elliot.my

Category: Post

  • “The life-changing magic of Japanese clutter” – Aeon°

    The world still turns to Japan for things; it also turns to Japan to rid itself of them. There’s only one problem: Japan isn’t anywhere near as tidy as outside observers give it credit for.

    […] While treatises abound on Japanese simplicity, minimalist design and culture, precious little is written about the nation’s masterfully messy side.

    A long read on how Japan isn’t the minimalist paradise Westerners often think it is.

    To be fair, as a Westerner, I do associate minimalist interiors with Japan. But I also associate incredibly maximalist spaces with it too. It’s either one or the other, in my mind.

    Why can maximalist spaces be worthwhile?:

    Cosily curated Japanese clutter-spaces are different [to modern minimalism. There is a meticulousness to the best of them that is on a par with the mental effort poured into simplifying something: a deliberate aesthetic decision to add, rather than subtract – sometimes mindfully, sometimes unconsciously, but always, always individually. Clutter offers an antidote to the stupefying standardisation of so much of modern life.

    The article mentions the photobook “Tokyo Style” by Kyoichi Tsuzuki that showed a Tokyo “startlingly unlike the rarefied minimalism that the world had come to expect from Japan. Tsuzuki’s photos were a joyous declaration to the contrary, celebrating the vitality of living spaces filled with wall-to-wall clutter.”

    Many of the photos in the book do show anti-minimalist spaces. But some don’t. Including the cover, which I’d say has many minimalist cliches like a bed on the floor, just a couple of plain t-shirts, and just one form of entertainment – music in this intance.

    The article mentioned ōhsōji, “an annual year-end tidying-up emerged as a popular ritual among the masses, a ‘big cleaning’ to ring in the New Year.”

    I like the sound of that and adopt it as a tradition. Post-Christmas is when a home is at its most messy and cluttered. Apparently ōhsōji is done between Christmas and New Years day.

    I think I’d prefer to do mine in January. I like that those days between Christmas and New Years where the house is strewn with wrapping, presents and half-eaten food. I wouldn’t want my ōhsōji to be too early. January 1st is the best time, for me.

    If you go to Studio Ghibli’s offices in the leafy western suburbs of Tokyo you’ll stumble upon the “immaculately designed and managed facility replica of the director Hayao Miyazaki’s workspace. It is a glorious mess. Heirloom-grade wooden shelves, overflowing with bric-a-brac and thick tomes, line the walls.”

    In searching around for the highest quality copies of the images above 👆 I stumbled upon this random which. I like it and it does give off a somewhat similar vibe to Miyazaki’s workspace.

  • Just discovered that ⌘ + S will save your draft in the WordPress editor. Good to know.

  • Morning all 🍂

    UK-folk, don’t forget to get yourself into some woods in the next few weeks — the leaves are looking gorgeous. They’re even managing to give some autumnal life and deep colours to this drab industrial estate.

    My Saturday agenda:

    • 📖 Read
    • 🪑 Ikea
    • 🥾 Walk
    • 🍿 Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

  • I’ve been considering writing a “Working With Me” document for some time. But I always feel like it’s a bit… much.

    I stumbled upon this persons one on GitHub and I rather like it.

    It’s simple and to the point (no pun intended). And gives a good overview without going into the weeds.

    If I ever do write my own I think I’ll follow their 👆 lead.

    Update: In fact, I’ve created a generic template for it, based on his (I hope you don’t mind Andy). The .md file is here.

  • The permalink structure for the posts on this blog are like: https://elliot.my/1234.

    I like it because it’s short. And this blog is for short posts. It works.

    However, the number comes from the post_id. And it just doesn’t feel very resilient if I have to backup and restore this blog on a new server, for example. In my head the post_id will be different.

    Apparently it won’t be an issue though. It’s stored in the blogs WordPress MySQL database. So if I can restore the blog and its posts, then I can restore the post_id‘s too. So I guess I’m comfortable with that.

    However, if I can’t restore the blog automatically due to some sort of awful data loss, and have to restore more manually I might be in trouble.

    Because if the structure is like https://elliot.my/2024/10/18/title-of-post it’s fairly easily to manually recreate, as long as I know the date and title of the post.

