Amen to this
Some thoughts on artist publishing:
There are no rules about what can be an artist publication: a zine, a magazine, a book, an art-book, a pamphlet, a poster, a postcard, a set of letters. A website, a newsletter, an app, an e-book, a workshop or webinar, and/or a print on demand book distributed to bookstores (like with IngramSpark). What you want to make can determine the right shape.
Artist publishing is another way to think of it, rather than self-publishing. I’ve been feeling like it’s a more accurate description for a lot of what I’m interested in, and seeing my peers and collaborators do.
Even more mysterious are lichens. A hybrid organism of alga, bacteria, and fungi, those that are named are named gloriously: Methuselah’s beard, hammered-shield, firedot, crabseye. They grow in the deep desert, they grow over statues like cloaks, they lie over rock faces like accretions of rust. They grow in the ice. They split and grow and abide on such little nourishment as can be afforded by less than the glint of light from an eye.
A spectrum of lichenI indulge myself in these fanciful and half-understood terms because now is a good time to know how to grow, even unnourished; how to flourish, in inhospitable places; how to become a hammered shield, and turn to dust, and grow from it. It is a bitter season to think about how to grow when the ground is stony and cold and leached of good.
Personal Library Science is defined as: the discipline concerned with the organization, retrieval, and transformation of an individual's data.
The operative words here are: organization, transformation, and individual. Personal library science is focused on you and your data, not the existence of all data itself. More succinctly, personal library science is focused on your relationship with your information. How do we store information so that it useful at a later date? How do we transform our information into new valuable assets in different creative domains? How do we do all of this while being flexible enough for the idiosyncrasies, proclivities, likes and dislikes of eight billion distinct individuals? How do we chronicle the information diet of a single person as they learn new things, interact with the world at different phases in their life? How do we make sure we can pass down our best knowledge to generations below?
In sum, how do we manage the libraries of us?
I don’t have any experience with these services but I’ve been collecting various forms of “zine makers” and “zine printers” for use one day:
http://www.bkmag.com/2015/07/22/meet-six-of-brooklyns-best-zine-makers/
https://raghaus.com/new-york-risograph-riso-zine-printing-service/
http://www.endlesseditions.com/
http://www.smalleditionsnyc.com/
I love the zine culture that lives in Architecture.
From Archigram, Archizoom, Superstudio etc to the modern day http://www.archizines.com/
These avant-garde architecture studios pioneered such interesting concepts as the non-stop city and the continuous monument.
Links:
http://archigram.westminster.ac.uk/
Essay: On the “Archigram-What-Organisation-You-Must-Be-Joking-Mate”
https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/01/smashingmag-performance-case-study/
Options for writing a web-book that becomes a print book:
(e.g. https://worldaftercapital.gitbooks.io/worldaftercapital/content/)
https://electricbookworks.com/
https://electricbookworks.github.io/electric-book/
e.g. https://platformland.github.io/playbook/book/text/index.html
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https://dauwhe.github.io/reflow/
https://jan-martinek.github.io/henry-david-thoreau_walden/economy.html#idea1
Architecture and videogames is a deep vein of interestingness.
See the note from Robin Sloan in this email about fortnite architecture:
https://buttondown.email/year-of-the-meteor/archive/week-21-all-is-foretold/
Links, ideas and concepts for running user research projects:
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The trick we use to make research findings memorable at Monzo
source: The trick we use to make research findings memorable at Monzo
TiddlyWiki is a super interesting project - been around for 15 years(!) and is a notes/knowledge platform that is self-contained in a single file - and the controls are all embedded in it so you can kinda script the environment within the environment.
It’s weird and promising and somehow is completely lacking in design!
It’s getting some fresh traction - like:
https://nesslabs.com/tiddlywiki-beginner-tutorial
https://nesslabs.com/digital-garden-tiddlywiki
https://sepiabrown.github.io/2020/04/20/tiddlyblink-glitch/
And finally a TiddlyTheme that doesn’t suck!!
Nothing about his job was rewarding for Jonah. He worked day and night at the quantum observatory research lab attached to the New Frontier science outpost orbiting Aries12.
Our understanding of time and space have changed in the last 100 years, what begun with relativity, was extended through quantum mechanics and then later entangled-thermodynamics upended our notions and our understanding but ultimately very little changed in our day to day. Yes we were able to master short wormhole transportation but only in isolated channels through our solar system, at short distances from the energy harvester orbiting the sun.
Using this we catapulted a short number of expeditions to some of the nearest stars and inhabitable planets around Earth.
It was on one of these space hops that Jonah and Franny fell in love. 30 years ago. Both quantum scientists they spent their entire education learning how to entangle molecules, only to end up entangling each other in the emotions of love.
But Jonah was destined for Aries12, and Franny for Aries13. And with a limited distance using the hops from our home solar system Jonah and Franny are separated for the rest of their lives. Without even any means to communicate other than radio waves with a 20-year lag. And, of course, the entangled beacons.
12 in total, designed to withstand the ravages of space, stabalised in 5 dimensions using a combination of magnetic and gravitonic fields. These entangled beacons are linked outside of space/time. Across space/time. Using space/time. Really, it’s impossible with our understanding still to determine HOW entanglement works. But work it does. Instantly. So Aries13, 20 light years from Aries12, itself 10 light years from Earth. Each with a series of entangled beacons capable of communicating 12 bits of information in total. 1 or 0. But able to communicate instantly.
The game theorists on earth had calculated a complicated matrix of scenarios, and an associated chart of communication patters guiding the use and interpretation of these quantum beacons. So far two beacons had been used. One signaling that Aries13 was indeed habitable, that all was safe and that resources were abundant and one signaling that resources had stabalised and colonization had begun.
But of course you can’t leave two amorous quantum scientists together for 10 years on a lonely voyage through space without expecting them to entangle themselves. Both literally and metaphorically. You see in addition to the 12 “official” quantum beacons Jonah and Franny had created 5 entangled particles, held in simple crude quartz chambers
A list of research/strategy/consulting studios that are interesting:
Rapid research and sensemaking is critical to consulting
This note should become a running list of all the tinyletters and substacks I subscribe to. (that’s harder to gather than you might think!)
Robin Sloan Craig Mod Deb Chachra Laura Olin All my stars Sentiers Erin Watson
Gormen is my horizon and my home. This towering city of red rust stuck on the side of a dead asteroid. This crumbling outpost a legacy of a crumbling empire.
I am seven when the Computer chooses me as the next Controller of Gormen. Aghast, I rebel in the only way a seven year old can. I run away. Through the corridors and hangers of this decaying city of red rust, I flee. Pursued by a great horror that I can’t name but I can feel - I flee through the great hall where the daily meal is being conducted - hundreds of people dancing in a mad orchestra of routine and tasks to feed the workers - I flee still.
Through the lower levels the people of Gormen are covered in red dust, the red rust of this place literally killing them from the outside in.
You never truly escape the red dust but as you climb through the the levels of Gormen somehow the air becomes thinner, purer, less dust.
I run.
I flee through the sleeping chambers, where the bodies of dormant workers appear like hulking beasts. To me, they appeared non-human, grotesque perhaps. Vile. Noises and smells that my seven year old body, as yet, doesn’t understand. I flee past the air vents - constructions so big that I have to crane my neck to comprehend them. Their thundering noise is somehow calming to me - reassuring that this city is still breathing, still alive, still doing what it should. The mechanics of this community are alien to me - workers and machines and servants and the high court and the mess halls and the engineers and the scientists and cooks and… I don’t understand. I can’t understand - just like Gormen the meaning of this place is layered up - layers of people, metal, rust and routine.
I run.
As I ascend Gormen to the higher levels, the noise retreats and is replaced with the glow of lighting that is too bright. Too false. The people are no longer covered in red rust but their eyes reflect the false light. They are empty and lifeless - motions devoid of the quickness and primal qualities of the workers of the lower levels. And yet here there is less rust. Less dust in everyone’s hair, in everyone’s clothes.
The library. A place I’ve been many times for education but never on my own. I see the librarian coming towards me and truly see with my eyes the monstrosity of a creature half man, half machine. Oil sheens on his metal surfaces while his human eyes burn with a look of knowledge that appears demonic. A creature who has traded form for knowledge - to give up his humanity to become all-knowing. All knowing and ponderous. I can easily outpace him and this, finally, gives me my first taste of freedom. These upper levels are steeped so thickly in tradition and etiquette that it is as if the whirling system of people and things move only in regimented movements, a limited finite way of being - destined to repeat infinitely again and again their movements and conversations.
Still I run.
I lose my way more times than I can count - dead end passages, locked doors, great halls that are colder than death itself. I stumble into a room filled with dancing lights, flickering and beautiful but when I see the faces of the trapped people - wired from every part of their body and a state of rapture on their faces, drooling and muttering and smiling and laughing an empty sickly laugh, I turn and flee. Those faces haunt me as I stumble on - still running and still scared but now I have been running for so long that I am feeling free - the solid pounding of my feet on the metal floors of Gormen reassuring me that this is physical and real.
What characters will there be in this story? The spiders of Gormen - the computers’ eyes and ears forever creeping on, and over everything. The rust, of course. Spick who will become my best friend from the miners - his infectious laugh and real human energy in his eyes but lacking the understanding of education. Mervyn - my assistant and mentor forever faithful but forever lacking, bound to the rituals and mechanics of the system. And Braun - the first voice in the senate and the puppet master of the upper levels. But there is plenty of time for that.
Still I run.
Down a long, narrow corridor I emerge into the observation deck. A hundred windows blazing with the radiance of the carpet of stars in the night sky. It will take me years to find this place again, and the next time I see it somehow it won’t be as beautiful as this time. Seven years old and heir to the whole of Gormen, I am able to put aside the looming dread and gaze out across the surface of the moon. Is the towering construction of metal and people Gormen or is the moon Gormen? Where does one truly end and one truly begin? I can look out over the valleys and mountains of the moon - everywhere tinged the same red color - and look up at the stars. Like pinpricks in the curtain of night, they hang motionless and yet twinkling. I am tired and lie down to rest. Rest perched on the very edge of Gormen - as far from the belly of the beast as I can manage. Many miles overhead the machines we call crows wheel and toss in some imaginary wind buffeted by space and tracing some pattern known only to the Computer. I feel for the crows out there in space with no air and no heat. How can those machines not lose their minds? Already my brain is confusing humans and machines - already my perception of things is losing it’s grip.
I will look back many years later, once I have become the Controller truly and know every chamber, every air vent and every crack in this majestic ruined place - once I understand how the rituals work and how the machine functions - the system made of humans and metal, of brains and computers. I will look back and wonder what did I know of Gormen as a seven year old? Gazing out from that observation deck - what did I know of the true nature of Gormen? This spiraling city of red rust. Perhaps, I will think, I knew it better at that age than I ever did again.
Examples of real work methods
http://www.themoderniststudio.com/2019/01/07/the-mechanics-of-strategic-storytelling/
Incredibly detailed and disciplined approach to categorizing ethnographic research.
Book printers:
https://www.livoniaprint.lv/ (recc by Farnam St guy)
Printninja (recc by Laura Olin)
https://www.heftwerk.com/
https://www.heftwerk.com/indie-magonomics.php
But the sea which no one tends is also a garden
Asphodel, That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams
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First, The fish needs to say, “Something ain’t right about this Camel ride – And I’m Feeling so damn Thirsty.”
Hafiz
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And we all say: OH! Well I never! Was there ever A Cat so clever As Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!
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So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
From: The Four Quartets by TS Eliot
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In the summer I stretch out on the shore And think of you Had I told the sea What I felt for you, It would have left its shores, Its shells, Its fish, And followed me.
Nizar Qabbani
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But after a time allowed for it to swim, Instead of proving human when it neared And someone else additional to him, As a great buck it powerfully appeared, Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, And landed pouring like a waterfall, And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush–and that was all.
The Most of It by Robert Frost
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We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.
Diving into the wreck by Adrienne Rich
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I prove a theorem and the house expands: the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling, the ceiling floats away with a sigh.
As the walls clear themselves of everything but transparency, the scent of carnations leaves with them. I am out in the open
And above the windows have hinged into butterflies, sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected. They are going to some point true and unproven.
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An airborne instrument I sit, Predestined nightly to fulfill Columbia-Giesen-Management’s Unfathomable will,
By whose election justified, I bring my gospel of the Muse To fundamentalists, to nuns, to Gentiles and to Jews,
And daily, seven days a week, Before a local sense has jelled, From talking-site to talking-site Am jet-or-prop-propelled.
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ECHO: For sure the Rebel is going to Die. Oh, there will be no flags, not even black ones, no gun salutes, no ceremony. It will be very simple, something which in appearance will not change anything, but which will cause coral in the depths of the sea, birds in the depths of the sky, stars in the depths of women’s eyes to crackle for the instant of a tear or the bat of an eyelash.
Aimé Césaire, And the Dogs Were Silent
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VIII I know noble accents And lucid, inescapable rhythms; But I know, too, That the blackbird is involved In what I know.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by WALLACE STEVENS
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The child is father of the man; And I could wish my days to be Bound each to each by natural piety. (Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”)
Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
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A Winter Night Tomas Transtromer
The storm puts its mouth to the house and blows to get a tone. I toss and turn, my closed eyes reading the storm’s text.
The child’s eyes grow wide in the dark and the storm howls for him. Both love the swinging lamps; both are halfway towards speech.
The storm has the hands and wings of a child. Far away, travellers run for cover. The house feels its own constellation of nails holding the walls together.
The night is calm in our rooms, where the echoes of all footsteps rest like sunken leaves in a pond, but the night outside is wild.
A darker storm stands over the world. It puts its mouth to our soul and blows to get a tone. We are afraid the storm will blow us empty.
https://www.npr.org/2012/01/09/144904447/a-winter-night
Sometimes Writing -Pat Schneider-
“Sometimes writing sits in you like a wild animal. Maybe you see its eyes. Maybe you don’t see it at all, but the hair on the back of your neck knows it is there where the deepest shadows lie. Often the shadows lie about what’s hiding in them.
The panther that has stalked you since you were a child is old now. No longer wild, and tired of guarding the treasure you yourself left behind– blind and deaf, she will give it all to you if you just let her go.
But how are you to know whether the fox on the hill in the cemetery carries your mother’s name or is the same fox you saw crossing your back yard in the snow
unless you put your pen to paper and use it to release the animal that hides in the shadow of your hand.”
The phrase Phantom Urbanism is the idea of building built as financial instrument, unlived in. Massive in scale.
Is there a concept of phantom media? Media property devoid of news - designed as investment vehicle?
Education, teaching & learning increasingly powers everything I work on.
Consulting is education: teaching clients how to do things.
Every consulting client is an education for the consultant.
Brand marketing hinges on educational experiences for users.
In-context, edutainment, powerful education and learning moments.
Links
Quantum computing for the very curious - learning essay format
https://education-trails.glitch.me/ - this is a stupid little prototype I built to show how a “guided learning” UX could look and feel like. I quite quickly abandoned this because I think it’s an evolutionary dead end (too forced for one thing). The one idea I did like here is using Chrome local-storage to quickly and easily generate your own “side notes” or space for reflection and notes to self while reading which I think is a great deliberate practice for learning.
twitter thread here shows my thinking and building process
TODO: a prototype similar to the above from the opposite end of the spectrum i.e. entirely self directed instead of forced linear learning. What would that look like?
https://www.packym.com/blog/process-course - love this idea for building a mini curriculum for a topic that you’re passionate about.
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this archive of Patrick Tanguay’s learning newsletter
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hyperlink.academy is an online university that lives in the links between personal websites. Here we learn about the internet.
The structure is simple. The academy has 6-week long semesters. Anyone is welcome to enroll and anyone can facilliate a course on anything related to the internet (programming, communities, hardware, music, anything).
If you complete at least 1 course during a semester, you graduate and get a ~sticker~.
source: hyperlink.academy
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https://hapgood.us/2016/10/10/new-directions-in-open-education/
Virgil Link to my blog post.
Small-o org design: the idea that changing the organization is a means to an end, not the focus of the work itself. But - it is necessary to change the org directly:
But leaders don’t have a critical piece of the story at their fingertips: a clear articulation of the actual issues that, if unblocked with structural changes, would lead to positive transformation.
Source: Software for Scaled Organizing by @clayparkerjones
Descending into Iceland from orbit is breathtaking if you do it right. Often you can see the northern lights, the glaciers and the glass spires of Reykjavik all contributing to a stunning vista. On my most recent trip however an absence of solar flares and cloud cover meant that I sank into a dull grey fog as the cruiser landed in Reykjavik, as if the city hid some troubled thoughts. I certainly did.
I’ve been visiting Iceland for the past 12 months regularly to interview, in person, Layola - the first human being with DNA successfully manipulated via CRISPr technology. In 2018 Layola received advanced recombinant DNA configuration across her whole genome using CRISPr - essentially using natural machines made of proteins and RNA to artificially switch some of her genes on and off. The purpose of the procedure was to cure her severe autism and the procedure took 12 months of intensive treatment.
Layola was the first human to receive a CRISPr procedure and the only human to receive the procedure since.
There is no question that her autism was cured, and Layola will tell you she is happy with the outcome, but to call the treatment a success requires understanding the full effects of the treatment spanning Layola’s behaviour, her pre-frontal cortex, the inner workings of international medical advisory board (IMAB) and 50 years of quarantine in Iceland in a glass box and with limited contact with the outside world.
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In the period 2000 - 2018 Autism was a common diagnosis. Poorly understood, we lumped the condition with ADHD and tried to pinpoint the cause on vaccines, gluten sensitivity in diet, pre-birth oxygen flow, ambient 5G radiation and many more besides.
