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digitally minimizing
Nov. 10th, 2025 09:20 pmmy post as written in /decluttering here:
over the past couple of weeks i have been deleting photos from my phone and cloud storage! its part of a whole digital minimializm upheaval in my life with a heavy emphasis on privacy and actual human connection. in the process ive realized that alot of my data footprint is in PICTURES. thousands upon thousands of pictures, most of which are frankly duplicated upwards of 10 times each (if its a selfie session easily 30-50 photos, out of which i like one or two)
so awhile ago i started with the strategy of favoriting photos that i really liked out of these photosets, and therefore my whole photo storage!
this has made it easier to go through and remember and delete things that truthfully i have never looked back on or thought about again. in the moment these things felt very meaningful to capture in pictures (so meaningful i needed 127 photos and 11 videos of a single concert), but looking back i have almost no attachment to them! and im a sentimental person.
so i have been using screen time where i would have scrolled previously to go through my library on my mobile phone and continue MASSSSS deleting. today i got rid of another 2.5k easily!
it feels good also to empty these essentially over memorialized memories because some of them were painfully associated, or i looked at them and some pain of rememberance came up with it, or disgust, or just plain old detatchment. even the ones that were great great memories but i know i would appreciate more if i could say print 25 photos of the whole trip out and make a memory book- it felt like a weeding process.
i repeat, i am a sentimental person and keeping photos, taking photos, curating photos, making collages and mood boards and vision boards is really really important and integral to me fundementally. which is why this feels even like an artistic extension of myself.
and i get to look at all my photos in the process of this decluttering!!
yayyy!!
over the past couple of weeks i have been deleting photos from my phone and cloud storage! its part of a whole digital minimializm upheaval in my life with a heavy emphasis on privacy and actual human connection. in the process ive realized that alot of my data footprint is in PICTURES. thousands upon thousands of pictures, most of which are frankly duplicated upwards of 10 times each (if its a selfie session easily 30-50 photos, out of which i like one or two)
so awhile ago i started with the strategy of favoriting photos that i really liked out of these photosets, and therefore my whole photo storage!
this has made it easier to go through and remember and delete things that truthfully i have never looked back on or thought about again. in the moment these things felt very meaningful to capture in pictures (so meaningful i needed 127 photos and 11 videos of a single concert), but looking back i have almost no attachment to them! and im a sentimental person.
so i have been using screen time where i would have scrolled previously to go through my library on my mobile phone and continue MASSSSS deleting. today i got rid of another 2.5k easily!
it feels good also to empty these essentially over memorialized memories because some of them were painfully associated, or i looked at them and some pain of rememberance came up with it, or disgust, or just plain old detatchment. even the ones that were great great memories but i know i would appreciate more if i could say print 25 photos of the whole trip out and make a memory book- it felt like a weeding process.
i repeat, i am a sentimental person and keeping photos, taking photos, curating photos, making collages and mood boards and vision boards is really really important and integral to me fundementally. which is why this feels even like an artistic extension of myself.
and i get to look at all my photos in the process of this decluttering!!
yayyy!!
supposedly fun things… DFW PTIII
Nov. 9th, 2025 10:29 amkeeping up with the last of the quotes from this collection.
p203 (on discomfort with D. Lynch body of work and approach)
“I’m going to submit that the real “moral problem” a lot of us cineastes have with Lynch is that we find his truths morally uncomfortable, and that we do not like, when watching movies, to be made uncomfortable. (Unless, of course, our discomfort is used to set up some kind of commercial catharsis — the retribution, the bloodbath, the romantic victory of the misunderstood hero line, etc. — i.e. unless the discomfort serves a conclusion that flatters the same comfortable moral certainties we came into the theater with.)”
OKAY thats the last quote, the ending of the book, while very entertaining, was a novelesque narrative piece that had no notable gems of standalone sentences or phrases :)
TOTAL REVIEW SUMMARY:
This was the first DFW book i have read in my life. ironically due to the essays in this i also have now watched my first D. Lynch movie in my life. i would say that this book was reccomended to me as an introductory piece to the body of DFW’s work because of its essays, variety, and philosophical bendt. I do feel that it would be a stronger rating and more impactful if he had kept it at the level of essay, philosophy and added a modicum of well positioned and poignant narrative. BUT NO. there are HUNDREDS of useless extensive dostoyevskyesque in detail excruciating sentences of fictional narrative to get through in this book. i am now at the stage of my human life where i do not feel any sense of disloyalty in skimming and subsequently skipping as much of a written piece as i need to in order to maintain my sanity and interest in the work. i dont feel bad personally for doing this, however i happpen to think this visceral reaction was intentionally added to the fabric of this book?? like some kind of psychic test of his readers to see if they could endure it?? well, as a reader, and human being, i feel i have put myself through listening, watching and reading enough useless media that i didnt consent to take in. so i skipped it. the only person who would be able to, in good faith, finish every sentence must be very personally interested in tennis. i would also like to say that i was actually enthralled in the ending of this book to the extent that i brought it into the PUBLIC SAUNA with me and therefore the last 26 pages that i finished of the book fell out, IN THE SAUNA. they are tucked into the back happily severed.
p203 (on discomfort with D. Lynch body of work and approach)
“I’m going to submit that the real “moral problem” a lot of us cineastes have with Lynch is that we find his truths morally uncomfortable, and that we do not like, when watching movies, to be made uncomfortable. (Unless, of course, our discomfort is used to set up some kind of commercial catharsis — the retribution, the bloodbath, the romantic victory of the misunderstood hero line, etc. — i.e. unless the discomfort serves a conclusion that flatters the same comfortable moral certainties we came into the theater with.)”
