The greatest crime is the overlooking of who you really are in favor of the story of who you think you are. This preoccupation with your personal drama is the cloud that masks the sun.
~ Wu Hsin
slip:4a359.
Personal drama →
Nostalgic →
All people have a “tact filter”, which applies tact in one direction to everything that passes through it.
~ Jeff Bigler from, Tact Filters
slip:4umija1.
A short and startlingly insightful idea about— …well, no. I’m going to make you click.
Also: Cue my misty-eyed nostalgia. That’s what the web looked like in ’96. Back when I proudly wielded the self-selected job title of “spyder.” (Do I have to explain that? Please tell me I don’t have to explain that.)
ɕ
How to save the world →
As we leave childhood, we unwittingly dial down our imagination and our ambition, because an ancient and out-of-touch part of our minds tells us they are dangerous. Creativity suffers, and so do our prospects for personal greatness and happiness. […] The purpose of this book is to illustrate this great discrepancy — between what is normal and what is possible — and give you some stepping stones to begin crossing the rift.
~ David Cain from, On Becoming an Individual
slip:4uraoe1.
Ignore me. Click the link.
…you’re still here, why? Seriously the entire point of this post is simply so I can link to Cain’s post, and the sublime 46 page PDF attached to it.
Go. Go now!
ɕ
slip:2oe2.
Complaining →
Don’t be overheard complaining about life at court. Not even to yourself.
~ Marcus Aurelius
slip:4a521.
Not so little anymore →
Recently my “little” box of quotes outgrew its original little box. The collection now exceeds 600 cards and continues to grow at an accelerating pace.
…and it has expanded conceptually far beyond simply being a box on my desk. The Little Box of Quotes podcast has surpassed a year of daily episodes. A precious 10 or so of the quotes were the original seeds for what became my personal sequence of daily reminders for reflection. My personal sequence then inspired my series on Practicing Reflection which ran during the opening days of 2021.
I’m curious to see where I’ll be with this in another 5 years.
ɕ
Seriously →
I know I’ve been off on two long tangents recently: The long series of posts about practicing self reflection kept this blog busy for two months, and before-and-after that I’ve been doing a deep rabbit hole exploration of Slipboxes. I’m still yappin’ about Slipboxes, but I think we’ll be seeing more random things here in April.
But before that happens here’s another thing related to the Slipbox: I found this really detailed summary of Ahrens’s, How to Take Smart Notes. I’ve been reading and studying these notes, as I’m reading and studying the book. Take a look at this post, How to Take… —the site is literally named The Rabbit Hole. You’ve been warned.
ɕ
slip:2ho1a.
Already knowing →
The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.
~ Leo Tolstoy
slip:4a392.
Bombast →
When is the last time you read a dictionary? Have you ever sat down, and started reading the dictionary at the very beginning? My mind has been melted and reformed. My foundations are shaken, (and stirred.)
Things were defensive from the outset: The literally-first, full sentence I encountered—set off within a box, with a fancy-schmancy Merriam-Webster logo atop—is, “The name Webster alone is no guarantee of excellence.” Followed immediately by the we’re-sick-of-litigating, but-that-isn’t-stopping-us thumb in the eye of, “It is used by a number of publishers and may serve mainly to mislead an unwary buyer.” Considering myself forewarned, and forearmed with a magnifying glass, I pushed forward into the volume set entirely in a font size whose capital letters tower exactly 2 millimeters. Sure, the Preface—a two-column wall of microfiche occupying the totality of page 6a—was winsome, as far as, I assume, dictionary Prefaces go. Pragmatic was the listing upon page 7a of persons comprising the Editorial Staff. However, things became serious, bordering on salacious, with the Explanatory Chart printed, (apparently primarily for practical purposes,) in sprawled repose across pages 8a and 9a as a visual menagerie detailing the architecture and idiosyncrasies of the dictionary’s didactic details. None the less, the degree of magniloquence encountered in the long-form Explanatory Notes for that chart, which begin on page 10a, and which span some 40 columns, is penultimate.
ɕ
One slipbox to rule them all →
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.
~ J R R Tolkien
At least, one Slipbox to rule over all the various mediums of information I have.
You see, the Slipbox also solves a problem I’ve known I’ve had, (stop laughing at me!) for a long time: PDF documents get lost. Not, “I can’t find it,” lost but lost under the gently falling snow which ultimately covers all. For a while, I used to print and comb-bind stacks of things from their digital format, just so they would be “equal citizens” in my spaces with other professionally printed things. But, (aside from the killing trees wastefulness of it,) this is a crap-ton of work. Yes I have them in a folder, (not on a hard drive but rather on a file server with a redundent array of drives backed up into the cloud,) but I never look in that folder. Out of sight, and they’re soon out of mind.
The Slipbox solved the real problems of finding a PDF and remembering to continue reading it. (Aside: Bear in mind that being able to print-to-PDF means I can turn anything from the Internet into a PDF. You should too.) I simply create a slip in the Slipbox for the digital document; When Where Matters: How Psychoactive Space is Created and Utilised, wound up at 8d in the Slipbox, (still early days in my fledgling Slipbox’s addresses.) So I prepended “8d – ” to the filename and then threw it into the storage folder.
Perhaps you guessed that I have a small mark on the slip too? I do. It’s a little sort of dog-eared document icon telling me that there’s a digital document “attached” to this slip. Done. Now the slip points to the digital doc; Digital doc points back to the slip.
And then I tossed that slip on my desk with the stack of books I’m currently reading. Second problem solved: Digital PDF is now on the same footing at things physically on my desk.
ɕ
slip:1a3.