Substrate

I am a lot more okay with being lacking as a person. To be irrelevant, behind, unseen. For me, that is one of the greatest sources of stability and peace. Because of society conditioning we are always trying to signal something whether consciously or unconsciously, so just plain giving up is really freeing. Sometimes I wonder if this is all something I could have done much earlier in my life, but maybe I had to experience the conventional life to truly know that is something I do not want. I am just thankful to know this early enough.

What if I adopted another story? I’m enjoying building this project, and it will be ready when it’s ready. What exactly am I afraid will happen if I just let it unfold at its own pace? And honestly, how lucky am I to be able to wake up every day and spend my time working on something that I’m incredibly excited about?

As you peak in the middle of the curve, […] you can’t necessarily communicate that information. You’ve integrated it for you, but that doesn’t mean you’ve distilled it down to a meaningful, concise story for someone else, someone still at the left side of the curve. The place you land on the right — the simplicity on the other side of complexity — is often super obvious in retrospect. That’s sort of the point: it’s made obvious to others because you did the heavy lifting of getting through the mess.

Negotiating the ambition of our ideas with the reality of our constraints requires a heightened level of honesty with ourselves, our process, and our work. And the challenge with reality is that we may not like what it has to say, and so learning to respect it takes some time and practice. If you don’t know what it is you want to do, don’t worry about it, and don’t feel like you need to have an answer for everything. People will like you more as a result. Besides, you make your path by walking.

“poetry is the displacement of silence, while prose is the continuation of noise.” Similarly, a poem doesn’t need to tell you the details of what a moment looked like, but it can find ways to show you what it felt like.

I’m just letting my career be what it is and following what is working instead of being bummed about what isn’t. I try to focus on the people listening, not how many aren’t. And she said to me, “the work will always be there, but the people might not be.” And that has stuck with me. I feel like I went way too far in the other direction, I over-corrected this summer where I was so loose and chaotic. And now I feel like I’m coming back to center in a better way.

When you spend all day sitting in your office thinking about difficult abstract problems, it’s wonderful to take a break and do something intensely physical, like aerial acrobatics.

It’s quite uncanny how easily we can put off, and eventually forget about, things that are important to us. How easily we can brush off meaningful tasks, big or small, until they live in this guilty state of consciousness.

"i'll tell you in person" is a promise

She told me that the key to a good meal is matching the chef’s time: take as much time to eat the dish as it took to prepare it. I always filed it away in my head, but never quite knew how to classify the sentiment. It’s just within the past few days that I’ve understood that the reason I liked the thought so much was because of how kind it seemed. To match attention is to be kind.

Let’s talk about the many shapes that reading (and readers) can take. I started this mini-essay by revisiting some old notes about strategies for dealing...

The relationships among the properties of flexible shapes have fascinated mathematicians for centuries.

“I want to be able to promise the folks who are using Buttondown that whatever they’re signing up for now, they’ll have five years from now, ten years from now,” Duke said. “And I think staying small and focusing on, if anything, a lack of ambition is really conducive to that.”

One of the quotes I put on our chalkboard wall right after we moved (because our home also has a chalkboard wall, why not) was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” ​ So I take all of that back. That’s not what I mean. What I mean is a little more complicated. … I think I’m saying that L and I chose a situation that forced real intimacy, and compromise, and looking outward in the same direction, from the very beginning.

Chenoe Hart observed that the common critique of suburbia as placeless can be reframed as “visiting the same place in multiple different locations ​ Robin Sloan recently defined content as “the specific kind of media designed for platforms and algorithms,” media for which the form is determined by the platform

Perfectionism isn’t about perfection, it’s about how others see you.— Lulie (@reasonisfun) April 14, 2021

I stepped into the portal a few hours ago and I discovered some things and made some connections that I hadn’t before. Now I’m going to hit “publish” and step out.

Because creativity, it’s just so much — it’s so inwardly focused. And I find that it’s so helpful to be pulled out of that system, otherwise I can just drown in myself. [Having a day job] means you can just make whatever you want to make. And what’s more independent than that? What I’m talking about is a problem of success, but we need to make sure that it’s not taboo to talk about the problems of success if we want to be successful. If we want ourselves and other people to be successful, we need to address the problems on the other side as well. I don’t want to drown in other people’s expectations. My own are hard enough. If what you make goes anywhere, it’s because other people carried it.

[outputting consistently] takes away from the heart of it if all you’re doing is focusing on that consistency.

…there are many Buddhist stories in it, most of which come down to doing the same thing forever with no response and then suddenly all is well. That is blogging.

I underlined this passage hard when I read it last year. Muddle. Yes. I know this state well, although I often refer to it as waffling. Here’s what I notice about waffling: I do it often, and it’s almost always to justify not doing something that I know, deep down, will bring me joy.