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Layola was born in 2000 in southern New Jersey in a region called south shore - now completely submerged - to two parents, Marshal and Alice. Loving parents, a middle class family and a child with autism. First diagnosed at 4 because of early learning difficulties and later confirmed aged 7 because of extreme sensitivity to touch, a lack of all spoken language and avoidance of eye contact.
Aged 14 Layola was sent to a privately funded retreat - where she was supervised 24/7 by carers and given a secure compound to explore, play in and call home. What was going on inside Layola’s mind at the time was largely misunderstood at the time but her externalities were extreme. Severe self harm, extreme aversion to human contact, complete and utter dependency on specific sensory inputs such as sounds and colors.
In 2018, 50 years ago this week, Layola was selected and approved for CRISPr gene recombinant therapy.
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“I suppose, you could start with the words. That was the first thing I remember coming out of the autism. I had been processing sounds my whole life but never in any organized fashion - but to hear words and speaking as you and I are now - that was something entirely alien and foreign”
Layola speaks with a quiet confidence, at once soothing and calculated. Each word carries a pause behind it as if each word is selected based on it’s own merit, no word more or less important than the last.
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The facility where Layola lives is difficult to describe favorably - a modest secure building in downtown Reykjavik, once the cutting edge of design, connected grid-living and security but long surpassed by the technology companies now crowding the downtown skyline and subway advertising.
Still, every year the IMAB and the CIA renew their contract to secure the building 24/7 with an armed staff and every 5 years a carbon/neutron probing appraisal is made of the 20-foot thick concrete walls surrounding the building. Further security details, habits, quirks and insights that I’ve picked up visiting Layola’s home over the past year are omitted from this article at the request of the CIA.
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When I asked if she was happy in her home, there was a pause followed by the measured response of “I suppose I’ve never known more or less but all my needs are met and I remain content.”
Obstacle Courses are a series of exercises, prompts or other creative task that help people create output rather than just learn.
(Not sure this note lives in Media Theory but not sure where to put it?)
New models for thinking, learning and understanding the new media and the modern world:
https://www.practiceofchange.org/
Emerging trends in economics:
- Platforms that unlock illiquid assets
- Gig economy for more efficient matching of labor
- New markets (e.g. GOAT for sneakers)
This article is excellent - How internet marketplaces unlock economic wealth
Hmm?
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Organizing the internet generation This is how Open Collective works.
source: Open Collective - Make your community sustainable. Collect and spend money transparently.
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We’re actively looking for the learning guide of the future. A large part of our newest investing thesis is about trusted brands that broaden access to knowledge, and an exciting path to achieving that goal may be to modernize the syllabus and bring it online. If you are working on a better syllabus, reach out: I’m dani@usv.com and I can’t wait to learn from you.
| Source: [Looking For Syllabus 2.0 | Union Square Ventures](https://www.usv.com/writing/2018/11/looking-for-syllabus-2-0/) by @usv |
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/19-ZT2OytKJBgpIabjvRcv2g-Kgs46Jeg/view
A set of projects / ideas for making blogging (aka networked writing) easier and in particular easier to start.
1) Create an open blog export standard
Does this exist? Doesn’t seem like a natural place to start but interop of blog platforms is a key barrier to…
2) Simple places to start
Things like blot.im are easy but how much do you get trapped in them? Interop allows for super simple onramps that then become easy to transfer to github or wordpress or ghost.
3) RSS facelift
Subscribing to RSS feeds sucks in the year of our lord 2019. Why? How can we re-energize adoption of RSS
4) Re-brand RSS
Run a kickstarter to raise funds for a design exploration around RSS to reenvision the RSS icon, workflow, and to create RSS-branded merch (Ben Pieratt would be the DREAM person to work on this)
5) Create the “bloggers way” course
A 12-week course and set of cohorts that sign up for learning how to blog.
If you give me seed money I’ll get 1,000 new blogs online.
Other ideas:
- Some kind of small-b analytics. How can you tell the right people are reading?
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New kind of comments? Does commento.io solve this? Discourse?
Maps as Media - an online course freely available from Shannon Mattern
Playable cities & hello lampost
In the map room - wonderful art project from Jer Thorp
Walkable stories:
https://walkkumano.com/ from Craig Mod
https://arroyo.jon-kyle.com/ from Jon Kyle
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https://harryjosephine.com/portfolio/flaneur/
https://www.mixital.co.uk/dmks-s3-gzip/texteditor/containsstronglanguage/flaneur_popup.html
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A sense of place in 30 questions:
The following exercise in watershed awareness was hatched 30 years ago by Peter Warshall, naturalist extraordinaire. Variations of this list have appeared over the years with additions by Jim Dodge, Peter Berg, and Stephanie Mills among others. I have recently added new questions from Warshall and myself, and I have edited or altered most of the rest. It’s still a work in progress. If you have a universal question you think fits, submit it to me.
source: Kevin Kelly – The Big Here
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<https://satellitestud.io/
https://sepiabrown.github.io/2015/08/24/architecture/
The publishing project that accompanies the activities of the Future Architecture platform, a multi volume field guide to the future of architecture.
source: Archifutures – A Future Architecture Platform project
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RNDRD is a partial index of architectural drawings and models scanned from design publications throughout the 20th century. We do not publish photographs of completed work, only renderings: drawings, collage, models and graphics of all sorts. Our source materials are (mostly) out-of-print academic and trade journals. We cull the most striking, typical and atypical images from thousands of pages of print that will not be available online. As the internet increasingly becomes the main source for designers to draw on precedence, RNDRD hopes to provide a broader sample of the history of architectural image making.
| source: [About | RNDRD](https://rndrd.com/about) |
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Once cities were designed to accommodate the masses; today the masses have to be seduced. During the past forty years, like all sectors of the economy, urban planning has become free enterprise: a perpetually speculative activity, which must give shape to developments even if it remains uncertain whether those developments will ever happen, or attract the people for whom they were planned.
This presentation explores the flipside: large urban plans that were built but never used. These now occur on every continent – the inevitable fallout of a world urbanizing at a staggering pace. But perhaps they are more… perhaps these towns also constitute compelling reasons for reflection in the face of a seemingly unbreakable consensus that the city is our one and only common future.
source: Reinier de Graaf, “Phantom Urbanism” - Harvard Graduate School of Design
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Google streetview examples of architecture styles
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https://www.amazon.com/Citizens-No-Place-Architectural-Graphic/dp/1616890622
Notes on Knowledge Management
https://twitter.com/nikolasklein/status/1233009025798877184 http://artifacts.fyi/
http://futureofinformation.com/
https://www.inkandswitch.com/capstone-manuscript.html
https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/08/01/networked-knowledge-combinatorial-creativity/
We believe now is a good time to work hard on this vision again. In this essay we sketch out a set of ideas we believe can be used to help develop transformative new tools for thought
source: How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
Analogy as the core of cognition
Links:
- Are.na / Networked Knowledge & Strategies for Learning
- Are.na / Are.na Influences
- Personal Knowledge Management - Harold Jarche
- Diagrams of knowledge
- Organising knowledge with multi-level content: Making knowledge easier to understand,remember and communicate - PDF
Tools:
- https://getmemex.com/
- Roam
- Workflowy
- Hypothes.is
- Are.na
- Notion
- Pinboard
- https://screenotate.com/
- https://openknowledgemaps.org/map/b63fb68c483132211d5a4066c2925114
Quotes
Suthers writes that: “People construct representations together, elements of the representation becomes imbued with meanings for the participants by virtue of having been produced through the negotiation mentioned above.”
source: Conceptually explicit representations for group learning and representational guidance
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The gist, as shown below, is that curiosity is at its lowest when knowledge is either very low or very high: the former leaves you nothing to get you started with and the latter without anything left to look forward to.
source: Why is this interesting? - The Curiosity Curve Edition - Why is this interesting?
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Bergman and Whittaker report that many of us use hierarchical folders for our personal digital organizing. Critics of this method point out that information is hidden from sight in folders that are often within other folders so that we have to remember the exact location of information to access it. Because of this, information scientists suggest other methods: search, more flexible than navigating folders; tags, which allow multiple categorizations; and group information management. Yet Bergman and Whittaker have found in their pioneering personal information management research that these other methods that work best for public information management don’t work as well for personal information management.
source: Managing our digital stuff
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Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources. Good curators are valued members of knowledge networks.
Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.
Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues.
source: The Seek > Sense > Share Framework
And: PKM in 34 pieces
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Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.
source: As We May Think - The Atlantic
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Multi-level summaries: A new approach to non-fiction books
source: Multi-level summaries: A new approach to non-fiction books
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In other words, deliberate practice of knowledge work requires testing knowledge, and that is achieved by doing. Note taking is not the under-studied force of knowledge, play is.
| source: [Deliberate Practice for Knowledge Work | simon sarris](https://simonsarris.com/play) |
A running list of internet-fiction that I have loved:
A proposal for a book - Robin Sloan
The Ursa Major Moving Group - Matt Webb
https://truebluestory.com/
Some personal wikis and sites that I’ve been inspired by:
buster.wiki/ - Strong design and everything has a date by the looks of it which enables an RSS feed. Very polished and thought through.
are.na - A platform that all the cool kids use for building personal knowledge libraries. Lightly social, perhaps the right answer but slightly questionable if they’ll be around for a long time. Ymmv.
Brendan’s /canon - this was part of the original inspiration for me. A curated list of pure stock - things that Brendan returns to again and again. He has a template you can copy too.
Worrydream’s quotes page - just a massive list of interesting quotes collected by Brett Victor. Notice how being one giant page makes it instantly searchable.
daywreckers.com - from Ben Pieratt, not quite a wiki but a very minimal site designed to collect the dots. A daily visit from me.
derek sivers’ daily journal - a post from Derek Sivers on how to keep a text-file long-term store for your ideas and notes.
And there’s lots more too - this twitter thread has a whole bunch of interesting rabbit holes.
http://gordonbrander.com/pattern/
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Here’s an interesting project from the NYT that uses gdocs as a backend to generate a wiki! Library
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http://johnljerz.com/superduper/tlxdownloadsiteWEBSITEII/id3.html
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Prior to the fellowship the research I did was spontaneous and infrequent enough that my ad hoc system of typing out highlights by hand into a one or more markdown files and sorting through them manually worked alright. But now that I’m dealing with many, many more pages of research, this system has become kind of unwieldy.
Here I’ll go over the tools I’ve built over the past couple years (most within the past year) to make this process more manageable. They are mostly meant to address a few key pain points:
Aggregating highlights from across several platforms (phone, desktop, and eReader) into a central repository Capturing charts and other graphics Tagging and organizing highlights Generating footnotes
source: space and times
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https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes
recreating andy’s notes in tiddlywiki
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BookStack is a simple, self-hosted, easy-to-use platform for organising and storing information.
source: BookStack
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How I plan to evolve my site to take back control over my data and reclaim my blog as my thought space.
https://dri.es/my-posse-plan-for-evolving-my-site
https://web.archive.org/web/20170321015124/https://frankchimero.com/archive/2013/homesteading-2014/
http://markmhendrickson.com/posts/homesteading-on-the-indie-web
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This! is the indie web:
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And don’t concern yourself with whether or not you “write.” Don’t leave writing to writers. Don’t delegate your area of interest and knowledge to people with stronger rhetorical resources. You’ll find your voice as you make your way. There is, however, one thing to learn from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery. Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.
source: Bring Out Your Blogs
Beautiful, independent print magazines I admire / subscribe to:
https://logicmag.io
https://www.readvisions.com/
http://holo-magazine.com/
I worked as a visual librarian when I was a young man living in Paris. A custodian of all the images, photographs, paintings and media humanity had produced.
My job paid pennies and the collection was poorly organized but I enjoyed spending my days unearthing and exploring the image library. Removed from the fast paced urban living this collection of images - most designed to excite and stimulate - were calm and serene. In between boxes of photos I would stumble on advertising slogans and catalogs of rejected logos. Life size prints of magazine covers. Dust motes in the air somehow the disjointed hyper-stimulating collection calmed me.
But frustration walked in the door one day in the form of the professor. I never learned his name but I did learn to despise him. Trained in architecture and working at an advertising and communications agency (while painting at night I came to understand) the professor exclaimed that he had seen every kind of image. No new images or visual media were left in his life. And he blamed me for being unable to find him new images.
His imagination he claimed was exhausted. There was no more progress possible. And it was my job to satisfy him. To present him with some image or style or visual that he had never seen before.
At first, as custodian and, humbly, expert of the visual archives I thought it a fun challenge to find something new.
Gaudi. Pointilism. Chinese architecture. A catalog of colors. Pinhole photography.
Everytime I brought the professor something he would take it in silence only to return the next week and proclaim that he had seen it before. Or that it was nothing more than a simple recombining of other derivitive forms.
A book of germs was my greatest mistake. A rare 1929 thick leather bound book filled with plates painstakingly photographed through a simple microscope I thought the images arresting and fresh and somehow more urgent and important than anything else I’d give him.
But when he returned with the book the look on his face was thunderous and he proceeded to lecture me until the sun went down and I missed my train home on the essence of originality and how biology and life was the most banal and reducible forms of image. Everything was biology! He exclaimed. These germs are the very mother of all images! I see them in literally every single visual scene I can imagine!
And he proceeded to tear down stacks of books and empty drawers of posters as he pointed and demonstrated what was to him the same image again and again and again.
My mind has not seen a new image in 20 years! Everything is but a shadow of what I have already seen! There are no new mediums and no new images! I fear we have reached the end of the visual medium!
And clutching his head he rushed from the library leaving me with nothing more or less than settling dust, a single dim light overhead, scattered books and images and the crushing emptiness left behind by the weight of the end of image.
Already late at night and with much tidying to be done (and anyhow as mentioned I had missed my train) I resolved to spend the night in the library. I would find an original image. I would search and strain until no image had been left un-looked at.
Slowly the library returned to order. I swept and cleaned and tidied as I went but slowly and methodically as I went row by row browsing and considering all materials. I vowed to find the orignal-image-needle in the library-haystack.
Eventually. With a tidy library and a fresh stack of items pulled and assembled from the archives I saw the sun peeking up out of the windows and I went home. Over tired and exhausted but quietly confident I had found original image. Surely they were obscure and to my eyes (young though I was) shared no lineage with images before or after.
All through that week the stack haunted me. I knew it was a promising collection:
A book on pirate flags from 1830 - written and illustrated by a real seafaring pirate.
The complete archives of a small accounting firm which included diagrams and doodles in the margins of the paperwork quite unlike anything I had ever seen.
A set of photographs that were untagged and unlabelled found nestled in between old magazines. I could not make out the subject or even how they had been taken but they possessed some quality that deeply unsettled me.
And finally, fresh the day before, the full rejected suite of marketing materials for a brand of men’s suits that folded before the marketing materials could be unveiled. Created by a young advertising student at a local University the marketing was at once bad and original. Too literal and boring while containing some desirable insight that made me want to question every fashion decision I had ever made.
The week passed like agony. Time dragging and my stack of materials taunting me with their immovability. Until eventually the professor returned.
He swept in Saturday afternoon. It must have been raining outside because his rain jacket was dripping and he had the air of someone who’s head has been ducked down to avoid the wind and rain.
Without stopping to take off his jacket or remove his hat the professor strode confidently into the library and with a small nervous nod from me picked up the stack I had prepared.
Perhaps it was the tension in the air. Perhaps it was the rain outside and the professor did not want to leave. Perhaps it was simply the urgency he felt but the professor stopped at one of the tables by the door. My curated images in his hands, the rain dripping from his coat sleeves still he flipped quickly but methodically through the images. Making sure he saw every one.
I looked at him without breathing. Waiting with tension for his verdict.
Once he had finished the professor slumped back in the chair. A raindrop fell from his hat onto his cheek and rolled mournfully down his face as if the heavens were crying through him.
Enough. He said. Almost too quietly for me to hear. And then again. Louder.
Enough!
ENOUGH! How is it that there are no new images left! How is it that I am able to understand and anticipate and deconstruct every single thing you show me? Nothing here is more interesting than a row of grey bricks on an unremarkable house in a grey city of shallow visual boring nothingness!!
He was shouting now. And standing. Arms raised above him clearly aiming his frustration and anger at me but broadcasting at the same time to the gods in case they happened to be watching or listening too.
You might think this powerful man with some heroic ability to understand all imagery would have cowed me but something in me snapped. I had been dancing around this library for months attempting to please him and I had worked hard to discover original and obscure works but nothing had been good enough for him.
Taking the professors anger as my own I jumped to my feet shouting words that are now lost in history. Like a madman I was screaming. Whatever it was I said it clearly took him by surprise because he staggered back, taking the rain hat from his head with eyebrows raised.
But something had changed in me. I stormed to the nearest pile and started ripping and tearing up pages, taking posters and making confetti, turning books into crumpled balls of paper. Scientific papers filled with diagrams from hundreds of years before fell in tatters at my feet.
None of this sated my rage though and with temperature rising I continued to destroy and remove images from where they had been filed and bound and organized. I grabbed a pen - whatever had been at the front desk and I scrawled on the back of a shred of poster I had just destroyed:
Original never before seen images.
And then in a bundle under this “cover” page I shoved scraps of books, photograpsh, canvas, art, science, words, diagrams and every other thing.
As I assembled them I kept scribbling and writing putting words on and across and over the images. “Original”, “new”, “image” or on a photograph I would write “boring” and on a painting I recognized as a piece of cubist art on canvas I wrote “lines never seen”.
Eventually my whirlwind energy began to die and I felt physical exhaustion setting in. I took two large binding clips and bound my “book” together and thrust it into the professors hands.
There! I proclaimed. Original images!
And it was my turn to collapse into the nearest chair. Full and utter bone bending tiredness overtook me completely.
