Is wordiness inherently bad?

I want to make the following sentence more fluid by removing its commas, but they are preventing ambiguity:

Vague memories, without any obvious relevance to what I was witnessing, bubbled into my conscious mind.

I wrote what makes a good shower? a couple months ago and I saved four versions of the same paragraph to analyze side by side.

The standard bathtub-shower design seems like a good idea.

most…wonderful places of the world were not made by architects, but by the people.

Can quantifying the attributes of a TV show tell us something about its quality?

I’ve written before about rules in games and the motivations behind their implementation.

In his book The End Of Absence, Michael Harris laments the everpresence of digital technology.

Out of boredom have sprung many of my projects and hobbies.

I had this encounter in October of 2022, almost two years ago.

That’s her! There she is, my sweetheart!

Traveling, furnishing, reading, writing, and more.

In her New Yorker article about suspense, Kathryn Schulz uses a clever image to describe how suspense exists at many scales.

This novel is like a long, restless dream about a man paralyzed by his guilt and his grief.

Compared to The Village Vanguard, The Blue Note was a bit embarrassing.

One of our intentions for visiting NYC was to test our interest in moving there.

During the week that Z & I were there, we saw friends, shopped, attended comedy & jazz shows, visited museums, drank lots of coffee, ate lots of pizza, walked, biked, rode the subway, took the ferry, and wondered where in the city we might want to live.

In November I posted my first /now update and since then I have posted three more.

Our roommate started dating our neighbor a couple months ago and it’s going great.

Snowboarding, walking, Vieux Farka Touré, hoverboxes, and more.

As I walk through cities nowadays I try to look through a Jane Jacobian lens at the diversity of enterprise and use about.

Walking on a late evening on my own I passed a theatre I knew nothing about.

I first read about Hailu Mergia in Pitchfork’s The 200 Best Albums of the 2010s, which listed his 2018 album Lala Belu at 185th.

The main reason I read Cormac McCarthy is to experience and learn from his writing craft.

…looking again in the old books, I find so much pleasure in the authority of [Cormac McCarthy’s] voice, and the wisdom that flames out from his pages, and it is painful to imagine that such a fire has been extinguished.

My path into software engineering, continued.

The Elephant Man bears Lynch’s touch lightly but this movie has his fingerprints all over.

When I have kids I will definitely show them this movie.

Log of concerts I’ve attended.

Soccer, hockey, Muze Radio, Cormac McCarthy, David Lynch, The Wire, True Detective, and more.

Even though Spotify categorizes it as a podcast, Random Tape is something else.

In chess, there’s a niche rule with an untranslated name that amusingly befits its esotericism: en passant.

I sit submerged at the bottom with my eyes closed.

I liked analyzing the game’s tactics and patterns from my ignorant perspective.

I sit submerged at the bottom with my eyes closed.

Hunched against the cold in our hotel bathrobes and slippers we crunched over the snow between the pools, looking for the hottest one.

At my soccer game recently there was a middle-aged man recording the game from the sidelines with a camera mounted on a tall tripod.

Dr. George Pransky in his book The Relationship Handbook writes:

[M]aintaining a sense of well-being is all it takes to make [relationships] enjoyable and easy.

John Hurt’s performance resonated with me like wine lingers in your gut.

This site – okjuan.me/vbook – contains all my public writing.

I’m 120 pages into this book and so far it has consisted purely of dialogue between a psychiatrist and a patient who has voluntarily checked herself in.

One of my favorite movies of recent times.

Muze Radio, Stephen King, Poor Things, and more.

My second attempt to review a book while I read it instead of waiting until I finish it.

Here’s an example of coordinated metaphors, something I wish other writers used more often.

Half memoir, half advice for aspiring fiction writers. Both good.

King’s advice is mostly for fiction, but some of it applies to non-fiction, too.

There was this little voice whispering to me that the book was really good, and if I didn’t finish, I would regret it forever.

Don’t come up with the plot of your story, says Stephen King.

I love IPAs, and I’ve had a lot of them, mostly in the Pacific Northwest. These are my few favorites.

Learning to pick between productive and absorptive activities based on my current mood and energy level has helped me notice, for example, when I should try to write instead of reading.

My first attempt to review a book while I read it instead of waiting until I finish it.

Losing weight, playing soccer, developing this site, reading books, and more.

As someone who likes to think and learn about psychology on my free time, here is my understanding of ego.

This page is inspired by Viktor Lofgren’s The Small Website Discoverability Crisis and Tom Critchlow’s list of digital bookshelves.

I’d recommend this book to anyone who wants to better understand the values and politics of rural America through literature.

Can you trust someone who denies that their subsconsious plays a major role in their life?

My path into software engineering.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to inform their dietary choices.

A not-so-secret desire of mine is to write non-fiction professionally.

I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term.

Absolutely essential read. Mind-bending and mind-expanding.

The two young guys standing at the counter brought in an old Honda Civic for a pre-purchase inspection, and Amir had found several issues with it.

I read half of The Executioner’s Song – Norman Mailer’s gargantuan, Pulitzer Prize-winning nonfiction novel about Gary Gilmore – and figured I could put it down and move on.

Take this quote by anthropologist Clifford Geertz:

One of the most significant facts about humanity may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.

This morning I almost got overwhelmed with things I had to do. Like when you set your glass down too hard and the wave rises to the rim menacingly.

