Big TIL for me: in Markdown you can end a line with two or more trailing spaces and hit new line/enter
to produce a line break!!
My main thing today:
Not much time to explain stuff, but I have two photobook reviews here that left a big impression
on me today. Both by Jörg Colberg, both about (beyond the photobook they are critiquing)
the obsession of most of photo-world, most mid-level photographers like myself anyway, with
the fact that cameras can record a very short moment. Like just because the camera is good at
that, that’s all photography should be focused on. Street and documentary work especially,
my own work even more so.
Many thoughts, not much time, here are the articles:
Ambience Decay
Splinter
Go read them.
Well, anyways.
Always a fucking demand. I feel like all day every day all I experience is getting
my attention yanked this way or that by everyone and everything. People, pets, friends,
loved ones, tools, systems, tasks, the bin, my home, everything just yanks me randomly.
“Pay attention to me, do this now, not that, do that now, not this, come here, go there,
be present, be practical, be emotional, be fun, be serious, now, now, now, now!”
It never fucking stops.
Why do I experience so many things as demands? It honestly feels like that.
This must be an ADHD thing, feeling like I’m holding onto whatever’s going on in my mind
at the moment and suddenly - YANK! Some external force pulls me away and I watch my
attention fall away with whatever my mental state was and now I’m confused, like
a sleepwalker that just woke up in the middle of the garden. But the demands don’t stop,
they expect me to be immediately ready to engage, and I’m just blinking there, groggy,
and I try to force myself to grab onto the new thing, to be present, to focus, to do,
say, listen, operate, think.
But that’s not how it works, is it. I can’t just grab on, on demand. That’s kind of the
point of ADHD. Grabbing on is automatic, I can’t directly control it. Like that scammy
grabbing machine game, where you have some control over the arm, but when and where it
grabs isn’t up to you. So I jostle the joystick, try to move myslef into a good position
so that if and when the grabbing happens, I’ll be aiming where I need to be. But it’s not
a sure thing and I am annoyed and angry and ashamed, because the Demands need me to
nail it and nail it now and I just can’t. I try and I try and I cry with frustration
but the arm won’t be dictated to, not even by me.
Well, anyways.
I’ve gone down a hyperfocus hole these past two days about finding a
cheap, handheld Linux terminal device. I was dreaming about setting up
a terminal-only environment on it, with things like a Beeper client, a
git repo for text notes, little python scripts, drafting logs here and
posts for my website.
I think what draws me to this idea is a feeling that the little apps
and utilities in a Unix system are like little creatures, with
personalities and quirks and behaviors that I can interact with. These
software-creatures are easier, because while they have personalities
to make them interesting and they “talk back” to me, they are clearly
defined, knowable. I can get to know them and be confident that I know
what buttons to push to get what results.
In real life it’s not so easy. Real humans are not so thoroughly
knowable, they are squishy and large and complex inside, real people
are infinite. That’s scary, so I try to retreat to my safe little
digital creatures. I look for this in places like
tilde.town, as well as in regular smartphone apps
and little obsessions like the current one. I want my safe, finite,
controllable digital creatures, that I can puzzle out and then once I
did, I can know them forever.
I tend to jump head first into rabbit holes/hyperfocus holes on ideas
of vague enjoyment and coolness instead of specific, practical
usecases. Like, say I get myself a BlackBerry Q5/10/20, set up Term49,
set up BerryMuch and now I have a handheld Unix-y device.
(I spent the last two days looking this up, so I’m confident this would
actually work.)
But now what?
The problem is that I don’t start with a problem to solve, a set of
things I want to do but don’t have a good way to. Like would I really
write Python scripts on the bus or at a cafe with this? I don’t write
Python scripts now on my laptop at home, so why would being “on the go”
make me do this suddenly? Same with communication. I don’t chat to many
people now on my iPhone and laptop, just having a weird terminal-based
chat application won’t change that.
The tool is not the answer.
And here is the crux of my problem: instead of defining my problems
properly, thinking through to their source and addressing that,
I run to picking up a new tool (phyisical or virtual) as a shortcut.
I feel overwhelmed and disconnected from my whole self at times? Let’s
make a new website, that’ll solve it. I feel disconnected from people?
Let’s buy a new gadget and spend days setting it up as an esoteric
text based system, that will solve it.
Usually what happens, is I get the tool, set it up, tinker with it in
and increasingly desperate and obsessive way, and then when it’s done,
I sit there and don’t have anything to do on it. At the end of the day,
I do the things I do already, regardless of what device or software
I have in hand. I will behave the same, feel the same on an iPhone, a
Linux laptop or a BlackBerry hacked to run Unix applications.
I will scroll mindlessly, on Facebook or the obscure Gopher protocol,
but I’ll scroll just the same. I scroll, I tinker, I obsess and that’s
all a great distraction from the fact that life is hard and scary and
fundamentally unknowable. I’m like a toddler handing on to his
pacifier for dear life for protection. The pacifier might make him feel
better a bit, but it’s just a piece of plastic and rubber, it won’t
protect him from the world. The world is here, all around, whether I
cling to my little piece of plastic and rubber or not.