The silence hung in the air and eventually I looked up at the professor.
With a thin firm smile spreading across his face my eyes met his and we knew. Somehow. I had done it.
Networked, digital, expanded, linked, HYPER.
I’m interested in how wikis, notepads, networked tools and more can change the face of writing.
an interface for conversational writing called “part of speech.” You can write and edit as usual on the left, and talk with a partner on the right. Its responses are meant to evoke and suggest, not answer. Everything you say on the right will appear on the left.
From Katherine Ye. Also from Katherine Ye - a list of thinking around the concept of notation
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This podcast with Ted Nelson
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https://www.are.na/chad-mazzola/networked-knowledge-strategies-for-learning
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Why is it so hard to make maps on the web. We interact with maps all day long, but only in very pre-determined ways.
Where are the exploratory, creative ways to build, play with and remix location-based content? A few things I’ve seen:
Hello lamppost - and the great talk where this idea is teased out some of these things are not like the others
https://walkkumano.com/ from Craig Mod
https://arroyo.jon-kyle.com/ from Jon Kyle
Urbanimals from the Playable City project.
Localize.city - not sure who is behind this but it’s a delightful UI
A barrow by a beacon - wonderful meditation on walking from Matthew Sheret
In the map room - an art project of annotating IRL digital maps projected on the floor. Wonderful.
The tyrrany of ads…
https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1103855323100708866
https://www.gwern.net/Ads
https://themargins.substack.com/p/taboola-outbrain-and-the-chum-supply
In love with the HDL: http://helsinkidesignlab.org/
Crucial readings:
http://helsinkidesignlab.org/pages/studio-book.html
Follow the smart ones:
http://www.bryanboyer.com/
https://medium.com/@cityofsound
So much of consulting is not “having the answer” but helping everyone get to the answer together. It’s about exploration and process as much as it’s about expertise and “being right”.
To that end - I’m fascinated by this idea of “small groups consultancy” from Matt Webb:
There are a couple of things I’m investigating:
1) That a small group is a powerful way of thinking, and of creating action. That repetition matters, and informality.
2) It might be possible to help with strategy without providing original thought or even active facilitation: To consult without consulting. The answers and even ways of working are inherent in the group itself.
My hunch is this: To answer a business’s strategic questions, which will intrinsically involve changing that business, a more permanent solution than a visiting consultant might be to convene a small group, and spend time with it, chatting informally.
You’ve really got to read the whole post here: Small groups and consultancy and coffee mornings.
Open questions:
- What kind of problems need this “small groups” approach?
- How do the commercials work? Who gets paid what? Who has incentive to make this work?
- What other models exist outside of traditional consulting?
https://sepiabrown.github.io/2017/11/07/privacy-glitch/
https://authorizedtowork.us/shop/news-of-the-month-club-2/
http://www.blueandorangemakebrown.com/home
https://www.instagram.com/p/BuG5g7EFiJ-/
I’m planning and building a new walkable sci-fi story called Glitch Gowanus. It’s based on a geo-caching walking treasure hunt experience I built for my fiancee to propose to her.
There are a lot of details to work out but I’m excited to experiment with it.
Here I’m going to archive and collect interesting things about Gowanus, location based web products etc.
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Reading:
source: Gowanus: Brooklyn’s Curious Canal: Joseph Alexiou: 9781479892945: Amazon.com: Books
Gowanus Links
Gowanus Neighborhood Planning Study
source: Gowanus Framework - DCP
https://twitter.com/sepiabrown/status/1107719170807001091
https://mkt.com/bustbright/item/stand-up-nd-fight
In 2019, nearly twenty years into the modern gig economy, constructing our identities primarily in terms of how we relate to the paycheck folkway is no longer good enough. After all, there is a good chance the gig economy will outgrow the paycheck economy, relegating the latter to a minority sector of the economy overall. Imagining our future in relation to the future of paycheck work would be like early industrial age workers imagining their future in terms of the future of farming. Much of the supposed “future of work” thinking I see around the gig economy strikes me as the equivalent of early factory workers worrying about where to park their cows.
So the gig economy needs to outgrow its origin story in the paycheck world. For the gig economy to grow from limited sideshow to full-blown folkway, we need to talk about a lot more, and develop much deeper internal realities and subjectivities.
source: Towards Gigwork as a Folkway
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I think the question of whether or not to outsource curatorial practice is a good opening to discuss the broader practice of outsourcing in general in the cultural heritage sector. It certainly easier for more people to relate to than the question of whether or not we should outsource digital and technology roles. This is a larger debate that we, as a community of practice, should have because I think that one risk of relentless outsourcing is that museums (and friends) will become nothing more than centers of production rather than scholarship.
If we say that our only purpose is to facilitate the assembly of content in the service of culture then it’s no longer clear to me what distinguishes the cultural heritage sector from any other for-profit entertainment company. If we are unable to articulate, even to ourselves, what distinguishes our work from that produced by the private sector then maybe it really is time to admit there’s nothing special about what we do. And importantly there are other people who do it — where it is pure and selfish entertainment — better than we do.
source: [this is aaronland] it’s like trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich in a toaster
The 30 year game - musings on designing a game that would be played for 30 years.
Overview of the 200 word RPG challenge
The greatest story in gaming - legend of the five rings
What is the future of libraries? And how can digital inform that?
https://connectedlib.github.io/
History of american public libraries (illustrated)
http://www.dashmarshall.com/strategy/branch_libraries/ - I love the idea of a library “flag” here.
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/04/18/in-praise-of-public-libraries/
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In Doug’s vision, librarians could become not just reference specialists, but personal research consultants. They could master the skill of traversing multiple streams of information flowing through our increasingly digital lives. And they could teach that skill to patrons, unleashing a wave of creativity and empowerment in the communities they serve.
source: Libraries in the Digital Age: A Case Study in Equipping Librarians with the Tools of Idea Management
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We need to develop — both among library patrons and librarians themselves — new critical capacities to understand the distributed physical, technical and social architectures that scaffold our institutions of knowledge and program our values. And we must consider where those infrastructures intersect — where they should be, and perhaps aren’t, mutually reinforcing one another. When do our social obligations compromise our intellectual aspirations, or vice versa? And when do those social or intellectual aspirations for the library exceed — or fail to fully exploit — the capacities of our architectural and technological infrastructures? Ultimately, we need to ensure that we have a strong epistemological framework — a narrative that explains how the library promotes learning and stewards knowledge — so that everything hangs together, so there’s some institutional coherence. We need to sync the library’s intersecting infrastructures so that they work together to support our shared intellectual and ethical goals.
source: Library as Infrastructure
Ethnography in business:
For the past 10–12 days people have been participating in a diary study about memory that I’m leading on. From the very start I really wanted the diary to be a physical thing that participants received in the post. I wanted it to be something that delighted them, made them feel like taking part was a special and valued experience.
Combining paper and Whatsapp worked a dream. We asked participants to complete the tasks on paper and then photograph them and send them to us on Whatsapp.
source: Weeknotes 5: It is possible to run a successful paper diary study.
The future of editorial distribution is in faces & franchises.
Here’s a list of editorial franchises:
https://twitter.com/fimoculous/status/1100142188271419392
Money Diaries (Refinery29) 36 hours in… (NYT)
Cultural Cartography from Buzzfeed
Content paradigm shift - thread from Venkatesh.
https://twitter.com/tobyshorin/status/1131619923082526720
So, being a good millennial, I decided to follow my passion. I wondered what would happen if we could combine the magic and power of video games, with the rigour and reporting of journalism? What if we could make a really good news game?
source: https://robinkwong.com/storytelling/
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Collective Wisdom is a first-of-its-kind field study of the media industry, that maps works that live outside the limits of singular authorship. While the concept of co-creation is entering the zeitgeist, it is an ancient and under-reported dynamic. Media co-creation has particular relevance in the face of today’s myriad of challenges, such as the climate crisis and threats to democracy. But it is not without risks and complications. In this study we look at how people co-create within communities; across disciplines; and increasingly, with living systems and artificial intelligence (AI). We also synthesize the risks, as well as the practical lessons from the field on how to co-create with an ethos grounded in principles of equity and justice. This qualitative study reframes how culture is produced, and is a first step in articulating contemporary co-creative practices and ethics. In doing so, it connects unusual dots.
source: Collective Wisdom · Works in Progress
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But what about their information architecture? Almost all of them are built in a feed structure, while the information architecture of the Internet is almost completely hidden behind the scene. There is no ‘Facebook homepage’ that presents updates, requiring you to click on the update, go to the update page, and then click back to return to the homepage.
source: News media should rethink their website architecture
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“Rappers got their start by releasing rawer, uncut mixtapes to the streets. These tapes were more frequent, less polished, and had samples we knew damn well weren’t cleared! But once the artist got popular, their studio albums were more polished, had radio-friendly singles, big-name producers, and a slow song or two to broaden appeal.
When artists focus on albums and stop making mixtapes (or mixtape-type music), they risk losing the audience that fueled their rise. But if artists stuck only with mixtapes, there’s a higher chance they might never breakout. Doing both allows them to grow while staying true to their roots. That’s why Lil’ Wayne’s run from 2005-2009 was so iconic. He released classic mixtapes and albums to maintain both audiences.”
source: How Tyler Perry Built a Customer-Centric Empire - Trapital by Dan Runcie
Diagrams and Doodles
How do diagrams and doodling fit into strategy consulting? They’re related and adjacent. I believe doodling and diagrams are good practice for creating frameworks. See my post here for more on that:
Below are some interesting diagrams, doodlers and examples I’ve collected. Hopefully I’ll keep this updated:
Venkatesh Rao of Ribbonfarm fame
Venkatesh has tons. Drawings, doodles, diagrams, flows and more. Some faves:
1/ Lemme do a 1-slide presentation since I'm feeling job sick. Title: How to Actually Manage Attention Without Smashing Your Phone and Retreating to a Log Cabin pic.twitter.com/kEPZUh7g50
— Venkatesh “Tetris” Rao (@vgr) October 4, 2018
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/03/how-to-fall-off-the-wagon/
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/07/19/quiver-doodles/
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/06/06/thingness-and-thereness/
Many beginning consultants have a weird kind of insecurity that leads them to invent and rely on over-complicated, bespoke constructs that they can name after themselves. While these can sometimes be useful, especially ones that are developed and refined over many years, across hundreds of applications, such as Wardley maps, in general, they are fragile visual bullshit. You’re much better off learning to use the basic commodity diagrams well than trying to make up and sell your own in most cases.
source: Basic Consultant Diagrams - The Art of Gig
Ben Thompson of Aggregation theory fame
https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/
Toby Shorin of Subpixel Space fame
https://subpixel.space/entries/diminishing-marginal-aesthetic-value/
https://subpixel.space/entries/each-binary-contains-a-universe/
Mark Pollard
All the good stuff is on Instagram: @markpollard
Nahee cyberdiagrams (nsfw)
The best instagram account I follow. Hands down.
Imagine a venn diagram of cyberfeminism, erotica, developer manuals, code and art. Mildly NSFW:
https://www.instagram.com/nahee.app/
Think Clrly
Hugh MacLeod
Ex-ad-agency starts doodling on business cards. Gets good. Becomes famous. Turns doodling into a strategy consulting firm. Magic.
https://twitter.com/hughcards?lang=en
Wardly Maps
Related to the frameworks and diagrams idea is the notion of “wayfinding” in strategy. Most famously Wardly Maps. More on that here: https://medium.com/wardleymaps
And there’s a fun tool to build your own here:
Misc
Maps of the mind looks delicious.
Good deck of visual slides from Julian Cole here
But beyond their two-dimensional depictions of a physical world, maps also afford us the freedom to express the cosmos; to make all kinds of ideas about the spatial relationships of multiple components unexpectedly clear. To draw one is an effective way to establish order on an otherwise chaotic environment. To make it navigable. To make it rational.
source: The Importance of Visualisation
Emissaries guide to worlding - a lovingly designed book that has tons of interesting diagrams in it.
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In one of the classes I teach at CCA, students were confused by mental models, conceptual models, concept maps, etc. I ended up drawing a taxonomy for models on the whiteboard, and it may help others.
source: Five Models for Making Sense of Complex Systems – Christina Wodtke – Medium
And:
https://medium.com/@cwodtke/a-visual-vocabulary-for-concept-models-f771b2b2e9
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diagrams of thought - massive arena channel!
https://twitter.com/geoffwilsonUX/status/912918557679288320
https://twitter.com/BorisAnthony/status/1144539930699423744
Synthesis maps and gigamaps (browse the archives!)
WHOAH: one page designs - hour video explaining how to make one page system designs. Incredible. (and slides here)
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How Domain Experts Create Conceptual Diagrams and Implications for Tool Design
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Speculative Drawing: 2011–2014
source: Speculative Drawing: 2011–2014
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I only recently learned about Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP cycles, which proposed scores “as a way of communicating [artistic + environmental] proceesses over time and space… + as a vehicle to allow many people to enter into the act of creation together.”
source: Shannon Mattern on Twitter
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diagram online with excalidraw
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Sketching Science in the Seventeenth Century
What constitutes a sketch? We think at first of drawings and diagrams, but there are other forms of sketching. The OED offers several pertinent uses of the term, none of them earlier than the late 17th century. The first refers to the visual arts: “A rough drawing or delineation of something, giving the outlines or prominent features without the detail, esp. one intended to serve as the basis of a more finished picture, or to be used in its composition; a rough draught or design. Also, in later use, a drawing or painting of a slight or unpretentious nature.” The second extends it to literary creations: “A brief account, description, or narrative giving the main or important facts, incidents, etc., and not going into the details; a short or superficial essay or study, freq[uently] in pl[ural] as a title.” A third, rare usage, makes a sketch simply “[t]he general plan or outline, the main features, of anything”. One can find all three sorts of sketches at work in the formation of the new science of the seventeenth century.
Source: Sketching Science in the 17th Century
http://www.xplaner.com/visual-thinking-school/
https://twitter.com/nicolasnova/status/1376581318637670400
https://davidhoang.substack.com/p/sketching-as-a-strategy?ref=uxdesignweekly
https://www.amazon.com/Sketching-User-Experiences-Interactive-Technologies/dp/0123740371/
https://syllabusproject.org/diagrams/
https://www.oarplatform.com/response/cartography-research-process-visual-essay/
http://johncaserta.com/webtoprint.html
http://htmloutput.risd.gd/
It was the practice when I worked at Stamen to create a stand-alone weblog for every project we did. This is where we would post ideas and updates for clients throughout the length of a contract. We posted a lot of screenshots and over time these websites became increasingly valuable to the studio itself. They allowed us to see the evolution of our thinking as well as otherwise good ideas that didn’t fit the needs of a project.
https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2019/01/30/something/#millsfield
https://printedweb.org/
https://zine.ideo.com/
https://www.pagedmedia.org/a-year-in-the-paginated-world/
bindery.js
Finally, we place great emphasis on making the thinking tangible, following my colleague Bryan Boyer’s phrase, making strategy you can see. This might well be sketch videos, which we’ve used with great success, or a real emphasis on drawing in order to flush out damaging ambiguity and crisply illustrate genuine possibility. And, if we’re talking documents as a deliverable, we ensure that it’s strategy that you might actually want to read, in a format you might actually want to read it in. (Each of our main client reports this year has been produced as a richly illustrated newspaper, via Newspaper Club.)
https://medium.com/dark-matter-and-trojan-horses/arup-digital-studio-7467a61d5fd2
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Whatever blogging tools or CMSs we use to publish on the web, we ought to start finding ways to have them generate well-designed books as well as web pages.
source: The Unbearable Lightness of Web Pages
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How to be a creative parent
A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Mom
The pram in the hall - Austin Kleon
Creative games to play with your kid
“Journey to Justinia”, or How I got my 5 y/o son to sit still and concentrate for almost 4 hours.
A fragment of an idea.
If the city is now cityOS - a networked urban environment - how might it be possible to “crash” the city?
Example ways to crash the city:
- Call 15 ubers/lyfts to the same location at the same time. Could you freeze a city block with traffic on demand?
- Hiring taskrabbits to “jam” a subway station by carrying large items through it
- Create a fake giveaway to swarm a place (e.g. hamilton ticket giveaway)
If the city is now cityOS then “bugs” in the system can “crash” the city.
How weaponizing disinformation can bring down a city’s power grid
The management myth - a great rallying cry for the need for humanities and human thinking and some great context on where management consulting comes from in the first place.
Strategy as an unfolding network of associations (PDF) - kind of dense but fascinating case study of evaluating strategy within the context of culture:
The evidence from the case suggests that the concept of strategy can be reappraised. From strategy as a static set of choices made at a specific point in time to strategy as an unfolding network of people, shared experiences and artefacts that is constantly being remade.
Of strategies, deliberate and emergent - Thanks to Thomas Hogenhaven for pointing me in the direction of this one:
Since strategy has almost inevitably been conceived in terms of what the leaders of an organization ‘plan’ to do in the future, strategy formation has, not surprisingly, tended to be treated as an analytic process for establishing long-range goals and action plans for an organization; that is, as one of formulation followed by implementation. As important as this emphasis may be, we mould argue that it is seriously limited, that the process needs to be viewed from a wider perspective so that the variety of ways in which strategies actually take shape can be considered. For over 10 years now, we have been researching the process of strategy formation based on the definition of strategy as ‘a pattern in a stream of decisions’
Small groups and consultancy - by the ever brilliant Matt Webb:
I don’t think strategy can be outsourced, I think it has to emerge from a company’s nature. So when strategy evolves, there has to be organisational change. When an organisation looks outside itself (for answers that should be derived from strategy) that says to me that it’s not thinking straight, that the organisation isn’t put together quite right yet. An organisation has these informal components, and cross-team small group meetings feel like a good way to weave them in.
