I made a keychain – avdi.codes (toot) From @[email protected]:

“The truth is I still put a lot of pride into being Very Good At Ruby. I cling to that pride, sometimes. I want to show that I've “still got it”. In a life drowned in caregiving and homemaking and survival, I often feel like I'm vanishing. Like I have so much still to offer, if only—and then there is screaming from another room, and I must defuse a meltdown, or mediate an argument, or make a belated dinner, or chase down a meds prescription, or or or…”

This is something I remember struggling with. I think I've come to terms with it now, mostly by giving up the idea of being good at stuff. I've been making peace with the fact that I make silly errors, and that's okay. I've come to realize that it's not even entirely due to the distraction and time constraints of parenting, and that I like how I'm growing even if it feels less certain.

Freedom – Butterfly Mind (toot)

‘This morning, as I wrote my morning pages, I felt a little fearful. All my life I've yearned to be creative. I frequently think, “If I only had more time, I'd…” All those things I've said I wished I had more time to do — write, draw, learn French, exercise, meditate — now it's time to see if I really do want to do them. What if time was just an excuse? I guess that would be okay. I'd learn what really does matter to me. Maybe it turns out I like the idea of being creative more than I actually am creative. Maybe what I really love is long walks and sitting in the garden reading books.'

This feels like a related thought. I'm glad I did my experiment with semi-retirement. That period of having plenty of time autonomy showed me that I tend to be more of a slacker than a hustler, and that's also okay.

I saw this snippet in a 2016 interview in Psychology Today with T. Berry Brazelton: (toot)

“BB: I've just finished writing a book, The Final Touchpoint I'd like to get that out there. There are better and worse ways to handle our aging, our denial of it, our acceptance, and—as Erik Erikson put it—our being generative, to produce as much as we can while we can. I'm 98 but I'm still trying to be generative.”

He died two years after the interview and I don't think The Final Touchpoint has been published, but it might be interesting to find similar books.

The Experimental Parent | Psychology Today (toot) I saw this snippet in a 2016 interview in Psychology Today with T. Berry Brazelton:

“BB: I've just finished writing a book, The Final Touchpoint I'd like to get that out there. There are better and worse ways to handle our aging, our denial of it, our acceptance, and—as Erik Erikson put it—our being generative, to produce as much as we can while we can. I'm 98 but I'm still trying to be generative.”

He died two years after the interview and I don't think The Final Touchpoint has been published, but it might be interesting to find similar books.

Memexes, mountain lakes, and the serendipity of old ideas (Interconnected) (toot) Hmm, an On This Day RSS feed might be worth writing a tiny script that I can add to a crontab.

“Naturally there's an On This Day web feed too so these posts appear in my newsreader each morning. Some personal serendipity to start the day.”

Oh Hello Ana - In defense of unpolished personal websites: (toot) On the value of legible source code for websites, especially personal ones:

“Today's heavily optimized websites have largely killed the "view source" learning experience. The code is minified, bundled, and often incomprehensible to beginners trying to understand how things work.
I got the ick from my own small optimisation. My personal website is small and it isn't an urgent service. It's hardly ever visited from a mobile phone. Maybe I shouldn't be using the little time I have to focus on that side of front-end development in this instance?
But deep down, all I want for my personal website is to give back to the web. I want anyone, regardless of skill level, to inspect elements, understand the structure, and learn from readable code. And I am fully aware my code isn't perfect. It's old and there's a lot of room for improvement.”

Found via Favourites of March 2025 | Brain Baking

• follow-up: also check out https://github.com/mariohamann/activity-graph

From @johnrakestraw's On keeping a notebook (toot)

“One thing that really fascinates me is how I'm reminded of events and readings that I'd completely forgotten – but, once reminded, I find that these things are once again in my mind. Perhaps I can say what I'm thinking more clearly — though I'm more than a little frustrated by having absolutely no memory of experiencing or reading something I describe in an entry written only a few years ago, I'm fascinated by how reading what I wrote has brought that experience back to mind rather vividly. Of course I'm reminded of what I described in the text that I'm now re-reading, but I can also remember other things associated with whatever it is that is described there. It's as though the small bit that I wrote and can now read is the key that unlocks a much larger trove of memory. Funny how the mind works.”

I am also quite fuzzy about things that happened, and I'm glad I've got notes to help me sort of remember.

Connections (toot) Following a link from https://manuelmoreale.com/pb-maya , I enjoyed this quote about blogging:

Although, as well researched and as thoughtful as Houston might be there's a messiness at work here that I love; it is the true great quality of a blog. That permission to roam, to let your curiosity grab you by the lapel and hoist you across fifteen different subjects over the course of a single paragraph; blogging is pointing at things and falling in love.

Programmable Notes (toot) Oooh, it could be fun to trawl through these for ideas for things to port over to Emacs.

The Smartblocks plug-in for Roam Research is the system I personally use to build these types of workflows. It offers a set of triggers, variables, and commands you can chain together into fairly readable statements like: <%SET:topOfMindToday,<%INPUT:What's on your mind today?%>%> or <%RANDOMBLOCKFROM:Writing Ideas%>.

Even with limited programming knowledge, many people in the community have been able to fashion their own Smartblock flows. Plenty of them have published their workflows to the community Github for others to use.

Smartblock flows on Github

The promise and distraction of productivity and note-taking systems (toot)

Books are maps to territories that are completely internal to the reader. By focusing so heavily on extracting the surface symbology of the map itself, these process-heavy note-takers risk losing sight of the territory. A book's territory is the reasoning and argument that the book presents to you as a path you take through your own psyche. The goal isn't to remember everything the book contains. Remembering a book's contents is useless. The book exists to contain what it contains. If the contents are important, you keep a copy of it for you to look things up again.

But that isn't the point of reading. The purpose of reading is to be changed. Sometimes the change is trivial and temporary – a piece of fiction that brings some joy in your life. Sometimes the change is profound – a shift in your perspective on life. “Action items” from a book are external and forcing yourself to follow through on them is exhausting.