Yet another massive loss in music. Black Sabbath was probably the first band I ever heard. Definitely the first band that I really got into. This was due to the fact my father introduced me into it when I was a literal baby. Hugely important band for me. Tragic loss.
Thank you for everything.
This week has been horrible when it has come to death of musicians. We just lost Sly Stone and Brian Wilson. Now, one of the most influental artists for me, Douglas McCarthy from Nitzer Ebb. What a horrible year and week.
Nitzer Ebb along with Front 242 were probably the two most influental bands for me which made me eventually to delve more deeply into the realms of EBM and industrial. Naturally, after those came bands like Ministry and Nine Inch Nails that also have always been super important bands for me. Nitzer Ebb were for me the gateway drug into this sort of sonic world.
Thanks for everything!
I recently stumbled upon a beautiful quote from Cesar A. Cruz that I just wanted to ponder.
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable”
Cruz’s quote is both provocative and elusive, a tidy aphorism masking a deeper tension. It implies a dual responsibility for art: to console those in pain while challenging those at ease. But who decides which group we belong to? What comforts one person might deeply unsettle another, and vice versa.
The beauty of Cruz’s idea is that it resists easy answers. Comfort isn’t inherently weak; it can heal. Discomfort isn’t automatically righteous; it can harm. Art lives in this paradox, in the liminal space where consolation and confrontation coexist. Cruz’s words don’t prescribe solutions, they challenge us to sit with the ambiguity, to feel both the sting and the salve of what art can do. That’s its power: to disturb us into wakefulness, but also to cradle us when we need it most.
Haven’t updated my “What I Read Between” -series in a while mainly due just being busy in my own life but also due to the fact that I’ve reading and rereading veeery big novels. But finally having been managed to finish those, let’s gather some thoughts.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment (reread)
I’ve always been a huge fan of Russian literature, or at least a big fan of few Russian authors. Mainly due to this reason I wanted to embark on this “rabbit hole” during the summer months. Naturally, starting with Dostoyevsky.
I’ve read Crime and Punishment a couple of times during my lifetime. First, as a mandatory homework from school and later few times just out of pure enjoyment and I can say that it’s possibly one of my favorite books. To summarize, book is about Raskolnikov’s internal and external battles and the repercussions of the crimes he has done.
I love how the “crime” aspect of this book happens only in the 100 or so pages, and the rest (600 or so) are devoted to the “punishment”, which in this case means battles with psychological consequences of the crimes, insanity and isolation, ending in the moment of divine grace and beginning of Raskolnikov’s redemption.
Great book, cannot recommend it enough.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Notes from Underground (reread)
Along side Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground is also a book that I’ve read multiple times from Dostoyevsky. Probably I stumbled upon this book when I was a “edgy” teenager, so I thought I could see some similarities between me and the protagonist.
Book focuses mainly on diving deep into the mind of man living in solitude. So a majority of the book is about questioning various everyday concepts, such as logic, reason, free will, and showing how suffering can add depth to our everyday life.
Again, very good book that encourages reader to not just read but also to think and reflect.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
The Brother Karamazov was one of the classics of Dostoyevsky that again for one reason or another I hadn’t read so I finally was able to finish it and what a book it was! Book itself focused where heavily on rich and absorbing ideas such as spirituality and logic and their contrast. So much so, that the plot of the book itself (while being great on its own) feels secondary to the exploration of these themes.
While the high level topics might be the main thing behind the book, I especially loved the way how Dostoyevsky embedded these themes in to the main characters of the book, the Karamazov family.
Book was pretty big with lots of different events and stories (even stories within a story) so couple of paragraphs doesn’t do it justice. Just this book alone deserves a separate post. I would even argue that just reading the book once doesn’t do it justice. That being said, I enjoyed the book tremendously, and I will be reading it again in the future.
David Foster Wallace: The Infinite Jest
The Infinite Jest has always been an interesting book for me. For many reasons. First, I’ve always thought David Foster Wallace to be an interesting character on its own right. But at the same time, for the the literary prowess that he had. I had read couple of works from him previously but Infinite Jest always felt like a somewhat of a herculean task to finish. Firstly due to its length, but also for how it was written.