    Or let’s say I want to move this blog off WordPress onto Hugo. Hugo will easily create URLs that match, again going off the date and title.

    But with https://elliot.my/1234 I’m going to have to manually tell it what the permalink is.

    I’m probably worrying about nothing. It’s unlikely I’m going to ever manually restore this blog. If I do, I’ll probably have bigger things to worry about.

    The post_id still makes me nervous. But I’m going to keep using it, as I like the short URLs.

    One more thing. The post_id isn’t really a post ID. Every media upload and post revision/draft has a post_id too.

    My last blog post had an ID of 433. The one before that 430. As I’d obviously hit ‘Save draft’ a few times.

    A concern I had was how quickly the number would climb. If it’s the four hundreds after 28 posts and 8 days, what will the number be in 1 year? Or 5 years?

    Assuming a similar pace:

    • After one year: around 20,000.
    • After five years: around 100,000.

    I think having a six digit ID after five years is fine. I mean Twitter has 20 digits or so.

  • In a world where every ‘An Update on Your Subscription” email I get is about a price increase, it’s nice to get a decrease for once.

    Having said that the email reminds me that I must cancel my subscription. Uber One remains an indulgence and it encourages me to get Uber Eats.

  • Terminally ill could end their life if two doctors and a judge agree – The Times

    A judge and two doctors will have to agree that terminally ill patients can be helped to end their lives under a proposed law to be introduced on Wednesday.

    I am for assisted dying. As long as reasonable safe guards are in place, people should be able to end their life if they so wish.

    This bill is just for the terminally ill who have 6-12 months to live. But it’s a start.

    The bill is expected to pass.

  • I envy people who can be productive in a coffee shop or office. My ideal working condition is a a dark, windowless pit devoid of light and people.

  • Dave Winer has been talking about how he’s hooked up his WordPress blog to Mastodon.1 He raved about the possibilities it opens up. But he was light about how to do actually go about setting it up.

    It seems like you need to:

    • Install ActivityPub WordPress plugin.
    • Click the checkbox of ‘Enable Blog-Profile’ in the settings of the plugin.
    • That’s it? After that it seems like it just works. For example, you can follow this elliot.my blog by searching @blog@elliot.my in Mastodon of other ActivityPub sites. Here’s the profile on Mastodon.cloud and Micro.blog.

    I’m hoping this post will show up!

    Update: this is me doing an update to see if it gets picked up by the Fediverse.

    Update 2: it only bloodly works! Not only the post – even the body of the post appears! But also the edits. The edit I’m writing right now I’m sure will be picked up.

    Update 3: Mastodon updates when I update here, but Micro.blog doesn’t. Oh well.

    1. Or more specifically ActivityPub. ↩︎

  • This is a fediverse test.

  • I’m getting old. Not because I turned 33 yesterday. But because ‘late nights’ are now defined as going to bed late enough to miss the start of BBC Radio 3’s “Night Tracks” at 10pm.

  • I’ve tried writing several email newsletters down the years. Every time I lost interest immediately.

    For me there’s just something inherently uninteresting and unexciting about newsletters. They reek of promotion and desperation.

    Blogs are a digital living room where I can share my ideas and thoughts with whoever drops by.

    And if I’m writing on the web, I want to write on the web. With things like blogrolls and reblogs, trackbacks and pingbacks, atom feeds and webmentions, via’s and hat tips.

    Blogs will always be my emotional and technological home.

  • How does my ADHD manifest? Mostly as accidental cardio from running up and down the stairs 20 times a day.

  • When you review things on Plex your friends can now see them. I love this. I trust my friend’s opinion over a critic or even IMDB/RT/LB/etc.

    Blog post. Video demo.

  • One of the consistently good sources for interesting websites or news is the Pinboard ‘popular bookmarks‘ page.

    I visit it everyday.

  • I’ve only just noticed that there’s a ‘Duplicate’ tab option in Chrome. News to me!

    For me it’s still slower than copying the tabs URL and pasting it into a new tab.

    But it’s amazing how you can see something hundreds, or thousands, of times and yet never see it.

  • I was gifted a Field Notes 56-Week Planner for my birthday.

