Day 28: 📷 community (@stupendousman) #mbApr
Depiction of community festival at the Taiwan National History Museum. #Taiwan
Catching up on some journaling on the balcony with a nice view before we leave.
#Taiwan
Lovely day at the Grand Kaohsiung Hotel. Next we drive up to Tainan to visit the National History Museum. In the evening we will catch the High Speed Rail to Taipei.
Tonight we are staying in the Grand Kaohsiung Hotel, a grand place indeed which has hosted many dignitaries over the years including Chiang Kai Shek, Chadian president Idriss Déby, and Reza Pahlavi Shah. They have a giant duck and a nice pool! #Taiwan
Day 27: 📷 surprise (@Sdevore) #mbApr
One of the suprising things visiting the holy site of the Buddha tooth relic (see previous post) was finding… a DINOSAUR display!? Unexpected… but at least its a herbivore! 🌱🦕
Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum houses one of the 3 tooth 🦷 relics of the Buddha ☸️ It is a massive facility. No photos inside unfortunately. We saw the reliquary, got small bottles of holy water, and ate a fantastic vegetarian meal. But, there was a surprise (see my next post) #Taiwan #Buddhism
We showed up just as they were getting the night market set up. It was absolutely pouring when the plane landed. But not too bad the rest of the day. We had “Buddha Head” fruit for the first time. Ate some great noodles at a vegetarian 卍 stand. So full of street food right now! 😋
Day 26: 📷 critter (@7robots) #mbApr
Some delicious critters at the night market from our first day in Taiwan.
On the train to get on the plane to fly to Taiwan!🇹🇼 Getting a jumpstart on Golden Week. All my photos for the rest of the Micro.Blog April photo challenge #mBApr will now switch from Sakura 🌸 to Taiwan themed. 🧋🥭🍍
Day 25: 📷 spine (@thedimpause) #mbApr
To the east of Osaka, floating above the tops of the buildings in the distance, is the Ikoma mountain range, the spine that runs up the middle of Kansai separating the Osaka Plain from the Nara Basin. This is my morning coffee view from the balcony. ☀️☕⛰️⛰️⛰️
Day 24: 📷 light (@eumrz) #mbApr
The cherry blossoms are long gone, so I have not held myself to that rule for the last couple of weeks, but I am glad to get you some cherry blossoms for tonight’s photo 💡🌸
Imagine interacting with your connected notes with a more engaging canvas view… that is programmable! “Visual-Semantic Morphism” is just one thing that came up in this cool presentation from @orion@hci.social
#Obsidian #OpenCanvas #ToolsForThought #UX #HCI
Started listening to The Blade Itself (The First Law #1) by Joe Abercrombie 📚
Recommended by my brother. Been a while since I read a straight forward fantasy in this style. Wanted something I could listen to on the airplane this week.
Well, hello there. 👋 If you don’t mind terribly, I should like to recommend this lovely video essay about Wes Anderson films and living with pain 🥹
Be well! I wish you the very best.
Started listening to Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth by Ingrid Robeyns 📚
Chapter notes on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6450313181) and Bookwyrm (https://bookwyrm.social/book/1617013/comment#reviews) if you want to follow along.
#EconomicJustice #limitarianism
Wife left the city for the mountains 🏔️ today. Came home with a giant mushroom 🍄🟫. Broiled it and cracked it open and a long centipede came out!! 🐛😱 Children are mortified and have sworn off food “for at least a week”! 😂
Day 23: 📷 dreamy (@maique) #mbApr
Love this local flower shop overflowing with leaves and twigs of all shapes and sizes. It makes me think of James C Scott. It also makes me think of my wife, since I buy stuff 💐 for her here.
Store name translates as:
夢 - dream 挿 - to put into a vase 花 - flowers
Just enough capitalism – A quick review of Slow Productivity
Slow Productivity by Cal Newport 📚
Cal Newport’s latest advice book tackles the question of productivity in knowledge work. Factory work can much more easily be measured and systematized. Newport points out that office workers, writers, artists, and scholars are often assigned tasks and must come up with their own individual system to be productive. These systems are opaque to managers, who end up relying on “visible activity” (which many busy office workers are familiar with) as the proxy for productivity. Add in always-on email and instant messaging apps, plus a global pandemic and people trying to work from busy homes, and you end up with a lot of burnout.
The initial chapters of the book will have many knowledge workers nodding along empathetically, sharing in the sense of exhaustion and overload. Taking inspiration from the “slow food” movement Newport quickly moves into his three solutionary principles:
- Do fewer things
- Work at a natural pace
- Obsess over quality
Each principle gets its own chapter full of tips in how you can step out of the hamster wheel of “psuedo-productivity”, take back your time from your employer, and focus on truly great work. Newport takes a lot of inspiration from classic figures like Isaac Newton, Copernicus, and Madame Curie. (Pretty intimidating for your average cubicle warrior…)
Ultimately, the book is not interested in deeper, critical questions of why we are burning out. Despite calling for a “revolution” in the conclusion, Newton drops some snide comments about Marx and leftists in the text. Challenging the system is not his job. Perhaps expected of a “productivity” blogger, he remains very much imprisoned in the self-exploitative work camp of the “late-modern achievement-subject” (see The Burnout Society by philosopher Byung Chul Han, an overview and link to my review here).
Maybe I am being too “obsessed over quality.” A cynic might say this is a short book that capitalizes on people’s dissatisfaction with their work life and then doles “life-changing” advice between mentions of all his other books (on sale at all fine bookstores! And I admit I would like to get at least one more!). The advice basically boils down to: get really good at something, raise your rates, and lower the amount of time you spend engaging in capitalism. It is burnout mitigation on the level of a corporate mindfulness retreat. But that’s okay. It is better than nothing, and sometimes a reader needs a bit of prodding to be self-reflective, and the book did spur me to think about my own working habits. And though I have my issues, it is much better than other “make your bed”-style self-help books. I enjoyed the first bit and there are a few good nuggets in there. I think it would be a good jumping off point for discussion in a book club or office setting. So if you need something to spark a little rethinking about how you are doing things, this could be a good quick and moderately stimulating read. 3 stars!
Day 22: 📷 blue (@lzbth) #mbApr
A reclining Myaku-Myaku, official character of the Osaka Expo 2025.
(and yes, I know you are wondering but I can confirm he has an eye on his backside)