and end dates

Under this movement toward the “creative,” art school merged with business school, as sociologist Angela McRobbie points out. Marketing and entrepreneurship are now standard parts of an arts education, with artists are encouraged to develop their personal brand.

Tracking weather conditions? Salesforce Cloud Cloud.

A stray thought: the correct 21st-century defin­i­tion of “content” isn’t “generic media” but rather “the specific kind of media designed for platforms and algorithms”. The clue is that “content creators” exist only on (for?) platforms. Another: you know it’s “content” if the form is provided by someone else.

they want to carry news from their world to ours

You don’t fix burnout by going on vacation. You don’t fix it through “life hacks,” like inbox zero, or by using a meditation app for five minutes in the morning, or doing Sunday meal prep for the entire family, or starting a bullet journal. You don’t fix it by reading a book on how to “unfu*k yourself.” You don’t fix it with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or “anxiety baking,” or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.

And though work itself is rarely pictured, it’s always there. Periodically, it’s photographed as a space that’s fun or zany, and always rewarding or gratifying. But most of the time, it’s the thing you’re getting away from: You worked hard enough to enjoy life.

The phrase “accept and connect” became so familiar that I started to think of it as a Californian mantra. Accept and connect, accept and connect, accept and connect.

Jacqueline Rivers, who directs the Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies, said that the Benedict Option was unlikely to help Christians address social injustices like segregation and inequality; in fact, it might perpetuate them.

“They just wouldn’t accept me—not my sister’s kids, and not my dad and mom. They just could not accept that I was so different from them. I worshipped my dad—he was the strongest and wisest man I knew—but he was a country man, a Southern country man, and I just wasn’t. All that mattered was that I wasn’t like them. It just broke me.”

One of the reasons that digital readers skim is not because of some quality inherent in screens, as Wolf seems to think, but because so much of what we find online is not worth our full attention.

We never had a reading culture. We had an entertainment culture where reading was the easiest form of entertainment.

It seemed that most of the new methods involved setting up elaborate systems to automate parts of the work. This is fine for particularly complicated and large projects, but setting up the system and maintaining it seemed to be more effort for an experienced person on a small project than doing the work without it.

The history of the web starts to sound like an endless retelling of the fable of the tortoise and the hare. CD-ROMs, Flash, and native apps outshine the web in the short term, but the web always seems to win the day somehow.

There are two words every designer needs to feel comfortable saying: “no” and “why.”

If the environment is so murky and chaotic that you cannot strategically figure out clever moves and timing, the next best thing you can do is just periodically release bits of your developing work in the form of gambles in the external world.

Can you jump across three or four fruit-fly domains over the course of a decade and still end up with mastery of something, even if you cannot define it? Yes. If you drop extrinsic frames of reference altogether.

I have come to the conclusion that if I cannot trace a coherent history of at least 20 years for something that claims the label “discipline,” it isn’t one. The problem with this though is that increasing amounts of valuable stuff is happening outside disciplines by this definition. It isn’t multi-disciplinary. It isn’t inter-disciplinary. It is simply non-disciplinary. It’s in the miscellaneous folder. It is so fluid that it resists extrinsic organization.

As Venkatesh says in the calculus of grit - release work often, reference your own thinking & rework the same ideas again and again. That’s the small b blogging model.

When things become easier, we can seek to fill our time with more “easy” tasks. At some point, life’s defining struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions

climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place

The two parties stand off at opposite sides of the chasm, flinging insults and blame at each other while the real culprit lies in wait at the bottom of the abyss.

(Eventually, the furthest point of “leftward” contains Mae’s hometown’s own mysterious history.)

The challenge of the walking simulator genre is that it replaces your personal survival with a mystery. Doesn't have to be your mystery! In Gone Home, it was "What happened to Samantha?" Everything in the game, everything you discover, ties into mystery of her disappearance. That is your motivation. For every new tidbit you find, you can wonder: "But what does this mean for Sam's disappearance?"

With Kentucky Route Zero, the absence of consequence makes choices both more interesting and less stressful.

It’s hard to think about Tacoma without also thinking about Firewatch. That game had a lot in common with this one – both are essentially ‘walking simulators’, where the player is free to move but has little control over the events around them, games where environment and occasional moments of ambient theatrics aim to give you the sense of narrative, where the bulk is conveyed through context.

For those who have it all and want less, there are staycations (or stagnations)

studio assistants

And what’s with the sneakers, the raincoat, the Bermuda shorts, the camera, and the fanny-pack? Is it some kind of Pop Art joke?

“What Would You Do if You Weren’t Afraid?”

Doing what we love involves things we don’t love.

To see the connections between things requires studying the blank spaces between them, days that slip into boredom and loneliness with only a person and their senses and their imagination to keep them company.

Productive people came to know exactly if they fit somewhere or not.

The hard work and industriousness that helped define the middle class seemed to entitle its members to vacations (as well as other consumer goods betokening self-conscious respectability, like pianos), but at the same time, vacations embodied the very opposite of what the middle class valued. The wellness vacation was one solution to this quandary.

Infrastructure is destiny. (The word “infrastructure” appears 24 times in Zuckerberg’s message.) Society is not a fluctuating arrangement of contending and at times noxious interests brought into a tenuous equilibrium through a difficult, ongoing process of negotiation and struggle. Society is itself a technology, a built thing that, correctly constructed, “works for all of us.” Get the engineering right, and the human community will scale as a computer network scales. Global harmony becomes a technological inevitability.

annotate links

While reading an ebook on an ereader, you choose to send the reading data to a social reading service. The service records all your bookmarks so you can search and return to them later.