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After my dad died, we found the love letters

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Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#21

Post by lazide »

cyanmagenta wrote: post #8

I love all the unexpected twists in this. And it’s very beautifully written and sobering. > the most important thing was to find xin fu in life, not to live your life in accordance to the expectations of anyone else That is why I write all of my code in uncommented C. Your expectation of a maintainable program that doesn’t segfault all the time is just your expectation. > he wasted his entire life, my mom said In som…

There is no path without some things missed, or regretted. Some people will always see the regrets, some will always see the positives.

That it is any other way is just something we tell ourselves to try to provide more foresight or potential meaning than is really available.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#23

Post by xandrius »

inglor_cz wrote: post #5

I like the storytelling, but the sentences without caps are pretty hard for me to parse. The constant search for the beginning of the next sentence destroys the emotional experience for me; I just can't dive into the text and feel "submerged".

Yep, I find that stylistic writing choice to be rather selfish. It might be because I'm a gamedev at heart but a huge part of writing is UX: sure you have something to say but the way you say it for the reader to actually go through all of it is almost as important.

That's why I think shortish chapters are good UX, instead of a single unbroken one. Using a good font, making use of paragraphs to divide sections and using caps whenever required.

I personally think if a writer doesn't care to even add a bunch capitalisation to make my life easier then I assume that piece of writing is mainly for themselves and I immediately stop reading, since it's not meant for me but for them.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#27

Post by mierz00 »

rjdj377dhabsn wrote: post #16
inglor_cz wrote: post #5

I like the storytelling, but the sentences without caps are pretty hard for me to parse. The constant search for the beginning of the next sentence destroys the emotional experience for me; I just can't dive into the text and feel "submerged".

Agreed. I normally find the complaints about formatting to be petty, but for a long form writing piece like this, all lowercase is just a bad choice with no discernable upside.

I’ve come to love this style of writing. While not quite the same, Tim Winton’s Cloud Street felt similar.

Just raw thoughts, no rules.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#28

Post by ninalanyon »

apples_oranges wrote: post #9

"He wasted his life", sounds so dramatic, but what does it really mean. It's just an emotion like regret triggered by made up standards. If things were different and in the end they would have said "he lived his best life", what difference would it make except a few different words, differently arranged. Not sure what my point is, but perhaps being too much into Buddhism and similar things made me lose touch with mor…

The waste is that he, and I too, could have lived a happier life had we had the courage and opportunity to come out earlier.

Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters

#29

Post by inglor_cz »

stavros wrote: post #24
gritten wrote: post #22

[flagged]

thats quite the strong response to what is, in essence, a matter of preference

Communication conventions aren't "just" a preference in the sense that they actually lower the friction inherent in any communication. It may be pretty hard to understand other people even if you use the same conventions to write down your thoughts. It becomes harder when the conventions aren't kept: the extra processing necessary has non-zero cost.

Imagine Debian maintainers releasing a slightly incompatible TLS library because of their preferences.

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