Jake Russo

I wrote this a few months ago, without publishing it. It hasn’t become any less relevant lately, so I’ll leave it here.

It could be a little cleaner and more concise.

I’ve never understood the point. Why? Isn’t the old adage about the positive correlation between banning things and the demand for and allure of those things true?

My school district, and its superintendent — Tim “I own this” Forson — just banned another 23 books. Until today, I didn’t appreciate one of the major effects.

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” ― Joseph Brodsky

I was always of the opinion that, while restricting information is generally a negative, parents have competing interests that must be accounted for. The internet is a massive wealth of information, but many parents use parental control software to restrict their children from content they don’t want them to see. What’s so different about parents’ rights in school? Further, how much of a difference does banning books really make, when every book you could ever want is available through the internet — ecommerce, ebook, and the like? (Public libraries, both online and off, are also invaluable resources — at least, until they come for those, too.)

Think of the teachers, the children, the librarians!

But book banning does diminish access, and it does make a difference. School librarians must purge their shelves; teachers in my district can no longer teach the lessons these books hold; and if, say, a certain English teacher were leading his class on a deep analysis of, oh, I don’t know, The Kite Runner, well now he can’t.

“Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear.” ― Judy Blume

So it’s not just about access. I have access to ~any book I want, and so does most everyone else; but I might’ve never read Persepolis, or The Great Gatsby, or The Kite Runner, among others, on my own, and I almost certainly wouldn’t have the level of appreciation for and understanding of their ideas that I do now. This is about exposure to ideas: ideas that some people, some parents, and certain Ron DeSantises might not like.

Maybe I should be more deliberate with what I read, and maybe I should try to seek out as much meaning as I can; there’s an immense collection of analysis online, and, I’m sure, self-study literature curriculums. But that’s not the point. We need exposure to other ideas; we need to realize that “America’s not always the good guy”; we need to think critically about life and identity and sexuality, socialism and Marxism and the American Dream.

That exposure starts in the classroom.

This is a drum that the right loves to beat — “they’re coming for your guns; they’re coming for your gas stoves”… but now, they’re coming for our books.

And as for the allure factor, I guess I have a new reading list, courtesy of the Department of Education (School Board?).

“Torch every book. Burn every page. Char every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible. And therein lies your real fear.” ― Ellen Hopkins

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The last time I had a laptop was late 2021, before I returned it and built a desktop. That was the right choice: the laptop¹ was overpriced and underperformant, and the desktop turned out to be a much better fit.

Not having a laptop, though, was annoying: I would have waste time, functionality, efficiency, and frustration using the computers at school. I would often have to worry about having access to a computer for sufficient time to e.g., write an essay the class before it was due.

Coincidentally, I saw a YouTube video talking about ThinkPads, their low price, upgradability, durability, etc. People seemed to like the T4xx² series, in particular.

The heft of e.g., the T440 wouldn’t work for me. I have a spot in my bag that can fit a slim, 14-inch laptop, and that’s it. There’s some distain online for the ThinkPads ending in “s”, for slim: less of their components are easily replaceable.

But that’s the tradeoff, I guess. And, realistically, I’m never actually going to upgrade the thing.

I ended up with the T480s that I’m using to write this post (and every other one on this site, so far). It wasn’t the product of much research; I just saw a listing for an OS-less (but entitled to Windows!) T480s on eBay one day, and bought it. It has an i7 from 2018, 16GB of RAM, an SSD, and a passable, 1080P display³. And the thing was <$300.

The mouse buttons above the trackpad are nice, and I use them instead of the built-in trackpad click. The design is minimal, but businesslike and sharp. They don’t look ultra-premium, but they don’t look like they’re from Wish.com, either.

I worried that the battery would be terrible, or the thing would look like it fell off a truck, but it’s not, and it doesn’t. There are, of course, signs of wear: some of the keys are shiny, and there’s a bright spot in the bottom corner of the display.

But it runs well, the keyboard is quite good (I originally thought it was mediocre-at-best, but it’s really grown on me), and it lasts 5-6 hours, which is about how long you can expect this sort of laptop to last.

Maybe I should’ve gone for an X1 Carbon; it’s basically this laptop but better. But this thing works! My only complaint is the screen, since I think a 3:2 aspect ratio is preferable (though all my screens have been 16:9, and I don’t have the weird LG one) and 2K with a little more vibrancy thrown in would be a welcome improvement. There are also some weird lags, sometimes, but those seem like a feature common to laptops, rather than a problem with this one in particular.

The experience of using my desktop is better (for reference, the keyboard cost more than the laptop), but using my laptop is lower-friction. It means I do interesting things, like writing this post, more often. It also means that things I’d write down and put off until I felt like walking over to the computer and turning it on (yeah, it’s just as easy as it sounds — it’s like eight feet away from me as I write this) got done a lot sooner and more often. I’ve subscribed to GeForce now for a few months now (the 4K tier, since I tell myself I need it for my desktop), and don’t use it much. I’m falling for the sunk cost fallacy, since I’ve spend some amount of money on Steam games, and losing GeForce Now (though I could immediately resubscribe and be fine, when I actually want to play) would mean I lose access to those games. But having the subscription means I one of the things I can do more often is game, since I can open it on this laptop. I might write at more length about GeForce Now, but maybe it’d be after I get a GPU and finally cancel the subscription⁴.

