A bundle of comments

Comments to articles around the web, on my turf.

Bengawalk

There's a lot of whining about Bengaluru's broken and crumbling infrastructure. Pravar, the creator of Bengawalk takes a refreshing and productive approach and demonstrates that clear articulation can improve things on the margin.

His video review of the Majestic station spoke to me. I always looked at the terrible signage and grumbled in my head. Pravar made it a video, which is much higher net value.

Not long after he posted this, there's been some improvements, some of which Pravar seems to have directly been involved in.

Here's also another group of people removing some trash from the awfully grimy Domlur flyover. Also clearly attributed to Bengawalk.

Note that this is different from complaining on social media along with other forms of slacktivism. A lot of effort is put into studying and articulating the issue. It's not just about drawing attention to the information flow, it's also about the quality of what you're putting out.

Please for the love of all that is holy: Stop writing long boring Titles

Good article on creating good titles. As baseline tips, I think these are correct. But if I were to extract the actual lesson here, it's about finding the right balance between finding an authentic voice, while also convincing people to read your work (which may involve a familiar bag of tricks).

I’ve been dealing with a particularly virulent form of code switching in the simple form of titling blogposts and talks. When you ask the writer face to face what their thing is about, they can give you a perfectly human explanation. And then when they send you their piece, it’s all “Leveraging GenAI with Robust Data Foundations to Transform Businesses”. I’ve left my body by the time I read the first word.

If you're too cliché, you risk getting drowned in the sloppy sea of internet information.

Sometimes titles don't matter. Like the title of what you're reading now. My intention is to simply imprint my thoughts on the internet sometimes, but not necessarily drive readership towards it. Catch my drift?

Jo Cameron

I recently read about Jo Cameron. Fascinating case of someone who has a different relationship to suffering than most of us. Particularly interesting is that she lacks both pain responses and emotional suffering.

Review of her medical chart showed that she had also reported little to no pain with hip replacement, for which her pain scores were 0/10 or 1/10 once on the postoperative evening.^[3][5] Srivastava remained slightly skeptical until Cameron allowed him to perform a normally very painful maneuver used by anesthesiologists on patients who are having difficulty regaining consciousness following sedation.^[3] This maneuver involves pressing hard on the inner edges of the eye sockets, which results in strong pain that shocks people awake.^[3] Cameron felt no pain from the maneuver, instead experiencing only pressure.^[3]

Aside from her lack of pain, Cameron was additionally described as characteristically happy, friendly, talkative, optimistic, and compassionate, as well as exceedingly affectionate and loving towards family members.^{[3][1][12][2][5]} Moreover, she was lacking in anxiety, depression, worry, fear, panic, grief, dread, and negative affect generally.^[3][1][2][5] She reported a long history of mild memory lapses and forgetfulness as well.^[2][5]

I am actually not sure if I'd want whatever she has. There's a clear upside to having a pain and some suffering response. Luckily, reducing suffering is easier than most people think.

Writing without a plan

I enjoyed Ankur's article about his writing process. It felt like he was saying the quiet part out loud about how people mostly write, versus how they are "supposed to write".

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve followed the same process for writing pretty much anything:
1. Decide what I want to write about
2. Dump all my thoughts about that topic into a new document
3. Reorganize my braindump into a coherent outline in the form of bullet points, making sure there’s a logical progression of ideas from start to end
4. Turn the bullet point outline into readable prose
5. Fix grammar, spelling, style, and tone
6. Publish
[...]
For me personally, this process just does not work for most kinds of writing I’m interested in. Or rather, it works to the extent that it allows me to produce something that looks like writing, but it makes the process of committing words to paper feel robotic and utilitarian.
[...]
So, for most of the creative writing I’ve done this year, I’ve followed a different process:
1. Set a timer for 45 minutes
2. Open a blank document and start typing
3. Wrote a good thing? Fix grammar, spelling, style, and tone. Then publish.
4. Wrote a bad thing? Move document to a Graveyard folder and try again.

Another salient point that's rarely mentioned or taught about writing is that technique and processes can only take you so far. A person has to also live a well-examined life to be able to have something to write about.

Pirsig captured this elegantly in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I'll end this piece with his passage:

He'’d been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn'’t. They just couldn't think of anything to say.

One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.

When the paper came due she didn't have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say.

He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they’d confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hardworking, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn't bluffing him, she really couldn't think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.

It just stumped him. Now he couldn't think of anything to say. A silence occurred, and then a peculiar answer: “Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman.” It was a stroke of insight. She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn't think of anything to say, and couldn't understand why, if she couldn't think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.

He was furious. “You’re not looking!” he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for having too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn't looking and yet somehow didn't understand this.

He told her angrily, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick.”

Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide. She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”

Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn't think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

Written in response to a prompt at the IndieWebClub meetup, Bangalore where I'm supposed to comment on articles or media I've seen around the web lately.