10.15.24 - thoughts of this Tuesday
Make it pretty
Law school and basically everything in life can be fun if you make it pretty.
I light candles when I work, keep things nice, spend a lot of time in the library, mark up my notes by hand, walk my dog between sessions. It's all fine.
If you're a law student reading this 10x your pretty budget and make your life nice. Stop using ugly fonts on your outline. Get a nice pen. Get a $7 coffee. It's fine. Just make more money later.
I could not survive this level of reading or work if it wasn't pretty. I really couldn't.
Becoming an adult on the internet
Today I saw poor phrasing on a wikipedia entry for an antitrust case. Usually I just get pissed and move on. But today I thought, I'm literally a 25 year old man who is exceptionally good (well, in relative terms) at this topic and am going to be a legal professional in that field. Why not just correct it? So I made an account and changed a couple of things.
This was a big coming of age thing for me. I think the hallmark of being a kid is entering the world, seeing how everything is ordered and set up, and approaching is merely as as a consumer or utilizer. You take for granted that this is all there. You take the heard earned fruits of civilization for granted.
I think the most important thing about getting older is looking at every single little thing in our the man-made world and realizing, a human actually made this. Someone wrote and sourced all those articles. Someone paved this road. Every single book in that library was written, printed, and bound by people.
Then everything becomes insanely interesting and you become extremely grateful. And one day, when you notice the people around you getting old, your favorite academics dying, your favorite writers turning gray, you realize, your favorite websites crashing or getting shut down (thinking of internet archive and bodybuilding.com), you realize, oh shit is it my turn to keep this all running?
We inherit an insane intellectual infrastructure and I suspect its more fragile than we give it credit. Correction, curation, and care have to be part of the culture of smart people on the internet, every day, if our kids are going to benefit from it like we did. We can't let it rot, or get flooded with garbage. Maybe for some zones, that's inevitable (looking at facebook and instagram, which are increasingly slop). But there have to be sphere of human centered order, places we can continue to trust. Wikipedia must be one of them.
On that point, I also suspect Webrings will become more important, newsletters and other mediums of expert curation will also see higher demand. Smart people will want to cut through the absolute garbage which is inevitably going to pollute and drown the internet.
Reformatting
I did some formatting changes to the site. I want it to open on a desktop without a scrollbar, and have it look as simple and fixed as possible. I want people to be able to see the footer with the theme and accessibility options immediately. So except for the very newest posts, entries will appear on the full notebook page. Eventually, when there are enough entries, it will make sense to categorize them and enhance searchability. But right now that's just not necessary.
My closing thoughts are that blogging on this is a lonely journey. No one cares. Why would they? But I do it because I believe that it is important. It is simply important to write and keep certain traditions and ways of being alive. The unstructured thoughts of the past should be available to people in the future. That's also why I wrote in physical journals and fill out a calendar with what I do every day. I want my kids to have them, and maybe my grandkids, and then they can give them to a library or a researcher one day. I'm sure they'll be of interest. They'll give a small glimpse into what it was like to live in the 2020s, at the dawn of an epochal break in human civilization.
For all I know it may be one of the more important things I do.
knxnts