What interesting things could use a library? What needs some sort of dedicated repository — whether online, in a book or museum or other space, for an audience large or small? What needs to be collected and treasured and shared? Might these libraries be crowdsourced, Kickstarted, collectively created, intensely personal…perhaps something else entirely? One thing […]
One from the archives! It’s always fun to revisit old drafts and surprise myself with the weird stuff I wrote way back when. Some is just weird; some I still enjoy quite a bit! I like the blend of free-associative rhyme and musings on writing-as-meditative act here… Should I disentangle the angle or embrace the […]
A list of favorite books, particularly ones that have had a long-term impact on how I think about or interact with the world. Sparked by this discussion on books that have influenced your mental models. Plenty more good suggestions there, but I’m partial to my own list! Really this is basically just a brief overview […]
Have you ever tried coming up with a really great pangram? It’s surprisingly difficult! A pangram — aka a ‘holoalphabetic sentence” (thanks Wikipedia!) — is simple to define; fiendish to devise. It’s a sentence that contains every letter of the alphabet at least once. You’ve probably heard one particularly infamous pangram: “The quick brown fox […]
Everyone knows that just by splitting your tasks into focused 25-minute increments, and like listing them out with proper prioritization, and fixing bum in chair daily — such is the simple key to knocking the wind out of your to-do list and achieving your dreams. But what you may not know is that behind the […]
Here are my reading notes for an interesting book I just finished reading, all about libraries and the organization of knowledge: The Dynamic Library: Organizing Knowledge at the Sitterwerk — Precendents and Possibilities Quick overview from the book’s blurb: THE DYNAMIC LIBRARY presents essays in translation from an interdisciplinary symposium on the classification and organization of […]
Holy hell, Unicode is fascinating and incredible! I recently found a list I’ve been keeping of my favorite typographical symbols, then got curious and spent hours today scrolling through the complete Unicode character set and reading up on the project. It was an eye-opening experience. I used the awesome program Ultra Character Map (Mac, $10, […]
Why do I so often feel like art is broken? When it comes to how we conceive of arts education, and how we’re taught to practice and recognize art and creativity, I think there’s a whole lot we can do better. One problem to start with: creativity is still fairly ghettoized in early childhood education […]
The title of this post is a quotation from The Autobiography of Malcolm X. The entire book is incredibly compelling. But this phrase, and the section it comes from, struck me on reading it and lodged itself in my memory as an idea worth thinking about further. This is from a part where Malcolm talks […]
Random fun idea: adding layers of content and modes of interaction to one’s website — say, for example, mine! What might this look like? This line of thought was inspired by some convoluted test I did to confirm that my site was up and running after switching hosts a while back. This process had me […]
An idea I had a while back — catalog my micro-habits, my movement patterns and granular choices, the small things that make up my daily routine. I figured it might be interesting to aggregate this information in one place, to make myself more aware of the effects, to optimize the flow and activity of my […]
I’ve raptly followed the recent Patreon controversy, eager to understand why one of the lifeblood services of so many independent creators inadvertently alienated and infuriated the very creators and patrons they serve. How did this happen? What does it mean for creators? What Went Wrong in Patreonland A few weeks ago Patreon suddenly announced an […]