by contemplating the canonical way of reacting the situation, an extreme way of reacting to it, a tragic way of reacting to it, etc., quickly scanning all of these forked possibilities and kinda remixing them into an informed execution seems… fun to me, I guess.

This is something that came to mind suddenly. I’m trying to get into the habit of paying attention to ideas that arrive, putting them down on paper quickly, and exploring them in writing as I write.

And publishing them. In case anyone finds them interesting or relatable.

But they’re definitely not completely thought-out ideas. Nor do I think I want them to be…

I finally managed to get micro blog working with a custom domain. Everyone on the internet has been so kind. Everyone on the internet has been so mean (I get it though, it’s always fun to be snarky).

The good outweighs the bad by so much though.

Now writing this from IA Writer which, to be honest, I haven’t used in ages because of loving Obsidian. But I remembered it could be hooked up to microblog so we’ll see…

I judge too much. That's not a good look. (See? There, I did it again: why is that a 'look'?). It's not nice. It's not cool.

I judge myself the harshest, of course. Anybody who judges themselves knows this. Anybody who judges anybody knows this. Maybe a good technique or exercise is for strive to complete compassion and non-judgment unto others, with the (selfish?) aim of having that exercise the muscle that most harshly judges oneself.

Judging others is related to categorizing and constructing. There's a case to be made that these are one and the same. Oh, Language, you always fall short, and yet you open up so much…

Regarding categorization, I based my thesis on it, more specifically algorithmic categorization (or 'categorisation' since I was forced to write in the King's English). But it doesn't really matter: categorizing is all the same ever since we became humans, i.e. creatures that categorize.

I haven't thought about construction as much. But a recent occurrence does paint an interesting picture about it:

I read a lot on the web, I follow bloggers, writers, 'creators'. I recently reached out to one of them who I like a lot. He has just an amazing way of thinking about things, is super creative when it comes to interacting with others via a diverse set of mediums (I can't bring myself to use media as the plural of medium, sorry). I reached out innocently via Twitter (jamais X) to ask about how he had built his WordPress site. In parallel, I reached out via LinkedIn since I was honestly surprised he had a profile: that's how great I think he is = he is not of this world, definitely not of the world we corporate creatures inhabit using jargon like "best practices" and "OKRs".

Long story short, we ended up speaking on Signal. Three mediums for one conversation!, new record surely. But as I was balancing my fanboying with my being a human being speaking to another human being, it hit me doubly: I was speaking with Him. And at the same time, who was He but a construction of my mind?

I say this because this unquestionably talented person actually asked me what it was that I liked about his work. I told him I loved his podcast, his ideas on 'world-building'. And he (no capital H this time) said it was nice to know that there was someone out there listening.

Again: construction. To me, this person was an unreachable Rock Star of the Interesting World (Note to self: I have to write about this soon). And yet, he was not insecure but at least unsure of what it was others saw in him, or if he was seen at all.

Perhaps it has to do with the fact that I'm Argentinian. Here in Argentina, we hate those that 'make it'. Argentinian Weltanschauung is like the epitome of the Gen X ethos: selling out is the worst possible sin, obscurity is popularity (but of the good kind). In short, we're all genius specialists that can solve the world drinking cortados in the local cafe while our country continues to rot.

Because of this, Representatives from the Interesting World catch my eye unlike any others. Therein lies my construction; it's a cultural predisposition.

I began saying I judge. And I said that because I recently saw an Instagram video of the girl I recently went out with. She recorded herself dancing in a long white t-shirt and pajama bottoms. Of actual model stature, her thin limbs move beautifully in a dance that's consciously quirky. In the next video, she's just wearing the t-shirt, the pajama bottoms lie on the floor, and her exquisitely fine legs can be seen, the bottom of the white t-shirt just barely covering her pubic area.

The quirky nature of her dance is enabled by her beauty. There can be no doubt about this. If she ignores this, she's playing dumb (the scent of judging begins…). What I mean is that her dancing is not innocent. It's not a "here I am just dancing on a Friday morning" type of dance. If her beauty wasn't so innately hegemonic there is no way she would be posting it.

In any case, I'll try to focus on myself: I immediately judged her. I thought: "WTF? Who does she think she is?". I set my phone down and told myself a story about not wanting to date someone who does these things. I know, it doesn't get more incel than this.

Then I picked up my phone and rewatched her dance. It was beautiful. She was beautiful. She was beautiful while beautifully dancing. Why judge?

