Libb

Pourquoi ces !#/$%! d'enceintes externes se déconnectent-elles dès que j'éteins mon écran? Elles sont même pas branchées sur cet !+# de 9%^1! d'écran!*

Je ne sais pas vous, mais j'ai de plus en plus de mal à supporter les frictions que me fait subir la 'high-tech'. D'une manière très concrète je veux dire : les bugs à la con me pompent l'air, pour rester poli.

Si vous vous demandez ce qui provoque cet inutile message d'agacement, j'en parle un peu plus posément sur mon blog Tranquillité et simplicité

Passez une chouette journée ;)

It's not our Weekly Thread (I will post it in a couple days, like every week) but I just replied this in another thread and thought it might be worth sharing with you guys. I also invited the OP to join our community. Hopefully, they will. A short summary, to give you some context: the OP was worried that they can't keep on writing in their journal and asked for advice. What follows is my reply to the OP reply to my first comment. The whole thread can be read here.

It's a bit long but I see so many (young or not so young) people being blocked by that perfectionism shit (I also had to fight against it, mind you). Let me know, if you think this has little to do with our community or if you think it's ok and feel free to add your own remarks and suggestions:

One thing I’ve discovered about my mentality is that, I’ve developed a perfectionist perspective/mindset

Perfectionism is the enemy of creativity, which journaling can be considered a form of but that’s true of any form of writing. Perfectionism will often be used as an excuse to not finish/publish a text. I learned at a very young age to say to my own perfectionism to fuck off. Even for simple stuff like commenting here on lemmy I’m OK with publishing posts/comments in English (which means that they contain even more mistakes than they would have in my native French), I’m ok with mistakes and I can always edit the ones I see later on. I’m also ok with not having a fully articulated expression of what I really want to say (for that you would need to read and me to write in French). And that’s true for any other published work, not just here on Lemmy (I may have been writing for a living, younger).

As far as I’m concerned, I consider perfectionism one of my worst enemy. I see it as my own fear of realizing I’m far from being as good I imagine I am ;)

After reading your insight, maybe I’m sensing a change in my perspective. A positive change. Maybe I can LET GO of the feeling of failure and move on…

So glad to know that!

Don’t be afraid (really) to try letting go of that perfectionism. Worst case: it won’t help you. But if it does help you, you will never regret getting rid of that shit feeling.

A warning before you try anything new: you need to be prepared, like be OK in you head, like for real because it’s the most likely outcome, with the idea that you will fail at doing it, that will fail the first time, and maybe the second time and maybe more. And even if you don’t fail, you may be ok with doing something great either. That’s not an issue. That’s how you begin. That’s how anyone begins. Trying to get rid of that shit feeling of perfectionism you will indeed fight years-long education and habits. It’s not just an on/off switch so be ok with that ;)

We now live in an age that hates failing and is in absolute adoration before perfectionism(at least as much as it is in adoration before money). That is the most stupid thing ever conceived; And it is even more so for all the kids that are being taught that. Because, simply put, failing is essential part of leaning. I would even say failing is the only legit way to learn anything that is worth learning.

How did you learn to walk? By walking a marathon or running a sprint like some athlete or was it by falling on your diapered toddler bum one clumsy step after another, over and over again? Yeah, not that brilliant but be assured that was the exactly the same with me. How did you learn to write? By writing poetry that put to shame dear Shakespeare at your very first attempt? Or by making a shit ton of mistakes, and by writing each letter clumsily one at a time, and then, after years of practice, by realizing you were indeed able to write your first (but still rather poorly worded) real sentences? So did I. And I experience that with every single language I learn(ed), even more so with non-Latin languages. And how did you (maybe?) learn to kiss, and more? Don’t tell me you were at the top of your art from your first kiss, and that you were a perfect lover the first time too because I certainly wasn’t (and, decades later, still am not ;)

Failing and then trying to understand how and why, and how to avoid repeating the exact same mistake, is at the core of learning and therefore should be at the core of any quality teaching too. Not telling kids they’re perfect and all they do is amazing. That’s bullshit. Alas, it’s that bullshit that is now the norm. Heck, teachers in schools nowadays are even afraid to give poor grades to students as that could be traumatizing for the kids… forgetting that’s it’s the sole purpose of giving a grade: to assess the level of assimilation of whatever the student was supposed to have studied. Sad state of affair out of which the real losers here are those students that don’t learn essential knowledge and skills anymore. They’re the ones that are being screwed up.

