I've gifted a couple friends Midori notebooks before. On the go, portable enough to carry in a jacket or back pocket, I'm partial to the A6 blank notebook. Otherwise, I like the free form factor of A5/A4 loose leaf paper, particularly on a spacious desk.
Just finished reading, for the first time, the short story "Bartleby, The Scrivener" by Melville.
I have also been reading the essays in David Foster Wallace in Context[1], published in November of 2022.
And I'm looking forward to reading here soon the seemingly first ever English translation of Philipp Mainländer's The Philosophy of Redemption[2], just published several weeks ago.
Oh, yes, exceedingly so. I found it to be extraordinary[1]. It has been on the back of my mind to-read since late summer of 2019, where the recommendation came from a soft-spoken lecturer.
1: For example, ranging from "...Nippers would sometimes impatiently rise from his seat, and stooping over his
table, spread his arms wide apart, seize the whole desk..." to "...at leisure intervals I looked a little into
'Edwards on the Will,' and 'Priestly on Necessity'..."
UCSC should also have a psychedelics studies program (is there any better place?), particularly on account of their already unique (and wonderful) History of Consciousness program.
I remember an old and dear chemist friend of mine there who made me aware of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). I still have his copy of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History he lent me after taking a sociology course on drugs in society, if I recall correctly.
The advice is excessive and idealistic. But otherwise, I think the default screen resolutions render text too small. On my laptop, I prefer the scaled resolution of 1024x640, compared to the default 1280x800. Other settings I use is increasing display contrast and making use of display color filters (filter: color tint; intensity: max; color: red).
> there is a whole new appreciation of being there
And yet, the always unsuccessful attempt of the photograph: "To annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself" (Barthes, Camera Lucida).
For as long as I may remember, I've had the same problem. I detest artificial light and I'm a sucker for the twilit, moonlit, and candlelit. Seems like modernization means having every single dark corner illuminated.
Aren't there types of candles that are long-lasting and which don't give off the seemingly bad chemicals I tend to hear about?
Every dark corner... of your yard. I can read outdoors by some people's lighting that's well over 1/4 mile away on an otherwise dark night.
Get a cold blast kerosene lantern (Dietz Blizzard is my go-to lantern these days), run some kerosene substitute in it, and you'll have a clean burning lamp that doesn't put out nearly the particulates of a candle with any slight air movement.
I have a Jupiter, and if I were you, I'd get the Blizzard.
The advantage of the Jupiter is that the font is gigantic. It holds enough fuel for several days burning - which is the point, it was a "weekend greenhouse heater" lantern, originally.
The Blizzard is a better looking lamp, puts out a bit more light (it drafts a bit better with the taller globe), and is far more at home in a house.
Don't get a Comet for indoor use. They're better than nothing, and after you've burned off the paint, they're... tolerable for casual carry around use, but that's about it. They're just not a great lantern for regular use.
I've tried different browsers, more so these past few years, and always end up back with Ungoogled Chromium. It seemingly uses half of the memory of Firefox.
A rare occurrence, a few months ago, I came across one (re: a dissertation that is both entertaining and for the lay): Neocosmicism: God and the Void (2013) by Ellen Greenham[1].
It seems like it eventually came into fruition as a full-fledged book: After Engulfment: Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert (2022) by Ellen Greenham[2].
