> Built in 1899 by the Czech architect Dušan Jurkovič, known as “the poet of timber” for his woodwork, the cottage and hotel are a lively combination of Czech-Slavic heritage and the Art Nouveau style of the time. The fairy tale-esque dining room, in particular, features Art Nouveau chandeliers and frescoes decorated with motifs from local legends. Constructed during a time of strong Austrian and Germanic influence, the mountain residences showcase the renowned architect’s focus on local culture and folk art. > After enduring a period of neglect and disrepair in the mid-1900s, both buildings have been lovingly restored, named National Cultural Monuments as part of a National Open Air Museum in the mountain town of Pustevny. As in 1899, they welcome overnight guests to this beautiful alpine area, while the restaurant serves local Wallachian cuisine like zelňačka (cabbage soup). The website has more photos. I love, love, love folk ornament and it’s even better put to an ambitious program by a creative overseer with resources.

(the proper DOI link) I’m partially linking this just because it was so irritating to find that my old annotation now pointed to a paywall. I read it in 2023 and have had it mulling around the brain ever since. The kinds of discussion you find about it online are disappointing. My own notes here will be brief. I had hoped for more from Nine Tolkien Scholars Respond but it’s mostly people saying “[gosh wouldn’t we have gotten a lot further if this had been published when it was written]” with a couple gestures in the direction of “[this has informed something else I’ve published elsewhere]” and “[kind of what I was trying to get at in my book]”. The contrast between the rootedness of the goblins in the Hobbit and the facelessness of the orcs in the Lord of the Rings is something that had escaped me as a child reader but seems obvious now. Reading this the recent attempts of Wizards of the Coast to de-race their game design seem… less than half-hearted cosmetic patches. If you are to replace “race” with “species” yet preserve half-orcs and half-elves we are not to take your biology very seriously. The actual racial hierarchies, the coding of various groups here seem the least ambiguous. The identification of the narrative with the Crusades gives me a little pause just because I can believe a lot of ambient belief wedges itself into artistic work, but I wouldn’t have imagined Tolkien in particular could fictionalize the Crusades by accident. I should probably pick through Devereaux but as ever find myself perpetually stymied by fits of military-history-induced narcolepsy.

I walk by a Holzer installation as part of my commute, sometimes stop, pick a maxim for the day. It’s not so different from pulling a Tarot card or finding a line in a reading – except I’m lying, it is, sometimes I find myself irritated by the ideologies I can read there. Anyway. The sound of a maxim is something to understand, to dissect. Holzer’s oeuvre a useful dataset.

This is all done by a Quirky Personal Site Haver (really: don’t miss the main site!) but this _subsite_ is more pointed at a lot of content you’ve surely come across before: > I’m Kit Anderson, productivity geek, entrepreneur, father of three (startups, that is), and soon-to-be the first self-made trillionaire (haha just kidding… but maybe?). This is my website where I write about my efforts to lead a productive life, the OPTIMAL life. The clean sans serif is _brutal_. It’s impossible not to think a lot about these themes in my job – or better said, it’s impossible for _me_ partially because of how _little_ reflection people are willing to cop to at work. My favorite thing is obviously related, my affectations… but a lot of people are hitting it at too kneejerk a surface-level, particularly when they bring in their understanding of economics. Even partially-articulated, I trust the vision of a Borges-informed Neocities-site-haver more.

> In short, science classes pair a description of our best knowledge at the present with a story of discovery of how we came to know what we know now, with the clear implication that this method is how we will continue to discover new things. > By contrast in history this same story (we call it historiography – the history of the history) doesn’t generally attract sustained attention until graduate school. Students learn the names of rulers and thinkers and key figures but they rarely learn the names of historians. Likewise, instead of being presented with a process of historical discovery they are given a narrative of human development – it is not until advanced undergraduate courses that they begin to engage meaningfully with how we know these things. In my own experience the exceptions to this were almost invariably stories about the knowledge-making achievements of other disciplines – archaeology and linguistics, mostly – rather than narratives of historical investigation. So it is not surprising that many students at those introductory levels come away assuming that the narrative is pretty much fixed and has been known and understood effectively forever. I went to an International Baccalaureate school for high school and while that was generally a mistake, _boy_ I loved that they gave us historiography. If you are bored in a class you can do mental backflips to ascend to new heights of being-irritating. “But wouldn’t a post-revisionist object to your characterization there as overly driven by…” On the other hand, I found the focus on great scientist narratives offputting in every science class I ever took. (Not that Devereaux’s wrong – I’m just contemplating how this is best done)

If you make your phone interface more annoying to navigate, you use it less. The combination of this color theme and this photo background: profoundly unusable! I am not good at remembering what I am doing in the middle of completing routine steps, even when the steps in question are “navigate to your time-wasting app”, so introducing the extra friction of “open up the search and type in the name of the app” is enough to decrease how much I end up doing it1. I also replaced my normal browser button with a shortcut that opens the browser then opens my flashcard app on top of it, with the idea that it takes no time to do a couple flashcards before going off to noodle around on the internet. This one’s been slightly less successful since I started unconsciously navigating to the browser via the open apps. I’ll start trying to close the browser after use and we’ll see how that goes. 1. Did you know that ADHD runs in families? Haha no reason to bring that up, _my_ debilitating personal incapacities are actually a sign of moral failure ↩

> 16 years of commenting has made me zero friends. That scares me. All of that social activity with zero ROI. At first, I thought that I needed to change my commenting habits, and, you know, try to make connections. But the more I considered how to make friends in comment culture, the more I realized that it wasn’t just my own social ineptitude. Comment culture has a problem. Systemically, it produces an internet of strangers. This is making a point about comment culture taking your social energy and throwing it into a black hole, with no value to turning strangers into weak ties, turning weak ties into strong ties, or maintaining strong tied. And that is all true! I would submit that it’s worse than waste: commenting for an audience, you learn habits that are actively counterproductive in proper social interaction. For instance: the value I’ve found in asking questions in average Internet comment sections is… little to none. People don’t tend to get what you’re _getting at_ with questions, which makes sense, since you have nearly no shared context. Rather, it’s better to figure out what your clever little thing is you can toss in; if others “like” it, it’ll filter to the top, and if they don’t “like” it, it’ll filter to the bottom and not bother anyone. However: this is a terrible set of instincts to develop if you actually want to have real conversations with people! Your clever little thing can’t be ranked down in a linear conversation, so you’re taking up airspace and making it about you and your thing – and with people worth talking to, **we should all be asking way more questions**! (I need to write up my notes on this book I read that argued that, because I think it’s been unfairly maligned)