ADSR / LNER / AMSR / It's just you, JHR

[hirez]

I was going to use the line 'One instinctively knows when something is right', but I'm not a great fan of sherry and its cultural baggage of tiddly aunts and false teeth vicars. I also don't really know where to begin to describe what I'm on about, so I'm just going to make typing like a sir until the thing finally falls out of my head and lands with a spludge somewhere unfortunate. Like social media. That's pretty unfortunate.

The thing I get most out of mowing lawns is a kind of brain-off satisfaction in manual labour. Although actually not, because if you're mowing a useful sort of lawn you'll be using something with a motor and whirling sharp things and you'll either be paying attention to that or looking in the long grass for severed body parts. Also you'll be paying attention to the fuel-air mixture or where the extension lead is relative to the whirling sharp things, where small and darting animals and/or children are at any point, where the edge of any mower-consuming steep drops might be, what metallic and/or concrete objects might be hiding in that patch of long grass and your dogshit radar, largely unused while the Party of Labour were in power, will be on maximum gain.

I think this means that one's brain isn't off, it's just not thinking of bloody Ruby or bloody servers or bloody 'git log -p'. However, I was having fun mowing lawns well before the invention of git, Ruby and the development of the x86-64 server architecture as we currently understand it. Thus it's probably not that.

(What was that horrible 'competitor' to MCA with two-level slots and the requirement to configure each card from its own setup floppy? God. Remember when you had to put extra things in computers to make them do something useful? That was shit.)

I think that there's something quite pleasing about orbiting a patch of scruffy ground with a whirly sharp thing and replacing the scruffiness with an abstract figure within which there is order. Or if not order, then a marked change. Given my background, you may see also grain harvesting or ploughing.

I should also note that a rectangular lawn carefully rendered stripy by carefully going up and down, left to right is absolutely no fun at all. It's just suburban, or posby as Ma would have it.

Ironing's another good one. Also properly indented code and sensibly ordered files. Although those things don't feel anything like as nice.

What I'm attempting to get at is that I have no idea what this thing is or what to call it. It's just a thing that I imagine is Just Me. In some ways, I don't want to think too hard about what's going on, just in case it loses its magic.

Comments

[quercus.livejournal.com]

EISA? Where the connectors were brown?

Unlike VESA, which was the one with the extra brown connectors.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

EISA. Yes, that's the fellow.

You could have done the 'EISA good' joke there.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

(a) Flow.
(b) Knolling.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, flow. Grassy knolls? Less of those these days than one might like :-P

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Maybe.

I guess one might make a case that writing/coding-flow seems closer to the Source Of All Good Things, but labouring-flow is (currently) an easier to achieve state.

Meanwhile psychedelics are illegal, and writing workshops are inverse-square diminishing returns.

Or it may be that enclosing a geometric figure and shrinking same is significant, in a kind of wonky propitiation to the gods of Scintillating Scotoma. (Even looking at the wiki page makes me feel ill)

Also, Cistercians.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

An interesting thing about flow is that the qualities that make something flow-y are pretty much orthogonal to the usual criteria for judging activities.

It doesn't need to be productive, valuable, or ecologically sound. Just needs to occupy the right fraction of your brain in the right kind of a way.

So if mowing gets you there, good.

Err - Cistercians ?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Monks. Big on manual labour.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

But Knolling would probably reveal the whereabouts of my spare vice.

[jarkman.livejournal.com]

which would be good ?

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

I don't have a lawn, so for me it's cable sorting. Types, lengths, oooh, love it. I wouldn't like to do it every day - I used to visit a lot of factories and I always wondered how folk on production lines could cope with the constant repetition with no brain gymnastics involved.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

[Goes to see if 'cable sorting' is a Youtube Thing. Not really, it seems.)

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Mel Stephens' "Fun With Cables".

[sheepthief.livejournal.com]

Part 7. Did you know that the distance between your fingertips, with arms outstretched, is the same as your height. So, for those of you who are almost 2M in height, it's easy to gauge the length of a cable in 1M increments. Like this...

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

It's called flow state