A Youtube channel and studying editing and animation

Wow, it’s been a while, a long while. Kinda funny how the last post is me starting a Substack and saying that I will write regularly. Oh well.

I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit.

So much has changed, I don’t even know where to start. I guess I should show you my new Youtube channel.

Another huge thing for me is that I’m starting to study Video Editing and Animation as well as joining another challenge committing to post videos for 6 months. So hopefully I’ll have a nice portfolio by the end of it.

I don’t know if I will write much but my videos are kind of like video essays in a way. I want to focus fully on mastering the editing and animation skills so writing will be set aside for now.

All in all, I’m happy. As I said in the video, I haven’t felt such mental clarity in a while. This new journey is exciting.

I’m on Substack now

This blog is not going anywhere. Moreover, I really want to write here more often but Substack will be a weekly newsletter of my best writing. There is so much I want to write about and a weekly format will hopefully force me to not postpone the actual act of writing.

As usual I urge you all to start writing. If you are not ready to have your own personal website, maybe Substack will be a good start?

Anyway, here is mine, welcome 🙂

Why do you write by hand?

That’s the question my friend asked me today. I paused. This is a perfect moment to say the words I always wanted to say. And finally the situation arose.

“I’ll write about it.”

“Well, if you don’t want to answer just say so.” She sounds a bit upset.

“No, I mean it, I’ll write about it, my writing voice is much smarter than my speaking voice.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we all have three voices: the one we think with, the one we speak with and the one we write with. When I write, I’m using a different voice than I’m using with you now. You’ll get a much better answer once I write it.”

So why do I write by hand? Well, there’s the obvious: there is nothing in the digital world that feels as good as writing with an actual pen on a real paper. Nothing compares to that. There’s nothing like flipping through your old journals. When I read though mine I get transported back in time. I speak with the younger me. At times she’s insecure and scared. At times she’s funny. But always bold and honest. Still me. She gives me answers I need today.

The handwriting feels real. Feels like me. Messy.

Digital doesn’t do it for me. Believe me, I’ve tried. I’ve tried it all. I really like the idea of fancy pretty apps like Notion. They are so neat. I tried to get into them. But can I say those apps don’t have a soul? Plenty of people write directly in those apps and their writing doesn’t feel soulless.

But it doesn’t work for me. I like when my hand gets tired when I have so many thoughts at once and I try to write them as quickly as I can.

One more thing is editing. When I write by hand, I don’t have a handy backspace key close by. It’s not that easy to just remove an unnecessary word and forget about it. If i want to remove something, i have to cross it. But it’s still there forever. My very raw thoughts. No editing yet.

I used to hate that when I was a kid. I always dreamed to be allowed to write my essays on a computer so that it doesn’t look messy and the teacher will only judge the essay itself, not my handwriting. I always got worse marks because of my handwriting and the amount of crossing words and “messing up the paper”. I hated my own handwriting.

I don’t hate it now. To me it has a certain charm to it. It’s as messy as the thoughts in my head. Yeah, I’d love it to иe more readable but most of the times I’m too focused on the meaning behind the words rather than the shape of them.

So analog all the way for me. Messy handwriting rocks.

Forgive yourself for being exactly who you are. Forgive yourself for asking for more when someone was very clear about wanting to give you less and less. Forgive yourself for wandering down the wrong creeks and into the worst gulleys without stopping to drink in the pink light of dawn over the prairie first. Forgive yourself for saying the wrong thing, being weird or rigid, making a bad joke, backing away, becoming dismissive, because maybe that’s what made it safe to have the parents you had as a kid.

From Monday reading How Open-Hearted Can You Be and Still Survive?

