Yes, I don’t think I have another app but more features on some apps I use (Smartdock, Joplin, Librera, Rimusic) would be slightly life-changing.

he knows nothing and genuinely thinks he’s doing a good job.

seems like the first step to improving is being given information on how you’re doing, and the second is being mentored/trained?

What do you use for TTS? I’m interested in both a service that’ll turn a PDF into an audiobook and that reads a document line-by-line. I use Librera for the latter but the FOSS voices available on F-Droid leave a lot to be desired.

Can I ask how you ended up there in the first place? I can scarcely think of a more interesting place on earth.

How integrated are you into the local community? How well do you speak the local language? I’m a foreigner living abroad and I would never trust either my own perception of this place nor 99% of other foreigners’ perceptions.

Surprised by how hiɡh up Mexico is!

Why were there trackers initially?

One thing I do not need is more recommendations of what to read, my list is bottomless. Do you find it encourages you to read more or read differently? Has it given you any insights about your habits?

what benefits do people see from tracking their reading? why do you do it? I couldn’t see the appeal years ago & had some hangups about it (like an overjustification effect psychologically from the social aspect of it messing up my motivation to read) but I’ve since gone through periods of tracking my spending & my food & seen benefits from those.

Jesus, why the downvotes? Someone give this man a dragonfruit. So much for friendly, casual discussion

I disagree. I’ve only ever had luck with the white ones.

I’ve done this and still only gotten lucky like 1/20th of the time. Very hard to tell when they’re ripe and flavourful

I realise now what I was getting at in the OP is how people massage themselves into a state of inspiration where they can maximise their engagement and what they get out of the book and the beauty of it and open their hearts to it or whatever, and how they interact with the text when they’re in that state. I realised this because I had the unusual honour of experiencing a state of inspiration the other night. Life feels pretty much dull and my heart feels pretty much shut to suggestion most of the time. What actually got me there was a completely unrelated life event (whose enchantment has already long since dried out). Seems like a work of art is the seed but the soil is life itself–how you read might be, at best, the water, so my question maybe isn’t of much use if we live in a world of concrete. I hope there’s more we can do that’s under our own control but it doesn’t seem that way now to me. (edited to rephrase a few times)

I’ve always wanted to learn to sing, ever since I was a kid. I even started taking lessons before I went through a major life change that pushed all of that aside. I meant to come back to it but I realised recently it just doesn’t matter to me enough to pursue it compared to other things I want to achieve. And it really never became fun for me: it seems like the only way to improve is to 1) make it a team sport, which isn’t an option for me, 2) start improving from when you’re young enough that you’re not self-conscious, or 3) painfully just listen to yourself be awful until you improve as an adult. Which is totally 100% doable, but pretty joyless & not worth the time investment for me rn.

Nobody has to take it seriously but I suspect it’s more fun if they do. Some writers plot and foreshadow as baroquely as if they were building up a philosophical argument. I just read a review of a novel I’d read and the reviewer quoted some beautiful sentences I have no memory of.

Good for others but doesn’t work for me as it’s not on mobile sadly. There are several mobile translation extensions but they all rely on Google/Microsoft/DeepL & I don’t know how to assess the privacy consequnces of that.

I dunno, I just mean like, in a qualitative way. A painter just puts the paint on the canvas, mechanically speaking, but there’s some idiosyncratic internal imagery going on as they make the decisions as to what goes where, right? Some people do things faster than others. I imagine some people read more by theme, maybe including reading several pieces on the same thing in sequence. Others read more by character. Some people see literature as being morally instructive, others as escapism. Some people are very sentimental and loving towards some aspect of a work and not an other. Some people re-read a lot. I actually re-read about half of a novel because I initially came into it with a lot of suspicion but as I became sympathetic to the protagonist and author midway through the book I wanted to go back and suck in what I’d already read with more generosity and love. We all do things a little differently, it’s fun to hear about how folks do it.

In terms of fiction I’m 2/3rds of the way through Free Food for Millionaires. It’s all right. I found the writing in the beginning so compelling, but now I’m not sure if it’s going anywhere. We’ll see. I’m an inattentive reader in fiction.

Not too good. I had a half hour long conversation with a friend on the phone recently & I realised it’s the first time I’ve had a phone conversation with somebody I actually wanted to talk to in months, except for that time I called another friend freaked out bc I was scared of my neighbour harrassing me. Not exactly the same giddy energy. This phone friend and I tried to meet up and got foiled multiple times. Shit’s exhausting.

My first edit to this post was “maybe I should take up gardening or sth but where to start” bc I want to be able to interact with and get feedback from just about anything besides my coworkers once in a while.

Sorry, I can’t hear you over my sitting down and standing back up repeatedly xD