Sorry, for that rant. It’s something that worries me a lot to watch so many younger people being frozen by the fear of failing despite being at the very age where they should happily be taking so many fucking risks and be daring of trying the most stupid shit. I also worry a lot realizing those younger ones are very quickly becoming unable to read and write, or to do simple math. Meaning they aren’t able to learn and understand much by themselves, and less and less able to communicate whatever thought, emotion, or idea they may wish to share.

To get back to your situation: your journal is not a work of art that will end up exposed in art galleries nor in a museum, maybe you will do stuff that will end up exposed and studied, no one can predict the future, but they should not be your journal. That journal is one of the tools in your toolbox with which you will do what you want with your life. It’s also a work in progress. Use it, abuse it, experiment in it, break it as often as you feel like it. In a few decades, when you will look back at your old journals, you will be happy you have tried (and failed) so many times at so many things. And I’m willing to bet you will be happy to have kept a record of all those failed and imperfect attempts of yours ;)

Why a WT?

We’ve a steadily growing community—we’re now 494 members! Welcome to all of you :)—but we still lack momentum.

The idea is to encourage more participation by sharing a weekly theme. This just an invitation and you’re more than welcome to comment about anything else (related to journaling), or to start your own thread ;)

Also: do you think we should do something to celebrate the 500th... if we manage to get there?

This week theme: What do you do you when you finish a journal?

Do you have any special rituals, or do you just start a new one?

Obviously, the question concerns pen and paper journalers more than digital users but don’t hesitate to comment as a digital user too! Explain us how you manage switching app (or if you don't switch and only use one, like I used to do when I used DayOne), or if you lack the emotion of finally filling the very last page of a notebook and starting a new one? Or if there is no emotion associated with that?

Edit: once again, I used my non-admin account to post this weekly thread. Silly me. Feel free to petition and demand a less amateurish admin if you feel like it's needed. I won't protest :p

Le sujet dont tout le monde se cogne, mais j'avais envie d'en parler quand même ;)

J'ai 50 ans et quelques. J'ai eu l'opportunité de voir Google arriver et grandir et, pendant des années, j'ai adopté à peu près tous leurs services. Ca fait plusieurs années que j'ai choisi de réduire mon exposition à Google (le jour où ils ont tué Google Reader, en fait) mais je n'avais jamais été complètement décidé à m'en passer non plus. Le virage oligarchie fuck-le-world des USA (et l'omniprésence de ces compagnies auprès du monsieur orange toujours énervé) m'a persuadé qu'il était temps de passer à la vitesse supérieure dans ma rupture.

• Ca fait des années que je ne touche plus à leur moteur de recherche parce que résultats trop merdiques, trop blindé de merde SEO, trop de pubs. Donc, c'est pas trop dur de m'en passer. Mon alternative préférée reste US et elle en plus est payante: Kagi. Mais avant de passer à Kagi ça va faire deux ans de ça, j'avais utilisé Qwant et/ou Startpage et/ou Brave Search. J'ai jamais été très fan de DuckDuck Go par contre, je sais pas pourquoi. Là, je reviens doucement sur Qwant, histoire de m'éloigner de Kagi mais j'avoue que c'est parfois frustrant: je trouve Kagi vraiment bien pensé.
• Gmail: j'utilise Gmail depuis... que c'est apparu sur terre. Je l'utilise surtout pour créer des comptes sur d'autres sites... et j'en ai beaucoup. La migration a été longue mais elle est terminée (je suis passé chez Infomaniak, si quelqu'un veut savoir). Il me reste une poignée de comptes où c'est pas évident (voire pas possible) de changer d'email... mais je vais finir par me résigner à ne plus les utiliser et perdre leur éventuel contenu (par exemple le seul jeu vidéo auquel j'ai jamais vraiment joué, ben j'avais un tas de bonus et de premium et je peux pas changer l'adresse). Tant pis pour eux (et pour moi).
• YouTube. J'étais un vrai gros consommateur (Premium). Quelques trucs intéressants et intelligents, et beaucoup d'autres qui l'étaient sensiblement moins. Par exemple, je ne joue pas aux jeux vidéos mais je regardais régulièrement des YT qui partageaient leurs games. Bref, là je suis passé de plus de 200 abonnements à... 3, ok 4. Ca me done sensiblement plus de temps pour lire, ce dont je ne vais pas me plaindre.
• Google Docs? Jamais été fan, mais c'est sûr que c'est très pratique quand même. J'utilise LibreOffice sur mon ordi (avant, j'utilisais MS Office). Depuis peu, en ligne cette fois, j'ai commencé à utiliser la version Infomaniak de MSOffice Web mais j'en ai un très faible usage: je vois pas trop l'intérêt d'écrire en ligne quand je suis sur mon ordi et que mes fichiers sont déjà sauvés sur un cloud. En plus j'aime bien mon LibreOffice qui est exactement fait à ma main ;)
• Google Drive. J'ai arrêté y a un bail. Là, je suis chez les Allemands de Filen.io. C'est moins riche mais c'est nettement plus respectueux de ma vie privée (chiffrement de bout en bout, sans accès possible par Filen) et ça marche bien. Sinon, sans le chiffrement complet, les Suisses de Infomaniak (encore eux) sont vachement bien aussi: l'offre payante de base de leur Kdrive c'est 1to de stockage pour moins de 20€/an (on peut en demander plus, et l'offfre gratuite de base c'est 15go).
• Photo Si j'avais beaucoup de photos, j'utiliserais sans doute Ente, mais je ne fais à peu près plus aucune photo depuis un bail... A la place, je dessine (mal) et pour ça j'ai besoin que d'un crayon, d'un carnet et de quelques aquarelles :p
• Par contre, je sais toujours pas par quoi remplacer Google Maps. J'aime bien leur mode Street view, quand je me prépare à aller là où je connais pas. Si vous avez des suggestions?

