Substrate

“But what happens if I can learn to measure love’s effect, and this love, which feels so real, doesn’t register?” “Reading this, I can’t help but think of those late-night phone calls, the easy seesaw of our conversation, our shared laughter. Also, the ways our bodies move together like practiced dancers, improvising to the same song. We, too, find shared rhythms easily.” “Does recording our sex occur to me? Of course it does. My urge is to clamp a hand over the mouth of that thought, much as, for many years, I used to clamp my hand over my own mouth at orgasm to stifle the sound. If I can hardly bear my own autoerotic sounds, how will it feel to hear those made in the company of my lover? Consider the mild discomfort of hearing a recording of your voice on, say, a voicemail. Multiply that discomfort infinitely. My lover has told me that I am noisy at orgasm (which she relishes), and though I suspect she is right, I have never heard myself. I am happy for this deafness. Some things I don’t want to notice, to reflect on, to consider.” “With her, more so than with any lover before, I follow my pleasure without fear of shame.” “My lover nods. This is news to only one of us. “I guess it’s not out of character,” I say. She shakes her head and smiles. When she turns back to her reading, I sneak a look at her while feigning interest in my work. I want to memorize this moment—sunlight dappling the floor, her long legs crossed at the ankle, the small rasp as she turns the page of her book—in which I feel utterly at ease, able to share my delight in multiple things with her: my strange study of our lovemaking, the recorded fact of it, her total acceptance and actual pleasure in this obscure corner of reflection. If there is a test, it feels like we have passed it. This moment, alone, is different. It is full of things I had not known before.”

“I couldn't help but feel that what that photographer saw was so wildly different from how I saw myself.” “Somewhere in the grayscale, we didn't look so off against white skin.”

"Moonmoon is an example of the linguistic process of reduplication, which is often deployed in English to make things more cute and whimsical. In the pure form of reduplication, you get words like bonbon, choo-choo, bye-bye, there there, and moonmoon but relaxing the rules a little to incorporate rhymes and near-rhymes yields hip-hop, zig-zag, fancy-shmancy, super-duper, pitter-patter, and okey-dokey. And with contrastive reduplication, in which a word repeats as a modifier to itself"

until the purple dusks on a pile of old tires And as we drift down the river on a fallen log

But I continue to think that artists — all artists — should be treasured as alarm systems.

“The analogy I'm thinking of here is a group of people sitting working at their computers. Every so often, you look up and look around you, sometimes to rest your eyes, and other times to check people are still there. Sometimes you catch an eye, sometimes not. Sometimes it triggers a conversation. But it bonds you into a group experience, without speaking.”

Paul Graham

There's only one true story. Don't miss reading it.

Last night I was picking through my stack and started composer Philip Glass’s memoir, Words Without Music. I wound up reading over 50 pages before I passed out. (That’s a lot: I’m a slow reader, especially at

“In this future, certain objects, like the snow shovel, might be represented by their own canonical version—the only one Amazon actually ever shows you. Everyone will see their own best choice, though, so it will be canonical just to you.”

The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book. —George Steiner Photographer Bill Hayes wrote a nice essay about Oliver Sacks’ love of words, and he’s been posting images of Sacks’ hand-annotated

“Graffiti artists are hired by real estate firms to bring a safe level of grittiness to a neighborhood. Ebay asks us to choose between passing on a valuable collectable to a relative or finding the highest bidder.” “But since something truly new or different is unassimilable to capitalism’s techniques for value extraction — economies of scale, interchangeable workers, mass production — much of creativity under capitalism is, as Mould argues, “newness to maintain more of the same,” rather than the development of new ways of being.”

You’ve landed here in search of Paul Jarvis—author of Company of One and podcast host for Call Paul

tired residue

“But in autumn, the evening of the year, a gradual hush falls over nature, its human parts included.”

Take a look behind the scenes at the illustration process for Jason Fried and DHH’s new book, “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work”. Back story Every essay in Jason and David’s previous titles, REW…

“This reminds me that I have a half-written blog post about being mid-career in tech that has no conclusion because, well, as you can see, it's unclear to me how to best use this time”

“I’m expecting a few days where I have to keep my eyes closed. I’d love your suggestions for audio escapism — podcasts, audiobooks, games, and other non-visual projects that don’t require intense concentration and are easy to lose yourself in.”

“It’s that work should be a means to an end. And in the end, we should go home.”

The key to the watchOS user interface needs isnu2019t getting the attention it deserves from Apple.