Substrate

I’d been caught off-guard by the publicity around How to Do Nothing. I was soon buried under the pile of obligations and opinions that followed. At times, it felt like I no longer knew what my book was about, or what it was that I actually thought. I felt desperate for some kind of clarity. And by placing the will so high above circumstance, it projects an untruthful image of equal opportunity in which the unfortunate should have just tried harder. When I examine my identity, I do see an inalienable spirit grasping for infinity. But in the very same place, I also see an intersection of historical and cultural vectors, held up by a web of countless reliances.

The first virtual Frieze New York offers some very real benefits—like being able to browse, and read the backstory of, the pieces we might have missed.

It can be so uncomfortable to be working in an interdisciplinary way that’s hard to explain to other people and to yourself, and isn’t even really a thing yet. I wish there was a way to tell someone in that position, or me when I was in that position, “No, you’re actually on the right path, it just doesn’t feel like a path yet. Ironically, that’s the evidence that you’re doing something interesting.” ​ It reminds me of the phrase in your book, where instead of saying “no” to something, you instead say, “I would prefer not to.” ​ I can just read and absorb, and not have a 100% airtight analysis right now. You know? Or maybe I don’t need to respond right now, I can just take it in. ​ But I would also say, it doesn’t matter if you know what kind of bird you’re seeing. For the purposes that we’re talking about, I think it’s really more about seeing something else that’s alive, and is living its life.

Poetry, perhaps more than any other literary art, is uniquely suited for giving voice to the deepest parts of ourselves. There is no reason that everyone shouldn’t have access to that experience.

According to this strategy, the best time to drink coffee is when you are already very alert. The reinforcement strategy has another element to it. When adenosine peaks, the best response is not to fight it, but “go with the flow” and (shock, gasp) sleep. With complete abstinence, it takes five days to reach adenosine normality;

Danny Hillis once defined technology as “everything that doesn’t work yet,” prompting the following corollary from Kevin Kelly: “Successful inventions disappear from our awareness.

But now I am crafting a simple webpage that only one other person will see. Not by accident, but by design.

I don’t see this changing any time soon, so I believe the solution will have to be technical.

An idea for iOS and Android

fy_iceworld is one of the most divisive and popular custom maps ever made for Counter-Strike. But who made it? We dove into datamining and the old web to find o

Maybe fy_iceworld shows how games are fragile temporary things. We can’t even agree what the game is about. There’s more than one Counter-Strike because each of us is playing our own idea of it. Everytime we get together on a server, every player is temporarily agreeing to let their mind intersect with every other mind, and together, we construct this momentary shared instance of Counter-Strike as our assumptions and logic clash.

Just share what’s of importance to you. And don’t look at pageviews. Don’t seek claps. Don’t chase reposts. Don’t covet trackbacks. Seek the unique pleasure of having shared something you feel is worth sharing. And the conversations that sort of writing (that sort of blogging) encourages. And yes, it can take time. Good things generally do.

I described it to her: “It’s like the beginning of a weekend day and you feel like you have the whole day in front of you to do whatever you want and all of a sudden it’s six o’clock and you haven’t done anything and you get depressed.” I was still in the morning of that weekend day. So here I am, it’s been about a week and a half.

Discipline is always the denial of something: investing in the long term by forgoing the short term. The question then becomes: who is seeing the returns on that investment? And are those returns desirable in the first place?

Group texts resist this temptation for many reasons. The largest of which is that performance isn’t necessary on the scale of talking with a few friends or family members. Also they’re much more likely to call you on your crap if you do start performing too much.

The future starts from belief, not rationalism, and belief is cultivated partly with aesthetics. Progress will come from regaining a grasp on the aesthetics that move us.

A book is a flexible mirror of the mind. Its overall size and proportions, the color and texture of the paper, the sound it makes as the pages turn, and the smell of the paper, adhesive and ink, all blend with the size and form and placement of the type to reveal a little about the world in which it was made. If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it.

This might be mistaken for sentimentality, but this feeling has little to do with the hallucinogenic loveliness of print. It’s about ownership. It’s about remembering where you were, and perhaps who you were, when you read something.

It feels different now, doesn’t it. It shouldn’t — thousands of people are dying every day. More than 67,000 have died in the U.S. alone, and 245,000 worldwide. But contemporary capitalism has an extraordinary capacity to subsume tragedy: it depends on growth, and on movement, neither of which can happen during the sort of societal paralysis that would be appropriate during this time. Not only, of course, because people are dying — but in order to stem the spread. And so (at least some of us) relax into a sort of short-term amnesia. You want things to be the way things were, you want

Anne Truitt’s advice against immediately judging artists: Don’t have to bring them in for a landing or send them away, just let them circle.

I think flowers enjoy their solitude … I think sprinklers annoy them.

You don’t have to know everything about a topic to write a book on it. You just have to be very interested in something and keep your audience in mind. ​ Technical books don’t have to be written in order. If you have a strong outline, you can hop to some other part of it if you are feeling stuck on the bit you are working on.

What are you seeing from your industry/work that is very clear to you but not obvious to people outside of your world?

I honestly don’t know. All I know is that once an estranged parent dies, there’s often little left but second guesses. My life in many ways has been defined in opposition to my father. It’s a story I’ve heard from others with an estranged parent.

Writing these updates feels like trying to describe a state that's receding from me, like painting a sky full of stars that are already dead. ​ The best online interactions I've had don't try to recreate the past, but start with the premise of disembodiment.