Not 100% sure it's the right place to post this but it also feels a lot like it 100% belongs here. So, let me know what you think ;)

I don’t know about you but when I decided I've had enough of the big bloated web, it was not just to get back to a Web that was not rotten to its core by marketing-money—and the annihilation of any notion of privacy marketing requires in order to better track everything we do so they can sell more ads. This mattered a lot to me, obviously. But it was not my sole motivation to be looking for a smaller and a more humane Web.

My other reason was to reduce my digital-waste.

Be it storage space used on the server for all the large pictures, or the energy used to make scripts run and to transmit always more volume of data between the server and the computers of any visitor.

So, without being a developer myself, I searched for ways to create a website as small and as light as possible; I searched for ways to reduce the size of the images too so they would waste less space and load faster.

It goes without saying, but to reduce waste the first thing was to refuse tracking, scripts and ads. In summary, I don't have ads at all and I don’t know who is visiting my website or what they do when they're visiting... unless that person decides to tell me by contacting me... through email, or here on Lemmy, as there is no way to publish a comment (but that's not directly related to e-waste, it's me not wanting to deal with spam ;)

Here is what I managed to get, I thought it might interest others and could be an interesting discussion:

• The website is static, it's generated through Hugo. Only the resulting HTML pages (full static, no PHP or JS) are uploaded on the server, with a really minimal CSS sheet.
• Minimalism was my objective to begin with but Hugo can do fancier stuff too. On my website there is nothing fancy, no animation and no effects. Just text and a few images (even the dark theme you can see in the first screenshot is not managed by the website: it's a FF extension called Dark Reader doing it). Also, the home page is text-only so it loads even faster (less than 14kB).
• I don’t think there is a single script running in the background but since I’m not an expert and only transformed an existing theme there may still be something hidden somewhere? All I can safely say is that the website loads very fast and that if there is a script running I honestly don't know about it.
• For optimizing the images I did quite a lot of research. Testing various approaches and compression algorithms. I ended up adopting the… AVIF video file format. Yep, a video format that works flawlessly to save static images and that also saves a lot of storage, like a lot.

To give you an idea, here is the picture I used in my last post (posted this morning). It’s a 1000x710px PNG screenshot of my desktop (879,5kB), next to it is a 700px JPEG (118,1kB) and next to it is a 700px AVIF at... 22,6 Kb. If you want ot check the actual image quality (not this poor compressed version) of the AVIF file go check the actual post.

Since AVIF can be tricky to get right, I wrote a small script that does the conversion for me using the imagemagick and the ffmepg command lines (they will need to be installed on your computer). I could only use a recent version of imagemagick (and that’s what I did when I was still using a Mac computer) but I’ve gotten better results using ffmpeg for the AVIF conversion.

#Excerpt of the full script

# resize 700 px if is larger than 700  
# add an unsharp mask (sharper image)
# Save temp file in /temp
convert "$1" -resize 700x700\> -unsharp 0x1 "/tmp/$NOW.jpg"

# convert temp file to avif using ffmpeg
ffmpeg -i "/tmp/$NOW.jpg" -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p "$DIR/optimized.avif"

Since I’m also lazy as fuck and don’t fancy myself typing complex command lines when I can avoid it, I transformed those little scripts into Nemo 'Actions' (Nemo is the file explorer that comes with my Linux Mint system, Actions are one of its nifty feature that lets it execute scripts through the contextual menu). So, now all I need to do is to right-click on whatever picture to have it converted as a jpeg, AVIF (and also a B&W version if I ever need it).