Loving this short Yoga with Adriene practice that i did today. The video is called Yoga for Self Respect. There are often words that resonate with me almost every single time I do yoga. Today the words are as follows:

So we’re at our best and I believe we truly can be of service to others when we feel like we are in alinement with who we truly are … “Yeah well, how do I get there Adriene”, someone asked. I think the answer is: look inside. We’re constantly looking to other people everywhere to validate, to show us the respect. Well, we wouldn’t be looking for that if we didn’t feel like we deserve this. We really don’t need to look outside for that, it’s all inside.

It’s so true. I almost never find myself looking for validation from other people now. Yes, the encouragement is great but what’s even more great is to truly respect yourself from the inside, not because someone else respects you.

Anything can happen at any moment

February 24th is getting closer which reminds me and all Ukrainians of last year, when russia launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This brings back those horrible feelings when life got slashed into “before the war” and “after the war”. Instagram is reminding me about those days that were before. I could never imagine a full scale war. I could not believe that it would actually happen. Since then, there was countless times of me feeling anxiety, uncertain of what could happen. If war happened, what’s next? Can it get worse?

It’s impossible to know the answers to these questions but there is one thing I know for sure:

“Anything can happen at any moment.

And when it does you’ll cope.”

I’ve read this two incredibly powerful sentences in a post by Oliver Burkeman. I think I read this post a month ago but it left a huge mark on me. Whenever I think about what can happen (and it’s always horrible things) I think of these sentences.

You’ll cope.

My favourite bloggers

I wanted to write a post about my favourite bloggers for a while now. It feels like whatever I write, it won’t do them justice, it won’t be enough. Cause they’re so cool. But if I continue postponing it, I’m hiding them from you. And I don’t want that. I want more people to read them and get inspired to start their own blogs.

I’ll give you a link on their recent awesome posts so you can check out for yourselves. All of them are incredibly smart people and they inspire me greatly.

So here it goes, in no particular order, my favourite bloggers.

  1. Seth Godin
    Seth writes every single day for 15 years and even this fact is cool enough. His posts are on life, marketing, work, writing, you name it.
    Recent awesome post: Most people (and the people you choose)

2. Kottke.org

Updates daily, also posts a ton of cool links from the different corners of the Internet on a large variety of topics. It seems like this guy is genuinely curios about everything on Earth and beyond. And this curiosity is contagious.
Recent awesome post: New Massive Image of the Milky Way with 3.32 Billion Individual Objects


3. Alastair Johnston

I found out about Alastair from the Bullet Journal community, he is an author of Alastair method, which is very efficient but it wasn’t for me. But thanks to that I found his blog and I think it was the first blog I read “back to back” and started looking for other blogs after. It is refreshingly honest, which I love, honesty is hard to come by these days.
Recent awesome post: 2023 – A Depth Year


4. Patrick Rhone

Patricks blog was the one that inspired me to start mine. I wrote about him in this post. It’s also one of those blogs I read “back to back” when I first found it. Also refreshingly honest and a lot of his thoughts resonate with me greatly. I think it can have something to do with the fact that Patrick is INFJ. Yeah, i know Myers Briggs is not exactly science but if you’re also INFJ you’ll know what I mean. INFJ is the rarest personality type so whenever I stumble upon them “in the wild” I immediately feel “wow, I’m normal” kind of moment.
Recent awesome post: Mental illness can be an explanation but not an excuse…


5. Derek Sivers

Derek has written one of my favourite books “Hell yeah or no” which has been my motto for the last couple of years. His blog is equally great, he even published one of his book as a set of separate blog posts. He does not post daily but I always look forward to a new post.
Recent awesome post: Travelling just for the people


6. Austin Kleon

Austin Kleon is my favourite writer and it feels like I praise him in every post sometimes. But he deserves it. You may have heard of him as a writer of “Steal like an artist” book. He even wrote “Keep going” and “Show your work” which are equally awesome. I keep saying that I’ll write a post about them, and I should! Each of them reads in like 30 minutes so it’s not a huge time commitment. But if you want to get to know Austin a bit more as a writer before you buy the books, read his blog. Or if you read the books and loved them, read the blog. It’s truly great. I love how he shares about his creative ideas as soon as he’s coming up with them. He really is the person who practice what he preaches in his books and it’s very inspiring. My favourite book of all three is “Keep going“. Jeez, I should really write a post about it.
Recent awesome post: We all have three voices


And one of my recent finds, which will probably become one of my favourite bloggers
Mike Crittenden
I’m currently reading it “back to back” but here is Recent awesome post: Where are your beans going?


