• So hungover. Ugh.
• Why did I do this to myself?! Never again.
• Every single person in Bangalore seems to have developed a cough at the same time, and nobody is wearing masks anymore. The threat of contracting an illness every time I step outside my house has transformed my otherwise banal workdays into grand and magical adventures.
• After using Figma for a week, I’ve realized that I can produce wireframes and mockups much faster if I work directly with HTML and CSS. This is not a dig at Figma; it’s a well-designed tool that I found fun to use. It’s just that I’ve been working with web technologies for so long that they come as naturally to me as writing or sketching with a pencil.
• Kinopio is everything I’ve ever wanted. God_damn_ this thing is good.
• I finished reading Geetanjali Shree’s यहाँ हाथी रहते थे. The last three stories in the collection were set in Japan, which was a novel experience. The only other Hindi fiction I’ve read that was set outside of India is Nirmal Verma’s वे दिन. In my head, I’ve always thought of Hindi language writers as either overly parochial or concerned only with Indian politics, both of which I realize are unfair assessments on my part. I’m glad Nirmal Verma and Geetanjali Shree exist to teach me that there’s no reason languages cannot travel beyond the borders within which they were conceived.
• I’ve been wasting too much time doing … stuff. Instead of reading, writing, and working on this website, I’ve been messing around with all sorts of software things with no concrete goal in sight. I believe that this sort of free play is necessary for creativity to flourish, but it needs to be reigned in at some point.
• I’m now reading Save the Cat on the Kindle app on my iPad. As I read, I’m taking handwritten notes in Notability using the Apple Pencil. The point of this exercise is to see if the iPad can serve as a good device for reading non-fiction, research papers, long-form journalism, or any other kind of writing that requires active engagement to be useful.
• My head hurts.

Links of the Week

• Designing for Thinking by Pirijan Ketheswaran
• Find Your Private Domain by Sarah Lewis
• How to be Wrong on the Internet by Brent Simmons
• The Component Gallery, DarkModes, and Fonts In Use for all your design inspiration needs

• I flew back from Delhi on Wednesday to find that winter had arrived in Bangalore while I was gone. Cold weather in the South might be milder than it is in the North, but I’ve lived down here long enough that even a pleasant 18°C sends me hunting for a hoodie and a cup of chai.
• The cats, too, are feeling the chill. Every evening, they yowl at me until I get in bed and wrap myself in a blanket, at which point they curl up next to me and fall asleep. It’s a hard life, y’all.
• My doctor has cut my nightly dose of antidepressants in half. Besides a bit of trouble sleeping, I don’t feel much of a difference in my moods so far. As they say, no news is good news.
• My iPad Pro arrived on Friday. When attached to the Magic Keyboard, it doesn’t feel very different from a MacBook running macOS. All the apps I use on my Mac are also available on iPad, and they look and work pretty much the same. I can move between the two devices without having to reprogram how I work, which is convenient.
• Where the iPad Pro really shines is taking notes with the Apple Pencil. I’ve been reading articles in Safari while I take handwritten notes in Notability running in a split off to the side. Since reading, writing, and taking notes is my primary use case for the iPad, I’m pleased with how well this setup works.

• After having so much fun with रेत समाधि, I’ve decided to read more of Geetanjali Shree’s fiction. I’m currently making my way through यहां हाथी रहते थे, her short story collection from 2012. The stories are often different in tone and subject matter from रेत समाधि, but they’re all written in that whimsical, meandering style that makes रेत समाधि such an enjoyable read.

Links of the Week

• Tech Companies: A New Religion? from ReligionForBreakfast
• Slow Software by Mark McGranaghan and Adam Wiggins of Ink & Switch
• How to Read for History by W. Caleb McDaniel

… fandom is not about loving something. I think fandom is a separate occupying experience more akin to obsession than it is to love. And I think that, you know, like, religions are fandoms because, like, most of the time you aren’t actually loving the details of the religion but rather obsessing about your version of the thing. And I feel like all of the fandoms that you interact with online are, like, religious and obsessive about something that they think is the thing, as opposed to loving the thing no matter how it comes out. Right?

Heather Anne Campbell, Get Played Episode 172

Later from the same episode:

To be a fan means that, like, you think it’s yours. It’s more like ownership than it is appreciation. It’s like, this is my thing. And as soon as that sort of metastasizes into identity, you’re fucked. Because like, any change that happens to the thing that you love—or quote “love”—is a reflection on your own personal self-knowledge. So it’s … you’re fucked. If you’re obsessed with a thing and it changes, you’re ruined.

Heather Anne Campbell, Get Played Episode 172

• This note is a day late because it was Diwali yesterday. I’m visiting my parents in Delhi, and worried sick about my cats back in Bangalore. My kingdom for a reliable catsitter.
• Fireworks are banned in Delhi this year. As I write this note on the morning after Diwali, there’s no smoke in the air or spent bits of fireworks on the streets. The AQI is still at Very Poor, but nowhere close to what it used to be in years past. This might be the first post-Diwali morning since my childhood when I’m able to breathe deeply without having a coughing fit.
• I want to start adding photos to these weeknotes. I’m not very good at using the camera on my phone yet, so please be kind. Here’s the first one, of an old type shop I came across in Jhandewalan.

