Recently 002

Realized that my life has become too data-driven. I consult ratings when I choose wine, a movie, a book. I’m surrounded by vanity metrics — likes, views, retweets — that shape what things I pay attention to. Does the fact that someone liked your post mean it’s good?

It turns out you can still buy a bottle of wine without consulting Vivino, choose a movie based on trailer/director/friend’s recommendation, and you can still write for yourself.

There’s another side of the same coin — rating things. Today, everything needs to be measured and then digitized to become real. Everything is consumed and nothing is experienced. The experience is so much richer when you don’t narrow it down to a single digit.

Redesigned my website and moved to Blot. Now it looks like a feed because I’d like to write more. When you have a list of posts, you treat them as sacred as if every one of them should be well-crafted and polished piece of work. The feeling is similar to when you buy a sketchnotebook and you’re afraid to make mistakes.

Started working on a MacOS app. This is something I’m doing for my own pleasure. Most todo apps are too complex for my needs as I need something as simple a piece of paper sitting in the menu bar. Small desktop apps give you the scale that is easy to reason about. They provide closure when you finish them.

So far, the hardest part was all the plumbing I needed to do to make something nice in SwiftUI. It gets easier once you learn all the needed patterns.

Watched some nice movies. Rewatched a few Harry Potter movies over the christmas holidays and then I watched mostly european cinema. Some notable mentions are below.

The Great Beauty by Paolo Sorrentino. It’s one of those movies that captures “feelings” instead of relying on a plot. You don’t watch it, you experience it.

Mr. Nobody by Jaco Van Dormael. Sometimes you get the feeling that it’s the right time to watch something. It was that time. It might feel like Mr. Nobody is a “cheap” movie as it has popular topics such as the chaos theory and the butterfly effect, and it stars Jared Leto. But if you look behind the things that might make it popular among general population, it has many hidden layers. And it’s so much pleasure to watch it again and again.

Triangle of Sadness and Force Majeure by Ruben Östlund. These were good. Seeing longer shots feels like novelty today, and Ruben Östlund gives you enough time to feel awkwardness of anything happenning on the screen. Also something I liked — once you think you know what he tries to say, he turns it upside down in the next scene. Possibly, Ruben Östlund got frustrated with the modern world so he just makes fun of everything.