Letter to a Friend, Christmas morning

Another letter sent to a pen pal via Slowly app

A Wintery forest and sun shining behind it

Just now finished writing a letter to a good friend, a young lady who is my penpal via the wonderful Slowly app.

As I wrote, my thoughts turned to it could be today's blog du jour. The letter did not contain any personal info so, here we go!

Latest of the many letters I have enjoyed writing with this app.


Hello K.!!

LOL, still having a chuckle on your disapproving, tsk tsk of my far too busy web browser scene. Yeah, you are right - it's probably even worse than you think now.

The thing is, I haven't turned off my laptop for days on end, I put it into sleep mode and come back later, or next morning and resume from there.

I have at the moment 3 Waterfox (Firefox derived browser project) windows open. Two are normal ones; the last one is a Private tabs window, where I do open Gmail and keep it sandboxed so it can't follow all my wanderings in the main browsing windows.

The other two are to reduce the clutter into the one original one; about 70 tabs if you can believe it, but I swear the laptop and browser handle it with aplomb, no sweat. (A snapshot of my too busy desktop Tasks List shows all the apps in use currently)

A snapshot of my too busy desktop Tasks List

I have many things going on at once, as you know. Mastodon instances, there's maybe 5 or 6 tabs with different ones, different accounts on each tab. I concentrate on one, my home instance (as Mastodon servers are called), and am very active there. Some of the others I visit frequently, some are less visited.

I do have a client called Pinafore loaded into the first tab in that set, which can support multiple instances (servers) configured. You just switch from the one currently on, to another, and it connects to it and has all the colours, avatar, etc that you selected for that one.

It is an excellent piece of software, besides the flexibility it is very light and nimble, the type of thing I really appreciate; there's too much bloated stuff around, unfortunately.

Got some exciting news to share - I posted a reply letter to a Japanese new penpal, similarly to what I had done with you earlier, same idea of it being a nice piece of writing, without any undue personal and private info, which could be appreciated by other users if I shared it.

Loved writing the letter, as I went into that flowing prose streak you know well, and the letter was satisfying for me, to write memories of various kinds too. While writing it, I recognized that it was that type of letter - and mentioned it to O., my penpal.

Sent the letter and went straight into Blogging mode; editing it in write.freely is so nice since it's a minimalist, no distractions programme, really focus the mind in the words or the formatting you want to apply to them, no buttons around to confuse things.

Added reference links, to Wikipedia sources, but buried most of them in the letter text itself to avoid reader distraction.

The web has this richness of us being able to connect and expand ad infinitum; but we sometimes need to keep focus and the readers in our page, not sent out on a spin, not to return.

The page became quite pretty and polished, as you know I am a picky and perfectionist type; sometimes a bad thing.

Once it was done, I had the idea of suggesting it to the Slowly team at Twitter, for possible publication in their "Slowly Stories" feature. I did, sent them a direct message and they liked it, accepted the submission.

It was posted an hour later, and was announced in social media accounts this morning. :) Yey!! See it here.

I sent my penpal a Twitter DM, (she is also a user there) and told her about it. A time warp, since she could see the letter immediately, if she wanted, or wait for delivery via Slowly a few hours later. I think she liked it.

Thank you for the suggestions of reading materials, web pages! I enjoy reading and understanding more about History, Geography, International Relations which tie together well into a deeper understanding of our world.

Nice that you had the chance to watch those favourite films with dad at your side. :) I used to watch a lot of film and documentaries with my older son, he was my buddy for those. We followed Breaking Bad since the beginning, and then on as the series developed, wonderful television and story telling, great acting, such a joy to watch. Even if it kept me tense during and sometimes after the episode was finished.

Time to send this one, K... Have a good week and weekend coming up!

Hugs, Saludos to A.,

rgx.


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RG. @design_RG@Qoto.org