Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #100 (Woo-hoo!), a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
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You can reach out to me by replying on this mail or adding a comment on this. I am also posting on Mastodon.
What should I celebrate? In the past I have celebrated editions, not years. This is my third year running this newsletter. This is the 100th edition of this newsletter. That is easier to keep track of and celebrate. It feels like something more solid - malleable, something I can point a finger at.
I was reading Jack Cheng’s Sunday #456 last week. In it he was wondering about the format of the thing that was his newsletter.
I’m thinking about formats today. Though, it’s more accurate to say I’m often thinking about them for this newsletter. In the past, it’s been a book publishing dispatch, travelogue, link grab-bag, weekly pieces of first-draft poetry, and other, more shortly lived experiments. Since 2021, I’ve been pretty good about including a photo with every issue, though my cadence has slipped from weekly to monthly since Rufus was born (maybe not surprising to any of you parents reading).
That made me want to think about formats as well. I settled on a format fairly quickly - something that happened in the week - a trip to a place, or an event somewhere, followed by something I had read in the week - something interesting. I reached that because of a need I had to link-blog, to share things I had read.
Those days, this blog was hosted on Ghost, and I did not have any way to publish short posts. I used to write blog posts daily then. So the links below had made sense then.
Now, I have a stream. Anything interesting that I read or find out about, I put it on the blog immediately. You can read the stream, just use RSS and subscribe to one of the feeds. So, the links below are just things I have already posted about.
I don’t have to post about these things anymore. In a way, I already have. So, I am removing these from now on. If you enjoyed reading those things, write to me and I will add those back.
There are other things I want to share here. My first-draft poems maybe.
This one is called - save some money
Well how do you save money?
You make money first. You go out into the world, do something, that someone else may find of value. Have that someone pay you. And so on.
What if you can’t? How do you save money then? You find one paisa here, one paisa there, from the money given to you, to do other things.
Maybe you walk to the place, you had said you would take an auto to. Or something costs less than what you had thought. And so on.
You would take me to a store, and get me a pack of crax, from that money.
I finished reading This and that by Ryokan last week. It is a short wonderful book of poems, translated from the original Japanese. Ryokan was a monk, who sat and saw the world through his ageing eyes.
Poems? No way
when you see that my
poems aren’t poems,
then we can talk poetry.
Could we do this now? In this day and age?
I was sitting with Prerna the other day. She had Instagram open. A reel came on the screen next - just a floating image, with some music and text on it. It was talking about how, after a doctor had asked his patients to dry their clothes in their bedrooms all of them had gotten asthma after that. Then there was a ton of description below the video - caption. Which was mostly bullshit. But it sounded scientific enough. Prerna took her time reading that caption.
And I thought, this is how they can change your mind and your thoughts - a little bit at a time. Reels are a perfect format for this. I had this thought yesterday when some far right type of reel was up on my screen.
I had thought then that reels are a perfect format for this. 30 seconds. Just enough to say what you want to say. With no one there to rebuke you, or question you. That’s the magic of these things, there is no time to rebuke, or even think. You see one thing, digest it and bam comes the next one.
With books, you sit with the ideas. You have time to think. You can question both the ideas in the book and your own ideas.
Videos were a distillation of this - 10/15/30 min videos. They were about knowledge. What are reels about?
Empty calories.
I like comedy reels. I open them from time-to-time.
What I do most of the time is read. Read people! Read more. Read more often. Read every time.
Just go. Read!
What am I reading now? I Deliver Parcels in Beijing and All that we see or seem. I will have the reviews up soon enough.
Here’s some ducks in the bay.
On a different day, a bunch of them passed overhead, flying into the bay. Slowly, one after the other landed in the water and started swimming.
I used to play a game on my oldest controller, which came with a gun accessory, where you pointed it to a TV and just shot these ducks that came flying out.
In my mind, ducks swim, not fly.
It was funny seeing them fly overhead with their big bodies, quaking about.
If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄
Until next week.