GYSO Drawing Part 39 - Notification
Published: 2020-08-16
(Transcribed from a text messaging conversation between Thor and Tim)
Introduction
Thor: Tim, I’ve got an idea.
Tim: Oh god why.
Thor: You’re a hairdresser.
Tim: Of course I am. Would you like a haircut Mr. Jackass?
Thor: Yes, please! Whatever gets me fired as fast as possible
What do you give me?
Tim: Hold on fam I gotcha. Do you like gorilla glue or quick dry cement?
Thor: That’s just quirky, not a fireable offense.
Tim: You underestimate my power. I’m a 1st dan terrible hairdresser. I could get you fired with just scissors if I needed. Now sit still, this will only hurt a lot.
*I grab the flamethrower*
Thor: I think I asked the wrong Dan about this…
If you’re not going to take this seriously, I’m spilling my beans right where I stand.
Tim: But Sir Fuckface, you wanted to be fired, and you resist the flamethrower? Perhaps you require a cannon? We all know how words can be ambiguous.
Thor: Yeah I don’t know why I’m resisting this objectively funny skit.
Shoot me up, man.
Tim: It’s almost like we’re trying to be funny or something. Jesus.
I mean…
*I take the flame thrower and expertly aim it to render you completely bald, with only minor third degree burns.*
Thor: Ah yes, the minor third degree of A minor flamethrower.
C
Tim: Yes yes. The small talk made while getting your hair cut. How frivolous and yet intimate.
Anyways.
*I start taking dildos with gorilla glue and attaching them to your bald ass head*
This will get your fired, I hope. If not you get a full refund.
Thor: Are you sure you’re certified for this?
Tim: Yes. That will be $2000. Remember that I have a flamethrower, and if you don’t pay I’ll be there to, as they say, collect.
Thor: You know, I don’t really see you as that threatening type of person.
Tim: You’ve never seen me with a flamethrower.
Are we going to go to the next section? Otherwise this’ll take forever.
Thor: You know, I don’t really see you as that threatening type of person.
Tim: You’ve never seen me with a flamethrower.
Are we going to go to the next section? Otherwise this’ll take forever.
What went right?
Thor: What happens if I insert some propietary emoji shut into this conversation?
Tim: I transcribe it in painful detail, plotting your death via flamethrower all the while.
Thor: Doesn’t sound like a good idea then.
How’s your week bean?
Tim: Adjusting to my new weird ass sleep schedule, and trying to stay sane in a world full of madness, always crawling away too slowly letting the swamp’s miasma to seep into the very fabric of my psyche, never to feel the release of true freedom and life, always compromising, always losing.
What about you?
Thor: I think I’m on the verge of ulcers from the final exam stuff for my summer course, piled on top of last week of full time work for the summer.
But I’m almost done. I’ve written my written portion and just have a multiple choice thing left.
I truly questioned for a few moments today if going back to music studies is a good idea, considering where I am mentally.
Also been pondering what you wrote to me a couple days ago. We were joking about me feeling like every idea has to be executed on, and you tried giving me the idea to not actively do that.
A weird week. I’ve been on my own, so I have been keeping a list of things that need to be done, water the flowers, do the dishes, study, and do flashcards. Iy has worked great, adding a mark has felt satisfying on top of doing the work and relieving the stress. So I downloaded a habit tracking app and I already feel oppressed. Fuck tracking arbitrary shit. One or two well-designed things that keep me moving towards a better mental state? Sure? Tracking my dishes, fuck no.
Tim: I like tracking things, but I know your pain. The trick is to forgive yourself if you fall behind. Being forced to track thing you dont actually care about is oppressive.
Like tracking my weight has been important to keep it in line and catch myself when I’m slipping. Sometimse I miss an entire month of tracking, and that’s fine.
Removing friction from your life is almost always rewarding.
Thor: Yesss
Removing frictiooooon
I do feel like humans, or ay leas I, strive into friction when things are too seamless.
For example, my Emacs config turns 1 year old next Sunday, and reading back some old diary entries, and the long list of music practice scheduling I did, it’s no wonder I keep overcomplicaying my systems.
It all works fine, because it doesn’t need to be as complicated as you think? Just a line of a text in a file? Yeah! A line of text in a physical notebook? Yeah!
Ironically, in an effort to consolidate my life into a few files of plain text, I now have a need to draw myself bsck in a little, give myself some restrictions and definitions of how I work and why. So that the weight of my emacs doesn’t start slipping.