The art of sharing - Jan Chipchase is a master at this and I can’t wait to read the full handbook but this excerpt is especially relevant for the sharing / campaign thinking I mention above.
Consultancy, Creativity and Cooking with Sunday Dinner - from the great Lindsey Slaby thinking about new ways of getting creative projects staffed, funded, connected and thought about. I love the strong emphasis on people. They are the capital at work here!
Venkatesh Rao on Q lab - Venkatesh’s new slack only! consulting project. Given my advocacy to getting into clients slack groups you can see why this resonated with me.
The Fieldguide to Independent Consulting - ok, I’m gonna sneak one of my own links in here but if you enjoyed this post you should read this little thought-starter around independent consulting.
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Venkatesh proposes that consultants get bought in when “monitoring costs” (in the coeasean theory of organization) are too high. I.e. a new type of work or one that the org does infrequently so has no way to efficiently monitor the quality of work.
This maps well to my idea of ways of seeing - i.e. teaching clients how to see the work is another way of saying teaching clients how to monitor the work. Dashboards rule everything around me.
Clients have problems that they describe as “I don’t know how to build this” when what they mean is “I don’t know how to measure this”.
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Yet beyond being (cognitive) labour saving devices models have another obvious virtue. They provide a shared intellectual scaffolding: a common ground upon which people can interact and engage. In that sense models have communicative virtuosity - they are good to talk with. They allow ideas to be shared.
source: Models of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Models - EPIC
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I’m about to design the connective tissue between research and vision, and I’m going to use the medium of words. My ability to successfully establish a believable framework rests on my level of craftsmanship with language.
source: Strategy is a Game of Language – Modernist Studio
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WAR-type statistics track well with the increased emphasis on personal rather than organizational productivity that Melissa Gregg describes in Counterproductive, her study of time-management self-help trends. In that discourse, “productivity isolates and sanctifies the actions of individuals. It elevates an elite class of worker beyond the concerns of mundane others.” Productivity fetishism suits a society of free agents who must continually renegotiate the terms of their value, their viability, their irreplaceable contributions; it not only provides a rationale for employers to sort contract workers, but it provides those workers a way to frame their achievement in the absence of a stable association to a particular job or a particular set of co-workers. More and more of us are perpetually in the position of a baseball player facing an arbitration hearing. We cast everyone else as the replacement-level people that we are besting with our superior performances. To garner proof of that, we’re more likely to tolerate increasingly invasive forms of surveillance that can document our accomplishments and chart our personal growth on whatever metric is necessary, whichever seems to give us leverage over the competition, if not the employers.
source: Not Relevant for Fantasy Purposes — Real Life
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What theorizing is not, theorizing is - (pdf)
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Learning results from the adaptive and manipulative interactions between an organization and its environments: experimental actions are important because organizations rarely master their environments so that they can develop lasting optimal responses… Long-term survival calls for surveillance of opportunities, whereas short-term coping concentrates upon problematic search. Most organizations have much of the latter and little of the former (Thompson, 1967). Yet, if organizations are to survive in hostile and changing environments, they must change strategies and pursue new development patterns. Organizational design should encourage experimenting so that organizations attain long-term viability.
source: How Organizations Learn and Unlearn (Hedberg, 1981)
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A survey of over 1600 civil servants in Pakistan and India found that “simply presenting evidence to policymakers doesn’t necessarily improve their decision-making,” with respondents indicating “that they had to make decisions too quickly to consult evidence and that they weren’t rewarded when they did.” No wonder Deloitte’s Reimagining Measurement initiative, which asked more than 125 social sector leaders what changes they most hoped to see in the next decade, identified “more effectively putting decision-making at the center” as the sector’s top priority.
source: Why Your Hard Work Sits on the Shelf — and What to Do About It
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I think we have trouble justifying architectural investments in software engineering because, unlike in the automotive factory, our systems machinery is hidden away in a data center or “in the cloud.” However, if we demonstrate rigor and get creative about exposing the machinery to the CEO, the justification may become a lot easier.
source: Expose the Machinery — Resilien
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Indy Johar - The boring revolution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XwSZjv2DyQ Systems thinking, complex systems.
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You came in as the high end consultant on rarefied air.  But then you stick around, and the luster wears off.  You eat cheeseburgers for lunch, just like everyone else.  And, after a bunch of months, you don’t seem as special as you used to.  Just one of the crew.
source: The Siren Song of the Long Term Engagement - DaedTech
This is wrong! This is the outcome from not engaging in status switching and strategy/stewardship! (or from shifting to coaching).
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http://samoburja.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Great-Founder-Theory-v-1.43.pdf
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A workshop created for NEW INC members, Strategic Digital Gardening teaches attendees how to approach their digital marketing and communications as a “digital gardener.” Taking ecosystems and growth cycles as key points of inspiration, digital gardening is a process for manifesting goals through community cultivation and intentional seed planting.
source: Strategic Digital Gardening for NEW INC – Willa Koerner
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Around two years ago, we realized that we needed to provide clarity around progression at UC and in the broader context of individual careers. For a variety of factors — one being that we hire entrepreneurial, inquisitive, ambitious types — we were getting a lot of questions about what comes next at UC. What’s required to make Senior Strategist? When should I expect a raise? What do I need to do to get better? How do the skills I’m building here contribute to my story as an individual?
Source: The Undercurrent Skills Maturity Matrix by @clayparkerjones
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How Jeff Bezos Turned Narrative into Amazon’s Competitive Advantage
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“‚ÄòAn aircraft factory is a machine for producing aeroplanes and it may be disastrous to attempt to improve production by piecemeal tinkering with individual departments ‚Äìone must seek out in all its ramifications, and destroy, the machine for stopping the production of aeroplanes, which lurks like a parasite within the organisation.‚Äô” ‚Äï from “Tomorrow Lies in Ambush”
Tools that help organizations remember, share knowledge and build wikis.
I’m such a sucker for the insider baseball of CMS’s. How do they work? What do they look like? Where’s the innovation?
I’ve been involved in consulting for a variety of different CMS projects over the years so I’m always hungry for little details that make a difference.
Also increasingly the enterprise CMS market is getting more advanced and is (finally) outpacing the consumer Wordpress market.
Interesting links and examples:
Case studies, capabilities decks and more that I’ve enjoyed:
Hawraf (RIP)
Ericaheinz.com - not a deck but some great case studies fully thought through here.
Upstatement case studies - A+ design layouts for case studies.
Teehan & Lax Medium case study
The agency pitch - 10 slides - from Lindsey Slaby
BusinessMagik. The
Star signs & zodiac Tarot Predictive analytics
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2093788053/instant-archetypes-a-new-tarot-for-the-new-normal
https://www.npr.org/sections/theprotojournalist/2013/12/23/256313507/what-exactly-is-hipster-christianity
https://newrepublic.com/article/153267/universe-according-hilma-af-klint
More data = more reliance on intuition.
Spiritual has been uncoupled from religious.
Occult ads. Machine “visions” Glitches or ghosts
Ghosts in the machine and glitches in the streets. Our sense of the otherworldly has shifted.
Of Humans and Daemons: Channelling the Network
https://melanie-hoff.com/generativetarot/
Tarot as collaborative storytelling
http://pointlinesurface.com/Claves-Angelicae-w-Gabriel-Dunne
CLAVES ANGELICÆ is an installation and procedural system that enables a participant to inscribe a magical Word onto the Ethereum network.
A framework is a spell. An incantation. Invoked.
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In Robert’s account, as in Geoffrey’s Historia, Merlin is created as a demon spawn to become the Antichrist and reverse the effect of the Harrowing of Hell. This plot is thwarted when a priest named Blaise immediately baptizes the boy at birth, thus freeing him from the power of Satan and his intended destiny.[14] The demonic legacy invests Merlin with a preternatural knowledge of the past and present, which is supplemented by God, who gives the boy a prophetic knowledge of the future. Robert lays great emphasis on Merlin’s power to shapeshift,[note 1] on his joking personality, and on his connection to the Holy Grail, the quest for which he foretells.
source: Merlin - Wikipedia
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A universal theory of BusinessMagik
Merlin was the OG consultant Of kings and queens and consultants (and mages and jesters) Business functions like a monarchy There’s a reason we talk about samurai and freelancers
Skills of the mage (consultant):
- Scrying
- Soothsaying
- Truth-telling
- Divination
- Spells
- Wisdom
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“Ideas about a person’s place in society, his role, lifestyle, and ego qualities will lose their hold as the cohesive forces in society disintegrate. Subculture values will proliferate to such a bewildering extent that a whole new class of professionals will arise to control them. Such a Transmutation Technology will deal in fashions, in ways of being. Lifestyle consultants will become the new priests of our civilizations. They will be the new magicians.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/168042-ideas-about-a-person-s-place-in-society-his-role-lifestyle
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Beauty vloggers—mostly young and femme-presenting—appear to be strangely vulnerable to spirit possession, ghost hauntings, and more.
| source: [Why Youtubers See Ghosts | Rhizome](https://rhizome.org/editorial/2019/jul/05/why-youtubers-see-ghosts/) |
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https://twitter.com/shryma/status/1171843845249732608
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Some Recommended Reading on Magic
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https://www.amazon.com/Alchemy-Curious-Science-Creating-Business/dp/006238841X/
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https://twitter.com/pieratt/status/1225794277491560449
https://www.marcusjohnhenrybrown.com/post/a-wicked-pack-of-cards-the-poem
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One of the files in my smartphone’s Notes app is named “Digital beliefs.” This is a document I update weekly, when confronted with unconventional uses of digital technologies, or habits and behaviors relating to supernatural influences
| source: [A Persistence of Magical Thinking? | continent.](http://continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/view/332) |
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The objective of this paper is to connect the somewhat obscure concept of hyperstitions — as developed by the group of researchers that operated under the banner of Cybernetic Culture Research Unit — to the concept and theories of ‘images of the future.’
source: Cultivating Hyperstitions - Jorge Camacho - Medium
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https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/07/business-as-magic/
Magical practices offer heightened expectations and altered experiences of both magicians and participants in a variety of performances and in “qualified places,” from Davos, monetary policy committee rooms, and courts of law, to concept restaurants, fashion runways, and award ceremonies. The study of magic in contemporary society privileges forms of charismatic explanation for phenomena, rather than rationally “explaining away” curiosities. Indeed, “magic is alive and well” (Masquelier 2004: 95) and adds to our growing enchantment of modernity’s—and capitalism’s—global reach.
Source: Performing Magical Capitalism - EPIC by @epicpeople_org
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http://www.openculture.com/2018/02/1600-occult-books-now-digitized-put-online.html
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09502386.2020.1788620?journalCode=rcus20&
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srrDutnZIXI&list=WL&index=14&t=25s
https://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/2906/2471
Brands Doing Editorial Platforms
Glossier Mel / dollar shave club The Creative Independent / Kickstarter Real Life / Snapchat
B2B Brands
Fundera Intercom Invision First round review Notion
https://www.aesop.com/us/r/the-fabulist/gayatri-spivak
Blogs to follow in strategy space.
https://artofgig.substack.com/ (esp for indie consultants)
https://uncertaintymindset.substack.com/ (excellent insights)
https://europeanstraits.substack.com/ (how does he write so much?!)
https://us20.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=3d1b6946215346237ceeb999b&id=0caaf1b5e5 (esp if you’re into music & strategy)
https://stratechery.com/
https://2pml.com/
The Public Necessity of Student Blogging
https://twitter.com/tobyshorin/status/1131619923082526720
Blogging practices of knowledge workers - Dissertation PDF!
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I’ve been publishing to my Amazon.com internal blog since May 10th, 2004. During that time I’ve unintentionally developed my own blogging style, and I’ve learned a thing or two about writing blogs. I figured I’d pass along some thoughts about blogging in the hope that it’s useful.
source: you-should-write-blogs - steveyegge2
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Summary: in this post I explain why you should start a blog (to help others and to help yourself), what to write about, and how to start it. I hope to persuade you that you should start a blog even if you feel that you have nothing to say and even if almost nobody will read it.
source: Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now - Alexey Guzey
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After Tatiana Mac proposed to bring webrings back, I hacked something new together over the weekend: A starter kit for hosting your own webring!
| source: [A Webring Kit | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer](https://mxb.dev/blog/webring-kit/) |
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Ideas are fascinators that sparkle and dangle in front of the creator, distracting an eager audience from the person behind the curtain. Submitting to the tyranny of ideas gives us the freedom to explore who we are apart from our public reputations. If ideas are living entities that exist separately from our selves, what remains of us?
| source: [Nadia Eghbal | The tyranny of ideas](https://nadiaeghbal.com/ideas) |
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The catch is, a Wild Thoughts blog can only be a source of renewal and rebirth if it remains wild. For that, it must remain free. In a way, I am like Max, and I’ve decided not to go back for my supper from the land of Wild Thoughts. Instead, I’ve pitched a tent inside, and put up a trading post at the periphery. Visiting me in the woods is free. Stuff at the trading post costs money.
source: Where the Wild Thoughts Are (from 2011!)
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While reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, I was struck by how applicable many of her observations were to the internet today, despite being published twenty years before its invention.
One of the most useful concepts I picked up is her treatment of public and private life, which I’d like to break down in this post. We tend to think of privacy as a binary distinction, but Jacob identifies several types of public-private life which, I think, can help us think and talk about our online interactions today.
| source: [Nadia Eghbal | Reclaiming public life](https://nadiaeghbal.com/public-life) |
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In my opinion writing is a public act, we must learn (even the most introverted of us) to share our work with a readership.
source: sync pdf
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Think of creating a blog as you would think of writing on a page in a notepad. Or scribbling on the back of an envelope and handing it to someone. It takes two minutes at most to create a blog at wordpress.com. And from then on, you have a “place” to post emails you that are post-worthy
source: Scripting News: Blogs are little things
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https://www.are.na/laurel-schwulst/humans-start-your-blogs
Here, we report the results of an ethnographic investigation of blogging in a sample of ordinary bloggers. We investigated blogging as a form of personal communication and expression, with a specific interest in uncovering the range of motivations driving individuals to create and maintain blogs.
source: https://artifex.org/~bonnie/pdf/Nardi_why_we_blog.pdf
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For some reason I’m thinking of what Carrie Fisher once said in an interview: “Take your broken heart, and turn it into art.” I suppose that the equivalent for me would be “take your broken heart, and turn it into a book about design systems.” Or better yet: “take your broken heart and blog.”
source: Take your broken heart and blog ･ Robin Rendle
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A while ago I created a Python script that threw a chunk of my blog posts into Are.na. Each post was turned into a text block that was placed in a channel called “CJ’s Blog.”
source: From Blog to Blocks — CJ Eller
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Generating websites from arena channels
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Things that I want to write more about: sunlit nature, and being outdoors in nature, especially in places that are cold and snowy. The difficulty and monotony and odd joy of getting better at something. Groggy morning runs. Loving yourself fully and expecting that same standard of love from other people—because God, self-loathing is boring. People who make completely different choices than I do and have completely different values, but are nevertheless very happy. How they think about meaning. The ecology of our changing planet and the adjustments we’ll have to make to adapt and survive. Navigating objectification, and learned self-objectification, in a society that places great value on female beauty and youth. How to communicate clearly and kindly in high-stakes situations. Technology and its effect on productivity. Strange possible worlds. Fear, vulnerability, loss of control. Surprising statistical truths. Small things that give me joy: the smell of lemon, rain and freshly-cut wood, un-sexualized intimacy, inventive and engaging movies, children in motion. Attempting to live a less self-serving moral life.
Source: How to write and what to write about by @readingsupply
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/74/59807/the-artist-in-consultance-welcome-to-the-new-management/
As the mega-galleries continue to battle for market share, Gagosian, most often cited as the world’s largest gallery, is beefing up its technology team. Today the gallery shared exclusively with ARTnews that it has hired as a part-time senior adviser Sebastian Cwilich, the co-founder of Artsy. (…) Gagosian’s tech department is a relatively recent addition to the gallery, the result of its hire last year of a chief technology officer in Gareth O’Loughlin, formerly the vice president of technology at Casper, the mattress startup. “Gareth and Sebastian are both leaders in the field, with a broad range of skill sets and unique perspectives on technology, business strategy, and operations,” Larry Gagosian, the gallery’s founder, told ARTnews in a statement. “They will be great additions to the gallery, enhancing and expanding our innovative work.”
source: Gagosian Hires Artsy Co-Founder Sebastian Cwilich as Adviser, Beefing Up Tech Department -ARTnews
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Is the museum a thinktank, a platform, a consultancy? Ivanova now works as part of the Serpentine Galleries’ Research & Development Platform, a relatively new arm of the London institution. In March the platform published its first report on ‘Future Art Ecosystems’ (coproduced with consultancy Rival Strategy), in which it envisions art institutions as innovative early-adopters of emerging technologies, with section headings like ‘Tech Industry as Art Patron’, ‘Strategies for the Art-Industrial Revolution’ and the ‘Art Stack’.
Source: The Artist of the Future by Gary Zhexi Zhang
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This article is the first in a series, where we unpack and explore a set of methodological tools and approaches developed while working on Primer. Primer is a platform for artistic and organizational development, housed in the context of Aquaporin, a global water technology company.
Source: Systems Effects and Learning Processes by David Hilmer Rex
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https://twitter.com/buckhouse/status/1313241232349384704
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There’s something about art + tech which is niggling at me. The process I’m interested in is when a technology organisation commissions or supports art as a way to understand itself.
