Author Archives: Steve Mays

If you care about your thoughts, keep them

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From an article by Derek Sivers on the benefits of a daily diary:

“Years from now you might be looking back, wondering if you were as happy or as sad as you remember during this time. […] We so often make big decisions in life based on predictions of how we think we’ll feel in the future, or what we’ll want. Your past self is your best indicator of how you actually felt in similar situations. So it helps to have an accurate picture of your past. […] You can’t trust distant memories. But you can trust your daily diary. It’s the best indicator to your future self (and maybe descendants) of what was really going on in your life at this time.”

Thoughts think themselves

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For those of us who subscribe to the theory there is no self — that me “I” thought is just a persistent illusion — a frequent question is where do thoughts come from if there is no “me” to think them?

They come from the subconscious whose name happens to be Jeff. Jeff sits in the refrigerator that is your consciousness. He has one of those horseshoe magnets he uses to arrange tiny word magnets on the outside of the refrigerator. Jeff is working backward and in the dark (trust me on that point) so the ideas he strings together are often random and arbitrary. He can sense when there is an awareness on the other side of the door and this makes him uncomfortable so he slows down the magnet work. When he feels the awareness depart he gets busy again.

Pixelmator Repair Tool (2019)

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I’ve posted on this before it bears repeating. Barb’s visiting an old friend (Jeff Pylant) who took the selfie on the left in which his finger features prominently. Using the Repair Tool in Pixelmator (not Pixelmator Pro) it took less than 30 seconds to fix the image. Not a pro photographer fix but good enough.

When you have 10,000 photos it’s hard to care much about any one of them

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We “took” photos differently when our cameras had a roll of film that could take 24 shots. And it would be days — later just 24 hours — before we got our prints back. That’s when we learned if we got the light right and everybody was ‘in’ the photograph. We didn’t snap photos back then. We positioned everyone. Said dumb shit to try to get them to smile. We worked at making the photograph. A little bit.

Today we one-hand the phone and fire off a burst of half dozen images and if they’re not very good they’ll scroll into oblivion in a few hours. We have no investment in such images. We have so many they’re like a wheelbarrow full of Reichsmarks in 1949. Or a pair of Imelda Marcos’ shoes.