Three rides and a long day of white-balancing, overexposing, lens-correcting images.

Cropped from a composition in reverence to Chip Kidd’s cover for The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

Part generative art, part pen-tablet exercise. The Pencil tool (N) is a much more appropriate bezier-starter (than the Brush tool, B) when tweaked well. The Brush picks up annoying stroke thicknesses by default.

[Talking about the Amish way of dealing with ‘new’ stuff.] If it’s going to make it [core principle valued above all else] stronger, then we can adopt it, and if it’s not, we’re not. Often the way they’ll do this is they’ll test it. They’ll essentially the Amish equivalent of an alpha geek use it. Great. Here’s a cell phone came along. Use a cell phone for a while. Let’s watch it. Let’s see what happens. Here’s a car. Great. Someone buy a car. Let’s watch. Does this make things better or worse in terms of the thing we really care about which is community strength? …

I think if you leave the walled garden of social media and go back out to the wild web, you can find interesting things. You can connect to interesting people. You could express yourself in interesting ways and you can do it in a way that’s just so much healthier because you don’t have these algorithmic forces trying to push you into weird extremes, or to pacify you, or to get you upset, or to get you mollified or whatever’s going on that’s necessary to get revenue up at these private companies.

— Cal Newport in conversation with Brett McKay. Podcast discussing Digital Minimalism, with transcript; I don’t think the second excerpt above does justice to being representative of the rest of it. He discusses the not-easily-perceived opportunity costs (such as in the Amish example) in detail in Deep Work, as well.

Off the indoor stadium wall, on the way to the bus-stand from the studio. Many months’ worth of film posters peeled off by the rain and the adequately drunk.

Only a lover notices the small things: the way the afternoon light catches the nape of a neck, or how a strand of hair slips out from behind an ear, or the way a finger curls around a cup. And no one scans a letter so closely as a lover, searching for its small print, straining to hear its nuances, its gasps, its sighs and hesitations, poring over the secret messages that lie in every cadence. The difference between “Jane (whom I adore)” and “Jane, whom I adore,” and the difference between them both and “Jane—whom I adore—” marks all the distance between ecstasy and heartache. “No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put at just the right place,” in Isaac Babel’s lovely words; a comma can let us hear a voice break, or a heart. Punctuation, in fact, is a labor of love. Which brings us back, in a way, to gods.

― Pico Iyer, In Praise of the Humble Comma, from Tropical Classical

Rode to Kappad in the evening. If you can hear Gama in the background, it is either young bearded pony-tailed folks playing beach football in slow-mo or you might want to get your head (preferably with ears intact) checked.

Every time I am at the beach with the intent of catching the moment the sun sets, something significant distracts me seconds before that happens. This time it was a regular crab walking in sideways into its bunker like the thousand other regular crabs I’d been watching the whole evening. Yes, exciting evening. I was probably sat on some of their bunkers too; choosing to align myself to the smoothened parts of the shore rather than the rough-and-tumbled. Next time; always a next time. The ride back was significant in that I passed three (3) Lycra-clad gentlemen on hybrids wearing fluorescent helmets and pained bicyclist expressions appropriate for a late evening ride. Not really. It was significant because thanks to the elections, the traffic was standing still and I got to reenact select scenes from Premium Rush. Not really. It was just that night had fallen by the time I reached the plantain plantations and the LED headlight illuminates banana leaves in glorious FullHD ghostly pallor. Add to that the slow breeze and a surprising lack of freewheel noise (need to degrease that chain soon), and that is roughly twenty-something seconds of bliss.

From October January 2014; I’d just left Gurgaon.