Tag: Reading

  • Weekly Notes 26/2025

    I almost lost this domain name. I was only on Instagram and Netflix.

    What I’m reading?

    • Platform Reality by Robin Sloan
      • “Ted Gioia’s recent newsletter style is a key example of 2020s ventilated prose, an unmissable textual trend.”
      • Always read the PS.
    • Playability by Jay
      • “One of things happening in culture that I think we can all feel intuitively is that increasingly media mediums are playable. I don’t mean ‘gamification’, and I don’t simply mean ‘engagement’ (but metrics inside of systems are certainly part of it). But the sense that people – Gen Z and Gen A, are literate in exploring systems. They poke at the rules, bend them, maybe even break them and see how the system responds far more than millennials did. We played the game, but didn’t fully appreciate that culture is an emergent property of a system’s design.”
      • “gamification (In my opinion) is mostly about obedience theatre.”
      • “Gamification is used to make you feel like you’re playing when you’re really just complying.”
      • “Code writes the rules. Rules shape incentives. Incentives shape behaviour. And behaviour becomes culture.”
      • “This is why playability matters. Not because everything is a game, but because we are all beginning to think like players, and this changes how we should understand agency inside of systems.”
      • “There’s a lot more we can say about both of these challenges, but in short they make doing solarpunk both harder and more necessary. The more cyberpunk the world gets, the more useful solarpunks become. The more material reality is buried under layers of digital abstraction, the better it feels to actually get your hands dirty.”
    • AI Won’t Live on Publisher Sites by Ben Werdmuller
      • “Almost nobody is visiting homepage after homepage. Readers almost universally read content from a central feed of information.”
      • “Email newsletters are, at their heart, another version of this model. By subscribing to a publisher’s newsletter, you’re adding their content to your reverse-chronological feed of information.”
      • “If AI lives in the browser, as it does in products like Dia (and soon in Chrome), you can query not just one information source, but every information source you visit through that browser.”
      • “publishers are better off considering how they might embrace emerging standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP) into their offerings so that their information can be consumed.”
    • Use a Lot of Words by Seth Godin
      • “Verbosity is the new brevity.”
      • “AI isn’t like that. In fact, our concision is getting in the way of the insight we’re looking for.”
    • How I Turned ChatGPT Into My Personal Nutrition Coach and You Can Too by Brett McKay

    What I’m watching?

    The video has some AI tool suggestions that I want to try out.

    This video taught me a lot about Dharavi and its history.

    This video asks an interesting question and not sure if it really answers it.

  • Weekly Notes 10/2025

    I returned to work this week, working from home, after the surgery. I am slowly catching up at work. My consumption of OTT content has gone up, in terms of hours but I have started reading The Times of India, RSS feed, and newsletters on the mobile in addition to the books.

    Reading

    1. Tiny Experiments, Anne-Laure Le Cunff
    2. The No Book, Tim Ferriss and Neil Strauss
    3. Discworld Rules, Venkatesh Rao
    4. With Great Power Comes No Responsibility, Cory Doctrow

    Writing

    I tried to write a few Status Update posts here using Wordland that Dave Winer made. This was bought to my notice by Doc Searls.

    I agree when he says in a later post that it feels like tweeting. I have been off social media for the past one week. I think writing with Wordland makes up for the writing I lose because I am not on social media.

    Watching

    I was happy to watch Toll Free Traveller again.

    This was a different podcast with Shephali Bhatt compared to the one she did with Amit Varma.

    You can read this blog on your favorite RSS feed reader or via e-mail by subscribing below.

  • Weekly Notes 05/2025

    I missed writing the weekly notes last week because I was not well. Sorry. 2171 weeks left.

    I gave a talk last night on OpenTakshashila on the trends in space technology and policy. The talk was brief and I did get lost while talking in the middle. I wrote a brief X thread on what my main talking points were. I will also write a more detailed blog post based on these talking points soon.

    I reduced the time that I spent on X, BlueSky, and Mastodon this week. It was more than the time I spent on these websites in the week before this.

    Writing

    I wrote the two newsletters:

    I am also following along with Brandon Sanderson’s Writing Course on YouTube. I am planning to use it to improve the story I started writing on thinkdeli for NaNoWriMo 2024.

