• Another late weeknote for y’all. I’m becoming a Tuesday person, despite my best efforts to be a different, better type of person.
• February in Bangalore marks the beginning of the city’s transition from winter to a brief spring to summer. Historically, these seasonal transitions have always been hard on my mental health, pushing me into quitting jobs, ending contracts early, or taking weeks off of work. I’m hoping that this time, all years I’ve spent working on my mental health will help me make it through February, March, and April unscathed.
• As you’d expect, I’ve been emotionally all over the place. I’m having a hard time focusing on work or household chores, instead spending hours every day scrolling through Mastodon, my RSS reader, or the orange website. I’m trying to reign it in, but experience has taught me that all I can really do is take care of myself and wait for things to improve on their own.
• Of course, there’s another way to look at seasonal depression: as a signal from my mind and body indicating that something in my life needs to change. Unfortunately, finding out what exactly it is that needs to change is a totally different ballgame. This is an ongoing process that will take me months or years to figure out.
• On Sunday, I went to Champaca to hear Aanchal Malhotra speak about her debut novel, The Book of Everlasting Things. Like her previous two non-fiction books, this novel also deals with themes of Partition. I can’t imagine the emotional toll she must have paid as she wrote these stories. Even though I bought a copy, I’m not sure if I’ll have the stomach to read it anytime soon. My grandparents on both sides were displaced by this senseless tragedy in 1947, and I’ve heard enough horrific accounts of what happened to last me a lifetime.
• Nerlu Café. Good coffee, good food. Go.

Links of the Week

• Makers by Matt Gemmell
• 3 thoughts on a decade of publishing books by Austin Kleon
• A Concerning Trend by Neil Clarke
• CheatGPT by David Humphrey
• You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you by The Oatmeal

Media Diet

• Reading: Christine by Stephen King
• Listening to: This is Why by Paramore
• Watched: Dune
• Re-watched: Everything Everywhere All At Once

• Tuesday afternoon weeknote? Why not? My website, my rules.
• Blame the lack of weeknotes in the last few weeks on my ill-fated efforts to start exercising. This is what’s been happening, on loop, every single week: I attempt to kick off an exercise routine on Monday morning, feel great for a few hours, start feeling progressively worse as the day wears on, end the day with a bad cold, and have to spend the rest of the week recovering. I don’t know about other people, but sickness and exhaustion don’t quite put me in a writerly mood.
• I’ve finally figured out an exercise routine that is ridiculously, laughably, stupidly slow and gentle. It doesn’t make me fall ill every time I work out, so I’m going to stick to it for a while. If bodies are temples, then mine is an abandoned ritual site for some kind of dimension-spanning Lovecraftian terror.
• I’m now focusing all my energy on fixing my health. I’ve put a lot of things on hold just so I can get to a baseline level of fitness that is reasonable for somebody my age. I still can’t tell if this is an after-effect of getting COVID, a result of getting older, or just the natural consequence of months of sedentary living. One of these days I’ll take myself to a doctor, I promise.
• Summer is slowly making its presence felt in Bangalore, which means my cats are full of boundless, murderous energy. They’ve started to wake up at 4AM so they can rip each other’s guts out. They choose to have their fights inside my room, often on my bed, sometimes right on top of my body, and so they’ve been banned from the bedroom until the weather turns cold again.
• My doctor cut the dosage of my anxiety medication in half yet again, and she says I should be off the drugs in another two months or so! I’ve been having periods of increased anxiety since I switched to the lower dose, but I’ve had enough therapy by now to be able to manage it on my own.
• I’ve been using dating apps for nearly a decade, but they’re not working for me anymore. While I’ve had a moderate amount of success using them for casual flings, I haven’t been able to find a fulfilling relationship through them. It’s clear that I need to look elsewhere if I want a long-term partner, so I’ve removed all the dating apps from my phone. Instead, I’m going to (gasp) look for romance in the real world.
• All I want to do lately is read, which is in sharp contrast to how I was feeling just a few weeks ago. I’m currently making my way through Stephen King’s Christine, which is pretty standard King fare. I love pretty standard King fare. My patience for literary writing has been wearing thin, and Stephen King checks all my boxes for what I’m looking for in my fiction these days: stories that are simply fun, with no pretense of literary merit, no attempts to discuss the “human condition”, and no compulsion to enumerate the myriad failings of our societies. I’m looking for stories told well, and that’s all. When I finish reading Christine, I have a few romance novels lined up in my TBR. And some crime fiction after that. Eat my shorts, Dostoevsky.