• Right after posting my last weeknote about feeling healthy again, I developed a high fever. As my body temperature peaked at 102.6°F, I dreamed that I was a manager at a software development sweatshop that produced WordPress plugins. My team members were the Belcher kids from Bob’s Burgers, who were not happy with how their lives had turned out.
• Figma is such a lovely piece of software! I’ve used it in the past for collaborating with designers, putting together screenshots of designs I like, and a bit of wireframing—but nothing approaching any kind of Serious Design Work™. Since my fever had left me unable to work last week, I spent many hours watching people use the app to build and prototype UIs. The workflow reminded me of building websites using Adobe Fireworks when I was a teenager. I’ve been monkeying around with Figma since then, and it’s been very fun.
• I may have purchased an iPad Pro on impulse. I blame the fever.

Links of the Week

• Larry (cat)
• I made $200,000 last year ghostwriting tweets for superstar VCs
• Continuous partial attention

• I finished reading रेत-समाधि. It was life-changing.
• Thanks to my regimen of gentle exercise using Ring Fit Adventure, the drowsiness and fatigue I’d been feeling for so many months is all but gone. Nearly a full year after my brush with COVID, I’m finally starting to feel okay. Thanks again, Mario.
• The nice man at the fruit store sold me a Thai guava on Monday, which is just an impractically large version of a regular guava. Almost as large as a melon, it occupied far too much space in my refrigerator and took me an entire week to eat. It was delicious, despite the bad UX.
• I’ve doing an unhealthy amount of frivolous busywork at my computer. In the last two weeks, I’ve cleaned up my contact list, reorganized my notes, tagged all my bookmarks, tried three different notes app, tried a new calendar app, and watched tens of hours of automation videos on YouTube. None of this had an impact on any aspect of my life, yet I couldn’t tear myself away from the screen despite my best efforts.
• I have a history of developing these odd, unhealthy obsessions ever so often. They’re mostly harmless, lasting for a few weeks before disappearing into whatever corner of my brain they sprung from. But sometimes they come at the cost of my health, hobbies, and work commitments. I don’t understand them, and so far I haven’t figured out a way to fight them.
• After months of not drinking, I knocked back a few beers on Friday night. There might have been karaoke and dancing. Wild times.

Weekly Links

• Keyboard shortcuts need modifier keys
• महेश वर्मा की कविताएँ from समालोचन
• on leading a purposeless life by Winnie Lim
• 1942 Letter to My Grandfather from His Father by Brent Simmons
• Your CSS reset needs text-size-adjust (probably) by Kilian Valkhof

• It’s persimmon season! The ones that are in stores now are not great, but I have high hopes for the coming months.
• After being sedentary for months, I’m trying to incorporate some gentle movement into my daily life—walking, household chores, and Ring Fit Adventure on the lowest difficulty. It’s not much, but it’s already had a positive impact on my concentration, energy levels, and mood. I’m starting to think that my health issues over the past few months were only partly caused by COVID; the larger contributing factor was my terrible lifestyle.
• I’ve had an iPhone 13 Pro Max for a year, but I’ve barely used the excellent camera that it comes with. I’ve now set myself a new goal of taking at least one picture I’m proud of each day. I’ve discovered that I enjoy taking photos, but I get embarrassed and self-conscious when I take them in public places. If I stop to photograph something in public, I can’t help but feel that I’m being a nuisance. I’m afraid that somebody will come yell at me any second, shooing me away. Am I being overly paranoid or is this something every new photographer deals with?
• I have once again been peer-pressured into using social media. I’m forced to be on Twitter because that’s where the frontend web community hangs out, and on Instagram because my generation likes to use it as a messaging platform. Contrary to popular belief, I enjoy having a job and friends, so I’ve sucked it up and installed both apps on my phone. Cue shrug emoji.
• As I make my way through रेत समाधि, I’m building up an Anki deck containing Hindustani words that I’m unfamiliar with. It’s a slow, laborious process, but I haven’t found any other method of effectively learning new words. I plan to make the deck public when I have a substantial number of cards in it.
• I love how Sara Soueidan plans her days.

Weekly Links

• The Problem With “Writing is Thinking”
• How to Edit Your Own Writing (I disagree with the bit about dependent clauses being bad, but this is otherwise a good read)
• PersonalSit.es
• Get in Zoomer, We’re Saving React

• I’ll keep this short because I’m still tired from my outing yesterday.
• Dad came to visit this weekend. He enjoys gardening, so we went to Krishnendra Nursery and Indo-American Hybrid Seeds on Sunday. If you love plants, both these places come highly recommended.
• In Dad’s opinion, the nurseries in Bangalore carry a wider variety of plants compared to Delhi. Their quality is better, too. He wanted to take quite a few back home for his rooftop garden, but we couldn’t find a good way of transporting them two thousand kilometers north without destroying them in transit.
• Here are some fun new words for you: in Hindi, anxiety is called दुश्चिंता, depression is called अवसाद, and bipolar disorder is called द्विध्रुवी विकार. Now you know.
• I fell down a familiar rabbit hole this week: watching videos about task management, time management, note-taking, quick capture systems, and apps that enable each of these functions. I hate the part of me that’s so easily taken in by this personal productivity snake oil, but I’m still unable to restrain myself.
• I moved all my email to iCloud+ as an experiment. Pray for me, because this thing does not inspire confidence.