Which makes it almost immediate to get the image I need. If you have never written one, an Action looks something like that:

[Nemo Action]
Active=true
Name=Optimize AVIF
Comment=Convert to a 700px AVIF file
Icon-Name=image
Exec=<action_scripts/makeAvif.sh %F>
Selection=any
Extensions=png;PNG;jpg;jpeg;JPG;JPEG;webp;WEBP;AVIF;avif
Quote=double

If you want to reuse those scripts/Action, they’re on my codeberg Git repo.

Dislaimer: I’m not a dev and I’m not even much of a geek. So, there is no warranty it will work. All I can say is that this works well enough for me and I'm ok with the result. There is no doubt this could be improved upon a lot. If you ever feel like doing it, you’re more than welcome to but please do let me know, so I can also use your improvements.

Also, if you have suggestions, tips, ideas to optimize further my website and images, do not hesitate to share them.

Since you managed to read everything to that point, and in case you want to have a look at my website ;)

The topic everyone was impatiently waiting for, we can all agree.

Ballpoint pens and fountain pens

If you did not knew it already the Cristal Bic, the world most used ballpoint pen, is French and even though the brand is now global and have factories in many countries (including the US, among other brands they own the US Waterman), they still made part of their production in the EU, in France and Spain.

(For those like me who worries about plastic/throw away pens, you may not know that Bic has recently started selling an aluminum body that's shaped like the cristal Bic that you can insert a refill in. Also, and for much longer, they make it possible to buy refills for the cheap plastic cristal Bic by packs of 50—so, you can keep using the same single clear plastic body for much longer only replacing the ink. Alas, those refills are not as readily available as the Bic itself.)

If you're interested in Bic history, and want to know more about what they do, they have this PDF available for download.

I'm not affiliated with them, I just have been chewing on one or another of their Bic pens for well over 50 years now and I quite like them. And that is coming from a lifelong fountain pen user...

Fountain pens? One may want to consider the excellent German brand Lamy which offers both cheap and expensive models of fountain pens (and ballpoint pens too, but not as cheap as Bic). Their cheap ‘Lamy Safari’ pictured here was designed in the 80s/90s to help kids proper handwriting and is still, imho, one of the best cheap/beginner-friendly fountain pen one could buy here in Europe. Its also real sturdy while still being easy to fix if anythign was to happen to it ;)

Also, I think they look gorgeous with their bright flashy colors :p

(colored) Pencils

If you're more into pencils, may I suggest you check the German FaberCastell or the Swiss Caran d'Ache? They're very different kind of pencils but they're also both amazingly good, be it their 'cheaper' lines (say, for kids) as well as, obviously, their artist lines (much more expensive too).

Watercolors

For watercolors, I would suggest the Dutch Royal Talens. Their student-grade paint 'Van Gogh' is unbelievably good for its price, as well as their artist-grade 'Rembrandt'. Heck, even their cheapest 'ArtCreation' line is nice (and it also offers truly excellent and cheap sketchbooks)

Obviously, the English Winsor & Newton whose artist grade paints are now made in France if I'm not mistaken, as well as their Cotman student-grade—but if you go the student grade road, I would strongly suggest you give Royal Talens 'Van Gogh' a try, like really, as you may be surprised.

The French Sennelier, they have a honey-based artist-grade watercolors that are so bright <3. They also have a student grade called 'La Petite Aquarelle'.

Last but certainly not least, I would not want to forget the Ukrainian's Rosa. A recent discovery for me (a little over a year ago) which I quite like.

One should also talk about paint brushes for watercolors, and about inks for fountain pens as in both cases there are excellent EU brands, but this is already way too long ;)

Your turn! Do you know any other European brand of pens, pencils or watercolors?

Edit: updated the title from 'in the EU' to 'in Europe'

I don't know if this was already mentioned but I just saw it mentioned in the French-speaking !utilisereuropeen@jlai.lu (Use European) community and I thought it was worth talking about it, here too. So, if you don't know about ARTE TV yet, here is my take on it:

ARTE TV is the European culture TV channel (free and on demand). It is a 32 years old German-French-European public TV which is rather unique.