Subscribe: https://bit.ly/SubscribeJorisVoorn This set is exclusively my own music and remixes, all made within the last year, with the exception of Colyn's remix of my track 'Never'. During the one year lockdown I've made a lot of new music, focussing mostly on techno. Some of these new tracks can be heard in this 100 minute set. March 20, 2021. A year after COVID-19 caused a worldwide lockdown and turned the global musical landscape into an empty desert, a new hope arrives at the horizon. In The Netherlands a try-out event takes place. 1500 people and a handful DJ’s are having their first party in over a year. Every person on site has been tested negative for COVID-19, people in the audience are being anonymously tracked with a small device which is monitoring their contacts with other people. This is the Future. If things go well today, if there are no positive tests 5 days after the event, this could pave the way to life after COVID-19. Tracklist 00:00:00 White Cliffs - Just Like You (Joris Voorn Remix) 00:06:40 Elderbrook - Numb (Joris Voorn Dub Mix) 00:09:35 Joris Voorn - Nea Skioni 00:14:20 Mees Salomé ft. Celine Cairo - Fool's Paradise (Joris Voorn Remix) 00:19:00 Joris Voorn - Never (Colyn Remix) 00:21:20 SOF - Vanquish (Joris Voorn Remix) 00:26:30 Dua Lipa - Break My Heart (Joris Voorn Remix) (Instrumental) [WARNER UK] 00:31:15 Lie2You - Obsession (Joris Voorn Edit) 00:34:00 Joris Voorn - Psycho 00:37:50 Kölsch - Shoulder Of Giants (Joris Voorn Remix) 00:41:00 Joris Voorn - Retrograde 00:46:30 Joris Voorn - River 00:50:00 Michel De Hey - Nova Nova (Joris Voorn Remix) 00:53:30 L.S.G. - The Train of Thought (Joris Voorn Remix) 00:57:45 London Grammar - Baby It's You (Joris Voorn Remix) 01:02:10 Monkey Safari - Safe (Joris Voorn Remix) 01:06:50 Joris Voorn - Rotor Multi 01:10:15 Joris Voorn & Speedy J - 35mm 01:17:50 Joris Voorn - Acid April 2021 01:20:40 Joris Voorn - Float 01:24:05 Joris Voorn - Rikshaw 01:29:50 Joris Voorn - Rhetoric Stereo Recordings 01:34:00 Joris Voorn - WSADPHSR Alt 01:37:15 Alex Kennon - Blinding Lights (Joris Voorn Remix) 01:41:10 Joris Voorn - Quicksand 🎶Check Out: Joris Voorn Live Show Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bvIfNEmpq4&list=PLnLlwmUgI-e154jnC_wpimf39xptthWrV&index=1&t=6828s #JorisVoorn #Techno #House Follow Joris Voorn: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jorisvoorndj/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jorisvoorn/ Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/joris-voorn Twitter: https://twitter.com/jorisvoorn

Calendar/TODO list that is actually a dynamical phase space. Tasks and interests are attractors, maybe breaks are repellers. Weighted by importance. Place a ball in some part of the landscape to see what to do right now. Maybe it’s cyclical, wrapped around a Möbius band/torus.

Dropbox mirror: https://www.dropbox.com/s/5aw8dd4v685skns/PJH%20%E2%80%94%C2%A0What%20does%20it%20mean%20to%20be%20behind%3F.pdf?dl=0 If you always feel behind, and never ahead or (better yet) neutral, then that sure is suspicious. Your behind beliefs might not be accurate, and anyways — who can feel motivated to run a race they’ve already lost?

On the good days, everything feels connected—a giant wall of conspiracy string. But on the bad days, every gesture and thought sits in isolation. It’s like I’m looking at the same board, but someone has turned off the layer containing the string. Rather than an electric galaxy of potential I just see…a mess. ​ Those are the moments when I miss the drip-feed of social validation that comes from sharing things on public platforms. It’s a steady piping cry of “Yes! Keep going! This matters!” that can make all the difference between enthusiasm and despair. But I don’t want to rely on it. I don’t want to give away that kind of power.

This is a playlist of lecture videos from my undergrad distributed systems course at UC Santa Cruz in spring 2021. Course website: http://decomposition.al/CS...

Yes, we give feedback and encouragement and suggestions, but we also bond over our art, letting each other in on the oft-solitary process of figuring out our thoughts and our stories. We push each other, teach each other, and ultimately shape each other and our work. A page to remind everyone what art is — love from many sources, shaped by an individual, to be shared. You release your belief that everything has to do with you and that you are in complete control. This is not a passive act. It involves working in favor of things that you surrender to and accepting that the results of your actions are not in your control. Dropbox mirror: https://www.dropbox.com/s/cwujmj6y3ezn6lu/ripple01.pdf?dl=0

Gifts, old friends, someone else’s life.