    I’m not going to use it for planning, but for J3T (Just 3 Things). On paper anyway (no pun intended).

    Each morning I’ll sit down with my to-do list and chose my work and personal J3T for that day.

  • I’ve decided to write up my favourite 500 songs. I expect to be done in about 3 years.

    Update: I’ve changed it to 100 songs. 500 is too many. 100 is good because you actually have to think about if it’s worthy or not. With 500 you could have pretty much all my favourite songs. Also, the list is ranked from most to ‘least’ favourite. That would be impossible to do with 500 songs.

  • The more I use Gemini the more I want to sell my Google (Alphabet) stock.

    Every now and then it comes1 up a winner and somehow solves a problem over LLM’s couldn’t. But most of the time it’s utterly terrible.2

    1. Another footnote. ↩︎
    2. And I’m using the ‘Advanced’ model too. ↩︎

  • I love a cutesy nickname. But I draw the line at “doggo”.

    There’s just something about it that oddly enrages me.

    It reminds me of cringe reddit slang from 2012.

    As far as I can tell, you can’t schedule a post to be published in the WordPress iOS app?

    Update: you can. You have to hit ‘Publish’ and then it gives you the option. Not the best decision, as I presumed when I hit ‘Publish’ it will publish right away.

    Me (middle) on my first day of secondary school.

    I mostly just get sad when I look at photos of me as kid.

    The hope, wonder and expectation of life is still there on my face, alive and well.

    Adulthood is a sham.

    I am trying my very best to highlight multiple paragraphs in the WordPress iOS app. And it just isn’t letting me.

    For the past few months my background sleep noise of choice has been BBC Radio 3.

    But for the past week I’ve been going to bed a bit later, meaning Night Tracks is over and ‘Round Midnight is on instead.

    I like jazz. But it’s not exactly sleeping music (some of it is. But not as a rule).

    At least tonight I’m going to bed even later than usual and it will be finished soon and Through the Night will take over.

    Yesterday’s post was over 1,700 words. Not too bad.

    I won’t be able to keep that up of course. But I’m pleased my first day was active.

    It was fun brain dumping to be honest.

    Today I’m grateful for… vision.

    An obvious one to be grateful for, I know. But sometimes I think about how much it sucks to not be able to see – if I think about it too much it stresses me out.

    It’s such an essential part of being alive. Not just for convenience, but for… everything.

    Films. Trees. Humans. Mountains. Writing. Computers. Yourself.

    Talking of blindness. There’s a TikToker I like called Ellie Wallwork (@somewhatellie).

    She does a series called ‘things I didn’t know about vision’. It’s interesting to see her learn about the oddities of sight and the world. Like:

    • Seeing out of one eye is not the same as seeing out of both eyes.
    • You can see individual raindrops falling.
    • Your lips are not the same colour as the rest of your face.
    • You can see the moon in the sky.
    • Shadows change shape, depending on where the sun is.

    She is also gay (or maybe bisexual. She says she’s ‘queer’, and I’m never sure if that covers bi people too (also the ‘taking back’ of the word queer, from slur to acceptable description again is interesting)). And it got me thinking about blind people and attraction.

    Are blind people more likely to be gay or bi? I wonder if the differences between sexes are less obvious when blind.

    Though I’m not so sure. I think if you’re a straight man, you’d still find men unattractive when blind. The masculine voice and energy alone is more than enough differentiation.

    It was 0°C when I awoke this morning. Winter is coming.

    A great list of some great, still active forums.

    Song of the Day: Queen of the Slipstream on “Poetic Champions Compose” by Van Morrison.

    And honourable mention to “I Forgot That Love Exists”, which sounds great with headphones.

    I’ve decided to write up my favourite 500 songs. I expect to be done in about 3 years.

    Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz is my style icon (well, if I had the balls to wear it).

    I can’t sleep if I have even the remotest whiff that there’s an eyelash in my eye. I’m scarred someone bad will result of it being in my eye for circa 8 hours.

    The rest of the day:

    • “The Substance” at the cinema. Weird, good.
    • Steak dinner at Prime with my girlfriend in celebration of my birthday tomorrow.
    • “The Guard”. First time watching it since I saw it on release at the cinema. It’s good. The mood and humour is right up my street.