    Reading

    I finished reading S Hareesh’s Moustache. I am yet to write a review of the book. I am presently reading two books:

    • The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Rolland Allen (56%)
    • Boulder by Eva Baltasar transl. by Julia Sanches (19%)

    Watching

    I watched these over the last two weeks on Netflix:

    • Sakomoto Days (ongoing S1 E3)
    • The Night Agent (S2)
    • Back in Action (movie)
    • Asura (S1)
    • The Playlist

    I watched these over the last two weeks on Prime Video:

    • Paatal Lok (S2)
    • On Call (S1)

    I watched this video on YouTube that I really liked, besides the Sanderson lecture.

    I had once read a book on this that I wrote about here. This one by Vikas Divyakirti is in Hindi and much more crisper and clearer. I also saw the video on Charwak by him and I was left wondering why we can’t bring this philosophy to the twenty first century.

    The illness last week means that several blog posts are pending on here. I will get to work on those shortly.

  • Weekly Notes 36/2023

    I missed writing the thirty-fourth and thirty-fifth edition of these Weekly Notes. These defined my steady decline into procrastination mode. Everything suffered – writing (at work and at home), reading, time spent with family, and many house chores.

    I am trying to get a handle on things again but they are slipping. The flow is very viscous.

    OTT

    • Kleo (German)
    • Those Who Wish Me Dead (English)
    • Collateral (web series, English)
    • Who is Erin Carter? (English)
    • God’s Crooked Lines (English)
    • Late Night (English)
    • Nalla Nilavulla Rathri (Malayalam)
    • Satyaprem ki Katha (Hindi)
    • Kohrra (Hindi)
    • Neeyat (Hindi)
    • In from the Cold (English)
    • Jailer (Tamil)
    • Nobody (English)
    • Rough Diamonds (Flemish)
    • AKA (French)

    I managed to Netflix and chill, though a few hours everyday. The above is from the past three weeks and not just the effort of the last week.

    Writing

    Reading

    I am listening to Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck on Audible.

  • Fear of Reading Malayalam

    It’s not strictly just reading, it could even be listening to it. I have been wondering about how to begin reading works of Malayalam literature.

    Of late, I’ve had to read movie reviews of the Malayalam movies I have watched to understand the nuances and cultural contexts involved. I needed articles like Anna MM Vetticad’s on Malayalam New New Wave cinema to understand the cultural intricacies of what’s happening in Malayalam cinema today.

    Trailer of the Malayalam movie Hridayam

    I supposedly even misunderstood the art in a straight forward Malayalam movie like Hridayam. It took an interview with its director Vineeth Sreenivasan to understand those nuances.

    If I misunderstand mass media stuff like movies, then I think understanding books would be many more times difficult. This keeps me away from reading or listening to Malayalam books.

    In the beginning of the year, I had written here that 2022 would be about reading and writing. It’s been 6 months in and I don’t think that I have fared too well.

    But, there are other things happening. Watching Hridayam got me back to listening to music again. Specifically, listening to the song, പുതിയൊരു ലോകം.

  • 2022 – Write and Read

    I had a lot of plans for 2022. Like everyone else. One thing that 2021 illustrated was not to say yes to too many things. You end up disappointing others and yourself.

    Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

    This informed me when I was filling up the YearCompass and I chose to select two things to focus on for 2022. Writing and reading.

    I write for a living. I write field documentation and manuals for a living. I want to practice writing more type of documents to expand my horizons. I also want to write fiction. I want to contribute by writing documentation for open source software.

    But, as I shared above, I want to focus on two things at a time. I want to first improve my skills in writing field documentation and fiction.

    The other thing I want to focus on, is reading. Through 2021, I had stopped reading. I could not read anything long. I wanted to get back to reading. I started by listening to the audiobook version of Dune. I followed that up by listening to the audiobook version of the Neuromancer.

    Towards the end of 2021, I started reading Indian Philosophy, inspired in part by the work that Ryan Holiday does with Stoicism. So, one branch of my reading will be spent reading/listening to fiction and another reading Indian Philosophy.