So I (sorta) took part in the March 2023 photo challenge of micro.blog. Only I didn’t take photos, but made sketches, mostly with pencil on paper. I did use the prompts. However, I didn’t always post on the appropriate day. Of course, I wasn’t included in the daily grid of photos.

Strava on the web was having a hard time serving content, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t on their end. So I force-quit a few apps, and things went to normal after the Gmail app was put out of business. Still could be a coincidence, though, but I don’t rule the app out from being behaving poorly.

While I deleted a reply that was negative about musical instruments, I still want to explain why I prefer not to hear music. It’s really simple, every time something horrible happens, it’s usually accompanied by (very loud) music. It’s like an itch, which can be removed by the pain of scratching.

Re my previous post, I saw the original movie of Dune (1984) on television, and was totally confused after watching. I believe I wasn’t the only one. I even had read one of the books in Dutch translation ten years earlier, and the movie was still a mystery to me (what’s it about, anyway?).

The speed reading fallacy: the case for slow reading - Ness Labs

Instead of trying to read faster, strive to read better.

On a personal note, I sometimes catch myself vocalizing what I read, to silence the noise going on in my mind, then subvocalize, finally reading words by their shape, all within 15 minutes. Rereading paragraphs I see myself doing as well, sometimes even rereading previous chapters.

Reading as many books as possible seems silly to me, since it’s only performative, an empty achievement, without benefiting anyone, least myself. Some books take longer to read than others.

I wonder if this book counts as reading material: Avatar - The Last Airbender - Art by Bryan Konietzko 📚 It’s more like reference material, somewhere between a novel and a dictionary.