Standing on the shores of space-time…
I am writing this post using WordLand. It was made by Dave Winer who writes Scripting News. I usually visit Scripting News on the browser because it makes more sense on the web than as a feed.
I have been reading a few posts about the refactoring Frontier project today. I found it via a link on the News tab on Scripting News.
Srikanth L introduced me to Zo Computer.
He had used Zo Computer to augment his investigations into the bank.in breach and the Bank of Baroda breach. You can now contribute tokens that could run Zo Computer for investigations.
Zo computer is like a cloud and AI rolled into one. It uses different LLMs to do the task. It also gives you some online hosting space. You can use this to build an app or a website.
I have started using Zo Computer to send me two emails – one at the start of my day and another at the end of my day. The one at the start of the day gives me highlights of news from space, energy, and technical writing. It doesn’t do the best job at this. The one at the end gives me three to five thoughts to consider during the night and prepare for the next day. I like the questions it asks here.
One of the blog posts Zo suggested was Yuki Watanbe’s blog post in Japanese. It talks about his year-long parental leave where he changed how he learned before and after this leave period.
Elizabeth Tai, a technical writer (similar to me), has written two blog posts that I have enjoyed reading:
1. My honest take about life as a techwriter in the AI age
She gives nice tips about how to think about life as a technical writer in the AI age. She is a software technical writer unlike me who is a mechanical and electronics technical writer.
2. Substack writers, you need a website!
She writes about the IndieWeb here.
I have often written about wanting to browse the web the old way. While I visit a few web sites by entering the url in the browser window, I like to read blogs on a feed reader.
So, one of the things that I looked for after I installed Debian 13 was for a feed reader that I can use for it. I found a feed reader for Gnome called Feeds.
It is written by Gabriele Musco.
It is just a river of feed and has three modes you can read a piece that you follow – web view, reader mode, and feed content.
Web view shows how the post would look like if you visited the website.
Reader mode showed you only the content of the post without any distractions.
Feed content mode shows you how the content is seen from the RSS feed point of view.
I loved the simplicity of reading here. It is as good as reading on the web while reading on a RSS feed reader.
8 August is celebrated as Bullet Journal Day. I went into the day questioning if I should continue using the Bullet Journal.
I have been using a Bullet Journal since September 2015. This does not mean that I have a neat pile of notebooks from September 2015 till today. I have written and then abandoned Bullet Journals. I have not been consistent in the last two years.
Since then, I have added a pocket 3.5″ x 5.5″ notebook to the writing practice. Both practices have evolved.
I have been using a pocket notebook to write most things that I was earlier using the Bullet Journal for. The pocket notebook was less of a strain for me to write.
It was similar to using Keep compared to using Obsidian or OneNote.
I had borrowed Hiran’s notebook system as a basis for my own. I asked Hiran if he had changed anything in his notebook system, which I had borrowed. He had made a few changes but none that affected me.
I could not think of anyone else who used the Bullet Journal. This only added the sense of not wanting to continue to use Bullet Journal.
I have found that the Bullet Journal community is now a two-tiered one. One that uses the basic system and adapts it for their own personal use. Another that wants to be part of an official community and are ready to pay for this.
The Bullet Journal website offers two plans for being a part of the community – a Foundation Plan and an Advanced Plan. But, both of these are quite expensive.
I attended Ryder Carroll’s One Hour to Get Unstuck webinar. He shared the practice of Life Inventory which is the first exercise of the Advanced Plan.
In the webinar, he suggested taking a life inventory under 8 categories today – Environment, Work, Relationships, Finances, Personal Growth, Physical Health, Mental Health and Play/Leisure. He then asked us to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. He then asked us to journal why we gave the rating we did.
He then suggested that we imagine we have gone ahead by 12 months. He asked that we use the same 8 categories so that the improvement would have been good enough of a change a year later. Rate. Journal.
The Advanced Plan then says that the journey from now to 12 months from now is a story. We can choose the story and plan it – which is what the Advanced Plan covers, but with a community.
After attending the webinar, I think I will give the Bullet Journal practice one more year. I will give this practice of Life Inventory a chance. I will not be joining any of these plans, though. I would rather co-opt my wife as a partner in crime.
Ryder has updated many aspects of the Bullet Journal which are not in the book of the same name. People in the plans mentioned above supposedly get these updates as well, earlier than they are shared elsewhere. Ryder is a practitioner still using the Bullet Journal and hence, this is understandable.
Dhanya and I watched Anomie after Mohiniattam. I wanted to watch the movie but Dhanya did not initially. The only reason we went ahead was because there was a Pirate Explains video of the film that we could fall back on in case we did not understand the movie.
We did not watch it continuously. But, over a few days.
At the heart of the film is Zara (Bhavana), whose brother’s disappearance — and the string of murders that follows people with a similar condition — and her reveal that they all died under similar conditions sets the plot in motion. Running parallel to the official police inquiry, her own search for answers plays out almost passively for most of the runtime. She asks around, follows leads that go nowhere, and seems, frankly, to be going through the motions rather than driving the case forward.
That’s exactly what makes the third-act reveal land so well. What reads as a half-hearted, meandering investigation turns out to be deliberately constructed that way. Once the reveal hits, you find yourself mentally rewinding through her scenes and realizing the film was quietly building toward this the whole time.
