Bones Barley Whatever
Relatively Irrelevant Intro
The past few months have revolved around unearthing my suppressed fantasies and giving them shape. This here website is one of them.
Imagining my personal blog, I always knew it had to be static.
Because: 1. A Post is a long text. 2. A Text file is a text file. 3. A Text editor is a text editor.
See also: Unix philosophy:
- Everything is a file.
- Use readable, accessible plain text for data storage and communication.
An ideal that cost me years of deferral in getting my website up and running. To be specific, making it feasible to keep the posts flowing. This is not the first time I got my blog up. But adding posts was never painless enough that I would actually do it. This time it will keep running. Courtesy of a 244-line shell script that I gradually built over the past month. I’ve named her meyk. All I do now is write my posts in a markdown file and wait 40 milliseconds while she takes care of all the rendering and publishings.
Totally Random Prelude
Credit was due and I gave it to Sadra in The making of 0xd. Now I’m here to reclaim some!
Last night I took it upon myself to ask him, ever so kindly:
What happened to sadra.blog?
To which he replied, dryly:
Archived under: sadra.space
Long story short, I coaxed this out of him through deep hypnosis:
Let’s make a bet to publish something on Saturday afternoon. If not, I’ll give you 50 pounds.
And now, as dispassionate about money and uncompromising about my friend’s passions as I am, I’ve taken the liberty of making this bet public and raising the stakes.
Anyway, I was reading his well-written We are hunters, not farmers today and I thought I’d indulge him with a few words of my own.
Neither Forager Nor Farmer: We Are Survivors
During my bachelors, I would ride the semesters in roller-coaster mode: short bursts of intense work and extended periods of fooling around, dodging deadlines; doing only the bare minimum at peak stress. By contrast, during summer—when most students were having fun—I would stay in my room all day, stitching night to morning, hyperfocused on personal projects and learning things I was curious about.
When my work life began, the once-momentary peaks of stress became the baseline. Aditionally, my core responsibility shifted from replicating what every other student did, to solving problems that no one else would forcing me to manage a more stable life.
Still, I’ve had many consecutive months of maintaining a quantified self, and just as many where I barely tracked anything. Months with a very clear daily routine, and months where I travelled every weekend. I’ve spent months without leaving my house and—well—all sorts of lifestyles, each with their own advantages given where they sat in the tradeoffs that constitute life.
What I’ve learned from all this was that there is no single right way to live. No perfect attitude toward life. And therefore, no lifestyle is inherently superior. Our ancestors were neither hunters nor foragers, neither farmers nor herders. They were bacteria—just kidding. They responded to the realities of their environment. That’s what humans are good at and that’s what we should keep doing.
But that doesn’t mean anything goes. What matters is for us to be attuned to the conditions of our environment and have perspective on our reactions to it. It’s about living deliberately. Having a reason for how we choose to live, ensuring that reason remains relevant to the realities of our immediate and wider environment. Noticing when conditions shift, and adapting. That is the heart of being human.