An aversion to adverbs is nothing new. I don’t think there is much point to writing about them. It’s not difficult to form a more powerful sentence by leaving them out. This quote from Ann Patchett reminds me how adverbs can get in the way of what you want to say.

If you want to write, practice writing. Practice it for hours a day, not to come up with a story you can publish, but because you long to learn how to write well, because there is something that you alone can say.

(seen on Micro Blog) Writing frees you from the constraint of a conversation and allows you to say something meaningful.

Much of my private writing is littered with adverbs and awkward phrases. To the point where I keep a list of the phrases I would rather avoid. We write often for ourselves, but also for our future self.

from taylor.town. How nice it would be if it were summer again. Another slow day at work.

Imagine this as text. Not the words on a page but the manner in how they were composed. Dominiqué Aury wrote:

lying on her side with her feet tucked up under her, a soft black pencil in her right hand… the girl was writing the way you speak in the dark when you’ve held back the words of love too long and they flow out at last. For the first time in her life, she was writing without hesitation, without stopping, rewriting or discarding; she was writing the way one breathes, or dreams… she was still writing when the street cleaners came by at the first touch of dawn.

I too do so in a similar (but slow) deliberate manner. As I do when I write in my notebook next to my partner in the coffee shop.

ava wrote a post, you can stick with it a rant about people struggling to find the right tools for blogging. I too have a similarly complicated setup for blogging. But if it were easier then more people would be blogging. There’s always a tradeoff between simple and complex. It’s taken me a number of tries to blog on a regular basis. Part of that is what software you choose. It’s OK to experiment.

music video - released in 2015

I took advantage of our tendency to be unoriginal on social media to make this animation. Everything from images search to editing is made “by hand” without any automated software.

I waited too long to post this and I forgot where I first heard about this video from. Not much anyone does anymore is all too original. Traveling as a tourist is often a shallow experience and as a result everyone takes many similar photographs. It’s hard not to sound elitest about this, but rather why I find much of what people post on social media uninteresting.