Not everything has to be a long meditation on creativity or what it means to be productive while maintaining a healthy balance between what you need to do and what you want to do. Sometimes, I’m allowed to just point you at stuff I like. Like You are listening to , a wonderful only-the-internet-could-do-this old-school mashup website combining a curated, chilled playlist (rotates regularly) with…
Identity is weird. I’m a writer, but saying that casts this weird spell on people. I think the spell comes from a good place, a place of compassion and curiosity. But it’s a deadly spell. “So… how’s the writing going?” Immediately I feel a fraud. How is the writing going? I haven’t published to the blog for ages, haven’t sat down to actually put an essay together for weeks. No, months. Who says…
I don’t think back on my early years with a computer anywhere near enough. Sam Henri Gold’s excellent article on the MacBook Neo made me need to do just that. My mum got me a Commodore VIC-20 from the local Fine Fare supermarket when I was probably five. We were a Tomorrow’s World household and watched Star Trek repeats over dinner. She knew what was up. Computers were going to eat the world, and…
My writing process is typically thus: I will bang out a stream of consciousness first draft, getting everything that I think I want to say out of my head and into text; I will then read over that first draft and realise it’s not right. The fact is that while I may have had an idea of what I wanted to say, the piece iteslf has no fucking clue what it’s about. In fact, it’s garbage. I suck and…
The sky is pink as we drive back from Peebles, gently racing the sunset to avoid navigating country roads in the crisp twilight of the first of January. “That’s definitely snow, isn’t it?” Anisa observes from the passenger seat. She reaches back to point this out to the kids but notices everyone else is asleep. She chuckles and goes back to staring happily out of the window, wondering aloud what…
Imagine if libraries had been invented just recently: all of human knowledge, way more than any one person could consume in a lifetime, in a single building. There’s no index yet, and you need special knowledge to access the building, but inside, every book, journal, article you could ever hope to imagine. Overwhelming, but exciting. There’s no way you’ll be able to read everything, so you just…
When we arrive, there’s a crowd of people milling around in the entrance hall, nobody looking too sure what to do. An official-looking person with a lanyard and some sort of scanner looks around the room. “Anyone else for the five thirty viewing?” I look over at Anisa and we quickly glance around to see if we’re skipping ahead of anyone else. When nobody else moves, we shuffle towards the…
Now that we’re firmly in the depths of Decorative Gourd Season , it’s time to crack out my hot chocolate recipe. I say “my” hot chocolate recipe as the kids usually begin a campaign around November for the return of “Dad’s hot chocolate”, but in truth it’s a simplified version of a Babish recipe . Which itself is an imagining of Flanders’s recipe from The Simpson’s Movie. So I guess it’s…
When was the last time you answered a greeting question without thinking? The kind of thing I mean is this: How are you doing today? It’s a standard opening, which essentially means “I acknowledge your presence with my words”. The actual words themselves are rarely important, and one of the key agreed norms here is that the person initiating the greeting rarely actually wants to know the answer to…
“Your brain is for having ideas, not holding them”, at least according to David Allen. This is all well and good, but why do my systems always end up with me still holding everything in my head? It’s trust. It’s always trust. I lose trust in my systems. And then I burn them down and start again. It’s a pattern. Part of it, of course, is painting the hammer (“ooh, shiny new app!”), but I’ve started…