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Current Thoughts - 22nd August 2020

Reading

I've been doing quite a bit of reading recently. I rarely read side-by-side, but right now, I have three on the go!

Escape Everything - Robert Wringham

Superior - Angela Saini

Indistractable - Nir Eyal

Escape Everything is a book written by the creator of the New Escapologist magazine, which is sadly no longer printed (but there's a blog that's reguarly updated). The gist is that modern life is a treadmill of working to buy the things to distract you from the drudgery of working.

After reading Early Retirement Extreme last year, this looks like a great top-up to it, but I'm not far through it yet so will hold judgement for now.

Superior looks in to the sad resurgence of race science, and the idea that different 'races' have genetic differences in intelligence etc. It also tackles the idea of 'races' entirely. Very thoroughly researched so far, I'm really enjoying it.

Indistractable has come at the right time for me - feeling like the internet in particular is destroying my ability to think deeply. I'm summarising the book so will post that soon, but have temporarily stopped reading as the section about 'indistractability' at work has come up, and I'm ignoring work for 2 weeks as I'm on holiday :)

Small internet

After recently joining the envs tilde community, I'm working on reducing the cluttered experience I have on the internet. Gemini, gopher, mutt and irc/matrix are helping massively to slow down and read/write with purpose.

Bristol

We had a trip to Bristol this week. Unfortunately, it wasn't the relaxed paradise I was really in need of, but we picked up some great vegan food (half price thanks to Rishi's meal deal!).

Programming

I'm desperately trying to think of small projects to contribute to the tildeverse. Ideas are sparse right now. I'd love any thoughts of little projects (lrb@envs.net)

Thanks for reading!