“DOING THE VALVES, TIMING, AND MINOR MAINTENANCE ON YOUR OWN CAR WILL NOT ONLY CHANGE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOUR TRANSPORTATION BUT WILL ALSO CHANGE YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH YOURSELF!”
– John Muir
and from the comments:
“This is a beautiful point. Many in my generation (millennial) have never experienced this firsthand. You do not know the full meaning of ownership until you have maintained or modified the thing. You cannot buy full ownership; you must participate.”
– LYNDON
There is a bond that forms when you take the time to repair something. Even swapping out the tire on your car. If you do it yourself successfully, you’ll see seams, and bolts, and rivets, the cars personality, will reveal itself a bit.
Like you’re setting her right. And she appreciates the attention.
Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2026), 92.
Cool idea from the living cool idea Stewart Brand. He included a list of software used to help write his book in the book credits. First I’ve ever heard anyone author giving credit to their tools.
Surprised non of the major LLMs hit the list.
Wow. Also Scribbr where have you been the last 24 months?
Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One (San Francisco: Stripe Press, 2026), 13.
I am happy that even in my quite shit first ever roll of film, these pictures look at least a little like they were taken by me. I think you can smell a little of the soil on them. I like how touchable all the surfaces and the dirt feel. I like their creepiness. And I like that I have probably taken the most artistic photo of all time depicting the grime on a car park barrier outside the leisure centre where I learned to swim. Nobody else was going to do it.
Blogger Emily Spinach shares her experience in being a newbie. Film photography’s challenges are twofold. One, you get one shot. Two, the feedback loop is delayed. All of which cultivate frustration and patience.
The film photography renaissance is underway. Will it scale?
Dan’s mother being one of the rare mother’s who follows through on the military school threat:
COWEN: What did you learn from your time as a Royal Canadian Army cadet?
WANG: I think the trite answer is just a lot of discipline. I think that I was a bad kid growing up. I was absolutely not a good child, and I’ll be the first to admit that.
COWEN: What does that mean concretely?
WANG: Ottawa is not only the federal capital of Canada, but it is also the drug capital of Canada. It is very easy to fall into a mischievous crowd when you’re over there. I was playing hooky from school a little bit too much, and running off, and trying to do whatever I found fun and not going to school. I never had good grades growing up. To this day, I will admit that I was academically challenged.
I always just enjoyed taking a book to read in the park or something, rather than sitting in class. My main issue was that I played hooky a little bit too much, raised the ire of my parents. My parents threatened to give me to the army, and I laughed that off, because no parents ever do that. Then, my mom did it. She gave me to the Royal Canadian Army cadets, and they straightened me out.
Taking the opportunity seriously and reconceptualizing tough tasks:
I was a very good army cadet. I was awarded recruit of the year. I was the fastest person in my regiment to be promoted to corporal. I was in the marching band, and I did excellent drill as well. Something I take away from some of the commanding officers whom I grew close to, they would tell me that the ethic of the army was that whatever you imagine is the most difficult thing, you should simply reconceptualize it as the easiest thing, and then you just do it. It turned out to have been a fairly robust lesson.
and writing exercises for the curious and ambitious:
COWEN: How did you learn how to write so well?
WANG: I have always grown up loving to read. My grandfather bought so many books for me, first picture books that had text underneath. Then, my mother also encouraged a reading habit. We had so many books growing up. I think that if I were thinking about writing, first and foremost, I pay attention to cadences. I think about beat. I think about the musicality of the effect.
I think that it is really, really valuable to just have a sense of how the words sound before it falls out of your pen. I have a sense of practice. When I was a musician, every so often I would take some time when I was still a college student to just go to the music library, check out some scores. I did this with a Mahler symphony as well as some Mozart symphonies, to just simply copy out the scores, and just write it all out.
I did this exercise also when I was early in my writing. I would just take a New Yorker article that I really liked, and simply rewrite the entire thing. When you engage in that sort of exercise, you really have a sense of what the composer was thinking when he was plotting out the harmonies. When you do that with a really good piece of writing, whether that’s a New Yorker article, or a really good book, you start having a sense of the choices that the author was making in terms of syntax, in terms of sentence length, in terms of the word choices, and being in a position to make those sorts of choices, I think, is very valuable.
Don’t think about why you question, simply don’t stop questioning. Don’t worry about what you can’t answer, and don’t try to explain what you can’t know. Curiosity is its own reason. Aren’t you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure behind reality? And this is the miracle of the human mind–to use its construction, concepts, and formulas as tools to explain what man sees, feels and touches. Try to comprehend a little more each day. Have holy curiosity.
– Albert Einstein
As read from Mastery, by Robert Greene.
So much fun is found in doing the thing, reading the thing, sketching the thing, for it’s own sake. We can want the output so bad that the joy of the input can be overlooked. Reminds me of Seth’s blog post: Hobby mindset.
Greene, Robert. Mastery. United States, Penguin Publishing Group, 2012. pg205
“Truth and sincerity have a certain distinguishing native luster about them which cannot be perfectly counterfeited; they are like fire and flame, that cannot be painted.”
– Ben Franklin
Ben Franklin is unmatched in the maxims game. Maybe Oliver Wilde sits close? Ben’s simile here reminds me of how contradicting his character was, but also how he strove to improve it.
Learn a craft is what I suggest to young writers who contact the Idler: carpentry or blacksmithing or gardening or upholstery; such pursuits sit alongside the life of the mind very well. It is wise reject utterly as a piece of bourgeois propaganda the oppressive aphorism ‘jack of all trades and master of none’. No: you can do lots of things. You can chop wood and carry water and write poems. You can combine small holding with software design. One Idler reader is a classical tuba player who is also a trained plasterer. He loves both and both earn him an income. Why limit yourself to one small field?
Encouraging words to all the jack of all trades out there. But I’ve found great satisfaction in focusing on one discipline deeply, for an extended amount of time. How else can one become a classical tuba player or trained plasterer?
Hodgkinson, Tom. The Freedom Manifesto: How to Free Yourself from Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste. United States: HarperCollins, 2013. pg47
Babbage saw digital computers as instruments by which to catalog otherwise inaccessible details of natural religion — the mind of God as revealed by computing the results of his work. He believed that faster, more powerful computers would banish doubt, restore faith, and allow human beings to calculate fragments of incalculable truth.
“A time may arrive when, by the progress of knowledge, internal evidence of the truth of revelation may start into existence with all the force that can be derived from the testimony of the senses,”
Of course George Dyson gives Charles Babbage his flowers.
With us entering the AI age, it’s fascinating how faster, more powerful computers don’t banish doubt or restore faith. They instead create more questions. Even with U.S.S. Enterprise levels of compute, some truth will remain incalculable.
Dyson, George. Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. United States: Basic Books, 2012. pg42
I have attempted, in my own life and in this book, to reconcile a love of nature with an affection for machines. In the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.
Floodlights and Goalposts 