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Thin desires are eating life

joanwestenberg.com

91–100 of 285 posts

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#91

> 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…

Im just learning this is a thing, tell me more, how long do you leave it in there? Any ratio's you use?

Baking is weird. You first should start by following instructions to the letter. Then once you get it you'll be able to break all the rules.

The bread rises because of the yeast bacteria eats sugar and expels carbon dioxide. So ask yourself, what does yeast like? Probably not hard to guess that it's a warm, moist environment with plenty of sugar. Too cold and they're slow moving. Too hot and they burn up. But the goldilocks zone is that of most bacteria, a hot summer day in the tropics.

How long to rise? That's more a question of how fluffy you want the bread and how fast the bacteria eats the sugar.

Follow instructions while you're learning but think about things like this while practicing and you'll get your answers pretty quickly. The problem is no one can actually give you a direct answer because there's variance. Besides, the more important skill is to learn to generalize and get the intuition for it. So pay attention to how sticky the dough is, how fluffy, how it stretches, and all the other little things. Think about it during and after. If you do this I promise you'll get your answer very quickly

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#92

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,…

This type of layout - short or 1 sentence paragraphs - has been around since the early days of the web. An early proponent was the BBC news website, and you can see they still adopt this style. The BBC found that breaking up text in this way made it easier to read on a web page.

News is the ultimate in thin writing, by definition.

I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing. It's explicitly advocating for people to engage with the world around them, even if that means they have to face the possibility of changing themselves.

Long-form paragraphs are exactly that: harder to read, but they invite you to grapple with the material that's being written.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of layout - short or 1 sentence paragraphs - has been around since the early days of the web. An early proponent was the BBC news website, and you can see they still adopt this style. The BBC found that breaking up text in this way made it easier to read on a web page.

News is the ultimate in thin writing, by definition. I think the article would've been improved by varying sentence structure and paragraph length. There is a time and place for short paragraphs, and they do make things easier to read. However, the whole point the article is making is that many things that are worth doing are not easy, and many things that are easy are not worth doing . It's explicitly advocating for…

Interspersed single sentence and denser paragraphs, seem to get the most bang out of both.

My reply was prompted by both the substance and style of your comment. :)

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#95
post #39
post #34

Why is every sentence also a paragraph?

I find myself doing this for anything "work related" like slack. It's definitely a thing on Linkedin posts. The idea is it's like TikTok for text. Short self-contained visual "things" that keep grabbing back your fading attention. I don't like it, but I like that I think about why it is and that, in a "professional" environment, it somehow (sadly) makes sense.

I've only ever seen this style as a satire of hustle bros. So I assume it must be a real thing originally.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#96

> We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need. I do not have more than I need. Very much the opposite - despite making a decent living, I cannot afford the bulk of my medical care that makes my life a lot more comfortable and extends my lifespan. making ends meet is sometimes difficult. > We're hungry for less, while more accumulates and multiplies. See above. > We're hungry and we don't have words to articu…

[deleted]

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#97
post #87

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.

I agree with you to a degree. I considered that as a reason as well, and "meeting people where they are" in communication design is something I think about a lot.

But if using an approachable format to deliver an alternative message was the strategy, I think we'd see a few places where the author tried to stretch the format slightly, to give a few core ideas more chance to resonate. In which case it could have been a masterful use of an antithetical format, to prove and point and enrich the message.

Instead, since the entire post conforms, it feels much more like an internalized autopilot, or purposefully manipulative technique.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#98

Even with thick desires, I sometimes find myself day-dreaming about the state when I have mastered a skill or understood a topic deeply. At the same time, I know from experience that the process never ends. Even when one does master a skill, one is deeply aware of what one doesn't know or understand or what one is not good at within that domain. What helps me is to focus on today. If I can spend even an hour on a top…

Oh yeah decades in I still feel I know f-all about programming. Doesn't help the field keeps expanding expintentially. E.g. I look most things up. I am basicially a slow LLM!

You're kind of the opposite of a slow LLM. LLMs don't look anything up, they enthusiastically assert that they're correct. They have no desire to know anything.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#99

> 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…

Im just learning this is a thing, tell me more, how long do you leave it in there? Any ratio's you use?

Depends on the method/recipe. Most of the recipes I follow have at least two rising steps, following by another one after the dough is shaped into its final loaf (or whatever shape you want). Each one would be about an hour and half or so. It could be done with a single rise as well, but two rises tends to give more flavor. If you don't want it right away, a slow overnight rise in the fridge is also pretty good.

"No-knead" recipes usually involve 20-30 minute cadence of "fold-and-stretch" followed by a rise to allow the gluten to develop naturally without kneading. Usually about four times.

Re: Thin desires are eating life

#100

Even with thick desires, I sometimes find myself day-dreaming about the state when I have mastered a skill or understood a topic deeply. At the same time, I know from experience that the process never ends. Even when one does master a skill, one is deeply aware of what one doesn't know or understand or what one is not good at within that domain. What helps me is to focus on today. If I can spend even an hour on a top…

If you didn't daydream like that would you have the motivation to pursue it? Are not those daydreams your kind encouraging you? "Look how great it'll be, this is why you'll put in the hard work now". You can get trapped in the dreams, of course, but they're useful too
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