Travel prep shave

Razor: #GEM #Micromatic Clog-Pruf Peerless
Blade: #Personna GEM PTFE
Brush: #Boti Motherlode
Lather & post: #HouseOfMammoth Shire

My last shave from home for a few days before hopping on a plane to bad weather, worse food, and Mary fucking Poppins

Explained to boss that it's impossible I travel without blades and they have to pay for checked luggage😅

Shire was delish as always, and the Peerless is fun.

Happy Reddit Blackout Day!

#wetshaving #GEMRazor #SOTD #ShaveOfTheDay

The Piggy Is Back And It Brought A Friend

Razor: #Koraat Sparschweinchen
Brush: #Boti Sunrise
Lather: #AbbateYLaMantia Verbena Toscana
Aftershave: #BarristerAndMann Seville

My Piggy razor came back from being on loan with a friend, and it brought this AYLM hard soap with it. Verbena Toscana smell so good!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Wetshaving/comments/12ms1g1/comment/jgep5c2

#wetshaving #StraightRazor #SOTD #ShaveOfTheDay

O #Boti od #PurpleRayStudio już mogliście przeczytać na łamach naszego bloga. Z okazji #SteamNextFest sprawdziliśmy demo i mamy kilka słów do przekazania 😊

Autor: @Czesionyo

▶️ https://pograne.eu/demo-boti-byteland-overclocked-wrazenia-steam-next-fest/

#pograne #giereczkowo #demo #pc #platformówka #steam #gry #grywideo

@vortex_egg I'll offer a general answer:

• This is something you should be thinking about constantly.
• My own problem isn't for want of materials, but for focus in getting through a specific work.
• (I'm avoiding doing precisely that in answering your toot, BTW....)
• (No, I'm not blaming you, it's on me.)
• I try to keep tabs on the works I really want to read.
  
• I'm leaning toward having a specific index-card deck that's devoted to this, on the basis that it's 1) physically manifested and 2) can be arbitrarily re-ordered as well as 3) easily supports works being moved to the "it's been read" category.
• "#BOTI" is another related concept: Best of the Interval. Keep track of what the best books/articles/concepts of the past week/month/year/decade have been. You'll end up with a very highly-curated reading list to recommend to others.
• Scan both references and citations for promising new material. A reference with an interesting association / concept, or citations of a highly-significant work, are both promising prospects.
• Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book, especially the later chapters, is an excellent guide.
• Consider sources as conversations or interrogations.
• Have no regrets at bailing from an unrewarding source.

I'll also look at others' recommendations, reading lists and syllabi, etc. I'm finding with time that individual recommendations and mass-market recommendations are often far less fruitful than the methods above. Subject-matter expert recommendations, on the other hand, especially for older and obscure works, are often gold.

Much new publication is not much worth reading. The back-catalogue is highly underappreciated.

#CuratingReading #Research #LiteratureSearch #StudyMethods

Books that Defined the 1990s

https://lithub.com/a-century-of-reading-the-10-books-that-defined-the-1990s/

The also-rans are (mostly) more interesting than the picks, but an interesting list.

Choosing bests is always a challenge.

#BOTI #books #BestOf #Lists #Reading #1990s

@Sandra I'd not seen the blog post, it we probably crossed posts.

I agree with most of the criticisms. I'm familiar with the productivity genre, and a lot of it is highly self-serving and overwrought, for obvious reasons. (It resembles much other self-help lit, from diet to fitness to relationships to personal finance to ..., again because the truths are actually pretty simple, hard work is required. it's easy to write a book, it's hard to compete...)

That said, I recommend the read, even if it's a quick, skimming approach dipping in to specific details. I'm simply not aware of a better general guide. (I'm not fully versed on the genre, of course, beware reviews based on partial exposure).

From your own digest (pretty good BTW), two conspicuously missing items are a daily and weekly review and planning and digest session (chapter 8, also see my own #BOTI toots) and the tactic of time-blocking (chapter 4).

The book is short (260 pp), easy reading, it's largely defined a space, and even if only as a pointer for criticism and expansion or refinement is useful. And yeah, I'm something of a believer in the book form.

@meena

#gtd

@vortex_egg
One cheat approach to this I have is to go through the HN daily archive, where HN is a decent prefilter. Often there's a small set of the top 30 (or up to ~100) daily items which are worth a closer look. I'll read a few days behind.

On Reddit, if you've got a good subreddit, you can set a date range (day, week, month, year) and then sort by "top" to get the most highly-rated items in that period. Reddit tends not to do a great job of quality selection, but it's not completely worthless.

