I’m sitting on the red sofa with my wife. She’s reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The fan is blowing at the lowest setting because it’s hot.
@aynish asked: “what makes email joyful to you?”
I skim email on the phone, move stuff to spam (maybe up to ten a day?) and so on. Spam does not spark joy.
Anything that requires more than two or three sentences only gets answered on the laptop. There, I have a keyboard, I have a big screen, and it’s not the system where I get to see spam.
I start up my favourite mail client and I download my mail using POP3. That is, it gets deleted from the server. These days, I try to treat private mail like paper letters.
One thing I try to do, for example, is to not quote the mail I received, because I don’t do that in letters, either. I paraphrase, summarize, and then I write.
Once I’ve sent my reply, I delete the emails I got. If I had gotten a letter, I’d also throw it away a few days after having written the reply. It feels weird, but there seems to be no point in keeping letters. If that is true, why should there be a point in keeping mail?
Now that we are living in a world where forgetting keeps getting harder: is this perfect memory something you agree with? – Record Keeping
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
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The reason I tried to edit the link (to “Record Keeping”) on this blog earlier is because it linked to http even on Gemini 🤷🏻♀️
– Sandra 2022-07-02 05:54 UTC
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Ah! I didn’t see that. All I saw is that you broke the special “quote” syntax I use:
> bla bla => URL text
The solution I’m using now is to use a relative URL and now it should work for both.
– Alex 2022-07-02 09:40 UTC
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In relation to perfect memory, have you read Ted Chiang’s short story “The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling”?
– Callum 2022-07-03 20:09 UTC
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I have not. The Wikipedia synopsis indicates that it is spot on:
In the near future, a journalist observes how the world, his daughter, and he himself are affected by “Remem”, a form of lifelogging whose advanced search algorithms effectively grant its users eidetic memory of everything that ever happened to them, and the ability to perfectly and objectively share those memories. In a parallel narrative strand, a Tiv man is one of the first of his people to learn to read and write, and discovers that this may not be compatible with oral tradition. – Wikipedia
– Alex 2022-07-04 06:54 UTC