Bonus
Curios about everything

It’s not really a blog, it’s a newsletter. Jodi is literally curious about everything, just as the name suggests. And it’s contagious, I just love her newsletter, and I don’t know what else to say. But check out the recent newsletter issue and see for yourself The Curious About Everything Newsletter #23

Had some great meat on a date with my husband yesterday. They say it’s supposed to be “like in Texas, but in Gothenburg”. I have no idea if that’s true but it was super delicious.

A language experiment

I got inspired by Lydia Davis’ language learning process.

Although she learned German by immersion, Davis’s preferred method of language acquisition is quite different, and, to an outside observer, demonically challenging: She finds a book published in a language that she does not fully or even partially understand and then tries to figure out what it means.

To improve her Spanish, she digs into a copy of “Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer.” In some cases the decryption proves easy. Words like “plan” are the same in English and Spanish. In other cases she inductively reasons the meaning of a word after noticing it in different contexts. Hoja initially stumps her when it pops up in the phrase hoja de papel — “hoja of paper.” Later in the book, it occurs in the context of a tree. Finally, Huck wraps a dry hoja around something to make a cigarette, and Davis realizes that only one meaning would work as well with paper as with a tree or a cigarette: “leaf.” Of course, it would be possible to solve the hoja enigma in two seconds by plugging the word into Google, but that would destroy the fun.

Basically she takes a book in a foreign language and translates it without a dictionary. Sounds crazy? Maybe, but not if you’re a language nerd like me. I really found a kindred spirit when I read that quote. I’ve always been fascinated by languages so now I want to see what happens if I take this approach myself.

The language I chose is Italian, I used to study it in a university in Kyiv (my dream back then was to become a teacher of Italian and English). But it’s been a long time ago and I haven’t practiced any Italian since. Well, besides listening to Italian songs and occasionally rewatching a few of my favourite Adriano Celentano movies.

I expect this experiment to take a long time but I feel excited about it. The book that I chose is “La solitudine dei numeri primi” by Paolo Giordano.

I’m guessing that my level of Italian is about A2 (it was probably B2 in my university days). I can still understand a lot of what is said but there isn’t much in my active vocabulary. So every time I tried speaking it, the Swedish words came out which sounded really funny.

Contemporary etiquette

I was never a fan of following traditional ancient etiquette rules that have outgrown themselves a few centuries ago. Unless you are a member of a royal family, don’t bother.

But here’s some food for thought. The New York Magazine has published a collection of rules and tips for how to behave in a modern society. (Found at Kottke.org blog).

I think it’s worth to have a conversation about this. Some rules are great, some are a bit weird or way too American. But it’s a good start. I think it would be nice to have a universal agreement on stuff like that. Obviosly it is impossible to make a set of rules that everyone will agree on, but it’s nice to fantasize.

So here are my own two cents on a few rules from the list that I either want to scream “Yes! Yes! Yes!” to or disagree completely.

2. You may callously cancel almost any plans up until 2 p.m.

At 2 p.m., there’s still ample time for your friend — if they so choose — to text around and find another dinner companion. By three, they almost certainly will be alone for the night.

Yes!


6. Never wake up your significant other on purpose, ever.

The author’s significant other obviously doesn’t snore.


11. When another human is present, don’t talk to your animal in the private voice you use when alone together.

I’ll talk to my cat as I want, thank you very much.


