November Favourites 2021
Table of Contents
- November Favourites 2021
- 🍿 My Favourite Movies of the Month
- 🖥 My Favourite Websites of the Month
- 📚 My Favourite Reads of the Month
- 🛠️ My Favourite Tools of the Month
- 💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month
- Quotes
- Concepts & Definitions
- 🖼️ My Favourite Visuals of the Month
- 📸 My favourite photos of the month
- 🧨 My Favourite Sparks of Motivation & Inspiration
- 🤔 My Favourite Realizations of the Month
- 🎥 My Favourite YouTubers of the Month
- 🎬 My Favourite Videos of the Month
- 🎸 My Favourite Music of the Month
🍿 My Favourite Movies of the Month
Hostage
Love Hard
Birds of Prey
Richard Jewell
The One
Frankie & Alice
Code 8
Tau
Fast & Furious: Hobbs & Shaw
Shutter Island
Suburbicon
Captain Marvel
🖥 My Favourite Websites of the Month
Niccolo Miranda's Portfolio
📚 My Favourite Reads of the Month
Reading citations is easier than most people realise
"I can see why false memes might spread quickly, even when they directly contradict reliable sources. Reading papers sounds like a lot of work. It sometimes is. But it's often not.... Maybe I'm being naive here, but I think a major reason behind false memes is that checking sources sounds much harder and more intimidating than it actually is."
🛠️ My Favourite Tools of the Month
PDF Viewer Pro is a fast and beautiful app, allowing you to view, search, and annotate PDF documents with ease on your Mac.
This month I found myself reading a lot of research and articles and this tool was really helpful for highlighting and annotating the notes I wanted to take.
Matter pulls everything you want to read into one beautiful place. With powerful tools, social curation, seamless audio and more, we're building a reader for today's internet.
I have a long term goal to have a carefully curated feed of content creators who I feel are customised to my tastes and interests. This app has introduced me to a lot of interesting reads and I really like taking advantage of its audio transcriptions.
💬 My Favourite Words of Wisdom of the Month
Quotes
"We are here, to live not just the length of our lives, but the width of them too." - Diane Ackerman
Past is history, future's a mystery, and the present's a gift.
Don’t trust the map, trust the compass.
Concepts & Definitions
That distinctive, earthy odour that is associated with rainfall is called petrichor.
The Icarus Paradox: It is a classic tale of Greek mythology. Icarus crafted wings out of feathers and beeswax to escape an island. He began to fly—the wings working wonders. But he quickly became blinded by his own engineering prowess and flew too close to the sun, which caused the beeswax to melt and sent him plummeting to his death. — What makes you successful can lead to your downfall.
"A counterargument to your own should first be summarized in its strongest form, with holes caulked as they appear, and minor inconsistencies or infelicities of phrasing looked past. Then, and only then, should a critique begin. This is charitable by name, selfishly constructive in intent: only by putting the best case forward can the refutation be definitive. The idea is to leave the least possible escape space for the “but you didn’t understand…” move. Wiggle room is reduced to a minimum." https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/11/11/adam-gopnik-angels-and-ages-darwin/
🖼️ My Favourite Visuals of the Month
📸 My favourite photos of the month
🧨 My Favourite Sparks of Motivation & Inspiration
Memento Mori Alternatives
Memento mori: an artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death.
Awe: An overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful.
There have been moments in my life where I've felt motivated by the reminder of my lack of immortality (anytime I watch Last Holiday with Queen Latifah for example). But at times I feel as though using the concept of death to motivate life is like living out of fear. I've been wondering what memento mori alternatives there are for being motivated by something more positive. One alternative that I thought was interesting is positive awe.
Recent research using fMRI has shown that experiences of awe, such as watching awe-inspiring videos (compared to neutral or pleasant videos) decreases activity in the brain’s default mode network (DMN), which is associated with self-focus and rumination. The result is essentially a switch in perspective from centring oneself in the universe to taking a step back and seeing things from a higher vantage point.
Uncovering Personal Values
This video makes me recognize that one exercise to figure out your values could be to reflect on who your all-time favourite characters are and why.
My Relationship with Art
I haven't taken the chance to answer this yet, but I wonder if I can enhance my relationship with art by contemplating the question: what do I want from art?
🤔 My Favourite Realizations of the Month
Mythology of Individual Achievement
"A peculiarly American, maybe Western, mythology of individual achievement — We think of the automobile as invented by Henry Ford, the lightbulb by Edison... it's vastly more complicated. There really have been dialogues, and conversations, and collective learnings that made possible all these breakthroughs. So we basically have created a kind of false narrative of solitary individual achievement." - Rufus Griscom, The Next Big Idea: Extended Mind episode [1:05:50-1:06:16]
Compliment Languages
Just as there are love languages, I wonder if there are compliment languages? In other words, are there different types of compliments and do people have preferences for which types they receive?
