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After my dad died, we found the love letters

jenn.site

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

#31

Post by inglor_cz »

mierz00 wrote: post #27
rjdj377dhabsn wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They still respect writing rules, in fact - except for the capitalizations.

If they wrote, say, phonetically instead, the text would become utterly unreadable, even though the raw thoughts in one's head aren't expressed in written English.

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

#32

Post by stavros »

inglor_cz wrote: post #29
stavros wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lib…

Right, but if this piece was clearly optimising for something other than efficiency of transmitted information, and that's why it was good.

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

#33

Post by skylurk »

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".

Here's another piece of writing, from a very different author, with lots of capitals. Maybe you like it more?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42889/hope-is-the-thi...

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

#34

Post by ninalanyon »

inglor_cz wrote: post #29
stavros wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lib…

Debian maintainers do a lot of things because of their preferences that have caused many people to criticize them.

Do you also criticize Shostakovich because he doesn't write in the style of Beethoven?

One could argue that a stylistic choice that slows down the reader is good because it forces the reader to pay closer attention. That is the extra processing has not only a cost but, plausibly, also a benefit.

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

#37

Post by inglor_cz »

stavros wrote: post #32
inglor_cz wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lib…

Right, but if this piece was clearly optimising for something other than efficiency of transmitted information, and that's why it was good.

I feel that this piece was trying to convey some quite profound emotions, and quite successfully so, but the insistence on non-capitalization was just getting in the way of this main effort.

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

#38

Post by quitit »

From reading both posts, there's a few things that come to my mind:

- It seems this is how the author is processing her father's passing, and it's not really up to us to make moral calls on the content of the posts. They are thoughts with gaps of missing context against a real life of highs and lows which is not readily condensed into a blog post.

- I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a violation. Even though they have passed, the people around them are very much alive.

- We can't makes guesses at what a person truly values, neither positively nor negatively. What can be seen as promiscuity can also be seen as seeking validation, human motives and emotions exist in the grey area.

- This is a person who was deprived of the sort of genuine sexual and emotional attention that we take for granted from puberty age. They lived as a type of outsider in school, work, and their daily norms. The integrity of their actions shouldn't be evaluated against our own values which were likely built from a different life experience.

- It's ok not knowing or judging. One has to practice a type of "radical acceptance" when reviewing these sorts of life matters.

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

#40

Post by Mistletoe »

skylurk wrote: post #11

There's a follow-up posted already too. https://www.jenn.site/my-dead-deadbeat-gay-dad/

Yeah kind of wish I hadn’t read that one. But the whole truth is always best to know. Somehow makes his story so much more sad.

Edit: Oh my goodness didn’t realize this was the same Dad from: https://jenn.site/my-dad-could-still-be-alive-but-hes-not/

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