Links of the Week

• Meanwhile, Over in Androidtown by John Gruber
• Why VR/AR Gets Farther Away as It Comes Into Focus by Matthew Ball
• Unbundling Tools for Thought by Fernando Borretti
• Evidence grows that mental illness is more than dysfunction by Justin Garson
• Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs by Folding Ideas

Media Diet

• Reading: Christine by Stephen King
• Playing (kinda): Rogue Legacy 2

I hope if there is another world, we will not be judged too harshly for the things we did wrong here — that we will at least be forgiven for the mistakes we made out of love.

— Joe Hill, Pop Art (collected in 20th Century Ghosts)

• I’m proud to announce that I’ve recently developed the ability to go for a walk at 7AM without wanting to murder somebody afterwards. Just goes to show that with grit and determination, I can achieve anything I set my mind to.
• … but now I have a stuffy nose, body aches, and a headache that won’t go away. Just goes to show that exercise was invented by the devil to punish me and I should avoid it at all cost.
• Feels like I fall sick every time I start an exercise routine, which is maybe something I should perhaps be slightly concerned about?
• I really got into video games when the pandemic hit, and continued to enjoy them during my sabbatical last year. But gaming has recently started to become unsustainable for me. The screen time has been giving me headaches, my hands are hurt from mashing buttons all day, and sitting motionless for hours at a time hasn’t been good for my body (see above). I may get back to gaming if/when I take a long enough break from work again, but I’ve decided to stop spending my time on it for the near future.
• I thought quitting video games would free up more time in my life for other, more analog hobbies, but I’ve immediately filled up my evenings with Linux and Emacs shenanigans. Will I ever learn? (No.)
• My house has sprouted more leaks, making two rooms entirely unusable. I don’t like it and I don’t want to talk about it.
• Journaling is one of my greatest pleasures in life. I try to write about 1000 words every morning as I drink my coffee, which doesn’t take me too long when I have something on my mind. I usually stop when I reach my target word count, coming back the next day to continue my line of thinking. However, this past week I’ve been consistently overshooting my target every single day. Each of recent my entries weighs in at 1500 words minimum, and some some of them are over 2000 words. It’s true that I have a lot on my mind at the moment, but I chalk up this output to the fact that lately I’ve started to enjoy the act of writing a lot more than I’ve ever done before. I’m pleased with this state of affairs, though I still can’t figure out how to turn what I’ve written into coherent blog posts I can share with the world.
• My friends were aghast to discover that I never watched The Princess Diaries when I was a teenager, so they sat me down one weekend and made me watch it. Usually I’m a sucker for romantic comedies, but I had no expectations for this movie at all. A Disney movie from 2001? How good could it possibly be? Turns out I’d underestimated this film — or my own love for sappy stories with happy endings — because I ended up being hooked. Yes, it’s a silly wish-fulfillment fantasy for teenagers, but sometimes that’s exactly the kind of comforting fare you need to keep your head above the water.
• And then I was made to watch Princess Diaries 2. It wasn’t as good as the first one, but it was still good and I was still invested. I guess deep down, I’ve always wanted to be a princess.

