Favorite photo I took in 2024. It re­minds me that spring is soon.

One thing I keep re­flect­ing upon is how com­i­cal my sit­u­a­tion with writ­ing has be­come. Over the last two years I’ve drafted count­less un­fin­ished notes, ar­ti­cles, es­says. Some I’m glad I never re­leased, some sim­ply missed their mo­ment. And some — it’s a shame they re­main in­com­plete.

There’s an anec­dote, though it’s true: Theodor Adorno had piles of un­pub­lished drafts ac­cu­mu­lat­ing years and years, and it cer­tainly both­ered him. At some point he be­gan ca­su­ally re­fer­ring to them in con­vos with friends by their tag lines, as if they are com­plete and pub­lished. I’m ex­pe­ri­enc­ing some­thing sim­i­lar. Somehow it gives me the free­dom to re­fer to a text, while fin­ish­ing it would re­move that free­dom.

Anyway, let’s hope I find a way to mit­i­gate this. It’s just weird to write texts. Especially when a text lays claim to some­thing. But there is a world of dif­fer­ence be­tween know­ing some­thing is right and ac­tu­ally do­ing it.

One prob­lem is prag­matic: writ­ing is hard. Even if it’s a failed text. And in a sense every text is a fail­ure, ex­cept for a few. It’s not that the ef­fort pays off — of­ten it does­n’t — is­sue is of­ten you end up at a deep deep loss, time- and ef­fort-wise. That’s why it’s best to write to fig­ure some­thing out for your­self, not know­ing what you will say un­til you reach the end. A kinf of “curiosity writ­ing”. Too bad there are so few texts like this. It’s risky, but it’s also more ad­ven­tur­ous. Maybe I need to stick to it, since I rarely man­age to write any other way any­way.

But an­other is­sue is con­nected to the theme that will pop up many times in my notes: how the in­ter­net be­came a lonely place. A net of iso­lated is­lands in sea of al­go­rithms, bots and at­ten­tion min­ing. Well, you know, all that stuff. And if you think this is lib­er­at­ing — “write like no­body gonna watch” — kick your­self: no more pub­li­ca­tions, no more mag­a­zines peo­ple read, no more dis­cov­ery of new au­thors. Do you see how mo­bile phone cam­eras sup­pos­edly rev­o­lu­tion­ized cin­ema? How many films shot on phones do you watch, or crave to watch, each year?

It’s kind of a strange land­scape nowa­days. Still, that part is bear­able. What is re­ally hard — and I’m fi­nally get­ting to it — is that a feel­ing I once had, that we as a wave, a flock, a dis­persed yet some­how united part of a gen­er­a­tion, had his­to­ry’s grace, that we could do stuff / act / speak/ come out / bring change — that feel­ing is gone. Well, many never had it to be­gin with. And we are still there some­where, I sup­pose. But hon­estly, the state of the world, or rather its tra­jec­tory, does not make it eas­ier. It is hard to face de­feat.

A month ago I stum­bled upon cool lit­tle site called in­progress.works and felt, to the core of my ex­is­tence, that it’s ex­actly what I need right now. There’s a tiny lit­tle com­mu­nity of peo­ple do­ing things and shar­ing how it’s go­ing. It’s struc­tured around a weekly up­date per­spec­tive that gives you a nice view of all 53 weeks of the year. Each week you post an up­date and can see up­dates from oth­ers. I fell in love with it.

I’m nat­u­rally dis­or­ga­nized and per­form poorly un­der a dis­ci­pline, so day-to-day plan­ning does not work for me — it’s harm­ful. But a weekly re­view seems to be just enough. The chance that I’ll find the mood to write a small up­date within 7 days is quite high. And when I see how many weeks are left, I get a sense of what has hap­pened so far and what I might want to do with the time re­main­ing.

After my first up­date, I no­ticed that peo­ple tend to treat it more like a show­case than a true up­date sys­tem — no shade here! But I felt shy and de­cided that I do need my own pri­vate weekly view. And guess what? Obsidian does not re­ally have that. With all the hun­dreds of plu­g­ins, it seems that peo­ple who care are very into or­ga­niz­ing, so the sys­tems the plu­g­ins pro­pose tend to be overkill and are based on daily notes. I, on the con­trary, dis­like daily notes.

So I built a small Obsidian plu­gin for my­self where I keep fill­ing the weeks one-by-one. But yeah — the Inprogress com­mu­nity is great.

Hello! I’ve de­cided to make this sort of mi­croblog to post short up­dates on how it’s go­ing. The thing is, I’m in deep win­ter mode, I mean hy­ber­nat­ing, and Autumn-Winter were rough given the num­ber of things like bu­reau­cracy and work, and I was sick a lot. So I will try to re­turn to my more nat­ural prac­tice of read­ing, writ­ing, mak­ing films, but surely it will take some time.

End of the year was hard (who would have guessed, right?) and brought on a work burnout with ex­haus­tion that I was not sure how to han­dle. In an un­fore­see­able turn of events, I stum­bled upon a few beau­ti­ful sites and de­cided to spend time do­ing a few mini pro­jects. Just be­cause I ac­ci­den­tally got in­spired, and well, I will tell more about this some next time, I guess. But one thing I did was cre­at­ing a read­ing list — up­dated and cu­rated by me. Dedicated to “all things crit­i­cal”, but above all it’s handy and helps me keep up with my “reading new-ish stuff” rou­tine.