radicaledward101

My Open Tabs 4

From time to time I like to clear out some of my open tabs on my phone. I do a little write up of each one. You can see the last two iterations of this series here and here.

This one is going to be a little different. I have a bunch of long-lived tabs open for a small number of categories.


Iyashikei

癒し系 means healing or therapy in Japanese (source: Jisho.org). In this particular case I want to focus on iyashikei anime, games, and manga. Healing stories seem to be a genre which the West lacks, or at least that has eluded me for the first 31 years of my life. However Japan has generated many works in multiple media that are therapeutic to consume. I’ve especially benefitted from manga like Aria and Flying Witch. As part of an effort to write a longer piece on my feelings surrounding this genre, I started searching for articles discussing it in English. Hopefully I will return to that effort at a later time. For now here’s a few of the things I found:

Permaculture

Wikipedia defines Permaculture as “a set of design principles centered around whole systems thinking simulating or directly utilizing the patterns and resilient features observed in natural ecosystems.” Essentially it appears to be a framework for sustainable living that has never quite taken off. I encountered the term after getting linked to some start up or other on Hacker News which led me to this page on urban permaculture. It seems like some of the principals and ideas here could be something I could really get into as a hobbiest. This is just one of a great many things that I want to find time to research further.

I had some additional links for this section at one time but may have inadvertently closed them.

Android Configuration

I went through another phase of looking into improving my android settings recently. I finally figured out how to customize text notification tones for specific individuals. Hopefully I’ll do a better writeup on what I have so far. For calls there’s a setting in contactsYou can see my sources for this on Stack Exchange and on Verizon’s Q&A site. Earlier I did the same for phone ringtones which you can see here.

I also started experimenting with Do Not Disturb settings, which are described on How to Geek. However I have since turned that off because I didn’t configure it quite right. I ended up missing a lot of messages!

Finally I started looking into rooting my phone, which I’ve never bothered with. I have an original Google Pixel and the guide I found is here. Unfortunately rooting requires unlocking the bootloader, which wipes the phone. Getting everything set back up after that (especially my Termux stuff) will take many many hours. So I’ve decided to wait for now. My main motivation for rooting would be to access the hosts file. I want to be able to block myself out of Reddit and Hacker News. I’ve found that the time I’ve been spending there has been detrimental to my mental health. For now I’m just trying to use self control, but the dopamine feedback loop from these two sites is very strong.

Blogging and Journaling

I found this archive of a Cory Doctorow article on blogging that I want to go back through and read in more detail. I think reading this was my original motivation to start these open tabs articles. The bit rot on this archive is strong, and it is interesting to take that into account when looking at the content. Cory talks about having access to his blog as an extension of his brain, but this article is decaying. At one time it felt like things on the internet are there forever, but now it is becoming obvious that a certain amount of preservation effort is still necessary.

Meanwhile in the physical journaling space, I continue to look for inspiration for art journaling and just writing in general. I found this inspirational collection of some very high effort art blogs. I don’t think I will ever get to this level, in part because it isn’t really my goal anyway, but these pictures do provide ideas for materials and formats for my own journaling. I kind of think of art journaling as gorilla scrapbooking or anarchist scrapbooking. When I think of regular scrapbooking I think of something extremely conformist and sterile, something mega church moms do with their sheltered children (though of course there is a place for this). But these can be something else, created with found things instead of purchased or with quotes and stories outside of that protected bubble.

I will continue to look for inspiration for writing, both online and off, as well as all forms of art.