Links of the Week

• How “Spider-Verse” forced animation to evolve by Vox
• I Don’t Believe in Sprints by Robin Rendle
• How Degrowth Can Save the World by Andrewism
• What Can We Learn from Barnes & Noble’s Surprising Turnaround? by Ted Gioia

Media Diet

• Reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
• Watched The Princess Diaries
• Watched The Princess Diaries 2
• DNF Dealers of Lightning by Michael Hiltzik

• 2023! A whole new year! I have the same new year’s resolutions as I’ve had for the past decade: continue to exist on this corporeal plane, try not to have a complete mental collapse, write a thing or two, and find true, lasting love.
• On NYE, I had a small, quiet, grown-up party with some of my favorite people in the world, and I was in bed with my cats just as the clocks struck midnight. As perfect an evening as I could ask for.
• But the evenings that preceded NYE were a little bit wilder. The football World Cup as well as a bunch of birthdays happened to fall within the week before Christmas, which meant someone was throwing a party pretty much every night during that time. While I enjoyed the festivities in the moment, it took me until Christmas morning to realize the impact all the drinking and sleep deprivation was having on my health. On the morning of the 25th, I woke up to find that my thoughts were hazy, my body was slow and sluggish, and I had fallen into a deep pit of depression the likes of which I haven’t experienced in years. I enjoy a good party, but alcohol has clearly started to have a strong negative effect on my mental health, especially when I consume so much of it in such a short time. I’ve decided to stay away from it for a while — perhaps forever.
• I’m still trying to get my daily schedule under control so I can sneak in a writing session early in the morning before work. Waking up at 7AM is not hard for me, but forcing myself to get into bed at 11PM at night is a real chore. Every atom of my body resists this. As I’ve discovered, I’m simply not the sort of person who enjoys sticking to a schedule. One day I’ll write a bestselling novel that will sell a million copies and then I’ll never ever have to worry about getting up on time ever again.
• I struggled with Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch for a week before putting it on my DNF pile. I would’ve absolutely devoured this book if I’d started reading it at any other time, but I’m currently not in the mood for fiction. Whether in literature, film, or video games, I can’t bring myself to care about the fates of made-up people right now. My interest in reading fiction waxes and wanes, just like my interest in any other hobby I have. I’m more interested in playing on my Steam Deck at the moment. In a few weeks, I’ll be bored of murdering hordes of enemies and hunger for a good story again. C’est la vie.
• I’ve been listening to an episode or two of Writing Excuses before bed every day, especially the ones that pertain to writing good characters. A single fifteen minute episode of this podcast contains more practical writing advice than some 300+ page tomes I’ve had the displeasure of reading. If you’re interested in writing fiction, or just enjoy learning how stories are put together, I recommend giving Writing Excuses a listen.

Links of the Week

• Don’t Make Fun of Renowned Dan Brown via A Useful Fiction
• 36 Things I Learned in 2022 by Jason Kottke
• Why the super rich are inevitable via The Pudding
• The lang attribute: browsers telling lies, telling sweet little lies by Manuel Matuzović
• AI’s Jurassic Park Moment by Gary Marcus

