Weeknote 44: Ugh

• 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