125 posts tagged with "in-English"

It's strange that someone who loves books as much as I do reads only 7–15 books a year. There are two reasons for that.

The first reason won't surprise you: like virtually everybody else in the world, my attention span and my ability to focus on reading have diminished in the last two decades or so, as a side-effect of constant screen exposure. I'm not too concerned about this, though, because at least I keep on reading. Not only that: about half of my reads are difficult, stuffy, old books — and often on paper, where there are few distractions available. (In contrast, many people nowadays seem to read non-fiction only, or contemporary literature only. Some of my fellow nerds read mostly — or only — technical books, articles, or blog posts. And there are even people who seem unable to read text for more than two minutes unless it's displayed on a bright, colourful piece of glass.) But even I don't seem to be able to read for hours on end like I used to in my youth. On my ~2h30′ flights to and from Frankfurt, I usually read most of the time, but not all the time. I manage to read for around one and a half hours or so, and then get distracted by my phone — like everybody around me.

Inspired by my friend Fidel, I'm publicly sharing some of my resolutions for the new year.

This (turn of the) year I have not thought much about this nor made an actual list, unlike some other years. But certainly there are a few concrete goals in my head, some of which I already mentioned on my recap of 2024.

Here go some of the goals I can divulge, hoping to put some social pressure on myself.

The year comes to an end in a few hours, and some of the digital services and apps that I use on a daily basis started nudging me as early as one month ago about my various stats and achievements throughout 2024, with the hope that I'd boost them on social media. I'm old school and prefer blogs to walled gardens, and since I have not been writing here much as of late, I thought I'd use those stats as a way to recap my year.

So here go four apps I use a lot, and my “achievements” on them during the year — in increasing order of importance to me.

⭐⭐⭐

I always thought I had read this short story thirty years ago or so already, because it was included in a volume that my parents had at home… but I could not remember much. I had a vague image of a decrepit vacant mansion being invaded by the surrounding vegetation, and ultimately destroyed by it.

Then in December last year my wife and I visited Ronda in Southern Spain, and I was fascinated by this old mansion, Casa del Rey Moro. Visiting the house, and reading about its history, the House of Usher (or the distorted memory I had of it) came to my mind immediately, and I resolved to read Poe's story (again?) soon.

Is it me, or is this getting a bit better?

Still too damn long and still too damn detailed. And too damn overemotional (the amount of stress it can still cause grown-up Proust that one time that his mum didn't show up in his room to kiss him good-night that summer evening when he was a little kid!). And too damn posh and affected.

But on this fifth volume there were a dozen pages here and fifty pages there that were real engaging or real funny. And a few memorable quotes and brilliant reflections on life and love (of which I share a few at the end of this post).

“Love, what is it but space and time rendered perceptible by the heart”

(← See the third week)

(← See the second week)

(← Start on the first week)

There's a silly thing I started doing in 2008: during the month of April I take one photo every day to “document” my day-to-day life for my future self.

The idea, at least initially, was to be as “natural” and “honest” as possible, and to take pictures of myself doing all kind of things during the month — from household chores to work to time with friends to special events. In the first years I was much more meticulous about selecting varied and representative moments each day, and about using timers, mirrors, stands and even other people to help me capture the moment as faithfully as I could. I always thought: “I want my 80-year-old self to be able to peek at my life as it is today”, because I have a bad memory in general and I think I will like that. And indeed, it's been “only” sixteen years since I started, and I already enjoy browsing past April photos and reading the comments I wrote at the time.

I always posted the photos online, but hid the most intimate ones from strangers: those are visible only to family and/or to friends — and a few are only available to me (that's why you probably see fewer than 30 photos in each of my albums and sets online).

In the goold old days of Flickr, a bunch of friends and acquaintances liked the idea and even played along for a few installments. It was good fun for one month every year, some of us who had met mostly over the interwebs got to know each other a little better, and some people took it almost as seriously as I did. When we all most of us abandoned Flickr, I used Pixelfed for a while (eg, April 2021 here and here). During the transition, I never got around to publishing the photos I took one year (2020, I think). Some of those years I set myself a theme or a prompt for the month: “16:9 aspect ratio”, “black & white with dashes of colour”, “repetitions or reflections”, etc. And one year, I forgot to take one of the photos (but I have forgiven myself).

Anyway, here goes my first week of daily photos this year!

Seventeen years ago yesterday, everybody was talking about that amazing gadget, the “iPhone” — but nobody you knew had one yet, because the world had been introduced to the iPhone only two months earlier.

Seventeen years ago yesterday, in Europe only wonks knew who “Obama” was, since he had just announced that he'd be running for president the previous month.

Seventeen years ago yesterday, I had been living and working in London for one year, and I was loving it.

Seventeen years ago yesterday, Twitter had been open for registrations for half a year, and was slowly getting more attention from geeks (although the product had been one year in the making already). It was exactly then that I joined the “micro-blogging platform” and started tweeting all kind of banal thoughts — just like the few friends of mine who were there already.