elliot.my

Author: Elliot

  • There’s an awful plague in the world of clothing. And it’s called “this item has an oversized fit and a boxy silhouette.” Why would I want those things‽

  • As an ADHDer, nothing feels more demoralising than spending hours building a massive Notion system so you can remember the bare minimum, only to find that the most productive person you know keeps everything in an ad-hoc Word doc.

  • With ADHD it’s vital to have a good start to your day, otherwise it’s a write-off.

    For the first time I’m realising the negative effects a messy bedroom has on a morning. Waking up and seeing stuff everywhere immediately makes me feel bleh.

    One of the habits I’m going to really focus on is a tidy room before bedtime.

  • Slow mornings. Quiet moments. Lit candles. Cheap heroin. Shoplifting Swarovski. Black market goods. Corporate fraud. Ultra violence. Chill Sundays.

  • I’ve always been curious by the biphasic sleep pattern of people in the medieval period. To my modern self it seems very odd, having two sleeps a night.

    I’m currently reading Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London. It mentions that England’s curfew time under William the Conqueror was 20:00. Biphasic sleep makes more sense to me if you couldn’t go out late. I mean what else is there to do? Especially in the winter.

    Picture it. You’re a medieval worker back home after a day of hard labour. You’ve had a small supper and chatted to the wife and kids. Now what? You’re exhausted, bored and the darkness has arrived. Before William’s curfew you might go to a neighbours house. The wives would knit by the one tallow candle they could afford whilst the men would chat in a corner. But it’s past the 20:00 curfew. So you’re probably just going to go to sleep for a few hours. It makes sense.

  • I cancelled my Washington Post subscription. Lots of people are right now, as the newspaper said it won’t endorse a U.S. presidential candidate this year°. I am constantly astounded by Trump’s awfulness and think him having a second term of office would genuinely threaten America’s democracy, but that’s not the reason I cancelled. I’d been meaning to do so for a while.

    I only subscribed because it was dirt cheap. But I found it had a shocking lack of content for a major newspaper. I’d launch the app every few days and go to, say, the technology section and there’d seemingly be almost no new articles.

    Anyway, like most subscriptions they try and convince you not to cancel by offering you a discount. To try and change my mind they offered me a plan of £2/mo. But I currently pay £1/mo. They didn’t change my mind.

  • Notes from London Comic Con 2024.

    • This was my first time, and it was better than expected. The venue was so big I’m not actually sure how much of it I actually saw.1 50% of I think?
    • I thought it would mostly be selling stalls and that I’d quickly get bored. But there was also music, food, meet ‘n’ greets, gaming machines, talks, promotional stalls, and gaming tournaments. Lots on.
    • Pay extra for the ticket which lets you in early. You can get your bearings and then see what you want to see before the crowds. The areas around the selling stalls in particular pile up with people as the day goes on, making it unpleasant if you don’t like crowds.
    • It was nice seeing nerdy people get to have their day, where they could dress up and express their interests with unrestrained glee.
    • I knew people dressed up, but I didn’t realise quite how many. I would guess 35% were in costume.
    • I’m clearly not as steeped in nerd culture as I once was, as plenty of the costumes were alien to me. My favourite was Pedro Pascal’s Joel from “The Last of Us” TV show. I liked it not just because I like the show, but because it’s the sort out outfit that you won’t be embarrassed to wear on the train journey home.
    • Those meet ‘n’ greet queues – where you can get an autograph or photo – moved slow. It was nice seeing people get the chance to have a few minutes to chat. But man the staff should have sped things up a bit. My girlfriend wanted an autograph from Tim Downie just before we were going to queue he had to go elsewhere. So later on we queued a 10 minutes before he returned. 45 minutes later we were turned away right near the end of the line as he again had to go elsewhere. There was not that many people in front of us when we started queueing, they were just slow buggers.
    1. By 14:00 I was satisfied with the day and left. ↩︎

  • I rarely think about how I’m lucky to live in a warm house with running water, have access to the internet, the freedom of a car, or that I’ve outlived plenty of my ancestors. I barely notice any of it – to my shame.

    But nearly every time I have that first sip of Fanta Orange or bite of a burger I am immediately delighted, gleeful and thankful.

    As I’ve gotten older, less and less excites me. Life simply felt sweeter at 16. But at least a Sprite still tastes just as sweet.

  • The Cultural Tutor points out that Charles Dickens wrote over a million words in his career — a decent amount of which were on Victorian London’s most awful and violent underbelly — and yet he never used a swear word.

    Take Scrooge:

    Dickens does not rely on brutality or violence, or vulgar language, to make him so despicable. It is rather by his simple acts of meanness and miserliness… that Scrooge seems so cruel.

    How tempting, when describing something bad, to immediately choose the most vivid imagery or direct language. Dickens proves that we need not necessarily do so.