Unique, because there is barely any ads to watch (and the rare ones are a somewhat very recent addition, hopefully they won't add anymore).

Unique, because like its name may suggests, this TV main focus (main, not exclusive) is on art, culture and creation. They regularly air concerts (contemporary, pop, rock, orchestral/classical,...), dance festivals, theater, opera, and so on. They also have series, movies, documentaries in a wide selection of genres. Podcasts, news,... The content is available in French and/or in German. Foreign movies are often aired or streamed in their original language, with subtitles.

Unique because, being a public television it's free access. There is no subscription, no login required either. It's entirely paid by French and German tax-payers money (you're welcome)

Is it worth it?

My spouse and I have not owned a TV for more than twenty years and ARTE could easily be the one reason we would want to own one but we don't even have to since a lot of their content is available through their website/Replay: arte.tv (not all content is available. Many film won't but a lot still are).

In recent years, we have noticed their documentaries morphing into the over-dramatized docu-fiction types, something my spouse and I consider of little value compared to more traditional type of documentaries (a lot more time is being spend on dramatization itself instead of actual information sharing/discussion). Therefore, we barely watch any of their new type of documentaries but if you're more into that type of content than we are, I would say it's probably worth checking.

They regularly have an excellent selection of films. Like, really. Things other TV would seldom dare to air. and like I said, there is no fucking ad-breaks either.

I don't know how easy it is to access ARTE from foreign countries, but worse case one would need to use a VPN and pick a French/German address, even probably any European address would do.

https://www.arte.tv/en/

I was wondering because I don't.

My pocket notebook (from the French Clairefontaine brand, but I will also use Rhodia) is, well, sitting in one pocket or another in my coat or in my bag, when it's not in my jeans back pocket. It is sat on, its cover has been thorn in the first couple weeks of using it. It's scribbled upon without much care (I often write while I walk, I will let anyone write stuff in it). I will tear off pages when needed. It rains on it (no idea why, my productive long walks the ones where I write the most are often done under the rain). This notebook is a workhorse and it shows.

And for my journal—a larger sketchbook ('ArtCreation' from the Dutch Royal Talens) that sits at home—the only sun it sees is when I write on the balcony of our apartment, the only water it tastes is the one I use with my watercolors set. It is much less beaten than my pocket one but I don't take much care for it either. No one but me writes in it but it's still scribbled upon everywhere, things are crossed out, sketches are started and not finished. And so on.

Am I that messy or is it common?

Bonjour Lemmy,

C'est une bouteille à la mer que je te lance — en prenant soin de ne pas te l'envoyer directement dans la tronche. De rien, je suis gentil comme ça.

Je souhaite m'équiper d'une paire d'enceintes pour brancher sur mon ordinateur.

• Je ne suis pas audiophile, càd que je n'éprouve aucun besoin de sacrifier un rein pour offrir à mes oreilles une paire d'enceintes qui me permettraient d'entendre le pet d'un ange sans la moindre distortion. C'est sûrement très magnifique à écouter, le pêt d'un ange, mais ça m'intéresse pas.
• J'ai une préférence pour des enceintes qui ne prennent pas trop de place: mon bureau me sert à étaler mes notes de travail, pas à exhiber ma belle paire d...'enceintes.
• Je ne suis pas gamer, c'est des enceintes pour écouter de la musique, càd essentiellement classique (17e-19e, pour l'essentiel), rock, un peu de variétés voire un peu de pop à l'occasion), des films, des audiobooks, et des podcasts.
• Budget souhaité 100-150€ ou moins; Je suis OK pour plus, même beaucoup, si tant qu'il y ait une autre raison à cela que audiophile et esthétique.

J'ai fait quelques recherches mais il y a tellement de choix, qui vont de 20€ pour une paire à plusieurs centaines d'euros pour une seule enceinte, que je ne sais pas du tout vers quoi me tourner.

Du coup, si quelqu'un(e) aurait des suggestions basées sur son expérience personnelle je serais plus qu'enchanté d'en savoir plus :)

Pour vous donner una ordre d'idée du range d'enceintes que je considère:

• Dans le genre pas cher du tout: Pebble 3 de Creative, ou encore leur T60 pour quelques euros de plus.
• Moins bon marché: Edifier MR4.
• Edifier MR60, qui me plaisaient bien mais je préfère un bouton de volume devant, et sans app sur le téléphone.
• En plus cher, j'ai noté les PreSonus Eris 3.5BT Gen 2.
• Encore plus cher: IK Multimedia iLoud Micro Monitor Speaker. Mais là aussi je voudrais le bouton de volume à l'avant, pas caché dans le dos de l'enceinte.
• Après, les prix deviennent plutôt du genre rigolos et, même si j'ai le sens de l'humour, je ne veux pas payer tout ça pour seulement une qualité de son 'audiophile' ou un design à couper le souffle.