Media Diet

• Playing Hades on Nintendo Switch
• Playing Children of Morta on Steam Deck

• I’ve now been working full-time for a month, and I increasingly have no energy or patience to sit down to write after a long day of work. If I don’t write these weeknotes on a weekend, I won’t be able to publish them at all, which is why I’m writing this one on a Sunday evening.
• Another side-effect of going back to work is that I find it painful to look at screens after I get home in the evening. That means any writing or note-taking I do after hours needs to be analog. I’m trying to get used to writing a lot more with pen and paper, less out of a love for analog technology and more out of a need to protect my eyes. For example, this post was written in a cheap spiral-bound notebook using a Jinhao fountain pen I borrowed from my brother.
• This has been a year of impulse purchases, and my latest one is a Steam Deck. After considering it for months, I saw a listing pop up on OLX and jumped on the opportunity. This thing can not only play all my favorite games, it can also run Firefox so I can panic about my dwindling bank balance on the couch, bus, train, or airplane.
• I was completely wrong about Mastodon. So, so wrong. Yes, the name is dumb, and yes, the word “toot” will never be cool, but the network has managed to attract such a huge number of interesting people in the last few months that I barely look at my Twitter timeline anymore. Who thought building a social network that was actively hostile to pot-stirrers, clout-chasers, venture capitalists, and thought leaders would result in a vibrant, friendly, and welcoming community?
• I’m not a competitive person at all, which is the main reason I don’t enjoy watching sports. I’ve had a lot of fun playing them, but I’ve never had much interest in watching them being played. However, this year I’ve been peer pressured into watching the men’s FIFA World Cup by a treasured friend, and now I’m invested. Yesterday I found myself complaining about the French to another friend who has been similarly peer pressured into watching this event, and we were horrified at what we have become.
• I haven’t written about my mental health for a while, and that’s because there’s nothing to report. After years of therapy and medication, things are finally … normal. I have more good days than bad, and don’t actively think about how anxious I’m feeling on an hourly basis. I still have bad days—I don’t think they’ll ever completely go away—but I now understand how to deal with them on my own. I’m grateful to have had supportive friends, family members, and employers throughout this mental health slump, and I feel very lucky to have found a lovely therapist to help me through it all. I couldn’t have reached this point in life if it hadn’t been for all the wonderful people around me.
• I’m so different today from who I was just two or three years ago that I sometimes don’t recognize myself. The mental health professionals I’ve worked with have helped me become a person I’m proud of. I’m able to feel compassion and love towards myself in a way that I never could before, and I have the confidence that I’ll be alright in the long-term.
• Therapy works.

Links of the Week

• Joe Hill — Writing Things via Desmond White’s blog
• Novelist Joe Hill on ‘Horns’ and Writing via Under the Radar
• What if failure is the plan? by Danah Boyd
• Cult of Mithras Explained by ReligionForBreakfast

• I turned 32 on Thursday! I celebrated with a low-key dinner at Royal Afghan with my brother and a friend. We stuffed ourselves with dal bukhara and naan until we couldn’t walk anymore, and then we stuffed ourselves some more with phirni and paan and chocolate. It was a glorious evening.
• I’m addicted to Marvel Snap. I don’t usually enjoy mobile games, but Snap’s short matches, simple rules, and emergent gameplay have me in their grips. I’ll have to uninstall this thing from my phone if I want to ever get any work done. Thankfully, the game has a PC version that’s not too bad.
• When I was in middle school, my friend owned an all-in-one PC that ran Windows 95, a beautiful little machine that sort of looked like the original Mac (though I hadn’t seen any Apple computers at the time). We could never figure out what it was called, beyond the fact that it was made by a company called NEC. A recent Internet search revealed that it was a NEC PC9821 Cb, part of Nippon Electric’s PC-9800 series. Just look at how beautiful this thing is! I wish they still made them like this. Here’s a video of it booting into Windows 3.1.

• I’ve tried a number of writing apps over the last few months, and I’m not satisfied with any of them. iA Writer is only good for short pieces, Ulysses loses my data while syncing, Word still sports the cluttered, baroque UI it has had for the last three decades, and Scrivener hasn’t seen a new release in more than a year. What seems to be working for me at the moment is, surprisingly, Google Docs.
• Does someone want to give me a million dollars so I can build an actually good writing app for essayists, bloggers, journalists, fiction writers, and anyone else who does creative writing? Please and thank you.
• Everyone I know has read and enjoyed Crying in H Mart, but I just couldn’t get into it. They can’t all be zingers, right? I’m now reading Nirmal Verma’s परिंदे, which has already made me cry once today.
• After some smaller Mastodon instances started blocking mastodon.social, some of my friends and I pooled our money and time together to start our own instance. You can now find me at @s3thi@fantastic.earth. Shout out to Abhinav for doing whatever he does with Nix to make it all work!