This time around, I read the text on the first of the videos. In Spanish, it read "Good morning for those that don't have any shame". When I first read it, I read it as a saying in Argentina. A sinvergüenza means literally someone who doesn't have shame but culturally something like scoundrel. It's a word used by certain cumbia communities, also something people say to each other to tease and greet each other with love and kindness.

She meant it literally. And when I read it literally, I better understood her dance and the recording of her dance. She was choosing to live without shame. And yes, I'm sure it's easy for her to do so. But I'm also sure that she has a closet full of ghosts I know nothing about. And yet… I chose to judge.

I hope all this writing did something to dispel my initial judgment…? I've since changed my mind.

The omen that is the algorithm that dictates the presence and absence of everything we see, surfaced for me the famous clip from Sex and the City. At a girl's dinner, Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda discuss why Miranda's date didn't want to come up to her apartment the night before. Berger is there, the writer that leaves Carrie via a stickie note. It's a moment of bonding for Carrie: she's welcoming him into her inner circle. While the girls console Miranda praising her indubitable excellence, Berger provides his male heterosexual and, hence, simple and to-the-point judgement: He's just not that into you.

The girls feel the awkwardness of the accusation. Better yet, feel an accusation and strive to avoid the awkwardness. But Miranda suddenly gets it, she's always been portrayed as more manly, more rational (all of these are the show's set of values and ethics, pas le mien); so much so that in the remake she starts dating a woman, not from a queer adventure point of view but from a she-was-always-kinda-male point of view.

In any case, Miranda gets it. Shouldn't we all?

Reading Annie Duke's book about thinking in bets to make better decisions she points something out that should be evident but is clearly not. She asks people to do a simple exercise: think of the best decision you made last year. Then think of the worst decision you made last year. Finally, observe if the best decision you made last year also brought you the best result in the year and, likewise, if the worst decision you made brought you the worst result.

The exercise shows clearly that when we judge our decision-making, we are actually judging our outcomes. And our outcomes have little to do with our decision making. They might have a little to do, but lest it remains unclear:

Our decisions and our outcomes are two completely separate and unrelated realms.

Great decisions can lead to terrible outcomes. And horrible decisions can lead to fantastic outcomes. The examples that really drive home these seemingly paradoxical statements are both related to driving. Stopping at a red light can mean someone completely rams into you from behind; running a red light can mean that you make it home in time before the love of your life leaves the city (and you don't get killed nor crashed into when running a red light).

This learning was profound for me. I guess I already knew it but, as usual, the expression of a simple yet profound idea is what makes or breaks the idea, what pushes into the very center of your brain so as to make it unavoidable to accept and understand.

I say I 'knew' it already because I am fond of reminding myself that if things are going bad, they're not all my fault. And if they're going great, they're not all my fault (or accomplishment). Scott Galloway says this a lot with respect to the market: be weary of thinking you're a genius when you're making money in the stock market. You're not a stock-picking genius, you've very likely riding a bull-ride along with everybody else. (I've had this happen to me in crypto so much so that I learned the lesson the hard way.)

As one further step into this continual process of encountering the World, I've repeatedly come across the fact that people are Others. And in the same way that your good fortune (luck or money) is not caused by you, I've begun to see more and more clearly to what extent my desire and way of acting toward an Other isn't related to what that Other does or decides.

Let me put aside this abstract profundity and dive into the real world: there is no perfect text that will guarantee a second date (or a first one for that matter).

There are of course very straightforward ways of ruining things from the start. If my opening move is to tell a woman I'm thinking of raping her the moment I see her, this will likely get me blocked and arrested.

The obviousness of this makes me believe that there is really no relationship between the negative and the positive. They're not opposed, they're just different in the same way colors are different, or objects are different. A coffee mug has no relation to a webcam. The coffee mug is the positive, the webcam the negative. They are ontologically separate. However, they seem to occur in many situations in an either/or way.

Either she likes you or she doesn't, positive or negative.

Or perhaps I'm failing to see, once again, the non-relationship between decision and outcome, between action and outcome. A perfect date doesn't guarantee a second date. A bad first date doesn't obliterate the possibility of a second date.

This was all a long-winded way of saying: I went on a date last Saturday with a very pretty girl. I texted her a few days later suggesting we meet up again, and she never answered back.

God bless Philosophy and Critical Theory for allowing me to get so much out of a simple rejection.

I'm designing a bit of a reading workflow. I find the morning more conducive to want to ingest a dangerous amount of material: diving into my RSS app (lire) and just saving articles like crazy to my read later app (Omnivore). Then queuing, i.e. downloading, podcast episodes onto my podcast app (surprisingly Castro after years of dedicated love to PocketCasts).

