Category: Advice

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Sorry, MacBook Air…

I checked out the current generation of MacBook Airs yesterday. I have an older (pre-butterfly keyboard) Air. Airs are cheap (for Apple) right now.

I could type quickly and accurately on it, but I really didn’t care for the shallow key travel, so I think I’m going to pass for now

Apple has been faulted for prioritizing thinness and style over function and reliability. For the price they command, I expect better than a keyboard that doesn’t feel much different than typing on the virtual keyboard on my iPad.

https://www.macrumors.com/2019/03/27/apple-apologizes-about-third-gen-keyboard-issues/

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Love and writing

I’ve heard the advice that if you are contemplating writing a book, you’d better REALLY be in love with it, because you are going to be living with it in your life for a long, LONG time…

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/11/01/ursula-k-le-guin-writing-falling-in-love/

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Narrative Structure

A long and thoughtful piece by Maggie Stiefvater on narrative structure.

“… as a professional storyteller, it’s my job to know what is invisible (and thus costs the reader nothing) versus what is now outside the norm (and thus costs the reader something to process). I don’t mind asking the reader to work for things that are important to me, but I need to know when I’m doing it in order to make sure I can keep their overall load light enough that they don’t lose emotional investment and trade my novel for Netflix. “

Epics, Break-Up Songs, & That Old Chestnut, ‘Just Because You Don’t Like It Doesn’t Make It Bad’

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Life extension and exercise

Let’s do the math here.

A report today suggests exercising twenty minutes a day adds two years to your life.

They don’t say how long you need to exercise twenty minutes a day.

Twenty minutes a day, in a 365 day year, means 121.66 hours spend just exercising, or five solid days.

So you can live to be, say, eighty, or you can exercise and live to be eighty-two. But of those bonus 730 days, you’ve spent 400 of them sweating, netting you 330 days; so, a little less than a year.

Yeah, you get to be ALIVE those 400 days that you’re sweating. But the “two extra years” they’re promising, it doesn’t come without a cost.

I’ve always thought a more convincing argument is that exercise presumably lets you have a greater percentage of your life spent healthier than if you’d been more sedentary.

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Why word order matters

The radio news has been reporting that in the California wildfires, a grandmother and her two grandchildren “were reported killed by their relatives.”

Uh… no. They were reported by their relatives as having been killed. Their relatives didn’t kill them.