I remember reading some interview from DFW, where he mentioned how he “wanted to write a best-seller, that was meant for literature students/professors”, which can definitely be seen in the book. The writing style in the book is very hard and difficult. Especially to someone from whom English is not their native language.
But overall I think the book was great. Especially the time in the current world made the book feel sort of “prophetic” in many ways. Despite the book itself is set in this dystopian world. But looking it with perspective of today’s world, it’s not that dystopian.
Similarly to The Brother Karamzov, couple of paragraphs doesn’t do the book justice, since it features hundreds of different characters, many of whom are just coping with modern technological world filled with loneliness and disconnection.
Again, a great book once you get into it, which definitely deserves an another read.
As you might’ve seen in my last post, I’ve been without an internet for good some time already. Still (like I mentioned in the last post) I’ve really enjoyed my time without it. I feel that I can switch off much better after working hours, and I still have energy to partake in various other extracurricular activities that I hold dear to my heart, like hobby programming projects, music, reading, sports and much more. So really there isn’t much to complain.
Currently, my new neighbourhood does have a pretty good signal – generally speaking. My apartment just happens to be in relatively awkward spot, which means that it’s surrounded by other buildings. I happen to have a relatively big balcony in my apartment as well and even in there I have basically one bar of connectivity going on. Naturally, inside I don’t have any signal or very little. Fortunately, I’ve been able to have just enough of connectivity so in case some emergency or something along those lines, I’m able to do something with my phone. But, when it comes to “surfing the web”, that’s not much that I can currently do.
That being said, I can do just some browsing in handful of site that don’t clog the whole bandwidth for silly updates and requests and mainly just focus on sharing good content. So I wanted to write a small appreciation post for people making websites that work with practically no internet at all.
TODO: Maybe gather some great examples of lite websites to somewhere?
Of course, when writing about this sort of topic, it also brings little bit of sadness to me to see how many websites is basically unusable without a relatively good internet. Fortunately, I live in a place where even at its worst, I can access relatively “fast” internet and of course most of the places (outside my apartment) is very well connected. I don’t need to go far from my house to get basically full 5G connectivity with varying speeds (whatever your contract at the moment happens to be). In places like Finland, 1 Gbit fiber connectivity is getting more and more normal even in somewhat rural areas. Germany is not on that level yet (and by many standards, very far from it) but it’s still good nonetheless. Something like this cannot be said about the vast majority of the countries around the world.
I kind of know the reason why something like this has happened that the significant portion of popular websites are basically unaccessible by many people. I think it’s largely due to this aggressive over-engineering software engineers tend to do in their line of work. Also, I’m not innocent in that front as well, since I’ve done my fair share of over-engineering during the years working in the industry. Sometimes since I wanted, sometimes it was needed and sometimes since I was told to.
But it begs an interesting question, why something like this so normal in our industry? Sure, there are cases where added complexity to your infrastructure, codebase, etc. has actually brought some benefits. But the amount of times that has happened is greatly outweighed by the amount of times when it, well, just has brought added complexity without any benefits. But hey! At least, the engineers feel accomplished when they are able to deliver that is “complex”.
From the UX point of view, this is also quite interesting topic, since I believe that no one in this world wants to have their app/product/software/whatever to be slow for the users. But often, this added complexity automatically hinders the performance of whatever you happen to we writing. You start doing more stuff than you would need to, this can be inform of unnecessary web requests, unnecessary computations and so on. I guess there isn’t any argument about the fact that something like this hinders the whole UX. Which begs the question? Why more people don’t care about the performance more in their products? You might have an application that might have a traditionally speaking “bad UX”, meaning maybe lots of menus, you need to press a lot of stuff to access whatever you might be after, etc. But, if everything happens instantly, I’d dare to argue it’s still pretty good UX, at least for many people. If then on the other end of the spectrum, you would have a great UX, but everything is slow and has to load lots of stuff, how good of an UX it really is at that point?
But yeah, I digress, seems that lack of internet just makes me want to write about stuff. Any case, TLDR, write light websites.