The BP Disaster is mindboggling. Also in the news: Britain’s elections, the Iran nuclear non-deal and sanctions, Greece, Elena Kagan, Thailand, FinReg, Carbon cap ‘n trade, Rand Paul, Arizona’s Illegal Immigration Law.
The Top 5:
Wow, light post, considering that it’s been a month. Maybe I _am_ slowly breaking the death-grip of RSS. Unfortunately, for you, that means links will be far less timely. It was hard picking a top 5 6 this time, but here they are. Real post coming soon. Just gotta deal with that pesky real life thing first…
As you may have noticed, about half the posts on this site are of the “linkdump” variety, where I aggregate all of the cool things that I’ve stumbled upon on the web throughout the past week or two into one massively long, link-filled post. There is a very logical explanation for this. Since the start of the year, I’ve been using an RSS reader. Every day, it magically aggregates all the new stories and video clips and articles from the websites I subscribe to into one, easy to browse location. It’s great. I’ve read and watched and heard about things I never knew about, much less knew could be interesting. Unfortunately, I spend too much time reading and curating to write about much else.
I browse subscribe to far more websites than I really can handle. I currently have over 200 subscriptions on my feed and receive more than 500 articles a day. For a while, I made a valiant attempt to read everything in my subscription inbox every day. Come home from work, turn on the computer, read the news, eat dinner, read the news while eating dinner, do dishes, read more news. Easily 2 to 3 hours every evening. In the meantime, the rest of my life began to fray. Things like cleaning. Socializing. Working. Praying. Hygiene (-ing?). (OMG, just kidding!). Sure, I was entertained and informed and distracted by shiny objects, but it was having a pretty deleterious effect on what some might call “real life”.
I was drowning in information. Literally. And in my attempt to stay afloat, to stay ahead of the torrent that was crashing down atop my head, there were disconcerting changes in the nature of my efforts. There was less reading. More skimming. More blatant disregard for opinions that “weren’t worth my time”. Nuance was lost. Context disregarded. Primary sources ignored. Arguments dis/agreed with, not analyzed. TL:DR. I could feel the echo chamber starting to ring, despite the fact that I subscribed to blogs with a wide-ish range of perspectives.
Thankfully, one week I went to a conference, my inbox exploded, and I never managed to catch back up. I actively follow about 4 (non-friend) websites now, about the same number as before I started using an RSS reader. Every so often, I’ll work my way through the archives of one or two websites, but I no longer try to read everything all the time. It was unsettling at first, seeing the unread article count climb ever higher. But then it crossed 999+. And it has remained frozen there ever since: a reminder of the breadth and depth of human creativity, knowledge, and experience; a monument to the folly of trying to handle it all at once; and guidepost for when I decide to explore its wonders again.
Relevant readings:
Ooof, this is what happens when you don’t post for 3 weeks. There’s a huge post below the cut, so here’re my top five reads.
And one for fun: 2010 SXSW mp3’s (legal)
As usual, highlights are in red.
I really did try to get this out last week, Livia, really I did. But I didn’t, and now this post has become bloated in size just like all of the others. *sigh*
I didn’t know how to categorize this first link, so I’ll just let it stand alone above the cut.
There’s an inscription: “I’m sitting on the back of a man. He is sinking under the burden. I would do anything to help him. Except stepping down from his back.”
One of the unexpected pleasures of going home for Christmas was going through my dad’s boxes boxes upon boxes of old files. There was almost nothing of sentimental value, just portfolios for projects long past. Still, it was fascinating to scan through the reams of paper. Scraps of handwritten notes, names of coworkers that I barely recognized, the places where my father went for business. The barest of glimpses into the life my father had outside of the home.
I saved a folio for myself, a momento of the work my father poured his life into, but which I never really understood. The rest of the files are marked to be shredded; after all, what purpose do they now serve? If I really want to be reminded of my father’s legacy, I need merely look in the mirror.
Changing gears a bit, digging through my father’s boxes made me a little bit sad about the transition to the digital age. My father had saved hundreds (thousands?) of work files. Mostly computer printouts, but they were at least physical and tactile and you could skim through the odd page or three. Me? I will leave behind hundreds (thousands?) of gigabytes of data, which frankly, makes for a much less enjoyable sorting experience.
I would also be sorely remiss to not mention that my father’s legacy includes (and perhaps more importantly, includes) the rest of my immediate family and his family and friends. It just makes for terribly clunky writing that I am not quite good enough to de-clunkify.