OKAY thats the last quote, the ending of the book, while very entertaining, was a novelesque narrative piece that had no notable gems of standalone sentences or phrases :)
TOTAL REVIEW SUMMARY:
This was the first DFW book i have read in my life. ironically due to the essays in this i also have now watched my first D. Lynch movie in my life. i would say that this book was reccomended to me as an introductory piece to the body of DFW’s work because of its essays, variety, and philosophical bendt. I do feel that it would be a stronger rating and more impactful if he had kept it at the level of essay, philosophy and added a modicum of well positioned and poignant narrative. BUT NO. there are HUNDREDS of useless extensive dostoyevskyesque in detail excruciating sentences of fictional narrative to get through in this book. i am now at the stage of my human life where i do not feel any sense of disloyalty in skimming and subsequently skipping as much of a written piece as i need to in order to maintain my sanity and interest in the work. i dont feel bad personally for doing this, however i happpen to think this visceral reaction was intentionally added to the fabric of this book?? like some kind of psychic test of his readers to see if they could endure it?? well, as a reader, and human being, i feel i have put myself through listening, watching and reading enough useless media that i didnt consent to take in. so i skipped it. the only person who would be able to, in good faith, finish every sentence must be very personally interested in tennis. i would also like to say that i was actually enthralled in the ending of this book to the extent that i brought it into the PUBLIC SAUNA with me and therefore the last 26 pages that i finished of the book fell out, IN THE SAUNA. they are tucked into the back happily severed.
a supposedly fun thing,,, PTII DFW
Nov. 8th, 2025 08:25 pmHere are some additional quotes from the book past the first 46 pages that captivated me, that i underlined and some (with emphasis) were so impactful that i dog eared the page (yes i do that to all my books if the content is good enough…. i have met some people who believe this is sacriliege… idk im not giving my books away or selling them or entering myself in the “Worlds Most In Tact Undamaged Well Read Book Competition” so whatevs)
pg 67 (a long passage on irreverence as a social, communication and artistic tool)
“Irony only has emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.' This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”
same page:
“All US irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I'm saying.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That its impossible to mean what you say?”
pg 79 (on masturbatory surrealism as an illusion of escape and novelty)
"And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as “liberating” as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly’s quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.”
pg 80 (this just reminded me of Kerouac and that it is a great description and so accurate :)
“…witty, erudite, extremely high-quailty prose television.”
pg 81 (i personally identified with this lol)
“… born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles.”
“Too sincere. Clearly repressed.”
“To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness.”
pg 82 (what a whopping ending)
“Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.”
LET ME BE CLEAR- THIS WAS MY FAVORITE ESSAY OF THE WHOLE BOOK, ITS A SEPARATE WORK OF ITS OWN OF COURSE CALLED: E Unibus Pluram AND YOU CAN FIND IT HERE https://tayiabr.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/e-unibus-pluram-david-foster-wallace-1990/
pg 89 (on the phenomeno of childhood uniqueness of self centred identity)
"One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? — that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? — that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else identify with this memory? The child leaves a room, and now everything in that room, once he’s no longer there to see it, melts away into some void of potential or else (my personal childhood theory) is trundled away by occult adults and stored until the child’s reentry into the room recalls it all back into animate service. Was this nuts? It was radically self-centered, of course, this conviction, and more than a little paranoid. Plus the responsibility it conferred: if the whole of the world dissolved and resolved each time I blinked, what if my eyes didn’t open?” “…regally innocent solipsism”
pg 90 (poetry)
“Noon will be a kiln.”
pg 91 (truthful statement)
“…you can always trust a man with multiple pens.”
pg 132 (hit a dry spell in the book… one of many) (on sensitivity)
“One of my basic life goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that’s extremely easy to terrify.”
pg 192 (DS-Dry Spell) (on David Lynch)
“…the films are, like a fantasy-prone little kid, self-involved to an extent thats pretty much solipsistic. Hence their coldness…His loyalties are fierce and passionate and almost entirely to himself.”
pg 201 (on the impactfullness artistically of David Lynches body of work)
“…The very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn't intellectual but wasn't even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s true medium wasn't verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern of Expressionistic or Surreal or what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true, whether they rang psychic cherries in the communicatee.”