Source: Art + tech by @intrcnnctd
https://thenewinquiry.com/athletic-aesthetics/
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It just turns out that MAYBE my artistic practice isn’t simply the production of clothing, it’s a long-term performance piece about labor that happens to produce clothing as artifacts of the performance. I’m kidding—kind of—but I have no regrets about the fact that the interactions I have sharing what I make on social media are as much part of my work as needles and thread.
source: Nozlee Samadzadeh - Sewist’s statement
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Collage Art:
https://www.google.com/search?q=Benedetta+Cappa
https://work.pieratt.com/#35123016644
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https://www.e-flux.com/journal/77/77374/digital-provenance-and-the-artwork-as-derivative/
https://thenewinquiry.com/athletic-aesthetics/
Generative Art
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This site serves as a gallery for my favorite select pieces of generative art. These pieces have been generated using Processing, p5.js, or OpenFrameworks and are each accompanied by a description of the underlying logic that generated the results.
source: Drawing With Numbers: Generative art from Daniel Eden
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https://medium.com/@zachlieberman/daily-sketches-in-2017-1b4234b0615d
Architecture and media feel like unusual bedfellows but bring together some wonderful connections in my mind:
https://twitter.com/sepiabrown/status/1106264379631259649
AMO - think tank from OMA ends up doing work that is not buildings. What is that work? Strategic design?
Media and cities are both systems-level problems.
Urban Screens
Also the built environment is increasingly becoming screen-ed. Screens on every street corner. Paper the size of buildings.
https://medium.com/s/story/very-slow-movie-player-499f76c48b62
I’m very interested in new ways of networking writing. You can see some thoughts on that in my post experiments in networked writing.
Most of my thinking on annotations is contained in this post: exploring the UX of web-annotations
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Hypothesis is the best in class at the moment but still has a long way to go. It feels robust but without a strong UX (especially so on mobile where it almost entirely fails).
https://crowdlaaers.org/ is an interesting looking tool that provides a dashboard for a URL (with they had the ability to do a whole site) to show how many annotations there are, from who, over time.
Genius actually has a better UX but as a VC-backed monstrosity I have no faith that they’ll be around for much longer (wouldn’t be surprised if Vox buys them for cheap at some point to fold the annotation layer into Chorus)
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Whoah - check out this service that live-transcribes C-SPAN into gdoc, allows for in-line commenting in the gdoc then spits that back out as JSON for web-display:
https://github.com/The-Politico/gspan.js
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Annotation - The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series
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What apartment number do I live in?
Its an innocent enough question that I would have been able to answer 1.57 seconds ago. Now - my heart is racing and my mind is working faster and slower than it has ever done and I’m trying to figure out if it’s apartment 2A or 2C that I live in.
You see - 1.57 seconds ago my access to the net went dark. Offline. Out. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Since birth I’ve had access to the net subcutaneously - implants under the skin just under my scalp able to communicate directly with my brain. Two arrays of gigahertz processors with microtech Bluetooth.
At least that’s what I’d have told you 1.57 seconds ago. Now I’m barely keeping my shit together trying to figure out if I can remember which apartment I live in.
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I round the corner of Kayes Street and I’ve taken to muttering to myself - the silence in my own brain is a thunderous cacophony and unbearable. Muttering under my breath helps a little. Distracted by my own mumbling, my legs don’t have to question which apartment I live in - they guide me to 2A comfortably and my hands go into auto-pilot, placing the keys in the lock and opening the door. I’m glad at least part of my body has it’s shit together because my brain is an unreliable useless mess right now.
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It’s two hours later and I’ve dug up an old iphone - back before the microtech networks were two-way and instantaneous like how we used to use iphones to communicate. Now it seems laughably archaic but holding this slim piece of metal and glass in my hand I’m able to marvel at how slick a device this is and right now it’s a life saver. I rummage for a plug and put it on to charge. While it’s charging I look around my apartment and it’s like my brain is swimming through molasses. All of my memories, thoughts, ideas are like they’re half a second too slow. With access to the net everything happens instantly (or so it feels) - but now it’s like there are little men inside my head who have to go and retrieve files stored in cabinets and some cabinets are further away than others.
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I’m back online. The glowing screen of the iphone gazes unflinchingly at me. I’d forgotten what this was like. I fire up blinkchat and am overwhelmed by the constant stream of updates and chatter - everyone is asking where I am, what happened to me and if I’m ok. As soon as I read an update, 6 more pop up on the screen. My stupid regular brain just can’t keep up - everyone else is sending these messages directly from their brains via microtech and all I have are these wet stumps of flesh called hands with which to type (type!) a reply out on.
- Am ok. Net went offline. Am home. All ok.
This doesn’t seem to appease the beast and my iphone crashes as continuous updates and notifications overwhelm the poor device. Jeez - is that what used to happen inside my brain? No wonder life feels so slow all of a sudden.
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I write my apartment number on my hand, just in case, and head out for lunch. My favorite vietnamese place is just around the corner. I walk into the cafe and head up to the counter - somewhere in the back of my brain I’m marveling at the number of things that are happening simultaneously in my body, walking, thinking, looking. See, this old lump of flesh and bones isn’t so useless after all! I’m starting to kind of enjoy this disconnection when the realization hits me like a ton of bricks. I look around the cafe in a panic. All around there are people - people that look like me, eating, drinking talking and being NORMAL. But I’m stuck. I spin around - remembering that a few years ago they got rid of the people working here - everything runs via the net. As I spin around looking around and feeling cut off a roomba spins past me carrying someones food.
It’s ok, I’ve got this. I walk up to a couple in their late-20s. They’re eating pho. My favorite dish (I think?).
- Hi, excuse me, I’m sorry to interrupt but my access to the net is down. Would you mind ordering me some food?
As soon as the words are out of my mouth I realize what this looks like. I’m in a restaurant harassing customers, appearing like a madman, telling weird tales of being cut off from the net. The couple exchanges a glance - barely registering eye contact - and in that split second I realize that they have likely exchanged an entire conversation between them over blinkchat. My brain feels like a bike compared to their Formula 1 race cars. I feel my cheeks blush and I stammer something about being sorry to interrupt and rush out of the restaurant.
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Hands deep in my jacket pockets I brace myself to the cold outside and walk fast down the street. I’m trying to make my brain go faster, better, to THINK dammit. What’s wrong with me? I can’t seem to focus at all - the dopamine loops in my brain have been optimized for so long to respond to instant, all knowing, information that I’m basically a nervous wreck without it. I imagine a mess of wires inside my brain all plugged into the wrong slots - connections firing without purpose, data flowing but me being unable to process the output. I imagine those poor guys pulling information out of filing cabinets in my brain. Sound the alarm! Red alert! We’re back in action fellas!
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I’m still stung by the experience in the restaurant - the look in their eyes as they looked at me, through me - a horrific sub-human being incapable of ordering via the in-restaurant mesh. What happened to paper menus and human waiters eh? What was so wrong about all that?
https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/
https://sepiabrown.github.io/2017/10/20/rnn/
We’re going to need a name for AI-written text:
- Synthetic content
- Algorithmic content
- Cybernetic content
- Spam
heres-how-publishers-around-the-world-are-using-automated-news/
Robin Sloan - Writing with the machine: GPT-2 and text generation
What we’re seeking to do, is allow the situation, and the ecology of systems within it, to be our guide and teacher (which, of course, is a lot about becoming more aware — including aware of the perceptual and interpretational traps we fall into…). And sure, we’re still going to be stuck in tunnels of our own perception, if we don’t explore the system *with* others — who have different experiences and vantage points from which to perceive the (eco)system (of socio-technical systems), etc. This work can help with convening and guiding the attention of that work.
A lovely series of diagramming and sketching prompts to dive deeply into systems thinking.
Below is copy pasted from an email to a good friend who’s teaching a course on entrepreneurship for political science students:
I’m a huge fan of Gary Chou and his entrepreneurial design course. It drives home the making and launching aspect in really fun creative ways. He re-named it to https://postindustrialdesign.school/ - but you can find the course online here.
For political science students and working with institutions and organizations I highly recommend diving into the work of Helsinki Design Lab. They have a few books available on print on demand I’d highly recommend: http://helsinkidesignlab.org/pages/studio-book.html& http://helsinkidesignlab.org/pages/legible-practises.html
Also - for working with and inside government you should follow the GDS in the UK. They are slightly less radical now but they started as a very radical and interesting group. Their alumni is a list of amazing people. Not quite sure where to start but this is good: https://public.digital/2018/09/25/making-government-as-a-platform-real/ (and public.digital is the latest venture from some of the original GDS folks)
Lastly - you should put the course online! I’ve been following along remotely with this course since pretty much the whole course is posted online. I think this open access / collaborative / blogging model is really powerful.
http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/j-g-ballards-experimental-text-collages.html
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/text-collages-by-j-g-ballard-c-1958
I had never thought so obsessively about poetry as I did when I was learning about syntactic linguistics.
There were different kinds of verbs, my professor had told me. If John threw a ball, that throwing was a doing. But if John loved Mary, my professor stressed that, within the structure of the sentence, John served as what was called an “experiencer” of the emotion of love. Loving was not a doing — syntactically speaking, of course. He drew for us two diagrammatic trees that demonstrated how the nature of a doing or experiencing verb influenced how the sentence was modeled in our internal understanding of language.
There is poetry in constellations, and poetry in patterns of birdsong, but this class was how I learned about the poetry that inhabits the formal structures of language. Was the professor aware of the symphony he was plotting out on the blackboard? He was composing out loud a striking thesis on what it meant to perform the act of love, or, indeed, to simply be the experiencer of some cosmic feeling. I was desperate to learn more, especially if the professor continued to explain these concepts in a way that inadvertently sounded like a poetic proclamation.
Part of a PhD on Writing Coastlines: Locating Narrative Resonance in Transatlantic Communications Networks which is full of interactive digital poetry experiences like this one. Magic!
The PDF looks a bit ugly but I love this kind of homebrew software approach. Allows you to create a custom calendar as a single PDF file for your remarkable
(Still don’t know why Remarkable doesn’t do a daily notes / calendar natively….)
Lovely thoughts on conversations, especially with those you’ve known for a long time. Rhymes with Good Conversations Have Doorknobs.
And I was thinking, actually, about conversations between my wife and me. I was thinking, more precisely, about conversational “space.” We are two whole universes connected, anchored by very deep connection, but there are a thousand books worth of experiences that belong to one of us alone. You spend 17 years together and we know the easy paths to each other. They are well-marked, assiduously maintained, no poison ivy. But how much more are all of us — are the hillsides — than the well-worn trails?
Every person on this earth is a monstrously huge landscape, and yet, we can drop into any of it with a simple incantation, the right string of words piped through this sparse interface. At a bus stop, taking in two dogs playing, paying for a muffin—you might unveil a secret path to walk for a year or just a few feet. I have been blessed with my mother’s gift of easy connection to others. But what is the nature of that gift? It’s saying: hey, that seems interesting, wanna go there? As simple as stepping off the trail to point out a mushroom.
Anything can open up a hillside to explore. But often, it is the components of conversations that open up the rest of me: an unexpected question, someone else’s lingering shower thought, a feral conjecture about the world, free empathy, a true thing offered, a scrambled memory reassembled in real time.
Delightful, funky, jazzy piano.
A URL is a radical act… I love these presentation notes on museums, the cultural sector and the web. Lots to mull over:
One of the reasons I think these considerations are so important to the cultural heritage sector is that the act of revisiting is the bedrock underlying the whole idea of cultural heritage itself. The act of re-reading a book, or re-listening to a piece of music or of going to see the same painting or sculpture again and again and of celebrating the evolution of an understanding about those works is what separates cultural heritage from entertainment. Entertainment, born of the moment, can and does become cultural heritage but it is precisely through the act of revisiting that one becomes the other.
The web simply makes those acts of revisiting possible for more people, in more ways, than ever before. When I say these things are possible I mean that the economics of participating in this global network of documents are within the reach of, if not everyone, then more people than ever before. These things become possible because technologies underlying the web are simple enough to meaningfully lower the barrier to participation and unburdened by licensing in a way which allows people to share their work and for others still to extend that work to meet their needs.
On Dudley High Street, we invite people to come together to reveal hidden stories and experiment with ideas for flourishing futures. Through many and varied projects, experiments and experiences, we open up ways for people to take cultural action rooted in long term thinking and care, collective imagination and regenerative design.
What a magnificent book. A call to arms to write, to self publish, to unfurl, to become someone new. Raw, honest, engaging writing. Highly recommended.
Love seeing concrete examples of teams creating new input metrics that they operationalize around.
%FIRE: Frustrating image-render experience
In addition to all the text updates people share, we have a lot of photos shared on Threads. When images load slowly or not at all, that can cause someone to stop using the app. That’s why we monitor an important metric to alert when there’s a regression in how images are loading for our users. That metric, %FIRE, is the percentage of people who experience a frustrating image-render experience, and it’s calculated as shown in Figure 1, below.
Figure 1: %FIRE calculation.
All kinds of things can regress %FIRE, both on the client end and the backend, but not all image-rendering bugs are covered by this metric. For example, in Threads iOS, we had a bug earlier this year where user profile photos would flicker because of how we were comparing view models when reusing them. That triggered a frustrating user experience, but not one where users would contribute to %FIRE.
A lovely bouncing retro something
What goals! Something I aspire to.
Lovely meditation on innovation
And associated HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40986894
www.amazon.comStarted reading this while traveling through Utah and Arizona to get a feel for desert living. I enjoyed the book but definitely didn’t feel like it lived up to the hype. Inventive but the characters felt a little stale.
Mintzberg now claims to use the term ‘the Honda effect’ to describe “western consultants, academics, and executives preference for over-simplifications of reality and cognitively linear explanations of events”.
What a wonderful exploration of the “overview effect” for organizations - seeing how the whole org works can be empowering AND alienating….
An incredible perspective on why getting things done in large orgs is hard
The best book on iterative, exploratory career paths I’ve read. Full of practical ideas.
A great perspective on input metrics, dashboards and creating alignment
A lovely soul-filled perspective on why organizations are dysfunctional.
Lovely little meditation on what it means to “think strategically”
I love these kinds of posts that really get to the heart of time/energy tradeoffs.
An amazing practical and well researched perspective on what it really means to be “data driven”
“Only 2% of executives who were part of our research workshop on learning said they believe that instructor-led learning will be a priority for their organization going forward. Instead, 39% said that “in the workflow” learning would be more important.”
While this kind of self-directed learning sounds nice, the research seems to suggest that guided instruction works better! This is a tension to solve - bringing in more grounded theory of how people learn into the buzzy hype-driven space of L&D and corporate learning environments
A lovely piece on why organizational context matters, and why it’s especially important in a world of remote work.
Comments: Something something
Comments:
Comments: A wonderful meditation on the arcs of a career and how you might pace yourself.
Loved this! I don’t read spy novels very often but Robin Sloan recommended it and I loved the story and the fast paced action. Fun change of pace - and there’s some great writing in there. Recommended.
Fun to read this against the backdrop of GPT3/GPT4! I enjoyed the book but found it kind of fizzled out at the end. I was hoping it was going to work towards some kind of crescendo but found the ending just kind of weak. But I still enjoyed the read.
What a fun read! Poignant, fun and really engrossing. It reminded me of hints of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon at times though I don’t think it had quite the same depth. Recommended though!
Love the style and sense of wonder that Jorge writes with. Perhaps I should read the other Bahia books in the series…
Stories of Place as Regenerative Design Practice
On Dudley High Street, we invite people to come together to reveal hidden stories and experiment with ideas for flourishing futures. Through many and varied projects, experiments and experiences, we open up ways for people to take cultural action rooted in long term thinking and care, collective imagination and regenerative design.
A lovely novella from Robin Sloan that builds on the Robin Sloan Cinematic Universe…! Fast pasted and full of intrigue. Definitely left me wanting more!
What a magical lush book. Ugly, raw, squelchy. The opposite of the Ruth Ozeki book I just read… Popisho is full of exquisite descriptions, magical realism, surreal nonsense and raw, bloody, colorful magic. Full of gods and humans at their best and worst I absolutely loved this book. If you’re looking for something that is a riot of color, emotion and humanity then this is it.
While at times Ruth Ozeki’s writing is lyrical and magical, mostly this book felt kind of sterile. Neither of the main characters feel deeply explored and the most interesting characters (the aleph and the bottleman) are really only side events. Overall the book tasted like it had been aged in steel barrels and I was left wanting something more full bodied, more lyrical, more vivid.
Beautiful and poetic:
Fieldnotes encompass more than drawing, and as we use fieldnotes ourselves, our understanding of what they are and how others might use this method, develops.
We start our series of Fieldnotes for Design with drawing & sketching. Further editions explore mapping, writing, data collecting, sound recording and the field itself. Fieldnotes for Design Volume 1: On drawing and sketching has been self-published in a small run.
Our approach is poetic; it relies on unexpectedness, happenstance, gesturing and evoking, rather than pointing and telling. We expect our readers to skip, dip, sigh, tut, smile, shuffle skim, muse and shift between our pages, producing a cacophony of responses.
A URL is a radical act… I love these presentation notes on museums, the cultural sector and the web. Lots to mull over:
One of the reasons I think these considerations are so important to the cultural heritage sector is that the act of revisiting is the bedrock underlying the whole idea of cultural heritage itself. The act of re-reading a book, or re-listening to a piece of music or of going to see the same painting or sculpture again and again and of celebrating the evolution of an understanding about those works is what separates cultural heritage from entertainment. Entertainment, born of the moment, can and does become cultural heritage but it is precisely through the act of revisiting that one becomes the other.
