I recently shared my system for using Ulysses for Bible study over on The Sweet Setup. It was a longer piece and one I’m happy about. Not because of my writing, but simply because Ulysses works so well for this purpose. I had been looking for a better option for storing my notes, highlights, and related passages for some time and was quite happy when I started considering the option of using a tool that was not a Bible app. I talk about structure, notes, tags, search and a lot more. If you tak…
Medium’s claps and Basecamp’s boosts. These are two items that feel like the creators have gone and ignored Steve Krug’s advice from his excellent book [https://www.sensible.com/dmmt.html]. Both features went from a very straightforward use case to one that caused me to pause and ponder. I talked a little about Medium’s change from hearts to claps last summer (Vol IV Issue 23 [http://email.chrisbowler.com/t/ViewEmailArchive/j/6420AF4A5569BAF32540EF23F30FEDED/C67FD2F38AC4859C/] to be exact), so…
On this theme, if you have kids older than 5, then you’ve most likely had requests to get Fortnite. It’s the current rage right now and as someone who spent many nights playing 4-on-4 battles of Goldeneye, I understand the allure. We’ve taken a stand against this kind of gaming in our home for now, but it’s something all parents have to think about. This article does a good job of discussing the pros and cons. It also touches on aspects of gaming that my parents never had to worry about. It’s…
I shared a couple of weeks back about gaming in our home [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/gaming]. Part of that essay was focused on how much I (and my kids) are enjoying Breath of the Wild. This article from late 2017 does such a nice job of summing up why it’s such an enjoyable game. > The vast majority of open-world games are actually very linear in terms of their core progression, with a series of primary story beats that have to be played through in order. Prior Zelda games were much the s…
Related to the recent theme of running your own website [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/personal-websites], Craig Mod interviews Jason Kottke on the latest episode of On Margins*. Craig’s podcast is focused on books, but he interviewed Jason on the premise that his hundreds of thousands of words published on his site over 20 years is several books worth. And God bless Craig for providing a transcript of each episode!A lot of the interview is only tangentially related to the theme I’ve been har…
Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve bonked on my longer runs. This often happens to me in a minor way around 14–15 KMs. But during my long run last week, it happened at 5 KM in. I finished just under 27 KM, but it was a thoroughly unenjoyable run and very slow. So it got me wondering about my nutrition. And reading. The link above has been helpful for getting a better understanding of how to approach this goal. And I thought I would share a few others: * A Complete Guide to Proper Marathon Nu…
I recently shared [https://chrisbowler.com/journal/personal-websites] a list of personal blogs that I enjoy. But I neglected to add Alan Jacobs to the list. Perhaps it’s because he maintains several blogs, some regularly, others less so. But his primary personal blog [http://blog.ayjay.org] is one I subscribe to, and it’s almost like a digital commonplace book. I first mentioned Alan in this space because of Habits of Mind in an Age of Distraction [https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/habits-o…
Video games give me some concern, but there are positive examples available.