july
your musings, thoughts & dreams; welcome here
@ashwinikumar.eth
There's nothing better than freeing yourself and actually feeling things again.
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@ashwinikumar.eth
Take your own sweet time but the hardest lesson that is a must learn is you need to choose yourself first and there's nothing selfish about it.
Even the empaths will agree.
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@july
I've been thinking about archery a lot lately. I've barely done it, and I don't even intend to do archery this year in 2026.
Funny story, I know… it's easy to sum up archery as practice where you have to get the arrow to hit the target, and while this is absolutely true from an external perspective viewing the process of archery happen - an archer shooting an arrow hitting the target, I think the practitioner of the art of archery themselves do not have an intention to hit the target. I think it's more an art of self-management and practice. No - it's about learning who you are in the topology of how you react to the world, how you feel things, what you think.
So — this is done through the case of archery shooting the arrow over and over again. The goal is to hit the target once again, but that seems to me less the goal because in the practice itself you're learning how to learn something so inside out that you don't think about doing it anymore. That is a surprisingly difficult task when you are a true expert at something. For example, I think you are an expert at your language that you grew up with. There's a tendency to forget that language is a very complex task, social interactions on a daily basis, nodding social cues, what to say when - all these things are very complicated and the whole entire process is a learned thing that you don't do so much and forget how easy it is for you, but you do forget how hard it is for anyone who hasn't done that for years or hasn't grown up around that culture or doesn't know the language.
I feel similarly about sticking with this example archery. You see someone who often does archery better than you. It's not that they're just inherently better than you, though that is the case sometimes. Some people just simply have more capacity to want to keep doing it, but really it is a matter of time. I think if you practice archery so often, you start to forget what it's like to not pull the string. There's a sort of natural motion that one learns, that is not so natural to become.
Archery then becomes much more about growing another limb. People throw this concept of mastering a tool pretty liberally out there in the world today. I think one of the things that we're missing is the tool is so transient these days. It switches and changes and moves so fast. We don't have time to intimately master it and help or have it become another limb for us.
I think certain tools are easier at becoming limbs for us, I think some tools sometimes are more growths that happen for us, they control us, but I think when you have something like archery and you master it, it becomes an extension of self in a way that beguiles even the most gifted practitioners.
So, but after a certain moment over time, with that sort of mastery of it becoming an extension of the limb, really truly pulling the string on the bow and letting it go. I would describe it as more the arrow getting sucked into the center of the target, more than you trying to hit the target. That's how I feel about archery.
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@pjc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50L44hEtVos
Adjacent thought: "Extreme late-binding permits you to not commit too early to the "one true way" of solving an issue — and thus makes it easier to change those decisions — but can also allow you to build systems that you can change while they are still running." — Alan Kay
👋 Happy new year @july!
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@july
I am a slow decision-maker at times
It takes me a really long time to come to decisions. Especially about ideas and things that I've never encountered before. Which makes me wonder, what is a decision? Because sometimes I make decisions that either I'm wrong, sometimes I make decisions and they prove right, but I don't even remember making the decision. I wonder if decisions are just simply heuristics.
I'd prefer to think of decisions more like hitting a tennis ball. Or rowing. As if it's some sort of physical activity. A decision is not final, though some are much more difficult to reverse, or even sometimes impossible. But there's varying degrees of irreversibility to them. I think of decisions as being physical acts of rowing or tennis.
What I mean by that is you think a lot about what direction you're rowing in or you think a lot about how to hit a ball on the tennis racket. If you work with professional tennis coaches from an early age, there are stories of tennis coaches that don't even let you hit a ball in a racket unless you've really fully learned the form and the process for how to hit a ball.
I think about decisions similarly in this way. I think it's mostly a process that borrows pretty well from physical activity metaphors.
You scan the horizon to understand your context. You practise your form to be able to execute on demand. Then you learn the most important thing, which is timing. How to time the oar or how to time the point of impact. That's always often seen as the decision.
And then there's other things like strengthening and training to continuously be in the best possible place to hit the ball. Wherever you may be to prepare yourself for all kinds of different situations and all kinds of different outcomes post-decision.
But mostly I think of it as if you've done the training and if you've done your research, most of the work is before hitting the actual tennis ball. I think when I'm slow at decision-making it's because I find myself needing to train myself extremely quickly in something new that I haven't done before, understand it and grok it to 80% and start doing training. That's a borderline impossible task.
And so I make not so good decisions but compound that over a long enough period of time in different domains in different spaces. You start to build essentially a repertoire of training and a repertoire and a registry of pre-made decisions and that becomes the library that you can lean on which allows you to give you an idea about what ball to hit when.
In this way, I think you encounter people who make very quick decisions, or in other words, get to answers really quickly, and you think that they might be some sort of genius or really smart. More often than not, it's that they have a large library, or a large built-up cache of pre-made decisions that they've previously researched or previously understood or contextualized. So the pattern matching is insanely quick without having to do a ton of work in between.
I think observing the fact that I'm a slow decision maker on certain things is recognizing the fact that I have a willingness to dive into getting to a place where I need to make decisions about things that I'm uncomfortable or I don't know much about. Wherever my curiosity drives me towards, I'm willing to live with that, as long as over time I get connected to other things that I can make pretty quick decisions on.
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@adam-
This is a common misconception. People do go to the movies, they’re just not going to multiplexes like they used to because that experience has gotten worse. 30 minutes of car commercials, in addition to a lot of people treating it like their living room where they’re on their phones.
What actually is thriving are smaller or boutique cinemas. (Alamo drafthouse, Prince Charles cinema, and a bunch of others fit this description).
Look at a distributor like A24 & Neon, they’re practically brands onto themselves and release to a dedicated target market.
They do both indie and big budget & lean into a wide range of genres.
It’s easy to confuse the big studios that have more marketing $ and conflate their advertising to assume everything is bland or repetitive. That’s definitely an issue with big studios because the more money that goes into something the less risks they are likely to take.
If there’s enough interest I’ll do a bigger write up on this. I’m just weary if this wallet app with a social feature is the place to do it. Maybe I’ll save it for my new newsletter
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@commstark
I’m watching home alone.
Society really has shifted huge.
This is a legit big budget movie with famous actors, the score by John Williams… and it’s a family movie.
Today, all big budget movies are action movies.
Not sure if it’s because families can’t afford movies or because families aren’t considered by big companies as a result of there being so many DINKs and single 25 year olds who make up the majority of consumerism
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@sarayu--
I love your eyes ma.
I always kiss your eyes and ask you a question, 'Why did I kiss your eyes now?'
And you'd think deeply, stare at me in a way that says, stop repeating the question, and reply, because you like kissing my eyes. Then I'd say, no give me the right answer. You'll put some thought into it and then say, 'because you're my eyes' (yen na nee dhan en kannu).
Then I'd give an audible sigh and ask you to revise your answer. You'll again put some thought into it and then say, 'because I'm your eye' (yen na naan dhan un kannu).
(In tamil calling someone Kannu (eye) is a term of endearment)
Ik I'm being a pester yet I continue being one out of the immeasurable love I have for you and I know you know that because you put up with me, gently.
Pure and simple, I love you. Nothing is as easy and beautiful as loving you.
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