If I were reading a book and each chapter started with such a "hook," it'd start to feel like a LinkedIn post.
Chapter 1: I didn't know what it felt like to be alive until I was dead...
Chapter 2: Death was nothing compared to what came next: judgment.
Chapter 3: I thought I knew what judgment was until...
Chapter II: IN WHICH PASSEPARTOUT IS CONVINCED THAT HE HAS AT LAST FOUND HIS IDEAL
Chapter III: IN WHICH A CONVERSATION TAKES PLACE WHICH SEEMS LIKELY TO COST PHILEAS FOGG DEAR
1)
Using brave on iPhone.
Firefox and Safari works…
A wise person should be able to read text that is flavored like cardboard. In general, one thing I dislike about this moment, is the incredible emphasis we place on the first five seconds of everything because everyone is thinking about all the other things we could be doing.
But many things are great because of how they feel 20 years later. The first five seconds of playing a musical instrument is horrible, but 20 years later and it is sublime. Emacs, Vim, are both notoriously forbidding, and yet, they are wonderful tools. Some things can be massaged to meet both criteria (I can imagine some emacs configuration that made it less painful and surfaced its true power in the first five seconds maybe), but other things are hard by nature and derive their value from how we have to adapt to them instead of how well they are adapted to us. I feel like the AI era is going to just accelerate this trend where everything we interact with is a slick surface and many people will never experience depth.
Read boring shit.
Always found them interesting.
see for instance --GW-image-sun-verginasun-black-svg
It ISN'T Venice you need to make me care about, it's YOU! Why should I spend any of my time on you?
A good first sentence should make me care about your perspective, at least for non-fiction about subjects well-studied.
Fiction, obvs, differs. Scalzi's Old Man's War had such a great first sentence I devoured the series.