Merci d'avoir lu cette bouteille à la mer. Bon WE ;)

Just noticed that post on our Simple Living cousin from Reddit and I was wondering if that was even an option to most of us?

Alas, the OP doesn’t share much context on why and how they did it, how they manage their daily activities without using any email.

I know I could not.

I mean, I can live without social networks (the only one I use being Lemmy, it was reddit before that) but I could not not use email.

I would even go as far as to say that removing email from my toolbox would make my life a more complicated and for what gain?

The OP mention not receiving spam. I don’t see much spam, simply because I use a spam filter. They also mention having better conversations than through email. Sure, I can understand that. But I can also have both without any issue. I never discussed much through email—save maybe in the early 90s, when I started really using email and quickly quit using snail mail in which, back then, people used to heave discussion that could go on for... years. With email I do things like create online accounts and stuff like that. I don’t exchange idea, I don’t even chat much. But while I do use email I can still discuss with people by other means.

Maybe email for me is a bit like the smartphone? I seldom use mine and only for practical purpose.

Like, there is no social, no games, no YT, not even… email is configured on my phone. It’s merely more than a phone (to pass and receive phone calls, I don't message) with a big screen and the very few apps I’m expected to be able to get access to (passwords, 2FA, finances, IDs), and that’s it. But as limited as my use case is not using that phone would make things uselessly and much more complicated for me.

What about you? Can you imagine going email free?

Si ça se confirmait (on va attendre de voir, avant de réclamer des têtes), il semblerait que nous ne pourrons (très bientôt) plus télécharger nos ebooks sur ordi pour les transférer par USB : Amazon’s killing a feature that let you download and backup Kindle books (merci linuxfr.org).

Ça change quoi? Ça change que vous ne pourrez plus les archiver (edit: plus aussi facilement, car ils supprimeraient la seule façon 'officielle' et simple de le faire, mais ça restera possible pour les bidouilleurs) sur le support de votre choix (genre une clé USB, un DD externe,...) et que Amazon pourra à nouveau décider de les supprimer de votre liseuse, comme elle l'a déjà fait par le passé.

Ça ne me concerne plus vraiment personnellement car ça fait bien plus d'un an que je n'ai plus acheté un seul ebook sur Amazon (et que la montagne d'ebooks que j'ai acheté chez eux est à l'abri de ce genre de caprice), mais ça me semble intéressant à partager comme info.

Ça me confirme aussi dans mon choix de me barrer loin, le plus loin possible, des grosses librairies en ligne et revenir au livre papier, quand c'est encore possible.

D'ailleurs, si ça vous intéresse et que vous avez pas peur de vous farcir la prose d'un Frenchie qui écrit in English, j'explique plus en détails mes motivations sur mon blog perso. Le lien est dans mon profil Lemmy.

So much this (link to Reddit).

Don't worry about not looking great, or clever, or whatever you consider a flattering image of yourself when you read back your journal in a few days, months, years, or decades—yep, I'm that old.

That's fine. No, that's great.

Believe me, no matter what, as long as you wrote honestly about it (not in the sense of writing some supposed indisputable deep truth, in the sense of honestly writing what you were thinking and feeling back then, at that time, no matter how silly) it's worth it and it will be worth reading back.

You have no idea how dearly I miss my old journals were I wrote about my first true love, as a little boy, and later about my second true love, as a young teen. And also, no matter how unflattering it is for me, all I may have written about my many crushes and my countless failed attempt at flirting. Thinking about it, I must have been in love every single day at that time and it must have been a real pain for my best friend who endured all of it—we're still best friends all those years later ;)

Some forty+ years later, I still remember V. wonderful blue eyes and how she smiled and her eyes too, and how badly I wanted to impress her. And how fucking terrorized and excited I was the day I rang her door, completely out of the blue, because it was the last opportunity I could ask her out. I was 14, I had long hair, flowers in one hand (like, really) and my face was tomato red. I still remember how stupidly I smiled when the door opened to let her dad out. He was about to leave for his job, wearing his... cop uniform. He looked at me for more or less an eternity, and the more he looked at me the more I was dying inside.

You can believe me when I tell you that, he was not happy to meet me, and that V. and I did not end up getting married :P