The web simply makes those acts of revisiting possible for more people, in more ways, than ever before. When I say these things are possible I mean that the economics of participating in this global network of documents are within the reach of, if not everyone, then more people than ever before. These things become possible because technologies underlying the web are simple enough to meaningfully lower the barrier to paricipation and unburdened by licensing in a way which allows people to share their work and for others still to extend that work to meet their needs.
Oof. That concludes reading all 16 of the realm of the elderlings books. I haven’t kept detailed notes on them but I’m so glad that I read them all and read them in order. In many ways Nighteyes is the main character. These last three books tie together so many threads and loose ends - the storyline is dark but the ending is magical. Robin Hobb has such a powerful command of both small characters and giant worlds.
This morning in our house we read this poem and talked about it.
— RanaAwdishMD (@RanaAwdish) May 26, 2022
What is the opposite of a gun? pic.twitter.com/XBIpcSd00h
Love this surprisingly insightful and useful theory of “step-by-step-ism” from Venkat:
Tagging an interesting microtrend that also looks important: a “step-by-step” ethos developing momentum. A general interest in break-king illegible learning processes into their component steps and refining them. A kind of process skill mindfulness. Like 6-sigma but for learning.
— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) May 26, 2022
In particular:
I have a theory in this. I’m very fond of the notion of “threshold concepts”. It’s the idea that there are crucial concepts in any discipline that have a paradigm shifting impact on the mind. They’re take you over a threshold that changes your perspective. pic.twitter.com/L5TbaP9akF
— drnick 🗳️² (@DrNickA) May 26, 2022
Good reminder and guiding principle if you’re writing a business book. What people want isn’t the same as what they enjoy:
At it’s core, I’d say 4HWW is a bunch of books in one:
A tactical guide for working less an automating work
A personal story of how he expanded his imagination for life
A subtle philosophical attack on our work beliefs.
I think when people write books they think they need #1 but in reality the most powerful books are always ones with strong personal stories with or without tactics. Ferriss’ story and the examples of others throughout the book is what was powerful for people.
This drove my approach with the Pathless Path. I tried to ask myself a question: what if I didn’t give any playbook, framework, or tactical approaches?
Mmm. Gotta spend some time diving into this idea:
Paul Soulellis: We’re doing that all the time, whenever we circulate anything. “Publics and Counterpublics” by Michael Warner, do you know that piece?
LG: I’m vaguely familiar.
PS: That’s been huge for me. The ideas he sketches out there go beyond publishing, to addressivity and acts of speech. In the past I used to think about publishing, and I think many people still do, as the production of objects. Like: you make a zine, you make a digital file, you make a book. I guess one thing that changed for me with Michael Warner's [piece] was the idea of setting something into motion and forming a public through its circulation, and through the discourse that's created around that movement.
I started thinking about publishing in gestural and performative ways where that action, when you make objects move—sometimes literally physically moving from hand to hand or library to library et cetera, or on the network from server to sever—that is where the public, or a public, or multiple publics are being formed. That can happen with anything.
Some nice reflections on working at Github - I especially love this meditation on working on a big project that got cancelled:
My first takeaway here is to always look at product decisions through this lens of time. Why is this important now? What else is happening in the product or with competitors that could hinder this? Are we putting too much effort into this too soon?
My second takeaway is to rethink the concept of shipping all together. We sometimes put too much importance on shipping, when deciding not to do something is often the harder, and smarter, decision—and should be celebrated. With so much weight on shipping The Big Thing, we forget how important it is to work incrementally. If it felt like we threw a lot of work away, did we bite off more than we could chew?
And last, it has taught me the importance of storytelling, documentation, and leaving a record of your work. People come and go from companies, but good ideas remain. Leaving time capsules of your thinking and learnings will ensure that your ideas live on.
Interestingly - print on demand only unlocks the first layer of value creation (more people making books), but there’s still PLENTY of room for the second layer of value creation (services on top of POD that make books as a service)…
Are there any productized services out there that package creator content into books and take care of distribution etc? https://t.co/XGOj6UWQFj
— Sari Azout - sariazout.eth (@sariazout) May 5, 2022
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What a lovely meditation on spreadsheets:
Making a spreadsheet is very pale work next to making a product or a painting, and they remain secondary and supplementary to the needs of the actual product or business they describe. But since they are one of the artefacts we use to theorise and then direct the activity of fifteen people, I try to make them with diligence and even some craft.
And:
The characteristic grid-like simplicity of the view, the absence of barriers… a landscape where nothing officially exists, absolutely anything becomes thinkable, and may consequently happen… — that’s Reyner Banham describing deserts, though I like to imagine he was looking at a spreadsheet.
And:
The spreadsheet’s unreality is dangerously doubled because, while their ordered data and formulae always comfort you that you have authored a controllable certainty, most spreadsheets are mere conjectures, provisional plans, ideas or hopes.
Spreadsheets are dreams.
At the beach we all become architects. High tide, a critic, sweeps our castles aside.
Thinking about the role of libraries in the future of social media…
These are the five core principles of the Brooklyn Public Library. Feels like you could certainly support these efforts with some kind of social space... pic.twitter.com/XGU789dawe
— Tom Critchlow (@tomcritchlow) April 26, 2022
Found this paper from 2006! “In the new digital libraries, users are not only consumers but also producers of information”
New DLs are also required to offer a much richer set of services to their users than in the past. In particular, they must support the activities of their users by providing functionalities that may range from general utilities, like annotation, summarization or co-operative work support, to very audience-specific functions, like map processing, semantic analysis of images, or simulation. The availability of this new DL functionality can, in principle, change the way in which research is conducted. By exploiting such types of DL, for example, a scientist can annotate the article of a colleague with a programme that extracts useful information from a large amount of data collected by a specific scientific observatory. This programme, executed on demand when the annotation is accessed, can complement the content of the paper with continuously refreshed information.In the new DLs users are not only consumers but also producers of information. By elaborating information gathered through the DL they can create new information objects that are published in the DL, thus enriching its content. The new DLs are thus required to offer services that support the authoring of these new objects and the workflows that lead to their publication.
Why do learning and play seem locked in opposition sometimes? When it’s through play that we do our best learning…
Let me start with a contrarian point-of-view: I don’t like edutainment.What do I mean by that? Am I a stodgy professor who wants to keep play and fun out of the learning process? Certainly not. In fact, my research at the MIT Media Lab focuses on ways to integrate play and learning. I have found that many of people’s best learning experiences come when they are engaged in activities that they enjoy and care about. Based on these ideas, I have helped develop new toys that provide children with opportunities to learn as they play (and play as they learn).
So why don’t I like edutainment? The problem is with the way that creators of today’s edutainment products tend to think about learning and education. Too often, they view education as a bitter medicine that needs the sugar-coating of entertainment to become palatable. They provide entertainment as a reward if you are willing to suffer through a little education. Or they boast that you will have so much fun using their products that you won’t even realize that you are learning—as if learning were the most unpleasant experience in the world.
Lonliness is a real threat.
The human brain, having evolved to seek safety in numbers, registers loneliness as a threat. The centers that monitor for danger, including the amygdala, go into overdrive, triggering a release of “fight or flight” stress hormones. Your heart rate rises, your blood pressure and blood sugar level increase to provide energy in case you need it. Your body produces extra inflammatory cells to repair tissue damage and prevent infection, and fewer antibodies to fight viruses. Subconsciously, you start to view other people more as potential threats — sources of rejection or apathy — and less as friends, remedies for your loneliness.
This kind of insight is validated by this long Harvard study. In particular, it’s not just that relationships matter - but the quality of relationships in midlife…
The study showed that the role of genetics and long-lived ancestors proved less important to longevity than the level of satisfaction with relationships in midlife, now recognized as a good predictor of healthy aging. The research also debunked the idea that people’s personalities “set like plaster” by age 30 and cannot be changed.
One way out is to strengthen our trust in institutions and communal care. Not to give people support but to ask them for support:
“For years people thought the best thing you could do for a lonely person is to give them support,” she said. “Actually, we found that it’s about receiving and also giving back. So the best thing you can do for someone who is lonely is not to give them help but ask them for help. So you give them a sense of worth and a chance to be altruistic. Even if we’re getting the best care, we still feel lonely if we can’t give something back. The care is extremely valuable but it’s not enough.”
:heart emoji:
Love this collaborative reading experiment! Printed out essays! Spiral designs! Co-reading!
how do you make reading more visceral and social? @maxkriegers and I ran a lil experiment...we got pals to together to nominate favorite essays, printed them on big posters, & crawled, walked, scribbled til we had layers of marginalia to share and discuss ❤️
— Mishti (@m1shti) April 18, 2022
some fav bits: https://t.co/OI7Xbyyqyy pic.twitter.com/k8BXfTYFWK
Mmm. This Sane app looks pretty interesting. Graph/table/grid view of a set of texts. Has hints of a syllabus? Hints of arena? Hints of Electric Tables? Something interesting emerging here
This White Space is part of an evolving research practice that forms the basis for Sane’s development. It sheds light on the thought processes behind our efforts to build meaningful tools for creating, collecting, and sharing knowledge online. It also functions as the first example and use case for what the product will look like. You can sign up for the waitlist at sane.fyi to be among the first to test it for yourself.
Lovely little meditation and exploration on custom workflows, software and tools to enable high level research:
Earlier this year I started a PhD in pure mathematics at KU Leuven in Belgium and in this blog post I discuss my research workflow. I talk about how I take daily notes, both handwritten ones and ones in LaTeX and how I handle references, featuring a way to instantly add clickable references to my notes.
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Shitposting and memes as essential digital infrastructure. Very interested in Jonathan’s new startup Antimatter that creates learning experiences through memes…
It’s impossible to tell good jokes about subjects you don’t fully understand, and very difficult to tell jokes that people with opposing opinions will enjoy and grapple with. To accomplish the latter you need to be informed enough about opposing opinion, generous enough to take it seriously, and above all confident enough to tell a joke that, taken at face value, inverts your actual opinion. This is shitposting.
Powerful stuff from Johanna Lewengard:
Education is never a neutral process. It either functions as an instrument to integrate new generations into the logic of a present system, or it can be the means by which students are allowed to critically deal with their reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their future—in other words, education as a practice of liberation. No matter what we believe, we all should at least be transparent about our approaches. Every student should have the right to know what kind of learning processes they are about to enter.And of course, one is more likely to support education as a model of integration if one benefits from or has never felt threatened by the status quo. In this case, this system is likely invisible to you. In liberatory educational practices, it is as important to recognize one’s role as an educator as it is to identify and name power. This should never be confused with freeing yourself, as a teacher, from your responsibilities. Even if I believe in co-created knowledge and use methods to make individual experiences and knowledge visible, it is my responsibility to organize studies in ways that increase each student’s chances to reach learning outcomes. If a student fails, this failure is also mine.
The connection between walking and attention….
There are places in-between the spaces we live. We rarely “see” them, but they are there.
I’ve realized many of my favourite writers, video makers, and photographers are constantly exploring this space in-between. They travel and then observe the space between where they start and finish. Their destination doesn’t matter, it is someplace you’ve never heard of. It is about the journey through the in-between. You might enjoy their work too—they include Chris Arnade, Bald and Bankrupt, Craig Mod, GeoWizard (Tom Davies), Beau Miles, Shiey and more.
Where they go and what they see isn’t “normal.” It is not big cities or popular attractions. For Bald and Bankrupt, it is an obscure historical Soviet site. For GeoWizard, it is the endpoint on a straight line across a whole country. For Craig Mod, it is a small cafe along a Japanese walking route. They do a lot of walking. As the slowest form of transportation, this allows them to do something special: observe.
I talked about questions as scaffolding here, and I like this idea of a learning question:
What is a Learning Question?
A Learning Question is a like a thesis question. It’s your own unique course title. It frames your goals, challenges or curiosities as a site for active exploration and response. It’s an itch you have to scratch.
It’s important that a Learning Question be open. Open questions are ‘designed to encourage a full and meaningful answer using the subject’s own knowledge and/or feelings’. They are the opposite of closed questions which encourage single-word answers.
Similarly, a Learning Question is designed to encourage a full and meaningful enquiry. It’s more about provoking a process of learning than about finding an answer, but if you do seek an answer it must be one that incorporates your growing knowledge and personal perspective.
Very often a Learning Question spawns a series of new questions which continue to move you forward and help you grow. Unlike an academic thesis question a Learning Question does not seek resolution as an enormous written paper! It seeks a creative response appropriate to the question.
The question can be seen as an externalisation of an inner purpose that is of great importance to the learner. This importance could be practical and immediate (e.g. ‘how can I gain the skills I need to get promoted?’) — or more philosophical (e.g. ‘what is hope and can it be designed?’).
Ooh - live cursor comments?! Might have to install this on my blog……
introducing... cursor-chat! a lightweight (31.8kB) library for cursor chat à la Figmahttps://t.co/W6LvnxIqb8
— Jacky (@_jzhao) March 25, 2022
playing around with ideas for digital co-existing + presence and built a library which you can add to your website in just 5 (!!!) lines of code :)) pic.twitter.com/V6hCh7WTOg
“Make the web respire to natural rhythms”
Now I find myself more mindful of the sun as I continue to tinker with the site. It never occurred to me before as I used and created on the web. But I think that is what makes Smith's idea of the feral web so intriguing. The web can feel isolated from the world around us, sometimes to a point of debilitation. However, whether your site is powered by solar panels or by a data center, there are many ways we can make the web respire at natural rhythms.
“A blog is always good enough” - lovely
I've recently wondered whether I could just dispense with the coffee stuff and share the whole collection in some useful way. And I've been wondering how to get it all together. I tried Scrivener, so it could be a book and Roam, so it could be networked and modern and Obsidian, so it could look like a spaceship. But none of them seemed to stick.
I even tried building webpages festooned with links and tags like I was building Xanadu, but I've read about that.
So I gave up.
And then, the other day I found myself saying to someone "Just do it as a blog, it's never exactly what you want, but it's always good enough." And that reminded me of these lines from How to Change by Katy Milkman.
"In psychology, there’s something called the “saying-is-believing effect.” Thanks to cognitive dissonance, after you say something to someone else, you’re more likely to believe it yourself."
So I'm going to saying-is-believing myself and just stick stuff on here, collect it all together and add thoughts it I have them. And then we'll sort it all out later. A blog is always good enough.
Such great advice in this piece:
If you’re a new manager and feeling overwhelmed, the first thing is to figure out whether you have a time management problem or an energy management problem.
I’ve been writing about BusinessMagik for a while and I love the articulation that Venkatesh gives to Lorecraft here:
I mean, this stuff is at some level ridiculous to my hidebound Gen X mind. Lore? Magic? Witchcraft? Vibes? Management by memes? Lexicons and larps? Tweeted incantations of power? Work as a multiplayer game? The workplace as an extended universe fiction?
Good for fun and games and actual fiction, but as a basis for Serious Things? Really?
When you’ve spent the first 45 years of your life convinced you are some sort of hard realist, with an imagination shaped by the end of the Cold War and the unforgiving economic landscapes of the early neoliberal world order, it is hard to entertain the thought that perhaps reality is, or could potentially transform into, some sort of malleable medium for imaginations addled by something uncomfortably close to magical thinking.
But of the two worlds I’ve been witnessing, I am becoming convinced that the emerging weird world being claimed by lorecraft, with tarot cards and literal magical thinking in the mix, is actually more real, and has been all along.
The dying world I spent so many years understanding on the other hand, despite the powerful normalcy field surrounding it, is in fact the less real world. The magical thinking that governs it is all the more powerful because those caught up in it are not even aware of it.
There’s more where this came from. We’re only getting started.
Continuing from yesterday’s post on interesting conferences, this looks interesting:
A Mostly Screen-Free, Zine-Full, Remote-Participation Conference on Experimental Methods for Research and Research Exchange
So there’s a digital naturalism conference. Looks pretty rad! They made a booklet from their last conference in 2019 which you can see online here. Looks fascinating!
Reminds me of this wonderful project from Simon Colly, the internet of natural things:
This self-assigned research project led to a popular newsletter, numerous articles, a touring presentation, and R&D projects. But what does ‘Internet of Natural Things’ mean? Well, throughout history, societies have collectively reinvented their image of nature, so it’s logical that we are now defining a new image of nature for the post-digital age. And with that comes a new and more authentic idea of beauty that designers can embrace.
The research has many strands. I’m exploring biophilic thinking in art, design, architecture and emerging tech. There’s great overlap with mental health and wellbeing. I’m particularly interested in the ways data and social media help us track animals, invest in them, and crowdsource their stories. I’m fascinated by how all of these strands coalesce to influence culture and aesthetics.
I want to understand how nature can play into a better relationship with digital technology, and how technologists and designers can work with, not against, the natural world. The guiding idea is not that we need less technology, but that we need more nature.
What a lovely phrase:
Careful attention results in output
Thinking in terms of input/output I always return to this meditation from Derek Sivers:
The word “inspiration” usually means “something that mentally stimulates you.”
But “inspiration” also means to breathe in.
The meanings poetically combine when you think of yourself breathing in thoughts, filling your body with ideas. But don’t forget to breathe out.
[...]
Because nothing is truly inspiring unless you apply it to your work. (“work” meaning your life’s output, whether creative, business, or personal).
In other words, your work, itself, is the inspiration.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
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Paul Robert Lloyd on creating “design histories”:
A design history looks both forwards and backwards. New posts show the team where a service is going, while older posts tell the story of how we got to where we are now.
That’s a fancy description. The simpler answer is that a design history is a blog with a design team committed to regularly posting about their work.
Love the idea of using a simple blog to keep track of how a service has evolved and changed over time. Nothing fancy. Just good ol blogging.
