Yeah yeah, everyone on the fedi's heard about your ✨special interests✨.

But what about your fleeting interests?

@mayintoronto OK, I thought about this all evening and wonder if high-quality keyboards count for me. I wanted to buy a nice one, so I tried some switches out, and then bought two Keychrons with those switches. Love them, but I’ve no interest in looking for a better switch or building one from the board up. What’s the ruling?
@Momomoto I'm sure the Fedi Keyboard warriors (enthusiasts) will chime in here.
@Momomoto @mayintoronto oh absolutely. e-notes too. One keyboard and one supernote and I'm good for as long as they last

@kostyn I looked into a supernote, and with the import duties in 2026...... I'm not paying $800 for a e-writer.

@Momomoto

@mayintoronto @Momomoto yeahhhhh it's bananas, I don't have a tablet though, so I was just like pretend it's an ipad, pretend it's an ipad, pretend it's an ipad 🙈🙈🙈 And I'm veryyyyyyy lucky that was an option for me
@Momomoto @mayintoronto I have a longstanding idea I call "olive garden optimization", that was born from learning that there was once upon a time an Olive Garden Culinary Institute in Tuscany. The idea was that they'd ship their managers there, show them a michelin star Tuscany-restaurant experience and then say "ok, we've got six sauces, four pasta shapes, decent wine, local line cooks and endless breadsticks. How can we use that to give people 80% of this experience for 15% of the price?"

@Momomoto @mayintoronto I see a lot of "fleeting interests" through this lens - what's the sweet spot for 'much, much better than what I had' without overspend or obsession, how do I get there, and then sitting with that for a while.

The nice part of it is that if you ever decide you need More or Better, the process of researching and living for a while in an olive-garden-optimal position gives you a lot of clarity about of what your next-steps options are and what they'll cost.

@mhoye @mayintoronto This is super good context, and I’m liking the Pareto principle aspect of it all. It’s a fleeting interest because I spent a year researching “good enough”, and now that I have it there’s little incentive in spending 80% more effort for maybe 20% more enjoyment.

@mhoye @Momomoto @mayintoronto

I like this perspective. A friend who has a couple of high-end bicycles explained something similar this way:

"It'll cost you $3000 for a good light road bike. Then it costs you $1000 more for each additional ounce of weight you save."

@mhoye @Momomoto @mayintoronto this is pretty solid advice. there just aren't enough hours in the day to be That Intense about *everything* in your life, but that doesn't mean you can't make things a bit nicer for yourself. I looked into pens years ago, settled on the uniball jetstream, bought a few packs of them and have been happy ever since.