What went wrong?
Tim: Oh. Did I just accidentally the next section? Lolololo
It’s like trying to remove barriers to entry to the things you want to do. When you make something easier to do, it makes it much more likely to be done.
Like making it a single button to record a note on your computer, instead of having to havigate to the note folder, open it up, and navigate to the right spot. You’ll probably record a lot more notes if it’s just a single button. Or jornal entries. Or whatever.
The same goes for other stuff. Your writing set up need you to bring out a notebook from your closet? You’re less likely to write than if you just had it sitting on your desk, ready to go.
I try to design a lot of my life around this principal. I’m almost positive it’s one of the reasons I’ve gotten so much more stuff done these days than previously in my life.
Thor: Yeah. I ranted about quickurl for ages a couple podcast episodes ago, a piece of software inside emacs from 1999.
There’s this weird cohesion thing that has happened. I remember when I started this standardized music practice idea a year ago, I would actually spend more time with my instrument than fiddling around with shit.
But now, I’ve got like three different bookmarking files on my computer.
One is through Droopy. One is through custom emacs commands, one is through emacs built in bookmarks.
Suddenly, cohesion is gone? I wonder if my annoyance with quickurl was because I would rather right tooth and nail to reach this obscure “cohesion”, removing an external factor like Droopy would cout out one of the placed I need to think “did I store this information in x or y file?”
Also relevant: I tried organizing in my temporary summer housing so that I would always have my book, my notebook and a pen at my computer at all times. I found myself leisurely reading a lot and enjoying it, as well as writing more journal entries than I have in quite a while.
But for some reason they ended up on a shelf next to my bed, and I haven’t touched them since.
I look forward to another school year though. Take the time to pull back my scope, revisit my values and do fewer things more slowly and more thoroughly.
Thor: Also fuck that I can’t send essays and other work in plain text to people. No HTML, no PDF, just simple text.
Tim: Droopy being an application launcher I’m working on.
There is a fine line between making your day to day actions easier, and yack shaving. If you spend 5 hours making a system for URLs that could have easily been done with a simple list, than you are moving away from your goal of making a good URL handling system.
There is a beauty in simplicity.
Imagine you did that note thing even more specifically. don’t let the book be closed, so you don’t have to spend time opening it and finding the right page. Every time you write an idea down turn to the next page, so you don’t have yo worry about keeping context between notes. Always have your pen uncapped / extended so you don’t have to fiddle with it before making a note. So on and so on.
I bet you would be able to stop yourself from taking notes.
As for the plain text thing; the cold truth is that most people feel like they nerd type setting and formatting, which plain text doesn’t really do. Most people don’t appreciate the kinds of things plain text offers.
(Even though HTML is in plaintext, it’s just a verbose markup language compared to something like markdown.)
Let’s go to the next section.
Tim: *wouldn’t be able to.
Fuck.
What happens next?
Thor: I had the idea yesterday of just writing the thing myself. Grep my bookmarks, copy the one I want and then I manually create a few templates for the type of formats I use. Which, spoiler, is none. So I won’t do it.
Oh yeah. For anyone wondering, we wrote this post over instant messaging. Tim’s gonna love transcribing this shut.
Tim: Or make a script with dmenu to let you dynamically search for them, and automatically open it in your browser. Oh wait.
It’s going to be verbatim. Auto correct and spelling mistakesand all. Yay. I love transcribing soooo much.
Any other topics you wanted to cover?
Thor: No the script is for format the links according to the major mode I’m in. Basically having a global way of calling “create link at locatipn” and it’s a standardized keycommand, works the same everywhere, and uses the same url navigation system.
But it’s not in my cards right now, so I don’t do it. I want it to be done already, and I think it’s a shame quickurl falls so extremely far behind that it isn’t even listed as a package in emacs built-in package manager.
Spill my weak beans, Dan.
It’s weird, cause I want to talk about everything and nothing, about all the things I’m excited about and worried about. But talking like that won’t help the curious nervousness I feel.
I’m just really looking forward to some things I want to do, and I’d rather do them than spend 45 mins on a podcast complaining about some peripherally related thing that somehow causes me to be unable to the those things effectively.
I’m good.
Tim: I don’t understand what you mean by “template”. It’s a URL. It doesn’t need a template…
I guess we should round down the post then, if there’s nothing left to say.
Uhh… Clever pun here.