Monday Thoughts 01
Every now and then, I am surprised when I find a day I haven't written a "thoughts" post at all - and today is one of those days. Amazingly this is post #1 for Monday Thoughts.
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On staying away from negative posts
I want to first clarify that I don't mean "negative news" - I already do a decent enough job (in my opinion) of getting bogged down in the negative news cycle. What I'm referring to are blog posts or articles telling people about all the bad things about specific software or platforms etc. A recent "People and Blogs" interview by Manu, Jatan Mehta, had a couple of answers that resonated with me.
The first was about monetization of blogs, but it was Jatan's closing thoughts that stood out the most to me:
Despite blogging being so integral to my life, Iāve often felt alienated by people in āblogging communitiesā because of my choice to use certain tools or services they varyingly keep disapproving of for ideological reasons.
Donāt associate people with their tools and platforms unless they own it. Be more inquisitive and empathetic about where people are coming from. Rant less, help more.
This is especially relevant with the recent WordPress developments (if you don't know what I mean, search "automattic CEO" and you'll probably find what you need to know). Some people prefer to use WordPress, but I bet there are people out there now ready to launch a crusade against WordPress and tell people they should get off the platform as soon as possible, stop sending money to Automattic. But maybe WP works best for some people. It's not their fault that the CEO is doing weird things. It's similar to some thoughts I had last year about unhelpful Reply Guys saying "format your computer and install Linux" when someone reaches out for help with a Windows problem.
Now, I don't have a problem with people offering helpful suggestions when asked for them. Like if someone said, "I'm having consistent issues with xyz problem on Windows. What other operating systems should I consider to resolve the issue?", then by all means tell them all about Linux! But unsolicited advice that doesn't solve a person's problem will probably result in some hostility and fight-back and that doesn't help anyone.
I digress from my overall thought though. Let me narrow down to a specific example: Spotify. I tried Apple Music last month but opted to stick with Spotify (I'll get into that another time, not today). There are all sorts of articles talking about the evils of Spotify and reasons you should leave the platform for something else. These are the kinds of articles I want to avoid. If it made practical sense for me to dump Spotify and use something else, I would do that already. But Spotify works for me; it works for my wife. I'm going to keep using it. I don't need people constantly telling me why it's wrong for me to use it and how I'm a Bad Person for using it.
The world would be a much better place if we stopped framing things so negatively.
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On the year of not tracking
Late last year I made a decision: 2025 would be the Year of Not Tracking. I think the post I wrote outlines my plan well enough but I've refined my "definitions" for myself a little more since then, so I thought I'd just summarize here what I'm doing or not doing.
First and foremost, I am NOT tracking books at all through any online platform. No Goodreads, no Storygraph. I don't want to keep thinking about updating my reading progress after every reading session. If I want to share what I read recently, I'll write a blog post or review about it. But otherwise, my general thoughts about what I'm reading are residing in a little Moleskine pocket notebook.
- Music: I have Spotify linked to my Last.FM profile, so it's going to automatically track my music listening. I can't be bothered severing the link, so that's fine - it'll continue to keep track of things for me. What I have done though is turn off the automatic post thing that would share my top artists or whatever to Mastodon. Again, if I'm going to share anything about what I'm listening to, it's going to be in a blog post of some sort.
- Movies: I actively enjoy logging movies in Letterboxd, so I'm going to keep doing that. I don't generally share my reviews online, I just have a bunch of people I'm friends with on the platform and I read their reviews or ratings. To me this doesn't feel as intrusive as tracking my reading so it's going to stay that way. What I will stop doing is logging rewatches - so when Now You See Me 2 was on TV last night and I threw it on in the background, I'm not putting that in my film diary.
- TV: One thing I've never tracked is my TV watching, and it's going to stay that way. So far I have successfully avoided joining any online service that serves to display to the public what I'm watching on TV. I have a notebook for that, if I even decide to fill that out.
So that's that. The other aspect of this is that I'm not going to take part in any end-of-year summaries. Almost every platform does this, including banks! I'm so done with it. I have no problem with other people doing it...I just can't get behind it for myself anymore.
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On upgrading tech
I love being on the cutting edge of technology, always interested in the latest phones and gadgets. I'm currently using a Galaxy S21+, which should be getting one more major OS update before Samsung ends support for it. But the itch is there to upgrade and go to something better. There's absolutely no reason to, not when my phone is functioning fine and - as I said - is getting another major OS update to match the S25's coming out later this year. In fact, I now feel like I upgraded from my S9+ too early. I should have held onto that one longer. I still have it, it's a dedicated media device now, but I could have held out a few more years before upgrading.
I also keep looking longingly at new smart watches, but my OG Galaxy Watch 46MM has tons of life left in it. I will admit it is annoying that it has no support from Samsung whatsoever and watch faces for it suck, but it is in great condition and does everything I need it to. A new watch would only give me an updated operating system, and more health tracking gadgets. Do I need those things? No. So until this one dies...I'm avoiding upgrading.
And that's going to be my mantra for 2025. Don't upgrade anything until it dies.
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On trying new workflows
I'm always trying to find optimal workflows when it comes to writing / blogging. I used to have great success with SimpleNote, but a while back they switched to this terrible Captchca setup for logging in and it bugged the hell out of me, so I dropped that. I've tried Notion, and that one is overkill. I know a lot of people like Obsidian, but being able to sync notes across platforms is pretty important to me, and I don't really want to add another subscription to do that1. The thing I want the most is to be able to write in plain text, with markdown preserved. By that I mean I don't want the editor to automatically convert **bold text** to bold and remove any characters - I'm copying this directly into Bear Blog, so removing the format markers is not ideal.
For the next little while I'm trying out Notesnook again; it is one of those editors that uses markdown as shortcuts to formatting, which is as I said not what I want. But I found a workaround - you can type in a code block and set the code type to Markdown and it works well for copy/paste jobs. The only drawback is that I can't figure out how to turn on wordwrap in the code block, which is distracting to me.
I have been trying to work with .txt files, and may in the end just go back to that. But it's always worth it to play around with different methods!
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I know there are ways to manually set up file syncing with Obsidian, but I don't feel like figuring out how to do that - I've looked into it.↩