Links of the Week

• Mentioning the War by Matt Gemmell
• Accent shame by Matt Gemmell
• Using :has() as a CSS Parent Selector and much more by Jen Simmons for the WebKit blog

Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down to write, remind yourself why it isn’t in the middle of the room. Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.

— Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

• All the friends I’ve made in Bangalore in the decade that I’ve lived here are now scattered across the globe—from Delhi, Bombay, Goa, and Ahmedabad to New York, San Francisco, Toronto, Vancouver, and London. Out of the few who still live here, some have already made plans to move away. I feel like Jeff Winger in the series finale of Community, except I don’t have an Abed to tell me that eventually, it all comes back. We’ve reached the end of Season 6, and we’re not getting renewed for Season 7. Dare I hope for a movie?
• I’ve been working on improving the accessibility of this website. Automated tools for accessibility testing don’t always paint an accurate picture of what it’s like to interact with a website using assistive technologies, so I’ve been learning to navigate the web using VoiceOver and NVDA. If you build user interfaces—on the web or a native platform—I implore you to try interacting with your product using these tools. You will be surprised to discover the ways in which your underlying platform exposes your software’s internal structure to accessibility APIs, and how easy it is to accidentally break this built-in functionality.
• The way I listen to music is changing. Instead of full albums, I now listen to curated playlists on Spotify and Apple Music; instead of recent releases, I enjoy digging up older music that has stood the test of time. I can no longer find enough hours in the day to evaluate every new album myself, so I’ve chosen to rely on The Algorithm™ and Father Time™ to help me find tunes I might enjoy.
• In a perfect world, someone with impeccable taste would listen to every track uploaded to every streaming platform daily, lovingly pick out the songs they knew I would enjoy most, add them to a playlist that was exactly forty minutes long, and send it to me along with words of encouragement that would put a spring in my step and a sparkle in my eye. But we don’t live in a perfect world, do we?

Links of the Week

• The government’s silence on Geetanjali Shree’s Booker win reveals the hollowness of its nationalism
• Disabled buttons suck
• Making Disabled Buttons More Inclusive
• Buttons shouldn’t have a hand cursor

• Until last week, I’d never eaten an avocado. I’d devoured salads, burgers, dips, and spreads in which it was a key ingredient, but I’d never eaten it in its stand-alone, fleshy, fruity form. Therefore, in order to expand my culinary horizons, I purchased an avocado last Tuesday. Sadly, not only did the fruit fail to live up to my expectations, it also rocketed up to the very top of my “Do Not Eat” list. Why is a stick of unsalted butter masquerading as fruit? Why are we as a society allowing this to happen?
• After forcing myself to eat a third of the avocado, I could no longer bear the assault on my taste buds. I banished it to the darkest depths of my refrigerator, where it could never hurt me or anyone else ever again. Incidentally, I’m giving away two-thirds of an avocado. Any takers?
• I’m falling in love with रेत समाधि. No, scratch that. I’ve already fallen in love with रेत समाधि, even though I’m only on page eighty seven.
• On Saturday, I went to Church Street to meet a friend. We walked from bookstore to bookstore, ocassionally stopping at coffee shops and restaurants to refuel ourselves. Lost in conversation, we traversed the length of the street several times in the span of two or three hours. We must have walked four or five kilometers in total, which is not a huge distance by any metric. However, when I got home in the evening, I was so exhausted that I felt like I’d run a full marathon. Even after two days of rest, I still feel tired today. Whether this is a result of COVID or my sedentary lifestyle, I don’t know. All I know is that my body feels fragile, as if it will fall apart if something so much as brushes against my skin. Not a great feeling at the young(ish) age of thirty-two.
• To make it easy for my friends to subscribe to this blog, I set up an RSS-to-newsletter pipeline using MailerLite. I plan to expose a subscription UI for the newsletter after I make sure it works as expected.
• When I sit down to write an essay without a good idea of its structure, I get so lost in how I should say something that I lose sight of what I want to say. I find that drawing up an outline before I start writing helps me finish essays faster and with less hand-wringing. It separates the task of figuring out what I want to say from the task of deciding how I want to say it, reducing the number of things I must mentally juggle during each step of the writing process.
• Outlines are not just useful for creating new work, they can also help refine existing work. Last week I took the first draft of an essay I’d been struggling to finish and converted it to an outline. This helped me see the bones of the essay, making it clear that I was obscuring its core message by adding irrelevant details and diversions. Once the problem became apparent to me, I was able to discard parts of my original outline that did not pertain to my core message. I can now use the edited outline to write a more focused essay, a task that I’m planning to attempt this week.