  • Photos from a morning walk.

  • AI has officially arrived. My Mum has sent me a AI-generated video on Instagram.

    Awful music. Horrific squawks.

  • The blogger Dave Winer invented podcasts. And he posts ‘podcasts’ to his blog scripting.com.

    But to most people, they’re not podcasts, as he is just quickly sharing his thoughts in audio form.

    And to me they’re not podcasts either.

    I like them though. And I’d like to try doing some on my blog. Only with a different name.

    And since I did my first one a few minutes ago I had to think up a name. I struggled. I even asked a LLM. I wanted something catchy and smart.

    In the end I liked the simplest and most obvious: audioblog.

    Update: Although if you say you’ve “released an audioblog’ it sounds like the blog itself, not an individual post. Mmm. Maybe ‘audiopost’ would be better? Or ‘spokenpost’? We’ll see. One for future Elliot to decide. Not 1am Elliot.

  • Audioblog. I want to read the body of a post when browsing a blog. Why do so many blogs just list titles, requiring me to have to click one-by-one to read posts?

    I’m not sure. But I recorded a quick audioblog talking about it.

    Don’t have time to listen? I asked a LLM to turn it into a blog post:

    Most blogs show just a list of titles. Click. Read. Back. Click. Read. Back.

    I prefer seeing entire posts on one page, one after another. Just scroll and read.

    It puzzles me how many blogging platforms default to title-only lists. Why?

    Maybe it’s just my way of reading. I like scanning quickly through content, letting interesting bits catch my eye. Others might prefer a more methodical approach: carefully selecting posts from a clean list of titles.

    The title-only approach does add a certain weight to each post. When you click through to a dedicated page, it feels more substantial, like you’re about to read something significant.

    But for short posts especially, I want to just scroll and read. No clicks needed.

    Curious to hear from those who prefer the title-list approach. What am I missing?

  • I have zero interest in a video of some rich twat giving a University commencement speech.

  • “Accountability sinks” – A Working Library°

    In The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies argues that organizations form “accountability sinks,” structures that absorb or obscure the consequences of a decision such that no one can be held directly accountable for it. Here’s an example: a higher up at a hospitality company decides to reduce the size of its cleaning staff, because it improves the numbers on a balance sheet somewhere. Later, you are trying to check into a room, but it’s not ready and the clerk can’t tell you when it will be; they can offer a voucher, but what you need is a room. There’s no one to call to complain, no way to communicate back to that distant leader that they’ve scotched your plans. The accountability is swallowed up into a void, lost forever.

    Being unable or unwilling to follow a chain of decisions and their outcome – and not hold decision makers accountable – is one of the biggest creators of bad businesses.

  • Dr Pepper just doesn’t hit like when I was a kid.

  • The article I linked to about Japanese clutter mentioned the Collyer brothers° who were hoarders who died in their home – one after being trapped by the rubble, the other of starvation.

    They were born in the 1880’s and died in 1947. And it got me thinking about how far back certain mental illnesses go.

    Some I’m sure are caused or exacerbated by our modern world. But surely some mental illnesses were present in tribes, say, 30,000 years ago. Did any of them get depression, ADHD, hoarding, PTSD, OCD, or eating disorders? Which ones are inherent in our make-up?

  • I’m listening to The National’s album “First Two Pages of Frankenstein” (Spotify link).

    I’ve never listened to their stuff before. Just one song: ‘About Today’ (Spotify link), that I discovered via it being in “Warrior” (2011).

    There was a profile of the band I bookmarked though. I didn’t bother reading the article – it was too long and I’m not that interested. But it said their new album was good. So here I am, checking it out.

    It’s okay. I probably need to give it a second listen, as I’ve had it on in the background as I read and write. But currently it’s a 5/10. The songs are too dull and too similar. Oddly enough, the best song on the album is the one with Taylor Swift (Spotify link).

  • Exploring Are.na. I couldn’t get my head around it when I first signed up in 2022. I’m still struggling, but I think I get it now. It’s the thinking persons Pinterest?

    I’m not a huge fan of its design. It feels very 2012 to me – with its heavy use of Helvetica and whitespace. It just doesn’t inspire my creativity.

    But feel free to follow me on there. You never know, I might find a use for it.

  • Talking of Japan, I’m a big fan of Japanese ambient music (Spotify playlist). And I noticed whilst looking at Haruka Nakamura’s albums that some of them are official soundtracks for manga comics.

    I didn’t realise that was a thing. And I’m still not 100% sure how it works. Are you meant to read the manga whilst listening to the music? If so, I love it. What a beautiful idea.

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    I was listening to the soundtrack for “Look Back“. It’s a lovely little album (Spotify link). Especially the last song ,‘Light song’, which is beautiful.