Architectural blogging
I think a lot about blogging, about why I like it, what I think I can accomplish through blogging that I can’t accomplish, or not easily anyway, through other kinds of writing … and that leads me to metaphors. For instance, I have appropriated from Brian Eno and others the distinction between architecture and gardening, and have described my blog as a kind of garden. But lately I’ve been revisiting the architecture/gardening distinction and I have come to think that there is something architectural about writing a blog, or can be – but not in the sense of a typical architectural project, which is designed in advanced and built to specifications. Rather, writing a blog over a period of years is something like building the Watts Towers:
First, Brian Lovin on a perspective around incrementally correct personal sites:
Incremental correctness is the process of iterating towards something more truthful, accurate, usable, or interesting. The faster we can iterate, the faster we can discover good ideas. Things aren't perfect today, but tomorrow things can be slightly closer to perfect.
Incremental correctness changes everything about the way you work. It's anti-perfectionism. It's pro-generation. It's about discovery and proof, research and prototyping, and having a framework to reliably test your instincts. It discourages major redesigns, preferring isolated improvements to a small subset of nodes in any kind of working tree.
I've always struggled to have this mindset when working on my personal website. I get stuck in these loops where I redesign the thing once every few years, and am left so thoroughly exhausted and frustrated by the process that I don't want to touch the thing ever again. If you've ever dreaded the notion of having to redesign your portfolio, you probably know what I mean.
Paired with Frank Chimero, on digital homesteading:
Have you ever visited an architect’s house, one they designed themselves? It’s fun to walk through it with them. They have so many things, arranged so thoughtfully, and share the space with such pride because of the personal reflection the house required to design (not to mention the effort it took to build). It’s really quite special. I think there’s a pleasure to having everything under one roof. You feel together, all of you at once. In a way, building your own house is the ultimate project for a creative person: you’re making a home for what you think is important, done in the way you think is best.
This a nice little meditation on service roles (i.e. consulting)
Have you ever been asked to help, and ended up feeling abused and misused? Why did it go that way?
Whether you’re part of a bunch of #consultants dealing with a #management issue, a coach, mentor, a friend, an HR or Finance Business Partner, or leading a radical #innovation process to help them to be fit for the #future — why does it end so disappointingly, so often?
There is a systemic pull for your good advice to… just be ignored.
The likelihood is that you’ll end up frustrated and disappointed: ‘if only they’d listened to me!’
The punchline:
…but actually, the answer is to embrace the vulnerability.
Clearly state the facts: ‘I have some expertise that might help here. And you know your context better than I do. Let’s learn about your situation and options together, and see if you can get somewhere better’.
Notice that this stance *resists the urge to be of immediate value*.
It *prolongs* the vulnerability, it accentuates it.
Media inside baseball, yes. But also great commentary and exploration of the power dynamics against “building a brand” or “being very online”
This week’s intra-mural media kerfluffle revolves around backlash to the idea that journalists need to be brands themselves — apart from the institutions they work for. It was precipitated by an article in Insider about The New York Times and retention problems potentially caused by the Times’ approach to outside projects.
At the center of this conversation on Twitter were two high-profile Times journalists, Maggie Haberman, and Taylor Lorenz, the latter of whom recently left the Times for The Washington Post. The short version of what happened is that Lorenz pointed to the Insider article (in which she is quoted) and affirmed that it’s important for younger journalists especially to develop themselves as brands and Haberman responded by accusing Lorenz of attention-seeking, and a host of other established journalists chimed in with whatever the Tweet equivalent is of a vomit emoji, mostly triggered by the word “brand” but also by the dynamic at play between Lorenz and Haberman.
This article explores why such social constellations might be forming and what makes them different from the long lineage of Small Groups that came before them. It also examines both the potential benefits and pitfalls of joining a Small Group and explores why they might one day be widely embraced by the culture at large.
At the very bottom of the post there’s a good roundup of other “small group” thinking in various forms
Oh! This is a magical website. Collection of essays that auto-compiles to a print on demand book. Very relevant to my interests:
The notion of a singular printing or edition obviously goes out the window when readers can recombine and print on demand as desired. "The book" in this context has to encompass all the machinery, the HTML and CSS, the server, the underlying content, the templates for the pages, the code to collate them, and the means of printing. Drawing attention to its own publishing to a degree a more traditionally constructed book might not. This is particularly visible, I think, on the cover for the on-demand print version of On Publishing where the logic of: "randomly place logos of those studios that have been included in this particular compilation so they do not overlap at one of a number of sizes" spans fifty lines of code that form the canonical notion of the cover.
Love seeing Craig Mod build his next book in this daily email series for subscribers. Figma is a great tool for this!!
Again: Fluidity, fluency, looseness — these are the words of Figma. Rigidity, precision, old software models — these are the words of InDesign. My goal is to get the book to 98% laid out before moving to InDesign.
Doing the work by actually reading the source material. Very generalizable!
People often ask what they can do to generate original contributions or comparative advantages. Usually they vastly overestimate how common it is to have gone through the basic intellectual background in a field. If you've actually read the book (actually checked the proof, actually implemented the algorithm), you're probably way ahead of the field. Much expertise is simply doing this over and over.
Love this mediation on maps, mapping and managing complexity in projects from Dark Matter Labs:
Maps are not simply means of sharing our work publicly. They are a central part of our inquiry process. They allow us to share our individual thoughts, explore connections and work collaboratively. Our daily work often involves moving between projects and holding multiple pieces of information simultaneously, and maps serve as a vessel for retaining that information. Different team members can enter a project, introducing new ways of thinking and spotting a host of new connections.
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“Specific curiosity as a driver of creativity”
The present research examines the causal relationship between specific curiosity and creativity. To explicate this relationship, we introduce the concept of idea linking, a cognitive process that entails using aspects of early ideas as input for subsequent ideas in a sequential manner, such that one idea is a stepping stone to the next.Study 1 demonstrated the causal effect of specific curiosity on creativity.Study 2, a field study of artisans selling handmade goods online, found that experiencing specific curiosity predicts greater next-day creativity.Study 3 demonstrated idea linking as a mechanism for the effect of specific curiosity on creativity.Study 4 further established the impact of idea linking on creativity, finding that it boosted creativity beyond the well-established intervention of brainstorming.We discuss specific curiosity as a state that fuels creativity through idea linking and idea linking as a novel technique for creative idea generation.
(Paper via here and freely available with a Google)
Some interesting insights from this:
- Maintaining an active list of “open questions” might make you more creative. Is there a way to reframe your general interests into a list of questions? I did something a bit like that with my areas of inquiry post recently
- Doing things leads to questions leads to creativity leads to doing things…. There’s a nice virtuous cycle here where finding specific problems - i.e. specific questions leads you into a positive cycle of curiousity and creativity…
Update: I wonder if there’s value in a little tool/prompt/exercise that encourages people to convert their general, abstract interest into a set of active questions. I have a hunch that if you can push people into a question mindset they can be more focused, more creative, less distracted and more likely to spend time on their interests….
Hmm. I quite like this working in seasons idea. As I shift more towards an independent model where I’m able to dictate my schedule a bit more (vs clients dictating it)….
Seasons & WorkWhen I look at the last eight years since I started working, one theme that stands out is how my work seems to move in seasons.I typically go through some significant work shift or change around the end of the year or the beginning of the next. A bit under a year ago I was stepping out of Growth Machine and starting on my rapid career sampling.The year before that, it was diving into Roam and creating the course as well as opening the Cafe (ouch).Before that in different years it was starting Growth Machine, starting my current blog, starting my first startup, getting into content marketing, starting my first blog... it's always around that time.Spring and into Summer are also often characterized by an intense focus on some project. Last year that was getting Growth Machine through COVID. This year it was learning programming.In the fall, I tend to be less productive. Not sure why. Maybe it's a relic from school starting and me resisting doing anything related to school until the absolute last minute. Whatever the source though, it tends to be a slower season.I rather like this ebb and flow. Six to nine months of focused output, a period of rest, a period of reflection and planning, then another push forward.
Amen to this! Google Photos can identify all QR codes in my library via incredibly fancy machine learning. And yet I need to swipe up, then tap then tap again to click on a QR code. Why can’t you just click a QR code in the camera roll?
(Hey Apple: what I wish I could do is tap on a QR code in a photo in my photo library, which it seems like I can’t? Because then I could save photos of all these posters and make my own ad hoc deeplink homescreen as a photo album on my phone, and share it with my family.)
(Also a nice post with lots of nice simple ideas for QR codes)
I’m thinking about Libraries - both literal, physical existing libraries AND conceptual future digital “libraries”.
Especially in the context of my library.json project how can we ensure that a project all about books can funnel value back to libraries?…..
The library of the future
You might be saying to yourself: but aren’t all the libraries already built? What’s the next frontier? This brings us to our final can of worms in this series: What would a public library look like on the internet? This question is so intriguing, yet so complex and nuanced, that many of you had a lot to say on the subject last week in our most engaged Open Thread in months. Some of you thought that anything attempting to replace libraries digitally was inexorably doomed to fail, and others were eager to bring their favorite features of their library — from shushing librarians to storytime — to some corner of their daily digital routine.
We believe this conversation is just getting started. We did a Library Design Sprint with librarians, designers, and researchers in summer 2020, and we tracked how Brooklyn Public Library went online early in the pandemic in our Terra Incognita project. This is a topic we’re still extremely interested in, and I’m looking forward to revisiting it in future newsletters. If you have a vision for the intersection of technology and libraries, we’d love to hear more about it in the comments, even if you’re not a billionaire.
Love this meditation on note taking and expertise in ill-structured domains…
CFT asserts that due to this nature of ill-structured domains, cases are as if not more important than concepts. This second idea is a more subtle one, so we’re going to spend a bit of the time examining the implications.
I think many of us have been exposed to a particular style of teaching in school, where we are taught a concept, and then the examples that illustrate that concept are treated as disposable. My go-to example for this is how we are taught quadratic equations — we are shown one or two examples and then we are expected to memorise the general approach for solving such equations. As a result of this instruction, many of us internalise that concepts are important and examples are not.
“Real nonsense”
From your description, and from what I know of your previous work and your ability; the work you are doing sounds very good “Drawing – clean – clear but crazy like machines, larger and bolder… real nonsense.” That sounds fine, wonderful — real nonsense. Do more. More nonsensical, more crazy, more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever — make them abound with nonsense. Try and tickle something inside you, your “weird humor.” You belong in the most secret part of you. Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool. Make your own, your own world. If you fear, make it work for you — draw & paint your fear & anxiety. And stop worrying about big, deep things such as “to decide on a purpose and way of life, a consistant approach to even some impossible end or even an imagined end.” You must practice being stupid, dumb, unthinking, empty. Then you will be able to DO
In my Deep Sea Diving on the Web class one thing we do is generate what I call "maps," or oblique strategies for navigating web platforms. Here are some of the maps we made for Wikipedia...
— elan kiderman ullendorff (@at_elan) February 9, 2022
(and you can sign up for future @index_space_org dives here! https://t.co/kD5oTJA3cJ)
Canon reading for “artist in consultance”…
Corporate personhood and artists-in-consultancy in recent fiction
This virtualisation occurs in the context of the porous borders between the individual and the collective inherent in corporate subjecthood, whereby the anthropomorphisation of the corporation and the corporatisation of the individual combine to dissolve the border between inside and outside, creating a networked subjectivity.
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A great little meditation on Alan Jacob’s line of inquiry on “Invitation & Repair”
As I’ve said many times before, I completely agree with Yuval Levin that it is indeed a time to build (or rebuild) our institutions, but the problem is that nobody wants to rebuild the institutions and they don’t want to rebuild them because they don’t care about them, they don’t value them, they don’t see what purpose they serve; for them an institution is simply an impediment to the achievement of their desires. In this kind of environment, I don’t see the rebuilding of the institutions as an immediate possibility. Americans today perceive institutions as repositories of resources for them to exploit.
I love this meditation and exploration on web-books:
Existing e‑books stand far from high standards of paper book publishing. Typography is poor, navigation and search are inconvenient. I present my vision of the future of books realized in bureau’s interactive books on design, which we publish and sell using in‑house technology and subscription business model. I will show live demo of our books and share actual sales numbers.
Remind me of the stuff Craig Mod was writing a decade ago…
As I stated before, we will always debate:
the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display;
the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting;
location by page, location by paragraph.This is not what matters. Surface is secondary.
The ditch digging,
the setting of steel,
the pouring of concrete for the foundation of the future book.
This is what requires our efforts.Clearly defined scope of these systems,
clearly defined open protocols.
These are what require our discussion.Tools with simple, quiet, clean interfaces
organically surfacing our changing relationship with text.
These are what we need to build.All of these efforts combined, these systems integrated,
these tools made well and deliberately.
This is the future book.
Our platform for post-artifact books and publishing.
We still haven’t solved all of this but I love thinking about the future of the book. Especially the practical notions of how to make both web and print books in 2022 (a pragmatic concern for me!)…..
More soon
A framework for writing online. This is a nice short video from David Perell
I especially like the ABCD framework for feedback. Asking specifically:
- A - What’s awesome?
- B - What’s boring?
- C - What’s confusing?
- D - What didn’t you believe?
That last one is key - writing is so much better when you strengthen the foundations and address people’s assumptions directly.
“Students learn more when their teacher has learned how to gesture effectively”
Huh. Gesture more effectively? From this amazing and fascinating presentation about external representaions of knowledge and learning:
static1.squarespace.com/static/61…
Book here that I just purchased
I love this one from Linus on how we might create more of a community or field of research in the “tools for thought” space
I too dislike the phrase and framing of “tools for thought” but don’t have something better.
Wouldn’t it be neat to make a hub for this research? Like an RSS feed aggregator and links out to various projects…? Something kind of like newmodels.io?
I didn’t realize you could turn a static site into a PWA - thought you needed a server for the serviceworker… Bookmarking this for later
“Urgently patient” - management needs to be urgently defining direction, and patient in realizing progress, projects towards them…. credit: Brian Dell
I would like to tackle the term "enchantment" head-on, expand its definition, and provide a sense of where it exists in modern life without relying on these historical forms or terminology.
My working definition: "enchantment" is a property of experience where the subject projects a fantasy, in the broad sense, onto the experience itself. Enchantment as such elevates the experience beyond its mere factual or physical essence, and brings it into a "super-sensible" relation with the actor. To use Fristonian terminology, the degree to which an experience is enchanted is the degree to which top-down priors predominate over bottom-up.
What a stunning, heartfelt and insightful piece from Chia:
When there is a desire to invent a world: chias.blog/2022/theo…
Damn I relate to so much of this - how deeply rooted that desire is to create worlds. With and for people.
A Great Diversity of Relationships
“Tugging on the thread of digital bricolage brought me to a wonderful paper by Seymour Papert & Sherry Turkle called “Epistemological Pluralism.””
This is a lovely meditation on balanced social media use - while also accepting that social media (Twitter) is deeply enjoyable and valuable…
acesounderglass.com/2021/12/0…
Worth reflecting on more mindful ways of engaging that don’t require deleting apps or withdrawing…
Whoah
365 Computer-Generated Books: A Thread
— Aleator Press (@aleatorpress) January 2, 2022
On each day of 2022, we will tweet out an example from our growing collection of computer-generated books. And in this thread, we will gradually compile these tweets in order.
🧵 pic.twitter.com/1grZIGRVeI
“Soft skills” and power inside organizations. Two great reads:
Firstly this on “how to be strategic” - think “one level up the food chain”
And then this on “know how your org works”: copyconstruct.medium.com/know-how-…
The geography of a program:
https://nearthespeedoflight.com/article/2021_05_25_the_geography_of_a_program?utm_source=pocket_mylist
“Does each place have a climate, perhaps, too? Is there an aroma to the fresh code as it blossoms in the spring of a sprint? Do the leaves fallen from aging syntax trees rustle and crunch underfoot as I traipse through a code path?”
Are there stronger characters than the Fitz and the Fool? What depth of emotion. This series is a magical climax and feels like it rivals the original assassin trilogy! Loved reading this series.
This book looks wonderful:
Creatures Are Stirring is a book about how to be friends with buildings. Through a collection of flash fictions (written from buildings’ points-of-view), creative essays, and case studies, the book re-conceptualizes buildings as our intimate companions by amplifying architecture’s creaturely qualities—formal embellishments, fictional enhancements, and organizational strategies that suggest animal-like agency. In an unsettled world, such qualities may initiate more companionable relationships between humans and the built environment, and ultimately foster greater solidarity with other human and nonhuman lifeform
Reminds me of this wonderful short story from Matt Webb:
We sat atop Parliament Hill as the sun went down, London lapping at our feet, glass of wine in hand, a hard red line on the horizon fading not to black but the glow of LED streetlamps diffused through the humid breath of our ten million neighbours.
The distant whine quitened as the drones returned to their charging towers. The apartment buildings, shadowy, took over with their rumbling murmerations.
“That one,” said K—, and I followed her finger to one particular termite mound, apartment containers crawling over one another, a slowly seething self-stirring pile, reconfiguring according to the occupants’ preferences this week and the up-to-the-microsecond spot rent.
“There’s a patch of apartments that are blocked,” and indeed there was: a 3D mass at the heart of the mass, visible sometimes, not moving. A scab. A tumour.
And this amazing talk on Hydrocommunities by Gilberto Esparza. Assembling robot “creatures” that feed off the city. Incredible
Eyeo 2018 - Gilberto Esparza from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.
URBAN PARASITES (2006 – 2007)
They are the complex restructuring of technological waste with mechanical and electronic systems that are configured as artificial life organisms with the ability to survive in urban environments. Many of them feed on the energy they steal from the electricity distribution network of cities and interact with their environment by moving and emitting sounds to communicate with other parasites of their species, forming part of the urban soundscape.