The bigger swing, though, is the film’s central sci-fi conceit. It is a sub-title, The Equation of Death. Rather than treating the afterlife as an abstraction or a metaphor, Anomie visualizes it. The production design and Sujith Sarang’s cinematography lean into color grading and imagery that make the afterlife sequences feel genuinely otherworldly. It almost feels like a space movie.
The Pirate Explains video tells a lot about where the science in Zara’s investigation gets wrong. He also puts in better words the sci-fi visualization in the movie. But, only watch it after you watch the movie.
I wanted to write a daily summary of my day this week. Specifically, because August 8 was BuJo Day. I learnt about Bullet Journal and the practice in September 2015.
This does not mean that I have a neat pile of notebooks from September 2015 till today. I have written and then abandoned Bullet Journals. I have a few partially written Bullet Journals lying around. I have not been consistent in the last two years. I have not written the whole of last week until yesterday.
Since then I have added a pocket 3.5″ x 5.5″ notebook to the writing practice. Both practices have evolved.
I did not read much this week because it was not the first thing that I did. It slipped through the cracks. The only progress I made in reading was in The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings (35%).
I wrote a lot this week for Blaugust 2026 (almost a post per week) including a short story.
I was listening to Sharath A Haridasan’s talk on the worship of the various forms of Devis in Kerala. He says that worshipping the Godess (whichever be her form) must be similar to worship of the child to her/his mother. Children do not think about philosophy before calling their mother. They share with their mother both the good and the bad.
He also shared many stories of people’s experiences praying to their Godesses and I have no explanation for why they left me crying.
Dhanya and I watched the two Malayalam movies, Bharatnatyam and Mohiniattam.
We met the surgeon who advised the recovery protocol. The hospital visit was completed quite quickly. I returned to work. Dhanya had a busy day managing the two kids’ various assignments. The rain did not help.
I re-discovered Mark Manson on YouTube where he has been creating really long videos and videos of intermediate length. Once you admit to yourself that you are getting old, then this video is really useful.
Dhanya and I spent the evening watching the Malayalam movie Anomie. We followed up by watching The Pirate Explains video of the same.
I got a notification saying that 08 August was Bullet Journal Day. I visited Hiran’s digital garden again to see if he had changed the way he writes his notebook, and found that he had.
As I browsed through his Notes, I found this line which really resonated with me:
This is why systems emerge through use, you can’t design a system around what you haven’t measured yet.
I spent quite some time reviewing my use of Bullet Journal. I have moved to a two notebook setup. I use the smaller notebook as a rough notebook.
I also got a copy of the first copy of The Hyphen. The book came in a slightly wet envelope that seemed to carry the memories of the Monsoon. I am not so sure that I will hand over this book to the public library, though. It is so well done.
Dhanya and I watched Governor about the 1991 incident of India pledging its gold for assistance from the International Monetary Fund.
I read this in James Clear’s 3-2-1 newsletter:
Clarity isn’t about knowing what you want to do with your life. It’s about knowing what you want to do this week.
I spent the day lazing around. I didn’t do much at all. I was mostly horizontal on this day.
The Malayalam movie, not the dance form. Spoilers ahead!
Instagram and YouTube shorts manipulated me into wanting to watch this movie. It came frequently enough and I was interested enough to watch it.
I watched it with my wife who was watching it for the second time. The first time she watched both the movies was after a fight we had.
Bharatnatyam is part one of this duology. It didn’t do well in the theaters and did wonderfully well on OTT. S R Praveen had written about this phenomenon (paywalled) for The Hindu. That encouraged the film makers to make a part two.
Both the movies have a lot of inside jokes and nods to other Malaylam movies.
The first film centers on Bharathan Nair, a strict patriarch played by Sai Kumar, and his son Sashi (Saiju Kurup), who discovers — after his father’s paralytic stroke — that Bharathan has been secretly running a second family in northern Kerala for years. What could have been a heavy melodrama is instead handled with a light, situational comic touch, and that’s exactly what worked for me.
The sequel picks up after Bharathan Nair’s death, as Sashi and his family travel to meet Rukmini and Ajay at their new home. What starts as a family reunion spirals into something far more unsettling: the revelation that a local temple — and the deity people have been devoutly worshipping — was fabricated by Bharathan Nair himself, seemingly as a means of siphoning public donations.
After watching these two movies, I would suggest that you watch The Pirate Explains video that help you catch things you may not have caught in the first viewing and also the various Malayalam movies that these movies has references to.
What makes watching these two films together so rewarding is the contrast. The first is about a private family secret and asks what you owe the people closest to you when the truth comes out. The second scales that same premise up to a public, communal level — asking what a lie can do when it’s not just kept inside a family, but sold to an entire town as sacred truth. One is about protecting people you love from an uncomfortable truth; the other is about what happens when that same instinct curdles into exploiting people’s faith for money, and then killing to keep it buried.
The wife had a hectic day today but promised to make wada Chutney in the evening. The medu wada we get in Pune can hardly stand up to the ones we get in South India.
So, I ask my wife to make these wadas occasionally.
Crispy on the outside, soft on the inside. My mouth still waters as I write this imagining what I had this evening.