It seemed, until the very last moment, that the seat to my right would be empty.

Freud, apparently, thought dreams prevented us from going crazy.

Really really good. It shows that McCurdy is not just interested in telling her story but also interested in writing as a craft.

Several years ago, in the last and lightest semester of my Computer Science degree, I spent a good deal of my free time studying YouTube videos about politics, philosophy, and sociology.

Suppose you have this sentence:

It leads us out of the present, leading to a life spent leaning into the future

I find it surprisingly easy to whistle a new tune.

I think this is a must-read for anyone who wants to be in a long-term relationship.

The idea is that, through sheer thought, you can mobilize a body sapped of motivation.

I picked up this book to learn about Norman Mailer’s writing style. He really is a very good chronicler.

Any aspiring non-fiction writer should read this.

It is old advice to live now because now is the only time you will ever live. Embrace this moment because it is the only one in reach.

Highly recommend to anyone interested in reading about time management. This book has a radical message for you: give up hope.

Writing The Virtual Book forced me to ask: when is writing the best medium?

It’s important to keep your metaphors from bumping into one another.

As Daudi Abe tells in his 2020 book, Emerald Street: A History of Hip Hop in Seattle, the city’s black folks first set down roots in Central District (the CD) in the late 1880s.

This is my second review of this book. I have to say – it won me over, big time.

As you will have noticed, the essays on this site are all titled “how to X”, but are not guides as much as blog entries. “How to” is just a rhetorical device, an invitation to approach a subject.

Once, when I was a Teaching Assistant for a 3rd year Computer Science course, I had to invigilate a couple students while they took a midterm.

Everyone should learn to leave books unfinished.

Ever since I read How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, I’ve stopped trying to absorb everything I read.

I read with haste, crazed by the amount of content I won’t get to unless I hurry.

The other day I picked a bunch of books from my library and tried to start each of them.

Death is coming.

There is a ridiculous amount of content out there.

I got some useful and interesting concepts from this book

Notes about style and process of writing how to work #2.

Right now, it’s 5:28pm. I just finished my work day.

Really beautiful. Poetic. A bit repetitive.

A gem! An exercise in the art of understatement and a great example of fruitful experimentation with the novel form.

As we are finishing our meals, the waiter comes over. It’s not to ask us anything, but to bless us with the news that we have completed our time in purgatory and earned our time to ascend. The speakeasy awaits.

It started with promise!

In elementary school I chose my outfits for one thing: recess.

A twisting plot with topical themes woven in elegantly. My main complaint is that they get the characters to tell you things that the story itself explains well enough.

Notes on style and process of writing The Virtual Book.

Decades ago, The New Yorker and other magazines experimented with the journalistic form by introducing literary techniques into it.

As satisfying as it was to hear Herbie narrate the stories in his audiobook, it was frustrating to never hear his music.

A modern torchbearer of Thompson’s immersion journalism is comedian-journalist Andrew Callaghan.

The first song of Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi is hard to describe.

The prose is great, incredibly tidy and evocative.

A poor adaptation… too literal.

This is straight up white American masculinity porn. Is pornaganda a word?

An incredibly entertaining read, full of absurd, shocking, and sometimes unbelievable scenes. An awesome example of writing as craft.

I just love the writing.

I really enjoyed watching this in theatres. However, is this not yet another movie that glorifies Dominator culture?

Just so good… a beautiful story about the scary and exciting process of individuating, bridging out of childhood.

I read a chunk of this.

Awesome read about an accomplished writer’s career and life.

The imagery in the opening scenes is fantastic.

The audiobook narrated by Herbie is great. His impression of Miles is hilarious.

Steinbeck brings you into a world, not only through colorful, vivid descriptions but also rich characters whose lives we witness over decades.

Notes about style and process of writing how to work.

When I do work and I get stuck I leave my desk and wander down the hallway.

I loved the writing, the acting, and the set design.

Does the brain control you, or are you controlling the brain? I don’t know if I’m in charge of mine.

My two main problems with this movie are Jack Nicholson’s character, Costello, and The Love Interest.

Despite all my admiration and enchantment while reading Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast I couldn’t help but frowning at his writing mantra: “make instead of describing”. Surely he’s been describing all along?

It’s exciting to see Black America represented in a Pixar movie: to hear Charles Mingus and A Tribe Called Quest, to see reflected the work ethic, family values, and sense of community.

This year felt like the right time to escape the present. And so, I ditched hip hop, neo-soul, and modern R&B and journeyed back to the 60s and 70s.

It is a movie about him, but it is told through her. It is a story about his failure to connect with others.

At the beginning it’s mostly fancy transitions and strings and choreography and facades and props. Past their yelling, the characters are pretty shallow.

Tara Westover’s writing is clear, poignant, and deeply thoughtful.

I wasn’t particularly satisfied with Randolph’s writing skills, but the book made for an entertaining 1st person account of the birth of Netflix.

Thoughtful and witty, infusing some ideas about the philosophy of knowledge into real, human struggles and situations.

Presents a mildly compelling thesis: the human tendency to form beliefs comes from our ability to think in terms of cause and effect, which is also responsible for our remarkable tool-using and tool-making abilities.

Starting a new book is exciting.

To my delight, there is a wealth of curated lists of great music from the last year, spanning across genres and levels of popularity.

I sit submerged, eyes closed, at the bottom;