I had a strange mood today and started and finished this in one 10 hour sitting. It was excellent, but simultaneously not as excellent as I had hoped. I enjoyed lots of the short stories in Dubliners more, I think. The "avant garde" structure often felt superfluous - although not always. The color symbolism was interesting, but I felt it fell away in the second half of the book. In fact, the entire middle portion (those gigantic sermons, my god!) was a bit rough to get through. But I do appreciate that it really evoked the sensation of being in a washed out, weary, hypnosis sort of state - and it did leave a psychological impression in the following sections, like you really "remembered" that part of Stephen's life. The discussion on Stephen's philosophy of art was the highlight for me, along with a bunch of tiny little fragments of test that felt like beautiful lucid clear thoughts. It did evoke the feeling of going through life in a largely automatic blur, with a few powerful moments sticking out. I especially enjoyed that the powerful moments were often completely mundane events made powerful only via Stephen's feelings in the moment. His struggles with expressing and capturing this elusive sensation were beautifully portrayed. And the switch to first-person at the end felt delightful in its regressive irony (according to Stephen's point of view), as it represented the "lyrical form" in some rough sense.

Anyways, curious if anyone else has thoughts on it to share. I couldn't find any discussion online about the red/white color symbolism. I interpreted it as a representation of cold lifeless religiosity vs hot vivacious "mundanity". But I'm not sure if the York/Lancaster origination of the symbols is meant to lend more to it, etc., or if maybe I've missed that entirely. The green and maroon were clearly political and I found lots of discussion on that. I'd love to hear what anyone else's favorite/least favorite aspects were.

I was reading this post https://lemmy.world/post/3049732 and it seems like there are lots of different desires and uses for people to want to hide certain types of content.

I'm sure I'm not alone in this: sometimes I do want to hide memes, sometimes I want to hide politics, etc. But sometimes I want to hide different things. That is, some days I come to Lemmy for comica and memes, other days for news, other days for discussion or technology, etc.

It might be a cool feature to let people create different "viewing modes" or "content filter profiles" or something like that. So I could have a "sports profile" that only shows certain communities of my choice, a "politics profile" etc. Not entirely sure if it would make more sense for these lists to be inclusive or exclusive or what. But the idea would be that I could edit and save these profiles and select between them in my user settings.

I don't want to post this as an enhancement suggestion in the Lemmy git repo so willy-nilly though, figured I'd ask on Lemmy first if anyone else thinks this is desirable? Personally I think it could have a huge payoff while not being too technically challenging or taxing from an instance data management standpoint. It may allow people to engage with Lemmy in a much more healthy and enjoyable way, using it sometimes for comfort, sometimes for information, etc. depending on their mood and needs. Basically, blocking is a great and powerful feature to improve a user's experience, but I hardly ever block any communities because I often will want to see that sort of content sometimes without needing to go directly to the community.

If others think this sounds nice, I would be happy to post it on the Lemmy repo as well as try to contribute code for the feature. But I'd really like input first, especially on whether it should be inclusive or exclusive lists, or something expose UI to choose (seems to risk bloat imo), or any other suggestions.