#15 Walk on the frozen canal

Life peek: Frozen canal & digital garden

The last week in Berlin has been freezing cold — think -10 °C. It was so cold that we were able to walk on the frozen canal. This was the first time in my life doing this kind of thing in a city center. The air was biting, the sun was shining, while we walked on the ice eating pastries.

It has now been a few months I am trying to build my personal knowledge management system — a.k.a. my digital garden as the trend calls it. I was first inspired by Andy Matuschak and Maggie Appleton's gardens.

The idea is to have a place to record my learnings, connect thoughts and hopefully see a thinking companion emerge from it — not there yet, but fingers crossed.

Yesterday, I was finally able to turn my offline digital garden into a live one. It has long been a private project, so it is currently not the easiest to navigate. I am building the habit of nurturing it, so come back in a bit and you might see more!

Read & Watched

Bacurau (2019)

Bacurau was... unexpected. I watched it as some Brazilian friends recommended it to me, without knowing anything about its plot.

It starts a few years from now in a tiny isolated village in rural Brazil. It is a direct reference to quilombos — historical places of resistance where slaves ran away from their masters during Portuguese colonial times.

Midway through the movie, we suddenly realize we are in a dystopian future, mixing genres from action to sci-fi. Very original, slow and tense, a critic of its times.

Food for thought

The Great Unbundling (2020)

In this interview of Casper ter Kuile, they talk about the "unbundling" process — or how spirituality, community and rituals that were once part of religious institutions, are taking on new contemporary forms.

People now find community in their fitness communities, justice groups or workplace. Young people are less and less religious, but still yearn for spirituality — moments infused with meaning and intention.

I have just started his book The Power of Ritual. In it, Casper explains how you can bring back meaning to things you do everyday—it might be your brewing coffee routine, meditation or journalling practice. This idea of making things meaningful and intentional really speaks to me and I am looking forward to going back to the book — which doesn't happen often with nonfiction.

T(W)IL

To use D3.js with React

This last week, I tried to integrate what I first learned of D3.js with React. Here is the example of a treemap I created using my movies data. Each box represents a movie genre. It is obviously still a work in progress, but I am already quite pleased with the first results. ⊙