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Scattered Updates (RATP #12, or #1 on new hosting)

March 17, 2024

A lot has happened, notes have been scattered, and alternatives have been found (at least for me).

I am writing more, and have fewer tabs open. But that is not translating into more writing in this form.

Short story long:

the Bookwyrm project rocks. It makes it easier to track stuff I am reading. Here is the shelf. I am still tracking things with Obsidian, mainly to track the graphs. But, mh, you can also export Bookwyrm books and build the Obsidian tabs from there. So… who knows. I am using Mastodon way more. At least in read-only mode. I’ve also started some conversations in real life on how cool Mastodon is, and also only. So, well, that’s something. I have a language issue related to what and how to write there – English? Italian? – and start rumbling about it. I like that on Bookwyrm I can sketch stuff in Italian and then get back here or elsewhere and elaborate for the outside. What’s helping me to reduce open tabs and save the items somewhere is my digital garden. I’ve added a links section which I upload way more than I send these mails out. This keeps the number of the tab low and allows me to create a vault of links. So, yes, I won’t miss the Godot 4 tutorial on a card game like Slay the Spire.

(not so) Shorts

Books missing I’ve read Queneau’s Essays… again. But did not add that to BookWyrm, at the time I did not know how to add books that were not there. Then Sterling (see alternative futures below) and Mila’s History of music. Plus some Calvino and a few books by Vincenzo Latronico.

Fediverse Recently I’ve tried to spend more time on Mastodon. I’ve discovered quite a lot of good things, like this post on gaming communities or the card of the Fediverse, Bookwyrm, or … much more. TL;DR: I feel like I’m getting quite a lot more out of scrolling the list rather than scrolling through the headlines of the way too many newsletters I used to subscribe to. So let’s write down some of the things I over obsessed with recently.

Language issue The fediverse brings me some interesting content in Italian. And that’s astonishing. No more Facebook delusions, no more “buy my stuff, please!” on Instagram. And also no more Italian going English in the marketing parts. I guess that, basically, as I told my dad mentioning why the Fediverse is cool “nobody is selling stuff on Mastodon (yet)” and also “there is no central unit monetizing the Fediverse”. I think this latter one is something I’ve read on Kenobi’s feed. So, yep, the presence on the Fediverse poses some sort of language issue. How should I write up there? More than one language is quite an issue. Salvatore Sanfilippo had a great take on that. I think it was about threads. And I am not super sure whether I’ve read that on LinkedIn or elsewhere. As Mastodon is no work but just a happy place to stay, I guess I’ll keep it as it is. But I’m glad I have a reasonable way to think more about the problem.

Books, Language issue, and Bookwyrm Bookwyrm are the Anobii/Goodreads of the Fediverse. And it is super cool to have that. I can link books to Bookwyrm pages and rest assured I’m not giving even more wealth to Jeff Bezos. It is not a possibility you often have on the internet. (Ok, maybe the instance of Bookwyrm I am using is hosted on AWS, but at least the service I am using only runs on JB’s stuff but is not owned by him. Wooo, this is something worth exploring even more.) Anyway, Bookwyrm is great and it allows us to solve the language issue. There I can write impressions of stuff I’m reading in Italian.

Alternative futures Enough of the Nazis. Let’s go back to book clusters. Recently I came across two roughly conceived book clusters about the future and its alternatives. One is on the Japan/SciFi future. It includes POP – whose main thesis is that Japan functioned as a preview of the global (Western) future. They boomed, busted, went into a financial crisis, and even got an aging population and alt-right trolling before it was a thing (which means, before it got into the US and had effects there). Japan went through all these and exported and developed the Japan imaginary. Everything from videogames, anime, manga, gadgets, and M&M (Miyazaki and Murakami). Something worth reflecting on is that we can probably name video games and gadgets in a few seconds. But we need to struggle to game up with names of political figures from Japan (Ito? Abe?). And, well, they even have an emperor! This cluster developed into some extra reading. Like… Battle Royale before being a game genre was a novel. (A novel in which centralizing super controlling government is criticized). Gibson and his essays followed this route. Gibson seems to share the thesis that Japan is a nice place to get future previews. Some of Gibson’s essays feature in Alt’s Pop, etc. But the thing I like the most is that much of non sci-fiction of these essays is set in a time in which what we consider kind of a given and inevitable today (big corps ruling the internet and being more powerful than governments, i.e. extractive and surveillance capitalism) was one of the alternatives at the time of writing. (And it was the alternative chosen in some of Gibson’s stuff. Even if the techno high-end stuff most often had some Yakuza-related items. Maybe mostly for plot reasons.) Youtube wasn’t there. Cloud was mainly an idea. Javascript already had too many frameworks. But Typescript wasn’t there. Etc. I like this idea of seeing possible perspectives.

Licks storing and Guitar I need a way to store the licks I am learning. I don’t play that often (forgive me, Alberto, Andrea, Camilla) but I’ve played over many years “starting all over again”. What if I have a place to store the licks I’ve learned and can play with?

(Further) Project Ideas

A script that reads BookWyrm export and creates an Obsidian document using the book template I use. Add RSS to https://garden.thegui.eu/ Study a bit the BookWyrm GitHub repo and try to give back.