Links of the Week

• Good conversations have lots of doorknobs by Adam Mastroianni
• Natural Language Inputs by Jim Nielsen
• 52 things I learned in 2022 by Tom Whitwell
• Word Persons and Web Persons by Roy Tang
• Plot Structure in Short Stories a lecture by Gwen Mullins in Numéro Cinq Magazine

• The mass exodus from Twitter has resulted in over half a million new accounts being created across the Fediverse over the past week. At this point, whether Twitter lives or dies is irrelevant. Thanks to Elno’s shenanigans, Mastodon and friends have finally gained enough critical mass to become practical alternatives to Big Tech social media.
• I’ve had a Mastodon account since 2019, but now I’m using it for realsies. Find me at @s3thi@mastodon.social!
• I spent all my evenings last week generating weird art using DALL-E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion. Here are some of the images I generated, along with the prompts I used.

• I’m struggling with my daily routine. I’ve been trying to find a block of 60-90 minutes during the day when I can shut off all distractions and just write. In the past, I’ve reserved my mornings for this, but lately I’ve been waking up too groggy to do any kind of mental labor. I’m a zombie until I’ve had coffee and breakfast, and by the time I’m caffeinated and fed, it’s time to get ready and leave for work. It’s incredibly frustrating.
• I have to grudgingly admit that, despite all its faults, Save the Cat has some useful advice. I’m writing down down all the bits that are not smug, condescending, or straight up unethical so I never have to look at the book again.
• Hades. Oh goodness. Despite how bad I am at this game, I keep going back for more. You see, even when you die in Hades, each run through the underworld rewards you with more of Zagreus’ story, new areas to visit, new characters, new weapons, weapon upgrades, stat upgrades, or simply new bits of dialog. There’s always a sense of forward progress, which is a problem because I can’t put the damn thing down.

Links of the Week

• That fediverse feeling by Jeremy Keith
• 10 Quick Tips for a Great Mastodon Experience by Jens Oliver Meiert
• The Man Behind Mastodon Built It for This Moment by Will Knight
• Why India Doesn’t Build Skyscrapers by The B1M
• I promise this story about fonts is interesting by struthless

• I said it on Twitter, and I will say it here again: I love my coffee frother more than I love my family.
• I spent most of the week tinkering with the CSS on this here website, and I’m finally sort of happy with how it looks. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll never stop working on it. We must imagine Sisyphus happy.
• I started a new contract with Loop Health today. When I heard about what they’re building—and how they’re going about building it—I just had to sign on. I’m also excited about getting to work with my friends from Prophecy, who have already been helping Loop Health design and test new products for the last few months. I’m expecting to thoroughly enjoy myself.
• Water has been slowly seeping into one of the walls in my office. Things were already pretty bad, with chunks of plaster chipping off it and covering everything with white dust. But now, a black mold has started to form on the wet spots. If you don’t hear back from me next week, assume that my respiratory system has been taken over by some bizarro alien fungus that lives in my wall.
• If you’ve ever wondered why so many mainstream movies and TV shows seem to have the same story beats and character arcs, read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat. It’s a cynical, peremptory handbook that teaches you how to quickly slap together well-worn story tropes to produce bland, inoffensive screenplays guaranteed to make a respectable amount of money at the box office before being forgotten even by the people who were in the movie. I wish I’d bought a physical copy of this book so I could repeatedly throw it across the room as I read it.
• My brother played Unholy in the living room on the weekend, and now I can’t stop humming it 24/7. Somebody stop me.

Links of the Week

• What are some examples of people who worked alone on a single strange project for 10+ years? via reddit
• Take Care of Your Blog by Robin Rendle
• Metaphor Search, a search engine based on a large language model

I tend to get overwhelmed when presented with too much information at once. Something as simple as a large menu at a restaurant or too many chores to do on a Sunday morning can make me mentally freeze up.

When this happens, I have to walk away from the source of the information and calm myself down before I’m able to function again.

Something similar happens when I’m working at my computer. As I go through my workday, I accumulate apps, windows, and tabs containing code, documentation, email, chat messages, UI mockups, bug reports, terminal sessions, API clients, notes—all the different bits of data that I must process in order to produce working software.