I’m thinking about preordering a Framework Ryzen 7040 series (Ryzen 5) because of their famed efficiency, and because it’d be a nice upgrade, a laptop that I could daily drive for years, easily refurbishing when needed. It’s been a while since I built my desktop, and the DIY version seems fun. It would also be a nice gift to myself for my last year of high school, shipping late Q3 of this year.

But the ThinkPad is excellent, and the more I use it, the more hesitant I become to preorder a Framework. This thing works pretty well! And if it stops working, I can cheaply repair or replace it. That also means I don’t have to worry too much about it: I can just throw it in my bag without worrying. Of course, the easy repairability of the Framework might have the same effect, but it doesn’t seem the same.

I guess we’ll see. The Framework improves on almost every one of my gripes with the Thinkpad, but they’re mostly luxury, quality of life improvements.

If you’re looking for a laptop, don’t get one from Best Buy for $300: it’ll almost certainly be terrible. Look for ThinkPads for that price; there are plenty, and they’ll probably actually work. There’s a prolific ThinkPad community⁵ on the internet, and it’s fun to see their passion.

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¹It was a Lenovo IdeaPad, which cost 3x as much as this thing, and was much worse.

²jvscholz on YouTube makes different, interesting videos. I think he has a few other channels, too. Definitely worth a watch.

³ The screen is 14″ (perfect size!) and 1080P, which, coincidentally, evaluates to the same PPI (and, thus, same perceived sharpness) as my 28″, 4K desktop monitor. (I actually don’t miss the high refresh rate as much as I thought I would, but the higher resolution and much better colors always make me glad to be back on the desktop.)

⁴I try to vary my entertainment — games, books, movies, TV, podcasts. I like to feel multifaceted in that sense. It’s often difficult for me, though; maybe I’ll write about this.

⁵Reddit and YouTube are good starting places.

Most of my writing these days (at least, until this site) is literary analysis for my (excellent) English teacher. Predictably, I frequently use quotes, and often, those quotes will come at the end of a sentence or before a comma.

For fear of seeming ignorant: yes, I know that in American English, the comma or period goes inside the quote. For example,

• Tom, “forc[ing] him out of the room,” demonstrates his violent assertiveness.
• Torvald was not “the man [she] could bind [herself] to.”

Sorry for the examples being a little poor; I tried making them up, instead of actually finding them in past essays. They should be more than sufficient to demonstrate my point, though.

I don’t like that; I think it’s annoying. If the punctuation is mine, it goes outside the quotes; if it’s the author’s, it goes inside. This is the case in British English, which I like. Unfortunately, I’m not into the whole “flavor” / “colour” thing. Waste of letters.

Except if the punctuation is an exclamation or question mark or something, in which case, if it’s yours, it goes outside the quotes, even in American English. That’s actually good, and I can see the argument concerning the comma and period: they’re neutral; they don’t change the meaning of the quote; it looks better when they’re enclosed, so keep them there.

But I’ve dug the whole too deep, and I’d seem clueless if I suddenly switched. And I still think my (the British, I guess) way is more precise.

Something I read on Read Max a few months ago stuck with me. He wrote about how actually writing, or actually producing is what makes you better; what really matters is that you produce at all.

I didn’t act on it at the time, but it stayed in the back of my mind, as I was thinking about (but not actually writing) my blog. The thesis of that post is essentially the rationale behind this blog, much of which I detailed here and here.

This applies broadly, though, and just as easily to podcasts. The relationship between this (“notes”) blog and my “main” blog is analogous to that between my Anchor (now Spotify Podcasts) show and my main (“Jake Russo Podcast”) one.

I just started this podcast in the car, outside of a restaurant. I’ve been thinking about doing just that for a week or two, now, and I finally did.

And it went well. It was fun, and, knowing that I only had one take, it was much quicker and more enjoyable than recording for my other podcast (which, unsurprisingly, only has two episodes — one of which is a trailer). My attitude with that podcast and this blog is similar, if not the same: I record something, don’t listen to or edit it, and publish. The goal is similar, too: I’ll never get better at blogging if I don’t do it often; I’ll never get better at podcasting if I don’t do it often. The only way anyone could possibly hear or read what I have to say is if I actually say it. And saying more is better than saying less — more chances.

I write this as I’m going through still somewhat manual process of submitting podcast RSS feeds to Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and other distributors.

You can listen to the episode I just recorded here.

It’ll eventually get its own page on this site.

If you’re interested in making content for the internet or need something interesting to do (both of which exist in my reason set), give the aforementioned article a read. We’ll see if this lasts; it’d be good if I were actually consistent with it!