Yass
“The point is this – it’s past time to take responsibility for finding the stuff we write, and if we do it well, and Daytona does, all of a sudden blogging works so much better, and the incentive to write stuff, to document, to narrate our work, to index everything you can, makes total sense.”
So now I’ve rolled out my new site design I want to generate some new open graph images (the old white/green sqaure is a bit out of date)…
This looks like a very promising approach:
Ah sorry to be clear I built that site and the screenshot service. `internal-api-screenshot` is a fork of this project https://t.co/2aUPUkrwI2
— Zach Leatherman (@zachleat) December 14, 2021
Though you *could* just use this existing instance `https://t.co/1VSBl7FY1p`, production usage is sponsored by Netlify.
Though - I really wish that you could use SVG files as open graph images, then I could generate them dynamically via Jekyll!
https://sepiabrown.github.io/test.svg
It’s interesting seeing Dave Winer playing with search as a new primitive on his “blog” (I put it in quotes because his blog is a mega-archive and leviathan body of work)…
A new dimension has opened up. Until now writing has been more or less Of The Moment. As Google has punished me for not supporting their various hijacks of the web, the writing has become more ephemeral, kind of like Twitter -- once written -- hard to find again. With Daytona all of a sudden my memex has memory. My writing is upgraded a billion percent.
Makes me think about ways to upgrade search as a more powerful primitive on my own site….
Right now I’m using a version of Craig Mod’s search script for static site and it’s fine. Functional but not really transformative.
Instead I’m thinking about a new /search page that pulls together:
- Blog archive (obvs)
- Notes archive via microblog API
- Full tweet archive (I’d self host a copy of my own tweets to do this)
- My wiki and saved notes
Making everything searchable feels like fun and it might surface some nice things….
Update 12/14: Hmm I just downloaded by twitter archive and tweet.js is 50MB so it’s not going to be practical to host and search that everytime someone uses my search box….
Not hard to see a link between these two pieces…
Summary
This report argues that consumer technology reviewers have failed their basic nominal purpose of critiquing tools. Instead, inspired by values introduced by Apple in the late 1990s, the tech review industry prioritizes aesthetic lust as the primary critical factor for evaluating objects. The reification of these values in their scoring system is transmitted to consumers and manufacturers alike. Like other prurient things, the objects designed within this paradigm are optimized not for usefulness but for photogenic and telegenic properties, a framework that finds its fullest realization in YouTube reviews and unboxing videos. There, even the intimation of critical rigor within tech reviewing vanishes, the smartphone becomes the center of gravity, and manufacturers are even further incentivized to design products for end consumers who are less users than viewers.
And…
Google caused a stir in the affiliate sector with its April algorithm update. The latest update promised better rankings in Google searches for websites with product reviews and product testing that include unique and useful expert content, while affiliate sites focusing only on clicks and commissions rather than providing the user with added value would be downgraded. So far, the update has only been rolled out for English-language Google search where some major changes have already been seen.
It’s a short post and I’m not going to ruin it by quoting it but this is a lovely meditation:
The Scale of the Web, the Authority of Print. What a lovely idea
Today, effective strategic publishing depends on two key channels:
- the scale of the web, and
- the authority of print.
What does that look like in practice, and what’s involved in actually doing it? In this article, I’ll cover some concrete issues in strategic publishing:
Love this from Simon - his stream is the primary inspiration for this notes microblog…
It’s two years since I started my Stream, a channel for quickfire posts alongside my more glacial blog, and I recently posted my 250th note. That’s 250 thoughts that would otherwise have gone undocumented or evaporated elsewhere.
It’s not lost on me that I am writing an Article about my Stream. But, as you will read, this isn’t a short post, and my Articles section is here when I need more depth. I’ve given myself options.
Writing all this down, you know what? I'm kind of mad about it too. Not so mad that I'll go chasing obviously-ill-fated scurrilous rainbow financial instruments. But there's something here that needs solving. If I'm not solving it, or part of it, or at least trying, then I'm... wasting my time. Who cares about money? This is a systemic train wreck, well underway.
We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.
Uh oh. I see troubles like this in my future…. Is there really no POD service that actually works well?
There was a long dark evening of the soul where I toyed with the thought of ploughing on regardless. Amy and Sonia put me right and made me see sense: there was no point doing all this work for an end result that may or may not be a decent printed product.
This was the moment where I realised I couldn’t go ahead with the process I’d planned. I couldn’t rely on these printers to print good books. All that work to get the book magically connected to the book distribution industry had been wasted time. It was time to think of a new plan.
Oh neat, Microblog has a little JS snippet to pull in the latest posts. This will let me integrate these notes into sepiabrown.github.io/notes nice and easily!
Lots of energy right now around grants.
Growing up, I've always been mesmerized by people I perceived to be “moths” — humans fluttering around just outside of the bright glow of the traditional spotlight. While “butterflies” sparkled within traditional systems, moths seemed to be playing games entirely of their own making. I believe both human and insect moths are frequently underestimated. They're just as smart as butterflies (or an AI, for that matter), beautifully complex up-close, and driven by a magical intrinsic force: agency.
Reminds me of Nadia’s helium grants program:
I ran a personal microgrant program called Helium Grants for two years. After reading ~4,000 applications and awarding nearly $40,000 in grants to 26 people, I’ve decided to put it on indefinite hiatus and focus on other projects.
Since starting Helium, I’ve gotten questions about how to start a microgrant program, so I figured I’d capture my learnings in one place. Some of this advice overlaps with previous posts I’ve written; this one is my best attempt at a cheat sheet.
I’d love to start a micro-grant program to get people zero -> one for blogging. How to encourage people to start a (small b) blogging habit…….?
Love this piece from Johannes about writing cultures, async work and the tools we use:
johannesklingebiel.de/wiki/Bett…
And in our Twitter exchange he links to this piece that I need to read that has some juicy details about Amazon’s 6-page memo culture:
writingcooperative.com/the-anato…
WHAT! So many mysteries unraveling, starting, crossing. Such emotionally charged scenes. Not giving anything away but this book is a big one.
A really magical exploration of global capitalism and… mushrooms?!
From the great album by Sam Fender. This lyric has crushed me recently - I keep seeing this idea everywhere.
From yelling at my kids to watching people behave angrily on the subway… Anger is such an insidious force that just destroys people from the inside out.
There’s always room to breathe. Don’t pay your anger forward.
Testing Twitter embed..
Parking this thread and article here to read later
Testing posting from Gluon. Nice!
Kiddos quietly drawing together 😍
Here’s a great post from Matt: interconnected.org/home/2021…
love the look of this #rpg
Just setting up my microblog…
LOVE returning to Fitz and the Fool. I’m so deep in the Robin Hobb world now….
Wow! Another trilogy down. I love the callbacks and hints for the original series. Onwards!
Now things are getting interesting! Love the origin story for the live ships - what an incredible dark backdrop to the whole saga.
Onwards into the Robin Hobb cinematic universe! This series starts somewhat slowly but I love the all new (or is it!) version of live ships and their unique “magic”.
I love this trilogy so much. This is my third or fourth full re-read since I was a teenager and it remains magical each time. Such world building, characters and adventure. Onwards to the remaining…. checks notes…. 14 books!
That last line!! Such depth of characters. I really love this series. World building, unique ideas around magic, politics, love, wolves, assassins! Love it. Just as good as I remember.
Diving back into an epic read of the 17 Robin Hobb books. The farseer trilogy is my all time fave and I’ve read these books several times before but I’m starting here to read them all in order.
www.amazon.comWhat richness! The first time I’ve read sci-fi that felt a bit like Iain M Banks. Deep, complex, rich worlds with strong characters. An absolute treat - spanning langauge, poetry, politics, identity, memory and more. I cannot wait for the followup. After reading so much poorly written sci fi recently (Dune, The Ministry of the Future, Exhalation..) this was a refreshing breath of fresh air.
www.amazon.comAn airbnb read. Just lovely poetic writing - a breath of fresh air after a bunch of badly-written scifi.
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www.amazon.comAbandoned during the free preview. Everyone is raving about this book but honestly the writing felt incredibly flat. I’m tired of sci-fi stories having bad writing :(
www.amazon.comSome great thought provoking ideas about coaching, consulting and being embedded inside organizations as an outsider. I especially love the concept in the book of overbounded or underbounded organizations.
www.amazon.comAbandoned 2/3 of the way through :( - while I quite enjoyed some of the provocations in the stories ultimately the writing didn’t captivate me. Left me feeling bored so I gave it up.
www.amazon.comI have fond memories of the first time reading this and felt like it left a big impression on me. Re-reading this book I still loved it but the shine has come off a little - I think other culture books are perhaps better. Still, the world building (universe building!) that Iain M Banks does is like no other.
www.amazon.comA great read about internet creators, economics of production, communities, influencers, open source and more. Nadia provides a ton of real data and examples but pairs them with big ideas and concepts. Essential read.
www.amazon.comA wonderful rich book exploring the world of high end culinary R&D to find lessons applicable for other types of organizations. A really fun read - great stories about high end cooking as well as sharp insights about food.
www.amazon.comClassic sci-fi short stories recommended by Matt Webb. Some really lovely ideas and great writing! All the stories are very character-driven and often reflect more strongly on the individual characters motives and identities over the larger sci-fi conceits! Lovely. Thanks Matt!
www.amazon.comWhat a magnificent - truly epic work. I’m a big Steinbeck fan already and I think I even read this one previously but loved immersing myself in this wonderful story. The biblical theme is almost too strong at times but is richly counterbalanced by Steinbeck’s incredibly loving character portraits. Amazing.
www.amazon.comA really great fast-paced read. Eliot has a great knack for constructing plausible near-futures and then situating fully realized human stories within those futures. Thought provoking and enjoyable.
www.amazon.comWhile the writing style at times is captivating - like a penny falling into a deep well - often the writing was unremarkable and the plot unfolded fairly slowly. All in the book was, ironically, forgettable. That said - the ending, where bodies start to fade away really resonated during this period of lockdown and isolation - it captures the essence of my embodied self fading away into an infinite series of zoom screens.
www.amazon.comA wonderful meditation on career change (and life change generally) as being a process of iterating and trying on new identities. Has deep implications for independents also. Going to blog this book up. Originally found via Vaughn Tan’s newsletter.
www.amazon.comBrian suggested I get into Haiku and pick up this book and I’m glad I did! Beautiful, easy to read intro to Haiku. The author gives great context for what Haiku is, the main poets and how to read Haiku poetry. Recommended!
www.amazon.comA wonderful book. Like an absurdist Cormac McCarthy x Kurt Vonnegut mashup. Lyrical descriptions, wonderful characters and a wild imagination. Highly recommended.
www.amazon.comThere are moments when the lavish fantasy world and the magic contained in it sucked me in - but ultimately the character development and plot just didn’t hang together to keep me reading. Good escapist reading but there are better fantasy worlds to lose yourself in than this one.
www.amazon.comA truly delightful novel - with hints of PG Wodehouse. This book really sucked me in with magical lush writing and a great wry tone. Definitely recommended.
www.amazon.comA fun quick read. There’s some good language and some nice world-setting but I wish some of the characters had been more fully developed and I wish the central idea had been stronger. The ending kind of fizzles out and there could have been room for so much more here.. Good for a little lightweight-dytopia though.
www.amazon.comI think perhaps I made a mistake. I didn’t realize until after I’d read it that it was part of the Borne series. Maybe that would have been useful because this book made zero sense. Like a William Burroughs book it was somehow interesting and riveting at times despite literally making no sense. Did I mention it makes no sense? The first section with the three astronauts was the most compelling….. Maybe I should read the other Borne books and it’ll make more sense? But I doubt it.
www.amazon.comAbandoned 500 pages in. I tried to keep going but just couldn’t. A Very Bad Book. Highly un-recommended. This is a good takedown. So many characters are badly written sexually frustrated males and it’s just all round a bad book. Couple sentences worth savoring but.. ugh.
www.amazon.comAmor is a wonderful writer with so many lyrical touches, flourishes and turns of phrase. The feel of the book of politics, culture and acting in the proper way is great. Without posting spoilers there’s a few themes in the book that make me feel like the book was written by a man - that some of the more emotionally rich moments are skipped over… But overall highly recommended as a fun, engaging and lyrical book.
www.amazon.comI really should have read this years ago but I really enjoyed this piece. The core ideas around tempo of interactions, narrative time and that the kitchen is the best way to think about time will all stick with me for a while. Recommended.
www.amazon.comA delightful little book that was a gift from my friend Brian. A little meditation on conversations, how important they are and some of the explicit and implicit ways they can go wrong. At first I thought this was going to offer solutions and ideas but mostly it just offers poetry and provocations. I think it’ll stick with me for a long time though - and the art from the author scattered through the book makes a lovely little object. Thanks Brian!
www.amazon.comA fast-paced, high-action read. A fun time-travel romp with some great characters. Ultimately I thought the premise was smart and the writing handled it well but the whole novel felt a little shallow. There were some really meaty ideas about identity and family wrapped up here that kind of got sidelined for the sake of the technology-driven plot and I thought that was a shame. Fun read though.
www.amazon.comLovely vintage sci-fi recommended by Chris Butler. There’s aliens, teleporting and… magic? But nothing flashy happens - it’s an incredibly human story. This is a really thoughtful and fresh story. Highly recommended.
www.amazon.comThe opening line of Idiot’s First is a masterpiece. ‘The thin ticking of the tin clock stopped’. Loved a few of the other stories but some were definitely forgettable. I’d recommend dipping your toe in and at the very least reading the title story Idiots First.
www.amazon.comAh what delicious sludgy, dark, human texture. China Miéville’s descriptive language and world building is unparalleled. This is book two (after reading Perdido Street Station last year). These books are long and luxurious so perhaps not the best entry point if you’re new to his writing but if you like this kind of thing there’s nothing better. My only quarrel with this book was the ending… It felt somewhat unsatisfying, or rather unfinished - where a typical book resolves this felt like the open sea was still in front of you? But it’s a very minor comment as mostly the strength of this book was that every page told a lifetime of texture. Definitely going to read book three of this trilogy after a break.
www.amazon.comAfter reading All That Is I had to wash my palette and get back to some of his delicious writing. This was much more in line with Light Years and contained some lovely moments. None of the short stories will linger with me too long but it’s a short read and I’d recommend it.
serpentine-galleries.myshopify.comThe core idea of the masks - the cartoonist, the director, the hacker and the emissary - is wonderful and a new lens to look at the world through, so overall I’d recommend the book. But there was also an incredible over-indulgence from the author to live inside his own worlds (which feels very finite game like, not infinite game like). And the lack of people anywhere in his worlds is also problematic. That said - the book as an object is beautiful and wonderfully designed.
www.amazon.comI really enjoyed this - a delightfully British story of being trapped, like a combination of Kafka and PG Wodehouse. The plot derailed itself in a few places and there was a whole Shakespere reference that kind of went over my head but the writing was wonderful. Recommended.
www.amazon.comI really loved this. Distinctive, fresh writing that captures so much of the present weirdness in society while also somehow feeling timeless. The middle third dragged slightly for me but the descent into ecological weird towards the end is just wonderful and reminds me of the Annihiliation series by Jeff Vandermeer. Oh and the whole book centers on this premise of artists becoming ‘consultants’ which is magnificent. Recommended. Verdict- 👍🌲
www.amazon.comA wildly disappointing read. Not that it was so bad but that having recently read Light Years I was expecting so much more. There were moments of brilliance in the writing and some of the scenes will linger with me overall the book didn’t really make me feel anything. Definitely read Light Years instead.
www.amazon.comBook two of the Analog series. Overall I connected less with the main character in this one but connected more with the overall premise which is very thought provoking. It feels today that we are actively living through the end (or at least a phase transition) of sovereignty. Compelling and a quick read.
www.amazon.comI completely devoured this book. The characters and pace keeps it flowing but the ideas will stick with me - it’s grounded in a very near future and the concepts are well thought through. Excited to keep diving into Borderless next.
www.amazon.comA majestic feat of imagination - whirlwind story of a gong-fu epic in a world gone mad. Definitely feels like it needed better editing or structuring and was about 100 pages too long but the strength of imagination and grasp of poetry really captivated me. Picked this up off the street on the way home from kung-fu training (approriate!). I’ll be reading more of his work.
www.amazon.comThis book completely destroyed me. The writing is dense and poetic like almost no one I’ve ever read. Did you know glass is a liquid and slowly ‘flows’? This book operates on a time horizon and ‘flows’ through lives in a deeply transformative way. Found via Phil Gyford
www.amazon.comIt’s architecture writing but lyrical, magical and opinionated. A tour de force through New York’s history with tons of interesting characters, ideas, explorations and more. Ideas include congestion as an organizing principle of the city, and every block being an archipelago. Wonderful and highly recommended.
www.amazon.comAbandoned. I think somewhere in this book is buried a wonderful treasure. The looping self-aware story is fundamentally interesting and new but the language that wraps around it chokes it to death. Abandoned about half way through.
www.amazon.comA wonderful original work - full of interesting characters. Ghosts! Spys! Old London! Really enjoyed this and tore through it super fast.
www.amazon.comGreat unique book, wonderful analogy to finite and infinite writing….
www.amazon.comProvocative premise but I felt it squandered an opportunity at a deeper political and/or emotional exploration of what would happen if teenage girls gained a new incredible power. Somehow it resorted to…. fucking and fighting?
www.amazon.comA staggering, creative, filthy, engrossing tour through a world with such magical and rich depths. No one can build worlds like China.
www.amazon.comWilliam Gibson meets Kafka. A corporate strategy consultant / ethnographer ponders the meaning of life and searches for the Great Report.
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Tender, oozing, lyrical, dark, DARK stories of being human. Did I mention they are dark? What writing though! What imagination!