Umeboshi 4

Hello my friends! Welcome to the fourth edition of Umeboshi, the newsletter that give you updates on my life and the things that I’m interested in. This last month has been about recalibrating back to life at home after returning from my holiday. I've implemented a few Siri Shortcuts into my life and I'm excited to slowly share those with you over the next few months.

The main change in the last month has been an attempt to slow down and use long stretches of time to do whatever I want to do: ultimately, I’ve found so many things that I’d prefer to do instead that I haven’t had a lot of free time at all actually. It’s funny how there’s so many things to fill up your time isn’t it? I tried timeblocking but I found that if I block more than 3 hours of my day out I tend to run overtime on one task and then everything falls apart. I’ve been tinkering with shortcuts, experimenting with ChatGPT and Claude, and reading multiple books at the same time.

In addition to Morning Pages i've been trying to keep a Daily Note (I've been using a Shortcut to make this easy). Tags have been something i've really appreciated using in Bear lately and it's been really easy to go back over the last few weeks to see what has preoccupied my mind. Briefly, I've enjoyed thinking about stewardship (more on this another time) and how hypey all the AI things are lately.

I've managed to read a few books this last month including Nevada which was stellar. I'm about halfway through The Persians and i'm finally listening to Someone You Can Build a Nest In.

📚 What I've been reading

Nevada

If you're at all interested in queer literature I think this is a must read. It's one of my top two books along with Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl which I read a few years ago and also loved straight away. Nevada changed my mind about the trans experience. I won’t say more than that, just go read it.

The web

I am so excited about the chance to use a local LLM (or just better cloud LLMs) on my computers and have it integrate with Shortcuts. I think it'll be really fun to play around with these kinds of things as I get more interested in hacking my phone to be a better device for me. My phone should work for me, not for the use of a company in California. Over on Macstories Federico Viticci  recently described how excited he is to use the new LLMs being made available in a future iOS update. Lovely read.

Very interesting article on a self-governing forest which feels like it’s aligned with my values personally and intersects with some reading I’ve done previously on hydrofeminism. But I acknowledge that it’s very unlikely this idea will reach a critical mass of approval among most citizens of capitalist economies.

📺 What I've been watching

We have recently gotten into Ghosts and it's so fun!

I really enjoyed Hank Green talking about The Culture and The Ekumen in this video. If you haven't read Iain M. Banks' Culture novels you are missing out! It's got so much good stuff in there and it's very decent science fiction. Plus, each story is a stand alone novel but is in the same setting. My suggestions for first timers are:

• If you like hyper capable ships playing an active role in the galaxy → The Hydrogen Sonata
• Existential threats and a big focus on sentient ships → Excession
• A slower paced but strategic novel in my opinion closer to Ursula Le Guin's work → The Player of Games

And then come and tell me about it! The audiobooks are really good as well and read by my favourite voice actor.

🎧 What I’ve been listening to

Someone You can Build a Nest In

Imagine you were a socially awkward monster who wears other people’s organs and bones but then you fall in love with a human. That’s the premise of this really detailed, quite lovely, very enjoyable book by John Wiswell. I really like the character building and how the monster is portrayed. It’s very fun in a ‘i’m cheering for the bad guy’ sort of way.

The web

The most recent episode of A Bit of Optimism features Phil Rosenthal of Somebody Feed Phil. Just listen, it's glorious. Phil talks about taking charge of what you do in your life and how important food and laughter is.

📓 Some recent journal prompts I've used

• An oldie but a goodie: What would my life look like 5 years from now if I continue on my current path? What would my life look like if I took a co pletely different path? What would my life look like if I didn't care about money or what anyone else thought of me?
• If I knew I was going to die 2 years from now, what would I do?
• What am I currently doing that might be holding me back from deeper connections with people?

That's all for now! Until next time, stay sweet and sour, my plums.

As always you can reach me @hellolerm. See you next month.

Liam