This is not all of the quotes but my eyes are closing :)) sweet dreams to myself, love you self, thank you self, night night self
pg 67 (a long passage on irreverence as a social, communication and artistic tool)
“Irony only has emergency use. Carried over time, it is the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage.' This is because irony, entertaining as it is, serves an almost exclusively negative function. It's critical and destructive, a ground-clearing. Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony's singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”
same page:
“All US irony is based on an implicit “I don’t really mean what I'm saying.” So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That its impossible to mean what you say?”
pg 79 (on masturbatory surrealism as an illusion of escape and novelty)
"And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as “liberating” as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly’s quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.”
pg 80 (this just reminded me of Kerouac and that it is a great description and so accurate :)
“…witty, erudite, extremely high-quailty prose television.”
pg 81 (i personally identified with this lol)
“… born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles.”
“Too sincere. Clearly repressed.”
“To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness.”
pg 82 (what a whopping ending)
“Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.”
LET ME BE CLEAR- THIS WAS MY FAVORITE ESSAY OF THE WHOLE BOOK, ITS A SEPARATE WORK OF ITS OWN OF COURSE CALLED: E Unibus Pluram AND YOU CAN FIND IT HERE https://tayiabr.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/e-unibus-pluram-david-foster-wallace-1990/
pg 89 (on the phenomeno of childhood uniqueness of self centred identity)
"One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? — that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? — that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit? Does anybody else identify with this memory? The child leaves a room, and now everything in that room, once he’s no longer there to see it, melts away into some void of potential or else (my personal childhood theory) is trundled away by occult adults and stored until the child’s reentry into the room recalls it all back into animate service. Was this nuts? It was radically self-centered, of course, this conviction, and more than a little paranoid. Plus the responsibility it conferred: if the whole of the world dissolved and resolved each time I blinked, what if my eyes didn’t open?” “…regally innocent solipsism”
pg 90 (poetry)
“Noon will be a kiln.”
pg 91 (truthful statement)
“…you can always trust a man with multiple pens.”
pg 132 (hit a dry spell in the book… one of many) (on sensitivity)
“One of my basic life goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that’s extremely easy to terrify.”
pg 192 (DS-Dry Spell) (on David Lynch)
“…the films are, like a fantasy-prone little kid, self-involved to an extent thats pretty much solipsistic. Hence their coldness…His loyalties are fierce and passionate and almost entirely to himself.”
pg 201 (on the impactfullness artistically of David Lynches body of work)
“…The very most important artistic communications took place at a level that not only wasn't intellectual but wasn't even fully conscious, that the unconscious’s true medium wasn't verbal but imagistic, and that whether the images were Realistic or Postmodern of Expressionistic or Surreal or what-the-hell-ever was less important than whether they felt true, whether they rang psychic cherries in the communicatee.”
This is not all of the quotes but my eyes are closing :)) sweet dreams to myself, love you self, thank you self, night night self
supposedly fun things i'll never do again
Nov. 5th, 2025 02:56 pmi read the book "supposedly fun things i'll never do again” by David Foster Wallace. I post all of my book critiques and reviews on https://bookwyrm.social/user/wizard145 (also on the link page).
i wrote down lines that really stood out to me and imo made the book reading worth it. this post is from the first 46 pages, i will be updating posts with the quotes compiled in the future. for now here is this batch:
p46 (on: ritualizied social rites portrayed in media)
“… the management of spontaneous moments.”
p48 (on generational divide in education)
“(we simply) did not conceive the “serious” world in the same way.”
p38 (on media addiction)
“… something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict and (2) offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes.”
p33 (on a trained audience)
“A dog, if you point at something, will only look at your finger.”
p25 (on being observed as an object)
“(Thespians are) absolute geniuses at seeming unwatched… a total unallergy to gazes is contemporarily heroic.”
p23 (on observing others as objects of inspiration for art being a form of voyeur)
“…watching somebody who hasn't prepared a special watchable self.”
p23 (on loneliness in modern society)
“(People are) lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.”
QUOTED from KNOTT 1983:
I strap a TV monitor to my chest
So that all who approach can see themselves and respond appropriately.
i wrote down lines that really stood out to me and imo made the book reading worth it. this post is from the first 46 pages, i will be updating posts with the quotes compiled in the future. for now here is this batch:
p46 (on: ritualizied social rites portrayed in media)
“… the management of spontaneous moments.”
p48 (on generational divide in education)
“(we simply) did not conceive the “serious” world in the same way.”
p38 (on media addiction)
“… something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict and (2) offers itself as relief from the very problems it causes.”
p33 (on a trained audience)
“A dog, if you point at something, will only look at your finger.”
p25 (on being observed as an object)
“(Thespians are) absolute geniuses at seeming unwatched… a total unallergy to gazes is contemporarily heroic.”
p23 (on observing others as objects of inspiration for art being a form of voyeur)
“…watching somebody who hasn't prepared a special watchable self.”
p23 (on loneliness in modern society)
“(People are) lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans.”
QUOTED from KNOTT 1983:
I strap a TV monitor to my chest
So that all who approach can see themselves and respond appropriately.
sensory memory 1
Oct. 17th, 2025 03:26 pmtheres a homeless man here that smells very reminiscent of a pink liquid childrens medication i remember my mother forcefully feeding me. i think it was an antibiotic? it came in a bottle and i took it out of a hollow spoon with measurements down the barrel. i recall how foul the taste was. alcoholy and this tainted bubblegum aroma. i truly am skilled at swallowing pills i dont know why it had to be that way.