Towards the end of the day, I get overwhelmed by the amount of data being beamed into my brain. I become disorganized, make bad decisions, or just stare at my screen, unmoving, for minutes at a time as my brain goes into shutdown mode. There are many days when I have to lie down for a little while after I get back home from work.

Modern desktop environments do nothing to help me contain this chaos. If I want to hide away some of my running apps so I can focus exclusively on the ones that currently need my attention, I must manually minimize them to the Dock or move them to different Spaces. When I need them again, I must manually bring them back.

Windows and macOS have always been designed around the assumption that users want to see as much information as they can fit on the screen. So, to preserve my sanity, I must spend a significant portion of my day quitting apps, minimizing windows, and moving them to and from different virtual desktops.

On a laptop, I can deal with the mess of windows by simply making all of them take up the entire screen (shoutout to Moom). The way I use my 14” MacBook Pro is not very different from how I use my 11” iPad Pro—with only a single window visible on the screen at any given moment.

But things are not as simple when I’m plugged into a large monitor. Apps like Figma might benefit from the extra real estate when stretched out to occupy the entirety of a 27” screen, but most apps are unusable at that size.

Whenever I use a large monitor, I have to remember to arrange all the windows I plan to use just so before I start work (shoutout to Moom, again). Kind of like a digital mise en place, but infinitely more frustrating. If I don’t do this, I end up having to interrupt my work session to manually prune my windows.

Fortunately, someone at Apple has a brain that works kind of like mine.

Enter Stage Manager

Stage Manager is a new window management feature introduced in macOS Ventura and iPadOS 16.1. This video from Engadget shows it in action:

When you enable Stage Manager, macOS moves all your open windows off to the left side of the screen, where they show up as tiny thumbnails in a kind of vertical filmstrip. Only the window that currently has your focus is shown in the front and center of your display, which Apple calls the “stage”.

When you switch to a different app, it moves to the center of the stage, and the previously focused window moves off to the left. If you want to see multiple windows at the same time, you can drag them into the stage from the filmstrip on the left.

Stage Manager doesn’t change my workflow much when I’m using my MacBook’s display, but it’s extremely effective on my 27” monitor.

• I can focus on one thing at a time, which is how my brain likes it.
• I run as many apps as I need for work at once, without having to minimize them to the Dock or move them to a different Space when they’re not in use.
• Instead of having to resize windows to make optimum use of my display, I can make each window as large as it needs to be and place it in the center of the screen. Since it will always appear by itself, there’s no danger of it overlapping with another window and hiding parts of its UI.
• I can group windows together based on the task I’m working on. When I’m writing code, Firefox and VS Code can live together in one group while iTerm and Git Tower live in another. When I’m writing, I can put iA Writer and Dictionary in one group, and Safari by itself in another.
• I can assign a Finder window to each group if I need to. Multiple Finder windows can get hairy to manage, but Stage Manager makes sure that each one lives within the context where it’s being used. At the moment, I have one Finder window grouped with Mail so I can import some old mailboxes, and another one with Safari so I can add images to this post.
• Perhaps my favorite feature of all: Stage Manager remaps Cmd + backtick to switch between all windows within a stage. With Stage Manager disabled, this switches between different windows of the app that is currently in focus.

Stage Manager even hides away the mess of icons I have on my desktop, which means I’m able to appreciate my favorite Basic Apple Guy wallpapers.

By eliminating the cognitive strain that comes from having to juggle tens of apps and windows, Stage Manager helps me focus better when I work at my computer. It helps reduce information overload and, for the first time, makes using a 27” monitor an enjoyable experience for me.

I don’t have a clinical issue with attention—depression and anxiety is more my style—but I suspect that people with conditions such as ADHD will feel a lot calmer after they enable Stage Manager.

Stage Manager is the biggest change to the desktop metaphor in decades, at least on the Mac. I found it a little hard to get used to at first, but after two weeks I can’t imagine going back to the old way of doing things.