Week 33

The Desi Dispatch has been an interesting side-project I’ve been working on for a few weeks now with my friend Adi. It came out of a simple annoyance that I suspect some of my Indian peers probably share: keeping up with Indian news is hard without doomscrolling Instagram, especially with all the junk that clogs Indian news media. The signal-to-noise ratio has become almost unbearable. Adi and I ended up hacking together our own way of curating India-related news and interesting stories, which became The Desi Dispatch. The backend and curation engine itself has been fun to build, but the real fun—and challenge—has been on the human side: deciding what’s interesting, what sparks conversation, what makes people (and us) actually interested in news again.

I’ve long been adjacent to the world of curation. In college, I was curating content I found interesting and sending it out as emails to close friends and family. That was all manual—just spending time on the internet and finding interesting things. Today, I can have thousands of news stories show up in front of me in an instant, but the real challenge is deciding what to run. We’ve had to learn to distinguish between what’s trending and what’s actually worth the time, between what might generate clicks and what seems insightful. We’ve had to make some decisions that have felt downright strange at times (not running news on Gaza/Ukraine every day) and some that felt exciting (running a story on clear air turbulence first, which we saw getting picked up in other traditional outlets a day later). Still others have broadened our own understanding of things as we sourced them, and some have just been fun. Still, the best part has been watching it click with others. It’s kind of humbling and exciting to see something you work on in your spare time resonate with people across the internet. Despite all the AI slop bombarding us every day now, I think there’s a pretty great space for exploring your own interests and creativity and sharing that continuously with the world. I think more and more people are here for that stuff.

In a few weeks, I’m moving from a wide apartment to a long apartment. It’s a bit weird to adjust to when the width is just enough to have your bed split the room in two. I was there today taking measurements to see what will fit and, in turn, which furniture I might need to get rid of. The measured area of my current and future apartment is about the same, but the layout makes it all wonky. It’s a firsthand lease, though, which in Stockholm is the equivalent of winning the lottery, so I can’t really complain. I’m not even really complaining—I’m quite happy about it and kind of excited to explore a new area. It’s also quite a big annoyance out of the way to not have to move each year as I’ve been doing. Housing is a whole other side-project in this city, and I’m glad to be done for a while with the hops after this next one.

I’ve been absolutely battered in training this week. A lot of soreness. We’re getting in too deep now, but I must now either learn to hold my own or risk being perpetually broken in some way. There’s a strange feeling of pushing against the limits now. I’ve realised I’m a creature of habit and routine, so being outside the zone of predictability and comfort can be quite disorienting. In that sense, the constant body aches and exhaustion are getting annoying, but there’s also a bit of wonder in figuring out what works and what doesn’t in this new space. I’m curious to see where it goes from here.

🥘 Food

• Lamb Meatballs

📚 Reading

• The Desi Dispatch - Week 33
• Wandering the town of Akranes - Bláfjöll
• I want to know what it is like
  to never speak of death
  or dying.

💿 Listening

• Dark Matter - Andrew Belle
• Jóga - Björk