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The importance of handwriting is now better understood

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Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never made any progress learning to drive, and I still can't write legibly without carefully considering every letter. These one to one things are not easy. The pen acts like an untrained intern. It does exactly what you say and doesn't deviate from that. The computer acts as your manager. It tells you exactly what spot to hit to make a letter. I'm not sure if this is pure crackpot armchair psychology, but my theor…

I understand where you're coming from, you appear to have the ability to relate to images on your own terms, nearly completely. I do not. I have at all times, "two sets of books" or "two maps". Unified by a singular Duty that limits what I can and can't do. My imagination is tied to imaging the next step in my 'journey'. (something like that anyway, it has subjectivity built into it). I cannot dump relations to rando…

You seem like you would enjoy programming in FORTH or perhaps LISP. I've never had much interest in either, I've always liked the modern crop of OOP languages, but they seem perfect for out of the box thinkers, they're specifically meant for people with ideas that go outside of what's already out there. Forth is especially interesting since it's the one language where it's very common to build your own implementation. Have you spent much time with either?

I wonder what tech would look like if it were less hostile to out of the box thinkers. Probably we would have a lot of really neat stuff, even though we do things in boring repetitive ways for a reason, it allows people with mediocre skills to produce great results be sacrificing elegance instead of predictability.

When I first got into tech, I did a lot more myself. None of my ideas were at innovative, most were copies of things I'd seen somewhere, but I wasn't familiar with what existing tools were out there, why I'd want to use them, what kind if features I'd want on real world projects, etc.

It wasn't so much that I had these amazing ideas I wanted to share, but I was attached to the genius innovator myth, like on Jimmy Neutron or Blankman or something. Everyone wants to be the on who discovers something great, but none of what I was doing actually seemed to be that great, I was just doing NIH and telling myself it was, plus being too lazy and full of task inertia to learn the industry solutions.

As time went on I got more and more into just using what everyone else uses, exactly the way it was meant to be used, and rethinking my whole approach if I found myself doing anything remotely outside what "the documentation for plebs" wants me to do.

I think it might be pretty cool to be able to think on multiple levels like that, seeing how things work, and having vision of how they could be better, outside of minor incremental improvements to existing tools.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#162
post #18
post #3

I have started to journal last month. I came to it through pens when I randomly decided to find a good pen when I got interested in it through some youtube videos(wow, YT actually working as intended, for once). To anyone interested, Pentel Energel 0.7mm is the best gel pen in the entire world, hands down. For oil-based ink, it would be Uniball Jetstream, i guess(i am gel guy). I always wanted to journal and thought…

Do you have any recommendations for getting over the friction of starting? Like, suggestions of what to write about if you're unsure what's worth putting to paper. I'm sure I'd have plenty to write once I got started, but an empty notebook is intimidating!

My first entry was like "Welcome to thunderrabbit's journal! Today is April 11, 1987 and I just had a fun experience that I want to remember..."

Journaling off and on since 1987, I have a few rules for myself when journaling:

1. Write the time, day of week, date, month, and year for every entry.

2. Don't worry about lapses in writing. Just write a new entry when I can.

3. Allow my topics to be spontaneous. I sometimes have a structure I'd like to use, but allow freedom in any moment.

4. Relish mistakes, smears, stains on the paper by labeling them, e.g. "tea stain while studying with Akane" (real example!)

5. Just enjoy the process of writing.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#163

I would love to write but my handwriting has always been poor and mocked by others, which has put me off

Should not matter; get started. My handwriting is atrocious (right from early school days my teachers have complained about it) and yet i write. Writing is personal; you are engaged in communicating with yourself and not with others; thus it doesn't matter what it looks like as long as you freely express yourself.

It’s not fun if it doesn’t look good

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should not matter; get started. My handwriting is atrocious (right from early school days my teachers have complained about it) and yet i write. Writing is personal; you are engaged in communicating with yourself and not with others; thus it doesn't matter what it looks like as long as you freely express yourself.

It’s not fun if it doesn’t look good

There is a lot of silliness that something has to be "fun" in order to do it. Writing is talking to yourself, disciplining and bringing clarity to your thoughts, building a mental model and more. The goal is to understand something better and/or express oneself freely and not showboating/looking good.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should not matter; get started. My handwriting is atrocious (right from early school days my teachers have complained about it) and yet i write. Writing is personal; you are engaged in communicating with yourself and not with others; thus it doesn't matter what it looks like as long as you freely express yourself.

It’s not fun if it doesn’t look good

Many things worth learning start out as not fun

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not fun if it doesn’t look good

There is a lot of silliness that something has to be "fun" in order to do it. Writing is talking to yourself, disciplining and bringing clarity to your thoughts, building a mental model and more. The goal is to understand something better and/or express oneself freely and not showboating/looking good.

I don’t do something that isn’t fun unless I have to

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#167
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup - I liked taking notes using my laptop because I could copy down what the professor was saying verbatim. This gave me two advantages; (1) I could focus on the lecture itself and not how to best summarize the lecture, and (2) I could review the notes later as a higher quality product than what I would have invented. This strategy didn't work for things like math classes which were hard to take computer notes on.

Why not just a audio/visual recording? Even when I took notes via laptop in class it was never a direct transcription.

I would never go back to an audio/visual recording, that simply takes too much time
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