16. If you ghost someone, stay gone forever.

I don’t ghost people because abandonment is my central trauma and passive-aggressive has never been my style. (I’m more aggressive-aggressive.) I suppose I can understand the appeal of ghosting as an easy way to cut someone off for whatever reason, or for none at all. What I cannot understand is ghosting someone and then coming back several years later to request a favor that would have been a considerable ask even if we had remained friendly.

let’s say we worked together in some context, were supportive of each other as colleagues, spent some time together socially, created a genuine rapport — and then you stopped responding to emails, texts, DMs, whatever. That’s fine, I guess. Working relationships don’t always last (even if it feels like more than a working relationship). It’s always going to take me a minute to stop reaching out, because abandonment trauma, but I’ll eventually move on and try not to take it personally (with varying degrees of success).

Yes. The same applies especially if you were never friendly and managed to talk shit behind my back. Don’t come asking for favours, it is weird and is never acceptable.


21. Gift randomly.

 I like giving people gifts as soon as I find something that may amuse them or that I want them to read or hear rather than waiting for some societally designated occasion. It feels less contractual this way. And the things I like giving — novelty T-shirts, hyperspecific vintage mugs, old issues of The Face, fruitcake, glossy eight-by-tens of ’90s musicians — rarely rise to the gravitas of a birthday or holiday.

It’s just nice to offer someone a physical manifestation of “I was thinking about you.” Or to figure out how you might distill someone’s personality into an eBay search string. Obviously, this doesn’t work with children. But most other people in your life will appreciate the small unexpected interruption to business as usual. This dovetails with another personal rule: Always send mail; everyone loves getting surprises in the mail. — Hua Hsu

Love this one and often do that to people. It is an amazing feeling to make people happy when they didn’t expect that.


30. When casually asked how you are, say “Good!”

It’s neutral and doesn’t force someone to endure a trauma dump or a spiel on how “the world is up in flames.”

Nope, that is too American and should never be accepted by the rest of the world. There is enough fakeness already, don’t add into it. If you do not genuinely want to know how someone is doing, ask something else. Heck, comment on the weather or something. Anything is better than being fake.


33. If you bring up astrology and it isn’t met enthusiastically, change the topic.

Not everyone believes in your made-up star bullshit.

Yes! Yes! Yes! This one should be a universal rule! Same applies to religion and other made up stuff.


40. Do not touch the small of my back to move around me at the bar if you’re ugly.

Don’t do it even if you’re pretty. Just don’t do it.


51. No deciding your order at the counter. When you roll up, speak up.

Yes! You’re not the center of the universe, so respect other people’s time.


83. Go on, take the last bite.

One thousand times yes! Eat the food, that’s why it’s there.


84-91. There are new rules of tipping.

Ok America, calm down. Don’t force your bullshit onto us because you haven’t succeeded to pay your workers salaries properly. Tipping is not mandatory, it is a compliment to a good service.


94. It’s okay to email, text, or DM anyone at any hour.

There’s nothing worse than being woken up at 2:30 a.m. with a dumb text or a Slack notification. So why did you do that to yourself? Phones and computers have great tools now to manage your time away, including setting working hours and muting types of notifications. We’re responsible for which flashing lights and noises we let into our lives. Because of that, anyone should feel free to text a friend or message a co-worker at any hour. We can’t successfully move into the future unless we recognize that the onus is on the receiver, not the sender.

Noooooooo! Not when it comes to work, not everyone is obsessed with work. Don’t take work matters outside of work hours. Chill.

If it is something else, like texting your friend, sure. You’re responsible for your own do not disturb settings.


99. Ignore your colleagues on the subway.

The commute, in the right light, is a sacred space not to be infringed upon.

Yes! Just yes!


And one more rule that I thought of while writing this:

If someone is constantly late for more than 10 minutes, don’t wait.

These kind of people do it because others accept their behaviour so they genuinely think that they deserve special treatment. Your time is not more valuable than mine. Especially when it comes to work appointments.