Will I ever consume all of this media? Very unlikely. Ah but the sense of control! Of being on top of the world! Of being a know-all see-all read-all listen-all Superior Being not from this world!

Then I get an email from work which I don't know how to resolve and my Empire shatters, bringing me right back down to pleb land where I put down my phone and go back to shoveling balefuls of email back and forth with my fellow digital interlocutors.

But still…

Perhaps the morning is better for compiling and evening for actually reading what you saved. Of course, this means that I will forever be a day behind the news. But I think this thinking (solipsism anyone?) highlights the flaw in systems thinking: nothing is absolute or airtight. Any good system has to have some wiggle room even from an architecting perspective.

In my all-encompassing-media-ingesting case, this would be something like casually browsing my RSS during the day and finding something interesting that I read then and there. My quest for the perfect system sometimes makes it hard for me to see that I'm also actually allowed to live a little. That not everything needs to be planned, stored away, highlighted. In short… productivized.

I am as much a victim as anyone of the pervasive culture of productivity but I think this is something beyond that. It has to do with the actual and staggering amount of information that's already out there and which increases every single hour. Sure, there's a lot of noise, but have you any doubt that you ignore an almost infinite number of gems every single day?

But, again, it's not just the petabytes of information and it's not just FOMO.

What this boils down to is mortality. The Internet has shown us the amount of life out there that so crushingly exceeds our own. Maybe History graduates know this too well but I'm sure they have a big blind spot as well: the omnipresence of an ongoing, vast, and practically infinite contemporariness.

It's not so much that I want to read every tech article out there and implant into my skull some way of listening to a non-stop stream of podcasts.

I just don't want to die and miss out on the rest of Humanity.

There are just so many nice things out there…

Reflecting on my 'blogging struggles' and the fear of actually writing things and putting them 'out there', I now think it's not so much related to a fear of saying dumb things but fear of mortality once again. Of noticing that my voice is just one of so many that have roamed the Earth. And that mine too will be eventually silenced.

By writing publicly I run the risk not so much of being ridiculed, but of acknowledging and conforming to my own mortality. As long as writing is still a project in my mind and not something put on paper or on whatever blogging platform I eventually choose to use, as long as it's in my head as a Project, it will be projected further into a Future where I incorrectly believe I will continue to exist.

Be it writing, reading, listening… there will come a day when I won't be able to do any of these things. In the meantime, I have to remember that I'm also actually allowed to live a little.

I've been struggling with setting up this blog. I still think this looks ugly. The font isn't as big on mobile... I don't know. And I don't have the time to study HTML or CSS. I just want to have some place to write and 'challenge' myself to do it publicly.

In any case, I came across this blog and found it super nice: quick and simple, nerdy in a good Hugo-like way. So I wrote to the author on BlueSky asking what his blog was built on.

He immediately replied it was created on Known, a tool I had never heard about. And when I investigated slightly I found out the person I was chatting with was the creator of Known himself, Ben Werdmuller!

Ah... the internet. It still remains such a small and wonderful place.

The best system is any system that works.

The best system is any system you use.

The best system is any system that works for you.

And finally, there is no best system.

I don't know where I read that spending money on the tools you are going to use is a good idea. I thought I knew what that meant, until it completely clicked for me when I remembered all the trouble I've been having to set up a blog. Just a simple blog where I can write stuff. Borderline impossible.

True: I did try to learn Hugo, Github, CLI, Homebrew, and many other things in one go. But did I really? Or did I just need money spent on the tools or hiring someone to get me a functioning blog?

When I was writing and setting up the "Letters to Luxembourg" blog, that was quick. Perhaps because I felt I didn't have as much going for it as my ultimate facing-the-world blog that would get me critical and commercial fame. It is many times a matter of expectations and how you set yourself up for success.

My drive for the Luxembourg blog was simple: get something going as quickly as possible to just write the things I had in my mind and heart. And I did it.

Perhaps it's also a matter of discriminating and separating the (very) different objectives one has when doing something. Taking my as of yet failed blog as an example:

• Did I want to write?
• Did I want to learn about Hugo and static site generators?
• Did I want to learn how to do everything from the CLI?
• Did I want to use my Github account and start building a repository?

The answer is yes to all of these but what I most wanted was just a place to write. That's all. And I didn't want to pay money. But now I'm paying for Dreamhost, I believe, and have no idea what happened to that as I'm writing.

