Logged in to Twitter for the first time in a while to respond to a few DMs — PSA: please don’t message me there if you are hoping for a quick response — and the algorithm served me an insightful thread on work productivity that only reminded me of how much I hated threads.

A memo written in 1977 has more useful advice on writing e-mails than a whole business class’ worth of courses. Number 8 in particular:

My last imposition on you for today is the excessive use of “appropriate” or “inappropriate,” when what the writer really means is either “legal” or “illegal,” “proper” or “improper,” “desirable” or “undesirable,” “fitting” or “not fitting,” or simply “this is what I want (or do not want) to do.”

Another duo to be expunged: comfortable/uncomfortable.

(h/t Josh Withers)

Adam Mastroianni has published part 2 of his three-part series on negotiation, and it is well worth your time. The problem of dividing household chores fits the theme perfectly while also being easily understandable, practical, and — if you haven’t gotten that part of your life sorted out yet — immediately actionable.

In case you were wondering: if we ever had to share chores, my preferrence is for doing the dishes, I am neutral on vacuuming, and you would have to pay me — and pay me a lot — to do laundry and clean the bathrooms. One of the keys of happiness in life, conditional on not being wealthy enough to pay people to do all your household chores for you, is finding a spouse whose preferences do not match your own.

Before getting married I (wrongly) tended to assume the preferences of others matched my own, and that every issue was a distributive one, to use Mastroianni’s terminology. But, of course that cannot be the case, ⊕ Though even now I have a hard time imagining anyone preferring to scrub toilets over loading a dishwasher. which living with a spouse tends to demonstrate quickly and abundantly. The negotiation aspect is one reason of many why dating a (gender-appropriate) copy of yourself would be a bad idea.

As evidence that people can change with age, I present this manual for spaced repetition. Some 20 years ago I would’ve eaten it up — I did, in fact, run SuperMemo on a Palm Tungsten T while in med school — but now the technique seems good for test prep and little else.

I love my current blog template: good typography, pleasant color scheme, Tufte-esque footnotes. Thank you, @pimoore!

But: what knobs should I tweedle to have front page excerpts not show up like this?

It is unseemly.

It was while watching the third loop of a video of Jack Callaghan, a 28-year-old man from Newcastle, running a steamer back and forth over his bedsheets that I realised I agreed with one of the commenters: yes, this also brought me “peace and joy”.

So begins a (paywalled, sorry) FT article on people earning a good bit of money from posting housekeeping tips to social media: #cleantok, #cleanfluencers, apparently. It reminded me of Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts, my favorite book to pick up and read at random, and for the same reason all these people are watching a guy clean out a microwave with half a lemon and some water: peace and joy.

The article goes on to describe some spring clean routines for homes of various sizes, including — it is the Financial Times, after all — some they euphemistically call big and stately. This spring we will be moving house, not cleaning it, but I’ll keep browsing through Home Comforts for peace, joy, and some semblance of a plan for spring cleanings to come.

On the off chance anyone reading this also knows the language formerly known as Serbo-Croat, now called Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin… or simply naš (“our”) language: the few writings I have, going back to 2010, are now on micro.blog.

Consolidation FTW!

With only two days to go before the worst month of the year starts, I can declare infrastructure week — the one that started back around Christmas — complete. All posts from the old blog, book, movie, and tv reviews included, are now hosted on micro.blog.

This rump week would be a better time than most to work on the pipes here, if not for my having to do actual work. ⊕ Which is all good! There are some exciting news coming in early 2023 which yes, need my absolute attention even on a holiday.Still, I will dedicate a few hours transferring posts from the ole' pelican-powered Infinite Regress — around since 2014 as a self-hosted blog and since 2012(!?) on SquareSpace — to using micro.blog full time.

It was an easy choice, driven by two factors: the Tufte theme for micro.blog is just that good of a look — thank you, @pimoore! — and posting from MarsEdit Via BBEdit for titled posts, such as this one. on an M1 Mac is just that good of a workflow. ⊕ Also fairly expensive — the 2014 me would have balked at a $5–10/month subscription and two pieces of $50+ software — but at a certain point time becomes more valuable than money and if you haven’t already reached that point I hope that you soon do.

So, I will be happy with just a transfer of old posts, plus-minus switching up footnotes to marginnotes and sidenotes as needed. Time permitting, I will make a few tweaks to the page layout, colors and font, but these will be gravy. The Infinite Regress layout has lasted more than 8 years, and I can easily see this one lasting 8 more.

Speaking of IR, converting it to a digital garden-like website The link is to Maggie Appleton’s overview of the history of digital gardens, and if you haven’t been to her website before, you are in for a treat. is the next big project, one that will have to wait for the next infrastructure week.

The older I get the more I appreciate anything in life that reduces friction. Yes, I could write a quick landing page myself and host it on Github pages for free. But for $5/year omg.lol makes it so much easier (and more esthetically pleasing than I could ever manage).