The third of my two tricks is to just rely on random selection to an extent. If you've got too much material to make an informed choice on, shuffle your deck and select something at random. You'll miss some stuff, yes, but you're making an unbiased rather than a biased selection. You can also apply other filters to noise sources.

#Research #ResearchMethods #LiteratureSearch #InformationOverload #CalNewport #DavidAllen #GettingThingsDone #DeepWork #Zettlekasten #BOTI

3/end/

@vortex_egg There are two techniques in particular I'd like to suggest which ... well, they don't fully work but they seem to help:

1) Time block your information-gathering phase. Whether that's on a daily or weekly ongoing basis, or as a project phase, say "I'll scan Twitter for X minutes per day, only". And do that at the end of the day, when you've taken care of high-relevance/payoff tasks first.

2) What I call #BOTI: "Best of the Interval". On a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual ... basis, review the items you've selected as noteworthy from that period as well as the top items from the next smaller intervals, and select some n number of best items. You'll probably find that a good value is 10 <= n <= 100, but do what works for you.

BOTI draws on the 43 folders / tickler file concept, or the round-robin database. Essentially you're determining that no matter how long your research goes on, you're committing to a finite set of retained data.

(This is used in all kinds of IT systems and network monitoring, especially with long-term data history.)

You end up with higher resolution in recent / near periods, lower resolution as you go back in time. But you're constantly trying to filter up the best stuff. Since assessment can take time, you'll re-scan earlier selections to see if you'd missed something of relevance (and you can always break protocol for something especially good). But you've got a structure and have set limits on scope.

You'll also start to develop a sense with time as to what actually provides usefulness, and if you track sources, which of those are most valuable. Filter noise aggressively.

A source that sometimes generates signal but usually doesn't ... is virtually always noise. Signal tends to come through, eventually.

(This is related to my "block fuckwits" advice.)

#Zettlekasten #DeepWork #GettingThingsDone #DavidAllen #CalNewport #InformationOverload #LiteratureSearch #ResearchMethods #Research

2/

@brennen Another idea I've been working with, sort of, is what I call #BOTI or "best of the interval".

It's kind of a #43folders kind of thing, but eternal. Alternatively, a round-robin databas / MRTG system (if you're sysadmin-aware, you may know these).

In any given interval, decide you're going to track the n most significant items. At the end of that interval, log/record those, and start the next interval. The best-of selection process continues for each subsequently larger interval period.

Intervals could be day, week, month, year, decade, etc.

What you should end up with is a reasonably small set of critically good or appropriate works.

Pick an n that works for you: 10, 100, 1,000, ... (Smaller is probably better, say 10--100.))

4/

Among the interesting suggestions I"ve seen recently (and have encountered / thought of myself previously before) is this "feudal vouching system":

highly engaged community members, vouch for others, who again vouch for others. If people in this "Dharma-tree" accumulate problematic behaviour points, the structure at first, bubbles better behaved members to the top. If the bad behaviour continues, by single members or sub-groups, the higher echelon of members will cut that branch loose, or loose their own social standing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26797017

Rather than use high engagement as a basis for vouching, arbitrarily selected communities, perhaps of about 50-150 active participants (posting or moderating) might be better. Think Mastodon, but in order to be federated, good posts must be "voted off the island", in the good sense.

I've been applying a somewhat similar notion to collecting and managing reading material and suggestions, what I call #BOTI, or Best of the Interval. It's a round-robin style system, where I compile a list of references over a period of time (monthly to annually seems to be most appropriate for me, though hour / day / week / month / year / decade / ... could be applied). At the end of an interval, some limited number of items is carried forward.

This is one way of addressing the "firehose of content" nature of information, recognising that in any given time period, you only have so much personal bandwidth to dedicate.

With the federated model, content federating is itself subject to assessment, and is effectively re-vetted. Note that different communities might favour different content: cooking, kittens, Kabbalah, canoodling, cypherpunk, core meltdowns, classic cars, concerthalls. Vetted / re-vetted streams themselves might be of interest.

Both community- and time-based elements of this could get interesting.

4/

BOTI Science & Technology: Best of interval compilations, suggestions?

... It's hard to assess significance in the moment, and day-to-day reports of science and technology advances are noisy. I've been looking for possible sources to use and am finding little that's satisfactory. I'd like suggestions....

https://tildes.net/~science/tle/boti_science_best_of_interval_compilations_suggestions_supporting_trends_identification

#technology #progress #collapse #compilations #boti #yearbooks #rankings #research #tildes