I'm reading and listening to Cal Newport. He's good. He has simple yet profound activities and I want to pay attention to him and his ideas. I started to read his latest book Slow Productivity and I was enjoying it until I started to get tired of all the examples of famous people and his way of excessively massaging his narrative to fit his ideas. I hate this type of extreme survivorship bias and retroactive narrative. I don't understand why he can't just make people up or find anonymous people he's perhaps worked with and talk about them. A made-up "Sally from North Dakota" is much more relatable than Benjamin Franklin.

Still, the ideas are good. And as always with these books, I go back to something my friend Uri used to say and has stuck with me forever: publishers make writers fill up their books to conform to a standard "serious-looking" length because thinner books (yes, thinner) don't sell as much or are regarded as not so well documented. Why, oh why?

I hate this about the book publishing business. So many books would be so much better off with much fewer pages. One that comes to mind is Peter Drucker - Managing Oneself: it's short, to the point, and full of spectacular feedback and useful tools. Also, it's pleasantly re-readable! I think this should be the way forward for non-fiction books: short, evergreen, to the point, thin, transportable, mini, pocket-sized, take-everywhere, keep-it-in-my-man-bag type of books.

Not surprisingly, it's part of an "Ideas" series by Harvard Business Review so the book is not so much short (supposedly unsellable) but part of a series and therefore collectible (so sellable!).

Now that I think of it, maybe the malaise of not knowing how to bookmark or store digital assets such as articles, ebooks, etc., boils down to the fact that they are not books. AKA, they are not things that silently sit and occupy space in a part of the house dedicated, knowingly or unknowingly, to the maintenance of Knowledge. In short, a library.

Digital assets don't have that heft or space. I'm sure much of this could be alleviated and worked on with proper UX and UI. Calibre does this to some degree as does this new collect everything app called "my mind" which, for me, is just a failed Raindrop.

Keep It comes to mind, perhaps I should revisit it and see how it looks today. I don't understand how my mind (mine, not the app) works when spending money. I think of Keep It and I automatically pull back because I don't want to spend money on another subscription. However, I'm spending money on Dreamhost which I had genuinely forgot about until I wrote about it here.

Oh well… perhaps the best system is the the best system is any system that works. Or perhaps the best system is any system you use. Or maybe the best system is any system that works for you.

But in all likelihood I should just remember that there is no best system.

I guess it’s only appropriate that my first post on micro.blog is about micro.blog. I think this recursive and solipsistic rhetoric device is common when you don’t know what to write about. Writing about writing is very adolescent thing one does, extending far beyond adolescence unfortunately.

Then one gets into the “zone” and actually writes about something. You develop an idea in an essay, maybe a character comes up for a novel.

And then you read masterpieces that have plots in a fractal-like sequence or a subject pretending to be the main subject, when all they’re “talking” about is the act of writing itself.

Something like this basically:

So here’s to a happy ascent towards actually writing about “something”! 🥂

I’m a fan of what I can only call “brute google searches”. I say Google, but it could be any search engine.

In the beginning, knowing the Google search operators gave you an undeniable advantage compared to normie internet users.

But now the algorithm has changed so much that the best results are “brute google searches”: monkey-typing-on-a-keyboard type searches, infant-learning-language type queries that just shout into the search bar the main nouns of what you’re looking for.

Turns out… that’s how I found my SuperSwipe.

I swiped right on a woman who was stunning but in a please-meet-my-parents way. Her bio mentioned she was a journalist (check) and a poli-sci major (check). She didn’t wear excessive makeup in her photos (check). She lives nearby (CHECK).

After I swiped right, I realized I was in love with her. I couldn’t go back and “see” her. So I Googled her thinking there was no way I could find her.

I found her. On LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Threads, and, finally, on Instagram.

I began to obsess.

I lamented my chances of ever actually meeting her.

I went back to the app and swiped right on fifteen other women as if our love had never happened.

I remember I used to think in English when I lived as a kid in the US. I wish I had some of that back. I wish I could still speak like that. When I came back to Argentina, it wasn’t as if I picked up Spanish and became great at both languages. I always remained a bit weird in Spanish, thinking I knew a greater vocabulary than I actually knew. 

As for my perfect American English, I was bullied out of it by a bunch of idiot kids who I still call my friends to this day. None of us knew any better.

I continuously email developers to ask for features but many times just to say how much I’m enjoying their app. I think this does something and brings something nice into the world. As time goes by, I think I’m increasingly incorrect about this.

A recent tweet made me a bit self-conscious about word order in English. (Does it show that I’m not native?). At the same time, fuck that. English is now owned post-colonially by the World and not by any country. Long live post-pidgin English. English is dead, long live Global English.

If everybody in the world speaks English with a different accent… how is that an accent? How is that a specific type of English?