Writing about stuff.
I will be happy and I am determined to be. I will be sincere about this since I'd love to live in a post-irony world. I'm deeply annoyed at being annoyed. If I am not happy, it annoys me, and I am determined to correct that. And I am deeply annoyed by corporations trying to colonize my emotions on top of my attention with greed as their primary motivation. The people behind the corporations.…
This is something I've been doing. I'm calling it an empathy/anti-cynicism thought experiment, but I'm open to better titles. It doesn't need anything more than a basic working knowledge of the world. You might get some things wrong based on assumptions, which is fine. We don't know everything about the world. You can look up and learn more if you choose to do it. The point of doing this is to…
Why is there so much news that's just news about news that's going to happen? Insiders Say That The World Will Be Ending Soon Not The World Is Ending Right Now But It will happen sometime in the future, here's the date, we're telling you about it so you can mark your calendar. What? You want to do something about it? No, you can't do anything. And we're not even sure it'll happen. We're just…
When you come across a survey that asks ['What makes a game, a game?']( https://forms.gle/B3LJcSrwLjdxyYE26 in Google Forms, obviously your next question has to be, 'Can you make a game in Google Forms?' So I made it. You can 'play' it in Google Forms here. You don't need to log in or submit any information to play it. All responses are anonymous. There is an Easter egg. You can replay it. I've…
I've been thinking about agency recently, the freedom kind, and it reminded me of something I came across in Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. Gravity problems. Life design talks about design as problem-solving, and solving a problem requires finding the right problem and then solving it through action. Here's how they describe it: “I need a better job” is not the solution to the…
Art doesn't have to be deep, locked behind a humanities education, hidden away in museums. That is art, sure, but there's also everything else that can be called art. Art is intention. Art is expression. Art is art, made for art's sake. You can make art. And I know it's not easy, because art doesn't feel like something anyone can make. And yet, it is. "A red square? I could make that." "But you…
The word idea is a loaded word. Having ideas is treated as a reflection of genius. You have so many great ideas. These sound wonderful. You're so brilliant for having these ideas. I couldn't think of it, but you could, which means you have something. So, there are all these expectations tied in with ideas. You have an idea? Wonderful. How do you turn this idea into a finished work? Just start…
Ghosts in the machine Commune with the living Saying words they don't mean This is a little bit about the Dead Internet Theory , which is about the internet being filled with bots. Which makes this a little bit about propaganda. This is a little bit about LLMs, the Frankenstein's monster reanimated by the corpus of human knowledge, capable of creating beauty and horror. Which makes this a little…
This is an unedited note in its entirety that I'm sharing from my personal Obsidian vault to show how I take notes ( in Markdown ) on things I like, or hate, or feel entirely neutral about but has something I might want to refer to later. The might is doing a lot of heavy lifting there but being a mostly text hoarder doesn't require much digital storage space. What's a few megabytes in this modern…
I've been thinking about materials recently, in context of art. Writing is my preferred medium. Of communication. Of thinking. Of creation. Words are my clay. Casually browsing a hefty thesaurus was one of my hobbies as a child, which says something. The Materials and the Medium With art, and physical mediums, or even digital ones, you can interact with them. In Learning to See: Inside the World's…