Comment by keiferski
14 hours ago
Usually these posts are about the benefits of using paper for your memory, focus, etc.
But I think a blank page is even more valuable for its explicit emptiness. You are somewhat required to be original when using paper. Or at least use your imagination than when you’re using a computer and can easily browse the internet for inspiration, use a software program to evaluate your writing or make suggestions, and so on.
It feels to me like culture generally has been unoriginal and echoing itself for a few decades now, and I do wonder how much of that is related to our choice of tools.
I still send my family hand-written postcards when I travel. I know my mom and mother-in-law love and appreciate them, my mom still has one hung on her fridge from my trip to Singapore 9 years ago.
It feels like postcards are a dying thing because it seems harder and harder to find them when abroad! I try to pick them up in the airport now when I land that way I can immediately write them and mail them from the hotel. My last postcards sent from Bangkok took over 7 months to arrive, I assumed they had just gotten lost or destroyed. I think they must have come on a boat and/or maybe gotten stuck in the Suzez Canal.
if you want a blank page you can open notepad exe
but then you're still limited to that set of glyphs.
I can fold the paper into origami.
I guess one could extrapolate a programming metaphor as the origami that notepad.exe enables.
A blank notepad window still requires imagination to fill. I like to use a wacom+krita because I like to doodle while thinking. None of that requires paper.
And I suppose you could sketch on notepad with ASCII but some might prefer the cave-painting primitiveness of pen and paper.