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Thin desires are eating life

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: Thin desires are eating life

#161

Post by euroderf »

> How could this be, when we've gotten so good at giving people what they want?

> Maybe because we've gotten good at giving people what they want in a way that prevents them from wanting anything worth having.

This has a political interpretation too. Have you noticed that online "petitions" have mostly disappeared lately ? Maybe this disappearance is based on now-widespread recognition that the way to get the attention and concern of the political establishment is to get out on the streets and make some noise.

Online activity can _motivate_ protest, but it cannot really express protest in a way that "matters". It's busy work. Keep the monkeys at their typewriters.

Online is the equivalent of hanging a sign in your window; it does not tell you whether your opinion is shared by most of your fellow citizens. Thousands of likes versus the knowledge that social media keeps each of us in our bubble, feeding us more.

But a monster rally in your city and elsewhere can tell you precisely that your opinion is shared by most (or "sufficiently many") of your fellow citizens. Pithy placards to the fore!

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#163

Post by ssl-3 »

mplewis wrote: post #159
unyttigfjelltol wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The prose is self-consciously different, makes the reader work a little harder. One can almost feel a literary water ripple or pebble garden, stillness and simplicity. Consider an analogy: the writer knows that a reader readily digests concepts in C++ and purposely pivots to something obscure like Pony. The reader says "this is inconvenient, I need to change my process to digest your work" and the author says "that's…

ok, but there's nothing there. The point of this piece is empty calories.

I thought the point was about baking bread?

I've never baked a loaf of bread.

I've never baked anything more complex than a pre-packaged cornbread mix, or a frozen pizza.

Baking has always been someone else's problem.

But having now skimmed through this bit of weirdly-formatted writing, I might give it a shot.

(Oh, and of that formatting: It reminds me a bit of what suck.com looked like in the mid-late 1990s. I still have the sticker they sent me stuck to a thing ~30 years later, but the suck-branded Gold Circle Coin condom they sent with it got mangled pretty bad in the mail.)

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#165

Post by bee_rider »

xiaomai wrote: post #87
ianstormtaylor wrote: post #47

I can't help but feel that this article was written in a format that is the textual equivalent of thin desires… Every sentence is separated into its own paragraph, like each one is supposed to be revelatory (or maybe tweet-worthy). It's pretty common design knowledge that if you try to emphasize everything, you end up emphasizing nothing. The result is that reading the article feels choppy, and weirdly unsatisfying,…

I think it makes sense to write like this if you're intended audience is already used to consuming "thin" desire media.

Hah, that’s a good point. It’s always interesting to see somebody find a clever little bit of redemption for a widely disliked aspect in an article—nice.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#166

Post by eCa »

datastoat wrote: post #151
ablob wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A paragraph is a feature designed to help the reader understand the writer's intentions. If it is used all the time, just like here, then it ceases to be helpful in marking breaks in trains of thought; or anything for that matter. Consider the following excerpt of the post: The thick life doesn't scale. That's the whole point. So: bake bread. There is absolutely no information there that would warrant three full stop…

Wouldn’t it be handy if the browser could intelligently join this author’s sentences into paragraphs?! (in connection to the thread about Mozilla putting AI in the browser)

No, I want to read it (or not) the way the writer intended.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#167

Post by phito »

drdaeman wrote: post #84
phito wrote: post #8

Very nicely written. I've been slowly removing thin desires from my life. It's hard to do at first, but what I've noticed is once I am free from them, I do not miss them at all. Almost like I was under a spell.

I'm not sure it makes sense to classify desires as "good" or "bad" desires, or "thick" and "thin" (or however we may want to label it). One can make such a binary distinction, but it could be just as much as harmful as it could be helpful. There's always a nuance, a hidden variable that makes the whole thing moot. If there's anything meaningfully binary, I think it's only an internal conflict between one's self-perce…

I agree, I would define those *thin desires" as whatever I'm engaging in a lot automatically, but if I were to pause and ask myself "do I really want to do this? Is this beneficial to me or am I being exploited?", part of me would say no. My "thin desires" might not be someone else's. We each have to take the time to ask ourselves these questions in order to figure it out.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#168

Post by markburns »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #106
ianstormtaylor wrote: post #47

I can't help but feel that this article was written in a format that is the textual equivalent of thin desires… Every sentence is separated into its own paragraph, like each one is supposed to be revelatory (or maybe tweet-worthy). It's pretty common design knowledge that if you try to emphasize everything, you end up emphasizing nothing. The result is that reading the article feels choppy, and weirdly unsatisfying,…

Reading, I knew someone would comment on it. I actually prefer the style - maybe because my attention span is shot. But I think it’s more because the author made sure each sentence was content heavy. No verbose paragraphs. And paragraphs made of dense sentences are themselves dense and become harder to read. Reflect on the structure of your own comment. I suspect you were not intentionally trying to be ironic. Edit:…

> Reflect on the structure of your own comment

Could you clarify, are you comparing the parent comment to the article?

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#169

Post by wlesieutre »

datastoat wrote: post #151
ablob wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A paragraph is a feature designed to help the reader understand the writer's intentions. If it is used all the time, just like here, then it ceases to be helpful in marking breaks in trains of thought; or anything for that matter. Consider the following excerpt of the post: The thick life doesn't scale. That's the whole point. So: bake bread. There is absolutely no information there that would warrant three full stop…

Wouldn’t it be handy if the browser could intelligently join this author’s sentences into paragraphs?! (in connection to the thread about Mozilla putting AI in the browser)

Heck just skip the website and ask the AI to make some text for you to read

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#170

Post by ssl-3 »

DarmokJalad1701 wrote: post #44

> The yeast doesn't care about your schedule. > The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization. Joke's on them! I run my oven until the temperature inside is ~100F - about a minute or so. Then I turn it off and set the dough in there along with some water (for humidity). It rises super fast compared to my kitchen which is ~65F in the winter and the bread is just as flavorful. Definitely not indif…

I don't bake, but I once installed an off-the-shelf PID controller into my kitchen oven[1] and this gave me some insights on things that are normally kind of inconvenient to observe (what, with the bright always-on LED display glaring at me at all times while I was in the kitchen with a constant report of what temperature in there was).

Like: The oven light. It's an incandescent bulb, which is also to say that it's waaaay better at being a heater than it is at being a source of light.

I found that leaving the light switched on in the oven, and the oven door closed, kept the temperature right around 100F. It varied a bit depending on ambient, but never by more than a few degrees.

---

[1]: It was an old Frigidaire-built electric range that someone gave me for free. It worked, until one day when I switched it on at a sensible temperature setting and put a frozen pizza in there. The temperature control then failed, and it failed stuck in the on position. The pizza was very badly burned and looked pretty crispy when I came back to it a short time later.

And when I tried to retrieve the pizza, the hotpad in my hand was converted directly from fabric into smoke as soon as it touched the pan.

While I lamented about the lost pizza and the expense of buying new replacement parts for an old freebie oven, a friend suggested using a PID controller and an SSR instead.

So I did exactly that: I bought the parts (including ceramic wire nuts and fiberglass-insulated wire), cut a square hole in the panel with a grinder and a deathwheel for the new controls, mounted an SSR in a recess on the back with an enormous heatsink, and it all went together splendidly. I put the new bits in series with the old bits, so it was never any less-safe than it had become on its own accord.

I miss that oven sometimes. It was actually kind of fun learning how to tune the PID, and to be able to reliably get a consistent temperature from it.

The oven-light discovery was just an accident; if I actually wanted 100F for some reason, I'd have just set the PID box to that temperature.

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